How to Optimize Your Marketing Investments for Peak Performance (Episode 4 of 5)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:16)
Welcome back everyone to episode four in this special Bliss Business Podcast series where we're having five distinct episode around how to turn your marketing spend into marketing investments that drive performance. I'm joined today by Josh Prizer, who's VP of Digital Marketing at Zero Company. So in episode three, we talked a great deal about measuring your marketing investment, setting up the parameters for how you understand conversion and all the various components that go into that. Then we even talked about attribution. So if you missed that episode, I recommend go back. We talked about the various impact, different levels of attribution and why it's important to maintain bottom of the funnel campaign, middle of the funnel campaign and top of the funnel campaign. We talked about that in episode two as well. Today, we're going to talk about data. We left episode three with this idea that data is your friend. You can't just make decision based on gut or how charismatic you are. It doesn't work. The data is your friend in helping you make the right decision. Let's just dig right into it. The first question is, how do you analyze marketing data to inform investment decision?

**Josh Prizer** (1:33)
Yeah. Good question. There's a couple of things I'm looking for. Once tracking is set up and I'm confident in the data, then I'm looking for which keywords are generating the lowest cost per conversion. Sometimes refer to that as the lowest CPA or cost per acquisition. Then obviously, I want to push more budget that direction. But I have to say, the find that gets me most excited actually is the opposite of that. It's when I can identify poor performing areas of the campaign.
What I'll do is we want to review campaigns, we look for non-performing or low-performing keywords and shut those off. So, you know, we have our own internal formulas that we'll use for that. But really, if I can shut off keywords pulling 10% of our budget, then that's just going to push that ad spend toward better performing keywords. It's really the fastest way to improve performance without increasing budget at all. Identify the losers because there are going to be losers. There's no question. But if you can identify those and shut them off, well, that's going to push budget. If you're analyzing the data, you're going to be able to push budget to what's working.
One caveat I'll make to that, and that is it's important to not shut things down until you have statistical significance. And there are calculators out there that kind of help you determine once you've hit that. But, you know, I've seen, you know, I've seen, you know, agencies that say, oh yeah, you know, we, you know, we shut off, they'll have arbitrary numbers where they'll say, you know, we shut off any keyword that spends, or that gets a hundred clicks but doesn't have a conversion, or that spends $20 and doesn't have a conversion. Those arbitrary numbers don't make sense to me because you're not, you're not going to have statistical significance. Those numbers need to change depending on what your target cost per conversion is. You know, if my target cost per conversion, you know, if I'm selling something that's $20,000, you know, and my target, then my target cost per conversion might be $500, $1,000. Suppose I'm shutting off a keyword that spent $50 because it didn't convert. Now, I didn't learn anything there. I might be shutting off something that's good. So, you definitely want to shut off the losers, but you want to make sure that you have that statistical significance.

**Tullio Siragusa** (4:13)
It can't be a gut feel. It's going to have data back here. So, let's talk a little bit about what strategies can businesses employ in order to optimize their marketing spend.

**Josh Prizer** (4:25)
Yeah, I would say a big one is making sure that you're, you know, seeing the force for the trees. You know, you're zoomed out. I can't tell you how many clients we get, especially early on. You know, they're nervous. We don't have that relationship yet necessarily, but they'll call us and say, hey, I didn't get any leads yesterday. Okay. Well, let me think of it like, let's say your budget is $2,000 a month and we've determined your target cost per lead is $50.
And we're actually, we're just starting out, so we're actually running about $70 a lead right now. We're a little higher until we can bring in down and optimize. So at $70 a lead, if our budget is $2,000 a month, yeah, we should be getting, well, $2,100 would be 30 leads a month. So yeah, we should be getting about one lead a day. But statistically, if we have one day without a lead, that's not really significant, right? Two days, even three days. That's not enough data. So you want to look at larger stretches of data, a week, a month, a quarter, and make sure you don't get into this zone. And sometimes we see this even when we take over accounts. A lot of times we see it when we take over an account that's been managed internally, where we'll look at the change history and we can see just all these kind of knee-jerk decisions that were made with too little data, where it's like, oh, well, this day didn't look good. So, I'm going to pull this lever, and then the next day I'm going to pull this lever, and the next day it's like, oh, my goodness, there's too many adjustments have been made. And what will happen is, is if you make too many adjustments over the course of a couple of weeks, it can sometimes take now six or eight weeks for the bidding algorithms to adjust and level out and get back on track. So, now instead of two weeks of poor results, you have two months of poor results before you can get back on track. So, it's really important that your agency and that you understand that, hey, this is a process. Don't rush it because you're going to end up making it take longer. You want to pull a lever, watch what happens, note the results, then decide, do I pull that lever more? Do I try a different lever or technique?