Hi everyone, today I wanted to talk to you a little bit about our experience with the native advertising platforms, Taboola and Outbrain. And for those of you who do not know, we run a lead generation agency.
We sell leads to predominately financial services businesses on a cost-per-lead basis. The difference between what we sell ’em for and what we generate them for is our profit margin. And that’s our business model, it’s very simple.
Up until, well, even up until today, 90%, sometimes 80% of our advertising budget is spent on Facebook ads and over the years we’ve dabbled with lots of different platforms. We had some great success with Twitter ads, we’ve done Google Display Network, we’re still doing Google Display, we’re still doing YouTube ads, we’re running pre-roll videos there.
And one of the questions that came up I think on one of our YouTube videos is what was your experience with Taboola I believe which is a native advertising network. If you’ve ever, if you’re in the UK or in America, you’ll be scrolling a big news publication, maybe here it could be The Sun or The Independent or The Daily Mail or whatever and you read some trashy article that’s on some of these sites and then at the bottom there’ll be the sponsored stories below the article and there’ll be some kind of real click bait-y type ads at the bottom of those sponsored stories and if you click through from them, you’ll tend to hit an advertorial and you’ll read through that advertorial.
It’ll be very cleverly written, there’ll be a call to action at the end, you click that call to action, it takes you to a landing page and you become a lead. So, it just so happens that our most of our campaigns on Facebook and GDN and YouTube are the same method.
They are ad to advertorial to landing page and we’ve found that’s a really good way to generate quality leads because people have to physically get excited by the article in between the ad and the landing page, they have to read it, they have to qualify themselves, they have to click through which takes time and commitment and attention from them, hit the landing page and then fill out the quiz or whatever that’s on that landing page and you can get a lot of volume and a lot of quality from this method.
We go into that within our course, there’s a free case study at the bottom of this video. You’ll be able to find it somewhere which will explain how exactly we do this but anyways, we tried Taboola for a little bit and it worked.
We were getting leads but the Facebook behemoth just sucked us back in, okay? The thing is with some of these other networks, Taboola, Outbrain, Twitter, GDN, YouTube, it takes time and it takes effort and concentration and testing and split testing and new creatives and understanding how the platform works because what might work on Taboola might not work on Facebook and it actually takes a lot of time and resource to move your attention away from Facebook and into another platform.
So, we tried it, we maybe spent maybe 10,000 pounds or something like that on the native networks and we got some leads, the cost per lead wasn’t as low as our Facebook ads. We couldn’t generate as much volume and our Facebook ads were just smashing it out of the park.
So, we decided to quit Taboola and move back to Facebook and this has happened quite a bit with us over the years. We’ve tried to venture out to different advertising networks to kind of cover our back a little bit unless some stuff goes down at Facebook but we always tend to go back and we always focus on our Facebook efforts because it’s by far the easiest, the quality that comes out of Facebook is the best.
We know it the best. There seems to be more people and more leads. It’s just a much easier way of doing things and when we made that decision to move and try different stuff, we always tend to do it at about 75 to 80%, put it in the too hard basket and move back to what we know works and if you’re an agency and you’re doing something similar and you’re testing and trialing, I mean go for it but if you’re gonna do it properly, then do it properly, okay? Commit to it for a certain amount of time, a certain amount of spend and I wouldn’t say that it was a failed test on us because we weren’t something, but it is much easier to focus on one traffic source and get that better and write better ads because the creative is king.
We all know that, that’s one of my mantras. If you can write better ads, then Facebook will still reward you with the best quality, cheapest leads and we see this over and over and over again. If you write better ads, your cost per leads come down and your quality goes up.