Episode 83
From Coffee to Clicks: Paid Social Insights with Chuck Olsen of RKSTR Media
Are you struggling to keep up with the ever-changing landscape of digital advertising? You're not alone. In this episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew, I sit down with Chuck Olsen, founder of RKSTR Media and a seasoned media buyer who's managed over $40 million in ad spend.
Chuck shares his insights on performance marketing, the latest trends, and how to optimize your digital ad campaigns for maximum impact. Whether you're a small business owner or a seasoned marketer, this conversation is packed with actionable strategies to elevate your digital advertising game.
Key Takeaways:
- The core principles of performance marketing for beginners
- Exciting trends reshaping the industry, including AI-driven campaign optimization
- Strategies for driving results in digital ad campaigns
- Balancing experimentation and stability when scaling in competitive spaces
- Essential tools and platforms for managing and optimizing campaigns
Spotlight on Quality Traffic
Chuck emphasizes the importance of focusing on high-quality traffic rather than just broad targeting. He explains how to use advanced techniques like lookalike audiences and specific objectives to attract the right customers to your business.
The Future of Digital Advertising
Despite challenges in tracking and attribution, Chuck predicts a bright future for digital advertising. He discusses how automation and AI will create new opportunities for marketers who can adapt and oversee these technologies effectively.
"Where AI or automation might take away something, it's going to create opportunities that open up from that as well."
Don't miss Chuck's final thoughts on staying forward-thinking in the ever-evolving world of digital marketing. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to sharpen their digital advertising skills and stay ahead of the curve.
Transcript
Foreign.
Speaker:That's good. And welcome
Speaker:to a new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew.
Speaker:And I'm your host, Brett Deister. If you please subscribe to this podcast and all
Speaker:your favorite podcasting apps, leave. A five star review really does help
Speaker:with the rankings and let me know how I am doing.
Speaker:But this week I have Chuck Olsen with me and he's the founder of
Speaker:RKSTR Media, is a media buyer, ad strategist and
Speaker:marketing educator who's managed over 40 million in ad
Speaker:spend. With experience scaling brands across
Speaker:DTC, healthcare, music and
Speaker:more, Chuck helps businesses grow with ad actionable paid
Speaker:social strategies, advanced attribution, ROI driven
Speaker:campaign insights and so much
Speaker:more. And so welcome to the show, Chuck. Yeah, thank you for
Speaker:having me. I appreciate it. Yeah. And the first question is all my guest is,
Speaker:are you a coffee or tea drinker? Coffee. I'm a big caffeine guy, so
Speaker:guess I got to say coffee. Do you have any like specifics you like
Speaker:or just whatever you can get your hands on? It's kind of
Speaker:whatever. We have the Keurig that's kind of the go to normally, but yeah, any
Speaker:kind of coffee, honestly. And I gave a brief summary of your expertise. Can you
Speaker:give listeners a little bit more about what. Yeah, so pretty much I have about
Speaker:coming up on 10 years now of media buying experience. I started off pretty
Speaker:small, just kind of dabbling around Facebook ads. Started off in the music industry. I
Speaker:was also producing a lot at the time. Got into doing
Speaker:Facebook ads for artists and gradually got into doing it for
Speaker:labels as well. Went on doing that for a few years, started to get some
Speaker:of my own clients, but wanted to go off into the agency world. So then
Speaker:I started went off on some bigger agencies. I started working
Speaker:for doing ads for steel, John Deere, AstraZeneca
Speaker:were my first kind of three at one of my old agencies and then
Speaker:recently was for l'. Oreal. So that was kind of the past
Speaker:about four years up, you know, in that gap. And now I've
Speaker:branched off to start my own agency focused in paid social media buying
Speaker:for brands and businesses across. The US who, how would you define the core
Speaker:principles of performance marketing for someone just stepping into this field?
Speaker:So interpreting your results, especially when you're smaller, is, it's,
Speaker:it's difficult because you don't necessarily have the scale of your results. So I think
Speaker:you have to know your offer and that's kind of always what it comes
Speaker:down to is the offer of your business. So that's like the starting point. Don't
Speaker:take your Results too literally. I think you kind of have to be
Speaker:optimizing the whole spectrum is is what I can say. So it's looking at the
Speaker:bigger picture of what you're doing and how your ads are playing into
Speaker:the bigger picture for your business. So it's a little bit harder as a
Speaker:smaller entrepreneur. You kind of have to do things around the
Speaker:whole process of getting a customer gotcha. And
Speaker:what trends in performance marketing are you most excited about right now?
Speaker:And how do you see them reshaping the industry over the
Speaker:next few years? Yeah, definitely. With pretty much every
Speaker:ad platform now is introducing their version of the asc. Pretty
Speaker:much consolidating your campaigns and your approach and then just kind of being really focused
Speaker:on your objectives. So with meta, with asc, you're really focused on the purchase
Speaker:objective. If your goal is sales for an E commerce business, I think that's really
Speaker:going to transform how people are going to be buying their media for
Speaker:the next few years or with now, but especially in
Speaker:the next few years because it's going to take the focus off of essentially what
Speaker:you're targeting and put more of the focus on the end result that you want.
Speaker:So I think that's a really big shift that some people have been preparing for
Speaker:for the past few years, but is going to be, you know, everything
Speaker:around your tagging and attribution
Speaker:is going to become even more, more important than
Speaker:just targeting alone was for the past, however long.
Speaker:Gotcha. And when it comes to optimizing digital ad
Speaker:campaigns, what strategies have you found to be the most impactful for driving
Speaker:results? So I try to split it up into
Speaker:the full like journey from when someone sees your ad, when they click on your
Speaker:ad, getting landing on your page to what's the rate of them adding the car
Speaker:cart or doing whatever that next business action is for you. Getting a lead you
Speaker:would look at, try to break it down every step of the funnel. So you
Speaker:might look at hook rate for a video or bounce rate for just a normal
Speaker:ad. From when someone's clicking to when they're, you know, loading the page
Speaker:on your on your website to then what percentage of
Speaker:people are clicking to add to cart and then what from there
Speaker:adding to cart to converting or whatever the equivalent is for your business. I think
Speaker:trying to break it down in that fashion. Every step of the
Speaker:way has been trans transformative because
Speaker:you can really pinpoint is it your ads or is it what your ads
Speaker:are driving or is it just your website and you need to do some conversion
Speaker:rate optimization. There so it really helps you thinking of it that way and kind
Speaker:of segmenting that approach helps you kind of really get to
Speaker:the real problem area of, of your ads and what you're doing.
Speaker:Gotcha. And are there specific tactics or approaches you've, you've
Speaker:honed over time that is consistently performance,
Speaker:especially in terms of targeting or creative execution.
Speaker:A lot of it has come down to trying to get the highest quality traffic.
Speaker:I think from what I've seen as these targeting options
Speaker:have gotten more broad, if you kind of just stick with the same landing page
Speaker:view results or at least for, for paid social, if you
Speaker:just stick with the traffic objectives and the general video view objectives and stuff that
Speaker:everyone's been running for the past few years or
Speaker:leading up to that, you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot because
Speaker:it's coming down to traffic quality and the quality of the people you are
Speaker:bringing to your business. And it just kind of takes a focus off that. So
Speaker:I think my big approach has been really dialing into lookalikes with the
Speaker:highest value customers, what's your highest quality traffic and aiming for
Speaker:objectives like that multiple page loads or 50% page scrolls and kind
Speaker:of doing it formulating the objectives
Speaker:for the brand around quality traffic and then quality
Speaker:buyers. And that has kind of made a huge difference and we've had a lot
Speaker:of success with that. Got you. So I mean it seems like for the most
Speaker:part you're saying try to mix it up and don't always just stick with the
Speaker:same old thing. Yeah, I think that's, that's especially where it's going. A lot of
Speaker:people in traditional media will preach awareness and share voice and
Speaker:all that. And I think there's a place for that at the bigger brand level.
Speaker:But especially for a smaller business, you have to be more targeted with your dollars.
Speaker:So you're really looking at lead magnets, lower funnel stu, mid to low
Speaker:funnel engagement tactics. And then finally what's driving the sales and
Speaker:looking heavily at prospecting versus you're not doing as much or targeting as
Speaker:a smaller business. But looking at how those strategies are aligning to what
Speaker:you want and really going for it because you can't, you don't really have the
Speaker:budget to be playing around and going for share voice or whatever. Unless you're
Speaker:a local business and you're only marketing within a certain target
Speaker:market. Yeah, it seems like awareness for smaller brands
Speaker:isn't that great because it doesn't actually drive sales. It's just
Speaker:people are aware of you, which is great. But that doesn't really do
Speaker:much. Yeah. And a lot of people buying on awareness
Speaker:objectives, they don't realize that Meta knows that people who are going to
Speaker:convert or any of the social platforms do, so they're going to attribute
Speaker:that impression accordingly. So if you're just running a reach campaign, a
Speaker:lot of those times those impressions might not even fully load on the screen. So
Speaker:they might take a 20% load of the ad on the screen when you're
Speaker:scrolling on Instagram and put it as the last placement and they count that as
Speaker:an impression. And that's gonna be the inventory that they're constantly giving away.
Speaker:For a reach objective video view objective, you could easily
Speaker:be falling in with people who are letting the video play on their screen and
Speaker:go to the next. So it's kind of like thinking in that way of
Speaker:what's their. What's their incentive because they're trying to just
Speaker:fill their ad inventory. But they know the placements and they know the timing of
Speaker:the placements that are really gonna get the conversions on average. So you gotta keep
Speaker:that in mind, especially now with awareness and how things are shaping. They
Speaker:have so much inventory, they just want to fill, so they're going to do
Speaker:what's going to incentivize them. Yeah. And how do you
Speaker:balance experimentation with stability when scaling, especially in competitive
Speaker:digital ad spaces? So a lot of the scaling will come down to creative
Speaker:stuff. So I try to segment, break it down. I mean, how I've commonly been
Speaker:doing it has been breaking down, at least for purchases, has been breaking it down
Speaker:to two campaigns. So you have one that's kind of like your test campaign, but
Speaker:that's kind of your core, where you're bringing in new ad ideas, constantly testing
Speaker:creative angles, hooks, headlines, whatever it might
Speaker:be, you're testing it within that campaign and then you have a separate dedicated campaign
Speaker:that's kind of like your scaling campaign. When an ad proves itself you've had
Speaker:success, then you would shift it into that campaign. And that's generally
Speaker:how we've done it, different objectives. So for some
Speaker:brands, it kind of depends on the brand and their product, the value of
Speaker:the products that they have, and their average order values and stuff. But one of
Speaker:the strategies that has been really good there has been using target cost bidding
Speaker:in that scaling campaign, because especially for brands that
Speaker:fluctuate month over month a lot, it will only spend when it's getting that target
Speaker:cost conversion. So that's kind of helped a lot using that as a scaling
Speaker:objective. But it definitely depends on the brand and Kind of the data you have
Speaker:available to you. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend that for everyone but that
Speaker:has been something that's worked well for a couple of brands.
Speaker:And are there any like tools or platforms that you recommend to
Speaker:basically manage but also optimize the campaigns?
Speaker:Yeah, so one that I really love, it's more of like a backend management
Speaker:thing but super metrics. I'm just a big pulling in data from the ad
Speaker:accounts and just being able to visualize it how I want helps me a lot.
Speaker:Tools within the ad account I think you know I've used weather targeting
Speaker:weather.com and there's also one more. Those have been really good because
Speaker:you can kind of it integrates with your ad account and it will show ads
Speaker:based on the weather patterns that are going on in the locations that you're selecting.
Speaker:That's been good too. And then also just kind of, I mean I know people
Speaker:who've used clicksees and stuff for fighting the bot traffic and
Speaker:that's also a really big thing that's going to be in my opinion growing
Speaker:the next few years is bot traffic and combating against that.
Speaker:Not saying clicksies is necessarily the right answer but I think keeping
Speaker:that in mind it goes to the quality traffic conversation as well for me.
Speaker:But I think that's also another thing is finding tools around what's going to help
Speaker:you get the highest quality traffic and then also heat mapping on the
Speaker:site. Microsoft Clarity has been a game changer too. Being able to
Speaker:see the session recordings of people landing on your site. There's paid alternatives
Speaker:to that but I think especially until you're you have
Speaker:tens of thousands of page views every month as a brand or more
Speaker:it just seems like it's a no brainer to not have to be paying
Speaker:for like a heat mapping thing. Yeah, it seems like one of the
Speaker:more basic tools actually get because it just kind of showing you where people
Speaker:are mousing their pointer over or may click on
Speaker:something. Yeah, absolutely. It's so
Speaker:vital to be seeing that the more that you can see the customer journey, the
Speaker:more informed you're going to be. Because I think every brand gets to that point
Speaker:in their advertising where they're like what's happening here? Why am I not getting sales?
Speaker:Why am I not whatever. And a lot of times you could probably trace it
Speaker:back to something you did in a site update or something. And heat
Speaker:mapping will help you see that breaking down your ad, your
Speaker:ad metrics into segments like I was saying, will help you see that a little
Speaker:bit. Quicker too. But the heat mapping really, really helps you see how
Speaker:people are interacting with your site, how they're clicking, how long they're staying
Speaker:on, and also what percentage of them, because it also does track bot clicks and
Speaker:stuff like that too. So it does help you see what percentage of your traffic
Speaker:is potentially falling under bots. How are they interacting where they're
Speaker:commonly clicking on the site. I love it. So I think it's a great
Speaker:thing that every single brand, especially in E commerce, should be on.
Speaker:And are there any underrated or emerging tools that you think marketers should
Speaker:be looking for or paying attention to? I would say anything that's
Speaker:going to be helping towards quality site traffic.
Speaker:I can't say there's any upcoming tools off the top of my head, but
Speaker:also tools that are helping with generating ad creatives. So kind of
Speaker:AI image gen is, I have mixed opinions
Speaker:on, but I think that it's going to be really helpful as a tool. I
Speaker:don't think it's necessarily going to be something where you can just plop in an
Speaker:idea. A lot of people are doing this with ChatGPT right now. They're just kind
Speaker:of plopping in a product image and then saying, here's a reference ad.
Speaker:Make an ad like this. I could see a place for that. But again,
Speaker:it goes back to AI being a tool in your creative process
Speaker:rather than just making the creative. Actually Neil Patel put out a few
Speaker:interesting stats on how when people know that something's AI,
Speaker:it actually hurts your brand image and hurts your conversion rate on your ads.
Speaker:So I think just recognizing or when you indicate something is AI
Speaker:created, it hurts your conversion rate. So I think these are things that you really
Speaker:want to pay attention to and people are going to be able to figure out
Speaker:what is AI generated, especially in copy. Like if you look at any copy with
Speaker:some people use EM dashes, but I don't. So when
Speaker:I see copy with that, that's kind of the first place that my head goes
Speaker:to is, okay, and who did this? With ChatGPT people can tell and over time
Speaker:it's going to become more known or people are going to become desensitized
Speaker:to what AI is creating. And you're going to need a more human
Speaker:connection, you're going to need a more human touch. Things that
Speaker:AI can't necessarily give right now. But yeah, I
Speaker:would say tools around anything that's a tool with helping generate creatives
Speaker:that's AI based is going to be a good thing to look into as
Speaker:well. Yeah, I Do know that the video side of it's
Speaker:getting a little too realistic. VO3 is
Speaker:doing a pretty good job. Gling's 2.0 or 2.1 is doing it pretty
Speaker:good. But you can still kind of tell that they're not real. Yeah, it's
Speaker:a weird texture of the video. I don't know how to explain it, but you
Speaker:can kind of tell that they're AI generated. Definitely. A lot of times it's the
Speaker:hands. They'll have like six fingers or like really, really big hands
Speaker:on the videos. I don't know about pictures, but on the videos you can tell
Speaker:that sometimes human hands, they don't really do very well with.
Speaker:It's the limbs. I saw that too. It gives you multiple fingers or
Speaker:arms. It's funny the things that it does get wrong and the
Speaker:spelling especially is hilar. What were the key decisions or
Speaker:pivots in a campaign that you led? Outstanding results.
Speaker:And how can listeners apply them? So it's a little
Speaker:bit more brand based, but one of the brands I was working with I
Speaker:saw on one of the social platforms, I can only
Speaker:speak a little bit broadly about it, but one of the social platforms I had
Speaker:seen it was indexing really high for view through conversions.
Speaker:So compared to click conversions, which are a little more desired because there are people
Speaker:clicking on your ad and then making a purchase, I saw it was indexing really
Speaker:high for view through conversions, which pretty much just means it's just showing
Speaker:someone an ad and seeing if they converted, they're not clicking on it. So it
Speaker:can be attributing from another platform that's getting really driving the conversion. But
Speaker:saw it was indexing really high with that and kind of an answer was to
Speaker:be bidding towards click only, which is not
Speaker:necessarily something that people would recommend or I would recommend for every platform. It was
Speaker:just in that instance when I saw on a percentage basis it was
Speaker:indexing much higher for view through conversions than any other platform.
Speaker:So that was the one time and that actually helped a lot and used that
Speaker:in combination with target cost bidding. And it was, I think, a
Speaker:300% or so year over year difference in roas. And one of the
Speaker:top campaigns of the brand was running on the platform.
Speaker:So I think it just comes back to being able
Speaker:to know the brand that you're working on, know their products, and also
Speaker:just keep an eye on the trends that are going through platform by
Speaker:platform. Whether you're just running on one or you're running on every single social
Speaker:platform. It's really important to Just see what's happening. And
Speaker:why might that be happening? I think it's really easy to just look at something
Speaker:and be ah, Roas is down this month. But why? What's
Speaker:driving that? Is it a site update? Is it something that's actually going on
Speaker:maybe with the platform algorithm? I know everyone on Reddit loves
Speaker:to say that, but sometimes it actually is just something that
Speaker:maybe not the algorithm, but what the algorithm's optimizing from. So it goes
Speaker:again view through conversions. If it's optimizing really heavy on view through
Speaker:conversions, it's going to be optimizing that back to the ad platform of people who
Speaker:are only viewing your ad that aren't clicking on it. A click is a more
Speaker:desired action. So if you have less of those for when the ad's optimizing,
Speaker:you're going to get a less desired audience that that ad is shown out to.
Speaker:So it's like a whole feedback loop that you want to keep in mind and
Speaker:all the parts add up to. The whole so what
Speaker:are, what do you see are the biggest challenges in performance marketing today
Speaker:and especially with the digital changing of the
Speaker:digital landscape? Like, what do you see like roadblocks for a lot
Speaker:of marketers? Tracking, definitely. And I've seen this trend too
Speaker:that a lot of the platforms are starting to have some difficulty
Speaker:with tracking, even with server side which is underreporting or
Speaker:again goes to the view through conversion, whatever that might
Speaker:be. I definitely see some gaps with some of
Speaker:the platforms there. So I think that's going to be the biggest roadblock is one
Speaker:successfully incorrectly setting up server side tracking. So conversions
Speaker:API is going to be the number one thing that I think every marketer should
Speaker:be learning, but they're going to make it easier to be implementing that. So what's,
Speaker:what's next beyond that it's going to be how are you actually
Speaker:tracking your campaigns and optimizing attributing and
Speaker:also what kind of attribution settings are you using? Because now
Speaker:platforms are introducing are getting heavier on incremental attribution,
Speaker:maximize value and those types of things should there
Speaker:might be a place for that in some brands campaigns and I think the strategy
Speaker:is going to become more around what are you doing around that rather
Speaker:than just how are you targeting people? Because the targeting is going to become
Speaker:automatic if you have a campaign that you're running instead of
Speaker:just typing in the interest segment that it normally would be, you can now
Speaker:get an adequate amount of conversions, create either lookalikes or just let
Speaker:the platform optimize on its own. If you're targeting the right campaign
Speaker:objective in your campaigns and then that will feed back to the platforms and find
Speaker:your target audience for you on autopilot. So when you take that out of the
Speaker:picture, the biggest thing is the actual
Speaker:tracking of the conversions and how that, how accurate that is and how that's getting
Speaker:done. So I think that's going to be the biggest focus moving forward for
Speaker:marketers. And what do you predict the future of digital
Speaker:advertising will be in the next five to 10 years?
Speaker:Honestly, I think really great. I think it's going to open
Speaker:basically the quicker that a lot of small businesses can start to get profitable with
Speaker:their campaigns, the more they're going to want to spend, the more that they're going
Speaker:to want to hire agencies. Because you can make
Speaker:everything self service. But I think at least as someone who
Speaker:started off running his own ads and doing it for other people, but mainly it
Speaker:started with myself. Once you get over that learning curve, you start to
Speaker:realize like, okay, I could use someone to run it because
Speaker:you want someone who's on top of it every day. You want someone who's always
Speaker:looking at the changes of the platforms. You want someone who's helping source creatives
Speaker:and influencers or whatever, if that's part of your strategy.
Speaker:And also keeping an eye on the tracking and just kind of day to day
Speaker:in the ad account and making sure that things are always going well
Speaker:for you. If there are dips looking into why that might be happening,
Speaker:there's just a lot more into it that when you start to run it yourself
Speaker:for a while, you're like, okay, I, I could probably use someone because there is
Speaker:more as, as automated as things are going to get, it's just going to create
Speaker:more things to have to be overseeing and, and looking at and keeping in check.
Speaker:Yeah, you can't do it on your all on your own apparently. Yeah,
Speaker:it's like they'll try and they'll make progress with it, but I think where one
Speaker:door closes, another one will open. And where
Speaker:AI or automation might take away something, it's going to,
Speaker:you know, overseeing that or knowing how to implement that, knowing how to correct it,
Speaker:or knowing how to feed it, feed it to improve it
Speaker:are going to be opportunities that open up from that as well. And
Speaker:people listen to this episode, they're wondering where can they find you online to learn
Speaker:more. So Instagram @rkstrmedia. I'm also
Speaker:UCK on the beat on Instagram. For me personally, you could also find me
Speaker:on LinkedIn, you could see my website rockstarmedia.com, it's r
Speaker:c k s t r media.com so not
Speaker:rockstar like guitar hero. It's rockstar like rck s t
Speaker:r. And that's probably the main places I would send people. I have some
Speaker:other social channels. I'm growing now, but as a new business owner,
Speaker:I've now become a content creator. So hopefully you start seeing some of my content.
Speaker:All right, any final thoughts for the listeners? No, I think for small
Speaker:business owners, for anyone running ads, whether you're a small business owner or marketer, I
Speaker:think try to have sight into what's coming and
Speaker:where everything's going and instead of trying to say
Speaker:or complain or say, well, I don't know why things are going this way or
Speaker:whatever, look forward, look at what's the new opportunities that are opening
Speaker:up. What are other platforms doing? I mean, Gary Vee
Speaker:calls it impression arbitrage or whatever he calls it in his book it's
Speaker:day trading Attention. So I think think more like someone
Speaker:who is trying to just find that opportunity of arbitrage
Speaker:with getting the lowest cost of impressions to have the best results
Speaker:for your business and then also moving forward, what are the opportunities that open up?
Speaker:So just be forward thinking. Know that as a small business owner or
Speaker:as any marketer, whether you're working at an agency or whatever it is, just try
Speaker:to have that vision for a path forward for things and bring on a team.
Speaker:All right. Thank you Chuck for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brew and sharing your knowledge
Speaker:on the digital ad space. Brett, thank you very much. It was great
Speaker:talking with you and. Thank you for listening as always. Please subscribe to this
Speaker:podcast on all your favorite podcasting apps. Leave. A five star review really does help
Speaker:with the rankings. Let me know how I am doing but join
Speaker:me next week as I talk to another great thought leader in the PR
Speaker:marketing industry. All right guys, stay safe. Get to understanding what's going
Speaker:on with your website with the heat maps and the digital ads and everything else
Speaker:in between and see you next week later.
