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Chad Kodary (00:02.301)
What's going on everybody and welcome to another episode of behind the revenue. Uh, ladies and gentlemen, this time I have Jason Hornung on from the Academy of advertising Jason, before we dive into it and have some fun today, why don't you just tell the people a little bit about who you are, what you do and what brought you here?
Jason Hornung (00:20.65)
Oh man, well I got connected to you last year through some mutual people in the industry, but I got into online marketing way back around the time when it started, 2005. Throughout the years I got good at converting traffic into sales across every kind of offer that you can imagine.
grew a little marketing agency off of that and kind of got really well known in the internet marketing community as somebody that actually delivers results. So that kind of led to building my academy to share what I was doing with people because people kept asking me and would find videos that I put on YouTube that I forgot to make private that I had no intention. That was what really kind of started that off actually was...
This was back in 2013 when I was building up my agency. I started hiring people because I got overwhelmed once I got to like 15 clients where I was managing their accounts all by myself. And then I'm like, crap, I need people to do this stuff for me. So I would just make these screen capture videos on Camtasia and I didn't know where else to put them. So I just put it on YouTube. And I'm not...
the most technologically advanced person and I tend to just do things without thinking too much about a lot of consequences. I didn't make them private. I didn't make these videos unlisted or anything. They were public. They were just training for my team, I thought. I didn't think anybody was going to see them. I started getting these DMs from people telling me.
Dude, I made $15,000 today from that video you put on YouTube of them like what? What are you talking about? What video? Yeah, what video right? so then I then I went back and I realized I hadn't made these things private and I'm like crap and I Had gotten into the marketing From being a Dan Kennedy disciple
Chad Kodary (02:10.653)
What video are you talking about? Jeez.
Chad Kodary (02:27.615)
Mm.
Jason Hornung (02:27.87)
And so one of my goals was always to have an information product. And so that was like the light bulb for me because I had been trying information products and hadn't gotten them to work at all across a variety of industries. Prior to that, what had always worked for me was just doing things for people, right? And I could easily sell that. But once that happened, then I was like, ding, I got an info product now, right? And then I...
That's how I turned that into my first info product in 2013 that sold and delivered a lot of results. That was the ultimate guide to Facebook ads. And then that became Facebook ads boot camp, which became Boot Camp 2.0, which I launched in 2016. And that was the thing that really put me on the map was that and my agency really kind of crescendoed at that point in time. And you know, we sold like...
I think it was 1,500 units of that, Boot Camp 2.0 at $1,500 a pop. Yeah, and I have hundreds of case studies of people that for the first time or maybe the best time, they got results with ads. So I've just been kind of continuing along that path. I still have agency clients. I run my academy and share what I do with agency clients. I run my own ads.
So I share what I'm doing there as well and then I have a couple of consulting clients that I work with here and there, you know, depending on what I want to do with my time.
Chad Kodary (04:06.041)
So that's some context for everybody. You're paid ads dude, right? That's your thing. You deal primarily with paid ads, right?
Jason Hornung (04:14.166)
That's what people know me for. I cut my teeth in the industry first with direct mail. So I've mastered direct mail. I've also then, when I first got online, I was actually an SEO guy and an email guy for the, yeah, before a paid ads guy, yeah. So.
Chad Kodary (04:32.053)
Really? Okay.
Chad Kodary (04:36.757)
paid ads is like, I feel like paid at, cause you get, you get to this point in business. Um, most people also don't realize this until they get to that certain point, but you get to a point in business where SEO and in networks and stuff like that will only take you so far. Um, and then it's like, okay, well, I can just continue kind of crawling at this slower pace, right? And try to get some inbound leads coming in through some organic stuff.
Cause we do a bunch of organic stuff. This being one of them, right? A podcast is a way for us to generate leads organically too. Um, but like you get to a point where it's like, okay, well now that if I have like a sales team or if I have, if I have any sort of team and I'm really trying to scale this thing up, whatever, whatever it is that I'm building, like paid ads is really the solution to that problem that most entrepreneurs have. Would you, would you agree?
Jason Hornung (05:23.27)
100%, yeah, I mean that was, you know, it was actually, so this is how far, how long I've been out here is, it was the Panda update for Google SEO. The Panda update, yeah. Do you, yeah. Yep.
Chad Kodary (05:32.493)
Panda update. Jesus. I remember that. I used to do SEO too. Yeah. I used to do, I opened my, I had my marketing agency in 2009. So I was doing all the SEO on all the accounts. I remember the Panda update. Yeah, that was a good one. I remember Ma's doing whiteboard Fridays and releasing the new Panda update and what was going to happen
Jason Hornung (05:40.636)
Okay.
Jason Hornung (05:44.06)
Yup, the pic.
Jason Hornung (05:50.838)
That thing crushed me, man. It was like, I had some clients where I had gotten them ranked number one on really competitive keywords. And I built, what I would do for clients is I would write these massive articles on keywords, and I would custom write them. And then I'd get links, and I would get pages really highly ranked. And then I would, from that traffic,
I would push people over into information product funnels that I would build for the clients. Right? And I had one client where from the Panda update, we lost like half of our traffic overnight. You know what I mean? And it took me years, literally like two years to get things to that point. So that was when I was just like, I can't go through this anymore. I need something that I can control. And that's really when I started diving into paid meds.
Chad Kodary (06:31.914)
Yeah, dude, that sucks.
Chad Kodary (06:44.961)
That's the biggest thing. Yeah. That's the biggest thing is control. Like if you're a business owner and you're not running paid ads, like tomorrow, if I need more business, I can literally just turn the lever up and get more business and it's ad spend. That's really what it's all about. Right. So I want to, I want the majority of the rest of our conversation to obviously be about paid ads. Um, it's something that we've been diving us as a company and our company DashClicks, um,
Primarily throughout the first five years of us really being open. No, thankfully we were able to have really good year over year growth, primarily off of organic and affiliates. Right. Once again, that only takes you so far where a team of, you know, almost a hundred people, so you can imagine. You need to get some ad spend, uh, going to be able to drive, uh, some growth, right, predictable growth, primarily, not just organic stuff for waiting for affiliates to do affiliate launches and things like that.
So for us this year, and, and just to add some context, some funness to this, I think in the entirety of DashClicks like we've probably spent maybe like in the last six years, like 200 grand on ads in total, which if you think about it is like nothing, right for a company of our size. So like organic has done really well for us. But once again, we're at the point where it's like paid ads is, is that we know that that's the next thing we know that that's what's going to take us to the next level. Cause
We need to be able to compete with our competitors. We need to be able to drive a large amount of influx of signups per day and, uh, and sell courses and products and all those things. So I want to talk to you and this is, I want to do like a fun exercise here, cause I think this will be fun for the viewers too. So we, we have a couple of different strategies for campaigns that we're running right now. I want to get your side to the story on what you think is, is good or bad or what you think that we should do. Almost like a little mini funnel breakdown here. So,
I'll start with one of our most recent campaigns. We just started a low ticket offer campaign. I guess first and foremost, what are your thoughts on low ticket, kind of like SLO, uh, strategy like liquidation offers, because for us, and just to also add some context here, our end goal, cause we are, we have a software called DashClicks pro where obviously we service marketing agencies, right? So our end goal is to get a software subscriber. We don't really care about.
Chad Kodary (09:04.689)
making money or making a profit off of our education material. Our education material is a way for us to just funnel people through to one, get more indoctrinated, like trust us, build the reputation, all that good stuff until eventually they become a software user and are paying or $99 a month or whatever it is, you know, to, to use DashClicks pro and then possibly use our white label fulfillment services at the same time. So
Those two things are really our end goal. And we use education as like a lever to drive them through. Right. So for us, we have, um, a low ticket offer right now, which is $27. Um, I'm just going to go, it's kind of like the, yeah, I'm going to walk this to the funnel so you can understand cause I know how your mind works 20 at $27, uh, lander, uh, landing page. Uh, it basically has like six of our courses that we created in the past. It's kind of like a volt.
Jason Hornung (09:44.63)
Walk me through it, keep going, yeah. You're doing perfect. Yep.
Chad Kodary (10:00.325)
where they get all these courses. They also get a call, 30 minute call with our team, which is a DashClicks demo, because it also includes a 30 day extended free trial of DashClicks, right? Which is the way that we can hopefully get them to continue using our software after the 30 days, right? So that's our continuity mix in the play there. So basically 27 bucks, and we have an order bump on that page, which is $67, which right now gets like 60% take. It's our...
I think it's like 37 proposal templates and another mini course, which is our product knowledge mini course, which shows you all of our products and how you can like resell marketing services and stuff like that. Obviously using the engine, which is dash. So that's kind of the landing page, $27 volt of a bunch of different courses plus an extended 30 day trial of DashClicks plus a 30 day phone call. Plus if you want optional $67 order bump, awesome. Right. Then we have the next page, which is OTO one.
Our OTO one page is $197 offer for a one year subscription of our agency website, which in our prop and our platform DashClicks, we have dozens of agency website templates. One of the things that especially newer or not, maybe not established agencies struggle with is they don't have a website. So our platform will basically you pick a template, you inject all of your contact information, uh, as you go through this little
stepper dialogue and we basically build out a whole website for you in five seconds and you in its life, right? So you, what agents who have site problems solve. So it's $197, uh, which is basically 50% off of what the retail would be. And that's for a year long after that, it renews that retail value, right? So just add some context. Um, then we have OTO three, which basically is a, an option for them to choose one of two things. One is our $7 proven prospecting script, uh, that we give them.
Uh, or it's our $497, which they get the proven prospecting script for free. Plus it's basically our course, which is called dash university. Um, and, uh, that's pretty much it. Um, right now our average order value on that funnel is about $94. So people are taking things, which is good. We just started running. We ran this, by the way, we ran this campaign about two years ago in this exact same funnel.
Jason Hornung (12:12.741)
Mm.
Chad Kodary (12:21.865)
We were not using any tracking attribution tracking. We didn't think it was working. We recently just installed high roast about three weeks ago on everything that we do now. Um, so now we're actually getting real attribution and figuring out what the fuck is actually working and what's not. Um, we just launched a new version of this campaign. The campaign is called agency lawn secrets launched it on Friday, literally a couple of days ago. Um, and I think we're at 200. We just started off at $200 a day budget. Uh, we're running.
Jason Hornung (12:21.87)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Hornung (12:26.923)
Mmm.
Jason Hornung (12:35.979)
Yeah.
Chad Kodary (12:52.169)
I think 36 different tests at $5 an ad set or something like that. Uh, uh, $5 an ad set. We're testing 36 different, uh, ad sets. Um, and that's, and then we have a remarketing campaign that we built out for people that went to the landing page that didn't purchase or bring it back on. That's basically the entire campaign and landing page and all that. We want to be able to take that and scale that up. It's targeting just to add some more context targeting. Also the big issue that we had in the past is if you tried to target, and you probably know this.
Jason Hornung (13:04.651)
Mm-hmm.
Chad Kodary (13:21.737)
If you try to target marketing agencies directly, very difficult because there's not really like a lever that Facebook allows you to pull. It says this dude has a marketing agency. You have to kind of target other things around it or use like lookalike audiences and stuff like that, right? Uh, plus the market is only so big. So what we're doing is we're targeting marketing agencies, but we're also targeting the biz op space, which is like, Hey, do you want to start a marketing agency?
In the next seven days, we'll show you how to do that with agency lawn secret. So that way we get like a way wider of a bucket. We can go after people that like shark tank and entrepreneurs and all that fun stuff. Right. So just adding context. So that's basically what we're doing right now. If you were in the driver's seat, what would you do?
Jason Hornung (13:56.462)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Hornung (14:02.958)
Okay, so I think in there you said right now you're getting a $95 AOV, is that correct?
Chad Kodary (14:12.117)
That's from the old stats when we ran that campaign about two years ago. And that was, by the way, that also, that funnel was still running organically. So we've still been selling that. So that AOV is updated. It's not from like a two year. Yeah. Um, but yeah, um, that, so
Jason Hornung (14:14.163)
Okay.
Jason Hornung (14:27.55)
What about the ads that you're running right now in the final, do you have any sales that came through so far?
Chad Kodary (14:32.317)
Yes. Yeah. We had about, I want to say about from the two, we've only been running 200 bucks a day for like, what? Three days now. Cause we turned it on Friday at night. Um, I think we've got about six people that went, that went through the purchase. Um, I haven't checked the AOV yet cause it's Monday morning and I just got in. Um, but, uh, but I would, I know that it's a probably a high AOV because I saw the orders come in throughout the weekend. And I think like three out of the six people that went through actually bought everything, which is a $298 grab.
Jason Hornung (14:38.806)
Mm.
Chad Kodary (15:01.185)
across the board, right? So I know the AOV is actually pretty high on those at least a six that came in so far.
Jason Hornung (15:02.763)
Okay.
All right, cool. So if I'm hearing you right, we have roughly $600 to spend so far, right? Okay, we generated six new customers.
Chad Kodary (15:19.529)
Yep, I'm actually opening up high roast.
Jason Hornung (15:19.862)
and we have a potential for better than $100 AOV. Is that, am I hearing you right there? Okay, cool. So.
Chad Kodary (15:27.933)
Yep, exactly. Yeah, 100%.
Jason Hornung (15:33.954)
Given what you told me about your goals with advertising, normally people that tell me that kind of thing, they're A-okay with their info product funnel being break even to ad spend or a little bit better, possibly even a little bit under break even. Yeah. Cool. So you're at basically one right now, right?
Chad Kodary (15:52.965)
even loss. I'm fine at like 0.75 or something like that.
Jason Hornung (16:01.814)
but it's only three days into this thing, okay? So what we have is all of the green light indicators that your campaign and funnel are working as you anticipate or possibly even a little bit better, right, if we adjusted your expectation down to that.75 or whatever, right? If we set it at break even as your expectation for how this performs, then you're at that expectation right now.
Chad Kodary (16:04.446)
Yep, exactly.
Chad Kodary (16:22.826)
Yep.
Jason Hornung (16:31.606)
So now this is a critical juncture point where a lot of people will fuck this up when they do this kind of thing. Because they will have it work in the way that they want when they're looking at the numbers. And they're like, woohoo, I wanna scale. And they start like pushing the volume on all kinds of different things. Or they might, the other thing that I'll see is they'll at the same time think, oh, I should test this hook and I'm gonna need another hook
Those are the two things that will happen right at this juncture point. And I'll tell you what, those two behaviors or even one of them, either one of them that happens at this juncture point, if you were to do them, it'll dive bomb the campaign. And that's why most people will say when they go to scale, their campaigns fall apart. Okay. Now,
Chad Kodary (17:23.674)
By the way, just to add some context, I just checked high rows as we're talking about a 1.76 row as right now.
Jason Hornung (17:29.506)
Bam, so that's better than expected by a lot. So what I teach people in my training, and this is something that I've never seen anybody else talk about, and it's when we have this initial proof of concept phase that we're pushing our stuff through to get a minimum amount of spend to try to determine is this thing working the way that we want it to or not and what do we do from that point? That's our first juncture, our first checkpoint.
That's where you're at. So when we base it off of your expectations, this thing is actually doing better than what we were expecting minimally for how this thing works. So what that tells us is we've got proof of concept initially. Now what we need to do is we need to sit on our hands and we need to let that thing validate for a longer period of time to ensure that performance continues. Because anybody that's actually run Facebook ads
Chad Kodary (18:18.573)
Mmm.
Jason Hornung (18:26.934)
will know that there's many instances where you'll start something off and it'll work good for day two, three. And even if you don't do anything to it, the thing will just stop working all of a sudden, right? Hundreds, right? So what we have to do is we have to put things through this validation period for two purposes. One, it's to confirm that we didn't just catch some short-term lightning in a bottle.
Chad Kodary (18:37.365)
Yep, I've had that happen multiple times.
Jason Hornung (18:52.758)
and Facebook's gonna not convert it because we don't want to start scaling something that has no chance of giving us more sales, right? All we're gonna do is accelerate our losses, which is what most people do at that point, okay? The other thing that we wanna do is we actually need to give the algorithm more time to continue learning because for most people after three days, it's not even done with the learning phase yet.
Right now, yours might be done because of your spend level, right? Because you're spending a little bit higher. But even if it does say inside of the ads manager that it's done with learning, we still want to give it more time and more days to give it more data to really understand who is converting, right? Before we start. Yeah.
Chad Kodary (19:17.929)
Yeah, it's that.
Chad Kodary (19:38.741)
Can I see a quick question? Quick question. Cause it's going to relate to what you're saying right now. And I want to add some context for the viewers too. Um, also knowing the fact that the way that we have our campaign set up, because yes, we are doing two in draws a day, but we do have it inside split up between like 36 different assets that are running at five bucks a day. So the learning is kind of like, and it's not CBO.
Jason Hornung (20:01.162)
Yeah, yeah, and it's spread out. And those are like little details, but I wanna keep people on the big picture, philosophical piece of it. Because this applies no matter how you structure the campaign, how many ads, adsets, all that bullshit, right? Because we're, yeah, because we're just looking at the totality of, how's the whole thing doing? Right? Now in your case, because the whole thing is working the way that we want, we're gonna let the whole thing keep validating, right?
Chad Kodary (20:06.322)
Okay, cool. Cool, cool.
Chad Kodary (20:11.333)
Okay. I wanted to make sure. Okay. Cool.
Chad Kodary (20:18.657)
Gotcha.
Jason Hornung (20:25.994)
Now what I teach people in my courses is that this phase, after we pass that proof of concept, we go into phase two, which is this validation period, where now we're gonna commit to letting your campaigns run without changing the budget, and ideally without turning any switch at all in there for another seven days, okay?
Chad Kodary (20:46.913)
So you're saying from launch, wait seven days in total, basically, to just don't touch shit and just let it run.
Jason Hornung (20:54.174)
Well, let me get clear on this. So we have an initial proof of concept period. That is normally 24 hours. It can go up to three days. In your case, you were at three days. Okay, so that was your proof of concept period. And then at that point we check and we look at our numbers. Are they working within our expectation or not? If the answer to that is yes, then we're gonna move the campaign into phase two of what I call it, which is a validation period. Where now we're gonna commit to letting it sit for seven days.
Chad Kodary (20:56.158)
Okay.
Chad Kodary (21:01.33)
Okay, got you.
Yeah, yep.
Chad Kodary (21:23.394)
Mm, gotcha.
Jason Hornung (21:23.854)
And ideally, we're not going to touch anything. Now, the caveat to that is we're going to check the campaign every single day, and we're going to keep looking at the numbers, right? As long as it's continuing to work at our expectation or better, we're going to not touch shit that day, OK? Now, if we look at the thing and something's going haywire, all of a sudden it stops converting, or it starts to decline in performance,
Then we're gonna perform different actions depending on what's going on. It could be anywhere from turning some ad sets and some ads off depending on what you have structured. It could be turning the whole campaign off, right? Because, you know, like we talked about a moment ago, we have those scenarios where it'll work for three days and then it doesn't work at all beyond that, right? So we might have to turn the whole thing off after another day or two of trying to validate, okay? But we're gonna, we're gonna...
Chad Kodary (22:12.075)
Yep.
Jason Hornung (22:22.026)
run our system and we're gonna look at stuff, we're gonna see is it working within our numbers or not. If it is, we're gonna leave it. We're not gonna touch anything. If it's not, then we gotta make a decision, and our decision's gonna be based on what's happening and how it's structured and stuff like that. And so I give people frameworks for that in my course. But assuming we get through that seven days, and the whole thing kept working the way that we wanted it to, we didn't touch nothing in there.
Now what we've got is we go to phase three of a campaign, which is our scaling and maintenance phase. That's how we properly pass a campaign through to get Facebook's algorithm to learn it right, to make sure we didn't catch some weird lightning in a bottle that's gonna fizzle out, and to also practice the concept of doing less to get more out of your campaigns, because most people that
actually are running ads and can get some things working, they stop working because of the choices that they're making at these different junctures. And that's because they don't have a clear framework and understanding of these different processes that you go through and how you evaluate the campaigns differently at each process and then make your decisions inside of the campaign accordingly. Right? So that's what people get from me. That's...
you don't see anywhere else. There's basically two sets of skills that you have with advertising. There's the pre-published stuff, and then there's the post-published stuff. Now, most stuff out there teaches people all the pre-published stuff. Here's how you set up your funnel. Here's how you make your ad, blah, right? But no ad in the history of mankind has ever made any money at all until you push publish in the ads manager. And if people get to that point and start doing that...
Chad Kodary (23:47.436)
Well.
Chad Kodary (24:13.217)
Correct
Jason Hornung (24:15.798)
That's when they get really overwhelmed, right? Cause they got all this data coming at them. They don't know like how to tell if something's working right or not. What numbers do I pay attention to? Is this good or not? How much should I spend to determine if it's working or not? How do I validate my tracking, right? There's just umpteen million things that come at people and they don't know how to deal with these things, right? And so, I mean, this is just one small segment.
Chad Kodary (24:38.538)
Yep.
Jason Hornung (24:44.626)
of all of that is, you know, how do we make these decisions when we're running these campaigns? That's the process that I use, right? And coming all the way back to, you know, your specific scenario, this is why people really need to have somebody that knows this stuff to talk to about these things, because you'll hear some gurus say, oh, do this, but dude, like there's, that doesn't apply to most people, right? Now in your exact spot, we got to get you in validation period. Ideally, we're not going to touch anything.
Chad Kodary (24:51.946)
Love it, dude.
Chad Kodary (25:01.118)
Yeah.
Jason Hornung (25:14.178)
for up to the next seven days. And if that thing keeps cooking along like it has, now you're gonna have the green light to be able to go and start scaling. And you should be able to increase your budgets without the thing getting all messed up. And you should see your performance stay pretty consistent as well. And those are the things that everybody wants, right? And so, yeah.
Chad Kodary (25:34.197)
to question for you, because this is where a lot of people will make stupid decisions. Um, and I want to make sure that we would point them in the right direction. Is it better to like, let's say I'll just use my, uh, my setup kind of as an example, I have 36 different outsets at five bucks a day, right? Um, is it after the seven days of my cool, the whole thing is still cranking. I'm still over a one or even at a one or whatever, whatever my happy zone is, right? I'm still cool with the results, right? And I want to scale this thing.
Do I turn off all the losing ad sets that just haven't been performing from the last seven days, right? And cut my losses on those. Uh, and then take the ones that are winning and go from $5 a day to a hundred dollars a day, or do I scale them up? Or do I copy them into different ad sets and scale those up into like a phase three campaign that I'll see a lot of people do what's like the best strategy for scaling ad sets.
Jason Hornung (26:21.015)
Yeah.
Jason Hornung (26:27.318)
It's the age old question, all right? So now, let me give you two thought processes that I give people that will shape your thinking about this. Okay, so when I'm playing the game of how do I make decisions in my account, I'm always trying, I'm always playing the game with probability. What has the highest probability of me replicating the result I'm getting when I scale?
Right? So I teach people that there's three ways to scale. There's vertical scaling, which is just increasing budgets on existing campaigns. There's horizontal scaling, which is creating additional campaigns. And then there's spherical scaling, which is creating additional messaging that you may put in existing campaigns or create other campaigns with. Okay? Now, in a scenario like yours, where we've got some...
we got a campaign that's working and producing the results and it's been validated to produce your results for us a certain period of time at least a week now it is to me it passes that right now uh... what uh... shoot i lost my train of thought there were what we're just talking about
Chad Kodary (27:45.213)
Yeah. So we were talking about what should I do if I have 36 different ads that should I just scale them up?
Jason Hornung (27:50.626)
Aha, okay, yes, okay. So you've got an entire thing that's working within your numbers. So you've got a wheel that is not broke. Okay, so you don't wanna fix that in this case, right? And we wanna play the highest probability of what is going to replicate the result, right? So coming back to the three types of scaling.
Your first step for scaling is going to be to increase the budgets. Okay. Now we're not going to turn off ads that look like they're losing though. Okay. And the reason for that is because of delayed and misattribution that happens inside of these things. Okay.
Chad Kodary (28:36.39)
Even if you're using high roast.
Jason Hornung (28:38.886)
Yeah, dude, like I can go on like an hour long talk about how high roast is at 100% accurate either. Yeah, and there's, yeah.
Chad Kodary (28:45.769)
Okay, cool. I didn't, I wasn't expecting it to be, but I was hoping at least like 90% accuracy or something like that.
Jason Hornung (28:51.534)
You know, it varies depending on setup and offer and market because there's different market behaviors that can happen. I had a client where we could, because of market behavior, there was 30% of their sales we could not track no matter what. Yeah. And so, yeah, in that case, it didn't help us. But here's how I always think about these things. Okay, so again, you got a campaign, it's a wheel.
Chad Kodary (29:06.788)
Mm, gotcha. Okay.
Jason Hornung (29:19.394)
The wheel, the whole wheel is working, despite what each of the things inside of it are saying. No matter what system you're looking at, Facebook, high roast, doesn't matter. You gotta decide what your source of truth is, depending on what tech stack you use. I use the Facebook Pixel, because if you install it clean, I get 90 plus percent accuracy with it, right? I don't have a lot of these problems that other people say they do, and we can dive into that at some point too, if you want.
Chad Kodary (29:46.001)
Yep. And by the way, once again, just to add, I want to add a little context here. The only reason, the main reason, excuse me, why we're using high rows is not so much for the attribution tracking on the front end. It's for the attribution tracking down the road because I know that I'm breaking even or losing money on a campaign. I want to know that I'm making it up later on down the road when they buy our software or fulfillment products or things like that. That's the main reason for us of why we use Iros.
Jason Hornung (30:14.262)
Sure, yeah, okay, cool. I totally get that. So yeah, I mean, there's any number of solutions that people can use and that work for them, right? And so you just gotta, at the end of the day, decide what your source of truth is, you know what I mean, and how you're gonna do that. But most people are gonna be starting off with the Facebook stuff and relying on that and kinda making decisions in there. So, you know, like coming back to my overall philosophy
How do I go about scaling? If I've got a campaign that's working, it's been validated and proven, my highest probability of replicating results is to increase the budget on that existing campaign versus duplicating it and making another one versus combining ad sets together and making a CBO, right? Any of these other, anything different, right? Anything different.
is going to have a lower probability of us replicating results because it's something brand new. The new campaign hasn't been learned by the algorithm like your existing one has. So your first play of scaling should always be to take up budgets on the existing campaign. Okay. Yeah. So then, you know, when I've got one of your situations where I've got a bunch of these ad sets in here.
Chad Kodary (31:24.104)
Mm.
Chad Kodary (31:31.957)
Got you.
Jason Hornung (31:38.89)
Now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna look at how are all of them performing inside of there based on the data that I do have, okay? Now if it's clear on the data that there are some that aren't performing at all, I have zero conversion tracking on them, all these other ones are tracking conversions, I can match it up to my bottom line and say, empirically these ad sets are not working, I will clip those off at that point in time.
Okay, and I would only do that in the scenario you're in where it's ad set budgets like you talked about. I would not do that if it was CBO. Okay, yeah, because, correct. Now, and I was talking about this before, even in ad set budgets, you're gonna have misattribution and cross attribution that happens. So that's why I was saying, if you can empirically say, or you can say with like at least a 90 plus percent confidence level,
Chad Kodary (32:12.525)
CBO, yeah, never. Yeah, because then you really don't know.
Jason Hornung (32:33.482)
these ad sets are not converting at all, then clip them off, okay? If not, leave them on, but we're not gonna scale the budgets. We're just gonna leave them at whatever budgets they're at. You know what I mean? And then what I do is I sort the ad sets based on how they're performing, based on the data that I have, and I'm gonna rank them in order of highest performance to lowest. And let's say I decide, okay, I wanna scale 100 bucks a day on my campaign, okay? And I've got all these different ad sets.
Well then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna distribute that 100 bucks a day across multiple ad sets, but I'm going to put all of it into the ones that are performing the best based on the data that I have. And then I'm usually gonna unevenly weight that across the higher performers as well, right? So like let's say I had five ad sets out of my 30 that were my clear winners, and one of them just killed everybody else, and I got that 100 bucks a day.
Chad Kodary (33:06.742)
Got you.
Jason Hornung (33:30.942)
I might put 50 bucks a day on that one that's killing everyone else, yeah.
Chad Kodary (33:33.043)
on that, yeah.
And what, at what point, and here's, we'll get into some of the fun talks because I've done this before. We've done this before in other campaigns that we've had sometimes on some campaigns. Um, and it could be the market, right? Cause I, with this one campaign I'm talking about, it was primarily targeting, uh, only marketing agencies. So it was kind of like within that bubble of there's only so many of these people out there, right? Um, where the second you go past like three, 400 bucks a day, the whole campaign just fucking dies.
Jason Hornung (33:59.403)
Mm.
Chad Kodary (34:06.217)
Right. So what do you do in situations like that? Because like, it's so hard to scale campaigns in a certain market or vertical or messaging, right? Depending on what you're trying to, you know, the outcome, um, is it just like, uh, well, you're, you're out of luck where you're just fucking stuck at 300 bucks a day and maybe try a new strategy and you do another 300 bucks a day there and just leave them on at 300 bucks a day, right? Like find that happy medium.
Jason Hornung (34:06.262)
Yep.
Jason Hornung (34:30.418)
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. So every campaign that you get to a point where it's producing the results you're expecting, as you're scaling it, you're gonna find what I call the point of diminishing return where your budget will no longer support the results that you're looking for, because basically what you found is for whatever Facebook set with the algorithm and the history that was in there,
Chad Kodary (34:46.797)
Exactly.
Jason Hornung (34:58.038)
When you ask for more traffic, they have to go out beyond the group of people that are gonna convert at the rate you need them to in order to make your numbers work. And that's how it gets skewed. So the first course of action that you take is to back the budget back down to the previous level that worked. Right, that's a play that I have been teaching people for years in my playbook. I call it budget descaling, right? A lot of people will happen, they scale it,
Chad Kodary (35:25.334)
Mm. I like that.
Jason Hornung (35:27.946)
it stops working, they shut it off, they start all over again. And that's why they can never keep scaling. Yeah, that's what most people do.
Chad Kodary (35:31.713)
That's what we did. And it fucked us. Cause we, we did that. And we had a campaign that was running and it was like two and a half row as, and it had continuity built in there. So it was more row as on the back end and we ran that shit for like three months at that very similar row as we were doing like 300 bucks a day or something like that. And we tried to bump it up to like five, 600 bucks a day.
The whole thing basically tumbled down on us. We just stopped getting conversions completely. We even tried to bring it back down. It still was, I don't know why for us, we just maybe had shit luck, but we weren't getting the conversions. And then we turned it off. We're like, maybe the campaign is fucked up. Maybe it's jinxed. I don't know. Let's just shut this shit off and just duplicate it and try to start it from scratch with a lower budget. And it didn't work. It was crazy. We tried to run it for weeks and we just, we couldn't figure it out. It just wouldn't work. We were just bleeding money. So we just turned the whole thing off.
Jason Hornung (35:57.499)
Peace! Yep.
Chad Kodary (36:25.269)
And we just shut it down and we had, we had turned on a new one. It sucked. It sucks to have something. It sucks to have something work good and then stop working. And I feel like Facebook, I don't know if it's just maybe us, but I feel like Facebook does this a lot. And when that happened, do you find yourself sometime? I know you're, you're probably like more of a Facebook, you Facebook more of a Facebook dude than like Tik TOK and Google and all that stuff, I would say I am too. I really actually suck on every other platform to be honest.
Jason Hornung (36:25.674)
Yep, yep. That happens a lot.
Jason Hornung (36:49.055)
Yeah.
Chad Kodary (36:54.933)
Um, but do you find yourself like leaning towards other platforms when stuff like that happens where you're like, well, let me just try to take this offer and all these ads and stuff like that, and maybe push it over to like YouTube ads or, you know, tick tock ads or something like that.
Jason Hornung (37:07.83)
No, I mean like when I try doing that, like it's a whole different beast, right? You can't just take what works on Facebook and move it over into these other platforms. It just doesn't work, right? So for me, my course of act, correct. Yeah, I just go and I fix these problems, right? So when we have something like that, so the term that I use is juju, right? Like sometimes we just,
Chad Kodary (37:15.744)
It is.
Chad Kodary (37:24.457)
especially the video styles and stuff like that.
Jason Hornung (37:37.494)
take a course of action in the account and it puts bad juju into our setup, right? Yeah, because like, we gotta remember, like everything is happening based on the signals that are coming in the algorithm based on the performance, right? And so like in your scenario you painted there, I think you said you had it running for about two months at 300 bucks a day. Yeah, when you get something like that going, it's so consistent and...
Chad Kodary (37:42.932)
Yeah, dude.
Chad Kodary (37:59.341)
Two, three months. Yeah. Yep.
Jason Hornung (38:05.382)
The algorithm, part of how it learns is it optimizes to your budget, right? And so that thing knew it had it dialed in. So when you went and said, hey, give us more, it disrupted the algorithm to the point where for probably the next 24 hours, your conversions tanked, which then that sent the wrong signals to the algorithm of who to send the traffic to. And it went into a tailspin is what happens there. Correct.
Chad Kodary (38:23.307)
Yeah.
Mmm, it's like a whole.
Tip the fucking Domino over. Yeah, it was like Domino's. It just plummeted.
Jason Hornung (38:35.822)
Correct. That's why, you know, like when you're dealing with small, part of how you scale your budgets, you need to factor in your audience size when you're making these decisions, right? Cause you can scale by hundreds, thousands, a day at a time, or you can scale by a percentage, right? Now, when I teach people in the smaller markets, when you get your budget up to like 250 or more per day,
That's a larger budget for most people, and it's a larger budget for the algorithm. So when you start adding bigger chunks onto that, you're making bigger leaps in what you're asking for in terms of the traffic, right? And so it has a harder time adjusting to those. So I'll tell people to make a percentage change there. But in your case, what I would have done if that was my account.
Chad Kodary (39:16.873)
Yep.
Jason Hornung (39:26.294)
Like if I was running that one, it had been sitting there for three months, things validated work, and I'm like, how do I get more out of this thing? I would have actually duplicated in that case.
Chad Kodary (39:37.013)
Duplicate the campaign left it on and just tried another two, 300 bucks in a separate.
Jason Hornung (39:40.142)
Correct. Anytime I get something that's been working at a budget, over 250 a day, and it's been running for more than 30 days is the benchmark that I use, I don't touch that motherfucker. I just let it run until it stops working. Correct.
Chad Kodary (39:51.84)
Yeah
Chad Kodary (39:56.725)
Yeah, collect. Do you have you have campaigns that have been on for like months? It just you don't even years really?
Jason Hornung (40:02.514)
years. I still have them right now, right now. I got one that's been running for four years right now for a client. Same funnels, same ads. Oh, we're spending $1,200 a day on that campaign right now. For the last four years, I've had that campaign budget anywhere from $500 a day all the way up to $4,000 a day, depending on what volume they want.
Chad Kodary (40:07.849)
What's the longest campaign that you've had on?
Holy shit. And how much ad spend is on that?
Chad Kodary (40:22.857)
and it's been on for four years.
Jason Hornung (40:32.058)
All I do is take the budget up and down. I don't switch out ads, I don't change shit, right?
Chad Kodary (40:32.489)
Wow. That's crazy.
Yeah, that's what we've been, uh, we've been dying to get some like that, like a campaign that you could just leave on. We had one, um, when we launched version, one of our platform and it actually, it ended up because I was lazy and I was running the ads back then. Um, and I turned on a campaign that was getting us signups to DashClicks for a free trial signup. It was getting a signup to like $15, a free trial signup, which for us was great as a software company.
Uh, this was also like four or five years ago. So this is a little way back before ad costs started rising so high. And I left that fucker on for like a year and a half. I didn't touch it. It was that like 200 bucks a day for like a year and a half. I just let it fucking go until we changed our whole platform. And then obviously that did just the messaging and everything didn't make sense anymore. So I had to turn it off. Um, that was the only time that I've had an ad like that. Performing just not touching. That was just me being pure lazy. Cause I didn't do anything to it. I just left it on.
Jason Hornung (41:16.001)
Yup.
Jason Hornung (41:30.506)
Well, that's what people say, right? Like you say it that way, right? But this is what I try to teach people and what I wanna get across. The vast majority of people, the reason that their campaigns don't last like that for a long period of time is because they're fucking with it every day. They're doing something to it every day, right? And I know, because I've been through that behavior, but I had to make these systems and I had to figure this stuff out because of sheer overload and volume, right? Like...
Chad Kodary (41:47.882)
Yep.
Jason Hornung (41:59.21)
You know, when I was running a bunch of accounts, you know, by myself, I couldn't sit there and tinker with stuff all day long. I couldn't sit there and button smash on the stats and be like, oh my God, my CPC went down in the last hour. I need to change the ad out. You know what I mean? But that's literally what people do, right? They're changing things on multiple levels that all have an individual impact on the totality of the thing.
And because they change so many things without really knowing, they don't keep track of it all. They're just like doing things because they think they need to, and they think that it can be better. Those are the two false mindsets that I see when someone gets to the place where they actually have something that's working, right? Because they hear all this stuff in the market about I gotta test all the time, your hook's gonna die, right? So they think they need to be doing all this testing.
Chad Kodary (42:43.421)
Yeah, wow.
Jason Hornung (42:51.178)
So they'll get something working, and then instead of letting it run and focusing on scaling it, they test, they erode all their profit over here on this testing budget, and they keep all their focus away from scaling, so they can't scale, and they don't get profit from their ads, right? And then all this other little things that they're doing inside of there when they actually have something working, they'll blow their load too early and try to scale too fast. They'll scale too hard in different things.
Chad Kodary (43:10.538)
Yep.
Jason Hornung (43:20.69)
And then they'll also have something that's working for a long time. And then they decide they want to scale it and they'll kind of mess it all up. Back end. Those, those are all the behaviors that happen, but it's all driven from, I got it, I need to do something in here. And there's also this feeling like, Oh, it could be, or it should be better. Right? So the, the big thing you want to get is you want to understand what do I need to get to for my business to work? Then we launch stuff.
Chad Kodary (43:29.073)
Yeah, I've been through a lot of those.
Chad Kodary (43:40.236)
Hmm.
Jason Hornung (43:48.95)
We test until we get it to those numbers. Then once we have it at those numbers, we stop all that behavior and we focus entirely on scaling and making sure that it's maintaining those numbers while we scale. And if anything comes up in the middle that would indicate that we're not able to maintain, that's when we then do a very strategic isolated test of a variable, might be an ad, might be audience, might be something in the funnel, right? And we're gonna test.
Chad Kodary (44:17.001)
Yep.
Jason Hornung (44:18.17)
That's all going to be based on our data that we have, which will indicate where our point of failure is in the process. So we're clear on, oh, what do we actually do next if it's not doing what we want?
Chad Kodary (44:31.961)
Lots, lots to unravel there. Um, I have one more question and then I know we're running out of time. We'll wrap it up. Um, or most of the, the ads that you run, are they more of like direct where it's like, you know, ads directly to a funnel and trying to make some type of sale or lead gen form, or have you rain a lot of ads? Like we're trying this other campaign right now that we have running also simultaneously to the one that I'm talking to you about that we've been running for about little less than two months now.
Jason Hornung (44:34.04)
Yeah.
Chad Kodary (45:00.233)
we're also spending about 150 bucks a day on it, but it's more of like an awareness style campaign where we have, uh, cold, we cold, warm, hot, and then remarketing. So there's like four separate campaigns running and we're basically doing the, you know, in the cold campaign, we're just, uh, doing video, uh, videos, essentially, and then targeting, you know, the next campaign will, you know, 50% of the people watched or engage will do that. And we'll kind of like bring funnel people through this, like for
tiered campaign system. The problem that I'm seeing there is it takes so long. It takes so long to see results and us as entrepreneurs, like, dude, like, I like the, the camp, this agency lawn secrets campaign, like I just want to turn the campaign on and I want to see some money coming in so I can refuel my ad spend. I don't want to wait two months. Right? Like, do you run, what, what's your thoughts on like, cause I know a lot of people want to tinker with it and try that strategy. Cause it's like, it's more of like, I'm indoctrinated and warm these people up.
Jason Hornung (45:50.346)
Yeah, yeah.
Jason Hornung (45:58.35)
it's it sounds amazing right now and this is one of those things that people teach and it sounds amazing and sounds applicable to everybody but here's the fact of the matter with those types of campaigns they are only suitable for deep pockets right the if somebody is needing to get a return on their ad spend right
So the vast majority of people out there, small business owner, small pockets, needs to make a return. Everything that I do is based on that. And when we are coming from that context, anything but direct response won't work, okay?
Chad Kodary (46:45.865)
Yeah, it's hard dude. Cause I'm at like, I don't know, like maybe like three, four K and that's been on that campaign. And we've got a bunch of signups. We have people that came into a world, but like a small portion bought because they come into a world that to like cycle through all of our stuff in order to make a purchase. Yeah.
Jason Hornung (47:00.362)
You have a whole bunch of loss that occurs in those funnels that these people don't talk about, right? They just talk about warming up. And then some people will have some sales. I've had one account ever where we were running that as part of a direct response strategy, okay? So we used, we were using video views objectives to completely cold, isolated audiences to build retargeting audiences.
Chad Kodary (47:06.154)
Yeah, yeah.
Jason Hornung (47:28.342)
for an e-commerce product and we were on average spending between 65 and 80 thousand dollars a day for this. We scaled it up to 143 grand on Black Friday of 2016. That was our biggest single day spend at a 3X ROAS. But that account, we were running 20 thousand dollars a day of cold video views ads.
Chad Kodary (47:34.466)
okay there you go
Chad Kodary (47:44.309)
Wow.
Jason Hornung (47:56.786)
simply to build awareness, build audience for our retargeting. And then we had, you know, the rest of the budget was on direct conversion ads between cold and, you know, retargeting, right?
Chad Kodary (48:11.273)
Yeah. Would you say for a company like ours, just stick to direct and try to like liquidate as much as we can or just go straight, just fucking go straight in.
Jason Hornung (48:18.87)
Well, I mean, you can still do the content for what you guys are doing. I would dial back how much you're spending on it substantially, right? Because you don't really need to put a whole bunch into those to build audience, right? Because the clicks are cheap, the views are cheap, depending on what you're using. Yeah, so I think in your case, maybe 20 to $40 a day would be a lot more appropriate of your budget. So like, you know, these strategies are all wonderful and can be fit into
Chad Kodary (48:33.961)
Yeah, it's super cheap. The video view campaigns are super cheap.
Jason Hornung (48:49.074)
most business models, what we gotta do is always look at what's the context of priority in the business, how do we sort and segment budgets for these different things, right? So I think it's appropriate and it's not a waste of time, especially given that you've been able to validate sales and stuff coming from it, right? I just think you have too much of your daily spend going into it. I'd allocate like 10 to maybe 15% of your total daily spend.
Chad Kodary (49:09.387)
Yeah.
Chad Kodary (49:14.216)
Mm, yeah.
Jason Hornung (49:17.91)
to that strategy within your marketing.
Chad Kodary (49:19.765)
Yep. The ads that you're running right now for the Academy of is it just primarily running ads straight to the Academy of advertising? Derek response ads.
Jason Hornung (49:29.262)
Yeah, I mean, I do, I test everything and I run all kinds of things simultaneously, right? So I mean, I got ads that run to, you know, like my JasonHorne.com page where it's like about me, you know, yeah, and stuff like that. Well, it's just part of an overall messaging strategy based on the five-phase psychological buying process, actually, which has been crushing it.
Chad Kodary (49:45.057)
Gotcha testing to see if they go through that. Okay, cool.
Chad Kodary (49:54.742)
Yep.
Yeah. I think for us, um, and some context for the viewers out there, I think for us, like the biggest thing that we've been able to do is like, there's, there's this like trust factor that you have to build with somebody and on the world of online and internet, right? Uh, and most people will not buy until that, that I look at it as like a gate, right? There's always a gate between you and the person you're trying to sell to. And until that gate is completely down or even halfway down, like
Jason Hornung (50:19.105)
Mm-hmm.
Chad Kodary (50:25.237)
they're not going to buy from you. So like for us, everything that we do really is just trying to bring that gate down. We try to do so many different things like the, this podcast is a great way to build authority, build reputation, obviously. Right. And then many other things that we do that are very similar to this and we kind of sprinkle those in all over the place. Right. And then sometimes we'll even run ads to stuff like this to warm them up. So that's part of like the traffic thing that was the, uh, the kind of warming up the traffic phase.
Um, that might be in that 10 or 15% that we might spend, but yeah, I can see as doing a lot more direct response ads. I think for me as an entrepreneur, when I turn on ads and I see sale come in the same day, it just does something really right for me. It makes me feel good about what's happening. Um, and I don't have to wait and, um, we can just throw those funds right back into fucking ads and start scaling. Because for me, we need to get to a point where, like I told you in the last six year of DashClicks we spend like 200 grand in ads, which is nothing. If you really divide that up, like we barely spend any ads.
I need to get to a point where we're spending at a minimum of a thousand bucks a day to start generating leads and sales and new P new people, basically into the world of DashClicks. So that's kind of our goal for 2024. But dude, a lot to unravel here. Um, I know we're going to wrap it up, Jason. Thank you so much for your time, brother. If people want to reach out to you, uh, if they want to buy your products, if they want to jump into the academy of advertising, which by the way, guys,
Jason Hornung (51:29.932)
Mm-hmm.
Chad Kodary (51:48.109)
Um, I'm in there in the Academy of advertising. It's fucking awesome. I love it. I've even licensed your courses because it was so damn good. So if somebody wants to jump in and they want to, you know, just learn more about running ads, scaling ads, all that stuff is academy of advertising.com. Is that where they should go?
Jason Hornung (52:04.098)
That's the place, man. You got it.
Chad Kodary (52:06.261)
All right. I will pick up pitch for you brother because it really is that good man. Yeah, it really is that good. Well, any, anything else you want to say to the viewers, any freebies or anything you want to give them?
Jason Hornung (52:08.813)
Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that.
Jason Hornung (52:16.266)
Man, I went into a lot already and there's probably a lot I should still unpack from all that. So I don't wanna put the fire hose on anymore. I already have.
Chad Kodary (52:22.577)
Yeah. There is. All right. Just go to Academy of Advertising got come. It's just awesome school group also what you get access to once you once you're in. I'm actually in there too. So if you want to speak to me in there we can talk in there too. And once again yeah dude Jason thank you so much for your time brother. We appreciate you. Have a good one man.
Jason Hornung (52:36.478)
Yeah, come on in and say hi.
Jason Hornung (52:41.706)
Back at you Chad. Thanks.