I Spent $10 Million on Paid Traffic, Here's What I Learned...
by Justin Brooke
10 min read
These 27 tips cost me $10mil dollars to learn.
So read them carefully...
But before I start the 27 tips, you should know I didn't start out with ten million dollars to spend.
Not even $500.
I got my start with a pathetic $60.
In 2007, I was blessed by landing an internship with a millionaire mentor. My job as an intern was to watch all the courses he had bought and write review articles.
Works even if your conversion rate is only 1%
I got to study courses & seminar footage from marketing legends such as Dan Kennedy, Chet Holmes, Joe Polish, Stephen Pierce, Perry Marshall, Frank Kern and many more.
This gave me the education of a lifetime.
However, I was still broke.
It was an unpaid internship.
And so, March 2007 after my internship ended, I decided I better start applying what I learned in order to fix my financial situationship.
Literally, all I could afford was $60, and that was only because I paid half my electric bill. 60 bucks doesn't get you much so I setup a pathetic $2/day ad campaign.
Then I used everything I learned in my internship and many of the lessons listed below.
The first month, I made back $150 from my $60 investment.
More than doubled my investment.
Second month $320, then $750, then $1580, on and on my original $60 investment kept growing. Until 11 months later in 2008, I crossed the 6-figure level.
Paid traffic, of all things, gave me a 6-figure career and then later on 7-figures.
Paid traffic is what gave me and my family the ability to travel the world.
Ever since then I have been an obsessive student of the paid ads game.
These are the lessons I have learned along the way.
Starting with the most important of them all...
Picture of a much younger me & my millionaire mentor Russell Brunson
1. Start With a Media Plan
I have learned that the effectiveness of your digital ads, depends more on your media plan, than the ad network you use or any of the campaign settings do.
A media plan is a 1-page document that summarizes your market research into which targets, angles, copy, placements, and images you will use. It should be simple enough to hand to any one on your team (or a freelancer) and they'll know how to run your ads from this 1-page document.
Skip this process and nothing else on this page will save you.
2. Upside-down Value
The key to massive success is the visitor must feel like they are getting a better deal than you. If it's the other way around, say goodbye to that visitor forever.
A conversion (opt-in, sale, sign up, etc) happens in the mind of the customer the moment they realize that the value they will receive is greater than the cost being asked of them.
^^ worth re-reading!
3. Use Blacklists
Most people don't know it, but they are often buying traffic filled with bots and click fraud. Best case scenario you are buying traffic from sites and keywords that are good, but they just don't convert for whatever reason.
Blacklists make every dollar you spend more profitable, by removing these know low conversion sites, keywords, and targets.
4. Use Whitelists
Just as blacklists help you get rid of dirty bot traffic; whitelists help you keep clean profitable traffic. As your campaigns run you are constantly adding things to your blacklist and whitelist.
Everything bad and decreasing your profits gets added to the blacklist. Then everything good that increases profits gets moved to a whitelist campaign.
Good whitelist campaigns are millionaires makers.
5. What's The Big Idea
To many ads are "me too" ads. Meaning they basically say, "I do the same thing as the other guys." Do like Seth Godin said and create a Purple Cow.
Why you? Why now? How is your product any different from what they tried last Wednesday?
And not different like we charge $5 less or we have an extra feature. It must be as different as a duck and a dog. It must make the customer stop and think "Ooh I've never tried one of these before."
6. You've Got to Have Class
Every ad should portray your product with class and quality. Gimmicks, hype, flash, all just attract bargain hunters and deal dashers.
You should be attracting the deep pocketed wealthy segment of your market. They have much more money to spend with you than dreamers seeking big hype claims.
7. Boredom is Death
You don't want your ads to feel like ads. "Nobody was ever bored into buying" as the late David Ogilvy says.
Your ads should excite, intrigue, and perk up your market. Especially if your ad is in a social media feed or video pre-roll.
8. It's Not About You
After over 5,000 ad campaigns I can tell you confidently that the customer doesn't care about you. They care about themselves, their family, and solving the problem they are experiencing.
Show them how you make their lives better and your campaigns will win.
9. Sell To One Person
We both know everyone will love your product when they try it, but hear me out...
The reason a dartboard has a red dot (bullseye) in the middle is to give you something to aim at. The game would be no fun if you just shoot aimlessly.
When you aim at nothing, you hit nothing. If you want your campaigns to sell like free cake at a weight watchers meeting, then make sure you target and write to one single person.
10. Bet On Psychology
Markets are different. Even people are different.
However, psychology doesn't change. Every human wants to be loved, wants to be comfortable, wants to leave a legacy, wants to be respected, etc.
Never rely on guesses or surface level emotions. Always rely on those primal desires that every human has. Appeal to those base desires and you can guarantee that your ads will hit the mark.
11. Think Macro, Track Micro
You must stay focused on the desired outcome. Be it cost per lead, earnings, or any number of metrics.
However, to get that desired outcome you have to track everything down to the keyword, interest, placement, or ad. This will give you perfect vision into what's actually working and what is not.
Don't be like the famous quote "I know half my ads are working, I just don't know which half." Thats rookie stuff, and you're better than that.
12. Train Your Pixel
I've been running FB ad campaigns since 2008; your fave guru was probably still in school at the time. And back then they didn't even have a tracking pixel yet.
However, these are the days of machine learning and AI. Which means your FB ad pixel is literally a machine trying to learn what you want it to do. You have to train your account pixel on highly specific conversion data, and if you do it'll seek out customers like a cold-blooded sniper.
I have A LOT more to say about this subject, but let's move on.
13. Open Targeting
It sounds counter to all advertising advice, but it actually works on FB.
Due to the META ads platforms machine learning nature, it's actually cheaper and more effective if you run your campaigns with wide open targeting.
Just set your country and then let the machine do what it does. Their algorithm will test thousands of audiences for you, then based on engagement and conversion data it will literally learn who to seek out for you. This is the power of algorithmic marketing at work.
14. Layered Targeting
Sometimes you need a bazooka and sometimes you need a scalpel. You just never want to use a bazooka when a scalpel is needed.
That just creates a big mess to clean up.
Layered targeting means taking advantage of the AND/OR targeting functions within the META Ads Manager. Allowing you to narrow into complex highly targeted audiences. For example, if you need to target people who read a specific book AND live in a specific city AND also have a specific job type.
It's critical that you understand when a targeting parameter means THIS OR THAT versus THIS AND THAT. Very different, and very very important.
15. Decoy Video Ads
There's a lot of bots out there, as well as half-interested human beings who act like bots. We want to filter all these people out, but how?
It is simple to do, just make them watch a short but entertaining video and then retarget only the people who have watched 95% of the video. NOW, you've got a crowd of people who are fully paying attention to what you have to say.
This is part of my "Bump, Set, Spike" campaign I wrote about in my book.
16. Trick the Algorithm
We found this trick by accident.
Basically, the FB ad platform is designed to reward small campaigns. It's a strategy that sucks in rookies and makes them think they are more successful than they really are, so they'll pump more money into the machine.
But when you know how the game is rigged you can use it to your advantage by making lots of smaller campaigns instead of one big campaign.
Shhhh... it's our secret 🤫
18. UGC is All the Rave
No not UFC, that's the fight sport.
I'm talking about user generated content. These are videos that look like or actually are real users uploading their own product reviews or testimonials.
People don't like ads, but they love watching raw and real user footage. Leverage this, by making your ads look like raw and real footage aka UGC.
19. Video Retargeting 🥰
Imagine a random stranger visits your website.
Then later that night as they are watching Youtube all of a sudden, they start seeing video testimonials of people raving about your product.
This might be one of the greatest one-two punch combos in all of advertising.
Our average ROI on these campaigns is usually greater than 300%, meaning we make more than $3 for every $1 we spend.
That's better profits than Vegas or the stock market!
20. Optimize for Mobile & TV
More than 70% of Youtube viewers are watching either on their phone or on their smart TVs while sitting on the couch.
So, if you're asking them to "click a link" you're making an expensive mistake.
Instead, you want to use QR codes, SMS messages, or VERY easy to remember URLs that they can go to. Also, many are watching at work, or in a quiet place so make sure it still makes sense with the sound off!
21. In-Market Audiences
Google has data on EVERYTHING, including what people are buying.
They can even recognize patterns such as visiting multiple car sales websites, checking flight prices, or visiting travel sites to know if someone is "in-market" for something.
Leverage these real-time buyer filled audiences for massive gains.
22. Ugly Banner Ads
If you saw the ads that have made me the most money, you would think they are ugly even amateurish.
However, Google themselves have begun to copy my ads (as well as others) with their responsive ad templates, because of how effective they are.
👉 👉 Ads that look like ads, don't work.
What Works Best on Facebook (META Ads)
17. Modular Videos
To say that the Youtube ad algorithm is a hungry beast, is an understatement.
Any feed-based advertising platform is going to be starving for fresh ad creative. The reason for this is they don't want to show the same ads to the same people over and over again. That tends to tick people right off the platform.
But great video ad creative is expensive and time consuming to create, so what are you going to do? Try creating the same body message, but multiple intros and outros.
5 intros, 2 bodies, and 5 outros will actually give you 50 unique video ads!
What Works Best on Youtube Ads
21. Brand Search
In 20 years of advertising with over 5,000 campaigns run on 14+ ad networks...
NOTHING has been more profitable to me than running Google ads on my own brand search terms. For example, if people are searching Adskills or Justin Brooke or Retargeting Recipes (all brand terms for us).
Our average cost to acquire a customer is $35-$60, but with brand search we acquire new customers for as littles as $4 each.
What Works Best on Google Ads
23. Once You Go Black...
Our data (billions of impressions) clearly shows that black background ads outperform any other color background.
This has held true on not just Google, but every ad network I have tested it on.
I think this has to do with the Internet primarily being a white background medium. Second best color we've tested is red, which is equally high contrast.
3rd is blue in case you were wondering.
24. Phrase Match Targeting
In Google if you target the keyword White Tennis Sneakers, your ads could show up for the word "white" or "white sneakers" or "white tennis" or "tennis sneakers."
Only a few of those options would actually be good though.
If you simply change it to "White Tennis Sneakers" by adding quotation marks around the keyword, now it's what Google considers phrase matched. Meaning, your ads will only show up when someone actually searches the words "White Tennis Sneakers."
That little tip right there will save you thousands of dollars.
25. Responsive Ads
Google is also big on machine learning, and will let you load up 5 headlines, 5 descriptions, and 5 images for a huge split test.
They will even split test these variations in many different ad sizes.
With 30 minutes of uploading headlines and description variations, Google could be testing thousands of ad variations for you.
Thank you Google!
26. SKAGS!
SKAG stands for single keyword ad groups.
For many years it was the hottest and best campaign structure to run. However, as machine learning and AI have exploded, these have become less useful.
But the principle still works.
Instead of single keyword ad groups, I'll usually put 5-10 keywords per ad group. These very tightly targeted campaigns out convert any other strategy I've tried.
And I've tried a lot in 20 years of running Google ads.
27. Custom Intent & Affinity Audiences
How would you like to only show your ads to people visiting your competitors websites. Yep, Google can do that.
Custom Affinity audiences let you cast a wide net, capturing people based on their broader interests, like a fitness brand targeting "yoga" enthusiasts by leveraging relevant sites and apps.
Custom Intent audiences, on the other hand, zero in on those actively hunting for specific products, making them invaluable for advertisers aiming to catch potential customers right at the moment they’re ready to buy.
Basically, it's why I choose Google ads over every other ad network.
I've already made my millions, traveled the world with my kids, and I did it all while working from coffee shops with my wife.
I enjoy staying home now.
I'm done with all the flights and speaking circuits.
I've got a nice office just up the street from my house, my own little studio packed with the latest equipment, and I love it there.
I've even got a PS5 in my office with big flat screen TV, so I'm never bored.
If you're up for it, I'd love to spend a little time with you each week to personally help you create the kind of wins I've had.
But first let me tell you a little more...
Is This All I Know?
What Other Experts Say...
"Justin Brooke is on the cutting-edge of what's working NOW" - Todd Brown
This is not even close to all I know.
We've only touched on 3 of the 14 different ad networks that I use.
I haven't even shared my favorite traffic method with you yet, I'm saving that for when you and I can talk face to face.
Here's why...
I've had a looong, rewarding career.
I have developed a wide body of marketing knowledge over the last 20 years, knowledge I want to pass onto you.
My specialized skill set has gotten me on stage at...
- Traffic & Conversion Summit
- Underground X
- MFA Live
- Info Summit
- Super Fast Business Live
- and podcasts such as EOFire, Mixergy, plus 27 others.
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