The marketing movement by Refine Labs. Everyone, welcome to the marketing movement podcast for by Refine Labs. I'm I was mad in one of the performance marketing managers here at Refine, and I'm bringing along Blake and Daniel today. We're going to be covering the topic of quick wins for your paid media accounts.
So I'll go through a little introduction first. I'll send it to you, Blake, introduce yourself. Obviously, we know what you do here, but maybe some of the size of clients you work with and how long you've been here? Yeah, sure.
So my name is Blake Strozick. I've been here since, I don't know, about nine months now. I work with like four different of our SMB clients. So typically that's like Series A, Series B startups.
And yeah, a lot of good insights from that. Like early on, you know, C stage or, you know, Series A and B, got some good insights for us there. Awesome. Daniel, who are you following your vendor?
Daniel Kingston, I started at Refine back in November of 2021. I'm submitting here for a little bit. And I work on two of our enterprise accounts here, which is a nice little change of pace from the work that Blake is doing. Both accounts that I came into were overseen by other PMMs here.
So had the benefit of not having to set up any new accounts, which is nice, but also means that these quick wins are things that are even more valuable because if you can find these quick wins in a client that's an existing client, it definitely will go a long way for winning you some support from the client. That's awesome. I love it. And I've been here since January, 2022.
So far, it's a short stint, but actually work with the mid-market accounts. So it looks like we have a nice plan here between SMB and mid-market enterprise, not by design. So, which will be fun. It's the quick wins here applied to every size of company, for sure.
So cool, let's do it. Top deck, like I said, quick wins. And you're paid media channels. So Dan, how about you kick us off for Google Ads?
I think as we're seeing the shift from ETA to RSA, I think it's super important. This is something that we operate as one of our best practices here is creating at least two RSA's for every ad group that you're running. Just in case for any reason, Google pauses any of your ads. The worst feeling in the world is when you're expecting something to spend.
And you go and check, however often you're doing your pacing and optimization. And you see that something has been paused and not running and spending at all. So definitely a super quick way to make sure that you are covered is ensure that you have at least two RSA's. And like I said, we're transitioning away from ETA's in prep for Google, making those changes behind the scenes.
So starting from RSA also gives you a little bit more flexibility and having two very different ads will also give you some good insights data wise. I've got a quick question on that actually. So of course, Google's sunset and ETA's those are not going to be able to create them after the day. I think it's June 2022 or something like that.
But do you have any advice for someone if they have a really high performing ETA? Should they still let it run? Or do you think everyone should shift solely to RSA's? Yeah.
Our approach to this point is if you have an ETA that's performing particularly well, keep it going. Like you mentioned, it's not like you're going to lose the ability to run that ad just that you're not going to be able to create new ETA's going forward. So there's no reason not to. And something else that I would do if you have a really strong performing ETA or several ETA's that are performing really well, make sure that you're using those keywords when you're really out your RSA's if you don't have them already.
It's obviously something that's getting a response from your target ICP. And you want to make sure that you're leveraging all of that data everywhere that you can. So don't be afraid to pull from your ETA's and RSA's prepared because the reality is nobody's probably really seeing both of your ads all the time. So you can get away with that overlap there.
I love that. One thing I want to add on the RSA topic. Of course, you have 15 headlines and four descriptions to use. We use all four descriptions.
But I've always advised you don't have to use all 15 headlines. I've seen performance marketers try and hit the 15 headlines. You get super repetitive. They'll use the same variation of a keyword.
Did their ad strength is super strong. But then you end up with ads that say like number one HR software, best HR software, HR software. It's not designed for the customer. Or it's not a good customer experience.
So I don't know. That's something I'm super passionate about. And I don't know if you guys have any anything to add on that. Yeah, I think like with like when you're looking at like Google ads, which are the quick wins, right?
It's understanding like the customer at the end of the day that's going to be behind the computer, the phone, making the click or the tap, right? Because it's like, you want to optimize for that and not for some score in the platform. Like you said, like, oh, I want to improve my quality score. Well, no, it's like, really, I want people to click on the ad land on the landing page and take like, you know, either learn about the product or take the desired action.
I think always kind of keeping that in mind. Because even though you might want to like do a quick win, you want to have the end go as like, that's like the biggest win at once. Mm-hm. Trying to appeal to the customer, not the robot.
Yeah. That's it. I think it's also a really big opportunity as they move towards RSA's. You know, I know that you're not the biggest fan of going for all 15.
But I think it's a great opportunity to push yourself. Think about all of the, like I was saying, putting yourself in the customer shoes, there's a lot of ways that you can fill those headline spaces. You can think about all the different use cases. You can think about all the different calls to action.
You know, the odds are that what you're marketing is not a single dimension, one dimensional product or service. So really, you know, take that as a chance to push yourself and think about what is it that you can get in front of a client or a potential user that is going to really make a lasting effect for them. So really, you know, pushing yourself to add that variety in. Because I do think that it is, it is really beneficial.
We recommend between 10 and 15 going forward. So, you know, really maxing out that space. And one of the other things is Google loves their algorithms, right? So the more variations you can give and the more data that you can put out there, whether it's different calls to action or whatever it is that you're leveraging in those headlines and descriptions, you're going to get some good insights out of that and be able to optimize your ads that are going forward the more options that you're going to Google.
I love that fresh back and that value added there. I have one more question before we move on to your next Google quick one. Do you advise the pin headlines ever in RSS? I think the biggest thing for us to make sure that you're putting your brand in your first headline, make sure that you're making your first headline very direct to what it is that you're speaking about.
Because we all know that attention spans are shorter and shorter by the day. So it's super important that your start of your ad is as strong as possible. And then beyond that, I don't recommend any other of the other headlines that you're using unless there's a specific reason you need to, just because it minimizes the role that will display in making those adjustments. So by pinning two headline, two headline for your position, you're putting yourself in the spot where you're restricting Google's chances to move that key word around to move that headline or description around in a way that will ultimately give you the most possible data that you can kind of start to glean some of those insights from.
It's so good. Just drop the bomb. It's amazing. You have any more go ahead quick wins for us.
One of the big things that I think I've always operated under is making sure that you're using as many extensions that are relevant to your ads as possible and your site and your service. We always think in the sense of screen real estate, you know, if you're using those extensions well, you're going to maximize when you're in those, especially when you're in those top spots and when you're showing for your extensions, but really making sure that there is a sound logic in why you're using that extension as well. So for example, if you want to use the site link to drive somebody to a specific part of your site or, you know, if you're using a phone extension, making sure that it's going to drive to somebody who's actually going to be able to give that end user what they're looking for. So likely your sales team or anybody else who's responsible for that kind of communication.
But, you know, it's a perfect balance between maximizing that's really real estate, but also the utility of those extensions. Man, that's so good. But you have another quick win tab to that. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of tough to follow, but I think, you know, we're at where I would go, right?
So I think a big mistake that I see a lot when people like are trying like scale up their Google ads account or just even operate them day to day is that they're doing things that can just like burn money. And so like one of those things is the auto applying ad suggestions, right? So like with a Google ads account, a well run Google ads account, I really believe in like, yeah, you can do things like smart bidding and there's automates, you can do it all depends on your volume. But in B2B, you want to make sure that you're kind of putting yourself in control as much as you can.
So turning off things like the auto applying those ad suggestions, that's like something you can go into the settings, it's not sexy, but you can do it like right now and that's going to help improve performance for you. It should. And then another thing that I see when people want to like get a quick win is they're typically trying to scale up the account. And so what they might try to do is they might try to do like a lead form ad.
And typically what I've seen is that's driven more conversions at a lower CPA, but it's a lower intent, less, you know, lesser quality conversion. So I think, you know, one of the biggest things when you're looking at quick wins is make sure you have like a solid foundation in place and then make sure that you're like keeping that end goal the same where it's, you want to drive quality visitors to your site and quality conversions. And you don't want to just try to make the quick win to try to scale up the account, but like you have that solid foundation in place. So that was my tangent on using the account, but it's really just don't do the auto apply suggestions, turn that off, don't do lead form ads.
And then my very last thing is when you're looking at your conversion tracking, again, it's just a fundamental thing, but really the quickest ones are like a fundamental skip that right. And so making sure that you have the appropriate primary conversion action. So if you do do something like smart bidding, you can optimize to that and then you have secondary conversion actions that while you might not be optimizing to, you can track some kind of good feel of the different objectives that you're tracking. That's all I'm going to say something you're talking about the lead form extensions and lower CPA higher conversion.
So from face value from from in platform, it would look like Google ads is killing it. One thing that I've seen a lot is especially when companies use an outsource partner to manage their paid media spend is that they don't have visibility into the CRM or down for progression of leads. So you very well, to your point, to be paying the agency a lot of money to manage your Google ads, they're coming to you with data saying, Hey, we lower the CPA by 50%, you throw more money at it, but then you look in the back end and you're just burning cash, especially to your point. Some it's a little shady, but I've seen some agencies do it where they they include multiple conversion actions and where like a 50% scroll can be a primary conversion action.
And so now you're paying 50 bucks just for someone to scroll down your page a little bit. And it's not a true conversion. So yeah, you had some really good things. Nice.
How about you, Miles? Do you have a what do you have queued up? Man, you guys, you guys came with some pretty advanced ones. I'm going to keep it simple here.
I have three things. Number one, turn off search partners. So you want to focus on high intent keyword terms in Google search. So I'm actually typing in in Google HR software and finding that out when you enable search partners and actually enables by default.
So you have to go turn it in and it's kind of nested in the settings. Anything with the search functionality, your ad control up on. So if someone's on some website and there's a search functionality, this is HR software, your ad can show up on that website, which is your point. As a B2B marker, you want quite a bit of control in Google ads.
And Google doesn't tell you who their search partners are. So who knows where your ads are showing up on? It can be showing up on a website that you do not want to show up on. If you have a competitor has a search functionality on their website, that can be scary, right?
So it's just much better to play within Google. Don't open up these search partners. It potentially can be a test if you're really just killing it in Google search, maybe you're experimenting with opening up search partners. But through testing over the years, I've never found it to be beneficial down funnel.
Maybe it makes the platform metrics look great, but down funnel it never converts well. So number one, turn off your Google search partners. Number two, ensure your languages are set to your desired languages. I've gone in quite a few accounts that have their language set to all languages.
If you only want to speak to English speaking personas or individuals, set it to English. You don't want to be delivering an English ad, English ads, excuse me, to all languages. Because that just doesn't make sense. So make sure that your languages are targeting the right languages with what you want to be delivering ads to.
My last one is around broad match. So as you guys know, we rarely use broad match. The only time we do is if there's very low search volume, maybe it's a new category creation, but we mainly use phrase match and exact match. Broad matches the Wild Wild West, you can spend a bunch of money on some crazy words.
I'm sure you guys have plenty of examples. So just focus on phrase match and exact match first. And then if you really have no volume there, then open it up to broad. Did we go through and I don't think any of us mentioned, I guess it's not a quick win.
Negative keywords. I mean, I've got something to tell you. I was going to build up. I wouldn't say that.
Like it's not necessarily a quick win, but it can be a quick win. If you or at least a quick win as you grow your account over time, right? So it may require a little bit more upfront work than something as simple as disabling search partners or something like that. But in the long run, effective use of your negative keyword lists, whether it's building out a broad strokes, negative lists that you're using to knock out words that are not going to qualify good traffic for you, whether it's competitors that you'll continue to add to over time, but you can block out certain things from the junk.
And also just really using negative keywords to counteract some of the changes that Google has put in place with how they're matching search terms is something that in the long run, you're going to look back and go. That was a much quicker win than I thought it was going to be at first, because even if it is a little bit more of a lift, there's a ton of value to be had there. And I think that sticking with that theme of leaders and where you're spending your money, really be selective about your bit adjustments as well. I think that's something that becomes that very appealing, what you guys are speaking to you earlier about making your numbers look good and really creating those high level values.
Just remember that they compound. So it's a really easy way to build to bleed budget if you start throwing in a bunch of big modifiers because you're seeing strong performance from some demographic or whatever, other observation off-body and see maybe layering over the top. But I think that one of the things that Miles you mentioned about the language piece that also supplies as a good rule of thumb across the board is don't try and get tricky and use a foreign language if you're not getting it from a native speaker. I think that that applies a little bit in search, but also especially on hate social.
Just that if you're going to run ads in a language that is not your native language, make sure that you're getting things and not running it through a translator or something like that. Because there are so many ways that those things become less transparent and more apparent to the user. Just make sure that you're going native if you're speaking a language that is not your own. I love that.
I love that. Dindy, I have any other quick ones. I know you have an nice little wets, but people spend a lot of money on Google ads, so I want to make sure that we can do that. I do.
I think one of them is a really basic thing and just thinking about it may not be the quickest left, but scrub your search terms. It will give you running a search query report and digging into where you're spending money that you don't need to be, where you have bids that are below the first page. Scrubbing your search term and especially doing a search query report and looking at what are the terms that your keywords are matching to on a regular basis is a great way for you to expand your negatives and figure out what terms are that medium and 10 to low and 10 based on the searches that you're matching to, as well as it might even give you expansions for your keywords. You might see something that you're not currently bidding on where you can get a cheaper bid out of it by putting that keyword directly in place.
And then also, like I said, looking for where are you spending money, whether it's spending one of the things that us marketers want to talk about is spending too much on brand or whether brand is even worth bidding on. So there's a whole conversation around that. I won't fully open that can of worms, but my one suggestion on that front is you can balance your brand spend by limiting or excluding previous visitors to your site. So if you feel like you're spending too much on brand as it is, or you're afraid to maybe spend on a competitor keyword or something along those lines, there are ways where you can give your toe in that water by specifically limiting or excluding visitors who have come here.
So previously, who were those people that are just too lazy to type out your brand's name and want to just steal those couple of couple of cents or dollars from you. We love that. I have a question for you on the search terms scrubbing. I would hope that a lot of the performance marketing managers watching us know that you should be doing that.
But the tough part is actually executing on it. So what is your process for going through a search terms scrub? Do you do it within the platform? Do you use Google Ads Editor, do your export to an Excel spreadsheet?
I'm curious around that. I think the best piece of advice I can give you around is do what works for you, do what you're comfortable with. I think that's the same for any optimization, any task that you're going to be doing, whether it's you like working in the platform and you want to look at everything in platform, whether it's you're really comfortable in editor and then everyone has varying degrees of comfortability in something like ads editor. So if you want to do it that way, it's a really easy way to make some quick changes and cut down on the time that you're using.
But it's also got to be something that you're comfortable with. If you're really comfortable manipulating data in Excel, we have some people here who are really great with Excel and love to run it that way. So I think that the first and foremost thing is find what works for you, find what you're comfortable with, and then run it that way. And then the second thing I would say is I know that it's particularly hard to make sure that you always have time to do some of those tasks.
One of the things that we built into our workflow is to make sure that we have reminders in place and do them at a regular cadence. So whether it is depending on the amount of money that you're spending and the scale of your account, you may only need to do an SQR and scrub your terms once a month or once a quarter. But if you're running a bigger account, I'm working in enterprise, so we have it set up where it's every two to four weeks, and it's going to depend on the volume that you're seeing and a number of other factors. But the longer that you let those things go as well, the harder they become to do and get back into the rhythm again.
So I think there's a quote that I love from James Clear on the author of Atomic Habits where he talks about your habits are only as good as the system that they're built on. So if you can put a really good system in place for making sure that you're doing the checks on your on your data and doing your optimizations at a regular cadence and again putting it into a place where you're most comfortable doing it, you're going to have success. It's so awesome. I drop in atomic habits, quote in here.
That's best pretty good here. Yeah, that's so good, Dan. I always spend quite a bit of time on Google Ads, but I really hope whether you're a performance marketing manager or director, what your role is within the demand generation marketing team to really take these wins and at least review your account and see if they're implemented because we talked about this, but we see a lot of companies spend a lot of money on Google Ads and a lot of times a ton of it is wasted and as simple as these tactics that we outlined most can save you, I mean thousands of dollars in that scenario of graduation. It can actually save you thousands of dollars and make your efficiencies of that paid spend much better.
So yeah, definitely advise everyone to go at least check out their Google Ads accounts, make sure those aren't implemented. And then the next one we have up, LinkedIn ads, Facebook ads, paid social. I don't know if you guys want to segment quick wins by LinkedIn ads or Facebook ads, but Blake, I'll let you riff on your quick wins there. Yeah, that sounds good.
I'll segment mine and I'll start with actually Facebook and the reason I'll start with Facebook. So, you know, my experience, if you're in B2B, so before I, you know, work your refine, I work in-house. And so here at Refine Labs, we use a targeting tool called metadata where we use their meta-match piece of their platform, it's not the full platform, but just targeting aspect of it. And I mean, you guys know this but for listeners, like that's what allows us here at Refine Labs to get like LinkedIn level targeting on Facebook because if you go natively into Facebook and you're running your ads, you're going to have just interest in demographic based targeting is like really the kind of like the core of it and location based as well.
But, you know, that's kind of like the gist of like the target you can do on there. And so my point with bringing this up is if you're a B2B company and you don't have a targeting tool like metadata and I didn't even, you know, I haven't even gone in and seen, I know they made some recent targeting changes to the platform to what you can target natively. I know they took some things out, but I wouldn't recommend on Facebook to like go and try to like broad target people for B2B because really to have like success, like the quickest win for Facebook for a B2B company is having the right strategy in place. And so for example, if you are selling to, you know, chief people officers at high growth startups and you're trying to target them on Facebook, well, it's going to be really, really difficult to target them.
Like it's actually going to be impossible to target them by job title on Facebook unless you have a targeting tool. So I guess my biggest, you know, quick win is if you don't have a targeting tool like that, start with Facebook with just a retargeting flow. All website visitors, you can choose high-end set pages, but if you're going to be typically of such a low volume of search volumes, your website, then I would say just start with the retargeting to all your website visitors. And that's where I would start on the page site for there.
I know you guys have a bunch of optimizations, but I'll kick it off from there. See if you guys agree or disagree with that take. I just want to make sure you guys use promo code, Blake, when you get your medicine. For your demo.
Yeah, I'll get my, I'll get my, I'll just take a kick back. I just want to jump in at that point and enter it down a little bit further. I think it really makes a lot of logical sense, especially from Facebook, you know, the data that Facebook is using for their, for their native targeting is relying on the information that you're using. So I ran into this a lot of use of work and education.
And I know that we weren't looking for people who graduated from the University of Hard Knocks, like that's not, you know, the target audience that we want to have. So you're really relying on people to be straightforward with the information they're putting in, which you definitely see better quality of on LinkedIn. So really driving that home as well that that targeting is super, super important for Facebook. And I think that something else you spoke to, like, which is really just making sure that you're aligning your campaign with like that desired user action.
So, you know, making sure that you're being very strategic in how you're using which channels and understanding the limitations of channels and also the strengths of channels. You know, you're looking for a chief people officer, the odds are you're going to find a better, better group of that on LinkedIn, right? But at the same time, you have a chance to make a stronger impression on Facebook because you're probably in a less competitive space from an ad standpoint. You know, there's probably less companies that are doing what you're doing that are reaching out to those people on Facebook because LinkedIn does offer stronger target.
So really just being very strategic and also just in your ad types as well, making sure that if your goal is to push somebody to your site and get them to read a white paper or, you know, take some other action on your site, make sure that you're using link clicks as the bid strategy and the campaign goals. And if you're okay with just really looking for brand awareness and for product ads and things like that, where you don't necessarily need somebody to go to the site, go for reach. There's no reason why you shouldn't be aligning what your desired action from the user is with the channel and with the bid strategies and the methods that you're using on your channels. It's a really, really easy way to refine the plan intended, the work that you're doing in the people that you're reaching to maximize those results.
So you said, you said something that I kind of kind of want to bet we want. So in reference to Facebook ads, you're talking about driving people to your website. If you, if that's action, you want them to take, I'll say, read a case study and he said to use the campaign objective link clicks. I've always used the campaign objective landing page use for Facebook because a link click for Facebook can be one click to the profile or a link click to see more.
It's a click, sorry, not a link click, a click in the most literal sense. So I'm curious, have you guys used landing page views versus the link click or, yeah, that's what's called link click objective or you guys going to throw back at me and find me on that? Yeah, so the specificity of that to Facebook for landing page use makes perfect sense the logic. I know that it's link clicks in LinkedIn.
So that's kind of where I was thinking of it from because we use that a lot. But yeah, I think that ultimately that just strengthens my point, which is exactly that, you know, be very strategic about how you are tailoring the action that you're looking for users to take with how you're setting up your campaigns and what kind of content you're pushing out to them because at the end of the day, your goal is to raise awareness for your brand, your goal is to ultimately lead to customers. But if you're making that experience harder for people by not using the right settings in your channels, you're going to see those drop-offs. You're going to see those, you know, they use bounce rate when it's a website, but you're going to see those people bounce from your ads where they're maybe not going for the full landing page click and they're going just for the link click to miles this point.
That's so good. Miles is going to have other miles, not me miles. You better have like four or five quotes cards for the social media channel, that's why you guys are saying this is so good. I don't know, I just hope he pulls out that you said you're going to battle him about link clicks versus landing page views.
I guess like the most like performance targeting, like I'm going to battle you on this and I love it. I see, I see him even the future. I see him even for sure. This is awesome.
So like you started talking about audiences, Danny started talking about audiences as well. I'm also going to talk about audiences. This is both for Facebook and LinkedIn S, audience expansion. We turn it off.
So especially for LinkedIn, we like to be very focused with our job titles. And we don't really want to go outside of the job titles that we outline. I think we're very diligent in making sure we're part of the right people. And especially with a platform like then where it's not as mature as Facebook, audience expansion can get wild.
So as is everything, it's always a test if you have super small audience size. Maybe you can test audience expansion and you can look at the demographics report, maybe exclude out some really relevant job titles, but at the start of it, exclude audience expansion for LinkedIn. Same thing with Facebook, but again, like I said, it can be a test as well. So especially if you're using like a metadata list, that may be something to test in the future, but start with audience expansion off.
You guys line up for there. It is free. It's not a battle. It's more of a skirmish.
I guess I have with you on that. So I would just say on Facebook, so definitely on LinkedIn, just because the targeting is so granular, I never touch audience expansion, like very, very rarely. I just haven't hit the scale with any of my accounts where it's like this makes sense. But for Facebook, because the cost difference, like typically what I'm seeing, I'm not sure if you guys are just seeing this viewer account.
So it's about like a seven to nine x multiplier cost difference and you just look purely at CPMs from Facebook to LinkedIn. So on Facebook, what I will do if I do like a really niche audience, I will sometimes turn on like audience expansion, but very, very rarely. But I think like two or point miles from the get go, probably not a good call. And if you're using a tool like metadata or clear bit to do the targeting, like you want to prove out those audiences first before you start playing around with something like that.
But in terms of like looking at it through the lens of a quick win, it can be something where just Facebook seems to have just better data of finding algorithm, finding more people that are like your audience. So using something like audience expansion, like not a look like audience, but audience expansion definitely can be something like incremental at best, but could be something like tap in. So I don't know if I like strongly disagree with you, but I would say that like, you know, it's something you can consider and it's pretty low risk if it doesn't pan out because if you're not an audience expansion for a really niche audience, you're not reaching that many more people in my experience. But that's my take on it.
Yeah, I'm with you there. And you said something around CPMs or cost per thousand numbers reach the significantly lower in Facebook to like 10 hundred percent. That's obvious. But I recently was targeting chief technology officers both on LinkedIn and on Facebook.
And I actually saw a cost per thousand members reach almost identical between the two platforms. Have you guys ever seen that? I've never seen this before. I think I haven't seen an example of that specific where they're exactly the same.
I think that there are going to be spaces you're going to get into where it may not be the traditional spread that you're going to see between Facebook and LinkedIn, just for some very specific audiences and ultimately those costs are coming down to the quality audience you're paying for. So just to backtrack for a second, I agree with the good points both of you made and I disagree with the bad ones you both made. But I think that there like with any of these platforms, any tool that they provide, there is going to be some utility if you have a strong use case for it. And ultimately you have to know that if you're going to pay the same CPM for a CTO on Facebook and on LinkedIn, that those are going to then travel down your pipe the same way and move through the rest of your funnel, which is always a challenge.
And like Miles mentioned earlier, I believe it was Miles that like you don't always have those insights. So it is sometimes challenging to manage those, but it's all about what you're willing to accept and what kind of spend you're willing to say, okay, we're okay with this or at one point you're going to turn that valve off and shut down. That's great. Give me more good socialness.
I'm going to keep it on the audience train. I think that what we're seeing is a shift. I personally have worked across education, across hospitality, across e-commerce, and everyone has their own different approaches. But one of the things that we're seeing now is consolidate your audience as possible.
There is, I think there is a natural inclination as B2B marketers especially to try and create every level that you can dissect an audience by and give yourself as much of that visibility into the data and say like, oh, we can compare this audience to that audience. And that's a big pitfall, I think, for a lot of B2 marketers because you can spend so much time digging into that data rather. And at the end of the day, there could be a variable that you can get a count for in a quantifiable way. So I think that consolidating your audience and giving your platforms, whether it's based on whether it's LinkedIn, a little bit of that room to reach a broader audience a little bit, and then continue to refine in from there is a really strong best practice.
And then one of the things that I think is really core to that process is also incrementally auditing your projected audience versus your actual reach. So this is something that I just literally finished going over with one of our clients today. We looked at what the reach was based off of the targeting that we're using and going back and seeing the audiences that we've been running for the last number of months for our North America audience. We were seeing like 43% of the actual audience versus the reach.
And then for the European audience that we have, it was like 32%. So really taking that into account as well and don't be fooled by the numbers that the platforms are giving you and saying, yeah, we're reaching this big audience of 1.5 million people because the reality is of that, you're probably only reaching a small portion. And it's funny because one of our co-workers called this out in the channel and the miles was chatting with me about it yesterday. And we were discussing the core theory of can you ever truly reach 100% of your audience across all of the platforms?
And it does pulling other platforms help you get to that 100%. And I think ultimately the answer to that is no, you're never going to truly reach everybody. But that doesn't mean that you can't take the efforts. And my other last point before I let you guys jump into all of the things I just threw out is really make sure that you're speaking a language of the platform that you're on, which ties back to aligning with your goals.
So one of the things that we're running a test for is running Reddit. And obviously something like Reddit or Twitter or TikTok or podcasts or whatever other often coming platforms you're looking at to expand outside of your core tenants. Make sure that you are using the language of those places so that you're at your ad field and then fit in with the content that users are consuming on that site. That's so good.
Just a few things I want to talk about there. One, you talked about segmentation at such a granular level. I was one of those people for sure. I had every little job title segmented out.
I think it actually increased the cost, I believe if you do that, but don't take my word for that. I haven't actually tested that. But what actually helped me, tactically, is putting all the job titles and just writing them down and then putting the use cases and pain points and filling those out for each job title. And that allows you to notice what groups of people you can squeeze together and combine them.
So a very simple example I found with a recent client that marketing managers, email marketers, and for this specific solution, directors and marketing, they all had the same pain points, the same use cases. We were able to bring them together. And yeah, that's what really helped me. And then I've lost my second points of my career if you ever need comments on that dancer.
Well, no, I mean, I know we've spent a lot of time talking about audiences, but I think it's a crucial point. I think kind of like the quick win I see with that is kind of what your boat's speaking about. So Miles, you're talking about segment where it makes sense, but Dan and you're talking about, you know, pull your audiences together where you can. So I think one thing, you know, when you're looking to get a quick win in your, in your, you know, in that platforms, when you look at your audience, you want to simplify.
And when you go so granular, when you've got everything so heavily segmented, you kind of get your spot, you know, yourself in a place where you're looking at like marginal differences of in platform metrics to determine if something's working, like an audience is working with some other, right? Because I've got on here one of my points for LinkedIn, because you don't have dynamic UTMs, make sure that you put, you know, a UTM, some sort of UTM tracking that makes sense for you with your ads on LinkedIn. But what I will say is with all that data and you're looking at your audiences, you don't want to become bogged down in it, right? Because this how we're approaching marketing, how we're talking about using unpaid social, it's not traditional performance marketing where you've got, you know, different CPL costs that you can benchmark against each other as like a North Star of success.
What you're looking at is looking at educating these, you know, audience members, these, you know, users, educating them to feed and running content to them. And so when you're looking at it through that way, later in fact, like, this is an quick one, this is all called as a slow when, but a necessary when you've got to have the right strategy in place when you're approaching all these things. Because I feel like, you know, a lot of my like, talk tracks always come back to like strategy and fundamentals, but like when it's like, you're thinking of these quick wins that lens, that's what it has to ladder back up to, right? So landing my plane on the audiences, simplify where you can, I think that's like the biggest, like when anybody can take away.
That's so good. And to what you're talking about, you almost like burn yourself out when you segment so granularly. I've also found that marketing ends up not being that great is you're so focused on segmenting all these people and trying to slice and dice, you're not actually focused on marketing, which is what this all comes down to, like actual good marketing, educating and entertaining your audience being remarkable. So yeah, it's your point of view, a lot of people get focused at the tactical level without taking a step back and making good marketing and being artful and not just analytical.
Yeah, that black hole is an easy one to fall down and then you just say, okay, you forget, sometimes you forget that you're speaking to actual people who, you know, it's like, oh, if I can make this a science and I can make this a perfect ad copy, it's going to have great results. And sometimes it's not about that. You know, I kind of touched on the Reddit piece, like one of our best performing ads was meme content. And like most marketers would hear that and probably guess, like, I think that someone that was listening probably just pauses and is like, yeah, we're not doing this anymore.
But it's true, like, it's really, you know, all these things are great, all of these processes are great. And you know, you want to make sure that you're doing everything you tend to the end of the day, don't lose the fact that you're marketing to other people who were just looking for solutions to their problems. Man, I think that's what we want to finish it off. That's too good.
Marketing to people not, I don't know, little profile profile pictures. I don't know, machines, there we go. Awesome. This was a blast, guys.
I really hope some people can take away some value from this and hopefully make your marketing mailers a little more efficient. I can't speak for the both of you, but my door is always open. I'm like, then I know these guys are constantly crushing it, posting great content, not trying to get you to subscribe or follow. But I like to think that we're posting some good content.
Like I said, for me, my DMs are open. So if anyone has a question, reach out while talking about this stuff. As you guys can tell, we just talked for an hour about quick ones. So that was not quick.
So cool. That's it for me. Do you guys have any other parting thoughts? I haven't figured out the leave the door open setting that Miles has on LinkedIn yet, but definitely has a few questions.
We're always happy to talk about this. I know that my everything about working at Refine so far has really been connecting with people on LinkedIn and being encouraged by the organization to do so. I've had some really great conversations. So definitely looking forward to more of that and definitely keep checking out the marketing movement to hear more from our super, super smart co-workers.
Yeah, and I think I would just close out with some of our miles and Dan, you know, if you need to reach out, I'm available on LinkedIn, always happy to answer your question. But if I had to get one kind of closing thought wrapping up quick wins, is that if you're listening to this and you're in a role where you're actively managing ad accounts or in Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, or you're even working with an agency that's working on this, what I would recommend is really focus on what's right for your business. You'll hear quick wins. I think what we talked about today is pretty universal.
You can apply it, we work at B2B SAS clients. So if you're going to B2B, you can apply most of these quick wins to what you're doing. But whenever you're looking and evaluating quick wins, make sure that it's the right fit for you and for your business, right? Because quick wins for a low ACV high volume SAS product is very different from a big enterprise.
There's a Fortune 500 SAS product. So when you're approaching that, look through that lens and it goes back to fundamentals and strategy. So if you have a good grasp on those, you'll be fine. That is a perfect close out.
I appreciate you guys. Thanks for helping out for an hour. I appreciate everyone listening. I appreciate everyone listening.
I'm not the first rest of your day.