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Creatopy Ad Talk “Focus On The Micro Conversions That Lead Up To The Macro Conversion” Johnathan Dane

Johnathan Dane
5 minutes read

To be honest, I have never met a team more fun and dynamic as the Klientboost team. If you don’t believe me, see for yourself. 

Visit their “Meat the team” page, and you will find that Josh Dunsterville prefers dad jokes over mom jokes, Mitchell Moore can run a “semi” 4-minute mile while licking his own elbow, and Joel Neustaedter is only 18% human.  

However, today we are not going to talk so much about them, but rather focus on their leader – Johnathan Dane

Three facts about Johnathan. He loves Adwords, he’s a contributor writer at Unbounce, and Johnathan Dane is his real name although he is from Denmark.

We asked John a few questions about Klientboost, himself, and Adblockers. Here are his answers.

Twitter: @JohnathanDane

 

How did KlientBoost first start?

Haha great question, and it’s a pretty funny/sad story. 

Coming out of college, I went straight to co-founding a digital ad agency in Utah and was doing that for about 18 months.

Running a client service business isn’t easy, and sometimes straight crap, so when I decided to move back to Orange County, CA (where I’m originally from), I actually wanted to start building a pay-per-click SaaS solution.

Little did I know, my guest blogging kept having potential clients come knock on our door. So my first hire, Josh our lead designer, and I decided to keep raising our agency prices and eventually started closing $10k/mo+ deals while still working out of Starbucks.

We were so afraid of Starbucks kicking us out that we created a weekly Starbucks location schedule to meet at different locations so we could keep working, before we got out own office. We didn’t know that Starbucks couldn’t care less about us being there or not.

As I started seeing the money being best with the agency side, we put the SaaS on hold, and now we’re in our 4th office location in less than a year and a half because we’ve kept growing.

What was the biggest challenge?

I have two :) 

Hiring and Infrastructure.

I didn’t think that we’d be at $60k/mo within seven months, so I was thinking I could manage all clients myself.

I actually could, but then I couldn’t do much marketing or sales at the same time either. Which is a huge opportunity cost that hurt our momentum. 

So having a steady flow of PPC talent in the pipeline was not my focus, and it would force us to stop and go, stop and go.

 

Klientboost Agency

Once we started being more aggressive with job postings, we started being better at that and we’re now building relationships with potential team members way in advance before they come on board.

For the infrastructure side, it’s important that everyone knows some basics of how we communicate and operate. I kept delaying to create a thorough training program because it would take so much time. But after I did it, we now have new hires go through that and many of the basics are covered so they can hit the ground running without stealing anyone else’s time.

What do you enjoy the most about your career?

Building an actual business. It’s insanely addicting. 

That, and also growing and grooming yourself to become a thought-leader and get opportunities like this to be interviewed :)

What makes KlientBoost stand out from other PPC agencies?

It’s definitely subjective, but it’s execution. 
We know exactly that improving quality scores and CTRs doesn’t have as much business impact as improving sales rates and conversion rates do.

So we focus much further back in the funnel than traditional PPC agencies and then work our way backwards. 

This means that we care about landing pages, UX, and conversion rate optimization, as we’re now able to pull the PPC and landing page levers to move faster for our clients.

Those are the main things.

We’re also very good at becoming a go-to place for other people to learn about new PPC and landing page tactics.

We’re not dry or corporate.  

We’re young, have fun, and we’re not afraid to show it.

That’s why I’m allowed to talk about PPC and poop emojis on stage at Unbounce’s Call To Action Conference. 

 

 

Is there an element that every banner ad should have in it in order to convert?

I don’t think any banner ad has an element that guarantees a conversion. The goal of the banner ad should be to get the click, and the landing page’s job is to get the conversion. 

For banner ads specifically, you’ll be better off to focus on the micro conversions that lead up to the macro conversion and make sure things are making progress, and then focus on lowering the threat of your call to action since banner ads usually have lower PPC traffic temperatures than the search network text ads. 

What are the three most common PPC marketing mistakes?

1) Focusing on crap that doesn’t matter:

Internal PPC metrics are great, but they’re not KPIs.  

If your PPC account isn’t continually making progress to lower cost per conversion or increase conversion volume when you have an agency working on it, then you’re wasting your agency money. 

2) Going through the motions:

Changing bids for the sake of changing bids is not improving anything.

Many people tell you that you constantly have to look at PPC campaigns because the landscape is constantly changing, and it’s mostly BS. 

You can have campaigns running that are consistently performing the same way month over month and be happy. And that’s okay.

But don’t waste your time on things if they’re not moving the actual needle.

 

3) Sinking from The Iceberg Effect

The lack of granularity that isn’t being taken advantage of in PPC accounts, blows my mind. 

In 95% of the AdWords accounts that I’ve seen, you can easily cut 50% of ad spend and still get the same results.

But if you’re not extracting and exposing what’s beneath the surface, then you can never control it.

 

In a time where there are over 200 million Adblock users, are banner ads still worth it?

Two yes’s on this :) 

First Yes: All people who use ad block should be banned from the internet. It’s the only way some media companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter can monetize their free services.

Anyone that complains about ads should be punched in the face.

Second Yes: I don’t think anyone continues to do anything if it doesn’t work.  

If your banner ads stopped working then you either exhaust all options to get them to work or throw in the towel.

Are times changing? Yes, and new ad variations are being created by companies like Kargo to still be relevant. 

Tea or Coffee?

Cappucino with one packet of raw sugar :)


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