Full Speed's Tyler Ward on the KPI that spells creative success

Tyler Ward: I will go in and then let our creative find out, hey, this is what's working in terms of ad ad types, landing pages, what I'm seeing in the actual creative itself. Is it colorful? Is it not? We then, he then does his little analysis and then we bring that to the partners to let them know what kind of creatives working for them and bringing back returns so that way future photo shoots and creative they can put emphasis on that.

Reza Khadjavi: Hey everybody, I'm Reza and today we're joined by Tyler Ward, uh, as part of as part of a series of conversations we've been having with media buyers to better understand the creative workflow and the the how the role of a media buyer is changing with uh, with the rise of creative as being an important aspect of uh, of media buying.

Reza Khadjavi: Tyler, great to, great to have you on board. Do you mind introducing yourself?

Tyler Ward: Of course. First off, thank you for having me. As uh, Reza mentioned, my name is Tyler Ward. I'm the senior digital marketing strategist at Full Speed Advertising. We're a digital marketing agency, uh, located in Seattle, Washington. Uh, mainly our accounts focus on, uh, e-commerce clients, uh, that are doing over seven figures a year. And then we have a few others in a few niches across, which I think is kind of important when thinking about creative.

Reza Khadjavi: Awesome. And so jumping right into creative, would love to understand, um, how that workflow looks like for your team. So everything from, you know, where do the where do the creatives get made? Do you, do you guys source that from clients? Do you work with creative partners? Do you do any of that in house? And just describe what the workflow of uh, getting creative and and running them and what what what that all looks like for your team.

Tyler Ward: Yeah, so being a part of an agency, I feel like you have to be very like mobile and or in terms of like, there's not one way we perfectly do it. We typically will do like a hybrid with our clients where like some of our clients they say, hey, these are the images, videos, pictures we would want you to run with this exact copy. And if that's the case, we go ahead and do that and we just present the data to them. But then there's a lot of partners where they give us a lot of creative freedom where they will send over some assets and they say, hey, do what you want with these. We'll send over creative or we'll send over like uh, some copy just to get you started. And then let's work together on this. And so that's kind of typically how it goes.

So like, let's pretend we're just starting with a new account. The way it typically goes is a partner will send over all their assets that they would want us to run, any of their brand guidelines. From there, we really run everything without any judgment beforehand. We let the data speak for itself. The only thing that we make sure is that we're testing things like multiple variations of ad types like single images, videos, GIFs, uh, carousels, instant experiences. And then from there, we really like, uh, obviously we do the analysis on the ads. Um, I will go in and then let our creative find out, hey, this is what's working in terms of ad ad types, landing pages, what I'm seeing in the actual creative itself. Is it colorful? Is it not? We then, he then does his little analysis and then we bring that to the partners to let them know what kind of creatives working for them and bringing back returns so that way future photo shoots and creative they can put emphasis on that.

Reza Khadjavi: Got it. And and the and you mentioned there's a there's a creative person on your team. How does the work get split between what that person does and kind of what you're relying on the partners to bring? What does that relationship like?

Tyler Ward: Yeah, so he can turn, he's like a magician. He can turn any image into some kind of movement, add some sort of animation. As like most people know, like video is kind of king right now. There's there is instances where you see things like carousels outperform video and GIFs, but even then, you put a video in a carousel, it's probably going to outperform a carousel without movement.

So where it kind of, what I do is I do all the numbers and data and I analyze what's working. And so that way I can just present it in a very clear picture for them. Um, we have a couple of people on our creative team and just let them know, hey, here's what's working. So that way they can go to the client and say, hey, whether you have these types of assets or not, if you send us something that we can add motion to or we can add movement to or just a group of images that work on a carousel, uh, then we'll work with that and we'll create some more ads.

Um, within the ads platform itself, the way it typically goes is we have a queue of ads that we're always ready to test. So typically once we pop, we're start pausing ads and we're subbing in that queue, what happens is once we start getting low, that's when we reach out to the partners and say, hey, we're we're running low on our queue of ads to test. We we're going to need some more assets or we need some more creative. Obviously, there's exceptions with promotions and things like that, but that's kind of like the typical creative process for us.

Reza Khadjavi: Got it. Cool. So it sounds like in-house, your team handles a lot of post-production on on the creative. So you have like assets and videos and you're kind of turning them into ad-ready formats, like testing, I guess, you know, things like the first three seconds and basically making the assets that the partner is providing to you ready to run on on the ad platforms, but then relying on them to kind of bring those those assets to you in the first place.

Tyler Ward: Yeah. We don't take any like product photos or lifestyle photos. We don't have like an in-house photography team or but the initial assets, to be honest, we're very lucky. All of our partners have very strong assets and like have a really good eye for getting strong assets to us. We've never really had a struggle with getting an influx of creative. So, like I said, we're lucky to have the partners that we have.

Reza Khadjavi: Got it. And and what's your, one of the things we've been discussing a little bit is just how important creative has been coming, has been, you know, becoming in in paid advertising. What's your view on that? How do you, what do you find in terms of the role of a media buyer, um, where creative fits, where kind of typical media buying strategies fit and how that's been evolving, um, for as long as you've been doing it?

Tyler Ward: Yeah, so I've been doing it for around like five-ish years now and like, it's I've used to view Facebook, I still view Facebook and Instagram ads as kind of like the wild wild west. I mean, just recently with the iOS 14 changes, like every paid media buyer is going crazy right now. Um, but I think just even with the iOS 14 changes, we're having to rely more on great creative than ever before, right? So what we're seeing with iOS 14 is smaller audiences are becoming smaller. So you're going to have to go more broad. And when going more broad, what really makes someone click on an ad is creative, right? So when you're relying on creative to generate traffic now, it it's very important that you know what works and what resonates with your potential buyers because as you go more broad, you really need to hone in on your target market so the algorithm can pick up on who to hit with your creative.

Reza Khadjavi: Yeah. Yeah. And so and expanding on the point you just made around trying to figure out what creative is working best and why, how do you do that? What what do you look for? What kind of KPIs do you look at? How what's your process look like for trying to determine what creative's working best?

Tyler Ward: Yeah, so as everyone kind of knows right now, data inside Ads Manager is messy. I mean, we use a lot of third-party tools to analyze that data. Main KPIs for me, I mean, it was always ROAS. I mean, number one is what are we bringing back? We need to bring back a minimum of whatever the client needs to break even. But after you look at return on ad spend, what we then go to, at least what I look at is, I think the main statistic that tells you if creative is resonating with the audiences or not is click-through rate, specifically outbound click-through rate. I think looking at just click-through rate is kind of a, it's a vanity metric that will bump up all the data versus outbound click-through rate is like how many people out of the people who have seen this ad are actually going to the site that showed some sort of interest in this ad enough to go to a site. So then from there, you look at things like add to carts and purchases. And if you're driving a lot of relevant people to the site, you look at like stats like page on or like uh, average session duration, pages per session, and you see you have like an add to cart to purchase rate that's lower, you might have a conversion problem on the site. So I think the main KPI I look for now on creative is strictly click-through rate. But then always going further and seeing, okay, well how much add to carts did this creative bring versus this one? How much purchases did this one bring? And obviously, like it leaves a lot up for interpretation. There's not like an exact science, but you can have an ad with a low click-through rate that's bringing a ton of purchases and that one will always stay running, right?

Reza Khadjavi: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool. So in terms of KPIs, that's what you look at. And in terms of trying to figure out, you know, what what type of ads are working, do you, do you categorize them? Do you have like a process with your naming conventions? How does that, how does all that work?

Tyler Ward: Yeah, and that's actually where like uh, your site Motion really came into place for us. Um, you had this great blog post that I found, uh, someone like retweeted it through Twitter a few months ago, like when you guys were still in the beta phase about naming conventions in, uh, ads. And that was something that we were actually like really working on internally. Um, we used to use a different tool to analyze our creative and the naming conventions just were, we could never really get it right. And I think Motion was, specifically that blog post, after reading it, we went through every single creative, which was a very tedious process, but one that I think was well worth it, um, that allowed us to really see what's working. So for example, uh, in that blog post specifically, it it pointed out ad types, right? I think that's the number one thing you need to look at first is what's working for you? Is it carousel? Is it video? We separate a video and a GIF, JIF, however you want to say it, um, from each other because we view a video as something more long form, a GIF is something like five to 10 seconds. Uh, along with that, uh, I mean single image, lately we've been testing a lot of instant experiences. But what was great about that blog post is you can go even 10 steps further than just ad types. You can look at landing pages, what what's working, product pages, collections pages, best sellers. Uh, lately even we've had a partner who, they they just, they thought their target market was males. When looking at their Google Analytics, 70% of their site visitors was females. So a lot of their creative only featured males. So, uh, what was really cool actually and we hadn't done this before is we just added another variable into our naming convention and just added like a male versus female, like what who who's actually being shown in the creative itself. And we learned that the creative that had female models or, uh, females featured in it was outperforming the ones that only featured males by like double. And like without those proper naming conventions, we would have never been able to like statistically prove that, even though if we had that intuition.

Reza Khadjavi: Yeah. Yeah. I've I've two follow-up questions for you. One is just following up on the naming conventions. Um, is there anything that your team has implemented to to stay disciplined on that? Because obviously like it's it's hard work to like get everybody on the same page using the same naming conventions. Is there anything you've done to to try to help facilitate that, keep that practice on the team?

Tyler Ward: Yeah, it's actually funny. I'm not sure if it was that same blog post, but I I think Motion has somewhere where there's a template for naming conventions actually. And there's not an ad that's not creative that doesn't go through that specific template. Um, we might have a few variations of it depending on what niche we're making the ads for because like your naming conventions are going to be a bit different for e-commerce than they are in real estate versus they are in automotive. Um, but that naming convention sheet specifically for, uh, at the ad level has been a game changer. Like it it's templatized our ads naming across the board. That being said, uh, ad sets and campaigns, those could probably use a little bit of work.

Reza Khadjavi: Got it. And okay, so my last question is, if you could describe your workflow in Motion, you already touched on a little bit with the examples that you that you gave around ad types and, uh, the one use case with with male and female in the, uh, in the ad types. But for somebody who's new in Motion and is just trying to get, you know, familiar with the platform, could you talk about what your what your workflow looks like with Motion, like week to week? Um, when do you use it? What how do you share the results with clients? Like what's the, um, what's the workflow like?

Tyler Ward: Yeah, so I think the one great thing about Motion, I mean, you have that original kind of setup that kind of pulls all your ads in and you can put in any KPIs you're looking for. So as iOS 14 was rolled out, Ads Manager's data has gone pretty funky. Um, we have like reports that come out that kind of make it a little bit cleaner to look at, but you're missing a lot of key statistics in Ads Manager now that Motion can pull like purchases and ROAS and conversion value. So before where I used to go into Ads Manager to do a lot of the optimizations, I'm now going into Motion and actually like sorting by amount spent, uh, and seeing what ads are spending versus like what are the KPIs we need to be hitting and you can really quickly tell which ads need to be paused through Motion. So there's kind of like my first workflow. I typically go in like twice a week per account and we'll just if we're 1.5X average order value and we're not seeing the returns we need, you just go into Motion and click, go to that direct ad and pause it, which is super convenient.

Um, in terms of like next steps, so after like going through and just doing daily optimizations to make performance better, typically then it's like, okay, well what creative is working and why is it working? So that's where I kind of broke down a bit. Like we we check ad types, we check, uh, landing pages, we check male versus female. Um, and we really just hone in on what's working in the top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel. You can separate all those out with variables. I then do that analysis. A lot of it, which would be nice is uh, if you could exporting that data. I don't know, I don't think that's an available option yet, but it's looking like me taking screenshots, saying, hey guys, here's what I'm seeing work for a specific account. Here's the data on it. Our creative team then takes that, they reach out to the client when we need new, uh, creative and they'll send over the, they'll send over that exact data to them and say, hey guys, here's what's working. Like, we know you may have thought X was going to work, but it's actually Y that's working and here's the data to back it.

Reza Khadjavi: Tyler, appreciate you taking the time to chat. Where can people find you online?

Tyler Ward: Awesome. Yeah, you guys can check us out at fullspeedadvertising.com. Like I said, we're an agency that mostly specializes in e-com. Um, for e-com stores doing seven figures a year, looking to scale. Um, other than that, I think that's all I got.

Reza Khadjavi: Awesome. Appreciate your time. Thanks, Tyler.

Tyler Ward: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.