How To Use Online Ad Retargeting to Boost Sales and Conversions with RJ Lewis

President and CEO of eHealthcare Solutions (EHS) – R.J. Lewis

RJ seriously knows online marketing. His company runs huge campaigns for the healthcare industry and one of the main tactics is ad retargeting. If you haven’t ever heard of this, you may be surprised. Learn how to use it in your own business, and how it can help with your sales and conversions!

Resources mentioned in the podcast:

• Matt Cutts: Try something new for 30 days

Check out eHealthcareSolutions.com and Ad-Juster.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Jaime: Today I have R.J. Lewis in the show. He owns a company that does re-targeting for the healthcare industry. To tell you the truth, I was a little freaked out at how amazing this technology is. We go in-depth on how you can use it in your own business to make your advertising more targeted and actually less expensive so that we're only hitting the people we want to hit. Make sure you don't miss this.

Announcer: Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you the Eventual Millionaire.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and today I have R.J. Lewis on the show. He owns a company called eHealthcare Solutions and they do advertising for many different healthcare providers, which is amazing because I need that, because of course I have to find my own healthcare and it's a pain in the butt. So I'm really happy that he's on the show today thanks for coming on, R.J.

R.J.: A pleasure, Jaime. Thanks for having me.

Jaime: So you're not in the healthcare space, as far as you're not helping people get healthcare, you're helping people find it, as in find the providers. Is that a good summary?

R.J.: Not exactly. Essentially what we're doing is we're helping marketers reach people who are looking for healthcare. We primarily work with pharmaceutical companies about 80% of our clientele are either pharmaceutical, biotech or medical devices, and they're looking to reach either physicians, healthcare professions, patients or care givers, and we help them to do that through the network we've established.

Jaime: That makes a lot more sense. So you're not actually helping the end user, you're helping the other people.

R.J.: We're helping you to the extent that we're bringing information and resources and tools to your attention that you might not have known about otherwise. We're not signing people up for anything. A lot of people hear our name and associate us with insurance we're not signing people up for insurance in any form, we're simply a distribution channel for medical publishers, medical societies and associations and other producers of web content who have valuable audiences and we help advertisers engage with those audiences.

Jaime: I'm reading your website and thinking "Oh, they do networking and advertising and that sort of stuff," so I just assumed it was for us. You're saying that the companies that make drugs and that sort of thing need to get their word out to the doctors and the physicians and that's what you help with?

R.J.: Exactly.

Jaime: So how do you target people like physicians? If you're looking at a wide range of everybody in the United States, you only have so many people that are physicians. Are there specific ways that you do that?

R.J.: We have a proprietary solution that we call informed targeting. Informed targeting is a sophisticated mix of some of standard internet targeting technologies you might think about, such as contextual targeting, but we also do registration based or profile driven targeting if the user has shared information about themselves, such as subscribed to a journal online. This year we launched our authentication platform so we've created a database from the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency, as well as the MPI numbers, which is by CMS, the Center for Medicare Services, and we've compiled that to create a master database of all know subscribers in the US of physicians, nurse practitioners, physician's assistants, and then we help our publishers to match their data against that database to identify individual users that we can target on behalf of customers. So pharmaceutical companies, for example, have very detailed information about which physicians or which prescribers prescribe their medication, so they'll come to us and say "We know there are 700,000+ prescribers in the US, but we're really only interested in these 220,000 of them, because they are the ones that prescribe our medication,those are the ones that have a need," so then we can go after those individuals.

Jaime: That is amazing. I have a client who is doing a startup in the healthcare field and trying to get hold of these people has been a pain, and him trying to go through everything has been a pain. I didn't even know people like you or companies like yours existed, let alone with the type of technology that you have. How did you get into this?

R.J.: We got into authenticated targeting basically because of client demand our clients were increasingly looking to make their media spend more efficient. We represent many medical journals, societies and associations, so sometimes, if you're looking to an endocrinologist, it's sufficient to go to one of our partners, like the American Diabetes Association, and be on their professional medical journals and that contextual placement is good enough, in many instances, for brand building and engagement. Other times, though, when you're looking for a very specific endocrinologist, you need data beyond just contextual placement, and that's when you have to get into either registration profile driven targeting or authenticated targeting, where you're actually reaching a known prescriber that you've verified.

Jaime: You said a whole bunch of different words that I get but I'm wondering if the people listening will get them. Can you go through what things like contextual based means?

R.J.: Sure, so contextual advertising is simply matching up, say, a diabetes ad with a diabetes piece of content. So if the journal article is about diabetes or the treatment of diabetes, you insert a diabetes ad onto that particular placement. Registration based targeting is when you go onto a website, you sign up and enter your information, say you're an endocrinologist and where you live, and based on the information that you provide, we can do other forms of targeting, such as targeting by specialty, maybe targeting by gender, by age if you submit your age, or geographic criteria. So that's registration profile driven. Authentication is one step beyond that, where we take that information and match it against our database and say "Yes, this is a prescriber," or "No, this is not." There are different levels of healthcare professionals out there, not all of whom have the ability to write prescriptions. In fact, categories like NPs and PAs, nurse practitioners and physicians? assistants, it varies state to state as to whether or not they can write prescriptions in some states they can't; in some states they can with their physician's supervision.

Jaime: That's all a bit insane, the fact that we have access to so much data that our ad targeting can be so targeted. People might get a little bitcreeped out by this. Is that something that you get a lot? When people are like "They know where I live, they know what I do, they know so much about me!" Do you ever get anything like that?

R.J.: I personally believe that privacy as we know it is going away. I think it's led by companies like Facebook and Google and others who have really pushed our limits and our thinking in terms of what privacy means and the importance of different aspects of privacy. That said, there are absolutely some concerns from people and I think those concerns are very legitimate and we have to do our best to balance those concerns with the needs of the marketers and advertisers trying to deliver a message to the right person. Not all of our publishers have bought into all elements of what we offer we're at different stages with different publishers. Some of the traditional, more old-school publishers are very reluctant to go down the path of authentication or user-specific targeting. The challenge that they face is that there are a dozen companies pursuing the same kind of targeting that we're pursuing and they're starting to take market share away from anybody who's not doing it. So if they want to maintain an advertising business they need to go down that path of authentication.

Jaime: I go back and forth. I've been online since as soon as I was able to so I'm like "Whatever," and it's so funny looking at people like my parents who are like "Oh my gosh! Don't give them any information!" I like having targeted ads because then I might care about the ads that they're showing me instead of having ridiculous things, because then the ads might actually be helpful. But it does get kind of crazy sometimes I had a friend post a specific Facebook ad for another friend and would joke with them, doing ads that are so targeted that they're creepy. So it's important to make sure that the people that have that information are doing ethical things with it, so having companies that are ethical doing this makes me happy, but when people don't I think that's when people get a bit worried about them having their information. Does that make sense?

R.J.: It makes total sense. I think your point is right on and I think that has to be the promise of targeting in the future where the message that's delivered to you feels less like advertising and more helpful. If those who are delivering ads online understand that you're in the market for a car and that you happen to be looking at Jeeps and that you happen to like a certain color or model, and they can start to deliver really useful information to you, then that's the Holy Grail, that's where we're all trying to go. Advertisers themselves haven't really caught up to take advantage of the targeting many times we'll do a campaign with someone and we'll create several clusters of different audience profiles that they can reach and, in theory, they should be creating customer-unique messages for each of those clusters, if not for each of those individuals, but often they haven't caught up to that yet because of their own bureaucratic issues. Sometimes they just create one campaign and run that same campaign to everybody, which defeats the purposes of the segmentation that we're doing.

Jaime: Having all of that data and not doing anything with it. That's good!

R.J.: I have my own creepy story for you. I think online advertising done inappropriately can be creepy. I got married a few years ago and when I was in the midst of searching for wedding rings I was using the Blue Nile website a lot, and Blue Nile utilities behavioral targeting, so because I was on that website they dropped a cookie on my computer and then their advertising starts appearing elsewhere, so as I surfed on my computer I would see a lot of Blue Nile advertising. I didn't happen to notice it until my now-wife, then-girlfriend was using my computer and surfing online and, looking over her shoulder, I noticed that everything was a Blue Nile ad! Luckily she didn't pick up on the fact that I was being targeted but she made a comment that "Blue Nile must be having a heck of a sale! They're advertising everywhere! So that's an example about when you're trying to keep a secret and the cat can be let out of the bag with inappropriate targeting.

Jaime: That's hilarious but sad too. She hopefully had a good idea you were going to ask anyway. So how can we use that? Especially small business owners, people who are just starting up and are in the first one to five years of their business. This is really potent but a lot of the time we think this is for the bigger companies who do ridiculous amounts of advertising, so how can somebody with a lower advertising budget use something like this?

R.J.: It's actually best for small business because you have a lot budget. The smaller your budget, the more focused and targeted you need to be in your efforts. A great example for you would be that you could work with a retargeting partner. Retargeting is very, very powerful what it means is that you're going to take a tiny bit of code, put it onto your website so that any visitors that come to your website get a cookie dropped onto their computer and then you buy advertising in ad networks or through partners like us and retarget those individuals, so you're spending money but the only people you're reaching are people who have been on your website. You can also buy data profiles from different data vendors, where you can say "This is the segment of people I've built, my customer segment I want you to find me people who are a lot like this so that I can expand my audience," because if I'm going after people that are a lot like my current customer base I'm probably going to find new customers in that segment. It makes your advertising very, very efficient.

Jaime: That makes a lot of sense. Howdo you pay for that? I know this isn't exactly what you're doing, but since you know the industry I'm asking you.

R.J.: You're typically paying for that on a cost per 1000 basis, so you're typically buying on a CPM. Your segment is probably a very valuable segment in terms of who you're reaching. You've got two clienteles you've got the folks who you're interviewing, so you're trying to attract more interviewees, and you've got the people who are listening and reading about that who are trying to learn and build up their own business skills or improve themselves. Those segments are probably going to be priced differently, but you could look at CPMs that are $1-2 all the way up to very expensive CPMs, depending on how specific your segment is and how many other people want to reach those individuals. When you look at physicians, for example, there are only 700,000 of them in the company and when you start to boil that down on individual prescriber lists, you can get lists as small as a handful 5, 6,7, 12,000 prescribers of any particular medication. Those individuals become exceedingly valuable because many people want to reach that same individual.

Jaime: Do you have any numbers as far as how long it takes somebody to buy? I see tons of advertising you saw Blue Nile advertising all over the place even though you weren't necessarily clicking. Did you actually buy a ring from Blue Nile or did you go somewhere else?

R.J.: I did make my purchase there.

Jaime: It worked!

R.J.: I don't know if it worked. I was already committed to the site, which is how I got tagged in the first place, but it probably didn't hurt because I probably went back more than I otherwise would have and that builds the relationship. One of the greatest challenges in online advertising, and advertising generally, is figuring out what works. I think it was John Wanamaker who said "50% of my ad spend is wasted, I just don't knowwhich 50%." Online has been doing a nice job of chipping away at that, but there's still an area of ambiguity where it's hard to do what's called attribution to what works. If you're running a search marketing campaign, if you're going search engine optimization, if you're running display advertising, if you're running certain sponsorships, you might have a user who's been exposed to a combination of those which one gets the credit for a sale when it happens? There have been a lot of studies done that show that if you run search and display simultaneously, your search engine performance will actually get better because you're running display, so your brand becomes more recognizable so when it comes up in a search result they click more, but search would typically get the credit in that case for having that conversion when display actually lifted the performance of search. Sometimes that works in reverse as well.

Jaime: Nice, credibility lends itself to each side. How long should you commit to something like this? Say I decided I wanted to try something like this, how long of a commitment should I make? Because we're told that someone has to see your ad seven times before they click on it. How do we make that determination?

R.J.: It depends on what your goals are, what it is you're trying to achieve. This is one of the most important questions to understand with clients before you even start making any recommendations in any form. What is it that you're looking to achieve? If you're looking to achieve brand building, to get your brand out there and create awareness, what you just said makes a lot of sense. Seven impressions or more starts to build that brand impression. If you're looking for performance, looking to get people to your website, and that's your only measure of success, or you're trying to get people signed up for your newsletter and that's the only measure of success, or to watch a video, it starts to change. The seven would be too much. If you're looking for performance, typically, after you've exposed someone to your message five times, if they have not clicked, they're not likely to. It doesn't mean they're not a good candidate for you, it doesn't mean you shouldn't continue to brand build if that's your target, especially if it's one of those highly coveted targets that you're trying to go after, but if you're looking for performance, everything changes. It becomes much more about your cost per acquisition, your cost per click, your cost per action that the user takes. You also have to make sure that, at the end of the day, it's the right people. So, great, you got thousands of people to your website and they watched a video and signed up to the newsletter, but were they the right people? So there's this continuum, from brand building all the way down to engagement, and your quality tends to be pretty different here. On the brand building side, we can give you excellent quality and make sure that you're hitting the right people but we can't always make them engage with something. That's the challenge for marketers andadvertisers alike. We have partners throughout the media buying process that have some of that responsibility as well so many of our clients work with ad agencies who are responsible for their creation and development. We don't actually produce the ads in most cases, we just target and distribute them, so if we put them in front of the right people and they don't engage, sometimes you have to be willing to go back to the drawing board and look at your creative and figure out whether you have the right value proposition or are making the right offer. That's where it gets frustrating at times, because it is a constant, iterative process. the beautiful thing about data is that you can market, react, market, react and continually change and improve your campaign, but you have to be willing to do that because, more often than not, a client just wants to say "Here's my campaign, just stick it out there."

Jaime: "I don't care if I'm losing money, I just don't want to deal with it anymore. Go ahead."

R.J.: Don't shoot the messenger if it's not performing the way that you might have hoped because we know that if you tweak this and change this you're going to improve performance.

Jaime: Do you do a lot of split testing to try to see what works better?

R.J.: You can do split testing, you can simply run multiple creatives. So we'll often say to start with a broad basket give us branded creatives, give us unbranded creatives. Here's a classic example if somebody tells us in the initial assessment conversation that it's not about building the brand, it's about getting engagements, the first thing that I'll say is "Give us unbranded creatives." We know that that works better; put an interesting question out there that people are going to respond to and want to know the answer to we know that that will drive more clicks. It's proven through numerous studies that an unbranded creative is going to get you a lot more visitors than a branded creative. That's where conflict comes in, because then they'll say "No, but I want my brand on there." They just told me the goal is not branding, it's engagement, so where on the continuum do they want to be? A lot of the time they want to be in the middle they want some branding but they also want the engagement.

Jaime: But when you do that you're not really going on either side and they might not get the results that they want.

R.J.: Exactly. So to answer your question about split testing, we'll often encourage them to give us multiple creatives some branded with call to action A, call to action B, call to action C; unbranded with those call to actions; different pictures if you're targeting women, is it pictures of other women that attracts them to click or is it pictures of men that attracts them to click? So we'll do some creative testing that way and if we run 50 creatives at the outset we can figure out which ones are working for which audiences. Some of them will eventually just completely shut down, others will increase their volume of exposure and others we'll swap out and try with a different audience segment if they work in one.

Jaime: I'm going to ask this question and you're probably going to say no, so I've pre-empted what you're going to say, but are there any known things? Like do women prefer clicking on women? When we start to develop our creative, and by creative you mean ad, or banner, or whatever it looks like, is there anything we can start with that might make it better that you have insider information on?

R.J.: I'll give you a very strange one. That's the wonderful thing about data you have to let the data speak to you and set all your personal beliefs and limitations to one side, because every marketer has instincts and the data doesn't always agree with the instincts. One of the things that we've seen a lot is on conversion pages, so when you've got a registration page for an end user and you're trying to get them to register for a newsletter or sign up for a site membership or something, the color lime green as your background color yields a higher conversion than any other color. It's just a strange anomaly but it works and you've got to go with what works. Of course a marketer might say "Lime green isn't my color, I have to use the gold and red, that's my brand color." Okay, but if you want higher conversions you've got to go with the data.

Jaime: That's exactly what I wanted to know. That's the sort of stuff that we don't know unless we have access to the data and no matter how many podcasts you listen to, no matter how much information you read, it's really hard to figure out what is working right now, and it probably changes after a while too. I just heard someone say that yellow buttons performed best for them, and that's really good to know, but I also heard that red buttons perform best so you never know what's going to work, specifically.

R.J.: Well, think about all of the variables that are going into it. It's not just the content but it's the audience; it's the individual people who are reading it. For some audiences, yellow buttons will work better and for some red buttons will work better. It is a trial and error type of environment where you continue to build on the learnings you already have, which is a great asset, but every brand is a little different, every customer experience is a little different, so there is a lot of testing that happens.

Jaime: Let me ask you this, because I get a lot of people asking me this and I don't know the exact answer when you're split testing, how many people do you need to have to determine whether one is better than the other? Because you won't know if you've just hit a bunch of people who like one thing better. How many do we need?

R.J.: It depends in part on your audience size. We've got customers who say there are only 6,500 on the planet that matter to them, so in their case it's a different number. Generally speaking, there are a couple of different thresholds for statistical significances. The minimum you'd ever want to use is 20 people for a sampling and 200 is considered the more acceptable threshold but, generally speaking, the more the better. The more data you sample the more accurate your ability to forecast is going to be.

Jaime: I heard "the more the better" but what is more? Is it thousands? But that 200 rule will help me out.

R.J.: 200 is the best number if you can get it. If you can't, if it's a really small audience segment, 20 is at least a meaningful number. Those are two big steps.

Jaime: Is this something we can do on our own? We know that we have to go with companies, but is there something like split testing that you recommend somebody does on their own or should they go with someone who really knows what they're doing and can walk them through it. What's that learning curve like?

R.J.: I think it depends on your business and the long term desire for where you want to take your business. If you want to build this as an internal core competency it helps to do it on your own and learn from it. We would have to do that because we offer that service to others so we want to continue to improve,not just in our own efforts and our own marketing campaigns, but in every campaign we do for someone else. If it's not your core business, more often than not you're better off going with an expert who has that knowledge and can do that for you. If a client hires us, they're not just hiring us to do some execution that they could do themselves, they're hiring us for the 15 years of experience that we can bring to the table so they don't go down the bad paths that they might have chosen if they did it themselves. Every one of those paths is a key learning and experience for them, so if they're trying to develop it as a core competency that's not a bad thing, because you do have to learn, but generally speaking, if it's not going to be your core competency, you're better off bringing in an expert to do it.

Jaime: I like that, because I think that it seems like the learning curve on something like this is pretty steep and it would waste a lot of time and a lot of money. So if I were to get started, we're going to go with me as an example so that people can get a general idea, what would be the first things that I need to do? I know this isn't exactly your business, but since you know it I'm asking you. Walk me through it, if I were to get started, or if there was somebody who wants to target physicians right now, how would they get started, how would they know what companies to go through, how would they even begin?

R.J.: If it's okay I'm going to use the physician one as the example because I'm more familiar with that. I'll try to give you some guidance on how to get started as well. There could be overlap, at least in terms of trying to find millionaires. When you look at the physician class, the average physician is essentially a millionaire and makes over $200,000 a year so it's a pretty good class in terms of some of the speakers that you're looking for. If somebody is looking to get started and they want to reach physicians, first they need to assess the marketplace. You're going to start with understanding where physicians go and you're probably going to either do primary research on your own or buy some research from a syndicate such as Manhattan Research which would give you, for a fee, a whole bunch of information that they've done through surveys and polls about where physicians go. You're going to want to talk to all of those vendors and understand what it is that they have to offer. Then you're going to compare those vendors with each other and figure out where you can reach your specific audience most effectively. Generally speaking, you don't? want to place all of your eggs in one basket that's always a risk because there are a lot of factors that go into whether or not you're going to have a good experience the customer service at the company, the data that they're willing to share, etc. So you're really going to want to look at a media plan that probably contains at least 10-12 different players if you're a large brand. It might be a lot less if you're an individual business owner. Many of those partners, like us, we aggregate numerous partners, so we've got 75 publishers who have 400+ digital opportunities, whether websites, e-mail lists or mobile apps, that we can reach, so by having us on your media plan as one partner, we're actually giving you distribution in a far greater audience segment and we're making it easy for you. Part of the value we bring to the advertisers is that they can get vast distribution, highly targeted on a large number of very high value credible sites very quickly. If they want to change an ad, say pull down the blue ad and put up the red one, it's just one phone call, one contact, and we do that for them across all of them. If they were to do that manually it would be countless hours of labor.

Jaime: I'm going to stop you there because I have a bunch of questions to do with that. Buying research you gave us a recommendation for physicians, is that something that's easy to find by a Google search on where we can find this type of research?

R.J.: Typically. For somebody like you, I don't know how large your newsletter list is, but you've already got a number of followers, so probably the easiest thing for you would be to put up a Survey Monkey survey and ask people for their top five favorite sites that they visit for this type of information. Just reach out and poll them. You're going to see some themes coming back. You can do that in phases so the first wave can be open form to maybe 15% of your audience and you go to more if you're not seeing trends develop but once they start telling you and see sites coming up again and again you can put them on a list, then go to the broad audience and make it easier, just have a multiple choice list of which sites they visit most frequently for this type of information and the ones that rise to the top are the ones for you to go and talk to about advertising or sponsorship because that's where your audience is and people like your audience.

Jaime: I love that. So if I'm going to survey them, is there any other information I need from them besides just the top sites? Should I be getting demographic information or asking other things?

R.J.: It's amazing how many businesses don't understand why their customers use them. I would try to understand what it is about your service that they value the most, because if you can get into their psyche and understand that, you can then start to craft a keyword strategy from that. Let's say a running theme for you is that people keep telling you "I want to achieve business success," you can start to buy keywords such as "business success," "achieving business success," "how do I achieve business success" You can start to buy those keywords in search engines and, by definition, it's one of your potential customers raising their hands and saying "This is what I'm trying to achieve," you know that you provide that value to others and you've just found a marriage made in heaven because you deliver exactly what they're looking for. So buy keywords against terms like that and you'll draw them in and keep them.

Jaime: What do you mean by "buy keywords?" Are you talking about Google ad space, contextual ads?

R.J.: Google Adwords or other search engines that offer targeted keywords. You can also work on your own search engine optimization strategies. So, using that example I just gave, if "achieving business success" is the number one reason people utilize or consume your product or service you can write articles on your website with titles like "How to Achieve Business Success" and as you develop more and more of that content with those keywords your natural rankings in search engines are going to improve.

Jaime: Do you guys do a lot of SEO stuff as well?

R.J.: We typically don't. Many of the ad agencies who typically do media buys for our customers offer that service. We do it for ourselves, but we don't typically do that for clients, although it is an option at different times for different clients, depending on where they are in their relationship and whether or not they have an ad agency, so there are times when we find ourselves performing that service, often more for publishers than advertisers, because publishers are constantly trying to build their own audiences and they sometimes need help in that category.

Jaime: And you said they sort of work hand in hand with the advertising and the SEO so that way it builds credibility, so having a tandem marketing technique seems to work really well. I really love that information, especially for somebody who has a list already that they can just survey, because that makes perfect sense. So I don't necessarily have to buy research. It will be funny because I might do this survey before this interview comes out, so everyone will be like "Hey, wait a minute, I know what she was doing." Or I didn't so they're going to be getting it soon! You said find 10-12 different players, which I thought was interesting because you're one of the players, yet you're telling them to find quite a few before they research and find one. Should they sign up with more than one to test it out?

R.J.: Typically you want to spread your marketing dollars across several different players set up a horse race, basically. One of the challenges of online advertising that's very different from most traditional media is that it's not just about the sale and securing the sale, it's about keeping the business, so because online is very measurable, because data is coming out literally on a minute by minute basis, performance means a lot. If you bought from 12 different players it's inevitable that, depending on how your KPIs are set up, how you're measuring success, and it's incredibly important to understand that from the beginning when you're working with a marketer, because it's amazing how often they don't know what they want. You really have to get them to answer "If I sell you reach to this audience or engagement with this audience, what do you want out of it?" because that's critical to understanding what we're going to measure and how we're going to say, six months from now, whether it was successful or it wasn't. If you don't have that clear visibility going in, as to what the performance metrics are and how performance is going to be measured, it's an uphill battle. Assuming you do have that information let's say you have a client who said "We're going to measure success by driving targeted visitors to our millionaire interview with so-and-on. As many people as we can get to watch that interview, that's how we're going to measure success." You could set up measurement for that by doing things like putting pixel firing into the video stream itself, so if this video lasts 45 minutes you could set up a pixel to be fired at two minute intervals, so you'll get a sense of how long people watched and track that back to what ad campaign drew them in and which one got them to watch more.

Jaime: I didn't know that. I can usually tell from analytics how long they listed,but I don't know where they came from and how long they lasted. That's awesome.

R.J.: As you start to do that kind of thing, now you see where it's important to get into the user's psyche. That search term that I'm buying keywords against, are they the right ones and which ones resonate the best and actually deliver the experience that the user was expecting when they clicked on the link in the first place? That becomes incredibly important and when you've got the 12 different players that you bought on your media plan 12 is just an example, some people do six, some people do 25 and you understand your KPIs and you're measuring performance, now you can rank them. After 3, 6, 9 months you can have an established rank and see which is your best performing player, all the way down to your worst performing player, and then you can start to optimize them and take the budget away from the worst performer and give it to the best. You'll probably hit some ceilings at some point that guy might not have any more inventory for you, he'd love to do more but he's giving you all the valuable inventory he has. Maybe he makes an alternative product but as you measure that you find that it's not performing as well, it's way down the list, so then you'll go to player two, player three, but you start to optimize performance against your media plan.

Jaime: I love that. Just in case anybody doesn't know, a KPI is a key performance indicator, and that's the measurement technique like you said we need to know what we're measuring beforehand. What would you expect someone to spend? I bet everyone listening is going "I'd love to have 10 players but my ad budget is not that big, considering that I'm just testing it." So if we were to do physicians, what's an average customer spend with something like yours and how would we to do it if we were to times it by ten, so that people can get a good idea of what that would look like?

R.J.: We're probably unusual in that a lot of our clients are large multi-national corporations, so the ad budgets that they have are significant. Usually a client that works with us are going to be in the $50,000 range at least, then it goes up considerably we've got clients that spend seven figures. For something like a small business I think you could do testing for a couple of hundred dollars. If you spend $2-300 on Google Adwords you can get a pretty good sense of what's working and what people are responding to.

Jaime: That's interesting. I started doing Google Adwords a couple of years ago when I first started because I was told that it was really good. I hired an expert and he went in and did all of my ads for me and, at the end of the day, it didn't really do very much and I was sick of just throwing money at it. I got some interesting data, like that the people who look up how to be a millionaire are not my people, because there were the people who just want to win the lottery, which is good to know, but I felt that I was wasting money on something that wasn't working and wanted to try something else.

R.J.: That's good to figure out, though, right? The audience you were getting for that is quite different to the audience you would get with keywords such as "how to be successful," or "how to be successful in business." Those are probably more your viewer and you're going to learn that through the process of testing different messaging.

Jaime: But at the time I gave up. But you're right about getting the survey from my people and really finding out what they're looking for, specifically, because at the time I didn't have much of a list so people able to talk to people who already like what I do would be a huge benefit, I'm sure.

R.J.: It would be interesting for you to find out how many of your views have projects or websites similar to what you're doing. In other words, how many people are bloggers about how to be successful in business? Because your customers themselves might be partners for you in marketing too. If you can get them to create links back to your site, and sometimes all you have to do is ask, other times you might have to do some kind of reciprocal linking strategy or make them a guest blogger on your site and you do the same for them, but some of your customers might actually be potential partners as well.

Jaime: It's been amazing, actually, the people that I've gotten. I just had somebody who said that they listened to my interview and it changed what they were doing in the business and he's a millionaire and I've just had him on my show. I was like "I didn't know that you were the guy that created that product that I absolutely love. Good to know, come on my show!" So it's amazing, the reach that you have and you don't even realize, because I don't have access to most of the people. I have my e-mail list but I don't go through it with a fine-toothed comb so I don't know all of the people on my list. Unless you e-mail me, then I know. I'll probably get flooded with e-mails of "I'm amazing too!" now. We need to wrap up ina minute, but you touched on how you created a new business based on the needs of what you were doing here and I just want to go through that process. Because a lot of people starting new businesses in general don't know what the needs are but once you get into a business you realize that there are so many need and opportunities. So tell us how you ended up creating another company?

R.J.: Well eHealthcare Solutions is almost 15 years old now and ever since we created it we saw this problem evolving to do with discrepancies between ad servers. So, trying not to get too technical, when we deliver an ad for, let's say, Pfizer, often their agency hosts the ad on their own server, so we just take their code, make a request to their ad server, and load it our system, our publisher has code that calls our ad server. So a publisher page loads, we say "What do we know about this user?", target ability, etc., and we say "It's time to deliver the Pfizer ad" but we don't have the physical ad on our server, we send a request to their server and pull the ad from there. The user just sees a page that loads with an ad, but the reality is that the decision was made on one server and the ad was pulled from another server and both parties can track whether it's clicked, etc. Because of internet latency, those two servers never have the same impression count so if Pfizer says "I want to buy a million ad impressions from you" and we set up our system to deliver a million ad impressions, the end of the month comes and the ad agency says "Hey, I only counted 940,000." That discrepancy is commonplace on the internet. Probably 65-75% of all ads on the internet are third party served and because that discrepancy exists, as you can imagine, it becomes incredibly difficult for us to deliver their numbers on schedule. They only want to pay for their numbers because that number is saying that the full ad loaded and they counted that. In the 6% or so that got missed, somebody hit the back button or there was a power outage or something happened where the ad didn't fully load. So we now have to deliver a campaign based on a number that we can't see because it's on their server and we also have to do billing based on that number that we can't see. So that's the problem as you grow the business and add more advertisers and more third party servers it becomes a huge operational problem. Ad-Juster was set up to solve the problem of discrepancy management, so it will automatically log into all of the third party ad servers for you and pull down the data and reconcile it with your own data so you can see what you've called the campaign, what your impression and click count was, what the third party's impression and click count was, and give you the full dashboard every day as to how that delivery occurred and what your customers are seeing in the way of data, not just what you're seeing.

Jaime: And people will buy that as another solution that they just install?

R.J.: Correct. The business is going gangbusters. We've got 52 of the top 100 comScore clients by size, so Facebook is a customer, Google's YouTube, NBC Universal and Disney basically the larger you are as an online publisher, the more you need this solution, because it's the kind of problem that scales with your growth, it becomes a bigger issue for you the more ad campaigns you run and the more third parties you deal with. I'll just give you the quick story of how Ad-Juster formed because it's really interesting. I started the business with my cousin and another partner. My cousin lives in San Diego, which is where the company is based, but he was out here in Yardley, PA, where he's from, and the business that he was a part of before had just sold, so he had a nice cash out from that, and we were having a beer and I asked him what he wanted to do next and he said "I want to start a business but I'm not sure what to do," so I gave him a problem. Every business starts with a problem; you've got to be able to solve a problem. I said "Let me give you a problem that we've been grappling with and I think the world needs a solution to," and I did a cocktail napkin diagram of the third party ad service. He knew nothing about online advertising he had never been in the space before. His prior business was software development for the US military, so they were a private company but all the branches of the military were their clients. So I diagrammed out this problem of third party ad serving and the problem it created and he looked at me and said "I can solve that." I said "This is a simple diagram, it's a lot more complicated than that," and he said "Let me tell you what I'm allowed to tell you about what I've been doing for the last 10-12 years," because some of it was classified and he had clearance issues, but he said "What we've basically been doing is getting the army systems to talk to the navy and the air force, because they all operate in these separate silos, much like these third party servers," and he said "What happened with their systems, prior to the software we built, is that you would have some guys on the ground in Iraq and the army would want to call in an airstrike and call in coordinates to the air force, the air force would come flying over and the air force guy would see a red X where he was supposed to drop the bomb and he would just drop the bomb. Sometimes there was friendly fire if there were guys too close to that area, but the air force didn't know that." So the problem they had to fix was pulling the data from the army because there's a transponder on every backpack, the army knew exactly where all of their guys were but the air force didn't. So they had to pull the data from the army and the air force, mix it together and push it back to both parties so that they could see each other. Now the air force guy sees the red X and he sees the blue dots and he can say "The guys on the left flank are too close, back them off before I hit," and he could watch the blue dots moving away before he strikes. So my cousin said "I've fixed this problem for the military."

Jaime: That's insane that it's the same thing, he was doing something so similar. How does that work?

R.J.: It's interesting, and this is that we were talking about, that it was instincts. I think instincts would say that taking someone from another industry and having him solve one of the biggest challenges in online advertising that no one in online advertising has been able to solve yet might not be a recipe for success but, sure enough, it was. I think, often, when you bring a fresh perspective to a problem or an industry it's a good thing.

Jaime: I love that. That's what I get a lot of people asking "What if I don't know much about the industry in general when I hop in?" Some people would say you need to have expertise when you're going into a specific thing, but after doing so many interviews it's funny that I've seen that so often somebody who knows nothing about it has a fresh perspective and goes "Oh, that's easy, all you have to do is this," and no one else ever thought of it. That's amazing. So how long ago did you create Ad-Juster?

R.J.: We started the company in 2007. It was about two years of just head down software development where we were utilizing our network as a trial, basically, to make sure that everything was working. We went through a process where we gave feedback and they would improve it, we gave them more feedback and they would improve it until we felt that we had a market-ready product and we started selling it in 2009 and it's just taken off since.

Jaime: Did you have to do a lot of marketing or was everybody like 'You solved the problem! I'm sold!"

R.J.: It's interesting because it's a fairly small industry and we haven't done a whole lot of marketing because the fact that there was a solution to this problem that is such a universal problem if in the online ad operation space meant that sometimes our sales calls were literally just 15 minutes we'd go in, do a demo, show what it is and if we have the head of ad ops and the head of finance on the line, it's the best combination because the ad ops guy is going to instantly see, within about six minutes of the demo, that it's fantastic and they have to have this, but he's not necessarily going to have the budget so you want the finance guy there to because it's going to make his billing process go from 3, 5, 7 days, whatever it is now because he has to pull all of the data from these disparate systems, down to 24 hours or less, so he will find the budget from somewhere and make sure that the ad ops guy can buy the product.

Jaime: Everybody's happy. It's a win/win for everyone. That's amazing it's really great to hear that, because there are so many problems in business that need to be solved and it's amazing that you can find one and then help your cousin start an amazing business that you are co-owner of, so that works out well for you too, I'm sure.

R.J.: Absolutely.

Jaime: Thank you so much. You've given us so much information and a whole bunch of stuff for me to do I'm going to have to add a bunch of stuff to my to do list. The question that I always end with is what's one action that listeners can take this week to help move them towards their goal of $1 million?

R.J.: I'm a huge fan of guys like Tony Robbins and one of the things that he says all the time is "Take action". You have to take that first step to do something. A lot of people look at the concept of starting or growing a business as an insurmountable amount of stuff. You just mentioned you added a whole bunch of stuff to your to do list if that list looks too long it just starts to look intimidating and you get paralyzed. But if you just take action, do the first one and cross it off your list, you've made progress. I would recommend a video by Matt Cutts of Google, and it's on TED videos, I'm a big fan of the TED video series. That would be a great place for you, by the way. I don't know if they do advertising or marketing but it's probably a similar audience to yours. But Matt Cutts has a video out there called something like "The First 30 Days" and his recommendation is a re-proposed recommendation, I don't know whose suggestion it was originally, but he shares his experience around it. His recommendation is to find that new thing that you want to do and do it for 30 days. Don't make it overwhelming, just dedicate a little bit of time, but you have to do that action. I've wanted to learn piano for years, so the big thing that I'm doing right now is I've committed to 20 minutes per day of sitting down and playing the piano. It's not so much time that I can't do it on some days but it's enough time to get me into it and improve my skills. So for 30 days I'm going to play piano, play piano, play piano. You can do the same thing with exercise there's a great exercise program out there called "The 7 Minute Workout" where it is literally seven minutes, you get your heart rate up, you work every aspect of your body and it's only seven minutes nobody can say they can't find seven minutes to do a workout, but you have to commit to doing it for 30 days. If you do that consistently for 30 days it becomes a habit and you're going to keep doing it.

Jaime: Nice. I haven't seen that TED Talk. I've watched a thousand TED Talks but I haven't actually seen that one, so I'll make sure to find it and link to it so everyone else can watch that too. So after this, go and watch that, because I'm sure that will be inspiring also. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, R.J. Where can we learn more about you? Especially if there is someone listening who has the need that you guys service where can we find out more?

R.J.: Our website is www.ehealthcaresolutions.com. If you're interested in the other business I mentioned it's www.ad-juster.com and you can follow me on Twitter at @rlewis.

Jaime: Awesome. We'll definitely link all of that stuff up in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on today, I really appreciate it.

R.J.: Thank you, Jaime, it was a lot of fun.

Jaime: Thanks for listening. The morale of the story is if you're buying your girlfriend a wedding ring, don't let her use your laptop! I know I need to implement this stuff and you do too, so if you have tried it before, go ahead and comment. Go to eventualmillionaire.com and click on R.J.'s interview and comment below. I want to hear if you've tried it before, if you're looking to try it go ahead and put a date on when you're going to try it. I'm going to try this, so you can help me stay accountable and I'll help you stay accountable too. Definitely try it and let me know how it goes. I hope you enjoyed this interview and have an amazing day.

Announcer: Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on EventualMillionaire.com.

Tags: ad retargeting, millionaire interview, Online Marketing, RJ Lewis, Sales Conversion, Sales Funnel

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Goals, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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