TJ15 – Retargeting: ‘Cyber Stalking’ Uncovered With Justin Brooke

Welcome back listener! You’re tuned in to Traffic Jam episode #15, I am your host James Reynolds as always, and you are now listening in to the third most loved media and marketing podcast in the UAE. That’s right listener, thanks to your support we’ve now climbed the Apple iTunes rank in the United Arab Emirates, perched closely behind a little known podcast called the Harvard Business Review, and that’s in the business section, subcategory media and marketing. I’m totally blown by this. I think that our tiny little podcast is challenging a big institution like Harvard is just amazing, and it is down to your support so first of all I would like to thank you for listening in to Traffic Jam and helping it become what it is. But of course, #3 I’m not happy with that. Being the type of person I would love to get this show up to #1 position so that we can get the great information that our guests share each week out to a wider audience and positively affect more businesses. So I want your help this week, if you have not done so already, head on over to iTunes via your iTunes player and leave the show a review. Let us know whatever you think about it; perhaps suggestions, some comments or just some good honest feedbacks about the information that I and my guest share each week. I really would be greatful for that, hopefully positive- or negative, if you feel that’s appropriate, help us push this show up there just a little bit higher where we can get it towards to top spot where we can get this great information out to a wider audience.

So go right ahead and do that! All the great comments that I receive will get read out on the show so if you want yourself a little bit more airtime and give yourself some exposure in front of the Traffic Jam audience which incidentally is growing and growing by the week, please make sure you leave your name in the review and also you might want to include your website address so I can give that a mention on the show too.

So what have we got coming up on today’s show? We’ve got all of the bits that you love each week; the one minute traffic tip, this week’s news in traffic, and the Traffic Jam jam which plays out the show. And this week’s Traffic Jam jam is quite a rocky number chosen by my guest so all you rock fans you’d want to stick around until the end of the show for that one.

So who is my guest this week? In his own words, he is an expert in acquiring and converting leads and sales through various online marketing channels and technologies. He’s got particular skills in Facebook traffic, both organic and paid, and the subject of today’s show, Remarketing – or Retargeting as it is also known and is the process of remarketing to people who have already visited your website. This is possibly one of the hottest strategies out there right now, and on this interview we cover everything to setting up your campaigns to sequencing of your messages. So, without any further ado, let’s get stuck in to today’s interview, the topic is remarketing, and my guest on today’s show is Justin Brooke imscalable.com.

James: So this is Traffic Jam Episode is Justin Brooke from IMScalable.com Justin, welcome to Traffic Jam!

Justin: Hey man, thanks for having me on.

James: Awesome, it’s really great to have you here. Before we kind of get stuck to the meat and potatoes of the interview, can you tell us a little bit about what you do?

Justin: Yes. I run a full service ad agency where we do the paid traffic to our paid clients. Our clients are typically they either have an info product sales funnel or they have a supplement product sales funnel although we’ve worked with software, dentists, we’ve worked with sales people but those types of sales funnels seem to work best for us. We had managed their Facebook ads, emails, retargeting, email ads, we do all the creative for them- that’s what we do.

James: I also hear that you break six inches of concrete with your bare fists as well.

Justin: Yeah, years ago when I was in Tae Kwon Do, one of my specialties was breaking. I wasn’t great at the fighting part or the forms part, but apparently I could break stuff.

James: Well, I think when it comes to fighting Justin breaking stuff is probably a good trait to have so I’m sure you are in good stead. And you also like blueberry beer. It doesn’t sound like the type of beer that someone who would break six inches of concrete would like.

Justin: Yeah, I know. My cousin who’s a female, she always says, do they make that kind for men too? It tastes good and I like it.

James: Well I like a bit of lime in my beer as well so we are both guilty of that one. So Justin, tell me how you got started online because I know when we did the pre interview stuff, you told me about some of the different jobs that you’ve had and the different business you had before you even got to the online stuff; you used to work in Wendy’s, in construction and telemarketing- a whole list of different stuff. What was that journey to getting to being an online marketer and the stuff that followed afterwards.

Justin: Yeah I have done a lot of jobs, and I did not graduate high school. So the jobs I had, construction – I was carrying the cinder blocks or digging ditches; I always dreamed about sitting in a desk in a grey crushed velvet chair and I was going to work the phone and I was never going to sweat again. That was my dream. It eventually came through after a while but it happened while I was at a sales job and I learned that I have a pretty good gift of sales- my mom always said that I have a gift of gab but basically, it’s sales job, I learned that I could sell, I was finally inside, I wasn’t sweating for a living anymore and one day I decided I did not want to be making 35% commission anymore which was a good commission. I felt like I was doing all the work because I was bringing in all the money. As a business owner I now know that the business owner was doing a lot more than I thought he was; more than just keeping the lights on. So one day I decided I wanted to make 100% commission and I went for it and kind of met Russell Brunson, we went all down that track.

James: Yeah, it’s an interesting story. I’d like to ask you about your early success of really getting online and that was the story of your turning $60 in to a six-figure business. Tell us a bit about that.

Justin: Right so when I got started I was pretty much begging people to let me build them a website for $189 then I realized that having lots of clients was a little bit like having lots of bosses and so I wanted to learn how to make a website make me pay my bills basically. I saw guys like Russell Brunson and Rich Schefren- all these make money online and so I started following them, started following how to make money online and Russell offered an internship and because I was pretty good at sales, I pretty much made sure that I got that internship. I found his affiliate manager’s phone number, his personal home phone number, I emailed him, I personal messaged him in forums. I just made sure he knew that I really, really wanted it. I got the unpaid internship, had to go out to Idaho, worked for free for thirty days and paid for my own way and all that stuff. He has a quarter million dollar marketing library, all these DVDs and books and audio books. It was my job to go through those courses and write reviews because he was trying to build an affiliate review blog so I got the education of a lifetime doing all of that for him, and then I took that education that I learned while I was out there and went back home. I still wasn’t making money, so I explained to my wife how we were going to make money, I had this little website telling a how to build a website video course, showed her what we would do with adwords, begged her to let me use money – we borrowed that by paying half the electric bill, and use the other half to pay for our adwords account; that was $60, $2 a day budget. At the end of the first month, I made $150, paid back the electric bill, reinvested the money, doubled my money again, doubled it again, month after month for 11 months in a row that I double my money and I had a six figure business.

James: So what were the keys to your success being able to go through that process and doubled that business consistently. What were the things behind that?

Justin: Looking back, something that I learned in all those courses was the importance of tracking analytics and metrics. That was like the underlying key in everything. It wasn’t about certain tricks that I learned from this expert guy or that expert. Everyone was always about doing the fundamentals and tracking everything. Even though I was only spending $2 a day, I was watching everything like a hawk because that $60 to me was like all my money that was money I didn’t even really have. So I watched it and I watched probably almost every click that came in and was optimizing and changing things. So the biggest key that I learned was to watch everything and I learned that one of the reasons why I am successful today is a lot of tracking, a lot of optimization, and I just tried to make sure that I stick to the basics with my ads.

James: One of the reasons I really wanted to get you on the show was to actually talk about one of those things that you’ve been extremely successful with recently and the topic that I’d like to get on today is remarketing because I know that is something that you’ve not only got great results yourself but you’ve also been able to achieve fantastic results for the clients that you serve. So with your permission Justin I’d like to speak to you a bit with remarketing and perhaps if we can start off by introducing the topic with what remarketing is because for many of our listeners out there, it might be a new concept to and perhaps a new word for  so tell us what remarketing is.

Justin: Remarketing or also called retargeting, is basically you are putting a code on your website just like you put a Google analytics code or an opt in code to your website and as visitors are coming to your page, it’s tagging them or cookie-ing them. And then you start building an audience of these people that you’re tagging and then now what you can do is you can go in to the network and you can upload banner ads that you will show to this audience of people who you’ve been tagging. There’s all kinds of campaigns you can do to show them different banner ads at different times. You can get really creative with it but for the most part, basically visitors come to your website and they leave your website, all of a sudden they started to see your ads all over the web so you look famous to them. It’s the same thing like walk in to a store locally offline, and then you came out of the store and all of the sudden there’s billboards all over your town for that store. You would immediately think O wow! This guy, he is the big thing! Everybody must like this guy. And then also sometimes people just forget. Somebody comes to your website, the kids started crying, or dinner was ready; life took over and they were not able to order. A couple of days later they see your banner ads and they remember o yeah, I wanted to buy that thing. It works really, really well right now, it’s showing your ads to a very highly qualified audience.

James: Got it, so it’s basically targeted follow up using display advertising on other websites that your previous visitors may now be visiting.

Justin: Absolutely! It gives you a whole other chain of follow up and some people are calling it the invisible list because it’s like people are opting in to your follow up sequence but they don’t have to fill out a form or anything like that.

James: Yeah, and of course they don’t know themselves that they’re on that list.

Justin: Yeah you have to make sure that you have your privacy policies and everything like that.

James: Got it, cool! Justin, what are some of the advantages of retargeting or remarketing over conventional display advertising. Why don’t you just go out and blanket the internet with display ads as opposed to doing retargeting?

Justin: Well if you just went out and blanketed the internet, you’d be showing your ads to a lot of people who are unqualified, and so the next step would be I would show my ads on sites that I think my visitors would be visiting, well, you’re still showing your ads to people who never really showed an interest. Where with remarketing, you’ll be showing your ads to people who have just opted in, to people who have clicked the order button but have not completed the order form. So you can be showing your ads to people who not only did they visit your website, but they completed an action on your website that shows that they were highly engaged and interested in what you have. And there’s other campaigns that you can run in your display ads: you can have testimonials for your products, you can have come back and you can get a 10% discount. You can get much more creative whereas if you were just blanketing the internet and you have come back and get a 10% discount, it might not make a whole lot of sense but to somebody who’s just been to your website, it makes a lot of sense. And they’re like o wow yeah absolutely!

James: Well I think I like to cover some of that high level stuff in terms of targeting lists and sequencing messages in a short while. But for now, I think it would be nice to lay the ground work for this conversation and really just ask you about what kind of results someone could expect starting retargeting and perhaps compare that to typical display advertising and I know you’re a stats type of person so what type of click through rate for instance might a retargeting ad get comparative to a typical display ad?

Justin: I have seen the click through rate for the most part being about the same, it depends on the type of campaign that you’re doing though. If somebody just hit your order form and did not complete it, your click through rates for the next couple of days are going to be a lot higher – in the 0.3-0.4, even as high as 0.7 – 0.8 CTR% where normally with display ads you’re looking at 0.05, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 maybe if you are doing really, really good.

James: I have heard people talk about getting click through rates of, in extreme cases might I add, up to 20%. Do you think that it’s actually achievable with retargeting?

Justin: It is totally achievable, but not on a large scale one. If you have a really relevant campaign, or a great ad- the CTR with retargeting is totally dependent in a couple of factors. #1 how far in to your website did they get? Are they somebody who just landed on your website and then bounced off? And they see your ads, it’s probably not going to be a very high CTR. If it’s somebody who came to your website, filled out an opt in form, watched your sales letter, and then they’re seeing your ads, your CTR% is probably going to go up. And then it also depends on how long after they visited your website. You’ve got to figure if after two weeks people would either have bought or decided they’re not going to buy so there are a lot of companies out there who they’re showing their retargeting ads for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. Some people just leave that thing running as long and after 90 days if somebody’s seeing your ads and they’re not coming back to your website, they’re done. All that you’re doing is just upsetting them with your ads now. I’m sure 20% is possible; I’ve seen some stuff like that on Facebook. Definitely the higher CTRs we see with retargeting is the retargeting campaigns where you’re retargeting people inside of Facebook.

James: Yeah! And I have seen a lot of that recently. I don’t know if I’ve just been happening up on sites that are actively doing retargeting but everywhere I seem to turn in Facebook now are sites that I’ve visited in the last few days so it’s obviously a hot topic of conversation.

Justin: Yeah across the board in all of my campaigns, the campaigns where it’s retargeting people inside of Facebook, they always have the highest CTR and the lowest CPA or the lowest cost per sale basically.  Those are the campaigns making us the most money for our clients.

James: Interesting! Cool, if someone is listening to this right now and they’re quite excited about giving retargeting a shot, what would be the process of getting started with it?

Justin: So you want to pick a network, and there’s a bunch of networks out there. You really want to think about first how you plan to use it and what type of website you have because there are networks that are better for e-commerce sites, and there are networks that are better for sales letter kind of sites. The network that I use is Perfect Audience, they are an all-around network, they can retarget in to Facebook and the whole web, they have a nice interface. There’s other networks out there that specialize in things like capture, they specialize in e-commerce; there are other ones that specialize but Perfect Audience is a good all-around one with great prices. So what do you need to get started? You need to think about how am I going to use it, what network am I going to use, what is my display ad strategy going to be? There are a couple of different strategies, maybe we should talk about that right now?

James: Yeah sounds excellent! I think if we get people thinking about how they are going to use it that might just tick a few boxes for our listeners so yeah, go ahead.

Justin: Okay, so the most basic strategy is you’re going to put your retargeting code on all of your pages and somebody lands on your page and they are going to see what I call a brand awareness ad. A brand awareness ad to me is something that has your logo on there, it has a headline that summarized the big benefit of your product, and then it has a call to action; learn more, get instant access, whatever. So that’s just a real basic campaign. It’s just anybody who lands on your website is going to start seeing your banners trying to get them to come back. The next level up is someone who has not only gone to your website, but maybe they’ve gone to your products page, or maybe they came to your website and they opted in and now they got to see your sales video or your sales page or whatever but somebody who has seen your product and so now you’re going to have ads that showcase that product, it’s still probably going to have your logo on there but you really want to be featuring that product that they were just looking at and you might have a discount, get 10% off or you might have a testimonial for that product, that’s a great campaign to run! I mean imagine all of a sudden somebody lands on your product page and then all over the web they’re seeing testimonials for that product. That’s real strong. Then the next level up is something I have seen Zappos do a lot. Basically someone comes to your website, they see your product, they click the order button, but they did not complete the order. For some reason they did not finish the ordering process so what you do is you basically show them an ad that says oops you still have this product in your shopping cart, come back now to finish your order, or you still have this product in your shopping cart, come back and get 10% off. Get creative on what you want to do. The other thing that I want to talk about is that there is something called message sequencing, and basically these networks will allow you to turn your ads on and off on certain days. So for instance I can create a simple brand awareness ad for the first seven days; this ad is going live on day 1 and it’s going to turn off on day 7 and it’s basically just reminding people of my logo, my benefit, come here. And then on day 8 I turn on a new ad that’s increasing the message and increasing the desire a little bit. This one now shows a 10% coupon and that one runs until day 14 and then day 15 I upload another one and now we have a 25% off coupon! And you can just keep increasing until it’s not worth it for you to get that person to buy anymore or we normally end where it’s a trial for free and pay if you like it, it’s our final last shot campaign.

James: Nice! So the way that these ad networks work, is the actually tag that person based on their first interactions and that sequencing would be specific to that particular person. Is that correct Justin?

Justin: Absolutely! It would be based on the day that they were tagged.

James: Got it! And would you say the best results come when you could be the more relevant with your ads? I mean some of those strategies that you talked about was getting very specific about that particular website visitor’s previous interaction; what products they’ve visited and looked at, what stage of the order process they got to, would I be right in saying the more relevant you can be and specific for that particular user, the better results you get?

Justin: Absolutely! I have seen people do some crazy things with their ads; big bright red borders and weird images on the ad. With that stuff you are trying to get attention and sometimes screaming for attention can increase your click through rates but nothing increases your click through rate better than making that ad more relevant to the person looking at it. We’ve seen that the higher you increase your relevance, the higher your CTR goes. Also, not only does it raise the CTR but it raises the conversion rate of the person actually buying. If you’re out there screaming for attention with that crazy ad, you may get that person to come because they’re curious about what this weird ad is on the website but they may not want to buy. But if you increase the relevancy of the ad, now the person not only clicks on the ad but wants to buy the thing.

James: Yeah, got it. Well it’s all I guess about getting the right message and also the right timing with the sequencing ideas you gave us because as you said you can increase the desire by increasing discounts and things like that to really encourage that action or sale.

Justin: Yeah, one thing I like to say real quick is a lot of times when I talk about this, people’s eyes glass over or it’s very overwhelming because I am talking a lot about advanced campaigns; what I want people to realize is that this is nothing different than your email auto responder sequence except it’s not an email; it’s display ads across the web. That’s all sequence messaging is. You’re just using normal display ads like you would different emails and as they go through different parts of your funnel, now they’re not getting your prospects sequence, now they’re getting the leads sequence, now they’re getting the customer’s sequence of follow ups.

James: With email marketing Justin I am sure you and I would advise our listeners to get started with that straight away, with retargeting is that advise still the same? Or would we need to get a certain sized list to get this thing to be effective?

Justin: There’s kind of a political thing going on with retargeting because there are a lot of people out there abusing it since it’s something where people don’t have to opt in. because some people are abusing it, some browsers do not track campaigns or they are teaching the users of their browsers how to turn off retargeting basically to stop cookie tracking. If you buy a new Windows PC – this is shocking! I just bought a bunch of Windows PCs for my office and when I was setting them up, every single one of them, the settings were default selected to do not track meaning retargeting would not have worked on them. So there’s kind of a window – we don’t know if this browser thing that is going on out there and if the browsers win that means that retargeting is going to go away. That’s a hard pill to swallow because we have been seeing 300 – 500 ROI on some of our campaigns. But at the same time maybe retargeters and advertisers win and this stays a lot longer. So what I would say is right now there looks to be a window of how long you can get started in retargeting. So you should get started as soon as possible because the ROIs are really, really good.

James: Well I guess there is a whole other conversation about relevancy again. I as a consumer would much rather be receiving advertising for stuff that I am interested in, and potentially discounts on products that I’m interested in. If someone like you is advertising to me I think that is a much better scenario than just having people pushing any other old rubbish on to us in the old fashioned way.

Justin: Absolutely! And it’s just that we’ve got a couple of bad apples out there. Just like in email marketing you’ve got spammers. There’s a couple of bad apples out there who are massively collecting cookies, they’re selling those cookies to other people, they’re showing irrelevant ads to these people so those couple of bad apples are what’s doing this but if you are using this correctly for your business and you are trying to serve relevant ads then you’re fine and you’re the people who’s using it correctly.

James: Awesome! Good. Well we have talked a lot already about targeting and sequencing. What about creative and getting the message right? In your experience, are there any types of banners that work better, sizes of banners that work better as a rule of thumb?

Justin: The sizes? Definitely! I urge everyone to do their own testing, try all the sizes, the more sizes you have, the more positions you can show up in. But based on my testing with lots of our clients, we have found that all seizes constantly are doing all the lifting. Those sizes are your 728×90 which is the big horizontal one you usually see at the top of websites. We see the 160×600 which is the sidebar one you usually see on websites, and then the square one which is 300×250. Those three sizes constantly get us the highest CTR and the highest conversions. We as a company, those are the only sizes we do, just to save money on costs and they usually end up winning anyway so we’ve just gone with those ones and if you really want to cut your costs, the 300×250 usually is the strongest of those three- not always, but it usually is the strongest of the three. As for designs, we keep it pretty basic. A lot of times are designs are white background with a picture; it might have the logo, a headline, and a call to action. What you want to do is a banner ad that looks like a banner ad that looks like a banner ad doesn’t get clicked. But a banner ad that looks like a featured article on the website gets clicks. That’s a really big lesson for people learning. And that’s based on our campaigns. Like I said, it could be different for you. Web design companies they need great designed banner ads because people are grading their design but for most of our clients who are supplements and info products and stuff like that, for us, ads that look like a feature article when they are displayed on the website, just a white plain ad displayed on the headline with a blue link that says learn more, read more; those types of ads work really, really well for us.

James: And do they work better Justin than a brand heavy ad? Something that would have the brand or the company’s logo positioned on it because I guess the general thought on it would be I have visited this website before and I recognized the branding, I recognize the logo and I am more likely to click on it. Is that true or is it not true?

Justin: Absolutely! And that’s what where you have to think about this person you are showing the ad to, what stage are they in on my website? Somebody who just landed on your website and they did not complete a lead, they did not click anything; for all you know, they did not even like what you had. That’s all they did; they just landed on your website. You don’t have any information about them. For those people, we show something just general- an ad with a headline, description and call to action. For somebody who has cut a lead or has visited their product page, absolutely show a picture of your product, show your logo. You basically want to be reminding them that they were at your website. You may not want to call out like hey you were at my website 5 minutes and 30 seconds ago, that’s a little spooky but yeah absolutely, like you said increase relevancy.

James: I guess there is a borderline that you’d get to where you’d start freaking out people out right? Who are these people the freaking CIA or…

Justin: Right. You don’t want to be really calling attention to you following them around the web. You just want to make it seem like hey that is so relevant to me it’s like they’re reading my mind!

James: What about changing of creative Justin? Do you recommend rotating it from time to time?

Justin: Absolutely! There are a couple of ways you can save money, I actually just read an article on this- trying to remember where, I think it was on adexchanger.com, it is a great blog for people to follow. You can save a lot of money by showing your ads a little bit later. Right now when we set up a retargeting campaign their ads are live to the person the moment they hop off the website and go around the web. That person may have still converted. They might just have decided to do something else and they decided to go away from your website put in another tab. So sometimes showing your ad a day later; you are showing your ads not to show on Day Zero, maybe to show on Day Two or Day Three, some of those people initially might have come through and bought anyway. So showing them on Day Three you may get the people who may have forgotten about you, maybe worked on an order, so you can save a bit of money there and then you can save a little bit of money by watching over time when your conversion number start dropping off because in the first couple of weeks we have seen increases to conversion but after three or four weeks it seems like if they have not bought within three to four weeks of seeing your ad, they’re just not ready yet and so you might want to turn your ads off and save some money then otherwise you’re burning money on ads that people do not want to see and are not going to click.

James: Yeah got it. You spoke there very briefly about tracking conversions and that of course a really important part on the campaign. With retargeting on these networks, how do you best track conversions; through the typical channels of Google Analytics conversion goals or would there be some other conversion roles you have?

Justin: With Google Remarketing you’re using your analytics account so you can count conversions through your Google Analytics account. With Perfect Audience, you tell them which ones of your pages is your conversion page and so if somebody clicks on your ads and then reach that page then they count that person as a conversion. And you can also then tell it to turn off your ads for that person.

James: Got it. I think just before we close out Justin I’d like to sort of pick your brains a little bit on retargeting on Facebook because as we mentioned at the top of the show it’s something that I have personally seen just grow and grow, I mean literally in the last few weeks or months or so become very, very prominent. How do you go about remarketing on Facebook?

Justin: Certain networks allow you to do that. Not all networks have access with what’s called the Facebook Exchange which is basically a side of Facebook which is just for ads. And the only way you can by the ads is through a network like Perfect Audience or Ad Roll; there’s other ones out there but I use Perfect Audience. And the way you do it is when you are creating a campaign inside your interface it will ask you if you want to create a www campaign or if you want to create an fb campaign. We create both, that way we’re like everywhere on the web. And so when you choose the Facebook one, instead of creating like a banner ad you are creating a Facebook ad. They ask you what headline you want to use, what description you want to use and what image you want to use, what’s your destination URL and what’s your bid – you’re bidding on CPM, campaign cost per click like you would on a Facebook ad, you’re paying on CPM so you’re paying for views here but the click through rates, the conversion on these Facebook campaigns are really, really good.

James: Fantastic! And Justin, your agency, this does remarketing campaigns for clients, so someone could get in touch with you and have this managed by your business?

Justin: Yeah absolutely. If you don’t want to deal with the entire message sequencing and creating all the different creative and worrying about all that, we handle all of it for you then send you a weekly report on your numbers.

James: Awesome! Sounds good! I guess we should give our listeners out there some way to get in touch or at least to find out more about you. What’s the best way for our listeners to go to?

Justin: We’ve got a blog; it’s at IMScalable.com/blog. There are some great articles there. Otherwise hook up with me on Facebook; my personal Facebook account is facebook.com/justinbrooke, my fan page where I share daily traffic tip is facebook.com/trafficstrategist. So that’s a couple more ways you can get more tips or hook up with me directly. You can also always just Google me. There’s plenty of things out there to find about me there.

James: Awesome! My audience are pretty much in to traffic so I’m sure that they’ll find your stuff really interesting Justin. Today’s been a blast! Thanks so much for coming on Traffic Jam. It’s been a real pleasure.

Justin: Thank you so much for having me. This is great!

This week’s news in traffic: The first news story this week is from Facebook who have introduced embeddable posts. The posts work the same way as embed to Twitter or YouTube and once your embed account is enabled you have the option to embed posts. That will produce a code you can cut and paste in to a blog entry or html file. For a post to be embeddable, it must be set to public to be publicly shareable. This enhancement will of course have an impact on how far Facebook content gets shared but it could have further reaching effects in to platforms such as Google who look at social signals and how content is being shared in their own content algorithm. So an interesting update to watch but given that only 28% of Facebook users set their post to public, let’s see how well this is adopted.

Staying with Facebook, they are seeking to snatch the long held dominance of TV advertising budget as they plan to sell TV Star commercials on their site for as much as $2.5 million per day. While the social network already allows advertisers to upload videos to their Facebook page and then broadcast them to a user’s news feed, the new service would let marketers buy their way directly in to a person’s feed with a 15 second pitch. At 15 seconds, the ads would also be the same length as Facebook’s Instagram videos. A feature that was added to the company’s instant sharing service last month. In response to the argument that this will decrease the kind of socialness of Facebook, Facebook have said that members will not see a commercial more than three times in a given day and once in every 20 posts. So keep your eyes peeled for these new ads, they’re expected out sometime this autumn.

Google this week announced a number of updates to YouTube that allow more video producers to use YouTube for live streaming. All channels in good standing with at least 100 subscribers will be able to use live stream from their account within the next few weeks. This is down from the previous requirement of 1000 subscribers so thus makes it accessible in the field for a lot more people.

In a couple of other announcements which we in fact got wind off well ahead of time and reported on Traffic Jam episode #11 with YouTube expert James Wedmore, YouTube have announced that they now allow external links from annotations to link to websites associated with your account; perhaps your blog or your company website. They’ve also announced that you can now use custom thumbnail to all videos in your account. For a real good run down of all this opportunities and how to go about it, go check out episode #11 of Traffic Jam with James Wedmore.

Thank you! It was another busy week in comments over at TrafficJamCast.com and at this point I would like to read some of them. First of all, AJ Sorenson who responded to the Andrew Warner episode – he said great interview, I am a long time Mixergy listener and it was great to hear Andrew from the other side of the table. We have Ralph Schmitz also leaving a comment to the Andrew Warner episode and he kept it very short and sweet but lovely comment, he said absolutely great. Also Edgar from mensdesign.com he popped on over and left a message to the Jeremy Schoemaker interview and he said Jeremy is the man, great interview, I found your blog thanks to shoemoney. I’d also like to take special note of those people that congratulated us for getting Traffic Jam to #3 in the iTunes rank. There was Ken McKenzie, James Schramko, Robin Logan, and Dave Crane. All popped by my Facebook page to leave a congratulatory note so thank you guys for your support. Thank you all for making Traffic Jam what it is, I would love to get more of those great comments and feedback and I’ll try to get through as many as I can on each episode.

Oh and just a little reminder of the quest that I made for you at the top of the show, and that’s to pop on over to iTunes and leave a review and rating. I really, really would appreciate that; it would help us push the show further up the charts in iTunes and get the show out to more people. So if you get a little moment this week, head on over there, leave a review and rating – it will only take a few seconds and I really, really would appreciate that.

The one minute traffic tip: In this week’s tip I just want to share something that we’ve been testing out this week and that is imaged based marketing using quote from the Traffic Jam episodes. If you are listening to this episode within August 2013 and you head on over to LikeJames.com, you’ll be redirected to my Facebook page where you’ll see quotes from Brent Hodgson, our guest last week, and Shoemoney, our guest from two weeks ago. We’re using quotes from the show in image format because people really like both quotes and images. Just look at Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram; see how these types of things are shared. So our method has been go and find a great quote from the episode, put the guest name against it with a little illustration of them and then post it to social media channels. We’ve already seen that people are picking these up and sharing them to their own audience and giving Traffic Jam wider exposure. So give this a try in your own marketing this week and then once you’ve gotten some results, head on over to TrafficJamCast.com, find episode#15, head to the bottom of the post and leave a comment with the results that you’ve gotten. I’d love to get your feedback and how it’s worked for you.

Okay, so that rounds out episode#15 of Traffic Jam. Just a reminder, I do also post tips and training over at my new website veravo.com so go and check that out and you can also take advantage of our website grader report there where we’ll put your website through a 30-point checklist and let you know how it is doing in terms of usability, traffic, social media, Google traffic, and a whole lot more. So go take advantage of that if you’ve not done so already.

Playing out this week’s show is a track picked by my guest today, Justin Brooke and it is a kind of rocky number; it’s by a band called Warrant and the track is called Cherry Pie.