Ad Optimization: Your Ads Aren’t Working and Here’s Why ft. Joe Fitzpatrick

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So much is spent on ads that it’s a no-brainer to invest in ad optimization. Embracing experimentation and learning from failures is essential for long-term success in performance marketing. Experiment Nation’s Tracy Laranjo spoke with Joe Fitzpatrick about reasons why your ads aren’t working and what you can do about it.

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AI-Generated Transcript

Joe Fitzpatrick 0:00
experimentation is, I think the the lifeblood of performance marketing. And the thing that I see that companies kind of,

you know, companies struggle with, is the fact that they find something that works. They do it, they do it to death. And then they when they’re doing it like, and they can only do that, and they’ve only spent their money doing that. And then whenever that stops working or stops, like hits a ceiling, they’re like, we’re next. And they don’t know. And then they’re really struggling to hit that next goal because they haven’t experimented right.

Tracy Laranjo 0:44
Hey, experiment nation. It’s Tracy, and I’m with a, he’s honestly a little bit of a blast from my past. And I’m really excited to record a conversation with him. His name is Joe Fitzpatrick, and he might also be known as the ad scientist in some circles. So thanks for joining us, Joe. Hey, folks, thanks for having me, Jesse. Of course, I’m so excited to have you on here. This, this kind of comes full circle, because you’re the first person to ever told me that sample size requirements are a thing in AV testing.

I remember you telling me this. And it was like, my whole world fell apart. Because I thought I was doing everything right. I was like, I’m killing it. I’m rocking this. And it just changed everything. So thank you for ruining my life.

Joe Fitzpatrick 1:37
That I get to be like, like a part of your journey to this what you are now. Yeah.

Tracy Laranjo 1:45
Well, you’ve also had quite a bit of a journey since we last work together. So you and I both worked together at a fun little startup called willful, and I was more on the conversion optimization side, you are more on the performance marketing or paid acquisition side? Both very complimentary. Plan twins. Yeah, you’ve kind of gone off on your own and really done a lot since then. So can you tell our listeners a bit about what you’ve been up to? And why you started ad scientist? Yeah.

Joe Fitzpatrick 2:20
So I mean, I’ve been in the digital marketing performance, marketing space for well over a decade now. And every time you know, I’ve joined a company, and I’ve gone through the process and got quicker at going through it. And I’ve on the side, I’ve been consulting, like freelancing here and there with different startups. And, and eventually, it just got to the point where I wanted something that was sort of more aware to meet more companies quicker, because I feel like getting under the hood seen what’s going on with different companies is, is the thing that I most enjoy. So rather than spending one, like my time with one company, starting my own agency to kind of have the ability to work with lots of different companies that maybe, you know, wouldn’t be able to have a dedicated performance media person or like a marketing strategist in house and been able to, just to see, well, all the different startups are in Toronto or in Canada, and that I’ve kind of talked with since I launched and, you know, in one three of our ad scientist going live and yeah, it’s, it’s been worth it just just to have a company that I can kind of set. It’s like, it’s bigger than me, I can invite people to come in and collaborate with myself on and, yeah, it’s kind of exciting stuff.

Tracy Laranjo 3:47
Yeah, absolutely. I think we both went self employed kind of around the same time. And it was so exciting, kind of hitting this milestone at the same time as you and one thing that I noticed about you as a performance marketer that I have not necessarily seen in other performance marketers is that you see a role for experimentation and testing, but in a rigorous, Conaway, hence, why you you know, you informed me of sample size requirements, I find that a lot of performance marketers just fly by the seat of their pants and things like statistics just kind of take a backseat. And I know that data is a really big part of what you do in performance marketing. Yeah.

Joe Fitzpatrick 4:30
Yeah. It’s like, the way I look at it, like, data has so much of a story to tell. And, and for my first job in marketing, I like been working with like the C suite. And there was always questions, questions, questions, and nobody seemed to have an answer. And then I kind of quickly realized, hey, you have a wealth of data within this company. And it’s not structured in a way that you can easily find answers but you know, if we Do it drill in there, there is the answers to those questions that every company has, it’s there or it’s in there. It’s an it’s somewhere in the corners of the internet that you can get that, like marketplace information or audience insight. And so that’s really what led me to get kind of be very focused on data. And, you know, I think that if you if you can use data to inform your decision making, you know, even if the, you know, the data is sparse, even that, that process of drilling into data and trying to find the answer clarifies the way you think about the questions you have, and you know, rather than it being a very simple broad question, you might try to refine what you’re trying to ask yourself and what the business needs to understand and, and that that journey that you go on, whenever you’re interrogating data, and trying to find out is is kind of such a rewarding journey for me. So yeah, I

Tracy Laranjo 5:59
love it. Yeah, I also, like I can relate to that, for sure. Sometimes you come across an issue on, you know, why does conversion performance suck, and then you do a bit more digging, you actually do some user research and you start to get answers, you can piece things together. So I’m sure it’s very rewarding, kind of in that type of way. Speaking of rewarding, I’m gonna, like take the flip side of that and say, I’m sure you come across a lot of reasons why ads don’t perform. Yes. What do you think, are the biggest reasons why that happens.

Joe Fitzpatrick 6:35
So there’s a lot of different reasons that like every company I’ve worked with, there’s probably been, you know, a unique blend of very similar things, lack of insight into the audience, is probably the biggest one, because that informs so many other decisions. And, you know, whenever I join a company, usually I’ll talk to, you know, the founder, the marketing team, whoever’s there that’s like, you know, dealing day in there with the customers, and then I’ll have assumptions about who their customer is. And, but then I will kind of take that and be like, okay, they this is the running theory of who the customer is. No, let’s try to prove that’s the case. Right? And I won’t lie, I’m not gonna say it’s like a, like, you know, 100% of the time, it’s wrong. But it’s not 100%. Right. So. So that’s one of the biggest things that like, stands in the way of companies having successful performance marketing is that there was assumptions made, because maybe that’s what the product or the service was initially intended for, but who actually adopts the product or service isn’t necessarily the people you intended for, there can be a lot of happy mistakes along the way, right. And so one of the first things, you know, that, like that, so understanding the audience, and then from there, you know, the creative is so important, and but the creative should come from a deep understanding of the audience, and what are their pain points? What do they value, and so if they, if they’re, if you don’t understand the audience, and you end up with like, this, like, kind of, like, bland messaging, on the other side, is people think that, you know, you ask companies, like who you’re trying to reach with your, with your advertising. And the question is, oh, everybody, everybody’s our audience, like, like, you’d be crazy not to buy our product or service, like, you know, like, the minute you’re born, you should have our product. And that’s not the case, right? So, really, probably the, I’d say, like, there’s, there’s, there’s a laundry list of like, you know, they’re like technical implementation, tracking, all that kind of stuff that goes into performance marketing, and, you know, you know, this with CRO as well, there’s, there’s a million little cuts that you can have, like in how you track and view your data, they could, like, set you up for failure and the future, right. But I think that the maybe the two biggest offenders are that like that, too wide scope, and lack of understanding and and also not challenging your your thought process and not trying to evolve your thought process and who your audience is over time, which is, I think, a big part of experimentation and trying to like narrow in and, and find new audiences and stuff out there. But yeah, a hybrid of those. And once you have both of those, like too narrow or too wide, and the lack of understanding their copy sucks, the targeting sucks. Yeah, you know, like, nothing good can come out of this. You know, and maybe you might get lucky and you have like a really good ad one time but if you don’t understand who your audience are or wherever they are, then you end up with a sort of like, well, it was really good ad, but we don’t know why. Yeah. Because you can’t you can draw a line. And it’s like, oh, well, it worked because of this reason, right? So that’s,

Tracy Laranjo 10:14
that’s how do you figure out who the audience is? How do you learn about them get that insight on them.

Joe Fitzpatrick 10:22
So the first place I go to is, like, I talked to, like, the big stakeholders, whenever I go into a company, like the founder that like the product team, and the people, I usually get the biggest insight from, as customer support, yes, the same, right? Those are the people that like dealing with them day in and day out. So a lot of like chatting to them, getting their buy in to kind of work with me to like, you know, you know, because you can, you know, if you’re, if it’s all one big ecosystem, so if you can work together with those, those departments, like everything kind of clicks better, but listen to a lot of their calls, read reviews, if your company has reviews, like doing all that kind of research on the audience. And then after that, it’s like looking at the company’s data, as I mentioned before, so you have, like most companies like the law, like startups, maybe they’re limited by the, like, the internal data that they have. But there’s ways to supplement that with that external data, competitors, all that kind of research there. But the most valuable is often the internal data. And, you know, internal data could be the transcripts of like Zendesk or something that they’re doing a kind of analysis on, like, what are the terms? What is the terminology my audience use? What are the big pain points? What are they disappointed by in our product, or feature or whatever, and drilling into that, and understanding how to like, you know, connect your CMS data, and their sales data and all of that, and bring it into one place, and look at it, and then again, interrogate it. But also, like, again, you’re starting with the the, you know, the, the startup site, you’re starting with the the idea that, you know, it was imbued with to you from the owners and the people within the company, but you’re always trying to, like, challenge that, like, that’s, that’s your like, well, is this correct? Is this what the data is telling me? And if so great, if not, why, and yeah, just starting that sort of process. And, you know, that’s usually like, my audit process is pretty thorough, and it usually comes out with like, quite a, like a small novella of like, information about that, the customer and about the company, that’s usually like, beneficial to the companies themselves, but like, it sets up, it sets up your performance marketing to be much more effective from the from the get go. Because you can you can start off with, okay, this is what I know. And this is what I think I know. And then let’s structure our performance marketing to try to help us fall like solve this, right. Yeah. So that’s, that’s, that’s my kind of take.

Tracy Laranjo 13:17
I love that you have voice of customer research in your process, like as part of your audit, I think a lot of people skip that step. Because it’s easier to just, you know, ask the founder, who’s your customer, they tell you who they want to be their customer, or like what you said, the person who has historically been their customer, but this may be outdated information. And you just, you know, you go into Google Analytics, do a little, you know, oh, what’s where is the drop off happening? And that’s kind of about it. That’s at least what I’ve seen with other performance marketers. I think also, this is why we worked so well together. That willful because I remember, we were both always hounding court meet our customers. Also shout out to Courtney. She’s listening. We would always be like asking her these questions about the customer. And then I do remember a few points in which we were sharing insights on the customer together because conversion and performance marketing goes so hand in hand with finding out language that customers use, because you would want to use that for keywords. I would want to use that for landing page copy all these different considerations that I think maybe gets missed in performance marketing school,

Joe Fitzpatrick 14:35
for sure. I think that’s like, I think whatever you’ve got performance marketing and CRO like working so closely together and aligned. It’s really powerful because CRO mix forms marketing work better. And performance marketing can contribute stuff that like help CRO are like you know, kind of scale and move faster and like insights and Understanding of audience targeting and stuff like, it’s all, it’s all it’s again, it’s all marketing, all of the income company is is one the ecosystem, right? They’re not disconnected, they’re not siloed. So, you know, but it’s where those handshakes happen, like the customer passes from performance marketing to CRO to, you know, email and converter, whatever it is, you know, it’s making sure those handshakes are like, really solid. And you know, what that information is being passed through is and why it’s being passed through. So, yeah, but yeah, what like, again, like we’re working with you and welfare like that was such like, a great resource to have that so few companies really do have, is that like, person who’s owning, like, the landing pages and the and the website and asking, like, why is why is this like this? Like, is there a better way to do things and having that sort of, like champion the audience and the customer, and like, really trying to improve their their journey and the value that they get, and that’s, you know, that’s a, that’s a big plus, for any performance marketer to have

Tracy Laranjo 16:09
that totally, I’m sure, it’s also at least what I found is, it’s so easy to work with founders who are open to accepting that their ideal customer is not actually who their current customer is, and they want to double down on on who’s already, you know, making the most of what, what, you know what the product is. And I think Aaron and Kevin, the founders of waffle, were really, they were always open to new insight that we’re not kind of stuck in their ways. And oh, this is our one customer, they always wanted to know, how can we reach more people? And who are these people? Yeah, yeah, it helps.

Joe Fitzpatrick 16:48
I mean, sharing those kinds of insights, where like, there was a segment that will be a new segment, we’ll be targeting or something. I always always really like, like, like, gladly accepted. You know, there are there are founders who like, you know, in the first year, their business like, oh, all our, like, customers are early adopters. I guess our customer is early adopters. And it’s like, no. Yeah. But ya know, that’s like, having a company that’s willing to like, change, its thinking about who its customers are automix a big plus, because there’s a difference between who your customer you want your customer to be and who your customer is. And yeah, I think that’s just one of those realities that every company has, has to meet at some point and get over. Yeah,

Tracy Laranjo 17:39
totally. Well, kind of on the flip side of that, what do you think people get wrong about performance marketing?

Joe Fitzpatrick 17:48
I think. So. There’s a couple of like, I think that when people hear performance marketing, they think numbers, right, they think it’s like an Excel spreadsheet. You know, I’ll give you x budget. This is the CPC, this is the like, this is the conversion rate. Tada, here is the output of that. Right? And that is like, it’s not like we’re not It’s not accounting, right, there is there is a, there’s that there is the I think performance marketing, like is very much about like, you know, results, right. And I think the performance marketing has also had the change, because of a lot of the updates were like, you know, how much data you can you can get on a customer and what sort of targeting you can do, it’s not 2016 And it has a it has changed, and I think for the better, because I think first of all, a lot of the targeting you could do in 2016 was kind of creepy. It was like, Yeah, I was like, yeah, that’s, that’s kind of creepy level of targeting you can do and people, but it’s, I think that, like the that, but the idea that like, you know, I can I can just put in this formula. And you know, if I want 10x, my customer base, I just 10x my budget. And that’s how it works. There’s, there’s so much more that goes into it, there is the creative element that I really think that, you know, has had to come out more as people get more blank to advertising, like the performance marketing ads or direct response advertising that was so kind of like prevalent in performance marketing, like you know, even even four years ago, and has had the change because you have to stand out. So there has to be a creative element there. And it does play a bigger part and there is more like there’s a lot of understanding there like the channels that you’re using with performance marketing as well. It’s not like that and this is one of the biggest things cuz I think educating clients on is like, just because two platforms are like paid social doesn’t mean they work the same or doesn’t mean that they should have the same, you know, oh, if we spend 5000 on this, or 50,000 on this, it’ll have the exact same impact when we spend it here. That’s not how it works. Right? And that’s what that’s probably a big misconception. Yeah, so I think that the inherent knowledge of the platforms is a big part of it not, there’s not one site, nice size fits all for performance, marketing. And then, one of the things that I guess the biggest thing that always kind of troubled me about performance marketing, I worked in a performance marketing agency when I was younger, and I would be on calls with brand brand agencies. And they’re very much the solid processes that performance marketing and brand are to like oil and water, like, the two don’t mix that like, and the things that you would do for brand, don’t have an impact on performance. That’s not the case. What you know, the things you can do that are common sense that you would do to boost your brand trust and brand perception within a market has an impact on your performance marketing, like, you know, if you are if you aren’t collecting customer reviews, and you know, eventually, once you’re you know, you’re showing your customer reviews on your Google ads, that is a huge benefit to your Google search, being able to share, you know, customer testimonials and reviews, huge benefit, whenever you even if you are you’re not sure where to spend your your star air Google review score on your ads, people usually have the very similar search pattern where they’ll see an ad, and they’ll go is this is this company valid? I’ll just type in the company name. Oh, there’s, there’s maybe like 200 reviews here. Amazing. I will trust this like I will, and maybe they don’t convert right then. But having that sort of third party check. And then next time they see your ad, they’ll convert it that’s like a three, three step process. But for some reason, whenever you’re in performance marketing, the expectation is like no, you know, you just deal with the ads, the ad creative, the data, the numbers, and but don’t suggest like, you know, let’s let’s do something that booster, our brand trust and those sort of, or have a good creative strategy that links in with maybe brand and other things like performance marketing is one one arm off your off your marketing and should really link in with everything else. I think that’s that’s a big thing that companies kind of miss whenever they talk about performance marketing. Yeah,

Tracy Laranjo 22:55
I think that’s a really good call out I see the exact same, almost kind of like adversarial relationship between brand and performance marketing or conversion optimization, especially. And I don’t know if if you also deal with this too, but especially when it comes to copywriting. Sometimes brand wants to use language that, you know, is creative and make sense for members of the team internally. But to the customer. It’s like, I don’t know what that means. Don’t tell me what this is. I have no clue what I’m even looking at right now. I see that a lot in CRO I don’t know, if you see the exact same thing, performances.

Joe Fitzpatrick 23:38
So like, whenever I’m doing audits of like ad accounts, or or you know, even like coming in, like, like to a new team. And whenever you like, whenever you’re hearing their copy for the first time you’re reading the website for the first time with new eyes. And I’ll actually do this whenever somebody joins any team of mine or as new a new employer be like, can you read this and tell me this? Is this like internals? Is this like jargon that we’ve made up and and talked about in 50 different meetings to give this the make this page or this like product? But makes no like sense for the Layperson.

Tracy Laranjo 24:20
And that’s why reviews and the customer support tickets are so important because you might be selling something by a certain name, and then people have no clue what that even means. But you have the answer. Yeah. Yeah,

Joe Fitzpatrick 24:32
like they’ll they’ll describe it. Maybe not in in such like, like, like there’s no pros going on there. But they’ll describe it as they see it or how do they internalize what your product is and it benefits you to like, Okay, well, if I want to reach more of this customer who I know has used our product or service, I should use that that verbiage to hit home what we do like there is a there is a point where the two shouldn’t meet and I think mix and mingle. And like, when you’re writing ads, good ads, like sometimes being too clever, is sort of a hindrance to yourself. Like, you have to ask yourself, like, you write something really, like snappy and sharp. And you’re like, Yeah, but yeah, like, is that true to my customer? Now? Like, yeah, you kind of have to, like, swallow that a little bit. And you’ll be like, so proud of that coffee, but it’s just not what the company needs right now. So, yeah,

Tracy Laranjo 25:29
ego really does not serve us well in in our lives, or do we really have to develop some thick skin and just be like, No, I was wrong, it’s fine. And just kind of move past it. Like, speaking of, you know, we’ve been talking about assumptions we’ve been talking about. Just, you know, performance marketing, in general is a very experimental activity, you have to try a lot of different things and see what sticks. Yeah. Where do you find experimentation plays a role in your performance marketing practice.

Joe Fitzpatrick 26:06
Experimentation is, I think, the lifeblood of performance marketing. The thing that I see that companies kind of, you know, companies struggle with, is the fact that they find something that works, they do it, they do it to death. And then when they’re doing it, like, and they can only do that, and they’ve only spent their money doing that. And then whenever that stops working, or stops, like hits a ceiling, they’re like, we’re next. And they don’t know. And then they’re really struggling to hit that next goal, because they haven’t experimented. Right.

Rommil Santiago 26:46
This is Rommil Santiago from experiment nation, every week, we share interviews with and conference sessions by our favorite conversion rate optimizers from around the world. So if you liked this video, smash that like button, and consider subscribing, it helps us a bunch. Now back to the episode. And,

Joe Fitzpatrick 27:00
you know, even if that was like, even if it wasn’t about like, finding new sources of revenue, or or whatever it is, and experimentation should be, you know, the, the, the way you get better with your core audience as well, like what I was saying, with, like, finding who your customer actually is, that’s experimentation. Day one, right? That’s a, you know, once I, once I find out who my customer is, what language they use, I want to I want to like, check myself there, right? You know, I don’t want to just like, oh, I went away, and I find all these great insights. Wow, good. I want to actually validate that again, something, right. So experimentation, to me is like I’ve, you know, found these insights. And I’ve shared these insights. But now I want to really, like make sure these insights are true for the entire, like, I want to see what the limitations of these insights are. Maybe it’s a maybe it’s true for everybody, I doubt it, it but like, there are probably limitations to how true something is for such a big population or segment of an audience. So So from day one, the way I would structure my performance marketing is in a way to like to gain insights, maybe not, you know, you you have these, like optimizations you need to be making and, you know, you need to be having, like best ad copy, and you, you know, you run those like, like multi Armed Bandit tasks and stuff out there. And that’s given you like, you know, which horse is getting over the finish line first, right? But you, if you, if you have a hypothesis, and an experiment you want to run, if you think about like, when a white copy across the finish line, and then you’re running like, you know, 100 campaigns, and is like, Is that always true? Or like, you know, you end up getting this like, if you structure your campaigns, and accounts and everything in aware that whenever you have run many, many different small tactical tests, in six months, maybe six, maybe Levita, if it’s a big enough account, like in a month, three months, six months, whatever is a time period when you step back, and you’ve got all this macro data or like, like macro data that is like so rich, because you’ve thought about what you want to answer what’s important to the business from the get go and tie that to like, Okay, well, what’s the business objective? Like? Does it help the business to understand the audience better? Does it help the business to understand what you know positioning or features solid product better? does that how does that like sharing that information with the product team help them like develop new products? But you can if you’ve thought about your performance marketing from day one through that experimental lens, and thought that in time I’ll have a rich set of data to mind for insight. You’re going to be you’re good company’s got to be richer. And your like your what you’re able to do for the company is going to be so much more valuable, right. And the way I kind of look at it is like, if you, if you are doing that sort of like performance marketing, without experimentation, there’s only two results, there’s win and lose where you had worked or didn’t work, right. Or if you do performance marketing with the lens of experimentation, there’s a third option, you, you lost, but you got an insight. Because you know why?

Tracy Laranjo 30:34
Now we’re getting into tests to learn test to win, I love it. Like,

Joe Fitzpatrick 30:39
I mean, in my eyes, if if I can have, if you like, like, like, three card monte thing, and it’s like, oh, you have two chances to win versus one chance to win, I’m gonna take the two chances to win every time in terms of what I pick, but so if you can turn your losses into wins, that is such a like, benefit to any business. So like, you know, whenever managing a team, I’m like, Okay, what you’ve tried to do didn’t work. Okay, why didn’t it work? And if I can’t get the answer of, Oh, it didn’t work because of this, then there was no other value added to the company. But if they can, they’re like, Oh, it didn’t work for this, this, this. And this reason, I’m like, quit, we won’t do that again, next time. Even smarter tasks, and we’ll do something else. And maybe, maybe we’ve like, like, added one percentage chance we’re gonna win next time. And but you know, do that again, and again, and again, it compounds success. So maybe at the start, it seems slow. It’s like, oh, like, you know, we’re losing more often than we’re winning, it’s like, but we’re losing, and we’re getting insights. So whenever, whenever the stakes are much bigger, because it sticks always grow over time, right. And so when the stakes are really big, especially with startups, like, you know, they’re like, Oh, we got like one sale a day, like her, I like that, or whatever. It’s like, oh, again, 50 sales a day. And then you’ve also paired that with like, oh, and we it’s not a flip of a coin, it’s a 6040 chance of winning, then like that’s where like, you start to get that like big growth. That’s where that comes in. And that’s a, maybe that’s the other thing that like, I didn’t mention about like, what people don’t get it by performance marketing, it’s a journey. It’s a process, you buy into it, you have a strategy, and then you steer the course, unless something comes like blindsided. The word obviously, then was like abandon ship. But if you’ve got if you’ve got a path to walk, and getting buy in early for many founder or CMO, and just stay in that course, and knowing that that process and time will give you that that growth you’re trying to unlock, but it is you have to constantly be casting, always looking at the boundaries and fringes of what works. And getting those small failures so that you can get a bigger win down the line.

Tracy Laranjo 33:03
Totally. I am like, I’m such a strong believer in like, you will win. Eventually, when you embrace the quote unquote, losing? Yes. Like, yeah, those are, those are not optional. Those are imperative to have a successful, I’m thinking from the perspective of a conversion optimization program, which is, again, it’s so similar to performance marketing in that regard, that it’s not, it’s not an option not to fail, like you have to it’s part of the process. And I think, I don’t know if you noticed this as well. But for me, the hardest thing is keeping trust with your client or your you know, your boss, when, you know, they see the flat results, they see the the dips, yeah, do you have tips for anyone who is kind of facing that challenge as well to make sure the trust is still there, and that the patience and the trust in the process is still there?

Joe Fitzpatrick 33:59
That is so like, that is a minefield, and there is no silver bullet for that. Like, really, I have found that the best thing, like as I will throw my hands up and say that didn’t work. But at least we know, it doesn’t work. And it didn’t work for these reasons. And some people will take that as Oh, okay. Like, you know, march on and but some people will be like, Oh, well, maybe maybe and another pair hands this, this, this would be like, and like, I think that’s a real insecurity. And people have that they can’t, like people only want to see the good and like but that’s just not life, right? You if you can, but I find that like if you are very transparent transparency is a big way to to win a client over. So like whenever I like you know Go to a client, I’d be like, Okay, this is the audit, this is what I found. And this, and now because of this, this is what we will do. And it makes sense. It’s logical. And then over every step along the way, it’s like, oh, we’re at this step, this is what’s happening. And, like, if you bring them along for the journey, and don’t shut them out, and include them in your thought process and say, like, hey, this didn’t work because of this. But if we do X, Y, and Zed know, we’ll get a win. And whenever they see X, Y, and Zed happened, and you got to win, then it goes up. I think he might have something here, you know, like, but like, if you if you were just to go like, Oh, if we didn’t, we didn’t, we didn’t win here. But I am going to do something, and then we’re going to win, and then

Tracy Laranjo 35:43
see here.

Joe Fitzpatrick 35:47
Don’t Don’t think about it. It’s like no, like winning or losing. It’s just part of life. Right? And I think it’s, you know, it’s whatever you find a founder, who is willing to like, kind of embrace the process and understand, like, kind of respect that like the craft and the trade, and just go along for the ride. And that’s super valuable partnership to have, right? Because, yeah, like, you can go to any, any buddy and just be like, do this and only give me wins. And if he wins, I’ll get the next guy who only wins and then we’ll be in this treadmill, or like off, like just hiring and firing? Because, like, yeah, it’s it’s kind of a bad place to be and a very wasteful place to be because you also lose all those insights that maybe the person had was getting so yeah, I don’t know, is there a solution? No, it, I guess, transparency and long term planning. That’s the only things I can think of. So

Tracy Laranjo 36:49
I think those I think those are really, really, really good call outs, and they’re things that you can just do for free anytime today. Yeah. What else? Would you suggest that someone who’s in performance marketing can do today to really level up their practice? Oh,

Joe Fitzpatrick 37:06
okay. So, like, I mean, like, I could say, like, you know, blogs and exams, all that kind of stuff. And there is a place for that. But really, I think, like, do is obviously a big one, the more you do, the better you get at anything. And, but also do with purpose, like, don’t just like, there’s probably, you know, maybe there is a, like a junior performance marketer out there listening to this. And they are just going in optimizing their client account, and then leaving, and then but like, under just looking at, like, you know, the data sets that are in front of them, it’s like, well, maybe just like, you know, if you’re in an agency, or you’re in, in house, in a company, there’s like, maybe think of like, the bigger impact of performance marketing and all the things that touch on performance marketing, and maybe just start trying to think of like the party players in the bigger picture. And, and start thinking, like, asking those questions, asking those bigger questions and asking yourself, how, how, how can how can performance marketing deliver more than just the transactional? Like, focus of performance marketing? How can it actually make the company better in some more substantive way? And, you know, I don’t like that’s a very, like, there’s not a book or anything I can tell you, that’s this. I really like it’s a state of mind, I guess, or like

Tracy Laranjo 38:37
you broke down some real poetry. In this episode. I was not expecting that. I’m gonna call it Joe a tree. Yeah, no, this was, this is a really great conversation. And I like, personally, you, you, you didn’t work with me when I was doing performance marketing, but I was so bad at it. And so like, because I have that mindset of, oh, it’s just dollars in dollars out, you get the spreadsheet. That’s it. So you really kind of showed me and hopefully our listeners too, that there’s so much more to performance marketing or or running ads that’s very similar to experimentation, and just the mindset around understanding your users. So thank you so much for breaking all that down. I saved the hardest questions for last. What do you have going on that you want to share with our listeners? What should they know about Joe?

Joe Fitzpatrick 39:36
Well, what should they know about Joe? I mean, at the launch of ad scientist is really the newest thing with me. I think that is that my my kind of baby for at the moment and just thinking that I really don’t know how much more I’m willing to take on the launch in a company at the moment, but I mean, I’m really enjoying work in a lot of fantastic companies and finders and you know, people are just different stages of the journey. So, yeah, I mean, that’s all it was exciting. And I think just the more that I’m able to meet and, you know, even if it’s even as good conversations, I mean, that’s probably the biggest thing that I’ve enjoyed since since launching my own thing is like meeting the other founders and just having chats about what what are the roadblocks that are hitting them? So? Yeah, I mean, that’s kind of the exciting road in front of me right now.

Tracy Laranjo 40:33
Nice. Where can our listeners reach you? So you

Joe Fitzpatrick 40:37
can reach me either on LinkedIn or on ad scientists.ca?

Tracy Laranjo 40:44
I love your website. You’ve got your dog Velma in there. Love her.

Joe Fitzpatrick 40:48
Of course, she is like there was no way there was going to be a website without her. Bs in there somewhere. Yeah.

Tracy Laranjo 40:55
Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Joe. It’s been really nice catching up with you and we’ll catch you around. Yeah.

Joe Fitzpatrick 41:01
Thanks for having me. Have a good rest of your day.

Rommil Santiago 41:03
This is Rommil Santiago from experiment nation. Every week we share interviews with and conference sessions by our favorite conversion rate optimizers from around the world. So if you liked this video, smash that like button and consider subscribing. It helps us a bunch. Now back to the episode.

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