We met up with David Szetela from FMB Media, and asked him a few questions about the future of paid advertising. Watch the full interview below.

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 Anthony: “What do you think has been the core reason for FMB Media’s continued success?”

David: “Two things: one is that we have a compensation model where we get paid more only if we produce more, so we get paid based on profit or value of leads. And secondly, we’re kind of experts in display

Advertising. Many advertisers shy away from display because it’s too difficult or too foreign, and we know how to make money with display advertising.”

Anthony: “Could you share some of those tips with us?“

David: “The key to making money in display advertising is targeting correctly. In other words, using one of many different targeting methods that Google AdWords offers or Facebook offers and tightening the audience size to limit it to the right target audience, and making sure that you’re not advertising to people that aren’t in your customer list.”

Anthony: “What’s the most common piece of advice you find yourself giving other PPC advertisers?“

David: “Use the Display Network – it’s a goldmine. I have clients that are making up to half of all their conversions from display advertising on Google AdWords, especially for B2B.”

Anthony: “What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made this year?“

David: “The biggest mistake I’ve made this year was overspending on a client’s account. Making sure that you don’t exceed the budget or spend too little is kind of a chore – and it can be very tricky, especially if you have a client that says their budget is very rigid and they don’t care if they can get extra business – they don’t want to spend more than this.

So that was my biggest mistake this year. You just have to keep an eye on daily spend every single day and make adjustments.”

Anthony: “What do you think the role of AI and virtual assistants and machine learning have on the Adwords industry moving forward?”

David: “It’s leading to greater automation and we already see it in AdWords which have some excellent automated bid management mechanisms where you can, for example, tell AdWords to get me as many conversions as as you, can but do not exceed this cost per conversion. And it works fine, it works great.”

Anthony: “How important is social advertising in your digital marketing mix?”

David: “Social advertising has skyrocketed over the past year. And Facebook is the biggest component of that. Facebook advertising is fantastic it’s even better than Google AdWords display advertising. The CPC’s are low on Facebook. It’s great for direct response either B2C or B2B. There are many different ad formats like shopping ad formats, and we’re getting a lot of traffic from it.

I’ve got a client that’s getting half of their conversions from Facebook compared to AdWords.”

Anthony: “How do you split your spend between display and social?”

David: “Well it’s really just like determining the budget for Adwords. You start out with kind of a test budget and I always tell my clients to basically spend what you can afford to lose for the first month or two and once you’ve got all the data, you can determine exactly how much response you are going to get from an increase spend – and then you can adjust the budget accordingly.”

Anthony: “What should people be thinking about now if they want to double their growth in 2018?“

David: “I would say two things: One of them is do more display advertising, both on Adwords and Facebook. The other is to take advantage of automation.

I’ll give you two examples: One is the automated bidding that I just mentioned and there are several different bidding types. For example, a B2C advertiser can tell Google, “get me as many conversions as possible but maintain this return on ad spend”. So it takes into consideration the value of each transaction and Google tries to maximize the actual value per sale which is kind of magical.

The other thing is that Google has recently changed their ad rotation settings. So you’re kind of forced to use an optimization methodology for rotating ads, and I do say that I trust it. I say that the algorithms have become very sophisticated, taking into consideration device, time of day, day of week, geographic location; all of these signals that help Google truly pick the right ads to continue running.”

Anthony: “What are your thoughts on the new AdWords interface?“

David: “I love it – I think it’s fantastic. It still has a lot of shortcomings in that Google hasn’t gotten around to moving all the features and functionality from the old interface, but there are several things you can do in the new interface that you can’t do in the old one. And I think that we’re going to see more and more of it.  

So I’m going to be telling people that they better get used to it, because next year sometime, probably close to the end of the year, it’ll be the default setting and you won’t be able to switch back to the old interface.”

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Tags: display network, paid advertising, PPC