Dive into a no-holds-barred back and forth with digital marketing rockstars Rohan Sheth and Matt Farmer of GrowRev  who’ve built their  top 1% agency by investing and managing  over $40M in advertising spend across all channels for monster bands like Mastermind.com, ClickFunnels, and Knowledge Source.  We’ll talk about the company-killing dangers of running non-compliant Facebook ads that will instantly put you into the poor house.  Then we’ll take a closer look at a  killer “free + shipping” book offer that not only crushed on response but helped build the client’s email list at rock bottom prices by doing one simple counter-intuitive pivot ..and more, including:

BIO:

While Rohan Sheth was still  in high school he  pulled in over $100,000 from his friends selling pocket bikes. He then transitioned into marketing, selling the 'unsellable'. Today he’s the CEO of GrowRev which manages more than $5M Per year in digital advertising that  consistently delivers highly mastered results to high-end celebrities and organizations around the world.

 With over 10 years experience managing digital advertising for some of the world’s largest brands, Matt Farmer has extensive experience on all major advertising platforms including: AdWords, Snapchat, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, OutBrain and Taboola, as well as almost all other large web and mobile networks.

TRANSCRIPT: 

All right.  Welcome to another episode of the Rich Ad, Poor Ad podcast. How you doing Dylan? 

Hey, doing good ready to crank this one out. It's gonna be a juicy one man.  

Today we got on the show the partners and founders of GrowRev agency.  These guys manage $40 million a year in ad budget across all channels. You name it. These guys are at the top of the game and I'm so excited to have him on the show. 

It's actually pretty hilarious. Dylan, wouldn't you say like the actual Rich Ad, Poor Ad combo that they sent over?

 

Yeah, yeah, that's badass, the definition of something that will get you shut down. So I'm pretty excited to dive in.  

It’ll  send you to the poor house super, super quick, that's for sure. But these guys may manage ads for some pretty big influencers online spending  upwards of $25K a day and with some household names I'll let them name drop.  But without further ado, let's welcome Rohan and Matt Farmer to the show.

 

Thanks for having us Zach and Dylan.

We're excited for this one. Yes, yeah.

 

Thanks. Thanks for popping on.  I'm so excited. I would love to start with Rohan telling everybody a little bit about how awesome GrowRev is as an agency.  And then would love to dive in a little bit about your guys'  background  pre agency.

 

Yeah, absolutely. Matt and I have run GrowRev for coming up on six years together now. Matt’s been in the industry, coming up on 11 years.  I've been in the industry nine years. 

And the way,  Matt and I kind of came together was I was heavy, direct response kind of in the affiliate-esque world and selling random shit online through paid advertising. I love media buying. 

But I went into the agency world. Me and Matt have known each other since before the 2007 -- 2008 economic collapse.  And he saw me transition into the media buying world and he's like, “What the hell are you doing here?” And kind of one thing led to another being good friends prior to this --  he told me what he was running. And I'm not going to ruin that for this podcast, I'm going to let Matt talk about his background and the stuff that he's done. 

I was just like, “Alright man, I've built this agency to a certain level, I'm going to just hand you 50% of this bloody company. And we're going to take this and scale this thing to the roof” because he knew he would perform, and he knew I could sell. 

So that's kind of how our initial partnership came into play. Fast forward to today. We've got a team based out of Vancouver, Canada. We've got a couple guys that work with us in the United States.  Then we're very actively building a team out in Australia since 40% of our clients are in Australia.  We managed three of the top- spending info accounts in Australia right now. So that's the overall GrowRev and then Matt, I’ll tee this one off to us so that you can kind of come in and introduce  the media buying side.

 

Yeah, no problem at all. So I've been doing this for about 11 - 12 years right now. Before I partnered up with Rohan, I worked with a company called Digital Brand Services. We had some absolutely massive clients.  We worked with people like the Olympics, Sky Sports, ATP Tennis, ICC Cricket --pretty much everybody in the sporting world we worked with and spent a pretty significant amount of money. 

I basically  partnered up with Rohan because I was really tired of “share of voice” advertising. You know, I'm direct-response at heart.  And I love seeing a good old ROI and optimizing around that, versus like hit 100% of boxing fans in the US. That just gave me a lot more purpose. 

So I partnered up with Rohan, that’s really kind of how it went down. We specialize in phone events, but we also do a lot of stuff around e commerce etc. Because I've been in the industry so long and have rode the wave. So, started with Google ads, went to Facebook back when I thought Facebook would never be a good platform and that proved me wrong. And now because of Facebook, we jump into stuff as early as we can. So the latest network we've been jumping on is TikTok. And it's been pretty amazing so far.

That's awesome, man. That's super cool. Now you guys have some pretty monster trophy clients, I would love to have you guys name drop some of the people you guys have been able to help out in the last year or so.

 

In the last year or so a couple of clients, we've run traffic for Mastermind.com. So that's obviously Dean Graziosi and Tony Robbins combination there. And then just in the recent months, we picked up a tiny little company called ClickFunnels, just joking, where we're helping them and their internal teams scale some of their traffic. So those are two household names I think most people recognize and then we've done tons. If you're in Australia, one of the companies that we work with is Knowledge Source, and they're a monstrous client for that part of the world.

 

For that part of the world over there.  I love it.  Thanks  Rohan, I'm like, you know one of our core values at FunnelDash is not to do business with Canadians.

 

(Laughter) 

...but today we decided to have you guys on the show…

(Laughter) 

Okay which one should we start with --  The Rich Ad or the Poor Ad? What do you think?  Let's give it over to Matt.  What do you think Matt?

 

I think the Poor Ad.  Just because the Poor Ad’s not gonna take much to go over.  It really quickly becomes a Poor Ad and can sacrifice Facebook accounts, business managers.  This thing is a gem.

So let's just talk about how you can get in the poorhouse with an ad like this. Because an ad like this... if you're spending a lot, getting your business manager shut off and getting your ad account deleted is one thing.  But Rohan and Matt have used the word “deplatformed” -- which is a very rare term, but it sounds so scary. What does that even mean? What does the word deplatformed mean?

 

Basically when you get deplatformed and they do it for certain people and influencers. I'm not going to drop too many names of people. We know some insiders -- especially in the affiliate world -- people who run an affiliate course and maybe have a nickname like Racks. People like that, where if you've mentioned his name in an ad, it's banned and you can lose your business manager.  

But in general deplatforming isn't just about losing your manager.  Used to be, back in the good old days, you just lose your ad account.  Then you create a new one.  Get a new credit card.  Life would be good. It's not so simple anymore. Facebook's really smart with this, so they pretty much like fingerprint your device. They'll delete your ad account.  They'll ban your business manager. You could lose personal access and  that's when it really starts to get nasty. And then if you keep breaking the rules, literally your entire name will be pretty much deplatformed from the platform.  

So if there's any ads, where they try to mention you, for example, they pretty much automatically get deleted out or banned out from the AI. So they can do an absolutely amazing job at banning you from the platform. 

And their platform really is like, you know, half the internet right? So like, yeah, I mean, I don't know if it ever bleeds into Instagram too but like you could it could be pretty, pretty devastating for somebody.

 

 

And even delete your Facebook page. So it doesn't it doesn't even matter the size of influencer either. We worked with one who had millions of followers and they were literally going to delete his Facebook page. And they'll take your groups too, your Facebook, anything that they can take from you, they pretty much will. 

 

Was this one active or just did get disapproved immediately?

 

For this ad that I posted?  This actually isn’t  an ad that I ran.  We specialize in policy at  GrowRev. So we do policy consulting for companies etc. We do a weekly meeting where all our media buyers have to go out and scour the internet to find ads that are noncompliant. 

So every week we have a theme.  It'll be like, this theme is MLM or misleading claims, for example, personal attributes, which is this one. So we get all of our media buyers, they have to bring back at least two to three ads under each category pretty much every single week. And then we have basically a discussion about it, why or why not.  Because it also helps you find really good workarounds. Sometimes they'll bring one to the table where it's like, wow, these guys found a really tricky way to not use a personal attribute or to not do a misleading claim. You know, there's lots of different strategies there. So, yeah, this one was definitely one of the gems from those meetings.

 

Okay, so let's dive into this ad. So you're not running this ad just to be super clear because you don't run ads like this, but we'll throw it up in the show notes. And it says,  “Are you over 40 struggling with hair loss?  Sells the only two FDA hair loss treatments which are 90% effective at preventing hair loss.  Limited time offer. 50% off three months. Start your regrowth challenge in June.” And then there's literally a picture of a dude like, he's faceless. He has like no eyes and it just focuses on his hair.

 

I'm wondering if they, maybe thought they could get around personal attributes by not giving him eyes?

(Laughter)

 Yeah. Maybe.  They’re like I guess like we beat Facebook on this one.  And then the headline on the ad says “hair loss can be optional.” That's kind of a weird headline.  50% off for three months. All right, break it down. 

Okay, so this ad is not running anymore. I checked before we talked.  It obviously got disapproved. This is one of the biggest things that people do. And it's personal attributes. You can't call out attributes about a person, and or how they feel or anything. 

So if I had an ad, where it was like, “Do you always feel sad?” You know, “ Go with GrowRev, because you'll be happy all the time”. You know, but this one, because “Are you over 40?” So, you can't call out people's age. You can't say, “Are you 19? Are you 18?”, etc. 

Facebook wants to prevent that because it also shows the general public how much information we have access to.  And it makes people feel not good or even saying something like, you know,” Are you fat?”  They don't want you to have a negative experience with their ads where you read the ads and then kind of feel bad about yourself.

They're all about that positive connotation. But really with these personal attributes, like “Are you over 40?”  They broke it there and then “struggling with hair loss” question mark.  You can't you cannot say that that is a completely bannable offense.  You could completely lose your account for that. They don't want you to call out these attributes, because anyone who's scrolling through and let's say you are over 40, losing hair, you instantly start to feel bad about it.

And it's just it's a negative user experience. And personal attributes is one of the most overlooked and banned policies that we see in general you can't especially You see it a lot…

 Like personality.  Like if I wanted to say “Do you have an awful personality?”  Like to what extent?  How far can this personal attributes go?  Because  that's pretty broad,

 

Like, no it is but you still understand why that they block it.  But you just never want to take for granted what people are thinking or feeling. It's pretty much blanket for that. So you could even have something weird like, “You sometimes feel happy and then sad and then happy”  that that calls them out. Or “Do you sometimes try to put on pants and trip and fall over?”  It's a personal attribute. 

You can't  call that out. But there's definitely ways around it. You could say “Men over 40 that are struggling with hair loss, love our product”, because you're not asking them.  A  lot of people, they avoid the word “you”in their copy. There are ways that you can use it. 

But usually if you're asking them a question, like “Do you feel...Do you…?”  It's best to stay away from that. And in general, I find it's always better to go from a positive connotation than a negative as well. Yeah, so you don't want to make people feel bad.

Like if it was me advertising this, I'd do a case study about someone who had great results and  they unlocked some great stuff in their life from it. And it's about them instead of being about the actual person and how horrible they feel that they're currently losing hair.

Okay, so obviously, you guys aren't running this ad, right?  So let's talk about how quickly something like this put somebody in the poorhouse?  I want to hear. You don't have to name names, but I want to hear a horror story of  how much money can an ad like this really cost somebody?   Like how poor is this gonna make me?  Like if they actually get their manager or their ad account banned or whatever?  You know, 500 grand a month plus, and their ad account’s shut down.  And like there goes an eight figure business.

 

Yeah, and it’s the whole opportunity cost of losing your account too. So we had a client that was spending like $25,000 a day -- a really big influencer. And they lost their business manager during a launch so it's not like they had to completely scrap the  launch.  But it was a majority ….it was 70% of their traffic. 

Of course, they had affiliates and YouTube.  Multi-network is the best way to make sure you're still safe. But at the same time, it's like that opportunity-cost of them not being able to spend 70% of their budget literally cost them millions of dollars. And then they had the headache of trying to get everything back, and even losing personal access to the platform. So they didn't have access to their page. They couldn't post updates. They couldn't do anything and even leverage their organic audience from it. So it was still successful.  They're able to run it through other channels, but at the same time, it literally cost them millions of dollars and opportunity.

 

Millions? Not one or two.

Yeah, I really heard horror stories of you know, individual access getting restricted where they can't go into turn off the ads and they're just spending so...nightmare.

 

Yeah, that happens a lot too. Sometimes, if you get personally banned, then it doesn't fully link like when your ad accounts banned. Everything gets paused. But if you get personally deplatformed, you just don't have access to anything anymore, and it will continue to spend. 

We've had a couple horror stories where it literally, like they had to start doing chargebacks and eventually Facebook just stopped charging them.  But it was a potential nightmare that would have cost them 10s of thousands of dollars in ad spend because they're promoting something that had a life to it.  So it's an offer that expired, so they're still advertising their Thanksgiving deal like Black Friday and where we're on our way to December pretty much.

 

I love it. So don't run an ad with personal attributes or it'll cost you millions when you get your ad account and your business manager banned --  worst case you get deplatformed. What are some other things outside of personal attributes that people should not have in their ads that can save them from this?

 

One of them is misleading claims and that one is very straightforward.  But a lot of people break it.  And that's a lot of the time what happens is they'll claim that you can make a million dollars.  They'll make all these claims you know, like cure diabetes.  That's a great one. All those products that you see get pushed around. 

So misleading claims is also a pretty big one. One of the really misunderstood ones is MLM and biz op. A lot of people don't know that biz op is actually allowed on Facebook. MLM is not but biz op is allowed. 

So with biz op, you just have to define what it is before you actually send them into the like on the funnel, you just have to define what it is. So an example of how you can break this is a lot of people advertise free webinars, and you actually can't call it a free webinar anymore.  That's against policy that will get you banned out, or at least your ads disapproved. Because if you're selling something on the backend inside the webinar, they don't consider it free.  Because it's basically you're going through a sale and the product itself isn't free. 

So you're allowed to actually advertise that.  You just have to define on your landing page, what exactly it is that you're selling them into. So you could basically say you have a webinar that's going to show them your program that costs $2,000 on how to rank on SEO or whatever. A lot of people don't realize you have to define it.  And “Free” gets used a lot.  They never used to crack down on this. But now they do quite a bit where if it's your free webinar, your free webcast, or if you're lying and saying, “my one time webcasts”, which is an auto webinar that runs every 15 minutes, then they'll start to hit you with stuff like that. 

And then what about “before and after”?  Yeah, that's a hot one. I'd love to hear y'all get around that.

 

Well before and after is only for stuff like weight loss. A lot of people don't realize there is a lot of before and afters that you can actually run. Like for example, we have a photography client where we can run before and afters. It's just, there are some situations where you can't run them and you just have to know what they are. But even for stuff like we've had once where it's like in one where it teaches users how to invest in real estate, and we can show a before and after of that house.   But on the health side, of course, you can't.  They'll hit you really hard for that. So there are situations where before and afters are completely fine. But definitely don't do it in the health space because that's where they nail you.

 

I love it.  Okay, so let's let's move on to the fun part. Let's move on to the Rich Ad segment here. Dylan, why don't you kick this thing off?  Well, let's read this ad here.

 

Yeah, so I was lurking on this one when you sent it over, but it looks like we get the cheat sheets that will help you understand the basics. So looks like a solid little lead magnet. Killer creative. I click through but of course, download and now I’ve got to give you my email. I love it. I kinda want to go in depth on how that worked out for it. This is honestly super juicy. I know you've mentioned, you've sold hundreds of millions of these.

 Guest:  Matt Farmer

Yeah, no, and I highly recommend this is one of my clients. So go buy all his products.  He's an absolute legend. But this was an example of just... it was pivoting for the current situation that shall not be named. That's another ad policy. 

But really, we do a lot of direct response for this guy. We have tons of ads that go directly to a landing page and we do great.  We get really good ROI from it. But during the first part of the whole situation, what happened was everything kind of dropped out for a little bit.  There was like a two week period where advertisers somewhat felt it, so we wanted to pivot.  And what we saw got really cheap and it's still true during this time, is that you could lead gen for almost nothing right now So building an audience has never been cheaper. 

But if you have a paywall at the front, it's pretty expensive. So let's say a “free plus book” funnel, or a “free plus ship book” funnel they caught there are a lot more expensive now. And it's almost because like we're advertising in a bull market, people are trying to just justify their ad spend within, the first click pretty much and just, feed the machine. 

But for this, we decided he's really good at email marketing, and he picks up a ton from it. So there's a couple strategies here that we use.  Number one, it goes to an advertorial so it doesn't even go directly to the offer. And what we did is we got part of his product and we gave it away for free. And that  is what works really well right now. 

You can get so just to name the metrics, we're paying around 30 to 40 cents per lead on this ad. So, yeah, it's insanely cheap because it's advertising something free and it's content. It's going to an advertorial so you get all the advantages there. And then once you get to the advertorial, in order to get the free cheat sheet -- so we're giving away a piece of the product -- get people addicted, show them the quality, it is a really good product, and people absolutely love it. So we give it away and then they give us their email. 

And then after they give us their email, they're sent directly to the funnel that they'd normally go to. What we noticed is we're literally generating hundreds of thousands of emails every single month.  He's been seeing the amount that he makes from this go up  because they have quite a bit of product. 

So once they get an email, they could really monetize it. But the craziest part was after they went through this funnel -- because costs are so cheap on the front end for the click, and for the opt in, and just to get them through --- it's actually higher ROI than just doing a direct response ad directly to the actual product page. So sending them through this, grabbing a lead from it, and then in the end actually making more profit was pretty unbelievable. 

I'm not even sure how you capture the lead….

Well, you can't really tell because you click to download it or if you hit next so if let's say for example, you click on the cheat sheet, it'll pop up and ask for your email address in order for you to get it. So you just put in your email address. And then after you do that..

 

Gotcha.

 

And then what we do is we sell them a lower ticket version, but there's lots of upsells etc. So even though after that we sell them a cheat sheet for $7, that's the essential then from there and upsells and there's.. 

He's an absolute legend when it comes to direct response and landing pages and everything. So you know, they get upsells and the cart value is probably like three to four times that.  So basically, we're able to lower click costs, get more people to click through. 

So now our remarketing lists are bigger.  We got an email from it, so anyone that doesn't convert, we can hit them up with other offers. So then after going to buy the product, we have a higher ROI than we did previously. 

So I think it's just a really good example of pivoting. And I find during these times you want to give away something for free. And we're doing that with a lot of clients right now. It used to be where we qualify them with purchasing something, etc. Right now I'm just I'm honestly I'm more trying to list-build, because if I can get an email for under $1 --  I wasn't able to get an email for under that before this whole situation. So it's, it's amazing how well it's worked compared to the actual other ads. Of course, we're still running the other ads, but this just absolutely inflates our remarketing email lists and yeah, we've had amazing results from it.

 

Now with that coming from a media buyer’s perspective on the front end side are you going ahead and optimizing for those emails out of the gate?  Or optimizing for purchasing whoever gets the email and so be it.

 

We're optimizing for purchase just because that is the main goal.  I find when I optimize around lead because it is a worldwide product, then we'll start to get the third world countries coming in at one cent leads. This guy's account is insanely well seasoned. So I have an audience that's 1.7 billion people. And it's extremely ROI positive as long as I optimize around purchase, but not around lead. So right now for this product, I'm always optimizing around purchase and Facebook pixel seasoned enough that it just does the work properly.

 

Yeah, that's snazzy. So what's the kind of conversion rate from the individuals getting the free little cards to actually convert to some sort of paid packages at 20%?  30%? Would you have any of those numbers there?

 

Yeah, I can. I could go over the brief numbers. We have about a 60% opt in rate. And out of the users that opt in we're seeing around from 25% to 40%, depending on the day. Yeah. 25% to 40% taking the $7 offer and upselling from there, which is pretty unbelievable. 

Oh my gosh, yeah so much data. That's awesome. They're like yeah, now If you could change anything about this what would it be to optimize this whole entire funnel for the most part?

 

I think the funnel is really well done. We are trying different things with it. There's quite a bit. I think on the ad side it can be optimized a bit more and I could try some more variants. As you noticed the text of the ad is very short and it's strange for this kind of stuff. Long Form used to work really well. But we ran a couple versions of this and one of our best performers literally just has in brackets new blog posts is the ad text. 

So I definitely want to do some more testing around text to see if I could get anyone's there. Also some video clips.  I think some video would do really well for it. It was one of those things where we got it made it fast.  It was hard for us to do video creative of it because everybody's locked in their own houses so we couldn't get film crews etc. 

On the landing page side for the actual advertorial, I wouldn't change much. We've tested a lot of advertorials. So honestly, when you do this advertorial strategy, there's huge advantages to it. And it's why we always push people to multi network because if you do Outbrain into Taboola and you can get an advertorial to properly convert, when you push them over to Facebook, you get significant advantages to it. So even though it is another step in the funnel, your click cost is so low, it just builds up your remarketing list and it just gives you a ton more opportunity to convert people. 

So once you have a really good advertorial locked in, which can take from 10 to 20 different tries before you find one that really works.  Once you've cracked that, it works extremely well on Facebook, and you could run it alongside your direct response ads. It's just a really good way of scaling spend.  And when you're constantly trying to spend more and more and more every single month, and you're in the hundreds of thousands, any opportunity you get whether it's going out tomorrow countries are just finding more funnels that you can throw at it the better it is.  Because this one generates so many clicks, it helps all the other campaigns too. So, honestly I probably wouldn't change this advertorial.  I highly recommend anyone watching to take a look at it and just understand what's happening. I think it's absolutely brilliant. And  if you have a product where you can give away a little bit of it for free, advertorial is one of the best ways to do it, in my opinion.

 

Oh man, well shoot Zach we got a Rich Ad.  So for the recap. We got an ad that can shut you down and an ad that can make it rain. 

So how much are you guys spending on this campaign?

 

It's... I won't give exact but it's hundreds of thousands per month. 

There you go. There you go.  Congrats. You're a big deal.

(Laughter) 

I think you're really on point there though Matt.. really updating the funnel to get a free book plus shipping.  You know, those are expensive to run now and especially in this environment. 

I mean, just if you reflect back in March, there were all kinds of email campaigns and promotions of like, we're giving away XYZ for free. But really building that into the ad campaign.  You know, I think it’s the right move.

 

So, gosh, congrats on you and your client for being able to push through that all the way through to ads and not just like some email announcement to the customer list.

 

Yeah, that's quite a little study there. But, I mean, this has been awesome, y'all. So how can anybody get in touch with you if they want to check out some case studies Check out your site? LinkedIn?  What's the best bet for somebody to get in touch with you over there?

 

So the best way for people to get in touch with us is gonna be going to GrowRev.com which is our website.  That's where we have a lot of stuff. We are launching a new website here hopefully in the next couple of weeks.  We're going to have all of our case studies exactly what we talked about with what Matt’s running.  And just breaking things down. Even from the policy end to why going multi network and how that's been benefiting clients etc. And if you're on social, the best way to find me is on social because that's the majority of where a lot of the fun stuff happens and Instagram is rohan underscore sheth.

 

That's awesome, man.  You guys are legends. Tell us a little bit about what's next for you guys. Where are you taking the agency? Where do you guys see yourself in the next couple of years?

Next for us is pretty much gonna be scaling what we have already built. Obviously we've hit the epitome and on one end of info.  So obviously taking all that knowledge and helping as much of the masses as we can, from the info side that people have got offers that are converting that are just stuck with it. 

They're stuck at $1,000 to $2,500 a day. And they want to get to that $10,000 plus a day so we're going down that route. And one of the things that we're really excited for, and we're going to chat about a lot post-podcast,  is going to be partnering with you guys. 

And then all of our smaller clients, too, that we've picked up through COVID in the  last few months of craziness is just going to be helping people just rebound with some funding.  And then help them get their marketing together and scale there. So we're actively building a lower tier to our agency.  Because a lot of times in the last little bit, GrowRev has been niched into that high ticket agency.  Where it's working with the clients  we've mentioned.  But now it's like, okay, let's make a bigger difference with what we can do and obviously with the products that you guys are offering.  It's a perfect opportunity for us to scale.

Yeah, you guys are a little bit of an elitist. Let's just be real.

 

(Laughter)

Love it. I love it. Well, you guys have been super awesome and gracious in opening up.  And giving us a little bit of peek into the numbers but also being very respectful to your clients. So I hats off to you guys for just doing that in taste but also really feeding the field to the to the audience. I think everyone's gonna really appreciate this episode. That's it.  Dylan! Take it away, man. This was an awesome episode. Give us a little recap. Let's close it out.

Thanks for tuning in. I mean, shoot, if somebody wants to figure out how to get banned that Poor Ad, best way to get into it. Want to figure out how to have a really cool content marketing kind of lead gen funnel -- best way to knock it out there. So If any questions pop up, y'all feel free to reach out to our guests here.