Abhishek: Hello everyone, today we have Harsh with us, a fellow performance marketeer. Let us hear insights from him about his experience in marketing. Harsh, how long it has been for you in the space of marketing and when you started this. Harsh Jain: So I have started my journey way back when I was in college. I was experimenting with different part of digital marketing, uh, uh, before coming into performance marketing, um, in performance marketing, I've been six plus years, but before that I tried a little bit of SEO, a little bit of website designing, graphic designing as all we started from that place because in back 2019 dropshipping was a big thing. So there was an idea of like experimenting. Abhishek: ⁓ huh. Thanks. Yeah. I Harsh Jain: things so I did that off a little bit haven't been successful on that part of it any kind of dropship and so yeah my background is background is in a software engineering but I wasn't interested in coding that much as much as into business and marketing so I shift that Abhishek: But I think now you like coding with Cloud Code and Codex. Harsh Jain: Yeah, we are using a replate and lovable to build the dashboards and everything for clients. So that is part of our strategy now, our process. Abhishek: Yeah. Yeah. Harsh Jain: Yeah, yes. Yes. So my journey has been like starting from, haven't done any specific, ⁓ like before then there wasn't any like big courses and coachings. basically watching from YouTube, doing few internships and then started from any companies who provide you the job and started working on that and all test and trial things and end up working with some of the really good guys who understand basics of. Abhishek: Understood Harsh Jain: Google ads, performance marketing, customer journey, a customer journey, how someone thinks about when it is searching for a particular product or search term. ⁓ So all of that understanding, ⁓ I am very lucky that, really, really lucky in terms of working with people who understand the business and everything, not just ads. So I've learned a lot. Abhishek: I mean I also say to a lot of people even founders or know marketeers that the industry we are in or the space we are in it's all self-learned nothing is being taught anywhere it is all it is all through your self-learning your self experimenting your campaigns your ideas your product everything so that is the best way to go though and my first yeah and my first question to you is the most Harsh Jain: Definitely. Yeah, definitely agree. Abhishek: Favorite question that I feel to ask to any performance marketeer is what is the biggest budget you have handled for a client? Harsh Jain: biggest budget I have done is ⁓ 300,000 US dollars per month. It was a US based brand. They were e-commerce. They were selling ⁓ armor, ⁓ US armor. And we have managed almost Abhishek: Cool. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. US armor in the sense the I mean what type of armor was it? Harsh Jain: ⁓ bulletproof jackets and the accessories usually people who in the security or this kind of people use gloves armor ⁓ Abhishek: Nice. ⁓ Harsh Jain: protections, any kind of ⁓ physical protection that you use. We were doing that. So they were expensive products. They're at the part where it was really good. So I did work on that. And there were two people working on this. So that was a nice brand to work with. So yes, the highest. Yeah. Abhishek: Mm-hmm. Most D2C founders I talked to and also performance marketeers they obsess over RoAs. What matrix do you think they should actually be ⁓ obsessing over in your point of view? Harsh Jain: I think the most important thing is the Jack, the cost per acquisition. A ROAS is important. You can see in the beginning ROAS is important. You need to know what is the break even ROAS for, for a company to make, make it profitable. But once you hit a particular ROAS that justifies your spending on your ads, but in order to scale any brand, you need to know what is the profitable cost per acquisition for a new Abhishek: Mm-hmm. You're a man, yeah. Harsh Jain: new cost per exposition for a customer based on that only you can scale a brand because if you'll focus on ROAS because nowadays every if you look at Google, Facebook you pick any platform the attribution is all mixed up ⁓ Google try to say the Facebook conversions are mine Facebook will say Google conversions are mine and back end you will see if you Abhishek: Right. Right. Harsh Jain: make a sum of both the platform in the back and you won't see that many conversions. So there is an attribution problem also. So you have to focus on ⁓ cost per acquisition. Yeah. Abhishek: Right. Acquisition cost. ⁓ yeah And also CPC comes with the same Harsh Jain: Yeah, CPC justifies that you are going to able to bring the CAC on the right amount or not. The CPC is also important. CPC. Abhishek: Yeah. Harsh Jain: because if you are paying too much for those clicks and your CTR and everything are not onto the point. And especially after, if even if you bring the CPC and CTR, your landing page experience for a, for a consumer is not good enough and it doesn't justify and have all those things to make you believe that this brand is one for you. It's not going to convert that well. Abhishek: Right, right. ⁓ What is the biggest lie the performance marketing industry tells the brands right now? Let's talk about from our perspective what we propose to clients and what would be an over expectation that any I mean you or what do you hear from the industry. Harsh Jain: I think the, the best, like the thing I hear is that periods for everybody. I don't think periods for everybody. If you're starting, if you're starting, you even haven't like, just figure out your market fit. Yes, ⁓ testing a product you can use pay rates, but if you're just starting out, I would suggest build your, yeah, go for organic build your grant. ⁓ if you can send some free products, if you can, ⁓ Abhishek: go for organic. Harsh Jain: Just run few create few content offline content, online content, whatever you can. So you understand that someone is ready to buy or not. Once you figure out the product is working and you have the market fit, just don't push all the money into the paydads because eventually it's going to be very low margins for you because paydads is too competitive, especially in ⁓ like Western countries where every Abhishek: Yeah. Right. Harsh Jain: Everything is too competitive here. We can understand that CPC is lower, but still, if you compare it with the same level of grants and same level of money here is also expensive in India. But periods has gone too much expensive after COVID the CPC is higher. The CTR is the competition is too high. So if you have figured out the product, your USP is good, your price is at right point and you understand your margins are good enough, then go after paid. But first figure out, figure out organ. can try to build a brand because if you're just Abhishek: Yeah, yeah. Right. Harsh Jain: going to survive on parrots, eventually, eventually it's going to happen to you that when you try to scale or hire more people, the margins are going to be way lower than that. Abhishek: Right. I have a theory for this when you said this it makes a lot of sense because Meta and let's assume Meta and Google users are 100,000 people your product users. Okay, you have you You have a product and there are 10 other competitors with the same product and All of you are putting a similar budget in Meta and Google now, how does Meta and Google push you through if you selling the same product, if you are putting in the same budget and there are 100,000 users, how does it happen? That is where branding comes in. If a user sees five similar products but from different brands, they choose the brand rather than the product. That's where I feel branding plays a role. Harsh Jain: Yeah. Definitely, definitely. Branding and social media content as well, because once you have that many people engaged with your social media or your content, you can at least use paid ads to target them back and sell them with a better offer, than just going out of finding that cold audience who doesn't even know your product or services. So Abhishek: Exactly. Exactly. Right. Perfect, perfect. Harsh Jain: So social media is very important in this now. It's more important than ever been. SEO is going to be more important as much as for last five years, performance marketing was important. SEO is going because AEO is part of SEO now. So it's going to be more important than performance marketing. Abhishek: Exactly. yeah yeah yeah be an answer ⁓ with an A that's why I've said we are trying to include this feature in widowsby.ai as well because it is more into the conversation let's say I think you might have used Claude and asked it hey Claude suggest me some best tool for this and it gives you an answer and you're using it so Harsh Jain: Yes. Abhishek: I think that is, I mean you might have known that that is the next ⁓ evolution, revolution that we are going to come up with if chargibity launches ads. What is your take on it if chargibity is launching ads in their answers? Harsh Jain: I think it already did. Yes, I saw, I follow someone on LinkedIn. It's already live. It's a beta version. It's only accessible to few people, but they already launched their UI and everything and it's available to few people and they're testing it. Yes. Yeah. It's going to start with. Abhishek: Is it? and again it's bidding model. Harsh Jain: similar same interest and everything and then you have to and once they get the data they're going to improve it like on the Facebook date. Abhishek: Yeah. It's like Google SEO similar to that. Harsh Jain: yeah it's going to be similar similar mix of google as well as facebook Abhishek: right right so hush ⁓ being a performance marketer give me your with ai tools coming in what are you what do you use in your daily ⁓ systems what is your like structure like for what you you choose a a tools per in your workflows Harsh Jain: So what we do is we use all of mostly we use chat GPT, Claude and Gemini. We are using three of them. We are using Claude for ad copies and everything. So what we do is on all of this part on all of this, ⁓ all of this AI tools, we create each tab for each of our clients and we train them with their USPs about their brand, about all their landing features. Abhishek: ⁓ huh. Harsh Jain: what I have performed, what kind of audiences they are looking for. So basically when you click on that tab the AI knows all about the brands. Now, when we do our own research about what kind of campaigns we launch, we just put all of that into the AI and it will give us the whole campaign structure, from ad copies to descriptions to how we can, based on intent, how can we differentiate the campaigns and ad set and everything. And then we... Abhishek: Yeah. Harsh Jain: Most of the time it's like, it's not a hundred percent right. But it's not that bad up to 80, 90 % it's good. It still needs some level of tweaks, but it will save a lot of time. We use Gemini and, and child GPT, especially the new version has come up for content creation, for ads and everything. Abhishek: on this too. Right. Harsh Jain: And for clients who have have budget, are using trying to use new tools that are specific for content creation like Hicksfield is very popular now. So we'll try to integrate that into some of our clients or people who have budget for that. And for reports and analysis, ⁓ for analysis, are using the same cowork and share GPT, but for reports and everything we are building in every agency or for every client, we are building a custom dashboard through lovable and no core tools. Abhishek: Right, right. So that's why, ⁓ why did I ask you this question is that whatever you have told, we have all included it in one space right now. Except, except, yeah, except the video creation part. We are trying to include it, but it is again expensive for the user side. ⁓ But yeah, we have included all of that in mitchellsback.ai, but I would, you know, Harsh Jain: Okay, and you're in your software. Abhishek: ask you to just try it out and give us your feedback and you know let us know how can we make it better but ⁓ another problem we were trying to solve is that I mean before the call we were talking about this the you know surveillance over the campaigns because there are n number of ad campaigns from a brand there are n number of ad sets Harsh Jain: Definitely. Abhishek: and each of that has different kinds of targeting and different kinds of structures different kind of ad copies and all of that so as a campaign manager as a human I felt that there was this gap of know surveillance problem that three to four days we give a gap and there is a loss in the leakage in the revenue so why don't we replace it with the with a tool which optimizes it and keeps it on track what's happening what's going wrong and gives us update. What do you think about this problem because we faced it and we are trying to fix it. Is that something you guys have faced it? Harsh Jain: You I would say on whatever I am doing, I don't need it that much. But if I have my own client, like 10 or 10, 15 clients, I would definitely use it. I'm working with agency and they have their own system. I'm not like plenty of people have reached out to me to use their own, like they have built their own software and search for analysis of the campaign and doing all the optimization and you'll give just the give permission. I'll do all the optimization for you. So you don't have to do it. And even some of my friends who are running Abhishek: Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. Harsh Jain: their own agency and clients they are using their they have built their own tools to do all of that so it is important it will save you lot of time but currently I'm not using that much because I don't have personal clients that many but yes I think it will save you lot of time my friends are saving a lot of time especially in terms of like they have not only set up the optimization through AI but they set up alerts if somewhere if it is too low or it is like ⁓ Abhishek: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Harsh Jain: I would say the fluctuation is too heavy in a row as or in calls or in results It is going to be seen by the person who is managing the account but on the minor level if you need to if the results are constant and and you don't need to change too much it can be done through ahead. Yeah Abhishek: Exactly, exactly. Have you ever used triple whale or any of our clients are using triple whale? Harsh Jain: Triple well I have seen it, but I have used wicked reports. ⁓ That is also good. Triple well I have used for one client, but triple well is very expensive. ⁓ So not many clients use it, but I did use wicked reports. Abhishek: Mm-hmm. Right, right so we have included all the features in triple veil and also you know included more versions of features than triple veil so as you said it is expensive we are trying to be on a moderate level and give a lot of know features to the clients that was our perspective Harsh Jain: So it is working properly in terms of attribution and different. Abhishek: Yeah, we have tested around 60 to 70 brands till now and the efficiency mark has reached to 80 % in the working model. So we wanted to put it in the market once it crosses 85 so that it gives better performance and better solutions to the clients. Harsh Jain: Okay, nice. So does it like let you see all kind of like first click, last click, does it like everything? Okay. So how does it like track the journey? Like let's say once. Abhishek: Yeah. everything. So basically it also track see ⁓ as you said the analysis report for campaigns is mostly available across but we have included the website crawling part as well where it your website and reads the customer journey as well. So once customer comes into your website where is he going first? Where is he wasting the time? How many cards did he handle? So we are reading every customer's journey. So we know Harsh Jain: Okay. Abhishek: What is he exactly doing there? Which is not done by this is the before part after the sale. I mean this before part is not, you know, analyzed by a lot of tools or like even performance marketeers because we we we are not able to do that deep of research because it takes a lot of time. So that that is where our agent also knows this is something I mean he's waiting for some offer or you know, he added it. something went wrong something like that so it gives a better response to the brand yeah and we are also optimizing the whole website in terms of UI, UX, defects it is not just meta and Google campaigns but it's a whole structure to help the brand to grow Harsh Jain: okay nice nice ⁓ nice, nice. I definitely, if I have a particular e-commerce brand, I'll check out this. I'll check out this store. Currently, my clients are in B2B. They are lead generation. But if I have an e-commerce client, I'll use it. Abhishek: Yeah. Definitely, definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and also we are partnering up with agencies and also performance marketeers to, you know, to distribute the product rather than directly going to the brands. So it is useful for performance marketeer and agencies for the brands. So we are collaborating in that particular way. So. Yeah. Harsh Jain: Yeah, definitely. I think it makes more sense because performance marketer can give you feedback is working or not to improve it rather than brand. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's nice. Abhishek: and he is the one who uses it rather than anyone else yeah and also yeah most frequent question and an important question I any performance marketer I would ask is if a brand is starting out right now with a limited budget if he has to go with Meta or Google which one do you prefer to start off with Paydads Harsh Jain: If it's e-commerce, if your CPC justifies Google ads and your cost per acquisition and you have a margin, start with Google ads as well. And if your CPC is too high, if you see that you don't have a budget for it, like let's take an example of you have a budget for a hundred rupees and your CPC is 15 to 20 rupees. Abhishek: Right. Harsh Jain: Now your daily budget is going to be you just going to get seven to eight clicks most. Now it's not going to be enough for you. So make sure you do your analysis. What is your CPC cost? How it's going to be your average conversion rate? What is it's going to be? ⁓ proper cat for you to be profitable this ⁓ if it all makes sense go with Google ads it's high intent people are looking for your product and services you're going to convert well then Facebook but if you don't if your CPC is expensive go about Facebook create social media content create good amount of money because Facebook is now all about content creation so as much as content you can put out and as much as content you can test it's going to be best for you. So if you have organic team who is creating good amount of content or you are an entrepreneur or owner who is creating brand around yourself and you can create content go with the Facebook as well. Abhishek: Right and give me an awestruck you know moment in your journey of you you thought that this ad campaign is not going to work and it has given the best results or you thought that this ad campaign is going to give results and it didn't work out can you take me a journey like that Harsh Jain: So I'll give you one way back when smart shopping was a thing and it was converting into P max and the company I was working for, was a UK based e-commerce company and our smart shopping were doing really good. And we were in the peak season in the December when Christmas was going on and we had to change just before that. I think it was September or October. Abhishek: Mm-hmm. Hmm. and the Black Friday sale as well. Harsh Jain: Yeah. So all of that was changing and we had to move it to P max and I didn't know how it's going to do, but based on test and trial, it did better than the smart shopping and, ⁓ and the company was happy client was happy. And I didn't expect all of that to work very well because P max were a hundred percent new. Actually it wasn't new, but that was the point where there is no option that you can go with the smart shopping. Abhishek: Yeah. Right. Good night. Harsh Jain: all your smart shopping is going to be convert automatically into Pmax. Yeah, so it just did almost at the beginning of the Christmas season and we didn't know that it's going to work or not. So it just did all the testing trials and it worked out. Abhishek: these things you sometimes it's just with just a he just throw a stone and if it works out and the client is happy that is the most happiest feeling we'll ever have yeah Harsh Jain: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But also the point is they make most of their sales and there is the main season for them. And if we screwed that up, it's going to be heavy on both sides. Abhishek: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know everybody is going to everybody's wallet is ready to spend during that period during the festive season globally I would say. Yeah. Harsh Jain: Yes. Definitely, globally. Even on our side, like Navratri and Diwali comes out, comes up. So we'll spend so much. I work with the ⁓ Indian braids brand at the Jaipur braids ⁓ brand, women's brand. ⁓ We brought that company from 15 lakh doing per month in season up to 45 lakhs per month. Abhishek: Diwali. I know. Harsh Jain: So her target was doing 60 above 60, but we did get her up to 45. So it was great feeling not for her, but for us, at least we did that. Yeah. Yeah. So peak season, if you cannot take benefit of that, it's going to be too lost both the sides. So it's going, yeah. For company as well as for you. Abhishek: Yeah. right right right right and another important thing from my side is how important is a landing page because a lot of brands do ignore that and even performance marketing I feel somewhere we tend to you know not give much concentration of just keeping it very generic but somewhere it feels landing page is the most convincing part in the customer's journey because that's his end part where he takes out his card and makes the payment. Harsh Jain: I think landing page and creatives are the most important thing right now. Abhishek: Exactly. Harsh Jain: because Facebook and Google are training in a way that eventually they are going to send the relevant traffic to you. If you're targeting the right keywords, even if you don't do search term analysis and do negative research that much, eventually they are training in a way they're all working on an intent basis, especially Google. So it will go for different search terms that you're targeting the keywords you are targeting, but it will find people's intent who want to buy the product. But if you're service, you'll Abhishek: All Right. Harsh Jain: landing pitch your creatives and your offers are not good enough they are not going to convert well so they are the most important thing Abhishek: Yeah, yeah, I think you creatively you have to play with both of this and strategically or with the numbers systematically you have to play in the middle. Harsh Jain: both tests. yeah definitely 100 percent Abhishek: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what do you think at what ad spend do the strategy fundamentally change? I mean, this is in your perspective and how do you handle Harsh Jain: Can you repeat the question? Abhishek: So basically there is a strategy for a brand which spends $1000. There is a strategy for brand which spends $5000. So do you strategize it according to the spend or how is it in your working model? Harsh Jain: Yes, it's definitely the span matters. The more span you have, the more channels you can go after and the lesser the span you have. It's going to be very tight budget. Abhishek: Mm-hmm. Harsh Jain: So you have to go after the channels that are to convert well because you don't have budget to test different channels and different audience. So either if you are into e-commerce, go for standard shopping or search campaigns. Standard shopping would be best. Abhishek: Yeah. Right. Harsh Jain: Standard shopping is good at bringing cold audience, relevant cold audience. ⁓ But if you have the data, good enough data, you have been running campaigns for some time, go with the PMAX as well. Try and test different things which works best for you. But take risk one at a time. Don't test everything at once. So if you don't have budget, go slowly, but be focused and test one thing at a time. That is the case. And if you do have the budget, you can test multiple things. Abhishek: Right. And also ⁓ for an e-commerce brand, ⁓ what are the best tools that you would suggest for them as a brand ⁓ owner or... ⁓ or an entrepreneur who is building in D2C brand right now in the market. Harsh Jain: I think I just found a tool for if you are using Facebook ads, there's a cool thought, create boost. Basically what it does is it gives you a deep analysis. ⁓ on Aurea every campaign on Aurea every creatives how it one creative or ad copy is performing competitive to others and it will divide based on that and not only that if you are using one creative with a different offers and text and primary text and everything it will analyze that as well and it will tell you which hook rate is better ⁓ which ad or offer is more engaging and bringing more conversions so we are trying bunch of tools but we are building some of the tools in-house. But for content creation and building new ads, are using, as I said, ⁓ for Hicksville. And you can build a few of them through Gemini. ⁓ They have Neo. And for Chad GPT 2.0, new image generation. So that is also doing very well. So even the Hindi content, I have tried for. Abhishek: Yeah. Harsh Jain: a business that creating a content in Hindi, it it generated very well images. Yeah. Abhishek: Nice, nice, nice and also in terms of like post checkouts and the follow ups for ecommerce brands that is very much important in terms of you know regularly you know keeping the customers in your loop to make them come back to your brand. Is that something which you work on as well or is there any automation or flow that you would recommend for a brand. Harsh Jain: So definitely use a board safe API tools that are out there. can keep you engaged if you have an offer and they're already been a customers. You can see definitely in most of the brands, but most effective. that happens in convertibles in skincare brand because skincare brands, the customers are very loyal. The acquisition cost is high in the beginning, but once you tell them buy one, get one is free, you can see there is a 50 % conversion rate through those messages because people are going to stock up on those. on skincare, skincare things. So definitely use those. ⁓ Email is also good. ⁓ So use email marketing for offers and at least don't send specifically for email marketing. Don't send like buying things immediately. Send informational content, educational content, keep your ⁓ audience active. And once in a while, if you have a good offer and something for them, and if you have either a new product launch or anything, Abhishek: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. value driven content, Harsh Jain: use ⁓ organic as much as you can and because I said organ is going to be the new top thing Abhishek: Today I feel in the world if you are directly going and selling a product nobody is going to buy it. You have to provide them value. know, tell them what, what are you doing exactly with the product? What problem are you solving? And then tell this is the problem I am solving, this is how much I am selling it for. If you go sell them this is this much nobody is going to buy in today's market. Everybody Harsh Jain: No, Yeah. Abhishek: everybody is going to compare your product with 10 different brands and then going to buy your product. Harsh Jain: Definitely. Even our new based on new Android meta update on Facebook, you, are running awareness campaign just to train our Facebook people who are engaged with the, what kind of content and based on the awareness campaign, whichever ads, highest engagement we used into purchase purchase campaign. And even after, if you find something working in the purchase campaign, we have a winning campaigns where we are targeting with a Abhishek: Yeah. Right. Right. Alright, yeah. Harsh Jain: special offers and also have a remarketing ad set as well over there and we'll let Facebook decide which ad set to go after because it is running on CBO. So awareness campaign and doing awareness for your brand is very important right now. Abhishek: Exactly, exactly and put down a lot of value to your audience. Harsh Jain: Yeah, yeah. Put out as many because whichever brand we work with, we say them put as many content as you can because it's going to be cheaper acquisition for you rather than just be going to run too much ads for you. Abhishek: Absolutely, absolutely I mean I think they are this I mean we have given I mean we have talked the very good insights and It was a very good conversation with you man ⁓ I think I think we I think it was more precise and targeted and problem-solving I know solutions we have talked about I think we'll do a part two again sometime later, you know ⁓ Harsh Jain: Yeah, me too. 100 percent. Abhishek: and give a lot of value to the audience that we have around. Thanks for your time. Yeah, yeah, sure man, sure. It was my pleasure as well and I'll see you soon. Thank you. Bye. a great day. Harsh Jain: Definitely. It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Yeah, bye bye. Bye everyone.