Gratuitous sorcery and incantations from actual Wizards.

Greetings, business innovators! Gone are the days of being elbow-deep in tools and tangled wires; you’re making strategic decisions, and directing your business towards opportunities and growth.

But as the owner of a booming business, there’s a new kind of pest you need to watch out for: Bots!

WHAT ON EARTH ARE BOTS?

Short for “robots,” bots aren’t the sci-fi, humanoid machines that might first spring to mind. Instead, think of them as special-purpose computer programs designed to perform specific tasks on the internet.

While some serve a useful purpose, like helping to index the web or respond to simple questions, others have less honorable intentions. Either way, bots are probably impacting your ad spend in ways you aren’t aware of.

These invisible critters, seemingly benign, can be as detrimental as a small leak that slowly but steadily drains your ad reservoir. Dive in with me and let’s explore why Bot Blocking should be your new best friend.

1. YOUR CASH IS PRECIOUS. DON’T FEED THE BOTS!

Nearly 40% of all internet traffic is some kind of bot, making them one of the costliest critters at this digital banquet. Every time one clicks your ad, intentionally or not, they take a bite out of your budget. Your campaigns become less effective for humans, because they’re keeping bots well-fed.

2. THE MULTIPLIER EFFECT: BLOCK ONE, GAIN A BUNCH

Every bot you block has a domino effect. Let’s say your campaign generates 100 clicks, but 20 of them were bots. With bot blocking in place, those 20 clicks can instead be living, breathing, humans clicking on your ad. Every dollar you spend goes 25% further.

In addition to getting more bang for your buck, your campaign has 25% more legitimate clicks to learn from. Services like Google Ads use machine-learning to figure out who is likely to purchase your product, and show those shoppers your ad. When droids no longer click on your ads, Google stops thinking you’re trying to sell to them.

With bot-blocking, your campaigns become leaner and smarter, targeting genuine souls and turning their clicks into gold.

3. NOT ALL BOTS WEAR BLACK HATS (BUT THEY’RE STILL A NUISANCE)

Think of bots as ants at a picnic. They might be on a benign quest, but you wouldn’t want them munching on your sandwiches.

Some of the bots that are generally useful include search engine spiders that index your site and images so that they can show up in search, and site analysis tools like SEM Rush, Ahrefs, and MOZ Open Site Explorer.

Like the picnic ants, “useful” bots can unintentionally snack on your ads. Seemingly innocent, but still costly.

4. BEWARE OF AUDIENCE EXPANSION AND DISPLAY AUDIENCES!

Advertising platforms lure you into expanding your audience and putting ads onto other “ad networks.” These networks are often made of low-quality blog websites that only exist to host ads.

Beware! Expanding your audience is like venturing into a dodgy neighborhood. Bots especially love these “expanded” territories. Be cautious where you tread.

5. BIG TECH’S HALF-HEARTED EFFORT

Tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and LinkedIn benefit from bots clicking on your ads. To a tech giant, a click is a click, and you get billed regardless!

While they make some effort to block bots, let’s be candid—when there’s money involved, motivations can be murky.

6. LET’S PLAY SPOT THE BOT

Are you experiencing a surge in web traffic without a corresponding boost in sales? There might be a bot party on your site! While it may look like you’ve got thousands of people flocking to your website, these visitors contribute no actual value.

You are looking for real humans to buy your products and services. Inflated vanity metrics like website visits don’t tell the entire tale.

7. BUT HOW DO I BLOCK THE BOTS?

Ah, the billion dollar question! The simple trick is to employ specialized bot-blocking software. There are a number of options in this arena. While the technicalities are daunting, any of the top options are going to do a pretty good job of keeping the bots off your ads.

Bot-protection software use myriad techniques, such as IP address blocklists, or excluding specific audiences, ensuring that any bot that clicks your ad once can’t click again.

8. DECREASE BOT DAMAGE

If you want to minimize the impact of the bots that do make it onto your site, there are couple of measures that you can take that will keep those bots from making a mess of your life.

1. Use Google reCAPTCHA on your forms. There are a number of techniques that help keep bots from filling out the forms on your website. To block bots that make it past your firewall, we have found reCAPTCHA to be the most effective tactic.
2. Make sure you don’t count clicks as conversions. The main types of clicks that people often count as conversions are clicks on email addresses, clicks on phone numbers, and clicks on submit buttons of forms. These actions are worth tracking, because there’s a good chance that they indicate a real attempt to contact you. BUT, it’s always better to track the successful completion of a form submission or phone calls that last a minute or more when you are measuring valid conversions.

9. WHAT ABOUT THE HUMAN PESTS?

Beyond bots, there are humans with mischief afoot—like competitors clicking on your ads just for kicks – also known as click fraud.

Fear not! Bot-blocking software often doubles as a sentinel against malicious human activity, adding such tricksters to blocklists based on their frequent clicking or other shady maneuvers.

WE BELIEVE IN EFFICIENT ADVERTISING

Wizard of Ads Online uses advanced bot-blocking defenses for our client ad accounts, ensuring every penny you spend targets genuine, interested humans.

So, titans of industry, let’s arm those ads. They deserve genuine engagement, not bot interference.

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To learn more about how we can help you, book a call with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads™ today.

Cinnamon, coarsely chopped apples, and brown sugar. Tonight, my kitchen smells like apple pie because I stopped in to see my parents today and Mom was baking. Lucky me.

I suppose there are people who would choose apple pie filling, posing as homemade, fresh from a can. Just like there are business owners who are happy to have someone, anyone, take care of their marketing. Sure, it’s not great but still – it’s close enough isn’t it?

We didn’t go out to restaurants much. I remember the smorgasbord place. I’m pretty sure me, my brother and baby sister got to eat for free. And I’ll never forget the ice cream cone dessert complete with a jelly bean happy face and a hat made out of another ice cream cone. It was spectacular. I also remember one time our family was invited to go out for coffee after our weekly bible study meeting. There were a bunch of families and we all went to a 60’s style diner- which makes sense because this was in the 60’s.

The waitress rattled off all the pie flavors and I heard apple pie. That was my favorite. My dad tried to explain that it wasn’t the same as mom’s apple pie but I didn’t actually believe him. After all, we were in a restaurant. I knew it absolutely had to be great and insisted on apple pie. Dad ordered the coconut cream. I imagine mom had herbal tea or more likely a (free) cup of hot water with lemon, and my brother would have picked green Jello or ice cream.

Turns out, Dad was right. The coconut cream pie was a little taste of heaven. The apple pie looked like something my baby sister might eat. Or maybe something she had eaten! One small, pretend bite and I was not interested…. I was all ready to order my own piece of coconut cream pie but, much to my overtired surprise, Dad said no. That would be a next time idea. It was, to my 5-year-old mind, a simple yet dramatic miscarriage of justice.

The apple pie wasn’t even close to real apple pie. And Dad had eaten it And his original coconut cream slice, minus the tiny teasing bite that had forever won me over to all things coconut flavored.

The situation simply wasn’t fair. Now, I was a cute, very overtired little girl and I remember crying myself into the back seat of the car where I most likely fell asleep to be carried into bed and tucked in with dreams of apple pie justice dancing in my head.

Lesson learned. I only ever eat homemade apple pie. Preferably my mom’s. There were a bunch of reasons I discounted my dad’s advice not to order that bit of pretend apple pie. Had I listened, maybe my perfect slice of mom’s pie tonight would not have gotten me thinking about all kinds of pretend, not really great stuff I have seen business owners settle for. Or worse, buy, even after they were cautioned against it by someone they trusted. Sometimes, even that nagging voice whispering in their own busy head space.

Technology today means you can ask a free version of ChatGPT to write an ad for you. Or edit a brochure piece. Or even create a campaign. There are agencies everywhere that will help you develop a mission statement and a logo and even some funky graphics based on a questionnaire, your website, your credit card paying the invoice, and a formula of how they have always done things. After all, cookie cutters do cut cookies.

The can opener concept of creative campaigns can fill a spot. But that’s about all filler can do.

Instead, let’s chop some apples. Different sizes, and a bit of unexpected red sparkle on some of the edges. We’ll sprinkle on some cinnamon. And use some dark brown sugar- maybe a bit of maple syrup if that’s the mood- with a couple of pats of butter. We’ll make sure the crust is rolled out, thin and perfect, with just a bit of salt and a perfect blend of flakey goodness still with a texture you can sink your teeth into.

Warm out of the oven, maybe we’ll pair it with a slice of cheddar. Or it might be more of a vanilla ice cream day.

It will make you smile. And the next one won’t ever taste quite the same, but it will still be fantastically delicious.

Homemade campaigns just for you and your business. Makes your mouth water and your clients come back for seconds.

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When asked, most business founders say something like “I try to stay true to the vision I had when I started the company.” Are you inclined to answer that question the same way? What if you ask a few of your employees that question? For bonus points: What if you ask your customers?!

The reality is that just about everyone stops thinking and communicating about their vision shortly after hiring the fifth employee. How do I know this? I’ve asked the employees in companies I’ve worked with, and the only ones who recall the vision being communicated clearly to the staff are employees 1-5.

But wait, does that mean that there is no vision? Or just that employees are not aware of it? Let me answer that question with a question. If employees are your most significant cost center, and you hire them to do the things that make the company grow and prosper, then how can they do their jobs while not knowing the vision of the CEO?

Clarifying and implementing the vision is one of the most significant areas I’ve seen leaders fail, in both companies large and small. Developing a vision is essential, and there have been countless books written on that topic. People who call themselves business coaches often focus on developing a business vision with the CEO. Marketing leadership usually has to weave the business vision into the branding and advertising of a company. Companies without vision fail at a much higher rate than ones who take the time and effort to define a vision. But that is just step one!

The follow up to having a well-developed vision is to be able to clarify that vision in a way that all your employees can move the company to closer alignment with that vision. Clarifying your vision is in a sense translating it for each department and then each role in the organization. If the vision is to sell the best titanium bolt at a reasonable price, then each person in the company from the executive assistant, to the HR manager, to the machinist needs to understand how their role can affect the company vision. They also need to understand what factors they need to be focused on while interacting with other workers in the company to best make the vision a reality. It may be about the cost to the accounting department, not the purity of the raw material to the Engineering team. In fact, it is about different things to different groups, and while long-term employees generally gain an understanding of their role in creating the best product, they do this without a formal process of clarification and validation.

Your employees (including contractors) are the people who will implement your vision. Leaving your employees without an understanding of company vision will reduce their chance of success and require more management interaction.

Sometimes employees only see a part of your vision. There are many companies I’ve worked with who have demonstrated the dangers of not correctly communicating their vision. One company I worked with, in particular, had a vision of creating millionaires out of users of their products. But it had no mechanism inside the company to make that happen consistently. The result was that customers felt unsupported after purchasing their products because they bought into the vision of the company as customers, but the company did not clarify that message to their employees. Employees heard the message but were not provided tools or a direction of how to accomplish that vision. Everyone just did what they thought was their job as well as they could. This created both frustrations for the customers and stress for the CEO at having frustrated customers.

The solution, in this case, was to create a new testing and certification department for the customers. People felt much better when they were being challenged to learn and then be tested on their knowledge of the skills they learned. Only when the company vision was clarified did it become apparent that to implement that vision the company needed to create a way to challenge and test their clients. Much like a personal trainer helps more than just an exercise program, so in this case were clients better able to achieve financial growth.

Of course, it didn’t hurt the company to create another revenue stream!

Book a call with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads®, and let's create those mind-blowing ads.

“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

This is Peter Thiel’s favorite interview question, and it’s brilliant.

And what I’d suggest is that you ever so slightly modify it to:

What important truth about your industry do very few people agree with you on?

Note that your answer has to be:

• Important, as in relevant to the customer
• True, and
• Counter to Conventional Wisdom (In Your Industry)

Nail that question, and you’ll have the beginnings of a very powerful branding campaign.

Because what you’ll have is a potential “advocated position” for your company.

Bonus points if you can name several of these truths.

For example, Spence Diamonds would answer that question with the following:

1. Paying for greater clarity than can be detected with the naked eye is foolish, when what really drives a diamond’s brilliance is cut.
2. Most grading certificates are fraudulent and not worth the paper they’re printed on, you’re better off doing business with a jeweler you can trust than relying on a third party’s supposed objectivity.
3. You should be able to clearly see the prices on all the rings you’re browsing for, so you don’t have to awkwardly ask staff for prices
4. Your beloved’s engagement ring should be made just for her, so that hers is the first and only finger that ever wears it.
5. Jewelers should guarantee their stones and rings unconditionally — even to the point of replacing the stone should it ever come loose and buying back the stone at any point should you wish to trade it in, or upgrade it.

That’s a pretty powerful set of statements, right?

But this works for any industry. Another great example of this is Safer Home Services in Pest Control. Their answers to that question might look like:

1. Spraying contact poison inside the home is a shameful practice that’s both ineffective at preventing intrusion by pests, and potentially harmful to pets and kids.
2. Pest-control treatment should only require one treatment per year if it’s done properly. Monthly or quarterly spraying is the sign of amateurs who don’t know what they’re doing.
3. Most household pests don’t live inside the home — they come in for food or shelter — so it’s important to prevent entrance to the home AND to eliminate the real “homes” for pests outside in the yard.
4. A Pest Control company that won’t guarantee their work isn’t worth using. We guarantee no more bugs for a year.

And for a third example, I’ll use Miller’s Home Comfort, whose answers might sound like:

1. When corporate, franchised, or equity-owned heating and cooling companies run things by the numbers, they end up short-changing their customers and squeezing their employees.
2. Routinely pushing repairs over replacements in systems younger than 11 years old is a bane of the industry and represents a dishonest approach to business.
3. Install teams shouldn’t install more than one system per day so that they can do the job properly.
4. The quality of the installation is more important than the brand name or even the specs of the equipment.

Do you see how this makes for powerful branding?

I’m not saying this is the only way to brand, or that you can’t have an amazing campaign if you can’t come up with satisfying answers to Thiel’s question.

But I am saying that having great answers to that question provides an express road to powerful branding.

So let me ask you:

What important truths about your industry do very few people agree with you on?

Do you have solid answers to that question?

And are planting your flag around them in your ads?

If not, why not?

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In my last book, I talked about differences in both the types of employees and even executives that a company needs throughout its growth and maturation. So here is a summary of that chapter from my previous book. For many entrepreneurs, the traditional wisdom is that if you do a good job hiring at the early stages of business, you only have to hire someone for a position once and they will grow with the company. I will get into why people think there is never a need to replace anyone, and why that is wrong in a later chapter, but let me focus on the hiring process itself in this chapter. Hiring the right people means you need to avoid hiring the wrong people, and there are many ways to hire the wrong people.

For instance, during those early employee hires, you need to be sure you hire for flexibility and trainability. Everyone, you included, has to wear a lot of different hats. The company can’t afford to hire experts to fill each need yet. Even the owners are probably not experts; rather, they are simply willing to pick up whatever needs to get done to make the next sale and do it.

If successful through the initial startup, what you want to end up with several years later is:

• Written procedures and processes in place.
• A management team that plans and knows how to minimize unplanned events.
• Expertise in their departments who work with other experts in other departments.
• No one is a jack of all trades anymore.

The personal challenge you face as the CEO – and that the rest of the CxO management team faces – is being OK with not knowing the up-to-the-minute operational details of the company the way you used to. Your focus is on guiding an ever-growing organization, which means, much like a conductor of an orchestra, you focus on what will be happening next, rather than what is happening now. You trust your management staff to execute on the future plans and keep you informed enough to be able to make the right strategic decisions. They, in turn, trust their department heads to know enough about day-to-day, but not necessarily minute-by-minute operations.

The most important reason to hire someone is that they have skills that a company needs, are willing to utilize those skills when the company needs them, and are eager to do this at a rate the company can afford. Secondary qualities, like people skills, will help determine how well this person fits into the company culture and how effectively they will interact with employees already at the company are also important. However, you as a founder or a senior manager liking someone as a person, while it is obviously a plus, should be much lower on the list.

I have been able to find very good people to hire for my clients, but that is not an easy process. Finding a great employee means the company has to do as much work as the person applying for a job. What I mean by that is great hires do not stay available for long. You may receive 25 resumes and see five great potential hires, but those five may have sent out resumes to 25 companies, and the first company to interview them and give them an offer is likely to get them. So do not waste time with filtering tactics that make the candidates jump through hoops. Instead set up an interview immediately with anyone whose resume looks impressive. The first interview may be only 15 minutes and cover just a few questions, but at that point, they are not likely to take another offer without talking to you first. If you simply email your candidates a list of questions, and other companies are already setting up interviews, guess what your odds are of getting a reply to your email?

If you take too long from initial contact to an interview, you will simply end up with the candidates who are most desperate, not the ones who may be the best fit. Finding the perfect employee is easy – it just takes the same amount of effort as making the perfect product or delivering the perfect service!

For many CEOs I’ve worked with, hiring people is second only to firing people as the least enjoyable part of the job in the company. Even ‘people’ people from sales and marketing departments dislike spending time to find the best candidates. Unfortunately, very often that means the solution is just to hire the first person who comes along, replies to filter questions, and doesn’t blow the interview just so they can end the hiring process. This leads to a company full of mediocre people doing an OK job. No one is terrible, but it also means it doesn’t take much to stand out in this crowd. The TV show The Office was based on following the fictional lives of mediocre people selling a boring product. In that show, no one is motivated to do more than the bare minimum. While the head of the office constantly comes up with ideas to motivate people but accomplishes nothing but distracting them from their work. The show was funny precisely because it showed an office full of people doing mediocre work and a boss who thought that his staff was great. It was a TV show written by utterly NOT mediocre comedy writers!

Another common occurrence is to see a company full of twenty-somethings. Yes, there certainly are examples of companies started by teens and others staffed by people just starting their professional careers, like Facebook in its early days, but let’s face it, a successful company like that is a unicorn – it just doesn’t happen very often. For most businesses that have an age bias in either direction, this is a detriment to the success of the company as it starts growing past a half dozen employees. Youth can have skill and energy, but if not balanced with wisdom, which only comes from making mistakes – maybe lots of mistakes – it does not provide the best workforce long term. Likewise, a company full of very experienced people will be missing the energy and creativity of inexperience which often leads to completely out-of-the-box solutions to problems.

I’m a fan of using interns precisely because they bring something unique to the workforce that cannot be taught – namely, an unbiased view of existing processes. But unless you are in college, and you don’t know anyone over 25, you really should be hiring some of your people based on experience and the wisdom it brings to balance out the exuberant enthusiasm of youth. Certainly, by the time you hire your 5th or 10th employee, you should be recruiting for skill and experience.

Mistakes can be made by everyone. Your goal in hiring more seasoned and specialized staff is to pay for what they learned from past mistakes through a higher salary or hourly rate. You pay for more inexperienced staff mistakes through unexpected business losses that come at the most inopportune times when a business follows through on a bad decision.

How do I find the best people if I don’t like wasting time on the hiring process? Well if you can afford to use recruiters (15-25% of annual salary) then do so, but only after doing due diligence on the recruiter. Don’t just trust someone who paid $9.99 for a business card with the word “Recruiter” to help you find a person who will be responsible for potentially millions of dollars in profits or losses for your company. Have the recruiter audition for you. Have them explain their process for finding the best employee for you. Have them tell you about their successes as well as failures of the past. Tell them you want to use one recruiter for the next five years, so they are potentially going to make hundreds of thousands off your company, and that you want to be sure that is the kind of relationship they bring to the table. If you can find a good recruiter, you can avoid having to find new employees on your own. If you can’t find a good recruiter, then don’t use a recruiter as they will merely cost you money and solve none of the problems that you would have if you just hired poorly yourself.

After the initial startup period of hiring generalists, one of the skills of a successful CEO is being able to surround himself with people who are more qualified than he is in their particular specialization. Look around your company and think about the people who you see as being better than you. For each one, you can honestly say that about – congratulations, you made a good hire. For everyone else in roles that are specialized, you probably need to start looking for their replacement sooner rather than later. For menial or entry-level roles you should not expect that people know more than you about doing that job, but they should at least be faster, more efficient, or more regimented in doing their jobs than you would be if you had to do it yourself. Any fault with the staff within a company always rolls up through management and executives to the CEO. Find good specialists, and set high expectations for their hires, and you will have a company of the top producers in your industry. Shrug off the responsibility to take the time to hire the best of the best, and your bottom line will suffer.

I had one client that had shown an ability to grow sales very quickly. They were riding the wind as it were. Then it turned out that the ride was unsustainable. When I came in, I was surprised to find a company full of people in their 20s. I wondered if it was all the innovative ideas of younger employees that helped them grow so fast. It may have been, but it was also the cause of their downfall. As I mentioned, everyone makes mistakes, as much as we try to be perfect. We can make fewer mistakes by remembering our own past errors and the mistakes of others. Nothing will prevent someone from making an error in judgment nearly as much as a bitter memory of the price they paid the last time they made the same mistake.

Learning from others’ mistakes is a half-step in the right direction, and it contains wisdom, but not the instruments of enforcing adherence to that wisdom. So when you have a company staffed by people who have made very few business mistakes in their lives, they will not help you as the CEO in avoiding mistakes. They have nothing to fall back on personally, and they will respect and admire you as a successful CEO even if you make bad decisions, further hurting your decision-making abilities by creating a false sense of always being right. We see this type of thing happen with politicians all the time. They surround themselves with sycophants and then end up falling from grace, but never understanding why they fall so far.

Making mistakes is human, learning from your own mistakes and the mistakes of others makes you superhuman. Unfortunately, most people need to make the same mistake multiple times before they actually learn from it. For companies that is often even worse because mistakes get institutionalized and become part of the normal process. It’s not wisdom unless you avoid the same mistake in the future.

If you have no other reason than this to surround yourself with people who are more experienced and better qualified than you, it is that their internal criticism and disagreements with you will give you the opportunity to prevent making extremely costly mistakes with the entire company. But that will only happen if you take their advice! If you surround yourself with only enthusiastic but inexperienced youngsters, they will have little criticism to offer you and you will keep making costly mistakes.

Unless you work with seasoned marketers with rich experience writing irresistible advertising, like Ryan Chute’s teams at Wizard of Ads®. Book a call.

There’s a relative I haven’t spoken to in five years. Half the family hasn’t spoken to him for even longer, and it was a consequence of running a family business. My name is Michael Catanzarite, and in this series of posts I will be going over some of the unique challenges that face family businesses of all sizes. One caveat is that every family’s dynamic is unique, and we’ll be using broad strokes here based on my experience of working in a family business that grew from relatively small to the largest arts and crafts wholesaler in the country.

IF YOUR MINDSET IS “FAMILY ALWAYS COMES FIRST,” YOU’RE PUTTING A CAP ON HOW LARGE YOUR BUSINESS CAN GROW

Family coming first sounds good, but the reality is that as your business (and family) grows, at some point, you will have to put the business ahead of a family member. I don’t mean choosing to spend time at work instead of with your kids. I mean potentially having to fire someone. This should be a last resort, but your business is there to support your entire family. It’s something you started and put your heart and soul into, and you can’t let one problem person screw it up. It’s also unfair to your employees, some of whom will become like family. In my case, a family member was fired, and it divided us. For the sake of this post, it doesn’t matter who was right or wrong, the point is he was one of 1,500 employees, and no one was untouchable. This person wasn’t stealing, wasn’t a screw-up, it was simply a personality conflict that had gone on a long time and was potentially causing issues with other employees who didn’t have the power to do anything. The person who did the firing thought they were doing what was best for the business, but I don’t think they thought through the repercussions.

In a smaller business, a squeaky wheel sticks out even more. Let’s be honest, the bigger your family is, the more likely someone isn’t going to work out. It doesn’t mean they’re a bad person, just a bad fit, or maybe they just don’t like the job. Of course, there’s also the chance they’re just an idiot. Every family has one. That‘s ok. Talk to them and see where their head is at. If they’re there out of a sense of obligation, encourage them to move on and find something they like. Forcing someone to work in the family business never works out, and they’ll resent you for it. This will fester and eventually blow up in your face. In our family, we were encouraged NOT to work there. Why? Because it was hard, stressful, and could make you feel trapped. I left the business for five years to go and do something on my own. It was a great experience, and when I returned, it was with a new perspective.

So make up your mind if you truly always want to put family first. Just know that if you do, the business may suffer, and your other employees will most certainly resent you.

If you need new branding guidance, book a call with no other than Wizard of Ads®. We'll help you figure out what new perspective on branding can work for your business.