Episode 11: Thomas Thaler Interview

Thomas Thaler is a true DigiThaler virtuoso.

He is simply at home in the online world.

Performance Marketer.
Computer scientist.
Gamer.
And so much more.

He's a man who goes all out. On the side, he juggles five-figure daily advertising budgets for big-name companies. And between you and me, he's also put in five-figure hours playing World of Warcraft in the past... how can you not like this guy! He now devotes more of his time to Facebook Advertising, and that's what today is all about: a top-notch conversation awaits you today with one of the TOP Facebook Performance Advertisers (you'll definitely be amazed at all the rest of the titles and job titles as you listen to the podcast) and simply a super human being.

By the way, if you don't know Thomas Thaler, you've probably never been to Facebook Ads Camp... or the AllFacebook Marketing Conference... or been active in online marketing at all. Thomas is THE authority, the Michael Jordan of FB ADS. As you'll learn in the podcast, his results and credentials speak very clearly to that.

It was a pleasure, thank you Thomas here again! We are looking forward to feedback, questions, suggestions, etc.
We'll hear from you on the next NO BS Online Marketing Podcast episode.

Until then

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Full transcript

Sebastian: You're also fed up with scammy online marketing gurus who promise you superficial hype strategies as a way to success?

Niels: As self-employed online marketers who consider the daily grind their absolute comfort zone, we've made it our mission to expose the online marketing bullshit. With us, you get the unfiltered truth about the current state of the online marketing world and which strategies really work.

Sebastian: In each episode, your hosts Niels Stuck and Sebastian Vogg present new online marketing topics such as SEO, Facebook ads, content and much more to take your online marketing success to the next level.

(9 sec)

Sebastian: Moinmoin, welcome to the No-Bullshit Online Marketing Podcast. Today's interview is with Thomas Taler. Hi Thomas.

Thomas Taler: Hello, greetings from Vienna.

Sebastian: Exactly. And with Nils, of course, as always. Moin Nils (Niels: Welcome, welcome.). And today we're going to talk a little bit about Thomas. If you work in performance advertising on Facebook, you've definitely come across this name before. If not, then something has gone wrong. Just visit Facebook. Ads Camp, that's definitely where he always shows up and demonstrates how to do performance advertising with very high budgets. Thomas, if you Google your name, you'll find quite a lot about you. So for example, your Twitter profile says: Trained computer scientist, management consultant and balance sheet expert, soon also lawyer. Tourist expert, SEO and social maniac. Is all that still true, or(laughs)?

Thomas Taler: (laughs) Yes, that's still true. Well, I actually studied technical computer science. And I also studied law, just 20 years later, and my career goal is not to become a lawyer, but the bar exam is already a long-term goal.

To my shame, though, I have to admit that I've been putting off this long-term goal for a few years now (laughs). Until I actually, I think, finish my law degree and pass the bar exam, it will still take some time. But being able to read and interpret the law has brought certain advantages, at least for the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation. And besides, the subject of law has always interested me. Now not only with IT together, but with many other things as well. And therefore-. Everything else is still true. There are two things you forgot. Or I forgot to write them down. (Sebastian: (laughs)) Computer games and motorcycling, those are the other two topics that really interest me.

So, if the marketing manager from Dukati is listening now (Sebastian: (laughs)), I would love to work for you, yes. I've already done very big campaigns for a few other big car brands. Dukati hasn't been on the client list yet. I would also accommodate in the daily rate, really accommodate significantly(Sebastian: (laughs)). Yes, I was a Dukati for many years. So now not the fourth Panigale and that is just also really-. Computer gaming is already a topic, which has occupied my life a bit, but the last few years no longer, yes. Sebastian asked me to say publicly how many hours I played World of Warcraft (Sebastian: (laughs)). I won't say, but it's in the five-digit hour range (Niels: In the five-digit range?). Yes, I have gambled the one or other night in my life. However, now for family reasons, that's no longer possible.

Sebastian: Okay, then an accommodating question. How long was the longest raid in World of Warcraft?

Thomas Taler: Yes, so longer than 24 hours, definitely (Sebastian: laughs). Well, I was-. I'm still in a very big guild and when a new content update comes out, you have to stop-. You can't watch that anywhere on Youtube, how that works. You have to hack in and try it out. Infinite, yeah, total fails, so really "ratz" (laughs). Instant Death. Also happens. You just have to hang in there. Yes, and ... #00:04:20

Sebastian: Really full Teamspeak servers I assume?

Thomas Taler: Yes, and I still have me-. If I want to chastise myself a bit and so live out my little maso streak. I'm still in the Teamspeak of my guild. And in the evening-. I'm mostly in the evening, when I then finish all my stuff, I put on my headphones and listen, yes , but do not play, because I have not installed it either. So I also have Diablo 3, that was the second time eater, that's all uninstalled, but in Teamspeak I still listen from time to time. But for gaming it no longer goes.

Sebastian: Very, very exciting. Yes, I think that's-. Especially in the online marketing scene, I know some people who (Niels: Pure self-control.) ... #00:05:02 came up a bit with games, yes, so I mean-.

Thomas Taler: But at GamesCon I'll be in Cologne. (Sebastian: Ah, at the GamesCon. That's cool) Self-liberated (Sebastian: Very, very cool). Just looking, of course.

Sebastian: Do not gamble(B: No), otherwise like such an addict again "aaah, here we go again".

Thomas Taler: We have rented a whole house there with loud nerds and maybe I'll take the laptop with me. Yes, thank God I have a very powerful one, so maybe I can install Diablo again on the way there.

Sebastian: Now I'll hack in here again. Have you ever had an Oculus Rift on. Or a pair of VR goggles?

Thomas Taler: Yes, I did. I was at F8 in California in 2015 and that's where the acquisition of Oculus was announced just before and was one of the really big topics, back then at Facebook's F8. They showed some nice examples back then, especially from the (?monetization point of view) that you can, for example-. That makes perfect sense, imagine some great concept, AC/.DC, perform in front of 120,000 people somewhere in Buenos Aires.

Well, I wouldn't fly to South America just for that, but I would spend five dollars to see it from the drummer's point of view, so to speak, right away, yes. And many, many others too. Or, think about the finale of "Germanys Next Topmodel". Yeah, I'm sure there's a number of people who would pay five or eight dollars right now that they could see that quasi from the perspective of one of the models running out there. Or soccer, yeah. Penalty shootout in the Champions League final. You're probably going to get into the seven-figure range there, from people who are willing to pay something for that. Unfortunately, from my point of view, it's not really that far yet, so I don't know of any commercially really interesting possibilities. I think that's not so much for technical reasons, because everything should actually work well. Maybe nobody really dares to talk about it yet. I think that was four years ago and since then not much has happened in this area, yes.

Sebastian: Yes, well, I got one a month or two ago. There's also the Facebook app for it, so you can have a look at it a bit, but it's all still very, very much in its infancy. So you can't do much there. It's just like, "Cool, I've got a Facebook app on it now," and so on, but-.

Thomas Thaler I think commercially it really becomes interesting. These points that I mentioned before, so to speak event sharing. Be it sports, be it music, but there are a lot of them, or festivals or things like that, where the space on site is limited. Because X number of people go into a stadium and no more, well. X number of people also go into a festival site and not a single one more. At the big ones in Austria there are 200,000 people, but more is just not possible. Yes, where do you want to accommodate them all.

Also for security reasons and so on. And about this-. You can reach an audience of millions. There are certainly already enough points where millions of people would be interested. At a particularly low price. You can go to the Blizzard-Con, just because we talked about Diablo before, there is such a virtual ticket. (Sebastian: Oh, gross) Yeah, if you don't go to the show, you can get-, I don't even know what it costs now, but some ridiculous amount, five dollars or so a day, you can kind of look at the entire show online. In a VR tour like that.

And, I mean, that's nice, right? A lot of people do that at E3, the big computer game trade shows. I also believe that you don't lose an audience there, but on the contrary, you gain one. The people who want to go there, can afford it and also want to invest the time, they do it anyway and everyone else, there are just a lot of people who say "Well, 300 euros for a day, plus hotel, plus flight and so on, I don't want to afford or I can't afford", but paying 10 dollars, I think, is okay. And, there's a lot more to come, I think. And the moment you can make money with it, it becomes interesting, like you say. Now, if it's such small gimmicks, why should a big player invest big money in it. You've got some kind of funny furniture stores, that's nice, but you don't earn any money with it.

Niels: Allright. I would like to give a brief insight into who we are talking to here for people who are perhaps not from the Facebook camp. I'm not from the Facebook camp and I had no choice but to Google who I was about to sit down with on the podcast and it was definitely very interesting. I went from a bulging Xing profile, to (laughs) Twitter account with a pretty funny profile picture ... #00:09:37. Okay, the man is ironically handling memes and then came the page with the written thoughts of Thomas Thaler (B: Yes, exactly.) That I'm dealing with a reigning world champion in beach volleyball. In indoor volleyball. Someone who drives Dukati. Who (laughs), yes we don't mention the numbers, plays many hours of World of Warcraft and yet is nominated one of the sixth best business consultants and does Facebook and SEO and-. How do you reconcile all that and what can't you do?

Thomas Thaler: Thank God we have the podcast without video (cough) ... #00:10:18 now the listeners, I can just say it, I was born in 1973. So I'm over 46 years old and have currently just already experienced a lot. I founded the agency on 1.1.1993. So, that's 26 years ago now. And have many different things. So IT has also changed in the 26 years. In the beginning, we assembled computers and installed Internet access. You won't believe it, because you are also a bit younger, back then you could still charge a day's work to install an Internet connection (Sebastian, Niels: (laughing)).

Yes, yes, and there were hardly any people who could do that. (? In the-). Just like today, when you take a SIM card, plug it in, press "switch on" and you're on the Internet with 150 Mbit. Yes, that didn't exist at the beginning of the 90s, and back then it was a very lucrative business. You couldn't buy computers in supermarkets, so in Hofer or Mediamarkt, Saturn and whatever they're all called. That worked well for a while. Then, of course, the Internet developed as well. The whole computer industry has developed. Hardware has become, from my point of view, less and less lucrative and I started in the middle of the 90s with advertising as a classic advertising agency. Actually in the offline area. And I just started like that, at that time there were only time-based ?banners, yes. Like 1000 shillings for three months on the start page and so on. Tracking was de facto non-existent.

There were no analysis tools either. Google Analytics did not exist at that time either. Web servers were-. At that time were still the log files, I can still remember well. We read them out in ASCI format. Over 100,000 self-made tools. Somehow to find out how many people were really on my website and what they were looking at. Yes, and so in the course of time my professional life has changed, drastically even. I see it most clearly with the number of employees. So the last few years I've been going solo and I'm not going to change it in the medium term. But I already had 80 employees. (Niels: Madness) Yes, I also did Internet providers and telephone providers for a while and had 30 people sitting in the call center, well. So times change and times also change you and when you're in the industry for a long time, you don't just do one thing, but the industry develops and my interests have also shifted as a result. Yes, I wouldn't want to do programming now. When I was 19, that was my career wish and career goal. I had technical training even before I went to university. I always wanted to be a programmer, so to speak.

Now it brings it already, because I have two years ago, ... #00:13:12, live on stage showed how to program and address the Facebook Marketing (?EPR) with PHP. Of course, that's an advantage if you know programming, yes (Sebastian: Absolutely, yes). It's not rocket science, but it's easier if you have a basic understanding of how a programming language works. I have to admit C++ is not used as much now (Sebastian: (laugh)) as I learned it back then. I passed by the JAVA world, which I regret a little bit. So, I was too early there. I would be interested in that, but now I don't have the time. Nowadays it has become easier with the frameworks.

Sebastian: Yes, I also have a background in IT. I'm an IT specialist for systems integration, not application development, but the whole thing. Switch the PC on and off. Support like that. But no, I have also, and I am also very grateful for having done SQL. ( VW ) and the whole stuff. Just now to-. When you just notice-. If a Facebook advertising, then because-. There are many people who are in there, are just creative or are just the people who now just say, we times a little ads. But the technical background is sometimes missing, I think.

Thomas Thaler: So a lot of people are always wondering what I can do with VBScript. Yes, so give me an XLSM file and I can really do many, many things, more than most people think, yes. So Visual Basic for Application is a very simple programming language now, but of course has easy capabilities and integrations of other things. I can easily call a PHP function from VB, and of course I can do some nice messes. So (Sebastian, Niels (laughter)) and I've tried for a while to deal a bit with bit management, you know at Google AdWords there are great tools for many years.

Facebook doesn't really have that. I have, to be honest, not seen a really good one yet and then tried that once so for myself somehow (?data) to extract from the advertising accounts. In (?xrecords) to prepare quasi and to send the bit changes back again. Only, there we are already exactly with the topic that through-. So a red line of the last years became. There is, unfortunately or thank God no right and wrong. There is not this one holy grail. The road to Rome. The highway to Rome, which is the only one, yes. But there are many different approaches, each of which works under certain conditions in certain environments. And even if I were to open up one of my advertising accounts and say "Hey, copy out everything you want, duplicate that into yours, do exactly the same thing" and you do that for one of your customers, it can work, but it doesn't have to.

So, you're going to have the funny case then that you're sort of, even if you do it one-to-one, so everything-. Even if you have the same audiences, you're not going to produce the same results. And that makes it difficult on the one hand for people like me, because of course we take a little bit from the experiences of the projects that we've done, logically. But so-. Some believe yes, now you have already made two car providers, now it comes the third car brand, now I duplicate that and start in 3 seconds I have it all running. It's not like that, exactly for the reasons mentioned, because, what most people forget, one of the essential points in the Facebook algorithm, not only in the paid but also in the organic area, is the competition and competition you have to watch out a bit, that is not your direct competitor, but everyone who addresses the same target group. Yes, and these are just, if you now the, from only male 30 to 50, then you will compete against, I don't know, millions of companies and not least Master Card, Visa, Coca-Cola and Red Bull and these consorts, which under quotation marks, the same target group just use for their watering can campaigns. And they'll always beat you with the budget they've got.

So in Coca-Cola, you're very likely to lose from the budget level. Yes, and against many others as well. You can't influence that either. Certain things, now let's stay with Valentine's Day. So if I'm not necessarily selling flowers, I would rather skip Valentine's Day. Because I know that the CPM price, i.e. the thousand-contact price, goes steeply upwards on that day. Champions League final, so the classics halt. I can influence that, but I don't usually know beforehand whether some big brand is doing a European campaign. And there are still many things, weather for example, yes, it is a huge point how hot. I don't know how it is in Germany. In Vienna it's a fluffy 36 degrees every day. So we-(Niels: Similar.). I was in Scotland for a month for exactly that reason, because it was 16 degrees there. So and then we came back and we kind of fainted. J, as hot as it is now in all of Europe now and also still is- For Monday they have announced for us now somehow 39 degrees (laugh) Yes, pretty extreme. Yes, of course weather influences many industries and products, because people are either more or less on Facebook. Only if you now against an outdoor pool of your choice-, so if you think that people are not on Facebook when the sun is shining.That is- exactly the opposite. They're all sitting in the outdoor pool with the-. I call them the cell phone zombies. Sitting in the shade in the best weather and muddling around on their cell phones. But that's how it is. And that's what I wanted to get across. It is, even if you have a strategy that has worked for you, yes, and you know that from your own areas. You can indeed-. I always like to show that.

I always publish campaigns, results and descriptions of how we did it, what worked, what didn't work. But that (?highs) is not a carte blanche and we also have in the industry, even the specialists among themselves, are not always of one opinion for a long time. But, on the contrary, there are often heated arguments, because one says, "I try it like this, it worked" and I say "No, it didn't work for me" and many other things. Lookalikes are a typical example. I myself don't use lookalikes because I've tried that umpteen times. It never worked well. I know others who swear by it and say "hey, they work like hell for me". Now I kind of don't dare say "lookalikes are bad" just because they haven't worked for me so far. I still don't use them. Period.

Sebastian: So also ...00:19:50 accounts also not? So if now a new (?hobby account) loslegst?

Thomas Thaler: No, I never do the whole thing (?unmasking) via lookalikes, but that's just from my personal experience. I have tried this umpteen times, and it has worked badly every time. But that doesn't mean per se that lookalikes are bad. I myself have seen enough examples of others where it works well. You know my motto: The best frequency is the maximum frequency. That's also a credo in retargeting that I like very much. Again, I know other industry colleagues who start sweating when the frequency of a retargeting campaign goes over four. Then-. Some I open then still another small my (?kotten) "Look there times purely. I have there a mean frequency 32 and a ROAS of 40." Is the campaign now bad or good? So, therefore-. There you have to look a little bit also on his own way and also with terms like sustainable and so always be very, very, very careful.

Unfortunately, sustainable campaign management sometimes means - I hope no one quotes me on this now, because otherwise a few will feel put on the spot again. I don't manage to achieve success in the short and medium term. That is then called sustainable. Of course, there are also customers who accept this and say we think five years ahead. From my experience. So I tend to get clients who don't have five years, but somehow have five weeks and then say they actually want to achieve a significantly positive return on investment within the first month. And it's also hard to say whether one is good or the other is bad. It always depends on where you want to go. If I'm a seller who doesn't know who wants to sell skis at the end of the season, he won't think in the medium term, but will say, "The ski season is over in mid-March. I can still sell skis until April, so to speak. And then it's over for the summer.

Even if I give away 50% discount then, nobody will buy the thing." So those kind of driven industries that are very seasonal and that's just once a lot of them. Yeah, and also anybody that has a product that's not stackable and storable. A hotel, for example. The hotel room that I don't sell today is gone tomorrow. So you see what I mean. I can't stack a hotel room. If you sell iPhones and you don't sell them today, you might be able to sell them tomorrow or at least until the new model comes out because then you can give the old ones away again at 50% discount anyway. So you already have a certain seasonal pressure in very, very many industries, and it's difficult to think sustainably and in the long term, in quotation marks, because quite honestly none of us can say what will be in five years. Will Facebook still exist in this form? I don't know. Will the Zuckerberg empire still exist? Most likely, so that, I think, I dare to say "yes."

Whether that's still in the form of Facebook as we know it-. Maybe, maybe not. Let's think of other large portals, yes don't know if you StudiVZ, if you have still experienced that-(Niels: Yes, of course.). No one could have imagined back then that that would be dead at some point, could they? Or think of MySpace, they were sold for 100 million dollars and nowadays they only exist on screenshots and somewhere on mirrored web servers. That's how documented it once looked. Maybe it will be the same with Facebook. However, Big Blue, the Zuckerberg empire, has already taken some very, very good and correct strategic steps. So, in my view, there is no way around them in the next five years. At the current F8, the credo "The new Facebook is the Messenger" is clear. Yes, so it's going to be more in that direction, whether it's called WhatsApp or Facebook Messe or again ?Sting or Portal-. Will also come in Europe in the fall. Kind of a hodgepodge of the whole thing. The future is private. I don't see it that way. Zuckerberg doesn't see it that way either. (laughter) I think that was my biggest misjudgement, and everyone else's too. The General Data Protection Regulation hasn't changed anything. But zero point zero. I didn't think so either. If you remember, a year and a half ago I was co-presenting with Plutte on this topic at Ad Camp. To the best of my knowledge and belief, so I certainly wasn't lying, but reality has overtaken us all.

In Austria they say "It is not as hot eaten as cooked" and in this case it was clearly so. There have-. Of course, now last May, a year ago was big screaming and everyone was in a panic. Now over a year later. If you ask any company now "Have you drastically reduced your advertising budget because of the GDPR?" You're very likely to get a "no." And that's why I also believe that Facebook is in this area with Privacy though-. It's all window dressing in truth. If you look at it. Because if they were really interested in transparency, it would be very easy to do that now. But they don't want to do that for a variety of reasons.

Niels: Okay, so in the conversation beforehand and also generally in what I've read, we also had a few other channels on the table in the meantime, such as Google Ads. Are there any other channels outside of Facebook, where you look after quite large customers, that are interesting to you, that you work for, that you would focus on?

Thomas Thaler: No. Actually, for one reason only. We touched on it briefly before. It's just this theme, what you're good at you should do, what you're not so good at you should leave to other people who are good at it. And there to my shame I have to admit now, AdWords is a topic that while I think is absolutely important and still great, I don't know my way around it as well as I used to. So I leave that kind of stuff to other people. We also got a question if I do the creative myself. (laughing) (Sebastian: Question from Lena.) Yes, actually not an uninteresting question. Actually so not a very important one. If I were a politician, I would say "Thank you for that question." It is easy to answer. No, I'm a complete Photoshop layman, so really a noob extraordinaire. I don't know anything about video editing either. I've taken three photography courses with one of those SLR cameras, but I still can't take a good picture. So, the answer is quite easy. No, I never do the Creatives myself.

The only thing where I have a bit of a say is the topic of copy. So the text, because I just know from experience, when you run a zillion ads, you know certain wording doesn't work and certain wording ideas just work. And that starts with-. These are the classics. Texts that are too turgid, like in an advertising PDF. That just doesn't work on Facebook. "Take our unique, wonderful, best-running, all-customer-satisfying product". You can write something like that in a folder, but I have to say that you shouldn't write it like that there either. It certainly doesn't work on Facebook. Such things, there-. But it's often a struggle, also in terms of corporate identity, because with larger campaigns and even higher budgets you usually have a CI CD Maxerl, male or female, sitting in the team, who then of course says "Please, the logo must be 80 x 80 pixels, ten pixels away from the top left edge". And then make any format from a small smartphone, where you can perhaps only cover a very small area. And then two thirds of the subject would be the logo. And then we say, "Well, either we leave out the logo." "There's no way that's going to work." Or we make the logo smaller. "That's absolutely not possible". And then you just have to discuss it a bit.

Basically, I think you should use the same language on Facebook that you use in your company. However, there are certain target groups that you simply can't reach positively with too formal an address. And you just have to take note of that and adjust accordingly. And I also believe that in the field of creative design, there are enough specialists and experts who can definitely do this better than I can. So the question is easy to answer. I-. Even if I would like to be able to do it.

Sebastian: Yes, so in the meantime it's probably also an important lever for you with your customers when you do something now. So that you hold good creatives have (B: No question.) The buy just then from designer.

Thomas Thaler: No question at all. Of course, we work a lot with creative tests. There are a minimum of three, usually 5 to 6, 7 are then run against each other. So variations with text and video. That's also something like-. Every now and then I read blog articles where someone believes to have found out empirically that videos work better or worse. Because he just, well-. I heard it like this. He somehow analyzed 10 million advertising postings. That may be statistically true, of course. So I have somewhere, I can calculate that of course, but that doesn't mean that it works that way for me.

It's like the average temperature between the northern and southern hemispheres. You can calculate it, statistically correct, but that doesn't mean that it's too hot or too cold in your country. So that's the problem with statistics. In fact, it doesn't work at all in this area. Therefore, in truth you must try it out. Florian Litterst always writes it so beautifully, yes. Test, test, test. Even if you have already done it once a year ago. That can be completely different again. Basically, the view rate for videos is of course higher. The click rate, I would not dare to say now, basically better or worse. And the conversion rate certainly not. So, with certain products, it's clearly better to sell via videos. With-. I have already had others, clearly others, where it was not the case at all. That's why it's brave to make a statement of principle. If you read such a basic statement somewhere and base your own business decisions on it-. That's a bit naïve, I would say.

Sebastian: Is just such a statement, where only meet, if you drive up with the Lambo and the Rolex on the arm has. Then you can say-. (laugh)

Thomas Thaler: Exactly, then you can actually only say "That's how it worked for me". So to speak. Yes, I wouldn't condemn the fast and frantic (?sellers) out of hand. These are definitely approaches that can work. But at the moment when it just goes into a pyramid game-. Yes, and unfortunately most of these things are. I don't have to have studied mathematics to know that this will be difficult.

Sebastian: Yeah, it's just the testing. So I mean, I've also had clients where they're like, "Facebook says do video, video is the next big thing." Video (?big). Then you do link ads and they perform a thousand times better than video ads.

Thomas Thaler: Basically, I can say that clearly, I would be very careful with all the things that Facebook tells us. So anything that says Facebook is doing something to maximize your success, I would be very, very careful about believing. I work a lot with manual bids. Not for the reason that I think I can optimize better than the Facebook algorithm, certainly not. But, the Facebook algorithm sometimes probably has different goals than I do. And, you don't really know those goals as a Facebook advertiser. Do you know it, I don't know it and probably nobody else does either. And then what that really does, you can easily look at it if you leave everything set to automatic, especially now with the new CBO, with this Combine Butchered Optimization-. There are some very strange effects. Yes, as the then really hacks 70, 80 percent of the budget on an ad set that is by far the worst values, so both click rate and conversion rate, as well as ROAS is worst. Well, hmm.

Sebastian: That's where the breakdown effect comes in, Thomas.

Thomas Thaler: Yes, exactly. And you have to see it in a very sustainable way.

Sebastian: Exactly. To six months times. ROAS 0.5 yes. Difficult.

Thomas Thaler: And then, I have to watch what I say, the best cases from Facebook itself, yes. They just then do-. You can say that openly, because it really is like that. They often compare apples with oranges. They take the costs, take them from the advertising account and the revenues, and there's one or two asterisks, and then when you look three pages later, what the two asterisks mean. That's a projected, estimated revenue for the next three years. That's like looking into a crystal ball twice. Shake it once and then an amount comes out and from that I calculate a return-on-ads-spending. I have to say, I'd call that brave or pretty stupid.

Since it comes from Facebook itself, we can't say it's stupid, it's very brave. Of course, this already offends people like me. And I-. We have an internal Facebook group where this is also addressed. I also write to them and say, "Guys, you're comparing real costs with estimated, extrapolated income. Boa, that's really close to the limit, yeah." So, there-. Would we already-. Let's leave the church in the village and look at our campaign to the, and in the performance area that goes. Of course, if I now a brand awareness-. In reality, I can only query the supported and unsupported awareness, because what do I want to measure in terms of sales? But with normal (?performance), I verscherble any product of your choice. I put X in and get Y out and the ratio of that is called the ROAS on Facebook. And that's the way it is, you can still discuss and argue and talk about the attribution window. We won't find a 100 percent satisfactory solution as long as global attribution doesn't exist. And I do read something from time to time, it's on the Facebook roadmap, but no one knows whether that will come in 2019 or 2020 or even later. Only then, when I can virtually pack all channels into one attribution window. That's technically possible at the moment, so I can map the entire customer journey, so to speak. Now I can do that very nicely and very well in the Facebook universe, I think, so with Facebook Analytics it already looks pretty good. On the Google world, virtually encapsulated, it also looks very good. But if you now add newsletters and (?DispWerbung) and "Gschisti Gschasti"-. At some point, this is technically no longer possible. Yes, and you just have to make it clear to the customers, because there are always arguments.

Sebastian: Yeah, right. Have you ever looked at Facebook Attribution? Well, there was also a presentation by Andreas-. So, that is relatively close to this attempt so and is actually also a quite cool tool so. But everything is just beta, I think.

Thomas Thaler: Absolutely. That's also the way, the direction it's going to go, yes. I-. It's going halt-. At the moment, you can only approach it and the moment you do multichannel on a grand scale, that is, you send out millions of recipients of newsletters and the next day you shell out a few 10,000 euros a day for AdWords and on the third day you shell out a few 10,000 euros for Facebook Ads. Then no one can really calculate the best agency in the world exactly. It gets difficult when you pay for these three areas on a success-oriented basis, so to speak. You have three agencies that work more or less on commission, and then it becomes tricky.

Sebastian: Facebook best on Less-Click, then it's no fun at all.

Thomas Thaler: Then it's no fun at all, definitely not. If you set it differently, then there's also the old joke, you just set the entire attribution window to 28 days view (Sebastian: That's good (laughter)). Almost a big reach campaign, so with the goal reach or goal impressions, just something like that. But really need times nice seven figures and then you let the newsletter do the work and the conversions tick in with you. But that is in truth hard on the border to fraud. You have to say that it's technically not 100 percent possible at the moment and if you really have a customer who runs several channels with high budgets at the same time, you simply have to be aware of the problem.

You just have to say that we can measure it up to that level. From then on, you have to make some kind of agreement. And, thank goodness, there are also the attribution variants or then data-driven, that you do that, for example, yes. Facebook Attribution can do that and Google Attribution can do that as well. You can get close there. But you're never going to get just like this rest of it, that the outbound clicks are not equal to the inbound clicks and even the inbound clicks are not equal to the landing page views and then you're still hauling a Facebook pixel event and that's another number again. And that's-. Even if you have the tag manager standing underneath, those two and-. I mean we both know how long it takes to load and execute three lines of java script so to speak. So that a user presses X exactly in those micro thousandths of a second, yeah, nobody can do that.

Still, if you, can test it quite easily. Take landing page calls, see in the ad manager and then add a classic, normal paging present event to the tag manager. And you fire those at the same time and you'll see the numbers vary by two, three, four, five percent. Nobody can explain that to you. The Michaela once ,from ?Idalo, once wrote a very good article "The 15 reasons why Google analytics statistics and Facebook statistics don't match." Agree all you wrote there. However, no one can really explain it. Facebook itself is also aware of this. But now we have to say, in the past we didn't even have the outbound clicks. They haven't been around that long. In the past, there were only clicks all and clicks link. Yes, and then the difference was 80, 90 percent. So we probably have to live with that here.

Sebastian: Yes, yes exciting, exciting. Nils, do you still want to graduate here?

Niels: Yes, I'd say we've now delved into this topic very well and intensively, and I think it's quite interesting that you still have such an interest in gaming. And let's just ask you, what are your top games and are there currently any must-haves, because I no longer have the market on the screen. I used to play a lot but-.

Thomas Thaler: So I can clearly name my top games. Well, the best game I know is World of Warcraft. So, that will, even if I no longer actively play it myself-. Diablo 3, uncounted hours and so Skyrim was already one of my favorites (Sebastian: Yes, Skyrim I would also have on the list.). If you my blog, I write him the unfortunately no longer, because I no longer feel like it. But I have back then, I think 2011 was that, I have a report on Skyrim-. There is, at that time was the game of the year (Sebastian: Have read it.). Yes, I also invested a few hours there. Currently, I must honestly say, I do not know. I'm driving now, in August I would like to have a look at it at GamesCon, because I'm just interested in what the technical possibilities are simply ... #00:40:09 the machines are, the graphics cards are super powerful. The whole topic of internet gaming has just become very, very comfortable. So now no matter on which-. Whether you're on BattleNet or something, your friends pop up, so you don't have to go tediously on a guild search anymore, but in fact you're in your buddy list-.From Facebook you'll probably find some people and. So there's what's being played right now. Action games I never liked that much. So Counter Strike and so I never played. But I've always been a fan of tactics, strategy and yes, role-playing games. Well, I played Ultima Online, when there were no graphics cards yet. (laugh)

Niels: Which component do you enjoy the most? PvP or anything in particular?

Thomas Thaler: Ah, no I'm not a PvP player, so I also have to admit I've also always played WoW on a PvE enviroment, but that's a matter of taste. I have to say now, I always played Mage and Mage is not that strong in PvP. (laughter) So, there are other classes, Warlock for example, that's much easier and also more fun to play. In my opinion. But, no, I've always liked it, this teamwork to flatten such a huge creature. That was always very, very funny and you just, that-. It was funny at a time when video conferencing didn't exist yet, when you had people you'd never seen before. But you knew a lot about them. So, how are the children, what are they doing professionally, is there stress with the wife-. Do you know such-(Niels: Krasse personal level become over this Teamspeak.). And did you know about people you have never seen, actually very much, also private nature. How is it going in the job, what do they earn and such topics that just someone, people occupy and if you play so times for ten hours, a whole night, you promise already about everything possible. The longer the evening lasts, the more open they become.

Sebastian: Have you ever done something like this with your gaming friends, TS people. Have you ever met each other?

Thomas Thaler: Yes, I was at several guild meetings even (laugh) No, no, that was always great and I spent fifteen years in Innsbruck and warm greetings by the way at this point to my Innsbruck gaming group. We all know each other personally. Innsbruck was not that big. So that's where you get to know each other. And then you meet sometimes in the outdoor pool, for dinner and to gamble and quite funny little anecdote also. When you go raiding in a guild every day, who is doing the campaigning for a different party than you. (laughter) That is then very, very funny. So, if the one, there is anyway only the one, that just hears, also knows who is meant-.

It's always quite funny, yes, that of course you also have to deal with, so to speak, competitors, I always don't want to bring up the word competitor, because it's a-. I don't think it's the same in the industry anymore, all good friends like five years ago or so. The market has become tougher, you can see that. Also at the conferences. There are a lot of people at the start. Many young people who are of course also very good at this and fight for customers. Many of them get nervous, of course. However, I still believe that the market is more than big enough at the moment and in the foreseeable future. So the demand is definitely greater than the supply of people who are good at it and want to do it. And that's not going to change dramatically now in the next two years, I think. And it doesn't matter now if you're doing content creation, also an-. Good people are always wanted there. So there are very few who can do it very well. Or campaign management or any other aspect, so you will always need people who are very, very good in this area and they will always be well paid. I'm not too worried about that for the industry, to be honest.

Sebastian: Let's see if we're still doing Facebook Ads in five years, but-.

Thomas Thaler: Yeah, I don't know that either. That-. Maybe we'll do, I don't know, portal specialist. It would be good if you wrote that on your business card right now (Sebastian: That would be cool.). Portal Senior Expert. Then in five years, you can post on the network, whatever it will be called then: I was 1a portal expert five years ago, so to speak.

Sebastian: 2019 Portal Expert

Thomas Thaler: Exactly, back when times were good and golden.

Sebastian: All right, Thomas. Great. Thanks so much for your time (B: I hope you enjoyed it). It was a ?cool podcast. Yes, (Niels: Very interesting.) super, exciting. Very interesting.

Thomas Thaler: All clear. Thank you very much. Many greetings. We'll be in touch (Sebastian: See you). Bye.

Sebastian: Ciao.

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