We have another episode of Champions of Performance Marketing.
I’m thrilled to share this conversation with Jairet Crum, a performance marketing expert who once helped drive nearly a million dollars in revenue… in a single day… from one product on one funnel.
Jairet’s perspective is so valuable because he didn’t start as a media buyer. He started as a copywriter. That direct response background shapes everything about how he approaches YouTube ads, and it’s exactly why I wanted to pick his brain for affiliates and media buyers looking to expand beyond Meta and TikTok.
In this conversation, Jairet breaks down everything from campaign structure andbudget allocation to why your voiceover VSL might be holding you back. We dig into the real CPAs on YouTube (spoiler: they’re higher than you think), why tracking delays can trick you into killing profitable campaigns, and the “allowable CPC” formula his team uses to know exactly when there’s room to scale.
I learned a ton from this one, and I think you will too, whether you’re a Meta-native affiliate curious about YouTube or already running video ads and want to level up.
Listen to the episode on our Spotify channel
Or watch it on CPV channel on Youtube
Q: Let’s start with your experience and what you’re doing at Tried and True Media. How did you start in performance marketing? What are you doing now? What does Tried and True Media do?
Jairet Crum: I was doing general digital marketing back in the 2010s. Around 2018, I decided I was going to be a direct response freelance copywriter, and that was going to be my focus. Within a year, one of my clients was an agency, and I was doing ads for them. They kept returning to me for work, so I signed on with them with a full-time contract.
That was Tried & True Media. At the time, I was the second copywriter. So you can really say that my start in performance marketing was through copywriting.
From there, I became very systematic in the way I approached things. I started building systems for how to approach writing ads and handling the repetitive parts of the process. My boss noticed that, and I moved into building a department.
From there, I started doing higher-level work, analyzing funnels, not just ads. I was working more in partnership with managers, and I began looking at everything you could optimize in terms of ad test iterations. Eventually, I became a performance manager, leading my own pod or portfolio of clients.
Now I manage relationships and develop new business for Tried and True Media.
The high-level takeaway is that I have experience in copywriting and a background in ads, optimizing ads, and conversion-focused ads.
On the performance management side, when I was doing that, I wasn’t hands-on-keyboard managing the ad platforms, but I was definitely working day-to-day with the media buyer to understand our ad campaigns, our targeting, and all of these things.
I was working in tandem with him to guide the tests: Are we testing the right devices? Are we testing the correct operating systems? Testing the right ages and genders? All those more granular tests.
My biggest claim to fame is where I helped a brand grow to running multiple six figures in ad spend a day. We capped out around half a million in ad spend a day at our peak, and we were running at about a 1.8 ROAS. It was a supplement, a digestion supplement.
I like to say: I did nearly a million dollars in revenue for one of my clients, on one product, on one funnel, in one day.
The agency (Tried & true Media) itself is a performance marketing agency where we do performance creative and run media. When we work with a client, we also offer CRO services.
We’re helping you optimize your funnel because we get paid on a percentage of ad spend. We’re not affiliates, so we don’t work on a CPA basis. We’re helping our partners optimize their funnels so they can make more money, because being on a percentage of ad spend helps us make more money too. So we go really deep with the brands that work with us, instead of just running traffic and creating ads.
Q: So you’re saying you’re not running an affiliate offer, but you’re working with ClickBank. How does that work?
Jairet Crum: I’m glad you asked that question because a lot of people look at us like affiliates since we work with the same people that affiliates would work with. We work with ClickBank, we have a good partnership with ClickBank, and we work with vendors that have offers on ClickBank. We run their offers through ClickBank.
We run similarly to what an affiliate would do.
On the affiliate side, there’s an offer on ClickBank, and whether an affiliate manager is trying to get the affiliate to run it for them, or it’s just a new affiliate getting into the platform and grabbing it themselves to run ads, they’re going to run media, put up ad spend, and create the ads, they’re going to do all that themselves.
On our side, we work in tandem with the vendor. We have exclusivity on the funnel that we run for them, and we develop it together. And we’re not paid on CPA.
I think the most important difference is that affiliates all get paid on CPA or maybe rev share, depending on the situation. We charge on a percentage of ad spend.
We model out how that actually keeps money in the business, and that’s usually why vendors want to give us a shot; we can actually keep more money in the business by charging a percentage of ad spend instead of CPA. That allows us to put more money back into ad spend, which means more scale and more customers.
Q: So you’re like a private media buying agency, more of a partner to the vendors on ClickBank?
Jairet Crum: Exactly. Because we work more on the side of offer optimization and analyzing your VSL, giving you a copy review, looking at all your landing pages, things like that, it’s more of a partnership.
With affiliates, in general, they’re going to run traffic on the funnel that you have. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, then they abandon you. We’re going to work alongside you to make things work so that you can reach the highest level of scale possible.
Q: But you promote the same offers that affiliates promote, mostly, because your partners are listed on ClickBank, right?
Jairet Crum: Yes, exactly. If they work with us, we have an exclusive on whatever platform we’re running. So if we’re running on Meta, then they’re going to pull that from affiliates on Meta, and we won’t compete with affiliates.
But we’ll work with the same vendors. That vendor might have the offer available on YouTube, and then we run it on Meta. That’s usually how it goes, something like that.
Q: A lot of affiliates are very successful on Meta but are afraid to start on YouTube. Do you think YouTube is viable for affiliate offers, for the kind of offers that affiliates and you guys promote?
Jairet Crum: It’s a really good topic. If you’re an affiliate who runs long-form post-text copy and images, you’re going to struggle when you go to YouTube.
But if you’re an affiliate who already runs video ads, I think there are a couple of guys right now who are crushing it with TikTok ads, they would have an easier time adjusting to YouTube.
It would be scary because the budgets are way higher. The CPAs are way higher, so your budgets have to be higher. Not that the TikTok guys aren’t running big budgets on TikTok, but YouTube has a really big CPA, probably 2x to maybe 3x, or max 4x what the CPAs are on TikTok, depending on the product.
But because it’s video-based, I say that if you really understand the principles of direct response, and that means mechanism-driven education and the entertainment aspect of video ads, I think you can crush it on YouTube.
A lot of these younger people who are video-platform native grew up on it. I know some of the younger affiliate guys who do really impressive video ads. I think they could crush it on YouTube because they understand video natively. And if they can inject that with direct response-style copy, really educational, mechanism-driven content, that’s the kind of stuff people want to consume on YouTube.
I tell people all the time: think about the platform’s context.
You’re on Facebook (Meta) to mindlessly scroll, and when you see something interesting, you’ll stick there.
People are on YouTube to consume information, to learn things, and oftentimes to be entertained. If they’re learning things, it’s also a bit of entertainment; it’s edutainment.
I think there’s a really strong fit for direct response ads that have educational value, where you’re piquing interest and telling about a discovery.
That kind of stuff is really fitting for YouTube because people want to consume that kind of content. They want to learn something new; they want to be entertained. And that’s what our best ads on that platform do.
So I think YouTube is a great platform for affiliate marketers. But people will suffer if they’re used to writing long-form text that’s meant to be read, and then they just pair that with an image. That’s not going to fly on YouTube.
Q: What’s a direct response ad? Can you clarify that?
Jairet Crum: Direct response principles are about driving an action immediately.
In this case, we’re making a lot of open loops in ads because they’re VSL ads; you’re not giving away what the product is. You’re not driving the direct immediate action of purchasing; you’re driving the direct immediate action of going to learn this important thing from a presentation.
That’s the educational aspect of the ad.
That’s the entertaining part of it is:
You pique someone’s interest with something like: “People who have this problem won’t believe this thing I discovered.” You open these loops about big discoveries or incredible results, and you pique their interest.
Those things feel entertaining, but they’re also learning something. It piques their interest, and they want to click to go watch the VSL. You’ve given them so much.
It’s not salesy; it just still drives an action.
Salesy direct response is like infomercials. If you’ve ever watched TV infomercials, that’s a great lesson in immediate sales direct response because it drives the action to buy right now. It leans so hard into the problem. It twists the knife on a specific problem very well.
With our approach, you want to twist the knife on the problem, but you want to set up that the information in the presentation, your VSL, is really what’s going to unlock the results they want. It’s like setting up the scene and then taking the visitor to where you want them to buy.
Q: What kind of offers do you see performing well now on YouTube? What converts and what doesn’t? What should somebody start with?
Jairet Crum: We see quizzes scaling, VSLs scaling, and e-commerce can even scale.
I’ve seen good direct response e-commerce offers. A while ago, there was a water pressure nozzle that you put on your hose, something bizarre like that, but they did such a good job of setting up the problem. It really reminded me of old infomercials.
Supplements do great. E-commerce gadgets can do well. Biz-opp does well, and finance does well. I guess what I’m saying is: if it’s a good offer with a good VSL, it can work. It’s not about certain offers working there and others not working.
Supplements do great, but there are also supplement offers that don’t work there.
I hate to admit it, but I’ve definitely worked with clients where I couldn’t make it work. I had one vendor, a ClickBank vendor, where I worked for probably about six months. We tested two different offers, and we would be break-even, a little bit positive, a little bit negative, break-even, a little bit positive, going through that cycle and just never really making it work. We had to just say: “Man, this isn’t going anywhere. We’re not getting enough results.”
And I was using the same playbook that I used to drive that other brand I mentioned to six figures a day and multiple six figures a day in ad spend at 1.8 and sometimes 2x ROAS.
So it really is about the quality of your offer, the quality of your VSL, and what I think now is essential: you’ve got to have higher-production VSLs. You’ve got to have a spokesperson. No shade to people who aren’t doing that yet, but that’s where the market is going. I feel like the market is sophisticated.
Q: So actors, or how do you find a spokesperson?
Jairet Crum: You can use an actor as a spokesperson. But I think if you’re still doing voiceover VSLs, you’re going to get left behind. That’s my take.
You have to be making some pretty outrageous, big claims to get a voiceover-only VSL to convert these days, because people just expect higher-quality production.
Think about it: your average YouTube creator films with three cameras and everything’s in 4K Ultra HD. You think you can still use recycled, outdated stock footage with a voiceover from ElevenLabs or something like that? It’s just not going to fly. It might work in the ad, but it’s not going to work on the VSL, not for long.
Q: What if they use AI to create the videos and VSLs?
Jairet Crum: Absolutely. I was actually talking to an offer owner this morning who just started using AI tools to generate some of the B-roll so that they have unique B-roll in their VSL. I told him, “This is a big upgrade. It looks a lot better.” It’s definitely a tool that people need to start leveraging.
Here is a list of tools to use for Video Creation
Q: If media buyers find an offer that’s working on Meta or on TikTok, should they scale it on YouTube? Should they focus on the video approach rather than the copy approach they might use on other platforms?
Jairet Crum: I would say look for videos in that niche. I know affiliates are constantly swiping, but definitely don’t steal. This is my warning: don’t steal. But get inspired.
Go out there and see what the mechanisms are, the pain points, for some of the ads that are within that same niche. Even if they’re old ads, those still show up on spy tools. So you can go check out ads in that niche.
Another thing that I like to do is to look at native banners and spy on native banners to get ideas of what’s getting clicks. That’s where I would start with making video ads.
Q: What traffic sources are you using? I know we’re talking about YouTube ads, but what traffic sources do you promote on mostly?
Jairet Crum: It’s mostly Meta and YouTube for sure, those are definitely the biggest volume. But we also do AppLovin, TikTok, and Rumble.
Q: When you set up a campaign on YouTube, can you walk me through how you structure it? Do you launch multiple campaigns for the same offer?
Jairet Crum: Now it has to be Demand Gen.
When I was a little bit more involved, it was back when we had Video Action Campaigns, but now it’s all Demand Gen. We try to limit those Demand Gen campaigns to just YouTube only, and Shorts only if that’s what you’re into.
Typically on YouTube, we start with a target CPA. We’ll have a ROAS goal, and we’ll have an idea of what AOV is best based on email sends they’ve had or other traffic they’ve had. So we kind of know where things should be, what ROAS we want, what AOV would be.
What we do is actually start on target CPA, but we put that at 20 to 30 percent above what we expect it to be, because YouTube needs more latitude to spend.
For an easy example: if I want a $100 CPA, I’m going to put up to $130 as my target CPA just so that YouTube will spend. If I put $100 CPA, it might not even be spent.
We’ll put that a little bit higher to start, to get some conversion data, and then we’ll adjust based on what happens.
If we start getting an $80 CPA, we know we can bring that down because we’re already achieving our CPA. If it’s not spending, then we need to increase that further so we can get it to spend and then identify where the real CPA is going to land.
The total budget is usually about 5x CPA to give it room to spend and learn.
Going back to that example: if we want to run at $100, we’re going to put a target CPA of $130, but our budget’s going to be $500.
Q: How many creatives do you put in each ad group? Do you use just one ad group?
Jairet Crum: I would put about three creatives in one ad group. I have people who swear that you don’t want more than one ad group in a campaign and other people who put multiple ad groups in one campaign.
I remember I used to always run just at the campaign level. It didn’t make a difference to me. I would just run it as a campaign; instead of doing multiple ad groups within one, I would run different angles and different concepts by campaign. So I would always just put one ad group and then put three videos in that one.
Then, broad targeting, let the creative do the work, and see what happens. You don’t want to go too narrow in the beginning. That’s the kind of stuff you do down the line. After you’re already getting conversions, you can test whether you convert a certain segment better.
If you’re running supplements, you want to do 35+ or 45+, maybe even 55+, depending on the niche, like vision or memory. But give it as much breadth as possible. Go broad targeting and let the creative call people out.
Q: When do you reduce the targeting? When do you stop the broad and niche down?
Jairet Crum: We would never stop broad.
We would just add a secondary campaign to see if we can get more incremental spend on whatever the best performer is.
Let’s say we do an analysis on broad, and it says your best buyers are women 45+ on iOS. That’s typically always the one, right?
So you’re going to make a secondary campaign that’s just women 45+ on iOS. You’re going to see if you can just get spend to that audience so you can get even more conversions on just that segment. But you still let your broad campaign run because that’s where it’s going after everybody else. And then react from there.
Q: So you’ll have two campaigns at some point, one broad and then a second campaign with a niche audience once you see what’s winning?
Jairet Crum: I would do that with winners. I’m running those big, broad campaigns with every concept, doing at least three videos. If I’ve got more than three videos, then I’m breaking them out by some other criteria.
For example, I have one concept where three videos are a hook test and three videos are visual tests. So it’s “Concept One Hooks” and “Concept One Visuals”, that’s two campaigns. Then next week, or in a couple of days, let’s say Concept Two, then Concept Three, then Concept Four. I might have 10 campaigns running.
Anything that’s working from the whole account-level audit or analysis, I’m seeing women 45+ on iOS, I’m going to take all of the winners from that kind of CBO-style approach that people do for scaling on Meta and put those into another campaign with that same structure. I would just call it a scaling campaign for an audience test.
I would put those winners in there, a maximum of three against, and just put those in campaigns until I don’t have any more. If I have five winners, I would do three in one and two in another. They’re scaling audience campaigns, and I just see if I can get more conversions out of that audience without waiting for those big broad campaigns.
So there’s a main broad campaign, and from that you extract the winners and create niche campaigns?
Q: And you mentioned the budget is usually 5x CPA, right?
Jairet Crum: Yes.
Meta is typically lower; I think with it you can get away with being lower.
But what I see with Google, and a lot of people see with Google, is that it needs more room to spend. So we usually have to do a higher target CPA, and then we have to do a higher starting budget just to get it to spend.
I think that’s another thing that steers people away from Google or YouTube specifically; it can be more expensive to start.
Q: How important is tracking for your YouTube campaign? What specific metrics tell you that a YouTube campaign is ready to scale?
Jairet Crum: We use an interesting formula that we call “Allowable CPC.”
It’s really just average order value times your conversion rate, divided by your target ROAS. That will tell you how much you can afford to pay for a click based on those specific metrics.
Allowable CPC = (AOV * CR) / ROAS
For example: if you’re paying $1.20 but your allowable CPC is $1, you’re essentially losing money on every click you get. But if your allowable CPC is $1.50, you’ve got a gap there of 30 cents. That tells us that we can scale up because we know you’ve got a lot of room.
But if it’s $1.25 and you’re already paying $1.20, you don’t have much room to scale. You can scale a little bit, but only incrementally until you reach that ceiling.
That’s one thing we look at as a proxy for whether there’s really room to scale. But of course, ROAS is the first thing we check to see whether we’re on target. If you’re getting 200% and the client wants 150%, you’ve got a lot of room to scale.
We usually do that allowable CPC analysis either in audits or when we’re further down the line, getting closer to our overall goal. We’ll look at a 30-day look-back window and compare where our target ROAS is landing versus real ROAS, and also where our real CPC is versus our allowable CPC.
But tracking is super important.
One thing I want to mention about YouTube tracking, and this is kind of crazy valuable. It’s more e-commerce focused, but Haus is a big incrementality company, and they did a YouTube study that was about five weeks long. It involved around 20-something brands. It was a really big study.
What they found about YouTube is that there’s a 3.4x discrepancy between platform data and CRM (tracker) data. And it took them five weeks to determine that. During a testing period of three weeks, it took another two weeks to get real clarity in-platform.
So if you’re looking at YouTube on a day-to-day basis, you might think that you’re doing poorly.
But a tracking tool can help feed data back in so that you get that information faster.
I wanted to point out how important that is on the tracking side, because if you’re looking at YouTube and you think: “Man, this campaign is burned; it’s no good“, you might actually have a bunch of sales.
We’ve seen our discrepancies usually close around 48 hours when comparing our internal tracking tool versus platform data. So it’s about a two-day delay, and affiliates need to make decisions on a day-to-day basis.
Not a lot of people are just going to say: “I’m just going to increase the budget and wait two days to see what happens“, because in two days, you can spend a lot.
The other thing I’ll mention, and I pointed out that YouTube is more expensive, is that they actually have a 30-day look-back window in terms of averaging out your budget, versus Meta, which has a seven-day look-back window.
When you look in Meta, and they say you won’t spend more than a certain amount on a given day, that’s based on a weekly calculation. If you say you’re going to spend $100 a day, it’ll say: “We won’t spend more than $125 on a given day, and we won’t spend more than $700 in the week.”
Well, on YouTube, because it’s Google, that’s 30 days, your campaign might underspend for two weeks straight. Let’s use $1,000 just to make it a little more scary.
You’ve got a $1,000 daily budget and it spends $200 a day for two weeks. Then all of a sudden on day 15, you’ve got $800 *14 days, you’re looking at around $11,200 that it could spend, and by its look-back window, it’s still technically on budget.
So keep track of how your budget is trending versus your actual spending. Because if there’s a big delta there, you could wake up and see that Google spent a lot of your money.
If your tracking isn’t dialed in, you might think it was done unprofitably. If your tracking is dialed in, you’ll know that it was done profitably. But regardless, you need to know when Google has those spend spikes; where are you at in terms of your economics?
100%, it’s better to have real-time data and understand exactly what’s happening in real time. As fast as possible.
Conclusion
There’s a lot to take away from this conversation with Jared, but if I had to boil it down…
YouTube isn’t just “Meta but with videos.” It’s a different platform with different user intent, different economics, and different tracking challenges.
- The CPAs are higher.
- The budgets need to be bigger.
- And that 30-day look-back window on spending? It can catch you off guard if you’re not paying attention.
But what makes it worth it is that people come to YouTube to learn and be entertained.
If your ads deliver on that, if they’re educational, mechanism-driven, and genuinely interesting, you’re not interrupting. You’re fitting right into what users already want to consume.
The key takeaways from Part 1:
- Start with a target CPA 20-30% above your actual goal, budget at 5x CPA
- Go broad first, then extract winners into niche campaigns
- Production quality matters more than ever; voiceover-only VSLs are losing ground
- Track everything, and don’t trust platform data at face value; there’s often a 2-day delay before numbers align
Coming up in Part 2, on the champion of performance marketing, Jaired and I go deeper into creative strategy, what makes a winning YouTube ad, and how to think about testing angles and hooks. You won’t want to miss it.
In the meantime, connect with Jared:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jairet-crum/
- Email: jairet@triedandtruemedia.com
But I suggest to see the whole interview on YouTube or on Spotify, sometimes is easier to understand by hearing a champion talking 🙂
Author: Julia Draghici
Julia is the CEO of CPV Lab and CPV One ad trackers. She has 15+ years experience in the software industry, from development to management. For more than 6 years she is helping marketers get the best out of their marketing campaigns by using a performant ad tracker. Passionate about entrepreneurship, business and performance marketing, Julia loves helping people!
