Call 888-757-2714

Meet Justin Ober

President of Full Circle SEM & Lead PPC Strategist

I’ve been involved in the digital landscape since the 90’s, building my first website in high school in Rochester, NY (using AOL’s absurd HTML builder that no one misses). I maintained that passion and curiosity for all things digital throughout my four years at Penn State Behrend, while studying psychology, marketing and the mostly-dead-acronym MIS (Management Information Systems for anyone that remembers that 90’s buzzword).

I sought better weather after school and after getting settled in Fort Lauderdale, FL found a job at FastFloors.com. This was my first real experience in the high stakes game of digital marketing – I was hired to manage approximately $100k/month in digital ad spend between:

Google Ads (AdWords back then)
Bing Ads (MSN AdCenter back then)
Yahoo (which was actually a big platform until they went through a dozen rebrands, including being named Gemini for awhile… which is now the name of Google’s main AI Engine… go figure)
Affiliate programs (anyone remember LinkShare?)
And shopping comparison engines (Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, to name a few)

High-Stakes Digital Marketing: The FastFloors Era

The trouble with spending $100k/month on the internet, in 2007, to sell flooring (which is not cheap) – is that no one converts on the website. You spend all of the ad dollars online and generate all of the revenue over the phone, creating a huge disconnect in the analytics. Connecting calls to digital ad spend became our Holy Grail. We went through the same iterations as most companies back then (asking customers, using coupon codes, using unique identifiers like a user ID, etc)… none of them were particularly effective. We eventually did solve the problem and it’s not how you may think – modern call tracking with dynamic number insertion didn’t really exist yet (or at least it wasn’t popular), so we created a “verification” step for all phone orders. This is actually still an effective method today: we spend money online, we track the users session and store it, then when we get a phone order we tell the customer they have to verify the “terms and conditions” and review the sale via an email we’re going to send. In that email we would include a link that stored all the parameters of the sale, so when the user clicked it (presumably on the same computer they were browsing on) we would then read their cookies, combine it with the sales data in the URL and (as far as the search engines were concerned) “convert” the customer and complete the sale. It was a beautiful system and it worked fantastically – overnight our revenue attribution increased from about 30% (collecting web sales only) to well over 80%. It was cause for a celebration.

Not too long after, the housing market crashed and remodeling took a huge hit, so I eventually opted to move to the agency side, working at USO Networks (which eventually became Domain Holdings) in Delray Beach, FL. Domain Holdings was a very cool, modern tech incubator + traditional digital marketing agency – the parent company and legal entity was actually Vandalay Industries (Seinfeld fans?)… So yes, I literally got paychecks from Vandalay Industries.

Agency Leadership & The “Vandalay Industries” Years

I was hired to assist in running the agency side and was quickly promoted to run it, and ultimately promoted to VP Operations. It was a big title, but still a small agency, so my actual role was far less glamorous: I was a hardcore PPC manager. I lived in Google Ads, AdCenter, Yahoo and Omniture (now Adobe Analytics). This was a great fit for me, as many of Domain Holdings clients were lead generation companies – and they had a familiar problem: linking phone calls to digital ad spend. At this time Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) was becoming more popular, led by companies like Mongoose Metrics, KeyMetrics, Infinity, etc… We were using KeyMetrics and I continued to hone my skills in connecting offline conversion data to digital ad spend. It’s also worth noting that I was able to successfully implement the system we used on FastFloors.com with multiple ecom companies. That system is likely still patentable today if anyone wants to go through the trouble (I accept kickbacks).

At Domain Holdings I worked with a variety of different clients, but we managed to carve out a bit of a niche in the behavioral health space. Addiction treatment centers in particular became our highest concentration of clients. For those that don’t know, even in 2010 addiction treatment was one of the most expensive verticals in Google Ads. It was insanely competitive and like many complex, high-ticket products and services: most conversions occurred offline. This opened the door for me in the behavioral health space and that experience would eventually pay huge dividends.

The problem with Domain Holdings and working for industry titans like John Ferber and Chad Folkening (look’em up) is that they weren’t really interested in scaling an agency: they were looking for the next billion dollar exit. We did little to build the agency and lost most clients to attrition and I saw the writing on the wall. When the time came for me to be let go (yes, I was technically fired from Domain Holdings), a close friend asked the obvious question: “If they’re just letting the agency business go anyway, why don’t you try to buy it out?” I have to mention this piece, because he reminds me constantly that technically my company was his idea… and his dog was technically my first hire (Roxy, Director of Naps, RIP). The idea to go back to Domain Holdings and negotiate a buyout of the remaining clients, may ultimately be the single greatest piece of advice I ever receive. Just don’t tell Ryan.

I had actually already started a business, but it was more or less dormant. Ober Enterprises, LLC., was more of a shell than a business. I had created it for a side project with the developer that helped build the offline conversion tracking at FastFloors.com (he was the brains of that operation, to be clear). We had thought about patenting and selling the methodology, but life, careers and families caused that to fizzle out. Nonetheless, it now proved to eliminate at least one step I would have to take to officially start my business. I already had an EIN and a registered entity, so it was easy enough to scour SEM related domains, pick one, register the DBA, create a logo and color scheme, write all the content for a website, build the website, set up a merchant account, set up some method of accounting (Kashoo anyone?), get business cards, create ALL the agency accounts I’d need to actually manage Google Ads, Analytics, Bing, Facebook, etc… etc… etc… Easy-peasy. Not stressful at all.

Armed with a very small book of business, a hastily written website and a dog that slept a lot: Full Circle SEM was now fully operational.

Building Full Circle SEM: National Scale with Local Precision

The next 15 years are a bit of a whirlwind story of trial and error, but from day one I really set out to accomplish one thing: say yes. When clients asked if I could do something, help with something, fix something – I would just say yes. Whatever a client needed I would figure it out, hope to impress and ideally grow their services, or do enough that they would refer us more business. That philosophy still holds today. It’s admittedly harder to do at scale, but I’ve never rushed FCSEM’s growth. I wanted to ensure every client was being properly taken care of. Today, while raising a family and now working from St. Augustine, FL we still have some of our original clients, and many of the clients we’ve lost over the years – still refer us business. I think that says a lot about who we are and the experience our clients have working with us. You can’t make every account work, but clients appreciate the honesty and transparency in our approach. So even if things don’t work out, there’s usually a respectful parting – and dozens of clients have ultimately come back.

A National Leader in Behavioral Health & Lead Generation

While we can work with any business we clearly specialize in lead generation – and more specifically, behavioral health. Our reputation has continued to grow in the addiction treatment and mental health services and we routinely manage $500k-$1M/month in behavioral health ad spend alone. Since 2010 at Domain Holdings to date (March 2026) I’ve easily spent $100M on addiction treatment ads and contributed to filling over 10k beds. I don’t consider FCSEM a niche behavioral health company, but we certainly specialize in the industry, and few competitors have as much experience as I do in that space.

PPC is at the core of what we do and although we’ve grown to offer basically every ancillary service – I still consider myself primarily a “PPC guy.” I love numbers and PPC is all math. Over the last 15 years the methodologies have changed, the tools have evolved, but at its core: it’s still buying web traffic and analyzing it – rinse-and-repeat. We started with KeyMetrics and manual Excel reports using VLOOKUP’s to manipulate data and today we have CallTrackingMetrics, GA4, and every ad platform data warehoused in BigQuery for script side data manipulation with LookerStudio as a frontend visualization tool – in addition, all our data and even our project management system is visible to a custom AI Agent we’ve built in-house. Needless to say, we’ve come a long way… and I believe we still have a long way to go.