Stop losing revenue after the click! Get your free conversion audit at https://www.tiereleven.com/cro/service
Are you optimizing your ads but ignoring what happens after the click? Most brands obsess over traffic acquisition while leaving massive revenue opportunities hidden inside their websites, forms, and customer journeys.
In this third episode of our CRO series with Ned MacPherson, head of CRO at Tier 11, we get into why CRO is really revenue optimization and why copying a competitor’s “pretty” site is a dangerous shortcut.
Ned introduces the AI feature we built that scours the web every couple of hours to show high-end shoppers exactly how the price compares to the market, without them having to leave the page.
We also get into something wilder: an AI agent that runs live pricing experiments across thousands of SKUs on its own. We talk about generative engine optimization (GEO) and how to structure your site so LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT actually recommend your website.
What you’ll learn:
- Why brand search campaigns can hide true marketing performance
- How cutting Amazon ad spend increased sales volume
- The importance of tracking blended CAC and MER
- Why channel-specific ROAS targets limit growth
- How Meta creates demand that Google and Amazon capture later
- Using native advertising to unlock colder audiences
- How connected TV supports multi-channel growth
- How proactive agency strategy builds client trust
- Why mature brands need diversified acquisition channels
Mentioned in the Episode:
Part 1 of the Case Study: https://perpetualtraffic.com/podcast/episode-791-5-missed-forecasts-then-one-budget-shift-then-4-straight-hits/
Tier 11’s Data Suite: https://www.tiereleven.com/what-we-do/data-suite
Partner With Tier 11 Marketing Experts: https://www.tiereleven.com/apply
Listen to this episode on your favorite podcast channel:
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We appreciate your support!
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Connect with Ralph Burns:
- LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ralphburns
- Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/ralphhburns/
- Hire Tier 11 – https://www.tiereleven.com/apply-now
Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Perpetual Traffic?
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READ THE TRANSCRIPT:
From $2.5M to $4M a Month. Ad Spend Barely Changed. Here’s Why
00:00:00:00 – 00:00:22:04
Ralph
Conventional wisdom says efficiency degrades as you scale more spend. Higher CPL. Higher ancak. Lower margin. Well, this account has now disproven that completely across eight consecutive months. If you’re suffering from this same thing. This episode is for you.
00:00:22:04 – 00:00:27:11
Ralph
the agency was spending what, 60,000 $70,000 a month on Amazon?
00:00:27:12 – 00:00:37:21
Ricardo
We just spent 10% of what they used to spend, but sell 60% more on Amazon simply because.
00:00:37:23 – 00:01:05:20
Ralph
Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic Podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns, founder and CEO of tier 11, and I am super excited to have a great guest on today who is going to give us the next stage of a journey that you’ve all been on. A few months back, we published a case study on an account, a premium DTC brand who shall remain nameless.
00:01:05:22 – 00:01:34:09
Ralph
And we did that case study. We’ll leave links in the show notes for that. Myself and Scott from Wicked Reports talked about that. And they had suffered from five straight missed months of forecasts until they met this guy on today’s show. And pretty excited to have him on. So this is part two of that sort of two part series, and maybe we’ll have a part three, which we’re pretty excited about.
00:01:34:09 – 00:01:56:06
Ralph
So we did say we would come back and have a follow up episode here. And that’s what today’s episode is all about. So welcome to the show. For the second time. Gross strategist extraordinaire from tier 11, responsible for all of this. All I do is talk about it and sort of take credit for it. But you’re the guy who should be taking credit for it.
00:01:56:06 – 00:02:00:18
Ralph
You and the team. Welcome back to Perpetual Traffic, Ricardo. Pals.
00:02:00:20 – 00:02:03:09
Ricardo
Thank you for having me. I’m excited.
00:02:03:11 – 00:02:24:05
Ralph
Yeah. Now I’m going to give a warning to everyone on the disclaimer. Ricardo is one of the most humble people on earth, so don’t take his humble manner as anything less than extreme competence and confidence in what he’s doing. So I’m going to be sort of your hype man today, if that’s okay, because that’s sort of my job.
00:02:24:05 – 00:02:48:06
Ralph
But anyway, take us through this journey because we did goes through this on that previous episode. Like I said, I will leave the links in the show notes for that. If you haven’t watched it already. And of course, you can watch this in full animation of exactly how we did all this with charts and all kinds of cool graphics from our production team over at perpetual traffic.com/youtube.
00:02:48:06 – 00:03:03:06
Ralph
Check that out for sure. So give us a little bit of a journey here, because it’s been about 12 months, if I’m not mistaken, since we started working with this premium DTC pet brand, obviously in the e-commerce space, give you a give your take on it?
00:03:03:08 – 00:03:23:22
Ricardo
Definitely. I wish I could say that it was a success from day one, but it wasn’t because I usually take some time to truly understand the business was a quite complex business. They had a lot of advertising channels, so we started working with them about 12 months ago. Back then they had multiple months where they missed their forecasts.
00:03:23:22 – 00:03:48:10
Ricardo
It’s a seasonal business, by the way, which is why they have those monthly forecasts. Watch means that one month a certain anchor can be good, a different month, it might not be so great, but that’s all due to that seasonality. So initially when we started working with them, we only that meta ads and TikTok ads, and that represented for about 20% of their total advertising budget.
00:03:48:12 – 00:04:10:07
Ricardo
So that was the first challenge, right, that we only controlled about 20%. There was a different agency that controlled Google, Bing, Amazon, and then they had some other channels that they did internally. So in the beginning, of course, you need to build trust. So we just focus on meta, just focus on TikTok. Try to do what we could to improve those channels.
00:04:10:09 – 00:04:39:01
Ricardo
But the difficulty was that we couldn’t really use top line metrics yet, because we only controlled about 20% of the ad spend. So even though we started, educating them on the metrics, they should be tracking the importance of looking at everything holistically. Realistically, we only control meta and TikTok, and I don’t think we are in a position yet to dictate what the other agency should be doing.
00:04:39:03 – 00:05:04:17
Ricardo
So that took some time to gain that trust. Maybe about 1 to 2 months. But when buy pretty quickly. So we won their Google business, their Amazon business and Bing. So that moment in time we controlled more than half of their advertising spend. And that’s truly when we could start to make a bigger impact, bigger decisions, and start to move budgets around between the channels.
00:05:04:19 – 00:05:37:12
Ricardo
And then within 1 or 2 months, we introduced native ads. And then later in February we introduced CTV as well. So this moment to our, maintaining about seven channels, seven advertising channels. They work with affiliates on their side. But that’s essentially how it all started and how I progressed through the month. And what each month they started believing in us more, we get more and more trust.
00:05:37:12 – 00:06:10:09
Ricardo
They started becoming more comfortable with measuring based on top line metrics alone. So in the beginning, they were used to looking at every single channel individually. So they had channel specific targets. So there was a certain market target for meta, a certain target for TikTok and a target for Google and which, as you know, never works because the channels behave differently and Google often just steals credit from the other channels, which was the case here as well.
00:06:10:11 – 00:06:45:06
Ricardo
So over time, we got rid of all of that and we just started tracking total ad spend, total revenue of course, total units sold, which in this instance, it’s almost all from new customers. And then we had our single Northstar metrics. Metric. Sorry, which was Ncac or the cost per unit for this business. And then we started moving the budgets around between between the channels, improving the strategy for each specific channel just to move that single metric in the right direction.
00:06:45:08 – 00:07:11:21
Ralph
Yeah. The I think the part to this, I don’t think I ever really touched on in the first episode of This Is the Trust Factor. And I had forgotten that we only started with just two channels, and now we basically control everything with the exception of obviously their affiliates. We’ve got a really strong affiliate network, which is great, which can also be tracked through, that year 11 data suite, which is really sweet.
00:07:11:23 – 00:07:53:21
Ralph
And also Amazon like Amazon was spend was fairly high. Google’s spend was fairly high. We weren’t controlling those things. And I think as we had, you know, sarcastically referred to in the first episode, is that the agency that was running those ads was taking inappropriate credit for the work that was being done on the other side. And, Ricardo’s chuckling now, if you know, watching that on, YouTube because it’s so this is the story of our lives when we’re running alongside another agency and we had obviously this is all these channels are running their business.
00:07:53:21 – 00:08:19:02
Ralph
So I think as a business owner specifically, if I’m thinking about giving a certain subset of my marketing and my lifeblood that drives all my revenue to an outside agency, I kind of want them to prove themselves first. You know what I mean? And I don’t blame them for saying, oh, well, Ricardo, here’s everything. Like, show what you can do over here.
00:08:19:04 – 00:08:36:20
Ralph
They were a little suspect. I remember in some of the sales calls originally, they were a little suspect of what the other agencies were doing. We talked about that a bit, but, you know, without denigrating them. But how did you kind of establish that trust? And that’s a big thing. And I think if you ask any tier 11 client like, why do they stay with tier 11?
00:08:36:20 – 00:09:00:16
Ralph
Because I trust them. And it’s that’s a hard thing to establish, especially when you only control a small portion of the overall. Like how did you establish that? How did you get to that point where they’re finally like, all right, we want you guys to do more. We see maybe what you’re doing is distributing to other channels, like, how did that whole process evolve?
00:09:00:18 – 00:09:33:16
Ricardo
It definitely takes time and it requires a lot of repetition. Luckily there’s clients, they’re pretty good marketers themselves. So over time, the guy used to us using, terms like Ncac and more, explaining the importance of not using channel specific targets and looking at top line metrics and channels logistically. So just took a couple of weeks of repeating the same things over and over again, trying to show small wins, whatever they could, or we couldn’t really show the big wins.
00:09:33:16 – 00:10:01:05
Ricardo
Plus we only control a small portion of the ads and but it was really about repetition. I think we were also a little bit lucky in the sense that the other agency wasn’t that proactive. So we were really proactive with new ideas that went beyond just media and TikTok. So anything that could help their business overall, we would just discuss and talk about, so that was the second thing that I think helped gain their trust.
00:10:01:07 – 00:10:20:22
Ricardo
And then over time, I think they just realized that the old agency wasn’t proactive. They weren’t really, moving in the right direction to have been working with them for a longer time. And since they had not been hitting their forecasts, I think they just eventually decided to let them go and move those channels over to us.
00:10:21:00 – 00:10:43:17
Ricardo
I don’t quite remember if we already discussed what we planned on doing with those channels or if that came after, I might have just planted some seeds like, hey, this is what you can do with those channels. And I might have already looked at the fact that a lot of conversions came from brand terms. There was the case for Amazon, for Google and Bing.
00:10:43:19 – 00:11:11:17
Ricardo
So you can of course point that out like suddenly or like thoughtfully in the beginning, to kind of let them think about it and really think about, does it make sense that we spent that, that amount of money on brand campaigns? If it’s only grabbing that last click and it’s not really creating new demand? So I think all that combined led to us winning their trust and just getting those additional channels.
00:11:11:19 – 00:11:44:10
Ralph
And I think that’s proactive proactivity is is so important. I mean, it’s it’s a believe it or not, it’s a core value of 211. It’s the third one is matter of fact on the five because it’s so important. And I think that’s how you do establish trust. You know, I always just tell my kids, like, I’m not going to praise you for emptying the dishwasher, because if I have to ask you seven times to do it, you’re being a pain in the ass.
00:11:44:12 – 00:12:03:21
Ralph
But what I will do is praise you if you never get asked or you do it on your own, in your proactive, literally. Like, that’s like, how do they establish trust? Like that’s a sort of a corny example, but it’s true. Then then they finally realize, like, wow, if I actually am to the dishwasher, dad is going to give me an attaboy, you know, which sort of declined over time.
00:12:03:21 – 00:12:26:11
Ralph
But anyway, that’s just bad parenting. But the proactivity, I’ve seen you in a lot of cases do stuff that’s like above and beyond, which is like we have an agreement that we sign with a client and it says we’re going to do X, Y, and Z in that client agreement. And then you say, well, what I really need is I need a new landing page for this particular office.
00:12:26:11 – 00:12:47:23
Ralph
And then you go out and create it on your own, like that’s proactivity. And because you’re trying to work in the best interest of the client because you realize, all right, it’s not only the right thing to do, but it’s also something that’s probably hampering my ability to be able to get good results. And I think a lot of that is the kind of stuff that does establish trust.
00:12:48:01 – 00:13:13:23
Ralph
You did mention two other words here, which I do want to make mention of here on the show is that Ncac and Murr, those are two of our marketing performance indicators. And if you haven’t picked up that marketing performance indicator spreadsheet as of yet or download, I don’t know what a perpetual traffic.com, for example, or cheer 11.com/npi and grab that because that is cost to acquire a new customer and media efficiency ratio.
00:13:14:01 – 00:13:36:11
Ralph
And those are two very, very important numbers. Those are the two sort of Northstar metrics for most of our clients here. And it’s interesting that I don’t know how you did this, but you kind of showed we’ve talked about this many times on the show, is that meta is where the awareness happens, like the awareness of your brand, like, oh my gosh, I’m a pet owner.
00:13:36:11 – 00:14:02:10
Ralph
I have this problem. I didn’t realize there was a solution to this problem, and there was a great product that could solve that problem I didn’t know I had, of course, this five stages of awareness based upon, you know, all the marketing books. The point of this is that you are creating that. But then you also said, well, a lot of the search terms that you are getting the click, getting the credit, are people searching for your brand name or the name of the product.
00:14:02:12 – 00:14:35:08
Ralph
And I think that unto itself is such a such a major revelation to a lot of companies, because they look at meta and say, oh, I’m gonna to shut off that ad because it’s not getting any conversions. Well, is it or is it not? It might be somewhere else. The point of this is that you were able to do that and sort of establish that level of trust, and I kind of assume that the Google and the bottom funnel in the Amazon stuff that I know we can’t really track keywords and Amazon inside data suite, but you can sort of see that in the Google account.
00:14:35:08 – 00:14:44:11
Ralph
Was that like part of your like, hey, this is actually kind of working together. The channels are actually feeding off each other. Was that part of that strategy there?
00:14:44:13 – 00:15:06:09
Ricardo
Exactly. Yeah. So it started with Amazon. When I looked at the Amazon account, when we got access to it, I realized that 80% or more conversions came from branded terms, and they spent a good amount of money on Amazon campaigns. They did some awareness campaigns. They did some non brand campaigns. But those campaigns truly didn’t perform that well.
00:15:06:11 – 00:15:28:21
Ricardo
And the brand campaigns made it look like a great channel. So that was the first thing I wanted to do was just take away, a big portion of their budget and move that over to meta. My hypothesis was that meta is actually, their most efficient channel. It’s creating the most demand that’s causing people to search for the brands, because that’s a higher ticket item.
00:15:28:21 – 00:15:50:14
Ricardo
People do their research, right. They compare products, they Google for the product to see if it’s available on Amazon, see what the price is. So that’s how they end up searching for the brand name on Amazon. But that’s not where they start, right? So that was the first as we took, a big budget away from Amazon, moved it over to meta.
00:15:50:16 – 00:16:15:22
Ricardo
The Amazon units just didn’t move at all. And over time they only grow. And that was the initial task that was started. And maybe like eight months ago, which we continued doing up until like March. And at the end of the day, we cut Amazon’s ad spend by about 91%. I think the unit sold increased by 63%.
00:16:16:00 – 00:16:27:18
Ricardo
So we just spent 10% of what they used to spend. But sell 60% more on Amazon simply because all of that budget went over to meta and other top of funnel channels.
00:16:27:20 – 00:16:56:06
Ralph
Yeah, that’s such a basic like you and I know this stuff like the back of our hands, like it’s obvious, but I find this it’s staggering to to well, I guess maybe that’s the reason why we’re doing this show, educate people on this. But think about like how we all buy and we buy based upon whether it’s something that we didn’t know that we needed, like in this particular case is DTC, you know, high end or a pet brand.
00:16:56:08 – 00:17:31:08
Ralph
Didn’t know that I actually there was a solution for it. But then I find out about it on the interruption channels on the meta, Instagram, TikTok, to a certain degree, even now, obviously, we’ll talk about programmatic native and and connected TV. You find out about it and you discover it there. And then the research starts and the last click, you know, attributed sale typically will go to one of those bottom of funnel platforms like Amazon, like Google.
00:17:31:08 – 00:18:03:11
Ralph
And it’s probably a Google search or an Amazon search for the brand name. And why overspend on that? And you found that complete inefficiency there and reducing the budgets on both of those platforms. I think you said it was 91% on Amazon. The agency was spending what, 60,000, $70,000 a month on Amazon, but 60,000. Okay. And then now it’s 5 or 6000 a month just to kind of maintain and stave off the competition.
00:18:03:11 – 00:18:04:08
Ralph
Correct me if I’m wrong.
00:18:04:09 – 00:18:10:15
Ricardo
Yeah. It’s about 2000 per month actually just for some some brand protection and that’s it.
00:18:10:17 – 00:18:32:13
Ralph
It’s unbelievable. So think about that. Like you don’t go to Amazon searching for a product. I mean you might you know in this niche you might look for those higher value keywords. You might Google for a higher value keyword. In this nature, we’re not going to talk about what those keywords are, but I always use the example in the personal injury law space, which is sort of an extreme example because the keywords are so damn expensive.
00:18:32:13 – 00:18:54:18
Ralph
Is personal injury lawyer or car accident lawyer. Providence, Rhode Island is. That’s a couple hundred dollars for that keyword to click, but the name of the law firm should be 10 or $20 in that range. It’s like, you know, Kevin Landry Law, you know, Providence, for example, actually a former client of ours here for we did SEO for them for years and years.
00:18:54:20 – 00:19:11:19
Ralph
But anyway, the point is this is that you shouldn’t have to spend a whole lot. And so you’re finding all of that overspend on the bottom of funnel platforms was unnecessary. And why don’t we shift that top of funnel, create more awareness. So then people just organically find you on Amazon and on Google.
00:19:11:21 – 00:19:37:22
Ricardo
Quote unquote, the easy test in the beginning, because, meta kind of operates as top of funnel, middle funnel, also portion bottom of funnel for this brand. So we have had a lot of freedom and just room to play within this channel. But over time, over time we started running the more difficult tests meaning introducing native ads and CTV, especially CTV, because you don’t have clicks.
00:19:38:00 – 00:20:01:02
Ricardo
So what is brands? Because it’s a longer buying cycle, testing those channels efficiently, is even more difficult because you need to let it run for X amount of weeks or months, maybe, and truly don’t make any other significant changes across all the channels. To be able to see the test result of introducing a new channel like that.
00:20:01:04 – 00:20:20:23
Ricardo
So luckily, by that time we’ve had enough trust that we could run the test and afford to spend, let’s say, 10% of our total marketing budget on a completely new channel, let it run for 2 or 3 months and then see what the impact is on the top line metrics. But that is a lot more difficult to pull off for some other brands, right?
00:20:21:01 – 00:20:49:18
Ralph
Right. Yeah. I mean, this was all of this and I think we’ve said this, before in previous episodes, like you didn’t cut that spend from 60,000 down to 2 or 3001 months. It happened over gradually over 4 or 5 months in most cases. And also when you start to reallocating that budget back to meta, you didn’t dump it all in all at once, or on native actually was the first, which is maybe we can explain that sort of shift.
00:20:49:18 – 00:21:22:10
Ralph
There. Some people might not even know what native actually is, but it’s very, very top of funnel. But like that shift didn’t happen all of a sudden. Explain that shift from bottom of funnel channels, branded keyword searches. You know what you’re overpaying for to more top of funnel, starting with maybe the native side. And explain that transition, how he worked with our, programmatic team and how you directed this whole strategic shift, which was obviously transformative and continues to be for the client.
00:21:22:12 – 00:21:45:08
Ricardo
So I would say it starts with the initial learnings, the initial insights, meaning when we decreased the budget on Amazon and then after that, Google and Bing, just mostly on those brand campaigns. We moved that over to meta, mostly top of funnel campaigns. We actually saw demand for those brand terms grow on Google, Bing and Amazon.
00:21:45:10 – 00:22:07:05
Ricardo
So that formed the hypothesis that we should invest more in top of funnel channels. And of course, we don’t want to pump all of our budget into a single channel. This brand really has good brand equity. They are around on so many channels. They run, many different videos. You have a lot of influencers talking about them.
00:22:07:07 – 00:22:33:16
Ricardo
So at some point we started thinking, okay, beyond meta, what other platforms can we invest in? By that time we could also see how cold our traffic was from meta was about 50 to 55%. Neo was a percentage that we could see inside our tier 11 data suite. Initially, of course, during onboarding, we don’t have that historic data, so it takes some time to get that up and running.
00:22:33:18 – 00:23:00:20
Ricardo
But by that time we had that data and I was actually looking for channels that I thought could be even cooler and could go up to 70, 80% new visits. Because the more we started spending on meta, it didn’t actually grow colder, aside from some awareness campaigns, which I’ll touch on later. So that’s when we started thinking about running native ads, knowing that historically that traffic seems to be pretty cold.
00:23:00:22 – 00:23:13:20
Ricardo
After we introduced that in November, that was exactly what we saw. We saw the highest new visit percentage, even higher than TikTok, and we saw the cheapest ICBMs. So the cost per new visit.
00:23:13:22 – 00:23:39:15
Ralph
All metrics that matter and are really important. And it’s interesting that no matter how hard you tried on meta, you couldn’t get you still had a certain percentage, a high percentage, still 50% somewhat of people who had already visited the site. And you could measure that by, estimated cost per new visit. We do that inside of tier 11 data space, sort of a secondary metric.
00:23:39:15 – 00:24:03:09
Ralph
But like, man, I got to get more people cold to this thing. I got to go out wider. And meta is historically nose in Google. They’re going to try and get the people that are already familiar with the brand. They’re trying to get the lowest hanging fruit as much as possible. Somebody who’s watched the video, it’s guys have really good video content, obviously very top of funnel, middle of funnel that convinces people some long form videos.
00:24:03:09 – 00:24:33:00
Ralph
Obviously they use their affiliates, they use a lot of sort of very low fi, kind of, grainy videos in many cases, obviously images, some other sorts of things. So there’s a very good creative diversification that top of funnel. But still you couldn’t like get more than like that 40, 50% being cold traffic or new visits. But when you shifted some of the budget over to native and I remember when we did this, it’s like October and it was October, November, I think we did in October.
00:24:33:00 – 00:24:55:06
Ralph
And then we started like, when are we going to see results? And it was coming right into like Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And we started to see, all right, the percentage of new visits to the site all of a sudden started to creep up. And like that’s a correlation between the channels and you can only sort of see that if you have a master database and master dashboard to be able to understand how all the channels intermingle.
00:24:55:06 – 00:25:07:08
Ralph
And that’s so I assume that’s what you guys were doing inside the account. And then once that happened, like, wow, we’re on to something more. And then what was what was sort of the next steps after that?
00:25:07:10 – 00:25:32:11
Ricardo
Yeah. That’s exactly how it happened. And another reason why we started off with native ads is that there are still clicks, so you can still track clicks as opposed to CTV, for example. So that’s what we started off. Well, it did take some time to truly see the impact on our top line metrics. Since the regular buying cycle was already pretty long just running what the minutes.
00:25:32:13 – 00:25:59:02
Ricardo
And this was an event called our channel. We’ve never advertised on the channel before, so it did take more than a month to truly see the impact on the top line metrics. But that essentially built more trust into the fact that we needed to invest even more in top of funnel channels. They have really good videos, they, work with have a lot of partner videos and influencer videos.
00:25:59:04 – 00:26:28:09
Ricardo
It’s a very high quality, even videos that make sense to run on TV, on connected TV. So that eventually led us to trialing out CTV in Q1, exact same process. So we launched the channel. Don’t really expect too much of it in that first month. Don’t really care about attribution or whatever attribution. CTV has and we decided to run that test for at least like two months.
00:26:28:11 – 00:26:50:12
Ricardo
And only after those roughly two months we started to see the impact again on the top line metrics. So the more budget we, moved over to the top of our channels and the more we pulled away from our bottom of funnel channels, the top line, top line metrics just kept improving and improving and improving.
00:26:50:13 – 00:27:15:02
Ralph
So for, the those who don’t know, native advertising is considered taboola or outbrain. They’re both self-serve platforms, and they’re those ads that you see, you know, all over the place. Sponsored by our brains, sponsored by Taboola. I think we’re exclusively taboola if I’m not mistaken. Yes. Correct. Yeah. Right. So it was a good test. You get a few clicks there because you’re still like on the web.
00:27:15:04 – 00:27:34:13
Ralph
And then the shift mark, I forget now February. March was around March for like all right, well let’s layer on the next level of this where we know we’re not going to get any clicks, which is connected TV. If I get my my dates right here, explain what connected TV is to folks.
00:27:34:15 – 00:28:01:11
Ricardo
So connected TV is all videos of course. So we mostly run 15 second videos, which are displayed on all of the what I call those channels, like your Netflix, Amazon Prime, those types of channels. We actually tried incorporating like a QR code that people could scan. But over time we realized that most people don’t really scan the code.
00:28:01:12 – 00:28:25:17
Ricardo
They might watch the video, which of course they do, because there’s a positive effect on the top line metrics. But most people just watch. They don’t really interact with an ad. What? It’s at least for us. What about higher production? That’s not the organic, authentic videos that you see on TikTok or meta. It’s definitely a little bit more high production.
00:28:25:19 – 00:28:46:09
Ricardo
And it’s mostly or in this case that was shot by their influencers, their partners. So they just share the products and the product over to those people. They record the footage, they will send over a script, and get back like a professionally done video. That makes sense to run. CTV.
00:28:46:11 – 00:29:06:15
Ralph
So that was sort of that next stage. Tell me about the budgets between I think it was March, the decision was made to go CTV like I’m gonna tell us about like you kept going with the native ads and Taboola or you shifted some budget over to connected TV. Tell me about sort of how that all evolved.
00:29:06:17 – 00:29:39:00
Ricardo
So we kept our budget on native ads. We just ended up freeing up more budget from Amazon and a bit of a reduction on Google and Bing. So that freed up some budget for CTV plus because we were doing so well. Our budget grow over time, so we have more budget to spend, which I would then recommend we’d allocate to like a new channel also because as mentioned, they are such a strong brand, I think it’s beneficial to be on, a lot of channels as opposed to just a single channel.
00:29:39:02 – 00:30:07:17
Ricardo
Also because the creative formats are different on each channel, right? So native we run advertorials which are long form articles on CTV. It’s completely different on TikTok it’s completely different. People have that preferred platforms. So that’s just another way of reaching completely new audiences. Maybe, maybe people that watch more TV but don’t necessarily interact on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok.
00:30:07:19 – 00:30:19:07
Ricardo
So that’s an additional channel that feeds kind of the machine and finds new audiences that will then start to see our retargeting ads on the other channels as well.
00:30:19:09 – 00:30:40:19
Ralph
Did you I don’t think I’ve ever asked you this. Did you notice an uptick in Google brand searches when you added connected TV? And these are like those ads that a lot of people want to click through on. Like I was watching Fubo, Fubo is my channel because it has a local sports and I, I saw like some of our ads actually on there just recently.
00:30:40:19 – 00:30:59:14
Ralph
So I was like, wow, there it is. But I didn’t click, but I it was good. It was obviously it was a video. It was very short form is like 15 seconds. So but I mean, I’m, I don’t own, a pet, so I’m not in that niche. So I didn’t go and Google it. But did you see an uptick looking at the analytics?
00:30:59:14 – 00:31:11:06
Ralph
Because that’s what I would sort of think. But then obviously I would then be Retargeted or I now or now I’m going to be in your meta audiences to talk about those two correlations. There.
00:31:11:08 – 00:31:35:13
Ricardo
So we did see a strong correlation with the heavy investment into top of funnel channels, not necessarily with CTV. Reason being is because we launched that channel with, I think, 6% of our total advertising budget. And so there might have been a little bit too small to measure the impact just on the brand searches. Also because that was right before their peak season.
00:31:35:18 – 00:32:04:15
Ricardo
So brand searches increased naturally also because we scale up our budgets. So there were at least three factors at play, which made it too difficult for me to say, okay, the increased brand searches definitely came from the increase or the investment. And CTV, we could show that, during like the winter months when they weren’t in our peak season, when we, moved their budget away from like the Amazon, Google I’m being to mostly meta and native ads.
00:32:04:17 – 00:32:17:22
Ricardo
That’s when we did see an increase in brand searches, even though their season was, went down. We couldn’t really tie that directly to CTV just because of those other factors.
00:32:18:00 – 00:32:43:01
Ralph
So I gonna throw some stats at, in to tell me if these are accurate. So by April of 2026, we as we added in, they started with us June, July of 2025, we added in native well use. You actually started to get the Google and Amazon and Bing business in and around like.
00:32:43:06 – 00:32:44:04
Ricardo
Overall in.
00:32:44:05 – 00:33:10:12
Ralph
October. Okay. And then we added in. So you got that. So you can now control that spend and reduce a lot of that overspend on branded keywords. Remember branded keywords or branded searches that you’re paying for. You’re probably going to get organically on Google first off, but you shouldn’t be overspending on the name of your brand name of your product name of your business.
00:33:10:14 – 00:33:46:03
Ralph
You want to spend as little as possible there, scooped that up. So you’re shifting that budget over to meta. You’re putting it into now taboola inside of like October, November. And then you add in connected TV March April time frame. And by April, the cost to acquire a customer now is like less than $120, if I’m not mistaken, which was, I think, one of their most efficient months ever on record.
00:33:46:05 – 00:34:07:08
Ricardo
It was. Yeah. That just double check. We introduced CTV in February, if I remember, by April we’ve gotten at least two months of running CTV. So I think that was another contributing factor to the amazing results in April. That was, I think, their best, efficiency to date. And at the same time, we could scale up as well.
00:34:07:08 – 00:34:11:08
Ricardo
So the total unit sold was also at like the peak point.
00:34:11:10 – 00:34:44:21
Ralph
Yeah. Like total units sold. Best ever. By June you’re up 59% year over year. Yeah, but the cost per cost to acquire a customer down overall 3%, like, since the April timeframe. Best months in the the history of the account. I mean, all everything sort of is pointing to this because the growth strategist U has been figuring out this thing that we call the growth diagnostic for 8 or 9 months now and sort of reallocating.
00:34:44:21 – 00:35:04:12
Ralph
I sure look at you is like, you know, shifting all the pieces on the, you know, on the chessboard here, like how you’re actually going to do it all. And then the implementation is done by obviously help with our creative team. We’ve got the data team, we’ve got obviously our programmatic team. We’ve got, you know, the media buyers who during the day to day media buying.
00:35:04:12 – 00:35:20:06
Ralph
But you’re like that guy that’s shifting it all around. Like that’s the job of the growth strategist. Correct me if I’m wrong, even though you probably wouldn’t say it. You probably say it was the team’s effort. But that’s okay. But that’s my interpretation. Correct me if I’m wrong now.
00:35:20:06 – 00:35:40:07
Ricardo
That’s right. That’s at least one of my tasks. I see that is kind of twofold so far. Client like this. It has a lot of channels. There’s a lot to move around. Right? There’s always the question, what if we have an additional 50 K to spend? What channel do we push it to. And then there is the channel specific strategy.
00:35:40:07 – 00:36:10:10
Ricardo
Right. So that always or sometimes also needs adjusting. For example for meta at some point it’s sort of getting warmer and warmer to traffic potentially because we introduced native ads and CTV. So that was now there was a bigger audience to retarget for meta. So I think that caused it to go after warmer audiences. So at that point we kind of I talked with the the team, the media buyer discussed ideas on how we could make meta cooler again.
00:36:10:12 – 00:36:31:08
Ricardo
And that’s when we started introducing all our campaign types, optimizing for landing page views, testing those types of things, which I will probably never do in the beginning. One. Right. Due to the situation and the fact that we introduced as all the channels and the traffic was getting warmer, that kind of created the perfect mix for us to explore.
00:36:31:14 – 00:36:33:13
Ricardo
Other campaign types.
00:36:33:15 – 00:36:59:03
Ralph
Interesting. So tell me about that. So that how much of the percentage of the meta spend and you referred to it before was over on awareness landing page views like slightly different usage campaign objectives. And we’re getting a little bit into the, you know, the tactics here. But you’re trying to get you’re trying to funnel more and more cold traffic, as opposed to just people who have some level of awareness of the brand, like how much of that percentage is spent.
00:36:59:03 – 00:37:08:00
Ralph
You don’t have to know exactly off the top of your head. But when was that introduced? Have you seen a lift from that, or is that going to be a strategy moving forward?
00:37:08:02 – 00:37:40:14
Ricardo
Yes, we have seen a lift from it. It’s only a very small percentage, maybe five to maximum 10%. For a brand that doesn’t have a great ecosystem that doesn’t operate in a lot of channels, I don’t think this will work. I think there’s been many people who try running traffic campaigns or awareness campaigns only to realize that there’s no other channel channels or, remarketing campaigns or enough of their brand ecosystem to push those people through the funnel.
00:37:40:16 – 00:38:16:10
Ricardo
But for this brand, there is, interesting, but that Lpv campaign, it’s a different campaign objective, as you mentioned, even though our videos, they were already speaking to, let’s say, unaware audiences, or at least problem aware but not product aware. So there we’re going. Pretty cold, but we were still using these sales objective, right. So we were trying to find people that were most likely in-market or maybe already researching similar products, which is different campaign objective optimizing for landing page views.
00:38:16:12 – 00:38:40:05
Ricardo
We actually saw our new visit percentage go up to 80%, the same thing as native. But it’s interesting that it took a very long time for us to see the true impact of that campaign. So inside our there were 11 data suite. We have a report called I forgot the exact name, but it kind of shows the time lag from first click to purchase.
00:38:40:07 – 00:39:19:20
Ricardo
So we knew that for our conversion campaigns on meta, the average was about 30 days. So after 30 days, like more than half of those clicks would have turned into customers, which is LP campaign. It took 90 days, so we only realized the true impact of that campaign after like 4 or 5 months. Additionally, I typically look back at the last month’s results, but that means that you’re always looking at like a 30 day lookback window, but never really looked like the campaign was doing anything until I looked back at the last six months, which I did like end of June.
00:39:19:22 – 00:39:37:23
Ricardo
That’s when I realized, okay, when I give it a bigger time frame, you give those people more time to go from a click to a purchase. That’s when their campaign actually perform. Just as well as the conversion campaign. But it just took a lot longer to realize that. And to get the data.
00:39:38:00 – 00:40:04:04
Ralph
That’s wild. I mean, that that’s like, that’s the heart of your job really is to make those types of assessments. And I do think so many people say, oh, well, let’s start with traffic campaigns and awareness campaigns, and then add in your sales campaigns and meta doesn’t always work. It’s a strategy that logically makes sense. But you’re saying because they’re multi-channel, because they’re on so many mediums.
00:40:04:04 – 00:40:23:09
Ralph
Overall, this started to work as long as you could look at a longer lookback period, which you can’t see in platform. Keep in mind so you can only see that if you’ve got like a tier 11 data suite type of solution for attribution. But like that’s a major shift because otherwise you probably would have shut those campaigns off and say, oh, they don’t work.
00:40:23:11 – 00:40:40:17
Ralph
But if you look at a longer look back, you’re like, well, actually they are. It’s just taking them longer to buy. Which makes sense because meta for a sales campaign targets people who are at least somewhat interested in the product, not maybe the product itself. Maybe they haven’t been to the site, maybe they haven’t watched any of your videos.
00:40:40:17 – 00:41:06:18
Ralph
But most algorithm is pretty good at figuring out those are converters, potential converters. So the window would be shorter. However, for traffic campaigns, for awareness campaigns, these are people that aren’t really interested so that the window would be longer. And like this is for more mature brands obviously, that are spending more like what you’re talking about here. But that’s a fascinating, insight into how this whole thing works.
00:41:06:20 – 00:41:23:12
Ricardo
Definitely. Yeah. I wouldn’t do that. If it’s a new business, I would just start with the people already in-market. So run your conversion campaigns, like all those types of campaigns, and only add the more top of funnel and awareness campaigns later on, when that ecosystem is in place.
00:41:23:14 – 00:41:42:13
Ralph
Yeah. For sure. So what’s next for these for these guys? I mean, I haven’t been on one of their calls in a bit, but, is it ramp up the programmatic side? Is it do more of this, you know, awareness and traffic type of campaigns. What’s your what’s your outlook? And obviously maybe we’ll have you come back and talk about this in just a few months.
00:41:42:13 – 00:41:47:08
Ralph
So anyway, like what’s what’s your prognosis for future state here?
00:41:47:10 – 00:42:12:21
Ricardo
I have not yet decided, but those are the options I’m considering. That’s either investing more into native or Ktvb or the, top of funnel campaigns in meta. That’s probably going to be one of those three options. And we’re likely going to test that pretty soon in preparation for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, because that’s why I’m a lot of those called audience have a good incentive to purchase.
00:42:12:21 – 00:42:36:00
Ricardo
Right. And that’s when we can, you typically get an influx for those channels or those campaigns if it’s trackable. So that might help us see the impact a little bit sooner. But that’s going to be one of those three options. Again, deciding a budget beforehand, talking to the client like we’re going to run this test for X amount of weeks or probably months.
00:42:36:02 – 00:43:00:03
Ricardo
Luckily we are still or they’re still performing really well, so we can’t afford to spend like 5 or 10% of our budget on a new test. But especially for those tests, we have to give it sufficient time. Otherwise we’ll just end up cutting the test after 30 days. Never fully seeing the true impact or potential impact of those initiatives.
00:43:00:05 – 00:43:18:00
Ralph
And, obviously we haven’t mentioned the brand name here, but I mean, if you’re up 59% year over year, your cost to acquire a customer is down 3%, like over that period of time. It seems like that would actually be like lower. But like, what’s their total revenue at this point? Because this is not a small business.
00:43:18:00 – 00:43:23:06
Ralph
But it’s not. We’re not talking about like an enterprise level business here.
00:43:23:08 – 00:43:28:20
Ricardo
Yeah. That’s good that you mentioned that because 59%.
00:43:28:22 – 00:43:52:11
Ricardo
Can sound high or low depending on what you’re used to. If we’re talking about, let’s say a six figure business, maybe 59% year over year, isn’t that impressive? But this is an eight figure business, right? So they grow from if you look at June, it’s probably close to like 2.5 million in revenue to 4 million ad revenue.
00:43:52:13 – 00:43:54:10
Ralph
In that in that month.
00:43:54:12 – 00:43:59:12
Ricardo
Yeah. And that month alone. So that’s an additional like 1.5 per month.
00:43:59:13 – 00:44:24:15
Ralph
Yeah. That’s a really good point. On the third point that I was like oh 59% gross. Well, I started off selling $100,000 a year, and now I’m at $159,000 a year. But you’re talking about 2 million plus per month, down to 4 million plus per month. This is not an insignificant business. So, and obviously, if they were in a lower volume, we probably wouldn’t be talking about a lot of these channels because these are a little bit more next level channels.
00:44:24:15 – 00:44:30:14
Ralph
But still, a lot of the principles would still apply, even if you’re a $100,000 business. Correct me if I’m wrong.
00:44:30:16 – 00:44:51:21
Ricardo
They do. Yeah, especially the bottom of funnel budget wise, like the brand terms that we talked about in the beginning. But start out with the conversion campaigns and only add those more top of funnel channels later on. But at some point they of course come into play. Like the bigger the businesses, the more it makes sense to expand into additional channels.
00:44:51:23 – 00:44:58:04
Ricardo
Also to be less reliant on a single channel. Right. Which these guys aren’t.
00:44:58:06 – 00:45:20:18
Ralph
I mean, we’re looking at 50 million in are here potentially, which is sort of my categorization of it like thereabouts, like between the 40 and the 50 range. Like this is like a huge deal. And prior to that they were, you know, 20 million or less like in maybe the mid-teens. We don’t exactly know. But this is a significant, increase.
00:45:20:18 – 00:46:02:18
Ralph
So. Well, you obviously, need to come back on in a couple of months in order to give us an update on what this is going to be, because this will be sort of a continuing strategy, a continuing sort of story here. You know, one of the, I think this is one of the sort of quintessential case studies for us and how we sort of view things in a multi-channel world using tier 11 data suite, using you as the growth strategist, the center of it all, the growth diagnostic, which is constantly looking and figuring out ways in which to get better and improved, and proactively looking for better and improved results, how that
00:46:02:18 – 00:46:35:18
Ralph
sort of plays out, it’s not necessarily there’s no real playbook for every business. Every playbook is slightly different. And I think that’s the kind of stuff that you and the team are bringing in. You leading the charge here, which is absolutely tremendous. So, of course, without mentioning this, if you’re looking to scale and spend and, you know, seeing your efficiency slip and have no idea how to get to that next level, of course we’re here to 11.com for slash apply and you’ll get your own growth strategist on your account.
00:46:35:18 – 00:46:53:18
Ralph
Maybe if you’re lucky enough you’ll actually get Ricardo on your account. But I don’t know. You’re in pretty much a lot of demand so we’ll have to see about that. So anyway, thank you so much for coming on. I love these segments. We’re going to have your, your partner in crime, Thomas, on the next one. So you’ve got the Dutch accent.
00:46:53:18 – 00:47:10:19
Ralph
He’s got the Scottish accent. And I’ve just got the Boston accent. So, yeah, it’s, the battle of the accents. Maybe we’ll have all three of us on at some point in time, but, really, really awesome. People want to connect with you on, the socials. Are you much of a social guy? Because I’m not really much of a social guy.
00:47:10:20 – 00:47:13:02
Ricardo
Me neither. But probably LinkedIn.
00:47:13:04 – 00:47:14:08
Ralph
LinkedIn. Yeah.
00:47:14:10 – 00:47:17:06
Ricardo
A pretty unique name, so should be easy to find me.
00:47:17:08 – 00:47:35:12
Ralph
Yeah, absolutely. Well, we’ll leave links in the show notes for all that. And of course, if you want our help over at your 11 scale and grow your business like we talked about here for the last 40 minutes or so, hit us up on to your 11.com. Of course. Watch this if you’re listening. I know a lot of folks listen to these, and then they go back over to YouTube and watch it.
00:47:35:13 – 00:47:54:08
Ralph
And, you know, if you’re a CMO or a VP of marketing or director of marketing, I think it would be really, really valuable for you to watch this over our YouTube channel or show it to your team, whether it’s internal or your agency, because they should be doing this sort of stuff, but they probably aren’t. And that is over at perpetual traffic.com/youtube.
00:47:54:10 – 00:47:59:14
Ralph
So Ricardo Powells, thank you so much for coming on perpetual traffic.
00:47:59:16 – 00:48:04:02
Ricardo
Thank you for having me. Looking forward to the next one.
00:48:04:04 – 00:48:31:18
Ralph
Absolutely. Me too. I can’t wait for, you know, part three of this story. So, like I said, believe all links over in the show notes over a perpetual traffic.com. Very much appreciative of a growth strategist here, Ricardo, for coming on. And until next show. See you.
