Partner with Tier 11’s marketing experts at http://tiereleven.com/apply
Is the ad you’re about to pause the one feeding every sale in your account? And is that shiny new channel really the fix for a rough month, or just an expensive distraction? Most marketers get both calls wrong, especially when the product costs thousands.
Growth strategist Ricardo Pouwels joins me again to discuss this further. We open Meta Ads Manager to show how he reads frequency, hook rate, hold rate, and cost per engagement on a campaign that spent $145,000 in 30 days. The coldest video has a lower ROAS than the other ads, but pausing it would cut off the traffic that feeds the converting ads.
I also talk about a flashlight campaign that “won” every engagement metric and sold nothing. Ricardo explains how an ad-level spend minimum stops Meta from dumping 90% of budget into one video. Plus, we cover the bad and good reasons for expansion, and why testing new avatars and messaging comes before adding any new channel.
In this episode:
- Hook rate, hold rate, and outbound CTR benchmarks by ad type
- Where last-click attribution breaks down on high-ticket offers
- What cost per engagement tells you about creative, and where it misleads
- Why creative diversification beats raw ad volume in the Andromeda era
- When to test new channels and how to pick the next right platform
- Testing new avatars and messaging before adding platforms
- Diversifying away from Google or Meta without hurting performance
Mentioned in the Episode:
Partner with Tier 11’s marketing experts at http://tiereleven.com/apply
Tier 11’s Data Suite: https://www.tiereleven.com/what-we-do/data-suite
Previous Episodes with Ricardo Pouwels:
https://perpetualtraffic.com/podcast/episode-722-we-analyzed-our-biggest-client-failure-and-this-is-what-we-learned/
Listen to this episode on your favorite podcast channel:
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Subscribe and watch on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@perpetual_traffic?sub_confirmation=1
Connect with Ricardo Pouwels:
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:
Before You Add Another Marketing Channel, Ask This One Question
00:00:00:02 – 00:00:15:00
Ricardo Pouwels
ChatGPT were released a couple of months ago. Some clients think it’s the new shiny object, right? So typically I recommend against testing those new channels if you don’t have another good reason to give it a try.
00:00:15:03 – 00:00:34:19
Ralph Burns
Things are going great with your digital marketing or things aren’t going great with your digital marketing. The question we always get is when and how should you expand into other channels that you’re not advertising on? We’re going to answer that question because it’s not a one size fits all answer on today’s show.
00:00:34:20 – 00:00:43:12
Ricardo Pouwels
I don’t hope all new channels early, but I would definitely first want to explore.
00:00:43:14 – 00:01:06:09
Ralph Burns
Hello and welcome to the Professional Traffic Podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns Burns, founder and CEO of tier 11. And we are going to answer that question here today with our growth strategist extraordinaire, Ricardo Powells, coming back for yet another visit here on Perpetual Traffic. So welcome back to the show, Ricardo.
00:01:06:11 – 00:01:11:03
Ricardo Pouwels
Thank you Ralph Burns. Think it’s been a month but went by so quickly.
00:01:11:07 – 00:01:25:05
Ralph Burns
It did. So it’s kind of cool because you’re sort of a miner, you know, digital marketing online celebrity. Now now that you’re showing up on these shows here. And I was talking to Thomas about it yesterday, he’s like,
00:01:25:08 – 00:01:37:14
Ralph Burns
yeah, I’m getting a little bit of notoriety. People are recognizing who I am, not necessarily like on the street or if you’re going to a, you know, restaurant in downtown Amsterdam and you’re getting like the best table because you’re like, wow, I saw you in perpetual traffic.
00:01:37:14 – 00:01:44:09
Ralph Burns
But it’s kind of a kind of a neat thing I think you guys are experiencing right now, especially on client calls, it seems like as well.
00:01:44:10 – 00:01:57:08
Ricardo Pouwels
Yeah, definitely. But I think it’s the only place where I’m actually visible online. I try to be as invisible as possible. I’m pretty anonymous on my social, so not much of a public figure, a guy.
00:01:57:08 – 00:02:02:11
Ralph Burns
know, neither am I, actually. I would far rather not be on the socials, but
00:02:02:11 – 00:02:03:03
Ralph Burns
our
00:02:03:03 – 00:02:07:11
Ralph Burns
director of marketing is very adamant that I need to be on the social. So
00:02:07:13 – 00:02:12:19
Ralph Burns
it’s it’s just constantly reminding me that, like, we need to create content, we need to create content. Well
00:02:12:20 – 00:02:16:16
Ralph Burns
now, Mike, well, we need the people from tier 11 to actually help out with this, which is
00:02:16:16 – 00:02:24:00
Ralph Burns
one of the reasons why you’re on the show here today and will actually be having more people from 211, because there’s so many talented
00:02:24:02 – 00:02:30:19
Ralph Burns
people within the organization that can lend a lot of expertise and solve the problems that we’re going to be talking about, like on this show
00:02:30:19 – 00:03:00:04
Ralph Burns
today. And who better to ask and who better to talk to than somebody who’s running millions and millions of dollars worth of paid traffic right now, and is the primary growth driver for so many businesses that we serve here at 11. But you, Thomas, and sort of the support staff within 211, which coming soon, we’ve got some creative folks, email folks a lot of other services that we do internally, as well as our programmatic chief, like a lot of different ways in which to grow.
00:03:00:04 – 00:03:04:22
Ralph Burns
But the big thing on today’s show is a question that you get asked quite a
00:03:05:00 – 00:03:19:02
Ralph Burns
which is when to introduce new channels after things are maybe working, maybe things the performance is starting to slip, or they just want to diversify and they want to test. And there’s a lot of channels we talked about some of those like ChatGPT.
00:03:19:02 – 00:03:42:02
Ralph Burns
Now obviously TikTok is one of those. We’re going to talk about that here today and answer that question. But before we get into that, the last show that we did together was really talking about why you’re winning ad is not necessarily the the ad that you would think it’s actually it might be the one that you’re about to kill.
00:03:42:02 – 00:04:07:17
Ralph Burns
And we have twice weekly calls where all the growth strategists, chief strategist John Moran, gets on those calls. We’ve got our CSM group that’s joining those as well. And we talk about these really specific issues, because now we’re in this age of Andromeda and we’re looking at a lot of different metrics. The way that we looked at a great ad two three years ago is completely different than how we view it today.
00:04:07:17 – 00:04:33:02
Ralph Burns
So I know we talked about that a fair bit on episode 808 about a month or so ago. Any new insights that you’re finding? Because we’re really sort of in this new realm of meta advertising especially, it’s the one that we choose first, in most cases to introduce products or the variations of products into the market. So talk to me about that.
00:04:33:03 – 00:04:38:18
Ralph Burns
What you sort of learned in the last month, because a lot of this stuff is super dynamic, and that’s the reason why folks listen to the
00:04:39:00 – 00:04:40:04
Ricardo Pouwels
Yeah, there’s always
00:04:40:04 – 00:05:03:13
Ricardo Pouwels
a lot to learn, right? I’ve definitely learned that the more complex a business is and the higher price point, the product or the service, the more difficult it is to understand creative behavior and creative performance. So if you’re selling simple t shirts with a design on it. Those are typically impulse buys. You can pretty reliably just look at last click attribution.
00:05:03:14 – 00:05:27:11
Ricardo Pouwels
But when we’re talking about a multi-billion dollar product, it’s people typically don’t convert after just seeing one image or one video. Right. You might have 20, 50, 100 different creatives live at any given time. And people start seeing all these different ads at different points in time. And then it’s up to you to figure out which of those ads deserve it spent.
00:05:27:12 – 00:05:39:17
Ricardo Pouwels
Like, do we need to pause certain ads? Do you need to? When do we need to cycle in new ones? How much ad spend do all of those videos and ads deserve? And that’s, I think, where the complexity complexity comes in.
00:05:39:17 – 00:06:05:06
Ralph Burns
I think I’ve said this on the show a few times, is that your the amount of touches in the amount you need to spend, relatively speaking, like there’s exceptions to the rule on all that is in direct relation and direct proportion to the amount a consumer needs to spend on your product. And which is kind of like is basic when you think about it.
00:06:05:06 – 00:06:36:00
Ralph Burns
It’s like, all right, if you’re selling a $7 product, you don’t need to sell that $7 product nearly as much as you do if you’re selling a $30,000 product. And I was at a client this week that sells a $30,000 product, and we’re selling those online through sales team, oftentimes directly on the site. And so my explanation to them was you will need many, many times, I don’t know how many, but it’s more than one AD is probably my guess.
00:06:36:00 – 00:07:00:06
Ralph Burns
It will be multiples of that might be 30, 5000. It could be 100 impressions before they actually with 50 different creatives, before they actually click that button to schedule the call to actually buy the thing. So talk to me about that and maybe even screen share a bit and like how you read the data. And it’s not necessarily the cost to acquire a customer or the sale or the lead.
00:07:00:06 – 00:07:30:04
Ralph Burns
It’s oftentimes these other metrics that are still kind of fluid and moving. Because Meet Andromeda is even though it’s been out for almost two years now, it’s we’re still figuring out better ways in which to read those numbers. All right. So we’re going to go over to Inside ads Manager here. And if you’re not on our YouTube channel, make sure you check this out over at Perpetual Traffic YouTube obviously subscribe as well, but you’ll be able to see exactly what we’re talking about here.
00:07:30:04 – 00:07:39:09
Ralph Burns
We’ll try and explain it in audio format as well. But oftentimes people will listen to these and then they’ll go and watch it on YouTube. So yeah, take it away, Ricardo.
00:07:39:10 – 00:08:06:02
Ricardo Pouwels
All right. I’ll do my best to explain it as good as possible in audio format as well. But what I’m looking at here is implied for metrics. So simply the At manager I typically also look at our data suite. So using third party attribution software to understand where the first clicks come from, last clicks, how cold our traffic is, what for now I’ll just look at the input for metrics.
00:08:06:04 – 00:08:30:02
Ricardo Pouwels
We’re going to look at four different creatives and get a better understanding of what the roles of these different creatives are. So in this example, we are talking about a product that costs multiple thousands of dollars. So in the previous example that I mentioned, if we’re talking about a simple t shirt, again you can pretty safely rely on last attribution.
00:08:30:02 – 00:09:12:10
Ricardo Pouwels
But for this product that’s not the case. So right now I have four different ads highlighted. They all run inside the same campaign. We’re looking at about 30 days worth of data, and then simply sorting from highest spend to lowest spend. Then I’m looking at a couple of very important metrics. The first one is frequency, which typically tells me if the creative is going pretty cold or pretty warm, like the higher it is, the more it reaches the same audiences, the more it’s acting in the middle of the funnel or bottom up funnel, and the more retarding it does the color it is, the higher up in the funnel and the better it is.
00:09:12:11 – 00:09:40:01
Ricardo Pouwels
A region called audiences. Makes sense. Then I also look at the hook rates, Holt rates, and the outbound click through rate, as well as how how many people are engaging with the posts. So typically for my top of online creatives, I like to see good hook rates, good Holt rates. That means that people are watching, they’re interested. And I’d also like to see a good cause for post engagement.
00:09:40:03 – 00:10:13:10
Ricardo Pouwels
Whereas especially image ads and warmer creatives usually have a higher goals per post engagement. This first creative, for example, is the highest spender. It has the best hook rate out of all of those four ads. That’s the best Holt rate, the best click through rate, and the best cost per post engagement. However, when I look at the return on ads band, it is lower than the campaign’s average, and it’s lower than my second ad and my fourth ad.
00:10:13:11 – 00:10:51:18
Ricardo Pouwels
So if I was if this was the t shirt company, I would probably have both this first and the third AD and kept the two ads with the best return on that band or the best CPA. But for this product, I am pretty confident that if I were to pause this first video and this third video, which are the coolest videos, the older two ads would all of a sudden start to perform a lot worse, simply because they don’t have those cool audiences that are feeding those creatives that are creating that traffic for these two ads to retarget.
00:10:51:20 – 00:11:18:06
Ricardo Pouwels
So if I have made that mistake many times before, so I’ve not learned not to do that and to keep creatives that kind of belong together, to keep them running together. So now I understand that we need creators get that go very cold, that bring in new audiences, new eyeballs, new traffic. But we also need creators that act more in the middle of Funnel and Baltimore funnel to actually convert those audiences.
00:11:18:08 – 00:11:42:13
Ricardo Pouwels
Because, as we just talked about, it’s highly unlikely that we just convert people through just 1 or 2 ads for a high priced product. So we need many different ads. In this example, I’m just looking at four ads. We already have 25 ads in this campaign, but in the account we have 50 plus ads that all work together in these these ways.
00:11:42:15 – 00:12:13:04
Ralph Burns
Makes complete sense. So if you’re watching this over on YouTube, you will see some of this is blurred out. We’ve in rare instances we have cases where brands don’t mind us showing them, but in this one very, very competitive market. So we want to keep this away from their competitors obviously, and protect the brand. So but you’re looking at a couple of different things that we have not talked about here on the show, which is super interesting.
00:12:13:04 – 00:12:36:19
Ralph Burns
And, you know, talking with the team about this every single week. Frequency is really is a key indicator to determine whether or not you are going after warm audiences or cold audiences. And if you’ve got a lot of spend and you have a lower frequency in this particular case, we’ve got a we’ve got a video and I know which video this is, is spending 14 grand or so in the last 30 days, which is a lot overall.
00:12:36:19 – 00:13:08:23
Ralph Burns
It’s a 10% of their total spend in this particular campaign. But the frequency is a 1.4 where as the next one down, which is actually two three down, is an image ad, which makes sense. And it’s about got less than half a little bit more than half of that spend. And it’s got a way higher frequency. So the way that you would read this is you would look at, okay, I’m getting great cost per engagement, which is another metric that we’ve never really talked about here, which is at $0.02.
00:13:08:23 – 00:13:42:10
Ralph Burns
So super good at you’ve got a hook and a hold rating, which are both very high, very healthy. And even though this isn’t a pitchy ad by any stretch, it’s getting eyeballs. It’s getting brand awareness almost to get the other ads. And meta knows this. Soon as somebody engages with that first ad, that spending all of that on these cold traffic audiences, they know, okay, that person is interested in this product, I’m going to show them some of the other ads that maybe do have a little bit more of a product pitch to it.
00:13:42:11 – 00:14:02:04
Ralph Burns
Yeah. Or even the image ad, which is the one that we see the most usually. And it’s surprising it actually isn’t doesn’t have the highest actually does. It does have the highest return on that spend which is completely in line. They’re all working together, you know, I mean, they’re all and you’ve said it a few times, I’ve said it a few times.
00:14:02:05 – 00:14:23:10
Ralph Burns
Like, which beer is it that gets you drunk? Is it the first or the 12th or depending on what your tolerance is? Maybe it’s like for my wife, who was which, you know, Moscow Mule. Is it the first or the half of the second that got her drunk? Either way, it’s like it’s the same analogy here. They’re all working together, and you’re using a bunch of different metrics here to determine what do I actually do?
00:14:23:11 – 00:14:38:11
Ralph Burns
What decisions do I make? Which is which is pretty fascinating. Cost per engagement. Talked to me about that. Is that one that you see universally as an additional metric that, you know, in addition to the hook and the whole great part of it?
00:14:38:13 – 00:15:00:18
Ricardo Pouwels
Yeah, I would say in addition to so that’s not the only metric that I look at, Will, sometimes you have a very engaging video. It’s mostly a video that people comment on. Maybe people are upset and that’s why they’re engaging. They’re commenting now, or they’re leaving like angry emojis, but sometimes it’s too over brand or too far removed from the product.
00:15:00:20 – 00:15:25:11
Ricardo Pouwels
Then you don’t have that connection with the product or the brand, and there’s simply no buying intent whatsoever. Whereas with this video, we still see conversions come true. Like it still has 68 purchases. I also checked in our data suite and confirmed that it does have conversions. If that wasn’t the case and it was simply engaging, but there was no connection with the product, I probably wouldn’t run it.
00:15:25:12 – 00:15:31:07
Ricardo Pouwels
It might be a good video for socials, but maybe not to put like 10% of our budget behind.
00:15:31:07 – 00:15:57:02
Ralph Burns
Yeah, this reminds me of what we’ll get into the additional platforms here in just a second. Here. It reminds me of a campaign I ran. This is going on 7 or 8 years ago, and I just randomly I was doing a Google Drive search, and I remembered this campaign where this exact thing happens. We were actually selling American made flashlights, and we were selling millions of them per month.
00:15:57:07 – 00:16:12:07
Ralph Burns
And I remember an ad that myself, and I think it was Molly Pittman, was actually helping me out, unless it was American themed and it got tremendous. It was American flags, just totally patriotic. And then a tiny little part to it was
00:16:12:08 – 00:16:17:19
Ralph Burns
these flashlights and targets, actually. And we were like, wow, this is like the best ad ever.
00:16:17:19 – 00:16:49:09
Ralph Burns
And it sucked up all the spend. And then when we went back and we could actually see through the tracking, it produced zero sales because people just liked it, because it was patriotic and they were enthusiastic about it. And the way that the I came through. So you’ve got to balance these with hook rate, hold rate, engagement rate, and then commercial intent as well, because otherwise you’ll just be following hook right and hook hold right like, yeah, things are going well, but you never get to the point where you’re actually talking about the product.
00:16:49:09 – 00:17:08:11
Ralph Burns
And that was the mistake that we made 7 or 8 years ago, which obviously is not the case here. But if you’re showing funny memes, people are going to engage with that. But does that sell your product? Well, if it’s a funny, mean that’s related to the product, maybe it will, but I think you really do have to have some discretion here when you’re looking at these secondary
00:17:08:13 – 00:17:31:14
Ricardo Pouwels
Yeah, exactly. I think it’s it’s too easy to manipulate any of these metrics. If you simply look at an individual metric, like if I were to redo this video and do something enraging in the video and get just a bunch of people to comment on the video, that doesn’t necessarily make it a better video or an ad for this brand, but I will get a lot more engagement.
00:17:31:15 – 00:18:00:11
Ricardo Pouwels
We can also do clickbait the headlines to get a lot more people to click and to inflate the CTR. I can also start running a big promotion or even say that the product is free and probably maybe not free. But if we do like a big discount, for example, put that ad in this same campaign, we’ll probably see a pretty high return on ad spend and a good CPA on that creative simply because it has a discount, whereas all the others don’t.
00:18:00:12 – 00:18:21:09
Ricardo Pouwels
But if I then start pushing all of my ad spend to that creative with the discount, it just takes a couple of days for the whole account and the business to start going down, because then we’ve exhausted the audience that was on the fence, maybe ready to buy if now taking advantage of the discount. And that’s it. At that point, you’re not doing anything else.
00:18:21:09 – 00:18:35:07
Ricardo Pouwels
You’re not creating new audiences, you’re not engaging people. So those are definitely ways that you can destroy an account by going to all in on an individual metric or things that are manipulated.
00:18:35:08 – 00:19:01:03
Ralph Burns
Right. Makes sense, makes sense. And just as a reminder for anyone who is maybe not listened to episodes here in perpetual traffic, when you’re looking at hook and hold rate and then outbound click through rate, which is the link that click through rate to go actually off, in this case meta and to the client site remind us what those magical numbers are, what your benchmarks that you look for.
00:19:01:03 – 00:19:06:17
Ralph Burns
For a good hook, create a good hold rate and a good outbound click through rate.
00:19:06:19 – 00:19:37:19
Ricardo Pouwels
For a hook rate, I would say ideally 30% or higher hold rates, maybe at least 10 to 15%, but the higher the better, of course. But it also depends on the length of the video CTR. It really depends on the type of creative it is. Like engagement pieces like this typically have a very high CTR, whereas more conversion focused creators like this fourth one typically have a lower CDR because you’re pre-qualifying the traffic.
00:19:37:19 – 00:19:55:14
Ricardo Pouwels
So the people that aren’t really interested, they don’t really click. Whereas the first video, since it doesn’t talk about the product at all, people are just clicking out of curiosity. So for CTR, sometimes 1% is good enough, sometimes it needs to be higher, but it’s dependent on what type of ad it is.
00:19:55:14 – 00:20:02:15
Ralph Burns
And hook rate is percentage of people that watch three seconds.
00:20:02:17 – 00:20:03:07
Ricardo Pouwels
Yes.
00:20:03:08 – 00:20:24:23
Ralph Burns
Yeah. And then hold rate is percentage of people that stay on after three seconds. So if you’ve got a ten minute video versus a ten second video, that hold rate is really going to be variables. You have to keep all of that in mind. And you’re saying 10 to 15%, but even higher, the higher the better. Which means that people are sticking around.
00:20:24:23 – 00:20:31:11
Ralph Burns
They’re not just getting pulled in by a clickbait first three seconds, they’re actually sticking around for the rest of the content.
00:20:31:13 – 00:21:06:04
Ricardo Pouwels
Exactly. And one last thing that I think is, is probably interesting to call out. You’ll probably see that this creative has spent about 10% of this campaign’s total, which is on purpose, because before we had any rules in place, meta was just pushing 80 or 90% of the ad spend to this single video, simply because the hook rate and the engagement and the cedar are so much better than any of the other creatives in this campaign, it matters is it’s good enough to start pushing all of that budget to that individual video.
00:21:06:04 – 00:21:29:15
Ricardo Pouwels
But at that point, it’s it’s no longer logic, right? If we push 80% of our budget to a single video for a high price product like we don’t have at that point, we’re not showing like those 50, 60, 70 adds to the people that need to see it anymore. So what we’ve done for this account is we use the ad spend minimum feature on the ad level.
00:21:29:17 – 00:21:45:22
Ricardo Pouwels
So if you go into the ad settings, there is a new feature in there, which I think is now a couple months old to force an ad spend minimum across all the individual ads inside this campaign so that it can no longer spend all of its budget on this single video.
00:21:45:22 – 00:22:06:21
Ralph Burns
And if you didn’t have that in place, it would literally be, this is $145,000 in the last 30 days in this campaign. Would it be 80 or 90% because the invasion is so much better and you’ve got pretty good hook and hold rates with some of these other videos. Let’s not kid ourselves here, but it would be it would really skew towards that 80 or 90%.
00:22:06:21 – 00:22:10:11
Ralph Burns
And then you feel performance would suffer as a result of that.
00:22:10:13 – 00:22:29:11
Ricardo Pouwels
Exactly. And that has happened a couple of times when we try to relaunch a campaign. We didn’t have the minimums in place. We ran it for a day to see if meta would be more reasonable, but it wasn’t. And then for that day it just pushed 8,090% of the budget to that single video.
00:22:29:12 – 00:22:52:22
Ralph Burns
So yes, let the algorithm do the work. Let the machine learning in the ad delivery system do the work, but put some safeguards in place at the same time. So because that’s what I mean. You have jobs I suppose. Otherwise, you know, none of this is automated. Super interesting. So a couple of new metrics to keep in mind here are frequency.
00:22:53:04 – 00:23:00:23
Ralph Burns
The cost per engagement as well as that feature is called once again it’s it’s in ads manager. What what was the name of it.
00:23:00:23 – 00:23:05:03
Ricardo Pouwels
Again I can quickly check it. It’s on the at level.
00:23:05:06 – 00:23:08:22
Ricardo Pouwels
It is called Bush delivery to this ad.
00:23:09:01 – 00:23:20:05
Ralph Burns
Okay. Push delivery to this ad. Right. So new feature on meta that we’ve never talked about here. And this is within the last month or so. So very cool
00:23:20:07 – 00:23:45:01
Ralph Burns
Well that is definitely a great add on to what we talked about a month or so ago. And you know, continued success obviously in that specific ad account, that particular client, this did come up with that client and multiple others, as I’m seeing it right now, is always the question of, okay, we want to expand.
00:23:45:03 – 00:24:15:12
Ralph Burns
You guys are doing exactly what we want to do or we wanted you to achieving our goals. How do we reach new audiences and how do we expand into other channels? And obviously with that client, we have expanded into native programmatic, connected TV. We also do Amazon, TikTok, all of that. So when when folks ask you about that question or just ask that question, when should we expand?
00:24:15:12 – 00:24:28:18
Ralph Burns
What’s your typical answer? And there’s usually differing reasons behind that. But what kind of advice would you give to folks that are listening and watching the show here on exactly that question?
00:24:28:20 – 00:24:56:21
Ricardo Pouwels
I think there’s a couple of different answers that I typically give, and there’s maybe like 4 or 5 different reasons that clients come to me with in terms of them wanting to try a new channel so I can maybe call them out, all 4 or 5 of them and list them in order of the reasons that I don’t think make a lot of sense to the reasons that I think are better, and in which case I usually comply or recommend to test the new channel.
00:24:57:02 – 00:25:21:15
Ricardo Pouwels
I often get asked whenever there’s a new channel. So for example, ChatGPT ads were released a couple of months ago. Some clients think it’s a new shiny object, right? They want to give it a try as early as possible with the reason that are early before anyone else. But when new channels launch, they typically in beta or they don’t yet have,
00:25:21:16 – 00:25:23:00
Ricardo Pouwels
good algorithm behind it.
00:25:23:06 – 00:25:45:18
Ricardo Pouwels
For example, metas at this time, right? Meta wasn’t meta as it is today like ten years ago. So we did try it for one client, but the number of features that were there were just very limited. We couldn’t even run conversion campaigns, so we simply tried it at a very small budget, but it was way too small to notice anything.
00:25:45:20 – 00:26:13:02
Ricardo Pouwels
So typically I recommend against testing those new channels if you don’t have another good reason to give it a try, simply because it’s a new channel doesn’t make it a good reason to give it a try in my opinion. Then we have questions like, I see a lot of these other people having success with TikTok, for example. We should also give it a try or there’s a lot of younger audiences on TikTok.
00:26:13:02 – 00:26:36:12
Ricardo Pouwels
So therefore, in order for us to reach younger audiences, we should go to TikTok, even though we can reach those same audiences on meta, like the audience size that meta has, still a lot of young people on meta as well, as well as on Google and of course, sorry, YouTube and some of those other channels. So that isn’t a great reason in my opinion either.
00:26:36:14 – 00:27:06:16
Ricardo Pouwels
Then we have a couple other reasons. Sometimes clients want to move over to a new channel when performances going down on their main channel, but that’s typically when, let’s say they’ve already had success for years on meta. They know that they’re driving platform, but now they’re just having a rough month and all of a sudden they want to they’re thinking about moving over to a different channel, not like this thing it but moving substantial budgets to that new channel.
00:27:06:18 – 00:27:35:23
Ricardo Pouwels
That to me is also a pretty big risk because you’re starting from scratch, like you don’t know at all what is working on that channel. You don’t have any historical data on that account. So it’s simply starting from scratch. And it typically takes weeks, sometimes months to get any type of traction. And to really make that channel worth its money, then we have better reasons to start testing other channels.
00:27:36:01 – 00:27:43:07
Ricardo Pouwels
For example, we have a couple of clients that are already on like five or 6 or 7 channels.
00:27:43:08 – 00:28:02:16
Ricardo Pouwels
Maybe we had a certain roadblock and we see that we’re struggling to reach gold audiences. So we’ve tried to scale up our existing channels anytime we do. So we had like a pretty hard ceiling and we just got significant diminishing returns by scaling up our existing channels.
00:28:02:18 – 00:28:23:15
Ricardo Pouwels
Then I might want to look at okay. Our issue is reaching new audiences. We try to scale up meta. We tried to scale up without any success. Maybe we can give CTV or native to try, depending on what makes the most sense for their brand. So then in my opinion, you have a better reason to give those channels a try.
00:28:23:15 – 00:28:51:15
Ricardo Pouwels
And then I would come up with an action plan like, this is how long we need to test the channel for. We need to dedicate X amount of budget in order for us to get any sense of if that channel is working for us. And there’s of course the reason of diversifying, right? If you are solely dependent on metalheads, you’re spending 80, 90% of your budget on meta and you’ve not yet explored TikTok, for example.
00:28:51:17 – 00:29:13:09
Ricardo Pouwels
But maybe your videos that are working on meta, you think they might also work on TikTok, are similar in nature, then I might make sense to try Tik-Tok ads as well, because your creators are already similar. It’s a similar social platform and you’re very dependent on meta, so you want to reduce some of that risk and start testing another channel.
00:29:13:09 – 00:29:22:22
Ralph Burns
So shiny object syndrome, which is I can’t imagine any marketers or any directors of marketing having shiny object syndrome or CEOs for that
00:29:23:03 – 00:29:45:09
Ralph Burns
So that’s not always worth the juices. Nobody’s worth the squeeze, so to speak. And I remember when Instagram ads first came out and man, did they suck. I mean, because we were all newsfeed all the time and right hand rail, if you can remember that, like the little ones on the side of the desktop.
00:29:45:14 – 00:30:09:00
Ralph Burns
And then Instagram came out, nobody knew what to do with it. And we tried and tried and tried and it did not work for about the first six months. And the algorithm finally figured it out. And now it’s a huge portion of our meta, especially now with reels and so forth. So shiny object syndrome is not necessarily a great place for, you know, any of these sorts of things.
00:30:09:00 – 00:30:32:18
Ralph Burns
But having said that, these like ChatGPT is going to get better. I mean, there’s now, you know, WhatsApp ads that are going to be coming out very soon, like there’s all kinds of channels. There’s obviously there’s TikTok shops, there’s TikTok in general. So yes, you should always be open to change. But just because something’s new doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be good to have any sort of return.
00:30:32:18 – 00:30:59:22
Ralph Burns
And then there is always that downward, like there’s there’s fluctuations. Not everything is lower left hand corner to the upper right, you know, like a nice stock chart. There is going to be fluctuations. And we talk to business owners all the time. And directors of marketing like like you do every single day. Like you have to sometimes weather a few bad days and that just and that doesn’t mean we’re going to shift all our budget from meadow over to TikTok immediately because we had, you know, Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday were bad.
00:31:00:00 – 00:31:25:06
Ralph Burns
The interesting part about the ceiling, they’re good reasons as to why to go to other channels is if you feel like you’ve hit a ceiling, oftentimes now with Meta Andromeda, it’s not just necessarily we’ve hit a ceiling of scale, but that also tells me maybe we should start targeting the creative for different avatars that we haven’t talked to before.
00:31:25:06 – 00:31:49:12
Ralph Burns
We haven’t targeted with different messaging, different pillars. We’ve talked about the messaging engine here multiple times here on the show. So at what point do you sort of balance that, hey, we need to scale because we’re hitting a ceiling with new customer growth too. Well, let’s just expand our scope and go after different avatars that we know exist with new creative and new messaging.
00:31:49:12 – 00:31:51:01
Ralph Burns
How do you balance those two
00:31:51:03 – 00:31:52:12
Ricardo Pouwels
Yeah, that’s a good question
00:31:52:12 – 00:32:11:14
Ricardo Pouwels
I don’t hope all new channels early. I don’t recommend them early. It’s only after we’ve already exhausted the other channels, and we’ve done so much to try and scale with the existing channels, and if we’re not getting anywhere, then are more inclined to try the new channels, unless I have other good reasons to do so.
00:32:11:14 – 00:32:32:23
Ricardo Pouwels
But I would definitely first want to explore different avatars, different messaging. Are we just speaking to one person on meta? And that’s why we’re reaching such a limited audience. Can we speak to a second type of person or a third type of person? So I would definitely do that first because before I would suggest another channel.
00:32:04:21 – 00:36:58:15
Ralph Burns
Yeah. I mean, the gross driver that we see so much right now is just really testing out and getting exposure on the meta platform. Because Andromeda is so powerful right now and obviously great creative diversity. I mean, the ad platform, the algorithm rewards creative diversity. And we’ve certainly shown that here, you know, in today’s show, but also just in general, it’s the not necessarily the more ads the better, but the more varied ads, the more varied creative with very different either look, feel, approach, hook messaging, face to camera, some other you know us versus them, founders story, testimonials, user generated content maybe through content creators like a diversity of content is really the
00:36:58:15 – 00:37:16:11
Ralph Burns
thing that it rewards right now. And it’s also the algorithm is so incredibly smart. It’s a great place to start. And you could build a very nice business just on that platform alone. But then when you add in all these others, you get this next layer of especially top of funnel, especially on the programmatic CTV and native side.
00:37:16:12 – 00:37:40:04
Ralph Burns
So last question for you here on the diversify angle, a lot of folks say, well, I’m only on meta right now, and that’s why I want to get on YouTube. That’s why I want to start on TikTok. Like what’s what’s your thought on that, on the diversification part of things. And usually this is for smaller businesses like, hey, I’m only doing one thing right now and it’s working well, but I’m worried.
00:37:40:07 – 00:37:52:17
Ralph Burns
I’ve got all my eggs in one basket. You know, my business rides and dies with this thing. Like, what would be your recommendation there on the diversification of platforms? Question.
00:37:52:19 – 00:38:22:11
Ricardo Pouwels
I would typically start with similar channels. So if you’re already having success on meta, maybe TikTok is the most similar channel that you can test next. So I typically see businesses are either mostly dependent on search, so they’ll be more into Google and Bing, or they lean more into social and run a lot more videos. I will pick the similar or the channel that’s most similar before testing the other channels.
00:38:22:13 – 00:38:44:02
Ricardo Pouwels
And the reality is also that even the clients that we have that run seven, eight, nine channels, not all nine of those channels are primary drivers, like there’s at least 3 or 4, maybe five of those that are just doing a bit of retargeting. There is supplemental, but if we take away the 2 or 3 main driving channels, everything else also collapses.
00:38:44:04 – 00:39:00:00
Ricardo Pouwels
That’s just the nature of the game, unless you’re a very big company. But for like seven, eight, maybe some nine figures companies, that’s typically one, maybe 2 or 3 channels that are your primary drivers and everything else is just supplemental, right?
00:39:00:01 – 00:39:30:15
Ralph Burns
Yeah. Makes sense. Well, this has been great because I think it answers that question that a lot of businesses have and a lot of businesses that at least the ones that I talk to that are, you know, potentially wanting to work with 211 have reached a ceiling in most cases. To your point, a ceiling on Google, and they’re very search ad dependent and they just can’t seem to get to that next level of scale and have maybe tried and failed in the past on meta ads.
00:39:30:15 – 00:40:05:15
Ralph Burns
And now is the time to really that’s where your next level of scale is. And because you’re really reaching a different audience and you’re reaching audiences that you didn’t even know existed out there, because for most of these brands that are very Google dependent, we’ve got a number of them, you know, inside tier level that we are diversifying two other channels and being able to sort of spread out that risk and also get the growth is because they’ve reached sort of a capacity on the amount of search keywords that they can they can get in any given market because it’s it’s not linear.
00:40:05:15 – 00:40:27:08
Ralph Burns
If you spend more on Google, oftentimes the more you spend, sometimes the less conversions you get at the CPA that is affordable for your business. So it’s something John and I talk about almost every single Friday on the AD Lab. But yeah, big opportunity there for if you’re Google dependent and you really need to diversify, you really want to get to that next level of scale.
00:40:27:09 – 00:40:58:01
Ralph Burns
Meta is the next logical place today, especially how good the damn platform is. So super insightful here today, Ricardo. And of course you can get Ricardo, but if you really want them, I guess that’s really up to Angela. If you want our help on any of this sort of stuff, you can always go over to 211. Com for apply, and we’d love to see how we can help you scale and grow your business.
00:40:58:01 – 00:41:23:12
Ralph Burns
And if you’re in this situation where you’re not sure where to diversify next or how to get to that next little scale, we can certainly do that and help you out there over at 12. So thank you so much for coming back on. This is, I believe, either your third or fourth time now on perpetual traffic. We’re going to have to keep having you come back on because, you know, that episode you did last month was one of our most popular ones.
00:41:23:12 – 00:41:25:12
Ralph Burns
So great work there.
00:41:25:16 – 00:41:28:06
Ricardo Pouwels
Thank you. A lot of fun.
00:41:28:08 – 00:41:52:16
Ralph Burns
All right. Well, of course, wherever you listen to podcasts, we really do appreciate if you leave us a rating and review helps us get this thing out to a wider audience. Teach people how to do this stuff the right way, this digital marketing thing the right way, through metrics that matter and growth that scales. And of course, everything that we talked about here today will leave links in the show notes over at Perpetual Traffic.
00:41:52:17 – 00:42:00:23
Ralph Burns
So on behalf of my amazing guest host here today, Ricardo Powell’s till next show. See you.
