Ralph and John dig into a case study that flips conventional marketing on its head, showing how rethinking ad spend can drive unexpected results. They explore why focusing on Media Efficiency Ratio (MER) instead of ROAS can uncover hidden opportunities for growth. Through examples and real-time analysis, they reveal strategies for reallocating budgets, cutting unnecessary costs, and achieving better outcomes. Along the way, they take live questions and break down how metrics can reshape business decisions. It’s a session packed with lessons that challenge the status quo and offer a fresh perspective on smarter marketing.

Chapters

• 00:00:00 – Welcome to the Marketing Jungle: Ralph and John Unleashed
• 00:00:49 – The Case Study So Wild It’s Practically Fiction
• 00:02:05 – Doing the Opposite: When Counterintuitive is Just Intuitive
• 00:03:36 – ROAS vs. Reality: The Brand Campaign Smackdown
• 00:05:52 – MER Explained: Or Why ROAS is Crying in a Corner
• 00:08:20 – Results So Good You’ll Wonder If We’re Making Them Up
• 00:10:50 – ROAS Walks into a Bar. MER Kicks It Out.
• 00:13:00 – When Saving $7K Feels Better Than Finding $20 in Your Jeans
• 00:15:30 – $425,000 Later: Did Google Ads Just Buy Itself Dinner?
• 00:18:05 – Tracking the Truth: Wicked Reports and Google Play Detective
• 00:20:45 – Why Your Ad Agency’s Yacht Might Be Your Biggest Expense
• 00:25:10 – Margins vs. Metrics: A Fight as Old as Time, But With Spreadsheets
• 00:28:00 – Turning Ad Budgets into Revenue: Step One, Don’t Panic
• 00:30:00 – Final Marketing Lessons: Indicators, Sanity, and Why You Shouldn’t Chase ROAS
• 00:32:13 – Live Q&A: Your Questions, Our Strategy Confessions
• 00:33:12 – Shopping Ad Secrets: Turning Standard into Stellar
• 00:34:24 – Remarketing: When Stalking Your Customers Pays Off
• 00:35:57 – Demand Gen or Demand “Gen-uinely Confused”?
• 00:37:51 – Video Action Campaigns: Clickbait With a Purpose
• 00:38:48 – Gmail Ads: Google’s Expensive Postcards Nobody Reads
• 00:41:44 – Performance Max: Where Traffic Metrics Go to Party
• 00:45:52 – Feeder Strategies That’ll Make You Feel Like a Marketing Chef
• 00:51:33 – Competitive Metrics and Why Lead Gen Feels Like a Marathon
• 00:57:06 – Wrapping Up: The Last Bits of Genius Before You Hit Replay

LINKS AND RESOURCES:

• Tier 11 on YouTube
• Get Your Marketing Performance Indicators™ Checklist Now!
• Tier 11 Jobs
• Perpetual Traffic on YouTube
• Tiereleven.com
• Mongoose Media
• Perpetual Traffic Survey
• Perpetual Traffic Website
• Follow Perpetual Traffic on Twitter
• Connect with Lauren on Instagram and Connect with Ralph on LinkedIn

Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Perpetual Traffic? Have some feedback you’d like to share? Connect with us on iTunes and leave us a review!

Mentioned in this episode:

AdCritter for Agencies

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Read the Transcript Below:

AdCritter for Agencies

Ralph: Hey folks, Ralph here with something that could seriously upgrade your top of funnel ad game. if you’ve been a PT listener for any period of time, you know that we talk about top of funnel all the time and how challenging it is for you to get quality top of funnel clients or leads or customers and then convert them typically at bottom of funnel.

Ralph: Well, TV advertising is one of those areas that we haven’t discussed here on PT all that much,

Ralph: but our friends over at ad critter have figured this stuff out. They do TV ads. So you can be everywhere without spending millions on super bowl ads, but they pair it with display retargeting. So you’re hitting the audiences with a complete approach. You reach them. Then you remind them and then you collect the revenue.

Ralph: It’s a strategy designed to deliver and let me tell you, it really works. We’re testing this at tier 11 and so far the results have been very impressive. Now with AdCritter, creating custom audiences are so easy. You don’t need to reformat files. You don’t need to mess around with complex spreadsheets.

Ralph: You just upload any file in any format and you’re ready to go. And the match rate is awesome. They make it easy to connect with the right people, the actual people that have interacted with your ads in the past, and then allow them to naturally flow through your funnel so you can convert them at bottom of funnel.

Ralph: Now, the folks at ad critter,

Ralph: we twisted their arm to get us a great deal for you, the PT listener. They are offering a special deal for y’all. And that is you can get a 500 campaign credit, meaning 500 in free money to test out the platform.

Ralph: Or dollar for dollar matching on any TV campaign up to five grand. Imagine the impact of that match spend five grand. They’ll add another five grand in display. That’s a huge opportunity here. Now it’s only offered to you, the PT listener head over to add critter. com forward slash PT and check it out.

[INSANE Case Study] How to Spend LESS & Make MORE on Meta & Google

Ralph: Hello, and welcome to the perpetual traffic podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns, the founder and 11. And today’s show, every time I do a tier 11 live with John Moran, I always say, you know, we’re not going to rebroadcast this over on perpetual traffic because we just keep going back to that.

Ralph: But the point is, is. this podcast deserves to have this content on today’s show, because it is so damn good. It’s so insane. you might not even believe that it’s true. And this is a client that I didn’t really even know. About too much. And John did a bunch of things here that I’ve never seen a marketer do before.

Ralph: So as a result of that, we decided that we would air it over here on the perpetual traffic side of the equation. So this is an absolutely insane case study. this is just the power of looking at your marketing performance indicators, figuring out What makes the most sense to change and in many cases, it is doing the opposite of what the client wants and what you think will actually increase the business.

Ralph: It’s doing something counterintuitive. And that’s exactly what today’s case study is all about. the client is actually in the clothing store niche. We can’t reveal who they are here. Obviously for. Privacy purposes because they are very big business, but this is the kind of stuff that you and or your team.

Ralph: Can perhaps start implementing inside your ad accounts to get these types of results that we got today. The results are crazy, crazy good, and John Moran thought of this strategy all on his own, and fortunately, he’s a part of our tier 11 team here. So why wouldn’t we put this on today’s show? Why wouldn’t we show the world?

Ralph: This is what we’re doing. We’ve really only started to work with him in a very limited capacity to start. And as he talks about it, we’re going to be adding a lot more as far as services, data, tier 11 data suite, which is a whole thing that we’re going to be talking about here and many different shows coming up in a very short period of time.

Ralph: But without further ado, let’s just get to this case study here so you can digest it. as always, with john, it is not about just listening. You really do have to watch it. And it’s not a shameless plug for our YouTube channel. It’s just that when you actually see things going on and how he thinks and how things are actually moving around inside the ad accounts, both meta and Google, you’ll understand why you want to watch this over on YouTube.

Ralph: So check that out over on perpetual traffic dot com forward slash YouTube without further ado, take it away. And this insane case study. Ralph and John

Ralph: Yeah, beautiful.

John: beauty, baby.

Ralph: right. now I have to figure out how to get rid of those guys. Oh, there we go. Here we are.

John: look at that. We figured it out

Ralph: the fake John and Ralph. And this is the actual John and Ralph, right?

John: no one needs those get rid of those

Ralph: rid of those people. yeah, we were just talking off camera here about a case study that we’re going to be talking about here today.

Ralph: Yeah, so it’s a it’s a clothing store, which is pretty cool.

John: we’re just gonna dive right in and start cruising. but there was a newer consulting client, That was basically Getting a bit of a feel for strategies, that we employ at tier 11

John: and made a pretty drastic change that is, More like atypical, than what people are used to.

John: And I haven’t talked about this topic for years, but it’s a topic that I, deploy almost every single account that we take over or we manage or every single account that we audit, it’s something always top of mind. And that is, obviously we already know that ROAS is going to be the topic for today, but the brand campaign spend versus brand campaigns attribution, there is a lot of times you can increase.

John: Your value of your company by a hundred percent in a week. And it sounds like, okay, well, yeah, that’s, that’s cool. but I’ve seen it before. You can much more often really increase the new customers and new growth for sometimes basically the same amount of spend that you are spending now, if you’re omni channel, but you’re overspent in brand, if you’re overspent in Performance max, or if you’re overspent in a brand campaign on search, I have a pretty wild idea that panned out really well.

John: Thank God. but I figured it was going to happen with the new client. And that’s a case study for today of taking your head out of the singular channel. Looking at the business goals, then optimizing the spend, regardless of what the platforms say in terms of performance, optimizing the accounts that spend for a proper goal alignment, which is so foreign.

John: I don’t know why. It’s so foreign to a lot of

Ralph: Why do people not ask that? just don’t get it. It seems so obvious,

John: it really is. And it’s, for some reason, it’s so obvious yet so form, but I know why it’s scary. It is really fricking scary to say, Hey, take all of your brand spend that has hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue, just, pause it. Just remove it. Don’t worry about it. You don’t need it people are like, okay, well, that’s the only one that’s over 500 percent ROAS.

John: And that’s the only reason why I’m getting that in app performance is like, that’s why you’ll never grow. almost like in Troy when it’s like when Brad Pitt’s like, that’s why no one will remember your name. It’s kind of like that.

John: It’s kind of like that situation.

Ralph: watched that movie last weekend. Okay. For the first time, like it just kept

John: Oh,

Ralph: up and I’m like, I finally, I’ve got to watch this.

John: You have, Oh, that is like, it’s like a rite of

John: passage. it’s like that a bar mitzvah, your puberty, like it’s, right there. Yeah.

Ralph: all right, so we’re going to get into this case study here in just a bit. before we get into it the question that I have for you is, and I, I always say the different thing when asked, why is Murr so important? but also what is it because when I look at Murr from tier 11, I actually look at it as the M being marketing because it’s spend plus salaries.

Ralph: That’s how I look at it as a CEO. I know you look at it as media paid media in both cases, pros and cons to, to, to either one the other. Where do you sort of sit on that?

John: Yeah. So for media efficiency ratio for Murr, my opinion, and everyone has a different interpretation because there’s never been, you know, Webster’s dictionary to come by and correct everybody. It’s mostly towards paid media. You can have her without paid media, like, or you can include other things outside of paid media.

John: However, I think for our position as who we are as professionals, which means performance marketers now we are paid to increase things, scale things, grow things, become more profitable. I like to use media efficiency ratio as a measurement of what I know we can increase. And what I know we should see as return.

John: So if you have an email campaign that’s hitting the same thousand people every month since 1986, and it can’t ever grow and no one can ever be added. I wouldn’t count that as in your Merck calculations, because it’s not affected by anything that you’re doing marketing wise it’s revenue. But it’s not going to be affected.

John: So where I look at where are the areas we’re currently spending on? And you can even take into consideration like what it costs you to hire the employee to go and chat GPT a bunch of blogs every month that yeah, that could be increased. That cost could increase and that is media. And what is the ratio of that return?

John: Because if you pay them twice as much to produce twice as many blogs. But they’re not getting twice as much out of it from the cost. If you spent six grand more a month, you should see 12 grand more per month that if you’re trying to achieve a two X Mer and if not, that’s not being achieved.

John: It’s a very simplistic way of saying, was that more effective? Whatever that is, when I increased it, or was that even important after I decreased it? that’s kind of what we’re looking at with media efficiency ratio is in this area for this case study, we took a client who is spending majority of their money on brand instead of Google and the same client that was seeing the majority of return in Google on brand.

John: And we pause that campaign that had thousands of dollars and we left the one on that was spending like 300 bucks and some crazy shit happens. Because we actually took that aspen and reallocated it to Because this is a large brand, they have multiple physical locations that you can shop at.

John: they have an online store, they have a good following, they’ve been in business 10 years or more, or let’s try 15, 20 years. it’s a great, great company. but they have brand loyalty. Don’t pay for it, stop paying

Ralph: pay for

John: it. If you’re a Nike buyer and you’re like, oh man, I only see one search listing instead of two, and I want to buy my new Nike shoe that I’ve been waiting for six months to come out.

John: You’re going to buy it. You can probably buy it on Amazon, who gives a shit, but you’re going to buy that product. So I’ll share with you something that is kind of crazy. let me share screen here. We’re going to talk about the MER because that’s in this calculation here.

Ralph: last seven days. Compare the previous seven days. So everything that we do here is live as it flows. This was 13, 000 of their 23, 000 in ad

Ralph: Live without a net John, John

John: Yep. Hi, but I live without a net. We’re going live. so this had 13, 000 in cost last week and the biggest brand campaign. It was bringing in 151, 000 in revenue out of the 250.

John: And I said, yeah, just shut it off. So,

Ralph: And they’re like, has John lost his mind?

John: yeah, well,

John: This little broad campaign spent a grand total of 38 bucks more. And it’s the brand and it’s in broad. And it wasn’t spending nine grand. Or, 10 grand, 8 grand. It’s spending 500 bucks. And for the low, low price of 38 more, all of my brand traffic that everyone used to overpay for in that other campaign just flew into here at 100, 000

Ralph: Unbelievable. This is actually why this is a case study within a case study within a case study, but it’s a case study as to why the

John: ROAS

Ralph: row as is bullshit first off. But secondly, the model that we now have. We’re converting our old customers off of a paid by the ad spend because ad spend in some cases, it does not equal scale.

Ralph: This is a great example of that. You’re just getting more out of less,

Ralph: less spend. More revenue. So if you are an agency and you’re running that outdated model, you’re probably getting fat and happy on just scaling up stuff like this.

Ralph: Hey, I’m tripling my spend on my retargeting campaigns and meta. The easiest thing

John: I’m doubling down on the brand campaign because I’m measured by ROAS.

Ralph: But you’re not moving the business forward by acquiring new customers. Hence your media efficiency ratio then becomes a much more important indicator as opposed to robots.

John: And what’s funny is this one said, all right, fine. We’re charging you 30 cents. We’ll charge you 2 cents. Now we’ll take your 26, 000

Ralph: Holy

John: for, 38 bucks, you know? All right, fine. For 38 more, here’s all these thousands of clicks and, uh, your

Ralph: by the way, disciples and dogs.

John: Let’s just take your cost per conversion, reduce that by 90%. And here’s your 42 cent conversions. and then let’s take your row as, which is going to be really funny to see. I don’t even know if I have rows in

Ralph: Right. Well, you don’t even have it as

Ralph: a column. That’s how little you think of

John: even, I really don’t care about it, but the conversion value by cost.

John: There you go. It’s like, this thing is so fluffy that the brand campaign, it’s like, here’s a 20, 000 bro. As there you go. cause if you don’t do this in decimal points, you do it in percentiles. that was 1600 and now it’s a 20, 000. and now here, watch this and you’re like, yeah, but John probably affect the top line, right? Or probably affect the bottom line. Nope. So this account does, we happen to save seven grand.

John: We’re like, thank you very much. We’ll put that in the bank and guess what? Our conversion value went up 16%.

Ralph: Unbelievable.

John: how the hell did that happen? Look at that. So you saved seven grand, you made 41, and then you also have, what about your conversion? So that went up 21%. Well, John, why did that happen? Well, when you drop your CPC to pretty much nothing, you get unlimited clicks and then you even get more attribution, but guess what?

John: I’m now I’m no longer paying for it. That’s it. It’s all that is now take all that good money. And you say, let’s just shove it into meta.

Ralph: Go top

Ralph: of

John: three and put up to

John: 13. Exactly.

Ralph: obviously as much as possible

John: doing catalog sales, DPA sales, like all those other stuff here. Evergreen campaigns. We’re just going to

John: spike it up.

John: So take that money

Ralph: model online, but as well as offline. but you’re only measuring the online sales here

John: and we’re really only marketing for online. If it naturally flows into the stores. Great. That’s actually a phase two that we already haven’t planned on, but it’s fine. Oh, yeah.

Ralph: especially with these campaigns top funnel

John: And especially if one of the one of their actual good executions is pickup in store, which means that person walks in and even buys more stuff after they try on the dress that they really like.

John: So this is now up. So they’re like, okay, add in 100 percent here, add in 356 percent here, add in 105, 19. So we took our money out, which is we took seven grand out of here and put 27, 000 into here. So it’s a 20, 000 incremental. Now, the in app results went up in Google and went up in Meta. So this one, website

Ralph: is purchase conversion value accurate in this particular case in meta. Okay.

Ralph: It’s okay.

John: Now, not purchase conversion, website purchase conversion. So this is yes over here. it collapsed that one. This is the actual one. This is the off of the right

John: conversion

Ralph: Got it. Okay.

John: So this, we gained 255 grand. Now I already did presentation to the C suite like the first week that we started this, cause everyone was panicked.

John: And I was like, okay, this is before this is after 11, one to 11, four, because everything was paused as you see in Google. After the 31st, that’s where it ends. And it starts on the first. That’s the day of the change. The first four days Google spend went from 15 grand down to seven. Meta spend went from 10,000 up to 30.

John: So there’s a delta of $11,000 there. The in-app, Google Rev went from 1 26 to 1 58. Meta went from 2 23 to four 50, so now you have a revenue increase of 130. That’s a 44% increase in top line cost between the two and a total in-app increase of 130,000. So like, alright, cool. So in-app went up. Total between the two up 130 grand and you spent more, which is 11 grand.

John: Okay, good. So yeah, you definitely spent more. The incremental blended ROAS is 11. 09. And you see, I’m saying incremental blended ROAS, not incremental blended ROAS. Now that was 130, 000 increase, but because it’s an app, it’s missing a whole bunch of shit. So let’s hop into their GA4 on the same date range.

John: Their total revenue went from 6 77 up to 1.1 million,

Ralph: Okay.

John: so the purchases went up 65%. The revenue went up 62%. So MER calculations, if you look at an incremental MER scale, you have 1 1 0 2 6 5 6 minus 6 7 7 3 0 7. So you have $425,000 in additional top line revenue for a total increase of a divide that by $11,720 for a 36 murr.

John: Holy shit.

Ralph: Holy shit is right.

John: And this is before Black Friday.

Ralph: Really? Now are you double checking this with the backend? I assume this is a Shopify store or BigCommerce.

John: store. Yeah. Right now they’re doing, Oh, no, I’m sorry. Not Shopify big commerce. So we’re using GA for, cause they’re like, we’ve been using GA for, for years. It’s accurate enough. we’re getting them on a third party attribution software platform. Guess which one

Ralph: It would probably be Wicked Reports is my

John: that’s right. So once, once

John: they’re in

Ralph: will there be a blot out integration as well?

John: There will be, yes, because we’re using GA4, which is just a dumpster fire. So anything is, going to be there. So I threw the whole kit and caboodle. I’m like, we need stronger data. We need to get better data stream. We need to have our tagging be fixed where it fires. And we need to have accurate attribution

John: omni

Ralph: I know a little thing called the Tier 11 data suite, which they might need. So

John: Hmm. I’m glad you mentioned that. I should probably tell

John: them.

Ralph: Yeah, you might want, we’re

John: Look at

Ralph: that have that too. That’s

John: all the shit I’m doing by freaking hand can be done for you. but yeah, shameless

John: self plugs there. But

Ralph: second. All right. So yes, shameless plug. Yes. Higher tier 11. Of course, that’s the bottom line for doing all these.

Ralph: Uh, we’re not doing it for our health. Well, actually we are doing it for our health. We just love spending more time together on Fridays.

John: buys me LaCroix.

Ralph: Isn’t that nice? Um, the point is this, is that it’s amazing. They’re using GA4 because it’s close enough. How accurate, how close is GA4 to the backend? You said big commerce?

Ralph: In this particular case, do you even look at that? Or they’re like, don’t worry about it. We trust GA for it to a certain degree. It’s close enough for us. It’s like horseshoes,

John: no, they, they actually fairly believe that GA4 is like pretty good. Cause it’s always been pretty accurate. it’s accurate to totals, but not actually to attribution.

Ralph: Totals. Okay. So total sales. Got it.

John: tag firing on the site. Mur. Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Like when it went from 600, million, that is very accurate. How it’s represented as to what happened really inaccurate, but. This is actually kind of cool. Check this out. This is something I wasn’t really expecting.

John: if we look inside the,

Ralph: case study, by the

John: I know,

John: right?

Ralph: this is, this is one of the craziest things, but it’s so fundamentally, like it just makes so much sense. Why overpay for people that are already looking for you and know who you are?

John: I know. And that’s, what’s great too, is like, it’s in here, this paid search, you can even see that the revenue actually went up. And that was after I took the paid search, one of the campaigns just paused, that was spending the most. It just funneled so well into it that even third party, not third party. In app tag and GA4 are two separate sources because GA4 is not pumped into Google ads.

John: Not this particular instance, anyway, it can be, but it’s not here, but this went up. Now, obviously organic search went up because guess what? We don’t buy their brand name anymore. So direct is like, okay, cool. I’ll, I’ll, I’ll just go here and stay with organic. So all of this traffic just flew into here.

John: basically once we get wicked reports and once we get a better data stream, we’ll be much smarter. This is what’s funny is I’ve used tools. Like Wicked and I’ve, done this for such a long time where I’m like, I’m fairly confident, just take the biggest campaign that has the most amount of money to deposit, you’ll be fine.

John: If you Google search their brand name or any variations of the brand name, because it is a difficult brand name to spell. That’s why you use broad, cheaper CPCs, but it’s still can, it’s like, okay, I know who you’re trying to go after. And what’s funny is we still have. Tons of people Googling everything.

John: nothing changed. They’re still finding us. We’re still number one. And here’s what’s great is even with this off, taking their biggest campaign, replacing 7, 000 a week with 300 bucks or 500 bucks a week. Okay. You’re still a number one all here. You still have your Google, my business, you still have your ads and you still have your listing here.

John: you’re fine. No, one’s gonna be like, damn, where are they? They’re fricking everywhere. But now when you look inside of here, if you look inside the brand core and you look inside of your auction insights, who are we bidding against? Nobody, don’t worry about it. Don’t overpay. If you are looking in your branded campaign and you’re the only one there and you’re paying more than two cents a click, like what we are now,

Ralph: Hmm.

John: it tells you right there that Google is just like, sure.

John: I mean, you’ll pay it. I’ll charge

John: you for

Ralph: This is a case study of why MERV matters.

John: exactly operational efficiency, reallocation of proper spend, the proper channels to grow towards the business goals that you’re expecting to achieve.

Ralph: Just because you’re spending more doesn’t mean that you’re actually making more.

John: and raw is bullshit.

John: Exactly. Yeah. Cause I, I can make you 25, 000, but unless I do something with the money I saved you, you’re not going to grow. You’re just going to save

John: money. So you save money on one area, you grow incrementally in the

John: other.

Ralph: I guess I’m trying to simplify this for people. This is a foreign concept. It’s like a lot of the clients that we’ve had recently, we’ve reduced their spend, which is counterintuitive. You would think, all right, you’re an ad agency. You just want to spend more money. No, that’s not the goal. The goal is not for us to spend money and us to look good.

Ralph: The goal is for you to look good. For your business to grow, and then we make sure that that’s the case by looking into the back end and making sure that all the numbers work. Obviously, in this case, we’re using GA for fine. They’re happy with that. There’s obviously better solutions. It’s close

John: Yeah. It’s close enough for our

John: first

Ralph: and you’re also getting the waterfall effect and all the regions in which they’re covered.

Ralph: that’s happening. there’s more people that are just going into the store now that you’re upping your top of funnel spend on Facebook or better, so you’re not even

John: what’s funny is like, that’s coming in like a 30 mer incremental.

Ralph: crazy.

John: Like shit. I can be off by half and we’re still dancing.

Ralph: Let me ask you a Mer question. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You can be a 15. You’re still like, you can have your

John: Oh, darn.

Ralph: and you’re still like so high. So just in general, when people do getting people to wrap their heads around this idea of like, not row as, but Mer what is a general, what’s a guideline When you first talk to an account, do you talk to them? Because this is usually like, I’ve been on hundreds of discovery calls. Nobody knows what Morris everyone knows. It is like, yeah, I want a three express. That’s all they say. every sales call. I think I’ve ever been on. That’s what they want.

John: yeah. It’s been the standard since like 2016

John: for some

Ralph: How do you change that mindset? And then how do you benchmark what a good murder potentially is? For any particular customer, or is it a, it depends on what their profit margins are, how do you determine it

John: Yep. So the way I know it’s funny is actually, started working lately, with the war room person on helping them because they want me to kind of like, partner with their company. So it’s still kind of in discussion, but one of the things I would say is what are your higher tier 11 or whether you would be like, I’ll give you part of my company if you just make it big, no matter what, you still ask the same questions.

John: And those questions are actually really, really, really particular. so here’s my questions. , I always ask what is our break even more break even mer means how much cash out versus how much cash in, does your company need to spend and make before you’re like, okay, I’m not losing any money, that is a really great First step is what is your break even

Ralph: Do they know

Ralph: what

John: say

Ralph: in

John: most of the time, no, so what I would say is everything that you’re spending in terms of marketing or media, including TV, spend SEO, email campaigns like that, because everything they’re spending in those areas, what is your total revenue?

John: Because that will tell you if this is a lost cause, or if there’s a lot of capability, because where’s the break even if someone comes to me and says, Hey, my break even murders at 10. You have to 10 X every dollar you put into that entire ecosystem. Now, if you’re breaking murders at three, great, that’s easy.

John: Every dollar put in, I just need to make three back. I need to spend a dollar in meta and I need to get 3 in meta, Google brand, organic and email and direct and returning customers and returning purchases. Okay, that’s very plausible. But when that targets too high, it tells you how well is the business operating, how well do they have their pricing versus the margins and is.

John: This even scale possible because as digital marketers, especially performance marketers who pay money for growing a company, I have a dollar cost associated with every scale. And usually it doesn’t get cheaper when you get higher. you spent more money or sometimes a diminishing return and upper level.

John: So really hyper targets, really hard to continually scale. So that breakeven Mer is important to know. And what is the Mer? And so that would be like, okay, I’m currently at a four. I need to be at an eight, but okay. Can we double the efficiency of everything everywhere? If you’re a fairly good company, no, maybe not.

John: And you’re at a lost cause. Don’t even try unless you’re like, okay, I see massive opportunity you’re under, but you’re underspent. Your pricing is, is atrocious. But you know, unless they’re like, okay, you’re, paying twice to what everyone else is paying for the same product. There’s things that you can obviously look at and say, okay, I do see opportunities for efficiency.

John: But if it’s like, man, you know, you got a $12 product and it cost you three a click, you need a two A 20 x mer. It’s not possible. That literally won’t work. So that’s the first thing. Then what is the LTB

John: of a

Ralph: And we’ve had customers like that that we’ve let go.

John: yep, it unfortunately sometimes doesn’t pan out or what we thought was as happening after we factor in all the other costs.

John: It’s like, Ooh, this is actually a lot higher and we don’t have, any room to reduce our CPCs that much. And we can’t increase our pricing. Like that’s a scary

John: position to be in.

Ralph: Yeah. Or change something in the business model from a cog’s perspective.

John: yeah,

Ralph: get better suppliers, you know what I mean? Or manufacture it

John: yourself.

Ralph: Yeah.

John: There’s always those kind of like bigger changes that you can make, but it also tells you like, do I want to go down and performance marketing approach and hundreds of thousands of dollars of aspen for the next year?

John: you know, the check engine lights on. Let’s try not to enter into the Grand Prix. It’s like, yeah, you know, it’s maybe it may be a good idea to pop the hood and kind of you. No, move some things around there that you got to look at the LTV, the LTV of the customers that will kind of tell you what your NCAC targets can be.

John: Those are two things. So after you get top line mer, if those seem like they’re appropriate, then you go into the next thing. Okay, what is our current NCAC and NCAC target? And then what is our LTV? And maybe even an LTV target. Those can be had by bundles, upsells, cross sales, product development, etc. So when you’re looking at what is the LTV versus the NCAC, that’ll tell you, okay, we buy them always for 20, and they always make us 100 every year.

John: Now, the 20 purchase may only end up giving them a 5 first sale, and then they will spend an additional 95 the rest of the year. Okay, great. So it tells you your ROAS doesn’t actually even matter in app. It can never matter. I have a client that it does not matter at all because their first sale is 12.

John: Their second sale is 1, 800. They get a sample, they order a lot of that product. So great, I really don’t care what in app ROAS is. It does not matter. I can’t spend anything to get a ROAS above anything if I’m selling a 12 sale. So that’s where that’ll tell you, is it possible to continue to buy on them?

John: and what channels is that possible? And what is it gonna make? And if it’s like we spent 25 and we only make 29. Oh, again, trouble in paradise.

Ralph: A lot of the things that you’re mentioning here and sort of saying very quickly, some people might not know what they are. That’s why I put down on the bottom of the screen there, get the marketing performance indicators over at tier 11. com forward slash MPI

John: So much better than this than I am. I’m just rabbit holing over here and you’re like, and here’s where all of

John: our

Ralph: And here’s what all this. Duff actually means so if media efficiency ratio is the first time hearing this, or you don’t know what NCAC is, you don’t know what LTV is AOV, all that you can get it all here. It’s like the most comprehensive guide. We actually built out an entire page on this, which isn’t quite done, but it’s 011.

Ralph: com marketing performance indicators with little hyphens in between. Get this checklist. it’s totally worth it because this is a new way of looking at marketing. It really is, it’s before we got spoiled by attribution and by meta and by Google and by in app metrics, like 10, 15 years ago, we’ve been going that road ever since it’s like, when we started to lose visibility, we started to switch over to Mer and now we use Mer almost exclusively, I think with every client, because as you explained so well, in this case study, ROAS is not an indicator of growth ROAS might be an indicator of overspending.

John: It was scary as I can make your in app ROAS, the totals on the report look like whatever I want.

John: 1,

Ralph: you want, you can look like a hero, but are you moving the

John: 000 brand or yeah, 1, 000 rows. Cool. More money to brand one, two X. All right. Less.

Ralph: double down on your retargeting over on

Ralph: meta,

John: Yeah. It’s so

John: funny. It’s, it’s, like telling the kid that she’s in school, come back with an A. They’re like, I’m writing the name in the parking lot,

Ralph: as opposed to studying for the test. Um, sure. We

Ralph: sure are. You and I studied for many tests that way.

John: I used to pay a kid in math class hours, Skittles for his homework.

Ralph: that’s brilliant. You know,

John: So I will kind of bring it back to the beginning. This is a really good case study for omni channel, traffic, spend level allocations, ignoring row as in app, really ignoring it and focusing on just top line mer because as you can see what Google says versus what meta says versus what GA4 says versus what actually happened, those are four different things. you have a different match. And then when we overlay wicked, that’s even going to be the fifth different thing. Now that’s going to be the most accurate, but it’s still the fifth different story. So we always have to remember your row as is indicative of what that step in the funnel in that channel cost.

John: But if you do not add it up to everything else, you’ve failed at marketing

Ralph: Yeah. Can you show again, I think that’s like, well, what you’re mentioning right now is super important. We’ve got a lot of questions. So we are going to get to, is that Meta and Google are both claiming credit for the same sale and double counting, but I didn’t see the numbers being that far off or did I just miss that?

Ralph: So like the total revenue was X that was in GA four, but Meta was claiming credit for it from website conversion, purchase value. And then Google was doing the same. So there is like, if you take the two of them together. It should be actually a larger number than it really is, but that is not the case inside GA4.

John: well, you know, what’s interesting is they do their large brand with a lot of brand recognition. So they have a lot of direct, they have a lot of return users. They have a lot of return purchasers that overshadow what meta and Google can produce at this time. So it’s almost like saying everyone that buys Rolexes in the world still buy Rolex, but add a dollar to the ad spend.

John: That dollar has no actual impact on the people that just continually buy Rolexes every year. That’s a little bit of what’s happening here. We have a great brand recognition and people just come to our store every day and buy millions of dollars worth of stuff and we’re like, I made you seven grand, I sent 7, 000 less.

John: So like, Hey, way to go, but I’m still making my, my money. Now, when we start to double down on it, that’s when you see the growth. What’s interesting though is our in app attribution, what we went to and from actually got lower. So check this out. Let me

John: share

Ralph: Yeah, that’s what I thought I saw, actually. So I’m

Ralph: just double checking.

John: Yep. So if we take our before, so Google spend 15263 plus meta spend of 10583, that’s 25.

John: Now let’s take out another calculator and then say the, 25 if it’s right here. So then revenue is 3 5835 divided by 25846. You have a 13. 57. So 13. 57. This is blended row as this is not mer mer is the return traffic of all users purchasing on any channel that could have actually started from a paid media channel.

John: So there could be direct email on organic. That’s not going to be indicative. Not always inside the paid media platforms because they missed those a lot. So let’s look at the after though. So now we have our total spend. Actually, the rev is 480, 845. That’s right here. Divided by 37, 5, 6, It’s a 12, 8. So our blended rows went from 13, 5 down to 12, 8.

John: Now that was the reduction, but because this is not mer, it’s a blended row as, which is also a bullshit metric, because as this went down, the total spend increase. Was vastly outshadowed by the total revenue increase at a much higher MERV. So blended ROAS between the paid media platforms went down. When you count everything that those paid media platforms can distribute, it went up. And that’s why In App ROAS is good benchmark, but bad at saying, okay, that’s it, that’s the full story. The other part though, is that sheet, the before and after was only four days. So in four day time period, day one, two, three, and four have been spending 100 percent of its efficiency more. The revenue is like day one, then day two, then day three, then day four, you have the time lag of return.

John: So there is a MERR delta there because a spike of immediate. Spend is not equating to a, yet a spike of immediate revenue yet. It grows into it. So this may normalize as the timeline we always talk about that may normalize back up to a 13. 5 Mer, but you always expect your Mer, your ROAS to go down when you increase spend, because you’re warming up new audiences.

John: love

John: this shit.

Ralph: If somebody didn’t get that, it’s a good thing that there is a recording of this that will be posted over at the Tier XI YouTube site, or wherever, actually, wherever you I’m watching, we’re actually on X now. I don’t know if you realize that, John.

John: Really?

Ralph: we are. Yeah, we figured it out. We finally, yeah.

Ralph: Somebody typed in

Ralph: x. com. it was still

Ralph: Twitter.

John: They’re like, are we on Twitter? I’m like, I think it’s called X now.

Ralph: Brilliant. Our brilliant marketing team figured that one out. Somebody, somebody just had to insert the credit card in the right place. anyway, thank you, Alison, for that. All right. So we get to some questions here. We’re five past the hour here. John Moran’s dog is in full effect. He says, hello. Of course, let’s get him here asking the first question.

Ralph: As a client, as a high media budget for meta ads managed in house, would you recommend the feeder strategy with PMAX plus standard shopping or just standard shopping?

John: absolutely. The feeder strategy has worked every time I deployed it because it’s a high amount of ads, but excuse me, it’s been a meta. You want to spend your spending allocation 80 percent on standard shopping, 20 percent P max, and you really won’t be increasing your performance max budget. Until you see your blended in app ROAS between those two campaigns, not being a one to one scale of ad spend increases on standard shopping and a total of revenue between standard shopping and performance max.

John: Once they don’t match, one outpaces the other, then you’re going to have to start to pump up your max. Again, always measure top line always. I can’t tell you how many times I can’t answer that really well. I don’t feel like how much you’re tag firing. How much attribution are you losing? What is your sales cycle?

John: How long is it is over five days? Because half the data is gone now, but we can’t. I’m trying to go through all those questions, but I would recommend starting with a higher standard shopping first, because there’s signals that are coming into performance max right now are so meta heavy, it’s not even really caring what Google’s doing at the moment.

John: It’s really not. So if you spend equal, you’re going to have a ton of remarketing and warm traffic and returning customers. And then half the ad spend is trying to teach the other half the ad spend. And this audience here is so massive. It’s like, yeah, I don’t really care if you get a couple of first clicks.

John: I have 7, 000 people that I can market now because you gave me all that budget to do so. So what do you want to do is you want to have your ad spend on standard shopping be higher, less than performance max. Your performance max is going to look fantastic right off the bat. It’s also going to ebb and flow much more with your meta.

John: Now, as Google starts to increase and do really good Job at standard shopping campaigns to feed optimizations, negative keywords, make sure you’re bidding strategies low enough that it’s going to go after cold traffic, like a low T row as, that is going to be really a good and aggressive. And then you’re going to start to see your performance max is going to be a little more stable.

John: It’ll stop ebbing and flowing so much with how meta does. It’ll be independent. Once you see those correlations between meta ebbs and flows, reduce The effectiveness on the ebb and flow of performance max, it’s a signal that you’re actually getting more of, well, it’s a sign that you’re getting more signal from your standard shopping into your performance max, because that link between those two tags is much more accurate than the link between the tag and the pixel.

John: Good medic and Google can remark is no traffic better than you can remark a meta traffic. Make sure you come priority and IDs are firing properly. So that the item ID is matching the same item ID is the feed so that your remarketing is perfect and performance max, I would heavily segment out those campaigns so that you have either categorical or.

John: Skew separations so that you can double down on the fact that that P max is getting a signal from that standard shopping campaign. So if you hyper segment, they’re more popular to each other and then 20 split until you find that point where there’s no normalization, then start to scale both of them equally.

John: What that means is that if this is always 80 percent it’s always at 20 percent of the budget, 800, 200 add 15 or 20 percent to both equally to get them to scale up in a stair step model that is equal to each other. Don’t do this because then nothing happens. You’re basically saying, okay, we’re finding good performance here, finding a performance here.

John: Let’s grow this mini funnel at a hundred percent budget. So. If it’s 800 a day and 200 a day, you get 800, you get 200. Your equal percentage increases.

Ralph: I’m just glad you’re on our team.

John: This is funny. I love this shit.

Ralph: My kids call you Otani, by the way.

John: What does that mean?

Ralph: He’s like, the unicorn baseball player. He’s like, he’s like Babe Ruth.

John: oh,

Ralph: I was like the Otani of Google ads. Well, it’s the Otani of traffic. Like how’s Otani

John: They said, Oh, Tony. I was

John: like, Oh, Tony. Oh, Tony.

Ralph: show. Hey, they might say show. Hey, every

Ralph: now and then, uh, amazing.

Ralph: All right. So our tour is back. Good to see our

John: They became LinkedIn friends with me. We’re

John: buddies

John: now.

Ralph: nice. , with demand jet audiences, leveraging audience signals instead of true audiences that we specify, have you been testing it or are you hoping Google reverts the stupid move to demand? Hmm.

John: demand gen for a while. If you guys look on YouTube, you’ll see a year ago, a video that got over a million views where it says initial results of demand gen, and in my opinion, demand gen is a very specific use case function for me. it is top of funnel and it is more list building.

John: So list building is fantastic. If you’re trying to say I’m getting demand gen to warm up cold audiences, to get them to the bottom of the funnel, you can, but YouTube is way better at that. I don’t think that adding in Gmail ads and a homepage of Google feed is having a large impact. And I also would double down on the fact that what we saw, and I actually saw this yet again with a consulting client in Germany this morning, he has more ads been to the account and it starts to spend in really shitty channels.

John: demand gen will charge you per click for an open of a Gmail scary. They never made it to the site, but if they open a Gmail ad, you pay per click. So my opinion would be because Google is basically using this tool for more remarketing, which is what we saw, it actually does more overtakes your good YouTube ads and then targets more warm traffic with the feed and then the GSP ads.

John: Where this failed for me is I couldn’t scale it anymore, turned into just singular PMAX where it’s like, nope, I’m going to do whatever I want, where YouTube, I can still hit an audience without expansion really well. That’s one. Two, the reason why they don’t allow you to direct the audience and more suggest the audience is fact.

John: It’s going to go where it wants and it’s going to ignore your suggestions and exclusions, which means, again, it’s just a ROAS machine. And that’s wrong. It doesn’t need to be a ROAS machine. It needs to be a cold traffic machine. And Gmail ads, in my opinion, are not the way to do it.

Ralph: Interesting. his followup here is sort of hits on that. I’m frustrated with this update because the efficacy of the VACs are way more effective because of the targeting. What’s your take?

Ralph: oh, video action campaigns. Yep.

John: Okay. it’s exactly right. And would say that, yeah, it’s funny. I haven’t seen them called VACs. I don’t know why. I’m surprised I haven’t come across that anymore. That makes so much

John: sense. I just call it YouTube ads.

Ralph: ArchArch just like coined it himself. I trademarked

Ralph: that

John: awesome. I got Murray. You got back. It’s cool. Now, if someone does it, like with the you, we got a, we got a mer vacuum. That’d be

John: sweet.

Ralph: Right.

John: So, yeah, but the video action campaign is exactly right. It overtakes your YouTube ads. It just sucks that in. And then it blasts all of the additional ad spend that you wanted to go into good audience.

John: It’s like Gmail ads. It’s like, fuck, no. And it’s like, what about impressions off the feed? You’re like, I still don’t want that either. it’s basically like we took the good. And then they bolted on the bad, like, man, no one wants Gmail ads. What if we force you to use it? It’s like, that’s never a good

John: idea.

Ralph: Did they ever

John: There’s, I’ve never had them work. And I had so many times I’ve tried them so much. And until I started looking at actual, well, here you go. E C P N D. When you look at actual E C P N D, which is one of our standard core metrics of MPI that we measure your E C P N D, you’ll find out

John: it actually can

John: go up.

Ralph: the way. There was no ECPNV before John Moran. So anyway,

John: So your effective cost,

Ralph: you a little prop there

John: thank you, sir. The cost per new visit, the effective cost per new visit that there, you’ll see it sometimes go up because you’re going to get more clicks, but potentially less people to the site. So Google’s like got a hundred clicks, not 200 You’re like, then why is my visitors going 198, 102? It’s because they click on a Gmail ad, never make it to your site.

Ralph: because of what, but load speed? Like what? What happens if you, I’ve never seen one, by the way, I’ve never clicked on

John: Oh, a Gmail ad. All right,

Ralph: I don’t think I ever have.

Ralph: I’ve never seen one in my inbox. You know what I mean?

John: Yeah, so let’s do this here. Hold on. all right. So you’re probably going to get, a little bit of an insight as to know the crap that I look at. hope it’s not too

John: embarrassing.

Ralph: stuff to the side there. Yeah.

John: I know, right? So, all right, so go ahead and share this.

John: So there’s

John: 90.

Ralph: Yeah.

John: So this is a product that we use. If I would navigate over to my promotions tab and then go here and I click that is a, click. I just costed 90 money,

Ralph: So you clicked it, but you’ve yet to go. Got it. Okay.

John: I’ve not made it to the site.

Ralph: All right.

John: So if you look at your ECPNB, I can send you a Gmail ad. And hopefully if you’re a person that’s like, you know what?

John: I wake up every day. I ignore all the important email in my inbox. I jump right over to the promotions tab and I just go to town. You may be a believer in demand gen. I’ve never met that person,

Ralph: All right. I just clicked on my promotions tab, which I’d never actually open. And they all go, they all go to my same black hole folder. That’s the reason why I never see them.

John: but that’s demand gen. you’re generating demand.

John: Trust

Ralph: I am that’s

John: Everyone’s like, wait, that’s what that is. Yeah. That’s Gmail

John: ads.

Ralph: you click on it and then it, goes, and then you have to click again to go to the site. So

John: Yeah. But you, but Google charges you when you

John: open Gmail,

Ralph: course, right now, I understand

John: you still get the message. Yeah, exactly. And now all of a sudden it’s like, you got 7, 000 clicks from demand gen. It’s like, where’s my site traffic. It’s like,

Ralph: That is nothing. We just took

John: didn’t go to where, right. It’s like, why don’t, how about this? Why don’t you just send email?

John: It’s free.

Ralph: Well, that’s why Google’s a profit when this past year was what was it? Go profit 87 billion revenue.

John: God. I mean, as I’m saying, my, my. My tech ETFs are extremely happy, but as an advertiser, I’m pissed off.

Ralph: That’s unbelievable.

John: exactly.

John: So that’s, that’s, there we go. Let’s move

John: on.

Ralph: let’s move on. Let’s move on. Thank you, Artur, for that. yes, John is constantly in the lab. we’ll have more stuff coming out of the lab very, very soon. Jose V says, does PMAX Still need lots of conversions to work,

John: I’ll have to find work. Just kidding. Um, so performance max

Ralph: scoops up the easy traffic. We know that

John: Yeah, I’ve said this since day one, demand gen is very poor at generating demand and very good at capturing demand. And I need everybody who watches this to really get intimate with what that means. Performance max. We’ll use every channel to go after every single person that they think will convert.

John: It doesn’t matter if it’s the owner of the company. That’s running the ads or someone that never heard of the company before it will go after anybody. It thinks that’s good and bad because it’s good. When you’re beginning out, you have no brand recognition. You have no existing customers. You have a very little warm traffic.

John: P max crushes it. That’s why it works so well. Like 2 years ago, it was a bell of the

John: ball.

Ralph: why not?

Ralph: You’re one of the

John: But as people Mhm. I was on the development team at Google. , I worked with those people and I was like, Hey, this is pretty cool. I was like, one of the first people to get a beta program and then I was introduced to the client.

John: They’re like, Hey, John, this is the guy that’s on there. John is, you know, helping us and YouTube meet. And they literally just walked, Google handheld the client right to me. It was actually really cool. They sold Tile. That’s from Tile. Go figure. Anywho. So this PMAX, does need a lot of conversions to work, but you have to also look at the fact is it the conversions that you want?

John: Is it newer returning conversions? Is it newer and cold traffic? Did it generate the traffic to begin with? That is where you have to dig into it because if you’re like, well shit three out of ten people that click are new

John: and Of the five conversions three are people who made purchases one two and six months ago So my question to you is does that work?

John: Yeah. It’s got a lot of conversions. Does it work? It’s up to you. And that’s what is gold dependent. It’s gold

John: dependent.

Ralph: Will it get you fired

John: Absolutely. And

John: it also can,

John: I was going to say it also can give you a raise until the company goes

John: under.

Ralph: That’s it. That’s it. You make yourself look great there, but you’re not actually adding any more value. You’re not actually helping the client achieve their goal, whatever that goal is. And that’s the number one question, Yeah.

John: You want to see something scary? here’s scary. I’m going to, I’m going to share screen again.

Ralph: But

John: We use

John: performance

Ralph: your case study was scary, scary. Good. So

Ralph: anyway, all right. You’re going to have a tough time topping that.

John: right. we use performance max in this account on purpose. In order to do the remarketing from everything that we’re pumping on meta. And we’re, we’re really cranking up. Like we are new leads, Merz holding new customers are increasing. Awesome. And we threw in performance max and it’s like 500 row ads.

John: We’re like, yeah, I’m so glad I’m getting that from my Google ads campaign with 5. 8 percent new people. Does that work? Sure. If you want it to re market. Yeah, fuck. Yeah. It’s definitely working. Look at all that revenue, 17 grand from that didn’t have anything to do with it. So my end CAC is atrocious. Why?

John: Because they’re not new

Ralph: Yeah. Those are the numbers that matter right there. Those are the metrics that matter in growth that scales there. John, John Moran.

John: And that metrics work as long as my client loves paying 500 every single time it gets a new customer.

John: That’s not a good idea.

Ralph: No, there’s a whole different thing. I think this whole conversation is all about ROAS basically is, is trash. And it can be manipulated and Mer is the way in which you should be measuring it might not make you look as good as you’re looking right now, but it will help the client.

John: Growing profitable companies. Don’t fire those people though.

Ralph: Right. will have longer term clients. If there’s agencies that are listening or watching here, not that I want to give you any free advice, but like, we’ve done it both ways. Trust me,

Ralph: this way is better.

John: I have something at the end. I’ll just leave everybody with about Mer. So don’t, don’t let me forget. I will leave everyone with the best advice I can at the end.

Ralph: All right.

John: All right.

John: So we’ve got 10 minutes left. Does this, yeah,

Ralph: know, I noticed as soon as we start answering the questions, a lot more questions come in. And then I find myself like, you know, running out of time at the end. So, all right, so let’s try and answer these as quickly as possible. John Moran’s disciple. Of course, he always gets a good question

Ralph: in here. You can read

John: He jumps in quick or she jumps in quick. Does the feeder shopping feeder strategy P max standard work for three tier standard shop? No, it does not. Unfortunately. So the performance max actually replaces number two and three. that’s the goal you want that always being secondary or not as important or cheaper traffic or brand.

John: And that’s supposed to be being the receptacle of what is being fed from standard shopping.

Ralph: All right. Moran’s dog. Lots of John Moran’s here.

John: I’m gonna get John Ryan’s left toe soon.

Ralph: John Moran’s head. That’s what we need next.

Ralph: John Moran’s

Ralph: floating

John: That’s why it’s not here,

Ralph: John Moran’s hair, I’m going to sign in as John Moran’s hair. All

Ralph: right. You can read this one here. Yeah.

John: Google ads campaigns for direct to consumer e commerce apparel client when the best selling categories of 50 percent return rate while other categories of much lower return rates such as 10? I’m hoping that return rate and this means that people Oh, no, you could be meaning that these people return that item.

John: And not people that like they return to buy. I’m imagining that’s what that is. Let me just let me know in the comments again. And we’ll come back to this one here. But tell me what the 50 percent return rate is at existing customers or people return that product. That’s way too different.

Ralph: Very different things.

Ralph: Uh, Dave actually has a question. What models are you exploring instead of targeting off ad spend? Well, we use a flat fee model now, but above a certain amount of ad spend, then we then add on and we renegotiate the agreement. It’s just that simple. People

John: but they’re really high.

Ralph: I mean, people like it a hell of a lot better. of course you’ve got blog posts that we can show here. Yes. If you want to learn more about Murr, this is actually one of the best ranks for Murr, believe it or not, like in Google.

Ralph: So anyway, go figure, Lucas. Ooh, this is where the Friday lab. Oh, he was confused.

Ralph: He was over on the perpetual traffic channel. Well, that’s cool too. You can go there, but you won’t see us. we do rebroadcast these every now and then on perpetual traffic because they’re so freaking good. All right. Marcus Hagan says, how would you divide a hundred dollars for the feeder strategy for a one man appliance repair company with five to 12 clicks and a hundred a day budget?

Ralph: Would you stick with max clicks with conversion tracking? It feels like we’ve answered this kind of question before,

John: I would know if it was about plumbing. this was about the new plans to prepare. So I would do to start off, I would do 60, 40, 60 a day inside of either a max clicks or a manual CPC to start, and then 40 a day into a TCPA or TRO as depending upon if you’re using VBB, which is value based bidding, or if you’re using just conversion based bidding.

John: So I would do a 60, 40 split because with a low budget, but still high CPC, You’re going to see, can you buy any more incremental, cold traffic in your manual or max clicks or manual CPC campaign at a decent price and see if you’re over getting overcharged in your TCP and TRO as, and it’s not actually needing to be five, 12 a click.

John: It could be two a manual, but it’s 5 when Google decides that it can sell you a conversion. And that’s the price that they choose to fix it too. So that’d be how it’s

John: structured.

Ralph: and then send 10 percent of your fees over to John Moran at John Moran at Venmo. Thank you.

Ralph: Very

John: my fridge.

Ralph: come prepared. You know, my fridge is always seeming like on the fritz. So anyway, I’ll

John: Mine’s always running. I got to go catch

Ralph: that’s

John: Ah, dad

Ralph: It’s so big. And, you know, even with you being like, so muscular and strong now, like the new John Moran, uh, Lucas does have a question.

Ralph: Are you live somewhere else than YouTube at the same time? I believe we’re live on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. And somewhere else, maybe Instagram. So

John: And both of our houses.

John: but

Ralph: houses. Yeah, but you can’t come here. So anyway, um, Marcus, oh, sorry. We just answered that question. Marcus has another question here. think that’s the same

John: Oh, here’s so it’s close. now that ECPC is gone is what he added to it. yeah, so I actually like Max looks better than ECPC only because it can also react to competitive pricing and it works its way down. It starts high, then works its way down to the absolute minimum CPC that it possibly can to still get enough clicks.

John: So it usually gets you like a four Fairly decent second, third position, sometimes fourth and top of fifth, which is really shit against that’s at the bottom, but check your search impression chair, and then you might have to just manual it for a while. If it’s too fluctuation or doing it within too much volatility.

Ralph: Very cool. We definitely helped him there. All right. Bridge. trying shopper and shopping feeder. P max T row as 300 percent and shopping T row as 550 percent P max is spending mostly on shopping, not much on display. CPC is close to shopping CPC. Is this normal?

John: I would actually do this. So check if your positioning is good. for your keywords in both campaigns, a couple of things. What do you want to do is you want to have a larger separation of your TROAS. So I usually use like a 40 percent standard shopping and like a 350 PMAX. I want the, I want those to be farther out.

John: I don’t want them to be so close that they fight over the same person and nothing ever gets fed. They just bounce off each other. Keep one really aggressive. So standard shopping, I pushed it down to like 40, 50 percent TROAS and your PMAX random to like sometimes 3, 350, 400. Because then it’s like, okay, Google doesn’t know about this person.

John: Goes to standard shopping, which is where the first click needs to be. Due to the fact that Google doesn’t know, and then when the Google knows they only bid on them, if they have a high chance of success, if they don’t bid on them anyway, because they’re probably not going to convert. So that’s why you want those things to be spread

John: apart.

Ralph: Makes sense. our tourist says Mer is cooler than VAC, but great VAC equals great Mer. So anyway, now that we know what VAC is, video action campaigns. Hey, John, how

John: you,

John: taught me the new,

Ralph: something new today? Hey, John, how do you explain seemingly unexplainable drop in conversion rates? I’m running a Google lead gen campaign for some strange reason.

Ralph: Conversion just fell off cliff. Could not find a answer. All right. You

John: uh, yeah, could not find a technical issue or anything of a theory that it might be due to election or something. Well, if conversions are dropping, especially this time of year, and it’s a lead gen campaign. That’s odd. I can see a conversion or e commerce campaign because someone’s running the black Friday side of a Monday sale at the same time.

John: But I would look into do a before and after and look at all of your competitive metrics, search, press, share, search, pressure, top, absolute top loss due to budget loss due to rank on both impressions, your top and absolute top click share, look through to see and look through auction insights. Did anybody come in and just start eating your lunch?

John: Exactly. Did anybody knock you down or anything? Cause usually lead generation is so. Sensitive to be at the top that if you’re number three versus number one, you’re went from first considered first clicked and first talked to, to, I talked to one person, I talked to the second person. I don’t want to talk to a third person.

John: So that positioning is ultra important. I checked their first.

Ralph: Got it. campaign was destination wedding packages. That change

John: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Because this is a long process with a lot of phone calls and a lot drawn out process. You being number one is important. So nothing is going to look out of spec. You’re still going to get a bunch of clicks. You may have, I think you’d have more clicks. Your CPC dropped, maybe a little bit better.

John: All that stuff could be bad though. If you want a good high

John: position.

Ralph: Got it. Makes sense. All right. Couple more questions here. I am not even going to try and like pronounce this person’s name. I don’t even know what the little like Mallory Mallory. Anyway, hi, we’re a

John: I’ll do mailery. You do mailery.

John: We got it

Ralph: we got it covered.

Ralph: Let’s call the whole thing off. We’re a small Swedish agency after one to two weeks of ads, 225 impressions, 175 clicks and 2 haven’t received any leads.

Ralph: Is this normal? They’re advertising

Ralph: on

John: know what channel you’re on. I don’t know. Yeah. Well, I was going to say I don’t know what channel you’re on. And that is a high amount of impressions for low amount of clicks. Not too bad though. It almost seems like a search. But 2 a click could be really low. Again, I would check your position. 2 a click if you’re an agency.

John: Again, I don’t know CPCs for agency in I don’t have that off the top of my head. But if it, it does seem on the lower side. Because typically you’re just going after every single person who did Google Ads. Google

John: Ads. Yeah, that’s low. I think your positioning could be important. So if you’re not on search, be on search.

John: If you’re not on exact match, go on exact match. So go on search, go on exact match so you can control intent and positioning and then use manual CPC and look for placement. You’re going to probably need to be in the 5 to 10 CPC range if it’s possible and that’s where you should be number one, number two.

John: For lead generation on search, positioning matters. Google knows it. That’s why they charge you 100 times more between the first position and the

John: fourth.

Ralph: The real question is, should you be advertising on Google for your agency at all? Because we found it there. Dogshit leads

John: now the other part is, That’s My consultant client in Germany is running a Facebook ad, 100 a day and close like eight clients in a

John: week.

Ralph: Wow.

John: So country does matter for

John: sure.

Ralph: quite a bit like we did it primarily us Canada and I think Australia for a while.

John: And we, and no,

Ralph: So anyway,

John: But we’re the land of bullshitters. Sweden might be pretty honest.

Ralph: got a lot of happy clickers over here.

John: do I see the best Google ads? They just see 48 times in a row. Who’s lying

John: here.

Ralph: somebody can’t be the greatest of all time. Um,

Ralph: but maybe, maybe that’s it. We’re

John: We got time for, I think one more

John: hour. I’m tracking, tracking Google organic and pay clicks on Facebook for each one. Searching after viewing the ad last month, 5k. My question is how to avoid spending money from both platforms in the same person. My question would be do it.

John: If you’re looking at Google organic and pay clicks on Facebook. You’re going to probably see the same thing. So if you’re doing Google organic and pay clicks on Facebook for each one, you’re not going to spend money on both because if it’s organic on Google, if you’re running brand on Google and pay clicks on meta, that’s you’re at the beginning stages of a customer journey, which was your need developing.

John: Here’s what I would really, really, really suggest invest in wicked. Duplicate reports, the tool just to get only the difference between your first click, your last click in your customer journey, I’ll share the screen for 30 seconds. I promise won’t be long

Ralph: Wow.

Ralph: This is, we’re in bonus time here.

John: I know,

John: right?

Ralph: I know

John: This is what you want to know. If you said, Hey, I have 49 grand in Facebook after four days, 90 percent of these people end in Facebook. This will tell you, do you need Google organic? Is there anybody coming from Facebook and converting on Google organic? Because right now it’s 1 percent that people that were driving from Facebook. No, they are not converting on organic.

John: Look at your funnel, look at the efficiency of the funnel, and then say, Oh shit, I didn’t even need that. That might save you thousands of dollars a month for the low, low cost of awesomeness

John: and wicked.

Ralph: Yeah, that’s a great screen, by the way, hats off to the wicked guys for creating that one. I believe we requested that and they created it. So,

John: it’s getting upgraded too, which I’m

John: super

John: excited

Ralph: know what could used to be a dumpster fire. It really was, but now it’s, it’s fucking great. So there you go. All right. Last question here. Can we answer this

John: Yeah, I got it. Yeah, we got

Ralph: got it.

John: All right. Since we know Google ads charges higher ever CPCs based on conversion value, how does Facebook handle this? Actually, we have not really seen the same thing in Facebook. We tested the crap out of it. Facebook is really starting to optimize for lower CPCs and lower CPMs, a better efficiency when it gets more conversion value.

John: Google is more evil than Facebook in this opinion. Or in this

John: situation,

Ralph: there you have it. They’re both evil.

John: they’re both evil. Google’s eviler. If that’s a word, word of

John: the

Ralph: Hey, do no wrong. What did they say? Like, to start off, they do no

John: They said do no

John: evil. Yeah. Yeah. And now they actually just appended it. it’s do no evil to the stock price.

Ralph: You know what? I just Googled how much Google actually makes in a year, like net profit. 100

John: my God.

John: Yeah. That’s through nothing but as nothing but honest, hardworking individuals

Ralph: Unbelievable. All right. Well,

Ralph: we are over time here. You’ve paid absolutely nothing for this free advice here. Thank you very much. Uh, everyone who did attend, it’s great to see you, John. I hope you have an awesome weekend we will be back the same channel, same time, actually on Twitter, like we were on today or X.

Ralph: As well as all the other tier 11 socials. We’ll see you next Friday, everybody. Thanks for coming. And thanks for everyone who asked questions and participated in

John: Yeah. Thanks

John: everybody.

Ralph: 11 live. See ya. So I hope you all enjoyed that case study. We’re going to be doing more of these as they come up, because if they’re super good, we’re going to bring them over here to perpetual traffic. And I do promise for those of you who are listening while you’re actually out and not watching it on YouTube, and you’re maybe you’re listening, you’re at the gym, you’re walking the dog.

Ralph: I’ve talked to people at many conferences where they say, you know, you need to describe this stuff more. I get it. We’ll start doing that more. , but when we actually record these, we record these in our tier 11 lives, which you can subscribe to over on our tier 11 YouTube channel, which is tier11. com forward slash YouTube makes it super easy to subscribe to that so you don’t miss any of those episodes.

Ralph: Not all of these are rebroadcast over on perpetual traffic, just only some of them, the best ones. So we’re calling the best ones and bringing it to you here. But I highly encourage you to watch the video or send your team to watch it even better.

Ralph: If you’re a CEO, a CMO, a director of marketing, VP of marketing, send your team over to watch this, whether it’s internal or it’s externally with an agency, they should be doing this kind of stuff. They should be thinking this is how you need to succeed right now. In digital marketing in the digital landscape that we’re currently in, and, uh, it’s not going to get any easier in 2025 because costs are going up, but smart, creative ways in which to scale and grow business will never go out of style.

Ralph: Like the bell bottom jeans that never go out of style. that’s what we’re trying to do here. So anyway, so check that out over on provincial traffic dot com forward slash YouTube. Of course, wherever you listen to podcasts, we certainly appreciate. Your support. So leave a comment and or a review. And on behalf of my awesome cohost, Lauren E Petrulo couldn’t make this week’s show until next week.

Ralph: See ya.