In this special Tier 11 lab episode, Ralph Burns and John Moran pull back the curtain on a powerful new Meta ad tactic: the CAPI import strategy. Learn how to eliminate costly data duplication, master new customer acquisition cost (NCAC) tracking by individual SKU, and scale your Advantage+ campaigns using a two-ad-set system that blends testing and scaling. If you’re running Meta or Google Ads and want accurate reporting, optimized spend, and smarter campaign architecture, this is the episode to study.

Whether you’re a CMO managing complex eComm portfolios or a media buyer navigating messy data, this one’s packed with Tier 11’s real-time breakthroughs—tested with their own money before hitting client campaigns.

Chapters:

• 00:00:00 – Dive Into the Latest from Perpetual Traffic
• 00:01:06 – Meet John Moran & the Game-Changing CAPI Import Shift
• 00:02:19 – Killing Duplicate Data: The Key to Smarter Ad Spend
• 00:04:09 – How Advantage+ and NAC Unlock Scalable Profits
• 00:07:11 – Inside the Lab: Strategy Shakeups and Bold Rebrands
• 00:09:22 – Real Ad Results: Behind-the-Scenes of a Meta Campaign Makeover
• 00:22:04 – Breaking Down Meta’s New Campaign Framework
• 00:34:19 – Creative Testing: What’s Actually Working Right Now
• 00:34:57 – Perry Belcher’s Email Playbook That Still Prints Money
• 00:35:39 – The Secret Sauce: Layering Strategies for Maximum Impact
• 00:36:00 – Your Weekly Traffic Fix + Hot Seat Q&A Begins
• 00:37:30 – How to Capture Distressed Seller Leads (The Smart Way)
• 00:41:54 – Unlocking the Power of the Feeder Strategy
• 00:43:35 – Winning in High CPC Markets Without Burning Cash
• 00:46:16 – How Small Brands Can Dominate with Feeder & Meta
• 00:49:58 – YouTube Meets Demand Gen: The Feeder Funnel 2.0
• 00:58:51 – Cracking the Code on Standard Shopping Optimization
• 01:02:18 – Wrap-Up: Big Takeaways & What’s Coming Next

LINKS AND RESOURCES:

• About deduplication for Meta Pixel and Conversions API events
• Matt Apps – Executive Producer
• The MAJOR Meta Advantage+ Changes You Must Know
• The Billionaires Club
• 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!

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READ THE TRANSCRIPT:

[Breaking]: How to Test (& De-Dupe) Meta Advantage+ Campaigns with 100% Accuracy

[00:00:00]

Ralph: Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic Podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns, and the founder and CEO of Tier 11. And I find it hard to not rebroadcast some of our Friday lives on this show here ’cause they’re so cutting edge. There’s so bleeding edge that we wanna give all you people that are.

Ralph: Doing this stuff, you’re in the weeds doing it every single day. But also if you are that person who is in the weeds boss, you’re the director of marketing or the VP of marketing, this is the kinda show that you want to send to your people to make sure they are on the cutting edge because stuff is changing so much.

Ralph: Specifically right now in Meta, it’s about the sixth or seventh show we’ve done on some of the changes that are inside the Meta platform. Obviously, we were one of the first Facebook ad agencies. I think we were one of the first three Facebook ad agencies on the planet. There’s now thousands of them, but the point is, is that none of them are on the cutting edge like this.

Ralph: And the reason why [00:01:00] we have today’s show from last Friday is ’cause it’s so good. I can’t keep it away from you. So today is myself and John Moran. John Moran is sort of the guy that’s behind the scenes if you don’t know who he is. Uh, sort of known for Google Ads, but we sort of put him in this laboratory.

Ralph: We have hired him and he’s been a part of Tier 11 for the last year and a half or so, and he has some private businesses that he deals with on his own, sort of his own businesses. And works for Tier 11, but because of that arrangement, it’s actually the ideal arrangement where he can test everything with his own money.

Ralph: He’s not testing it with Tier 11 client money. He’s testing all the things that are going on right now, and he has been coming up with this new strategy

Ralph: that we’re now calling the CAPI import strategy, which we’re gonna talk about here a little bit. I would definitely. And highly recommend you head over to our YouTube channel and actually see this. Some of it [00:02:00] is going to be blurred out just for confidentiality purposes, but you can actually see sort of the evolution of, in the first part of today’s episode, him going through the megapixel and the conversions, API, the CAPI integration.

Ralph: If you know what that sort of stuff is, we’ll leave some links in the show notes if you’re not sure what that is, however. How he has been able to make sure that there is not de-duping and de-duping. If you don’t know what that is, we’ll leave some links there as well. But basically it is the ability for a platform to eliminate redundant copies of repeating data.

Ralph: Meaning that if you have a pixel on your site and you’re also doing server side tagging through a conversions API integration, or maybe you’re using tier 11 data suite through the three. The MarTech platforms in which we import data, you wanna make sure that the data that’s piped back into the platform is not duplicated.

Ralph: ’cause it will give you inaccurate reporting. It’ll give [00:03:00] you flawed optimization. And last but not least, it’ll waste your ad spend. So he has figured out a way to use this new strategy, this CAPI import strategy, which we will be talking about in future shows, uh, in the testing lab and in the laboratory, so to speak, in order to make sure that duplication is not happening.

Ralph: And the big learning outta this is. You all know that we’ve been talking about new customer acquisition costs or N CAC quite a bit, but if you have a e-commerce store that has six or 6,000 SKUs or maybe you see multiple different products, you wanna know what the conversion. Is on each individual product, what is the NAC on each individual product.

Ralph: And you can now actually do this with this strategy that he lays out here, and you’ll actually see us starting to do it with a new account in the first part of today’s show. So anyway. I don’t think he defines the duping, but like I [00:04:00] said, we’ll leave links in the show notes if you wanna look into that even further.

Ralph: The second part of the first section of the show, we go deep into

Ralph: How we test using Advantage plus campaigns inside Meta, how we use a one campaign and then two different ad sets, one for testing and then one for scaling. And the way that John actually does it here and explains it, I highly recommend you look at this over on our YouTube channel, this is groundbreaking stuff. We’ve done a lot on this. Just think about it like if your cost to acquire a new customer, you have 6,000 SKUs. It’s not the same for every sku. It’s not the same for every product. Every product has a different level of gross profitability, a different number that you’re looking for.

Ralph: You might be able to average it all out. But if you can average it out and you have equal sales of all your products, which never happens, that’s a formula for success. However, you need to get very granular and know what the NAC is for each individual [00:05:00] product. The way to do that is through this kind of tracking, which is gonna screen share exactly what that is.

Ralph: So, uh, he’ll also highlight his incredible Microsoft paint skills. It’s Van Gogh Monet ish, uh, and exactly show you how. Advantage Plus is now really becoming an automated platform for wherever that individual is in your conversion funnel. Customer journey, customer acquisition path, whatever it is that you wanna call it, they’re now targeting specifically individual people based upon where they are in that conversion path with the type of ad that will take them to the next step and ultimately lead to a conversion, which we’re seeing 50% reductions, if not more, on new customers acquired in Meta specifically.

Ralph: So. Today’s show. That’s sort of a summary of it. John talks very fast, so that’s why I’m summarizing it for you right now. ’cause I summarize it [00:06:00] as we’re sort of talking. And then the last half is sort of a q and a. A lot of questions that you probably have maybe some of the listeners of this show do.

Ralph: So definitely stay tuned for the entire show. It’s sort of a longer show here today, but definitely one that you wanna check out and send to your team, send to your marketing team and or send to your agency if they’re not doing it the right way. And of course. If you need help from us, we’re always here over at two eleven.com/apply.

Ralph: So without further ado, here is John and Ralph. Take it away, boys.

John: We’re good at marketing. Yeah. I’m not good at this. That’s right. Staying on time that, that’s

Ralph: not my thing. I’m not an integrator.

John: No, we’re a doer. Yeah.

Ralph: Yeah. You’re like, visionary cooking stuff up in the lab and Yeah. I’m doing my thing, whatever that is

John: over here. My meth lab, my rv. That’s right. Coming out. My underwear going, I found something. I found something. Oh my

Ralph: God. [00:07:00] Here it’s, yep. which is pretty exciting ’cause this is where it all comes out.

Ralph: if you’re a new listener or watcher of this show, ’cause I know people, some people just listen to it and they don’t watch it. You should be watching it. ’cause we do a lot of screen shares here, but we are going to be renaming this. Ooh. are you aware, I don’t think we’re allowed to say exactly what the name is, but it has something to do with the Ads lab.

Ralph: Yeah,

John: I remember we were going back and forth from it. I didn’t know if it was, I like the one that you, the most recent one that you sent me. I think that was, had a great ring to it. yeah. Which is why I’m more of the data guy.

Ralph: Data guy.

John: I was like, chat GPT was able to produce this for me. What do you think?

Ralph: Yeah, no chat. GPT is good. That one, actually, that was one that we had for a while. It was called, we used to call it the ads lab. But this is the ad lab. And then, cooking up stuff in the, what did you say? the experimentation kitchen? Is that what you said? Yeah, that’s what Chet said.

Ralph: Yeah, that’s what Chet said. That’s good. It’s good, John, coming outta there, like coming outta the [00:08:00] lab. But I always started to think like, you should have like, the duck hair, like from like back to the future, but you have no hair. Maybe just put on like something blows up and your hair come

John: on like this.

John: Put a DeLorean in the background.

Ralph: Big Google sign on it. so yeah, so we’re gonna be renaming this thing. we were calling the two 11 live, but it’s not really that good of a name with John Miranda. It doesn’t have a really good ring to it. No. But what we’re doing is we’re bringing out new things that you’ve probably never heard of, and.

Ralph: You spend your own money in a lot of cases, like millions of dollars for one of the more recent breakthroughs that you’ve had inside John’s lab. Yep. And then we present it here. So this is the cutting edge of the cutting edge. I don’t think anybody else is really doing any of this stuff. So now it’s like we talk about like feeder strategy and dog piles life strategy like this thing that we did so long ago.

Ralph: I know, right? But back still, like that’s cutting edge too. So yeah. So anyway, so for those of you [00:09:00] who are new to the show, that is the name of the show. It’s gonna be coming out. We’re gonna change all our branding and everything probably next week. and this week though, you’ve got a couple of things that you’ve cooked up.

Ralph: One of which I’m familiar with. Some offline things happening. Yep. and then maybe some meta trickery

John: that

Ralph: we might wanna

John: talk about a little bit. what meta said should happen. I have some data on,proving the model out about the de-duping by ad set and the omni child traffic flows and how Meta has now consolidated what they call opportunities to specific campaigns.

John: So we’ll go through the proof that we can see instead of data suite, which is where we, it’s our diagnostics tool in the lab. Essentially, this is the Tier 11 data suite, and that is what we’re gonna be showing some, some examples as how meta is now. Utilizing their campaign targeting and creative targeting, and how you now have to think about your new structure and set up instead of meta.

John: Yeah.

Ralph: Cool. You’re gonna, you’re gonna define de-duping for those of us, not me specifically, but for those who are listening or [00:10:00] watching and don’t know what that is. ’cause that’s a techy term that yeah, we bandi about here, but we also wanna make sure that you understand exactly what we’re talking about.

Ralph: So anyway, excited to get into that. so where do you wanna start screen share or just, that’s an explanation. Alright. Screen sharing is the way we roll here.

John: I love it. Let’s peer pierce the veil. Let’s see what’s going on here. All right, so I can’t show the name of this company. it is a fairly, large company and so what we wanna do is simply show the results.

John: this is yesterday’s performance. They did spend, $50,000 yesterday. So it’s about a campaign that spends about 50 KA day and having trouble with, growing their new customers. Like, pretty much every customer or every company that’s running digital marketing, there’s scale.

John: That’s it. That’s all you want. scale. So when that is always the primary target, there’s always obviously something that is limitations. And those limitations are now being overcome and identified by the kind of tier 11 data suite, capi import feature, both for meta and for [00:11:00] Google.

John: And what we noticed. Is that as an example of yesterday being actually the first day of imports. So day one, which is really nice ’cause now we kinda get to see a snapshot as of why for the, for all transparency, and I can prove this, I just have to, change the screen here and go off camera here for a moment.

John: But they spend about 1.3 to $1.5 million per month. Big spenders. Exactly. Big spenders, but also very hard to grow new customers. ’cause they have a great brand recognition and they’ve been in the industry for 25 years, We said we have to get, we have to get a snapshot as to what’s going on. And so we wanted to run our own imports,through the API calls of Google Ads, and then get a feel from a diagnostic as to what is working and what is not.

John: And on day one, what we can see so far is if we compare their previous primary conversion action showed 925 sales yesterday. [00:12:00] However, after we import our new and returning customer, the $50,000. Was spent on, spent about 600 returning customers and only 400 new customers. Interesting. So not only were they missing data, because anybody that’s good at math should be able to see this pretty quickly, but 5 92 plus 6 92 is 984.

John: And they were counting only 925. So not only were we missing, we. we’re having more returning customers than new from basically a 60 40 split five nine and three nine, we’ll just call it 600, 400. It’s 60 40. Returning customers now spending millions of dollars a month on 60% of your own returning customers is what is going to be the death of any company.

John: And it just makes a lot of sense, especially when you peer over to the other side and find out that the value cost per conversion is 104, and the value per conversion is a. When you’re basically spending the same CPA to get the [00:13:00] same a OV you are now gross break even, but you are net negative. You are losing money faster than you’re making money and you’re spending millions of dollars per month on it.

John: Yeah, that is detrimental. Now this company is in, it does make sense. Yeah, exactly. And this company is in the healthcare space. Yep. This company cannot use audiences now for targeting. Now for exclusion. Google has stopped them. They essentially said, we’re sorry you violate HIPAA by using any one of your audiences ever.

John: So it’s a company that we previously worked with for a little while and knowing that, targeting exclusions are fairly, gone. This is actually also crazy enough running only standard shopping. There is no performance Max. Okay. So we’re seeing that our standard shopping is bringing in still 60, 40, 60% existing customers because they have thousands of SKUs and when people wanna buy something, yet again, they’re not brand loyal to that company.

John: They’re simply product and solution aware and are looking for the solution regardless of who [00:14:00] has the solution. ’cause they are reselling products. They are a distributor of products. or, sorry, a retailer

Ralph: of products. So does that speak to the fact that they’re not creating brand loyalty on the first sale?

Ralph: So that like, I know, take away all the stuff that you’re doing, but like that I see as a fundamental issue. Absolutely. Because they’re in a highly competitive space. People are just like, I don’t care where I get this thing. And it doesn’t matter if it’s from them or not from them. I think that’s part, that’s a business problem.

Ralph: But that’s still like you’re diagnosing that problem through paid media to a certain extent.

John: Absolutely. And

Ralph: they’re either. this is meta, so I was thinking more like on the Google side, they’re either brand naming your brand, or they’re probably just looking for the thing that they want the particular medicine that they’re dog like in their pet in this particular case.

John: Yeah. and that’s the reason why Amazon exists. Like no one goes to Amazon and be like, wow, I heard about this great thing on TikTok from Amazon. No, it’s, they’re going there to buy the product and when you [00:15:00] don’t necessarily have the brand. Loyalty, you become a hopeful retention play. Yeah.

John: We know that six outta 10 people are gonna buy something again in the industry, but it could be from Amazon, it could be from their competitors, it could be from them. So now it’s just a pure pricing play. So that pricing play now is essentially try to not lose as many new customers as you did last week.

John: Like that’s the goal, which is a really shitty goal. and this is a super price

Ralph: sensitive market.

John: Absolutely,

Ralph: because they’re competing. As I recall, I’ve, I’ve been a customer for years and years, like their biggest competitors, outspending them, but also. Is on the same products, a little bit less expensive in most cases, as I remember sometimes.

Ralph: Yeah. It’s almost like, okay, the

John: reason why we have so many new and returning customers that actually just revolving door is like, that company has better price. I’ll buy from them, but that company’s got better prices than I’ll buy from them. Oh, now they have a better price. And so they basically just bounce off of peer pricing, so

Speakers 1: That’s what’s interesting is there’s no retention play. There’s no nothing there to keep the user, to keep the customer, and that is, it’s just becoming like a well. [00:16:00] I’ll spend a million and I’ll make a million and then I’ll lose a million and we’ll do that every day. It’s basically like that, that kinda model.

John: yeah, and this also even shows that just because you’re running standard shopping does not mean it’s new customers at all. Actually, standard shopping has been moving more into returning customers. ’cause of the T ROAS targets can be more easily met

Ralph: every, everybody thinks Like Google shopping is used so much.

Ralph: Yeah. For like, reordering stuff that you’ve already bought. People don’t really think about it that way. Of course, everybody’s gonna, brand name or Google brand, name my name. it doesn’t necessarily happen that way. And you’ve seen that plenty of times, especially Oh yeah. Now using this, it’s like you can push it right back to the actual, either keyword or ad campaign specifically.

Ralph: And it proves itself out.

John: Yeah. And optimize towards that. And that’s what we’re be working on now is we needed to get a little bit of a sense as to what’s going on, and we found out uhoh like you’re losing thousands of dollars a day in net profitability. So yeah, like that’s just one example of being able to just simply, we’re not even optimizing towards it really yet.

John: Like this is just day one of [00:17:00] visuals. So yeah, just being able to use, the tier 11 data suite to understand. What your campaigns are even delivering to you, much less optimized towards it later on. But this is a really good understanding of saying like, oh, that’s what’s actually true.

John: Not CPA, not roas, because they have actually have a great roas look at three and four X roas. It shows they’re making four and $5 million per month. But if 60% of those are people that are coming back because by chance. Ah, this is in dire straits. So yeah, it’s very interesting.

Ralph: And they’re not on data suite, I have to assume.

Ralph: So the new and returning that you’re o you’re only using meta right now as your proxy to say, Hey, here’s, not only are you missing a fair amount of purchases over here, like you just using the standardized purchase event, however, if we are separating this out now, we’re actually seeing it at a more granular level.

Ralph: That’s not being backed up by data suite at this point.

John: Can we work together? Diagnostic kind of thing. That’s great because what they measure by and what we measure by [00:18:00] are like two ships passing in the night. So for us to be able to have control over their metric, which is more like how to roas that part is like, did you now we can see that 60% of what happens in that campaign has nothing to do with that ad spend.

John: Yeah, really. So that’s what’s interesting. So now we know why some things are like pushing rope is there’s the people that are returning. ’cause these people particularly have a prescription. They’re not gonna buy anything else. They can’t. It’s illegal. Really cool to see.

Ralph: Yeah. Yeah. that just goes back to the idea of.

Ralph: Like before you had this and we could, I wouldn’t even say we could do this inside data suite because the purchases, it was like newer returning customer on like all your products. And you’ve used examples where there’s like thousands of SKUs or maybe like six different SKUs, like in the pet space as well.

Ralph: That’s actually in the pet space also. Not that we do just exclusively pet. examples here, but they just so happen to be that way. Yeah. Just and bound and people, just whatever. Yeah. There’s a lot of crazy people out there that find, it’s like [00:19:00] unbelievable how much stuff people will buy for their dogs and everything.

Ralph: John’s

John: dog, please close yours.

Ralph: that’s right. We just give them free content. That’s what we get for John Morin’s dog. But anyway, this really does speak to that point. We talked about this yesterday in the call, an internal call. It’s like every one of your products doesn’t necessarily have the same nac.

Ralph: Right, Some have better, some have worse. we have had customers where like their gross profitability is 90% on one of their products, but on their other product it’s 40%. Yeah. Because their cost is just higher or whatever it is. But if you have a global nac. You just have to take the average, but you don’t really know, are you getting the 90 gross?

Ralph: Are you getting the, the 40 gross? Yeah. Like nobody really knows. So this is really cool of being able to laser focus in on new customers for a specific product and knowing exactly what that NAC is, so your metrics make sense and it’s metrics that matter. Yep. Growth that scales. Yeah, that’s right.[00:20:00]

John: It’s almost like we’ve entered the next phase of Digital Mark. Something like that. Yes.

Ralph: Exciting shit.

John: so moving on to, to, to my second test for the week. I. All right. that we, wanted to kinda share. So I’ve been making some claims, that Meta has told, me specifically, and I don’t, I won’t say us because this is something that I had a personal conversation with Meta in when I was in, when I was in Iceland.

John: And what was interesting and

Ralph: this mysterious conversation, you just explain that again. Yeah. Like people are like, oh, what is John like? He had this mystery person. They flew me to Iceland to speak. They flew me to Iceland.

John: Yes. I was attending a, a. Speaking engagement and and it happened to be in Iceland.

John: It was actually put on, by Amazon, and a gentleman named Kevin King. So they were trying to get Amazon, companies that don’t really have a website, they’re just pure sellers on Amazon. They were trying to bring in like kind of industry experts to teach other platform techniques. So I was brought in for the Google, and someone else was actually brought in for meta, a creative agency actually out.[00:21:00]

John: We had a opportunity to speak with Meta and Google, who were also attending the event because it was part of what they call like the Billionaires Club, which is people who had made more than a billion dollars on Amazon. So you have the one person that spoke before me on YouTube is Mr.

John: Beast’s, producer. oh, cool. yeah, so it was really cool. in, in with people that are, way more successful than I am, but I’m just happy to be there. I started to, ask a whole bunch of questions to some people that were on the meta team. Love to get a video of your talk, by the way.

John: What’s that? Love to get a

Ralph: video of your talk.

John: Yeah, I will have that soon. Actually, just talk to Kevin this morning. It will be live and I’ll have that, I’ll have that. It’s actually how to drive Google Ads traffic to Amazon to make it. Make the ad look like Amazon. That’s actually what we covered here.

Ralph: Awesome.

John: But did you have to wear your oversized suit? No, I got a new suit.

John: Your talking head suit, remember? I know. Otherwise I’m just floating in there with like 65 pounds lighter. I turn and it’s just my head. My body stays there.

Ralph: It’s the last time I saw John speak on stage. The [00:22:00] oversized suit is all I remember. Anyway, keep going.

John: So the,One thing that they mentioned, and one thing that I’ve been talking about is the, what we call or what they call the de-duping of opportunities.

John: What that means to define de-duping of opportunities if you have built your meta campaign so that they are segmented out by. Level of level awareness. So top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of the funnel. Or you’ve segmented ’em out where saying, okay, if they do this, then this moves over to this campaign.

John: But if they do that, it moves over to this ad set or this targeting,

Speakers 1: right? That

John: essentially was shattered by meta. Meta wants. One campaign, one ad set all creative. It’s exactly what we used to do. Like

Ralph: exactly page view, event to view content, ad to cart, initiate checkout. We would target each one of those with different ads.

Ralph: Now all that’s out the

John: window pretty much. Exactly, and so it’s all gone. So what we are assuming is, okay, let’s say that’s true. Let’s say that as soon as a click happens inside [00:23:00] an ad set, that ad set is. Is the only ad set that can show to that user when they’re either clicked or when they’re impressed, and it will not be able to jump to another asset or campaign unless that ad or ad set is turned off.

John: So we started. That’s wild. I know

Ralph: that just unto itself. That little p you were explaining this to our internal team yesterday, like really? How do we know that’s true? Like, you’ve seen it, you’ve proved it out, but when you heard that, weren’t you my God. insane.

John: it actually is, and I’ll share some data that is up that is backend data from another agency that I’m a part of.

John: very tiny agency. It’s a VC group. we’re not even, we have like a. 15 accounts total in, in the world kind of thing. Like we, it’s not a big company, but we buy companies and make them bigger. what ended up happening was, we had a campaign that basically just exploded,in a bad way.

John: And like, it just, it fell off the face of the earth. this is the internal conversation that actually happened on April 18th, where, long story short, last week, January 25th, [00:24:00] confirmed by Angelo our contacts and meta major uptick to a SC campaigns. This is what we obviously saw happen. Our account went from in platform rows of 3.5 to 0.4 on average.

John: No matter what we tried no recovery in this campaign. So what we saw, because we do a lot of extremely technical media buying, like you fart on Tuesday, you see that ad on Thursday. Like it was, it was insane with the amount of technical structure that we had broken out in all these campaigns and overnight 3.5 ROAS M platform to a 0.5, like flip a switch, just like.

John: Thought it was a tracking issue. Thought the was gone. Nope, everything was working perfectly fine. But what we found out is that the way that we move traffic through our prospecting, remarketing, and acquisition funnels, of which we actually label PRPT and like a CQ and everything, we have them all break broken out by label.

John: That thing just went and just blew up. So I already have, a bunch of proof that, the technical media buying portions of our campaigns are just dying. And it’s [00:25:00] crazy. So one of the things that I thought was, okay, if what Meta has said is true, I should be able to backtest that.

John: I should be able to identify that. So hopping into our handy dandy, it’s kinda a handy dandy notebook on blues clues, the handy dandy tier 11 data suite. We’re able to see the ad or the ad group and the campaign that users are being pushed through. And what was interesting is before. We used to have like a, bunch of different campaigns that could get first click and the, then you have other campaigns, got second click, and then you go to remarketing clicks.

John: Now it’s, you can see that it is locked in. After an ad was paused, that first one was an old one. From March we paused it, and now every single. Every single, click is coming in and are like completely what was essentially now top of funnel campaign. And it is an add click on the Catherine Cat ad.

John: That’s the name of the cat in the ad. ’cause this is again, a pet brand. Go figure. But that’s Catherine the Cat. So I gotta click on Catherine. Catherine. Catherine. Catherine. Catherine. And then even after they buy, it’s like click. I’m [00:26:00] Catherine. They do not, they’re not released from this ad set or ad.

John: Yeah. And then we said, okay, let’s take a look at this one. It’s

Ralph: like their user ID is permanently attached. Yeah, to that ad set specifically. Okay. Makes sense. Yep.

John: And so we started to look at longer time periods and we started to see when things started to bounce around and we’re noticing, okay, once we pause this on March 22nd, then the one that we launched on March 29th, the new one in creative testing, got a click creative testing, got a click again.

John: Then it jumped to this 1, 3 22, 3 22. Each time we date them and we move forward, we can see them jump to the new one. 4 27, 4 27, 4 27, 4 27. Same ad set. four clicks in a row on 5, 6, 5, 7, 5, 7, 5. it’s literally the same ad set now locked in. The only time I can get them out of this is if I pause that ad or that ad set.

Ralph: Is that a different

John: ad each time? Can you or do you not know or do you care? Nope, this is the same ad. We labeled it the same ad. Okay. The same, yeah. So the ad name and we all like Heidi. Patricia. When these [00:27:00] are paused, then this new one comes in and then they are locked into here. Got it. Okay.

John: So we started to identify that we got, 4 27 immune. Now they’re going through Heidi. We did have a direct visit in between there, but they’re seeing this, they have five clicks on the same ad.

Ralph: That’s

John: wild. To think Uhhuh people would actually do that.

John: Yep. And so I started to go through each one of these and it was like 3 22. So same ad. And then that was paused. This is back in 3 22. The new one we launched at four 13 is same here. Now we have this one that’s taken in, taken this over, and I’m gonna see, is this the same one that’s also gonna show up now in the next 2, 3, 4, 5 times.

John: So I keep looking into this thing. Catherine. Catherine. Catherine. Catherine, Katherine. it’s the same thing. They are the same ad every single time they used to bounce. Now they’re locked in. if they’re locked into your top of funnel and it can never go to your middle or bottom, that’s the reason why your funnels shattered.

John: It breaks. And this is a reason why Meta wants to have the campaign and the ad group to have all of the creative ’cause it can jump in between different ads like we’ve [00:28:00] seen. Sometimes it goes through different names, but the ad set is the same exact ad set every single time. Unless it’s paused, it will only release the opportunity when it’s paused.

John: And I don’t know anybody, this last one of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, we have six Catherine clicks on the, on literally the same day, all five, seven. They kept seeing the same exact ad. Seven times one day.

Ralph: User behavior is just so mind boggling to me. Right. I think that’s one of the reasons I should have been a psychiatry major.

Ralph: Well, psychology probably ’cause I wouldn’t be a psychiatrist. but I should have been a psychology major. I did take, everyone can write the drugs. I want that one. that’s psychiatry and that would be better. I should have gone down that road anyway. But it’s very, it’s closely. Related to advertising and marketing in general.

Ralph: Yeah. It’s like why would somebody click on the same ad? And I’ve seen those ads and I know those ads and they’re not particularly interesting by any stretch, but it’s like they’re thinking about it. I remember I heard like the, one of the first digital products I ever bought was Jeff Walker’s product launch Formula [00:29:00] 2.0.

Ralph: This is way back like when I launched my first online business and I watched his webinar. Like his, the replay of it, I think seven or eight times. And then he said in one of his webinars, he’s like, yeah, on average people watch anywhere between five to 10 times before they decide to buy because it was like a $4,000 product.

Ralph: And back then that was like all the money in the world I had.

Speakers 1: Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know what

Ralph: I mean? So anyway, so I bought it, but I never will forget that. ’cause he’s like. People watch the same stuff over and over again. You wouldn’t think that they would. They would watch it once and then maybe the replay, and then that’s it.

Ralph: But if you’re really thinking about buying something, you click on the same stuff. You do your research, you Google Yeah, the brand name like maybe 10, 20 times.

John: Yeah. the touch points and are only growing as we start to throw more ads at everybody all the time. Like it makes sense. It’s the reason why friends is still on tv.

John: Yeah, absolutely. stop, what, like 2000, like four or something. It’s crazy. [00:30:00] Yeah. Now my, and people are still watching Exactly. Watching refund reruns, but it’s, it is, it makes. It makes a lot of sense and it makes no sense at all at the same time. yeah, like right now we’re in that transition period, which is hopefully Meta’s AI targeting based on creative is just as good as what I was doing.

John: like that’s a scary proposition. yeah. and so I think it’s our job as good marketers and educators of the industry to explain what we’re seeing so that people, I’ve had a lot of times where I’m always a tinfoil hat guy. I’m always like, soon Meta’s gonna just do this.

John: And I was like, okay, John, like, go back to your cave with your tinfoil hat. And all of a sudden, like, things are starting to like, come true, which is cool. so it is moving that direction. But I think that’s the, sometimes, tinfoil hat theories, they become reality.

John: it doesn’t make sense why they would just stick a person in one ad set forever.

John: And then they’re like, there’s different conversion events. So different conversion events are allowing now to jump. I’m like, oh, like now. That’s why Capi Imports makes sense. It’s like we can actually control the flow of the traffic. ’cause if you don’t. Your tofu ad is stuck [00:31:00] there forever. Good luck.

John: that is horrible. they’re just forcing you to relinquish all control and to put into one campaign with one asset and let AI, God figure it out.

Ralph: So in that ad set, if they’re clicking on the same ad multiple times, you’re also mixing in because we talked to our creative director Lauren yesterday about this, who by the way, is going to be launching her own new series on YouTube, on creative.

Ralph: So teases, hint, hint. Nice there. anyway. So her question was, how do you actually test creative? Or how do you know which creative to bring in? And I would always think, in each individual ad set you’re gonna have for one particular product, you’re gonna have five or six different creative types or maybe hooks and so forth.

Ralph: But your data shows they’re clicking on the same damn ad.

Speakers 1: Yeah.

Ralph: So it’s like, I’m not thinking about like, oh, it lasts longer. Oh, it tastes great. oh, it’s less filling, or whatever. Whatever the benefit is for me, [00:32:00] I would want to get. But I lock into one thing and Meadow almost knows that I’m locking into that one benefit.

Ralph: Like less filling is the thing that’s gonna get Ralph to convert. Using a horrible analogy here, but basically that’s like a hook and it seems like the data shows that to be the case. How would you respond to

John: that? if you combine your horrible analogy with my horrible Microsoft Paint skills, you get an explanation here.

Ralph: Oh my God. Oh yeah, he’s Michelangelo. Oh yeah. Look at this. Look at that funnel,

John: baby. Oh yeah. And so this is obviously everyone knows the funnel.

Ralph: Yeah,

John: that’s actually not too bad. I’m pretty proud of myself. I can. That’s like it’s all

Ralph: aligned and everything.

John: Yeah. Look at that. Looks, I know. What a hard I figured out if you hold down the shift button, it actually makes things straight up.

John: That’s good. I’m a pro in paint. That’s good. What Meta wants is if they have these users who are in the top of the funnel and middle of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel, and you’re [00:33:00] producing all of your creative over here in these kind of bubbles essentially, and this is all of your ads in one ad set, then what Meta’s job and what they’re saying they can do now is saying, this person needs to see that.

John: This person needs to see that. This person needs to see that. Why? this person is. Is product and solution aware, but is not company aware this person is dealing with a problem, but they have no idea that there’s a solution about it. This person is actually just, trying to price match, your product and everyone else’s product.

John: So where, what Meta says is we understand where our users are in the buyer journey to. Based on how much we can match their needs and activities to your creative. And then we will combine them. Now, what there was also mentioning though, is that if I have a user in this, a user over here that needs to see that ad, they are going to be seeing that ad multiple times.

John: Now, meta states that as they move down the funnel, they will then see the same ad that this person’s seeing, and as they move down the funnel, they’re then gonna see the same ad that this person’s seeing.

John: So essentially what [00:34:00] they’re claiming is we will show the appropriate ad, which is why they lock in, which is why when you’re looking at creative targeting, creative testing, if you have two ads at the exact same and the audiences are the exact same meta’s going to it can’t.

John: Target to one person with two ads, so it chooses. And so everyone’s like, no. I’m gonna force it with a BO, I’m gonna make meta spend the money. And what you’re doing is meta said, Hey, I have no one for this, and that’s not how I work. And you went, yeah, but I’m a BO, so take my money anyway. it goes against the narrative now.

John: So meta’s like, Fine, I’ll choose both and I’ll split it. So it’s gonna be split down to different audiences. And so we thought, okay, that’s how we do our creative testing. If it’s gonna be the same audience, why don’t I spend 90% of my A spend on the same audience. I’d be spending 10% of the A spend on, but with different ad.

John: So I can test with my 10% and then push it to my audience with 90% and then retest the 10%. It’s actually Perry Belcher’s old email marketing, [00:35:00] strategy from 2016. Where he had a hundred thousand users in a list. He took 5,000 users tested one email headline or subject line ticket or 5,000, test the other subject line, then blast out to the other 90,000.

John: Same exact thing.

Speakers 1: Yeah.

John: The audience is the same. They’re locked in. It’s like an, it’s like a, it’s like an email list. So that’s how these things are kind of evolving. we just have to give it obviously more time because we’re seeing ’em locked into that one ad. Then we gotta see, are they gonna jump down to the other one?

John: I have sort proven it with feeder strategy, so that’ll be something next. We can see the view contents and then the purchases now, so we’re starting to connect those dots. Yeah, it’s starting to jump between conversion events, so we’re like, good. That’s really cool

Ralph: too. Yeah,that’s some next level stuff right there.

Ralph: That’s actually combining two of the things that we’ve come out here. In the ad lab, not that I’m renaming it already. ’cause we don’t have our, all our branding together. The point is like that’s a combination of CAPI imports plus feeder strategy.

John: And soon it’ll be CAPI imports with feeder strategy on top of Dogpile strategy.

John: Oh, lumping ’em all in together.

Ralph: Oh baby. Oh yeah.

John: It’s

Ralph: good [00:36:00] stuff. make sure that you stay tuned here every Friday, 2:30 PM and we’re getting a lot of people watching this on the replay too, so it’s insane. and we’re actually somewhat on schedule here. As promised last week, we would get to questions in and around the three o’clock timeframe, and we’re right there.

Ralph: That’s right. I’m getting better at this. I know. Look at us

John: getting organized and

Ralph: stuff.

John: Still late, but now we’re on time. Still late. We’re on time. Exactly. Minutes. Like my grade in high school. 50%. That’s good. Yeah. Isn’t that good

Ralph: enough? that’s technically. Pass fail. My son is graduating this year, oh man.

Ralph: From the NBA, his NBA, we were talking about this. He finished his baseball season yesterday. Yep. 21 years he’s been playing baseball finally. Geez. Like that was the last game he’s ever gonna play. Now he’s into like beer, beer league, softball. but anyway, so all of his classes are pass fail. I’m like, that’s my kind of program.

Ralph: Anyway. Yep. Yep. Because fifties are good. So that is the first part of today’s show. Stay [00:37:00] tuned for the second part where we go into really specific questions from you, the listener, the watcher. Uh, I highly recommend you, you subscribe to the two 11 channels so that you can get these lives every single week. You don’t have to wait for us to cherry pick them over gear on al traffic, but we’re gonna get into the q and a section right after this quick break. That’s right. all right, let’s get to some questions here. Hopefully we’ll be batting better than, his batting average this year. John, it was a little bit of a disappointing year. Malomo has a question for you. Hi, John. I’m trying to generate distress seller leads and my campaigns are having a touch time, a tough time.

Ralph: I’m assuming that serving, no matter the bid. I’ve used Max clicks, high budget, 700, big cap, like 80 with no impressions, clicks using manual CPC raising, exact phrase match keyword, like $95 bids, no impressions. And one last thing, just additional context. I targeting a specific country inside of a state, not national.

Ralph: Ah,

John: county. County instead of Okay, [00:38:00] got it. So a specific county that’s gonna be very difficult. when we were doing distress seller leads, I. Okay. you can target like a region. then it can work. My, my opinion, there’s something else that seems to be going wrong here. I understand the CPC cap at 80.

John: I. Potentially could stop learning ’cause it can’t start high and it wasn’t really finding much lower it. Your bids might be $250. We’ve had 220, 200 $40 CPCs. That’s not uncommon. DUI, attorney Houston is 800 bucks. So you know that’s And plastic surgeon, orange County is like two grand. So there is vastly, wild ranges of CPCs if you try max six for the bid cap.

John: The only thing that I would say is set a CPC and daily budget that is fairly high. If you’re using $700 high budget, set a $700 CPC. I know it sounds stupid, but what you’re looking for is some sort of sign of life that tells you. If this is actually [00:39:00] even going to work at all. I do have a small,half second use case that I can share with you.

John: It’s on a client that is, we’re having the same sort of exact issue actually, and their issue is we cannot get, enough traffic because this is a highly segmented, and competitive industry. So if you look at the last seven days as an example, I got a grand total of, three clicks.

John: Now they’re coming in at $66 CPCs. But because we’re only spending $400 a day, it will actually only give me three clicks because if this actually starts to shoot up to a hundred dollars, I can’t earn one more. So it says, if I know the CPC is this much, and I know the daily ad spend is this much, it will purposely, sometimes I’ve seen it purposely not get enough clicks because that next click could put them over the budget.

John: Because the CPCs are so high. So test with a really high CPC and what I mean, really high CPC, I’ll, I’ll actually start with like $80 CPCs. I’ll work up to 90. I’ve actually gone up to $200 CPCs. What I did find is that yes, I can actually start to [00:40:00] get impressions for like x-ray repair and MRI preventative.

John: These are hospitals searching for people to come out and fix a $500,000 piece of equipment. There’s not a whole lot of traffic out there, and we’re only going to one state. This is Texas. the search terms are perfect, like in the last 14 days, like the, I can see, my three clicks out of the four that, or six that I got, which really sucks, but prevent, the x-ray repair, who fixes MRI machines, MRI, coil repair scanner parts X-ray, repair technician near me.

John: Sometimes the CPCs are crazy. I get very little clicks. So what I would say is set it to the ridiculous and then look at your, search, impression share. Lost by budget. And that should if, if you’re actually capturing everybody, it should, and I’m so sorry. I’ll actually just share this with you real quick.

John: You can see that I’m trying to spend $400 a day and I could only spend $90 every 14 days, but I’m fairly confident in this because my search lost impression, share by budget is 0%. I’m not losing anything [00:41:00] doing to not spending too much. This is actually, there is no one there. It’s just a limited

Ralph: supply.

John: Exactly. If you have anything over zero. You need to raise budgets and bids.

Ralph: So budgets and bids and then accordingly. Daily. Yeah, daily budget. So bids, So 700, like some ridiculous number. Yeah. There four to

John: spend a month. Do that one day.

Ralph: Yeah. Got it. Got it. And then gather the data.

John: Exactly. So send it to the extreme and just find out is it too cheap or like, or is your account set up too cheaply for the ccpc, or is there really no one there? Yeah, I think it’s

Ralph: a frightening thing for a lot of people to do is reverse psychology there. if you’re gonna be making money on this, I assume that you’re either reselling the leads there or you’re using them yourself.

Ralph: if you’re doing wholesaling or distressed buying, you’re talking a OV in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars potentially. Anyway, all right. William Forshaw has a question here. Hey, John. There now three weeks in fi, we are now three weeks into feeder strategy. Very cool.

Ralph: We realized that due to high price [00:42:00] ticket item, we have better results of the balance of 50 50 between standard and P max thoughts.

John: Yeah, so that makes a lot of sense. The reason why is if you have a higher price ticket item, you’re gonna need a longer time and more remarketing. Yeah, so feeder strategy is combining the first click and then the remarketing efforts, and then the return branded searches, and basically any way they, they could possibly get back to you and you’re trying to force them to come back to you.

John: Now, that will probably take a few clicks and maybe a few days to a few weeks. Now, if you are doing half of the feeder strategy, which is just standard chopping, what you have to say is it’s gonna take a few days to a few weeks, and I’m betting all that on the first click and only one click. So it makes sense.

John: So you have to push more additional aspect to the remarketing effort because one click is not going to be enough attention for a two week sales cycle. So yes, I, that’s why I tru try to usually always teach like, what’s the best structure? It’s like, it depends when you have a longer sales cycle, higher or higher a OB or both, you need more time and more channels to develop that education that they feel comfortable on spending that much amount of money.

Ralph: Yeah. [00:43:00] Makes sense.

John: brain

Ralph: bite. I think this a new watcher, maybe just a long time listener, but first time caller kind of thing. Hey John, I’m doing the due to this. Any updates on search feeder strategy? Can I run the feeder strategy with the full built P max campaign alongside standard shopping?

Ralph: Or should it just be p max feeder? And then the clarification here, how do you apply the feeder strategy and standard shopping when dealing with a large number of SKUs, profit margins, best sellers, et cetera?

John: Yep. So in the, can you run feeder with a fully built p max campaign, where you’re talking about search and then P max and then shopping.

John: I have not been able to run a search and full bill Pax ever, only because the vast I. Amount of variation in search terms allows for a vast amount of variation in CPC. And one campaign will take the good and one campaign takes a leftover and it’s not really up to me which one gets which because the varis are variances are two great.

John: Sometimes [00:44:00] it’s $2 click, sometimes the $7 click and depending upon where they’re at in their buying journey. So standard shopping was always really easy ’cause I use a feed only PLA, remarketing campaign. So that one’s very simple. It’s one channel to one channel, or sorry, one channel to like two channels.

John: But a full bill p max is seven channels against search. that will way overtake any quality that you’ll be able to find inside of your standard search campaign. Because I. The PM MX campaign has such a better way of identifying warm traffic and buyers that are closer to the buying journey. That’s why they deliver a lot of returning customers.

John: it’s waiting for those people and then just snipes ’em. If you ever go into your insights and reports inside of Google Ads for Performance Max and look at the conversion rate of your search terms, it’s like 30 and 40% all the time. Now there’s only onesie twosies, but every single one’s a, it just cherry picks and nails ’em.

John: So your search campaign is at the detriment of,it’s kinda like the forgotten child. The new kid. Older kid got the car, you got the bicycle. Like know, it’s that’s it. Unfortunately. They got the new

Ralph: suit, you got the hand me down.

John: exactly. So that’s what I’m saying.

John: I actually don’t really, I [00:45:00] don’t run a full bill p max ever. I can’t anymore. it never scales and it’s not supportive enough. So if I need to do a full bill p max, I’ll just run Advantage Plus. Yeah. it’s just way better for targeting. if your mileage may vary, but that’s. That’s what I’ve been able to see.

John: how do you apply theater strategy, standard shopping segment out by categorical. So categories are the best way. When you have a lot of skews, you don’t often see categorical jumps inside of traffic, categorical editions, which means I came for socks, I bought socks and shoes. Very difficult to say.

John: I came for socks and I bought a purse. You failed at why I went to the store that day. I. That’s where you see if you can categorize your products and you build out your campaigns by category, then you can have an average A OV and L, T, V and C target of those categories because they’re probably all within about the same ish price, different than other categories.

John: But that is how I would absolutely set things out. Now, your bids, budgets, targeting and your T Row as targets, and all this stuff’s gonna be based on your profit margin.

Ralph: Sounds good. we have a new John Jay Ha. Who? Jay ha. It’s got a logo. Yeah, it’s got like, yeah, [00:46:00] maybe his name really is Jay Ha. I don’t know, but I think he’s just like, neither, like misspelled it or whatever, like on YouTube.

Ralph: John Moran from Made I’m impressed. This is definitely worth answering the question. All right. What advice for small and medium sized brands leveraging the feeder strategy and meta ads? Will we lack the capability for a data warehouse or third party attribution tools?

John: do in-app CPA of your, add to carts compared to your main campaigns, and also look at your click the rates compared to your main campaign.

John: If feeder strategy working properly, you should have a cheaper cost per add to cart in your feeder than you would in your conversion campaign, and you should also have a higher click-through rate. If not, it’s not working properly. So those are the two things that say the new users are coming in, are actually more engaged and interested as people are trying to convert and they’re taking action.

John: So use those two and make sure that those two are more effective and efficient at, in the C-P-A-C-P-C-C-P-M and CTR, [00:47:00] for your feeder campaign, the campaign’s, doing the optimizing for view content.

Ralph: Okay, so be view content and then Gotcha. So you’re saying instead of purchase in this particular case.

Ralph: At the cart

John: and that be, yeah. And I’ll share with you a, an example of this. ’cause that’s why you all are here. Yeah. this would be cool to see. So we did this, we’re here for our pretty faces, John, like, listen, I know right to ourselves. look at this, look at it, look at this mug.

John: So what we’re looking at here is if we look at the customized columns and we look at CPM and then we do CPC and then we do CTR. what we can look at here for an example. This is, there we go. So I have a 4% click the rate, in this one, this is actually the first week that I had a conversion campaign beat my feeder strategy.

John: CTR. Usually this is like three and this is four and five, and it’s like 1, 2, 2, 2. This one actually did pretty good this week in five. It wasn’t always like that. If we look at, I think like the last week, oh no, that one’s doing really well. The, I think it was when we did the new creative on the 16th.

John: Is four, [00:48:00] three, then 1, 2, 5, 2. So it’s, you wanna have your click to rate be at or better than your conversion campaigns. Then your CPC is 25 cents and 13 cents compared to $68, $3, $2. And obviously CPMs are lower. But what you wanna look at here is if I spend. $3,000, seven times lower. I know, right? 13 cents.

John: Yeah. That’s my scaling. And that’s you’re getting all that good reward because Google thinks, or meta thinks it’s just nailing like 17,000 conversions every month. Like it’s just like optimizing like crazy, right? So when we look at our results, we know that we’re spending $3,000 and we’re getting a hundred added carts.

John: So if I look above one at $12,000, I should have at least 400 added carts, right? Because that’s four times more. I have a hundred here. I should have 400 here. I have, 200, 200, two and 200. Yeah. Yep. So I’m spending four times as many, as much ad spend and only getting twice as many a to cart. So obviously this one is trying to convert people so as hounding [00:49:00] people more often on, The trying to get them to buy. So they’re becoming less disengaged. They’re not clicking as often as they used to when they first found out about us and when we’re new and exciting. So that’s what we have to look at is if I’m spending 50 grand now, this one is gonna be a lot. It’s, 1100 conversions.

John: ’cause we’re spending 50 Gs every two weeks. But that’s the thing where you look at and say, okay, this one is 2600, 3100, I should have about equal add to carts. This one has 36 add to carts. So you see the cost add to cart is like three and four and five times higher in my conversion campaigns, which means my cheaper campaigns are bringing in people with good click.

John: The rates means they’re interested and they’re adding to cart, which means they’re taking action. Yeah. That’s how you judge those without data suite, I.

Ralph: Got it. Yeah, it makes sense. like if you’re going all the way through, you’re just getting really optimizing for a click, but they’re all going through to add to cart.

Ralph: Not as many purchases, obviously. you’re gonna get some purchases there, but it stands to reason that Yeah, that’s an easier way to do it. Brian, Jay has a question. Hi, John. The sequencing campaigns are running. Did I miss somebody here? No, I didn’t. all running YT [00:50:00] feeder.

Ralph: Thanks. Assume that’s YouTube. but what’s the other half of the setup? How do you set up campaigns to target the sequence traffic, video views, page visits?

John: OTCE is my favorite campaign type. and I’ll go through what that is in a moment, but first I have to use an asterisk of. If you are running other channels besides YouTube for proactive outbound marketing, such as if you’re running, meta, for example, this strategy is much less effective for this particular question.

John: What I mean by that is I would start what I call an OTCE Demand Gen, which is open target. Customer excluded, the customer excluded, is eh, It’s a bandaid. Hopefully, that will help a little bit. But because Google has officially come out, at least to me, and say that the new customer only is probabilistic, not deterministic, it means that your customer exclusion is a more of a hope Than a than an ask, or it’s an ask and a hope rather than a command.

John: Did

Ralph: they really tell you that? Did they talk to you about that?

John: [00:51:00] I actually have the email.

Ralph: Oh, that, I remember that email. Okay. Alright. I thought you were being hyper. I’m a py. Google.

John: No, that’s what I’m saying. Like they, he was like, it’s, yeah, that’s what he was like, it’s prob probabilistic. I’m like, ha, that’s great.

John: I’m like, that’s a

Ralph: class action lawsuit right there. We showed that on a previous episode at great risk to ourselves. Exactly. Contact. Contact. That van is still outside getting close. Deep throat. Deep throat at Google. You right. Whistleblower. No whistleblower at Google. My

John: God. So that’s what’s funny is so open target, customer excluded, which means basically you’re using just optimized targeting.

John: I know it sounds stupid, but optimized targeting is Google’s checkbox for go after warm traffic on my website. Let me decide who to go to is what Google says. Yeah. So running a demand gen with just YouTube and using the open targeting allows meta to run warm and do does your remarketing for you.

John: So as you bring in a whole bunch of YouTube sequencing traffic on first click and education, the open targeting is gonna be like, Hey, anybody that came from there is semi interested, I’m just gonna go hound and try to get them to convert. So that’s the other half of that feeder strategy for YouTube sequencing.[00:52:00]

Ralph: Killer. You know what I love about this show is I can interrupt you a lot and you never lose your train of thought. Yeah. I don’t know anybody else that can do that. anyway, cocaine. I’m just your hype man. I’m John Moran’s. Hype man. That’s really all my role here. Big money says we should call the show Big Money.

Ralph: Does sense? I like makes sense. All right, we’re gonna skip over to his question here. John Moran’s dog is up next. Oh 33. Big money says, how do you get a 90% search? Impression share for an exact keyword placed in a new campaign is an only keyword. When I increase budget, it spends on other keywords.

Ralph: Search, impression, share, barely moves.

John: Yeah. Search. Impression share is based on eligibility, but it’s also a moving target. Like the goal post can move depending upon is if there’s other variations of that. So search, impression, share for more

Ralph: competitors into the market, or even if

John: your CPCs start to be lower.

John: Okay. there’s actually many different factors. your search impression share for exact keyword is going to be how often is that keyword showing up in the amount of total times it could have showed up. [00:53:00] Now what that means for an exact keyword is you have to have an exact search term.

John: You will never. So it’s built in goalpost moving, which means if I’m bidding on, best dog toy and my search term is Best Dog Toy, I have a hundred percent match rate for that search term and that keyword. And now am I getting 90% of every available search that day, which means am I spending 90 Gs on that keyword, maybe a hundred Gs on that keyword a day.

John: It’s possible. I’ve spent 200 grand a day, easy on clothing keywords, so you gotta spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a day on that one keyword with that one match type, with that one search term in order to hit that very high search and pressure share. Which means your eligibility is, yeah, you’re getting 90% of everybody.

John: That is never gonna happen because your search keyword and your search term can now be. Can now have hundreds of thousands of different variances. Variations.

Ralph: Yeah.

John: So you have to now have 90% of the hundreds of thousands of variations your, you’re [00:54:00] mathematically in the billions and trillions of dollars in apen.

John: So just know that you’re never going to hit that. And as you add in more ad spend, you are now eligible for more. So the goalpost moves right. And certain impression share is based on eligibility, not market share. Just know that is you pay me $10, you could have got 10, which is only 10% of what you’re eligible for.

John: You pay me $20, we have more variations, and now you’re eligible for 20. You’re still stuck at the same percentile.

Ralph: So would the recommendation here be to just increase budgets and see what happens?

John: My, my opinion at search impression share is not anything to really pay attention to, in my opinion.

John: Now, lost by Budget Benchmark, exactly. Lost by budget. Lost by rank. That tells you if you’re not spending per day or per bid, but if you’re talking about search impression share, you have to like negate every single other variance that you possibly can for next year to try to get it dialed in, then start to increase your spend, and you better hope that one search term that you’re getting 90% of your spend to, or a hundred percent of your to, is.

John: The only thing you should ever bid on. So in my opinion, it’s a diagnostic, but it is not anything that I actually use. A click [00:55:00] share is way better ’cause that’s actually what is divided by the estimate number of searches. Your clicks, you could have received search of pressure share is what you are eligible to receive.

John: So one’s eligibility, one’s actual market share. So do click share. That would be a way better.

Ralph: Pretty

John: cool. I learned something there too. Thanks.

Ralph: 33. Big bunny. Yeah. Big money. All right. John Moran’s dog. He is here last week. We you recommend a P max feed only shopping brand for a new B2B E-commerce industrial products B2B 10 K, budget high.

Ralph: A OV. How should the budget be split between P max only and shopping? There’s a follow on to this e-com client. Temporary? Or is that’s a separate question, I think. Yeah,

John: let’s do the first one I think, and maybe we’ll roll into the second one. So yeah, P max feed only shopping brand for new. Yep.

John: So I remember saying like, that is what is starting off. That’s where you should go. the budget split between p max, feed only and shopping, I would do it 80 20 to start 80% of your budget to be shopping, 20% to be feed only. If you’re running a brand, do 70, 20, 10, 70% standard shopping, 20% p max, and [00:56:00] 10% brand.

John: Pretty cool. Yep. John Ryan Stock. All right. eCom client wants to add temporary one month campaigns for different suppliers each with its own budget. Would Google Ads be an effective solution or meta ads instead? Has to add temporary one month campaigns for different suppliers? It depends on the goal of what you’re trying to do.

John: Standard shopping, easy. nope, no, no issues there at all. YouTube, that won’t work. so it depends on the campaign type. Anything that has a singular channel search shopping one month, yes. Just have to be aggressive. High ad spend, couple hundred dollars a day, really low T Row as a really high TCPA targeting.

John: Let that thing just go ham. You want a 200% roas, set it to 10%. It’ll start with aggressive, crazy bids right at the top for best search terms. Immediately the results might look like crap, but that’s what it’s gonna take to get there for a month. so yes, you can, it’s just very expensive. What would you do with med ads? What would be the recommendation there? I. I’d have to know way more than a one-off campaign for suppliers. I’m not sure what that [00:57:00] means. I’m sorry. Yeah, I’m not, yeah. Okay. It depends, is the

Ralph: question. Tony? Ana here. Oh yeah. Scarface. We have Scarfaces a, I guess so.

Ralph: It’s fricking awesome.

John: A Pelican flag. Come on, Pelican.

Ralph: $14,000. Hear all, all say hello to my little friend. All right. Hey, John. by the way, Mike Lambert, who you met. The, he does the best. Scarface.

John: Oh, does

Ralph: he really? Person. Oh my God. He has rolling it. Like whatever he would do, it’s like crazy. Amazing.

Ralph: alright anyway. Hey John, not too sure if you remember me. He did the five X on the TCPA for max conversion program. Everything was going smooth for 30 days, and all of a sudden no impressions and no bids. Is that normal? did the five x Yeah,

John: I had the copy of the campaigns to get ’em started again, which put ’em in.

John: Yeah. Okay. I was about to say, if it just all goes to crap, that happens. Unfortunately, sometimes the best way to do that, like you said, is to [00:58:00] basically explode it and then go and make, a brand new version, just cloning it. but yes, that is, I’ve had to do that. For some reason, like once every two weeks, it’s just, I’m like, oh, it hasn’t run in two days.

John: Clone it. And then after I clone it, if it doesn’t start after five days, then I have to basically open a ticket. And sometimes Google’s like it got stuck in queue. We’re sorry. So sometimes it’s not necessarily a bad structure or a bad strategy, they just get stuck. but it is something that, I would say clone it.

John: If you wait three days, clone it, wait five days, because it could be just be learning for a week and if after zero impressions for five days, then call Google. If you’re like just con, confirm that everything looks good.

Speakers 1: that’s right.

John: Also, just check out ad preview and diagnosis though.

John: Just run that just in case, because it could be like a negative keyword that was accidentally added at the campaign or at the account level that a year ago was stopping that thing from running. I’ve had weird crap like that.

John: Interesting.

Ralph: All right, John Moran student is back for another question.

Ralph: Thank you. Are the top five ways to optimize standard shopping campaigns in Google Merchant Center to boost conversions?

John: Yeah. So top five ways of optimize standard shopping. So first [00:59:00] thing, use a low T ROEs. Second, use a, use a main campaign that is gonna be a catchall. So always have no matter what your structure and set up dog pile means.

John: The campaign strategy that I’d like the best for shopping is one campaign says all your products, and then you’re dog piling on top of that with individual campaigns that are also running with those same products, with additional ad spends, you’re doubling down on it. That’s the my second thing. Third thing is look at your titles like in, in a one by one basis, which means if you have a thousand skews, you’re gonna go one by one unfortunately, and try to, and you can upload it in chat GPT, and they can even rewrite the headlines for you.

John: I do that all the time. It actually is a great jumpstart. But look at what the titles are for each one of your shopping, SKUs, because that is going to be your keyword for your searches inside of Google Ads. So just know that your keyword is basically your product title. If you’ve never looked at that, it’s almost like never doing keyword research on a search campaign.

John: It’s very important. Fourth thing I would say is making sure that all of your feed, items are filled out. As, as much as it can be. If you’re reselling items, especially make sure you have the GTIN or MPN in there because that is the way the Google product categorizes audiences with a product.

John: That [01:00:00] would be one of the best thing. And then in the last, the last step, obviously if you’re doing like a feeder strategy or dog pile or you’re doing CAPI imports, but the CAPI imports is like now a non-negotiable? we are importing because right now, like I said at the beginning of the show, running standard shopping.

John: Which you know you’re talking about right now, no idea. The client had 70% of all their standard shopping, non-brand search terms and conversions be their own customers. I would’ve never been able to optimize out of that without knowing that there’s no button I could press that would fix that. So that was the only thing that’s gonna save a company that’s spending 50 Gs a day.

John: And that’s a pretty powerful statement there. So that’s why it’s a non-negotiable for me. Yeah, pretty killer.

Ralph: I find that feed optimization is one of the things that so many e-commerce companies just completely discount, just don’t even think of and they skip over it. Yeah. The GTIN is like so important.

Ralph: Like I, you gotta figure like, it’s like optimization really. you gotta feed Google like the information to be able for them to be able to read what it is that your product does and what it is and the feature benefits and everything else. One

John: thing, I’d be [01:01:00] very cautious about G tns.

John: If you’re a manufacturer though. That potentially will look into distribution. Okay. What this means is that if you say, Hey,I’m a recovering fat person, so I got a cookie next to me. So a cookie, the GTIN of this cookie is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Now. If you’re the manufacturer of this cookie and you’re never gonna resell it, Google has no use for that GTIN, really, you can use A GTN, which will allow you to make MA major changes to this cookie.

John: And that thumbprint of GTIN is a way that it identifies that this cookie stayed the cookie whenever changing the title images, pages, descriptions, whatever. However, if I am going to resell that cookie and I use your G-T-I-N-I now can get your traffic. Because Google has audiences it knows need that product.

John: So if I resell it, I can earn some of that traffic. ’cause that’s the only way that Google knows who wants to buy that cookie is based on the barcode. So if you’re a manufacturer, don’t release it. If you’re a reseller. Get ahold of that with your bare hands. Yeah. Sounds good. That’s a good way

Ralph: to end the show there with a cookie.

Ralph: There you go.

John: I did good today. I good. A cookie? You got a cookie? [01:02:00]

Ralph: I’ll give you a cookie. We actually sent out a bunch of cookies this week, which I’ll tell you about maybe this weekend. yeah. What’s that? This is yours. I just grabbed a package. Oh really? We sent it to the wrong prospect. Crap. I thought you loved.

Ralph: Oh. I’ll work on efficiency and I blame Ryan for that one. All right, everyone, thank you so much. I think we answered most of the questions here. a lot of New Watchers this week, John. Pretty exciting and not as many questions, but I think pretty good information. which is what we try and do every single week here on.

Ralph: That’s right on not tier 11 live on the ad lab. In the Ad lab. Yep. In the ad lab here on Fridays, 2:30 PM Eastern every Friday. Don’t miss it. Same time, same channel next week. Yep. Appreciate you. See you all next week. We will talk to y’all next week. See you. Good everyone. Bye-Bye. Bye. All right. Well that is this week’s show. We’ll leave links inside the show notes here in order to, uh, so you can get a little bit more information [01:03:00] on de-duping some of the things that John talked about a little bit more, like this is a masterclass and how to. I wouldn’t even say hack these algorithms that that’s not the right term.

Ralph: How to engineer new ways in which to make them more effective. And I think John is the person that, from my standpoint, I’ve been doing this 15, almost 20 years now, one of the best, if not the best in the industry and figuring out like reverse engineering how these platforms work. To ultimately get results for clients and to help them scale and grow.

Ralph: And that’s what we’re in this for. So, uh, all the links are over on the show notes @perpetualtraffic.com. Make sure if you were just listening to this show that you go back and you watch it over @perpetualtraffic.com slash YouTube. So on behalf of my amazing co-host, uh, Lauren e Petrillo and John Marin, until next show, see ya.

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