Ralph and John return to the “performance kitchen” to unpack a radical shift in digital advertising strategy. Discover why ungated webinar content, pre-click education, and native storytelling inside ad sets are outperforming traditional funnel tactics. John breaks down how a $120 glove brand scaled with a sub-$20 CPA—without touching the campaign for over a month—and why Meta’s Andromeda update is forcing advertisers to master content, not just structure. If you’re still gating your best material, you’re already behind. This is the future of Meta ads—and it starts with feeding the feed, not the funnel.
Chapters:
- 00:00:00 – Inside the Perpetual Traffic Machine
- 00:00:09 – What’s Cooking in the Ad Lab Today
- 00:00:38 – Why One Ad Style Won’t Cut It
- 00:01:26 – Meta’s AI Is Now Selling for You
- 00:02:28 – Your New Ad Grid Game Plan
- 00:04:37 – Welcome to the Performance Kitchen
- 00:06:09 – Andromeda Changed Everything—Here’s How
- 00:10:21 – This Glove Ad Crushed It
- 00:17:34 – Pre-Click Education = More Conversions
- 00:19:51 – Turn Old Content into Ad Gold
- 00:21:16 – Gated Content Is Killing Your Ads
- 00:23:34 – Ads That Educate, Ads That Convert
- 00:29:53 – Do Media Buyers Still Matter?
- 00:32:58 – Scale Smart: One Campaign, No Tweaks
- 00:39:33 – What’s Next in the Ad Evolution?
LINKS AND RESOURCES:
- 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:
9.7X MER in 2 Months: Meta Advantage+ Case Study Pt. 2
[00:00:00]
Ralph: Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic Podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns, founder and CEO of Tier 11 flying solo here today. But. Today we’re Rebroadcasting a, formerly known as Tier 11, live now what’s called the Ad Lab every Friday, 2:30 PM Eastern, over on the Tier 11 channel. That’s tier eleven.com/youtube.
You can check these out. It’s myself and John going through the latest in advertising traffic. And today’s show particularly is about a test that we started about three weeks ago, and we talk about. Importance of diversity, of creative. And I’m gonna show a screen share here just for a second because I think this is super important and sort of run you through this a bit.
’cause we’re now seeing this diversification of creative as one of the most important things when it comes to running paid [00:01:00] ads these days. It’s not necessarily the strategies. John will go through some of the strategies here today. This is the lower. Spend campaign that we started a few weeks back. We rebroadcast part one of this.
This is part two. This is the follow up. I think these are super important as you sort of follow along. Very tactical episode. If your media buyers are not onto this right now and you’re looking at your internal team, or maybe you’re running your ads yourself. Advantage Plus sales is the future, and it is because Meta one of the early investors in some of the founders of Chat, GPT, if you can believe that I was actually listening to a podcast today when I was traveling.
Meta is very, very smart. Meta and Google, and vested in the technology that is now powering chat, GPT. Powered obviously by the NVIDIA chips, like the super powerful Nvidia chips. This was the start of AI 6, 7, 8, 9 years ago. [00:02:00] They’re investing $65 billion in AI right now to make campaigns like this one that we’re highlighting here, even more intuitive for you as a media buyer, but the thing that they’re not creating.
Creative. So I’m gonna share my screen here. Something that we use as an internal document. We haven’t ever shared this with anybody. John has talked about it multiple times on these ad labs are formerly known as the Tier 11 lives,
and here it is right here. This is called the Content diversification grid. And these are the types of creatives that John and our creative team are now putting into all of our campaigns. Sometimes in this particular case, the case study that we’re talking about here today, part two, he only has three or four of these.
So we refer to them a couple of different times during today’s show. And by the way, this was a show that I did on the road, so the audio is a little bit, you know, less than ideal. I. It doesn’t really matter. Just listen to what John is talking about here. And also head on over to our YouTube [00:03:00] channel@perpetualtraffic.com slash YouTube so you can actually see how this campaign is taking shape, because still hear on my voice here, uh, still suffering some of the effects of lingering effects of COVID even two, three weeks later.
So, content diversification, these are eight different types of ads. Founder story, us versus them. Product demo, customer testimonials, AI ads, features and benefits face to camera. White Listing Positioning Test and UGC and John will be talking about three or four of these in this campaign that we’re testing here today, which is basically, he has not touched it in two to three weeks.
So he started this test with Advantage Plus sales and is still getting $15 NCA on $120 NAOV. And if you don’t know what that stuff is, if you don’t know what NAC is and NAOV is. You need to refresh yourself and get, uh, the copy of our download for, uh, MPIs Marketing Performance Indicators. ’cause this is the future of marketing right here.
[00:04:00] And that’s over@perpetualtraffic.com slash mpi, M as in Mary Pi. So check that out and also check out our YouTube channel, ’cause I’m showing this content diversification here, uh, in the screen share.
So without further ado, let’s get to the episode with me and John. This week’s show is part two of our experimentation on a low volume, low ad spend account for Advantage Plus sales. Take it away, boys
Straight from the performance kitchen. Actually, we have a tagline here. I was just read Live from the lab, join us in our performance kitchen, cooking up chaos. Watch our weekly Tesco Live. Learn what converts and steal the formula. That’s awesome. How about that? I love it. Performance sounds great. So anyway.
All right. Well, here, we’re in the ad lab and John is cooking up performance in the performance kitchen.
you’ve got some really tasty recipes brewing, I hear. [00:05:00] Yes. And especially some follow ups and some of the ones that, some of the recipes that I think we, we got, we got the list of stuff we have to get in the grocery store.
They put all, like, got it home, put it all together, mashed it all up, threw it in the oven, and I think right now you’re ready to like, pull it out and tell us like, is it done yet or is it, we still need another 20 minutes, like, what’s going on? So yeah, give us an update on some of the things you’ve been doing in the ad lab.
John: Absolutely. I think the continue on with that analogy, you were like watching every step where it’s like, now we’re gonna like, we’re gonna cut it this way, now we’re gonna put in the oven. Like we’re, it’s been baking for a while and, what we expected to happen is sort of happening, which I like to back up, a little bit and rather than just diving right into the metrics, what we are absolutely going to get to, especially on my small test of the new Andro to update and how it is acting, and what the new model is for kind of go forward.
I wanna talk about the philosophy a bitof the reasoning behind But it’s changes. [00:06:00] And also even Google’s changes. The interesting part about the Andromeda update and the interesting thing about having all of the ads inside of one ad set and also having the users locked into that ad set is forcing almost advertisers to go back to traditional way of marketing.
It also is providing a better user experience for the people who are on Meta and Instagram, which is, I think, the number one factor for the change. ’cause people don’t want to be like picture of a dog, 20% off. And then it’s like my update from my cousin at 30% off. And so it’s not, they don’t want it to turn into kind of like this big, big sale platform.
They’re gonna ruin the user experience. People are gonna just kinda hop off. They want to grow, learn, engage, educate. they wanna be involved, like a form, like a community. And so what meta has been producing in terms of the content diversification, the founder story, the UGC, the ad ais, the testimonials, like [00:07:00] all of those different ways that they’re doing content diversification is to.
Educate the user on a story, engage them where they may be at in their funnel and lock them into that ad set so that they can continue to produce results from that campaign because they’re finding more and more opportunities. It essentially removes a lot of the highly structural technical media buying, not the technical media buying, but the highly structural technical, like if they did this on Tuesday, then we do this with them on Friday kind of thing.
And I have another test that I’m running with another company that, that I can show a little bit of it, on this live here. But then I also have my main case study, but I wanna give you some different variations. But the reasoning as to why is something I think I kind of skip over a lot.
And what I have been seeing more often in the way that meta is deploying or changes is more to how people are subconsciously buying nowadays. And I believe this is [00:08:00] something that we all do, but we all have that cognitive, dis cognitive dissonance where it’s like, it’s not necessarily our frontal lobe as aware, it’s more subconscious.
When we start to engage with purchases on social media, what we’re actually doing is being force fed content on the front end of our phones, like through Facebook and Meta and YouTube, and then the landing page is simply a confirmation of what I’ve already learned. Right. So an extreme case of this, and it’s something, someone, something I’m working on with another company now, but they have an hour and a half webinar, that they push people through for an education and then they sell them the full course at the end.
And it is a fantastic company, fantastic product. Like their core offering is spot on second to none. Excellent. but I think that the original thought process on deploying the model might be still a little bit old school. And I say old school as in like a year ago kind of thing. Like it’s not old school at all from a digital marketing perspective, but what we’re testing now is taking their hour and a half [00:09:00] webinar and breaking it up into smaller chunks.
And those smaller chunks are becoming creative.
Ralph: Oh yeah. Great
John: idea.
Ralph: Yep.
John: So love that. This way. Exactly. So this way I now don’t have to put up an email wall and then Yeah. Ask for your digital currency, which is your email to then tell you why I’m special. Lower the gate. No gate. Exactly. and as you’re scrolling through, I’m educating you in micro, micro chunks.
So it’s like I’m now convincing and selling even pre click. And it’s the reason why Amazon is 40% of the e-commerce is because that is how people are being educated and are purchasing, they are being educated via ads slash landing page. But the conversion will happen on meta. But if I didn’t have a landing page, could this still work?
Of course. That’s why Amazon businesses are in place. So due to the fact that Amazon is a thing due to the fact that Amazon businesses are a thing, due to the fact that people are educating themselves in content, pre click on meta, we’re sort of skipping the PDPs in terms of levels of [00:10:00] importance.
It’s almost like a shopping cart now, or a confirmation of what I’m already, what I’m already engaging with. So for meta to say, Hey, you need to take your landing page, break it out into bite-sized chunks and create ad copy with it, it’s essentially what they’re asking us to do. So what we’re looking at is when we ran this test for the glove company, and I’m gonna go ahead and share screen and explain this.
We broke out the landing page into educational piece of content. This is that first week where we only had like the two click attributed and we still have 19 ads live. We had 50, but it was like a mother’s day and then a Father’s Day and a Memorial Day. And so, we ended up having to stop those sales.
But we still have all the original ads that were not, seasonal, still running and still live all the way back from over a month ago. I have not touched anything else besides shutting off the seasonal ads and then tripling the ad spend. It’s the only thing I’ve done, just
Ralph: people haven’t seen the previous episode.
This is a bespoke gloved company. Yep. From like handmade in Vermont. Yeah. Not something that people are waking [00:11:00] up in the morning and say, Hey, I need a luxury high-end glove.
John: I need $120 leather glove,
Ralph: 120. Like I can get, a pair of gloves at, home Depot for 10 bucks. But exact,
John: it’s exactly the, I used this as example earlier today ’cause I’m educating a lot of our clients on the type of content that we need to start to produce for them.
And the reasons as to why, and it’s exactly right, the. If I’d never visit the website and of this glove company and I’m only engaging in the ads, there is nothing the website is going to tell me that I don’t already know. And that’s the purpose of this, is if you’re engaging in the first ad, the one that people have engaged with the most, which is interesting.
The one that we have the most amount of sales, we have an $18 CPA in. We have a, it was $1,800 in ad spend. The next one down is only $318, but that $1,700 in ad spend that has got gone to the first ad here. the one that has the highest amount of engagement [00:12:00] has 73 7 day click attributed conversions and is bumping out 93 totals.
So it’s much, much higher than the other ones. However, this is one of the most informative. It is an in seam stitching for dexterity. It is seamless pointer finger for performance. It is additional welt on the secondary seam, so there’s no, this high wear area. It is double walled palm for longevity, it’s vent a vein protector.
So if you’re working in something, slices the glove. It’s got an additional flap to cover your veins. It is a two inch goat leather cuff. It is made in our own factory, right here in the United States in Vermont. Now, would you pay $120? I’m getting closer. ’cause that’s much different than the Home Depot, off the branch shelf.
So, and then when you’re looking at now the actual process of it, like you’re seeing people who, and I know this is gonna sound weird, but look like who I am if I’m in this industry, more blue collar esque and they are hand making these things right here in the United States. It is what it looks like after a thousand days of use, the before and [00:13:00] after.
I know this will be around forever. Like I’m now understanding everything that I need to know about this product and also how durable it is through like chain testing and stuff of that. Like, I now know it lasts long. It’s made here, there’s seven features that I didn’t know of before.
It is, it, all of this information that I am now getting off of these ads and getting off of this information is all before I went to the website. Yeah, so conversion rate on our site has actually increased exponentially. I’m just gonna, I’m gonna talk about that here in a moment, which
Ralph: makes complete sense.
Right. Can I just mention one thing that the ad that is getting all the conversions. It seems to like, it’s a very feature, not benefit based ad, but it seems to me, I don’t know if this is accurate, it seems more of a bottom of funnel. Like, oh, I just wanna reinforce that the thing is really good because you caught my attention with another ad, maybe with a video ad, or like the story or like how it’s made, and this is like the last [00:14:00] click ad because it’s sort of the final thing I need in order to say I’m gonna pay 20 bucks for a para gloves.
Right. Right. But is that what you’re seeing in your data here, or is it getting a lot of just like, Hey, that looks really cool. I’ve never seen a glove like that before. First click, like, is there any way to tell based upon how the algorithm is working, like what is top of funnel, primarily what is bottom of funnel?
John: Right, and what’s interesting is we don’t know because we have not started our iterations yet. That’s my first test is just, let’s say if I let this thing ran, how would the users flow through it? Right? But since we don’t actually have a founder story or why we created this, or why this glove company even exists, was there even a need for it?
We haven’t touched that. We haven’t even scratched that surface yet. So the closest thing to a top of funnel is thank God everyone knows what a glove is. If this was the brand new wizzy wig, we’d be in a lot bigger trouble,
Ralph: but. You can wear over your
John: hands. I know, right? Oh my God, I never knew that existed.
[00:15:00] Yeah. Like if I could be like introducing the glove. Whoa. Tell me more. Like, whoa, we skipped that part. Thank. It’s not a mitten, right? Oh my god, John, this is what’s a work glove. Now I have a snow glove, but
so what we saw is like, whether it was right or wrong, this is what the first ads that people started to click and buy from, which is. Which is what we saw. It ended up being the first pushed and the first essentially to, to market. And it got, the majority of the Aspen upfront. And that trend did not change. This one here, that’s the first week that got $60 in spend with a, $20 CPA in the first week. If we look at, since the inception that $60 in spend has turned into $1,700 and that $19 CPA is now down to
Ralph: 18, it’s a
John: cheaper after going from $60 to 1700.
Ralph: Yeah.
John: So it still is leading the charge now.
Is it? Right? Probably not. Could we have a [00:16:00] better ad that we could have led with? Absolutely. Was this good enough? It was.
Ralph: If we’re talking matter.
From a business standpoint at that particular nac, I mean, we’re talking about cpa, but we’re really talking about NAC because we’re assuming everybody’s a new, new customer in this particular case because it’s relatively new brand. So,
John: right. and when we’re looking at year over year performance, where our sessions over time is only changed 6%, but our conversion rates up 68%.
Yeah. Paid. And it’s, this is where we started to launch. This is year over year performance. So February, you’re warming them up offsite
Ralph: before they even get there.
John: Right, exactly. Like we had, February was 3% better, then we went 22% better. Then we started these campaigns and went 70% better. Last month was 115% or better, 115% better so far, month to 874% better.
And we’ve actually spent less, which is quite interesting when you compare this whole, this whole, account year over year. lemme turn off. The [00:17:00] A is active. If we look at the overall account year over year, there’s 17 total campaigns and we spent, let’s do this here. Yeah. Compare previous year.
There we go.yeah. That is 5 14, 6, 19, 20, 24, 5, 14, 6, 19, 20, 25. We spent 6% less and are scaling up now 174% better with the same amount of customers, same spend, same sessions. 68% better conversion rate. Excellent. So we already know this is more effective, but that is what’s interesting is your website’s conversion rate could be drastically affected by how educated were these users before the click?
A hundred percent.
Ralph: So people don’t think about that though, like that’s just a novel concept just unto itself. Like that’s a big takeaway just to think about. Like, oh, my conversion rate is 1%. Well, okay. That probably means that a lot of cold traffic will have no idea or maybe stumble on your site for whatever reason, or maybe aren’t pre-educated on your [00:18:00] brand are coming to your site.
You’re getting a 1% conversion rate, which I believe is about average in the industry. It’s about one to 2% maybe. Yeah. less than 1% is sort of suboptimal. But overall, and that’s
John: where we were. Really?
Ralph: Yeah.
John: Yeah. I mean, A OV didn’t change. 0.1 sessions over time, year over year, last four months did not change at 6%, but our conversion rates are up across the board.
6% more sessions, 70% more add to cart, 61% more reach checkouts, and 78% more completed checkouts.
Ralph: All because areas like increasing average order value in LTV in this client. But anyway, I’ll refrain from any those.
John: Well, that’s, but we’re looking at CRO though. Totally. Totally. It’s like CRO. It’s like CRO is, yes, it is a portion, but judging CRO by conversion rate, by its low sum is half the battle
Ralph: effective.
John: Absolutely. I mean, if I was like, [00:19:00] Hey, I got a free Xbox 360. Just click on the sad. And you get there and it’s just like, do you need more Viagra? Yeah. No, the, what I knew I was getting into is way off of what I got there. Is that on john.com by the way? Oh yes. use coupon code. Life is hard.
and you,
so that’s what’s interesting is even the way that we’re educating these users, pre click is, what I say is people are now being fed micro education through feeds. They’re, they have a news stream every day. And that news stream is not, hey, trust me, I, this landing page kick ass, everything you wanna know, it’s over there.
I gotta do, I got a product, I’ll tell you about it, but only when you click, it’s dead and gone now. Yeah. And that’s where we have to definitely look at to say anything that we would want to show them in on our website. Segment that out and then create that into its own ad that is telling the story the way that a person now wants to learn.[00:20:00]
Remember when we had like, content, creation, syndication, amp, publication and amplification? You remember all those like 10 years ago? Totally. It’s the same, it’s the same shit. We’re just taking our landing page content and syndicating it now as an ad and then throwing ads behind it. It’s the same thing.
Ryan Deis was, a godfather of genius, but it’s still true to this day. So, so is it safe
Ralph: to say that you should take your best gated or hidden content? IE the webinar that you were talking about? We talked to a client this week that, was doing an hour and a half webinar. I’m like, why are you g that?
What I kept thinking, and we’ve done this in many cases, we actually have a great case study where we did exactly that.
Either a singular video or multi-part video and just the thing and people watched it like hundreds of times and then eventually just, filled out an application to like to get a coaching call or a consulting call. [00:21:00] Eventually sell a 2000 bucks money. Right. Same kind of thing. So it’s like I’ll just ungate your best Skype and use that as ads.
Is that sort of the bottom line here?
John: That’s exactly right. and I think what we’re doing is, I don’t have permission to share this, so I’m just gonna give some snapshots of like the technicals. I’ll get permission to do a deeper dive and we can share this, but. we have this company that offers this, like a medical billing and coding type of class.
And you can buy it online and you can start your journey and your education. but there’s a webinar that goes through why you are going to buy this and it’s long form of a sales, sales presentation. So we started to do that where we’re taking the stuff that is gated and trying to bring it to the forefront.
And then we’re using, the first click import to see optimize towards the actual people who finished as an example. This one, we still have the webinar viewers. There’s 2,500 people that have started the webinar. Only 1300 have finished the webinar, so about half. But that’s been optimizing now towards these $10 completers, and we’re already starting to see that [00:22:00] those people who are going through and finishing the webinar.
Our purchasing the course at eight. at eight, where this one is four. However, this one is spending a whole lot less. So I have a new test I’ll be able to dive into, but what we’re looking at here is taking that gated content, pushing it to the front, and then saying, can we just start to get you to purchase the class by pushing the webinar in front of you versus having to push you through the webinar.
And so far, again, this just went live not too long ago. Oh, that’s a great test. Yeah, and basically the test started, I mean, we’re looking at. I mean, was it the 14th? So six days ago when we actually like turned it on. So I mean, we don’t even have enough to, for us to really, be able to showcase this as a case study just yet.
But as a quick example, we know that on 1400 we have eight or 14,000. We have eight. So as, so quick math here, one thou 14,446 divided by, eight [00:23:00] is $1,800 CPA. The one right here is a thousand dollars CPA. So it’s like 45% cheaper to take the webinar, push it as an ad. And we have some ad is webinars still goes through the webinar funnel, but or there’s gonna be some more information that we’re gonna be, we’re gonna be trying this year where our thought process is if I don’t gate it, if I just take the webinar break into chunks to show it to you, you’re now getting a webinar before you click and then I can push you towards a purchase.
So it’s definitely a newer test, a newer style of thinking. Everyone I’ve talked to about this, which is, basically me, my mirror and like two other people all agree. Yeah, exactly. So, but it’s weird what I’m been presenting this, it starts to click. They’re like, okay, I think I learned that way.
I engage with content that way. I don’t wanna sit there and read your landing page, but if I’m bored on Facebook and you have more interesting, cool things that you wanna share with me, I’ll listen. If it’s good enough. And that’s what we’re up against now, [00:24:00] is your content good enough? Can I tell you a story?
Can I convince you? Can I use my traditional marketing? That hasn’t changed in 200 years to do the same thing? And so that’s where we have to take our, our thought process is now, it used to be, I’ve been saying this, where it’s email used to be digital currency, now it’s becoming a click. Yeah,
Ralph: it’s, and it’s, you can retarget those clicks.
Probably more effectively than you can, the emails in so many ways. It’s like the click is so much easier to get, but then the email has deliverability issues and all the other sorts of things that go along with it. And the you’re not gonna get as many as a result of it because you’re gating.
And people are like, is this content gonna be good enough that I’m gonna give up my name and my email address? We still have that sort of quandary every time you, you’re faced with like an opt-in box for anything? I certainly am. I mean, just look at your phone. How many frigging you know, spam messages do you get every single day?
’cause you gave out your phone number, to all these [00:25:00] people and all you know, God knows who this is how people. Truly do interact. Yeah. And I remember this lesson very early on. I might have said it here on the a, I was about to say 11 live, is that, remember when I first bought my first info product, it was Product Launch Formula by Jeff Walker.
And I watched that thing, he gated it. he had to like put in your name and email address. But I watched the replay like eight or nine times before I decided to buy a $2,000 program, which at that point in time was all the money in the world for me. Oh yeah. And Jeff Walker still gated everything, but now if you look at like how he does things, he doesn’t gain anything.
Right. It’s exactly what you’re talking about here. And that always stuck with me. It’s like people don’t necessarily, you don’t think they’re gonna do what you want them to do. Like, oh, I’m gonna watch the webinar once and then I’m gonna apply for the coaching. it’s like that’s not how it works.
They need to consume it. In a [00:26:00] lot of different ways. Through retargeting ads, through maybe other snippets, reminders, things that they see in their newsfeed and Oh yeah, the big, the big one hour presentation that shows like the value of the program, all of that together, you ungate it, it makes so much more sense.
’cause that’s how we as humans buy.
John: I mean that’s, that means that’s back in previously previous agency that will not be named. We had, tons, I had a thousand videos on that YouTube channel of like my brain just out there and everyone could have taken that stolen. Everything I’ve ever done in my life, put me completely outta business and did them themselves.
They didn’t because they appreciate the education and they are happy to learn and they feel. Not to get too touchy feely. They feel more connected with me. Like they’re like, I’m a brand now because I’ve been explaining the story. And so sure. those were what client, our clients and our people watching this, they, they can do that if you are able to teach a user the way they want to be taught, which is right now [00:27:00] Meta is still the best platform for ads on an outbound perspective.
And as long as they’re learning in chunks and you’re speaking to them in all of the different variations that Meta wants us to use inside of a ad set, that’s where we’re seeing. And I’ll jump back into this one screen share because this sort of now starts to explain the, explain the reasoning why this is doing this here.
There we are. So since we’ve started up until today, these are obviously the ads that we had to turn off because of the seasonality and like Father’s Day and stuff like that. So we just look at the ones that are even just still active. Each one of these ads here, whether they have, I.
$1,700 in ad spend or $5 in ad spend. My CPA rarely goes over 20 to $25 more. More under twenties. I have a, like a $31 here and there that, that makes sense ’cause it’s duplicated and I’m gonna turn this off soon. I just told myself I’m not touching anything until the, this is something I need to update.
But I mean [00:28:00] $5 and $5 sale, $8 sale, $13 sale for, I mean, I’ll take all these little onesie, twosies cheap CPA, ’cause I’m spending a whole grand total of $150 a day. But we started to see that when you’re looking at the all ads and view charts, the amount of ad spend that we have in this campaign here, we’re spending, $30 a day.
I bumped it up to about $60 a day, then I bumped it up again to $150 a day and my per purchase, I. Has stayed relatively flat when you’re talking about tripling the budget in 30 days. And so our website purchases went from, four, then dipped down to zero, then peaked up at eight and dipped down to here.
But we can see that my three chunks of getting my feet wet, scaled up a little bit, and then a larger scale, the median points are at a higher level each time. It is becoming more effective and it’s easier to scale because these people are [00:29:00] more warmed up and there’s more new users being added to the existing funnel where they’re going to learn everything.
I’ve now sort of in our first test, which is, this is not the best way to do this. Honestly, I would’ve had, if I could’ve taken six months and built the best creative in the world and then deployed this, I would’ve been happy. I just took the most diverse content we could find over the last few years, then try to put this thing together.
But now I have set up essentially a museum, and I’m now bringing you into the museum. Like, this is where Vermont Glove Company was made, and this is, and I’m now showing you an educate. And on the other side, you’re in the gift shop.oh, grab a glove. That’s what this is. This is turning into, so it’s really interesting to see how the technical aspect is less important, but the creative aspect is now spotlight.
Ralph: So on that point, I had a question about this today on a client discovery call, like, how relevant are media buyers today? More so, or less so than they ever were because Advantage Plus [00:30:00] sales, et cetera, et cetera. Creative is obviously, is the big thing right now. So media buying is just a commodity.
Like what is your sta what is your status on that? As of right now, and I’m gonna keep myself muted because Starbucks seems to have turned up the volume here for some,
John: anyway, the nightclub that sells coffee. So I don’t wanna lump media buyers altogether. I’m a media buyer, if you think about it. I do most of my days like media buying and strategy kind of thing.
I think that our, we have three groups of people. You have the business owner, you have the traditional off the shelf, I’ll call it standard operating procedure, media buyer, and then you have the. S media buyer, that’s also a strategist, the business owner, we need to pull out of the digital marketing more and more.
I, I want Vermont glove to make the glove 2.0. I don’t want them to be taught what click the rate is on [00:31:00] Tuesdays. So I think from a media buyer, they’re still more relevant now, more so than ever because the business owner or the person that is actually in the position to build a brand and do iterations of creative, that is, or sorry, iterations of their products.
So doing product development, building a better, faster, quicker engine of their company is the sole thing that they should be focused on. The media buyer doesn’t need to be adding value by saying, look at the complex structure. I created the media buyer. I. Adds value by saying, I understand the way that I need to work with the next iteration of this algorithm, and I will take it from here, and you need to follow my lead.
So if we’re measuring media buyer, as in, are they technically advanced or are they less technically advanced? That is I would say, are you decent at your job or are you faking being a media buyer? That is how I see it nowadays is [00:32:00] if, can you learn, adapt, and grow? Okay, then you’re a professional.
If you’re like,no, I got my SOP the same way I’ve done it since 1986. Well, those are dinosaurs that die and that is moving faster and faster. Faster. So media buyers as a whole, a hundred percent needed, but the media buyer has to learn, adapt, and leverage. A bad media buyer is gonna be just as valuable as the owner doing it themselves.
And I think that’s where I find the point of demarcation is if you have a bad media buyer, you’re not gonna be any better than the owner. ’cause you both are just winging it. A good media buyer understands that things got more simple. The creative is doing the targeting, the structure has changed, the transition has to be implemented and the optimizations have to go a certain way.
It may have gotten easier with less buttons, but this became more complex to understand.
Ralph: I think the role of the strategist, I changed locations, as you can tell here. It was just getting way too loud there.I’m on the [00:33:00] car.see this is what we do here, but I’m so close to the Starbucks. I’m still connected to the wifi.
It’s, it looks great. It’s good. So it’s actually better, it’s way more comfortable and hell a lot quieter. Anyway, sorry about that. Before there was a dance party going on in Starbucks, I just think a strategist role. Become so critical because they’re the intersection of traffic and creative, because it’s not one or the other.
It’s both together.
John: Yeah.
Ralph: I think that’s really where all of this is going because the pushing of the buttons for Advantage Plus sales, like you said it yourself, like we showed this campaign, what, three weeks ago? Have you touched anything since then?
John: I, it took 10 minutes to build. I mean, if you have the creative, it takes 10 minutes to build, and I haven’t touched this in over a month.
Ralph: the caveat is if you have the creative too And you have some good creative there. You don’t have like the classic John, we can even show people sort of your matrix of all the different types of [00:34:00] creative, which should probably turn that into a lead magnet at some point in time because it’s so good.
The point is like if you even have like any creative, like think about like what people are gonna need, what do they need to know in order to be interested in your product? If you’re the avatar that you’re trying to target, and it’s literally, it’s those types of videos, that type of content.
And you didn’t even like get all of it here. You just got a little bit of it. Half,
John: yeah. Maybe a quarter to half of what we, yeah, I mean probably 30% of the content diversification, 30% of it we got.
Ralph: Yeah.
John: And we’re gonna be making a lot more. But creative is very difficult. And this is a very small, very well operating, but very small, rural farmland company.
So they’re, they’re not ivory tower, New York City with, photo shoots. they’re out there yanking on barbed wire. So it, but it’s exactly right. It’s really good gloves. Exactly. After a thousand days you can see what they look like. So again, that it’s great. So what’s really interesting about this is I think it’s almost like media buyer is [00:35:00] agnostic.
the person that is, I. Is in charge of informing the owner of what needs to ha happen in meta. Could be called a media buyer, could be called a strategist, whatever you wanna call them, whatever label you wanna put on them. But I think what we have to look at is the person that owns the company should be focusing on building their company.
Again, to bring up Brian Dice. I want my dentist to fig, to be the best at drilling my tooth. I don’t want to teach them email marketing.
Ralph: Right.
John: And that’s exactly right.
Ralph: It’s a classic, like you always just say that.
John: Yeah, exactly. When he did marketing,
Ralph: which apparently doesn’t anymore. So,
John: yeah. Right.
and so that’s why I think it’s interesting is like media buyers are obsolete. If they cannot adapt quickly, then yes, I would’ve say then you might as well just do it yourself ’cause you’re not any better or worse. You need to hire the people that can understand this and leverage it.
and that doesn’t need to be, it doesn’t need to be anybody specific. It’s can you, are you up to speed on everything that is happening at the time it’s happening and testing what makes sense logically to both Meta [00:36:00] and your particular business instance.
Ralph: Alright, so before we get to questions here, which I know we’ve got a lot here, which we’re gonna have to do a lightning round on.
Yeah. I really wanna ask you this question. So you set up an Advantage Plus sales campaign. You have 30 or 40% of the creative that’s ideal based upon sort of the model that we use. Your campaign’s going in the right direction, you’re getting $15 nac, on $120,average order value. Things are going great.
What happens if I start a campaign and I’m getting 220 NC on 120 NAOV? And I was like, all right. John says, wait. Wait for the algorithm to figure it out. But I’m losing money every single day. And how long do I wait? Like what has your experience been with that type of scenario? Because we really haven’t shown that quite as much here.
We’ve shown more of the success side, but like, when it doesn’t go your way, what’s your guidelines? What your, what’s your guard?
John: So I have, three other [00:37:00] companies that we’ve launched that looks like it’s failing in platform, but is successful to top line. I have yet. Knock on wood launch, this new way of doing it and having top line look worse.
I have had in platform look worse. I can share, well, I can’t share the backend. I have a company that, we are a part like equity partners and owners of through another firm that I’ve had for a few years that had a negative 30, a negative 40% year over year drop since February, March, and April, may.
year over year drops of 40% and we went from about 20% to 30% growth to negative 30% and 40% reduction. The first week of killing all 16 campaigns and launching two and NCRC we’re back up 12% in the last 20 days, which is the month of June when we started. Now in platform looks like N CAC metrics that are in the high hundreds for, or like six, seven, $800 for a product that’s $200.
So in platform looks terrible. But [00:38:00] what we saw as a byproduct of this is the reason why it was working is that an Advantage Plus took over and the creative did the targeting. It went off of Instagram and went to Meta, and they are a fashion brand with clothing. So that is like where we wanna stay on Instagram.
We do not want to go to meta. when we did first click cap imports that got more new customers, all of a sudden we saw we go off of meta and then go back to Instagram. And before even all of the metrics have started to come in, we went boop right back to year over year growth. So that was the only time where I’m like, oh God, this failed horribly.
And then we look in at top line, we’re like, oh, everything’s fine. Wait a little bit longer. And then metrics are rapidly changing. So they’re all of a sudden it’s like 80% CPA reduction every like week. So it’s catching up. But I have yet to see this fail from a top line perspective, which is the only way I measure it.
Ralph: Interesting. Okay. Well, I mean, I’m sure a lot of people have
John: tried it.
Ralph: Yeah. I mean, so far so good.
John: I mean, that’s the hardest
Ralph: thing.
John: I’ll say this. I’m so sorry. The hardest thing to do though is to not touch this. That’s the bad part. People are like, okay, I did it in two days. I didn’t see [00:39:00] it, so I wiped the whole thing.
I’m like, no, not gonna work. Right,
Ralph: right. That’s what I was gonna ask you. And you’re up to like four, you’re 4 million plus in this test, in this new campaign type. And this is like, you’re pretty much, I wouldn’t say you’re batting a thousand, but you’re getting pretty close. Like you’re, yeah,
John: it has, that one account has gotten worse.
They’ve all had small amount of better success while this is getting in, getting going or to like attend next home run kind of thing.
Ralph: All right. Hope you enjoyed this week’s show. We’re gonna continue to drop in episodes from this campaign because I think it’s so important that you as a marketer understand exactly how all this stuff works.
If you’re not experimenting with some of these newfangled, uh, campaign types, especially within the Meta platform, vantage Plus Sales, this is the place where we’re gonna be giving this type of advice for you and your team. Most importantly, and of course, if you need our help. In managing this kind of stuff, we are absolutely cutting edge.
We’re the only ones that are teaching this stuff right now. You can check us out over [00:40:00] at tier eleven.com/apply.
So make sure you leave a rating and review Wherever you listen a podcast. We will read those rating and reviews on the air, good, bad, or otherwise. We love the feedback here ’cause we do this show for you, the listener. And on behalf of my amazing co-host, Lauren e Petrillo, until next show, see ya.
