Episode 722: We Analyzed Our Biggest Client Failure (And This Is What We Learned)

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Before you spend another dollar on ads, you need to do your business math right. Download our Marketing Performance Indicators checklist to track the key metrics that accurately measure your marketing efforts.

Download the checklist here: https://www.tiereleven.com/mpi  

 

Today’s case study is a perfect example of why such metrics matter more than your creative or targeting efforts. The client came to us with growth goals, though their business had been in decline for three years. About 60% of their revenue was coming from existing customers, but that segment was shrinking year over year.

 

Even with our top strategist, Ricardo Pouwels, deploying proven strategies, we weren’t able to break through the tough competitive landscape. We shifted the budget from Google to Meta ads and focused on improving new customer acquisition metrics, but the client couldn’t wait for the strategy to fully take effect.

 

You’ll learn that marketing can’t fix a fundamentally flawed business model. Tracking metrics like new customer acquisition cost (NCAC) can show progress even when overall revenue drops, but only with realistic expectations about recovery timelines that most businesses aren’t prepared to accept.

Chapters:

  • 00:00:00 – Introduction
  • 00:02:43 – Meet Tier11’s growth strategist, Ricardo Pouwels
  • 00:07:12 – Case study: Gardening niche client with a flawed business model
  • 00:12:32 – Challenges with Google Shopping and price competitiveness
  • 00:15:49 – How pricing issues contributed to the client’s decline
  • 00:19:27 – Testing new strategies: Meta Ad budget adjustments
  • 00:22:47 – What is the ideal timeframe for testing new marketing strategies?
  • 00:32:17 – Managing client expectations while saving a struggling business
  • 00:38:05 – Why a paid media strategy does not always work
  • 00:39:55 – What’s the best way to turn around a declining seasonal business?
  • 00:44:22 – Why didn’t we focus on email marketing to boost sales?
  • 00:51:23 – How to tackle business challenges with paid media

 

Want to learn how to calculate your NCAC?

Listen to our previous episode on NCAC

 

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READ THE TRANSCRIPT:

We Analyzed Our Biggest Client Failure (And This Is What We Learned)

 

[00:00:00] Lauren: There’s a lot of things that need to be considered that anyone that’s listening where you’re like, Ugh, I see my Google ads declining. I’m seeing my new customer growth declining. You have to be prepared ’cause it’s only gonna get worse as we get closer to Q4. 

[00:00:13] Ralph: What would be your advice to them when it comes to paid media and or.

[00:00:19] Ralph: Business metrics. 

[00:00:20] Ricardo: If they want to grow their way out of this, they will have to. 

[00:00:24] Music Playing: You are listening to Perpetual Traffic. 

[00:00:29] Ralph: Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic Podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns, founder and CEO of Cheer 11. Alongside my amazing co-host, 

[00:00:38] Lauren: Lauren e Petrillo, the founder of Mongoose Media.

[00:00:41] Ralph: So glad you joined us here today, and today we are gonna be digging deep into what not to do. I, I love these kinds of examples, Lauren, because everybody wants to show how great they are. I kind of sometimes wanna show like the mistakes that [00:01:00] we’ve made. We’re not perfect, although, you know we get it right most of the time.

[00:01:04] Ralph: The point is, is some of our cl, some of our clients aren’t perfect either. Surprise, surprise. I don’t know if you’ve had any imperfect clients. Have you had any Lauren, in your experience? You know 

[00:01:14] Lauren: what? Anyone who’s listening that is a current client, anyone that’s listening who’s a past client to you are perfect in beautiful, in every single way, shape, or form, any future clients, I will think the same thing.

[00:01:23] Lauren: Publicly, 

[00:01:25] Ralph: that is such a politically correct answer, which I was not expecting considering, so who you are. But anyway, no, at the end of the day it’s, wait all that, wait, wait. 

[00:01:32] Lauren: What was that? Considering who you are, you mean because of my sense of humor. 

[00:01:36] Ralph: Your sense of humor, and you’re just, you’re not a bullshitter.

[00:01:39] Ralph: Like it’s like that’s, that’s who you are. But anyway. No, we love our clients. Uh, these guys, we actually really did our best. We did our damnedest. Um, but sometimes. You can’t help a business with paid traffic and creative and digital marketing [00:02:00] strategies. Mm-hmm. If there is a, how we say, flawed business model and also antiquated ways of looking at data.

[00:02:10] Ralph: And that’s kind of what we’re gonna be talking about here today. And not to pick this company apart ’cause they shall remain nameless, however. It’s a lesson for all of us on what not to do. And if you are working with an agency or you have an internal team, let’s say you’re a director of marketing and you’re director of marketing, you know, you get reports every single week of how Google is doing and meta.

[00:02:34] Ralph: And Amazon, an email and organic, and it’s all siloed. You’re looking at it all wrong because they all work together and that was something that we couldn’t quite get across to this particular client here today. And so we have the subject matter experts, the one that did an astoundingly great job on this client, Lauren.

[00:02:56] Lauren: Yeah. 

[00:02:56] Ralph: None of that. I’m 

[00:02:57] Lauren: excited. 

[00:02:58] Ralph: I know none other, he’s [00:03:00] never been on perpetual traffic before. Nobody knows some of the, like these wicked smart people behind the scenes at tier 11. Well, today he’s coming out and he’s even wearing the tier 11 T-shirt today. So without further ado, welcome to Perpetual Traffic Growth Strategist extraordinaire Ricardo.

[00:03:16] Ralph: Powells and I probably pronounced it incorrectly. 

[00:03:21] Ricardo: Thank you. It’s good to be here. 

[00:03:22] Ralph: Great to have you. Actually, it’s good to have some sanity and some smart people on the show finally. It’s been a while. The point is you’re fired. Wow. I know. Yes. Shots fired. Health. I’m on your show with you. I know, I know. No, uh, actually, Ricardo is.

[00:03:38] Ralph: Uh, you’ve been with Tier 11. Just a little bit of a background. Mm, I it’s so many years. I can’t, I can’t even remember at this point. Just over three years it’s been, geez. Oh my God. And what did you do before? Yeah, time flies while you’re having fun, while you’re, while you’re dealing with these sorts of things we’re talking about right now.

[00:03:55] Ralph: Um, probably to actually time slows when [00:04:00] you have issues like this. ’cause the fun ones usually. It’s the time flies. But what did you do before, uh, getting hired at tier 11? Forget your background. Just to give the folks a little bit of a background on who you are. 

[00:04:12] Ricardo: I started in digital marketing about 10 years ago.

[00:04:15] Ricardo: I used to have my own Shopify store. Initially started doing just drop shipping, learning everything myself from Facebook ads to Google ads, email marketing, conversion rate optimization. Um. Two people that I hired for customer service and order fulfillment. So I did that for about three years. That’s why I learned the most about all different kinds of work and expertise that comes with having a Shopify store.

[00:04:40] Ricardo: And after that, I joined the agency world, uh, first with a different agency just for meta ads or Facebook ads back then. And then quickly grow into kind of a growth strategist role. I call it differently at the different agency, but it was pretty much, um, anything we needed to do to help clients grow, whether that [00:05:00] was through Facebook ads, Google ads, conversion rate optimization, creative strategy also did, um, and I joined here 11 three years ago.

[00:05:10] Ricardo: Um, different sets of clients that I work with here, a lot more complex. I would say, uh, usually bigger businesses. Which is, uh, great for me ’cause I love to tackle like the bigger challenges, uh, as opposed to just a small store, um, that runs traffic on one channel, uh, which is pretty, kind of easy to solve for.

[00:05:31] Ricardo: That’s what I’ve been doing since 

[00:05:33] Ralph: That’s a great, my background from my standpoints, like if when you’re running your own Shopify store, when you’re doing dropshipping, I wouldn’t say it’s typical, but I would say it gives you a much broader sense as to what’s out there in the digital marketing space, as opposed to just pure, let me go into the Facebook ads manager or the meta ads manager and just start buying media.

[00:05:52] Ralph: It’s like that is one component of all of it, and you’ve got that breadth of experience, which actually came in handy in this particular case study that we’re gonna be talking [00:06:00] about here today. It’s like that type of background is essential. I think if you don’t have that, it’s harder to look at things the way that we do.

[00:06:10] Ralph: Like with the marketing performance indicators, which you can get over@tiereleven.com slash mpi by the way. Uh, which is a broader way of looking at how to do digital marketing now. So it’s like you rely on that experience pretty heavily. And I know you did for this one because the strategies that we were gonna be, you know, that we deployed.

[00:06:29] Ralph: Also tried to get deployed, maybe didn’t do such a great job at convincing the client to be able to do them, comes from that background. Would you agree or disagree? 

[00:06:41] Ricardo: Definitely. I would say the financial side for the most part. Sometimes clients need help on the financial side. Um, whatever the cost of goods sold overhead.

[00:06:50] Ricardo: So if you have that background and you used to make your own kind of spread spreadsheets with like profit and all the costs. Kind of know what comes, [00:07:00] um, with scaling a business and how like fixed costs and variable costs play a role. Uh, so that’s, uh, a big help right now. Yeah. 

[00:07:09] Ralph: Yeah. And uh, and these guys didn’t have a whole lot of profit to play with, I think, which was one of the problems.

[00:07:16] Ralph: Why don’t we just get right into it? So this is a case study in the consumer niche and specifically in the gardening niche. And they sold a lot of products that have a ton of competition. Specifically Seeds was one of them, but they have a lot of other products. So tell us about sort of the background of this client and sort of where things started and give us an idea of like what the original strategy was and how we kind of started to work together.

[00:07:48] Ralph: And then we can get into some of the specifics after that. 

[00:07:51] Ricardo: Sure. So this client, they can through 

[00:07:52] Lauren: us get weeds, specifically Ralph, right? Get into the weeds specifically that get into 

[00:07:56] Ralph: the weeds. That’s good. Not the flowers, the weeds. [00:08:00] Right. But 

[00:08:00] Lauren: you have the growth expert who’s trying to grow weed, flower, their bank accounts 

[00:08:08] Ralph: that doesn’t need to, we just want, we just want flowers like bright, sunny flowers.

[00:08:13] Ralph: Anyway, go ahead, Ricardo. Hey, 

[00:08:14] Lauren: Miley Cyrus. 

[00:08:17] Ricardo: Right. So this client, they came to us end of 2024, uh, and we were launching our own strategy in January, 2025. Um, initially I think there was a bit of a mismatch in expectations, and they had growth goals. They wanted to grow by X percentage year over year, and only.

[00:08:38] Ricardo: Two, three months in, we realized that they were a declining business. They had been declining for about three to four years. Um, so the goal wasn’t really to grow. The goal was to stop the bleed and help them reverse that trend. Initially we looked at, of course, their traffic plates. They were always spending a lot of money on Google ads.

[00:08:57] Ricardo: Meta ads, uh, were responsible [00:09:00] for about 5% of their, uh, paid media and. That hadn’t been working for them for years. We wanted to push more on meta and decrease their ad spend on Google and funnel in more new customers. So the majority of our strategy was centered around new customer acquisition. Um, so we introduced MCA and me started tracking and measuring those metrics, and then initially started scaling up our meta ad spend in January.

[00:09:30] Ricardo: Uh, because it was a seasonal business, it was difficult to compare. Using our new metrics kind of year over year with the reporting tools we were using. But in the first couple of weeks, we gradually built up the budget on meta, but unfortunately this client was used to looking at just overall MER, overall store roas and channel specific roas.

[00:09:53] Ricardo: So they were stuck in, just look at those two metrics. They saw the top line mower go down [00:10:00] and the Google specific growers go down as well. Um, that was before we figured out that they were a declining business and before we knew about the split between new customer revenue and existing customer revenue.

[00:10:14] Ricardo: Um, so they quickly kind of grew anxious. And had us pull budget away from meta again and push it towards Google. Um, essentially forcing us to look at last click attribution, uh, because that was what they were used to looking at, and that is what they were reporting on to their higher ups. And in about February we started getting their numbers, meaning like the new customer revenue versus existing customer revenue took some time to get that information.

[00:10:43] Ricardo: That’s when we uncovered that 60% of the revenue was coming from existing customers, and that had been declining year over year as well. Um, so you can imagine if we are doing our best to increase the new customer revenue and make that part of their [00:11:00] business more efficient, but at the same time they are bleeding money on the existing customer side.

[00:11:07] Ricardo: Even if we were to generate an additional 50,000 in new customer revenue because of the percentages, they were losing like 100,000 in existing customer revenue. And therefore because they looked at the top line robots or more, that number just went down over and over again, uh, and we were kind of being punished for it.

[00:11:30] Ricardo: Um, that then turned into a couple of months back and forth testing strategies. And them having the belief that there was so much more to do with Google Ads while not recognizing some of the bigger business issues that were at play. Um, ’cause we were running Google shopping campaigns, it is very price competitive and it’s a commodity that they were selling.

[00:11:56] Ricardo: So you can imagine you have to the listings up top with different [00:12:00] prices that we were simply not winning. Based on reviews. We weren’t winning either. So for the, the user, there wasn’t a great reason to pick us over the products of their competitors. Um, we did share that information with the client. Of course, they.

[00:12:18] Ricardo: I think acknowledged the issues, but didn’t quite understand the weight of those issues. And we tried to fix it with paid media, but it was just too big of a decline in new customer revenue and existing customer revenue to make up for it with just Google ads optimizations. 

[00:12:36] Ralph: So for those of you who are listening and who aren’t familiar with this, the the primary methodology for acquiring Earth.

[00:12:44] Ralph: Well, for acquiring customers or for selling their product lists through Google Shopping. And as we know with Google, if you’re not familiar with Google shopping, but basically it comes at the top of the page and you’re listed against everybody else in that space for whatever [00:13:00] that keyword phrase is.

[00:13:01] Ralph: Let’s say it’s Zia Seeds as an example, and you would have. All of your individual pains right there of images of the product. And then you would have price, maybe even quantity, some kind of value proposition and sort of an an a bridge sort of, uh, you know, little snippet. But if you are not price competitive and there’s no superior mechanism for your particular product.

[00:13:34] Ralph: Most people are just gonna choose either the cheapest option or the Amazon option in many cases. And obviously Google Shopping isn’t necessarily on Amazon, but sometimes it is. The point is, is like, or they just go to the, wait second. Stop, 

[00:13:47] Lauren: stop. So Amazon pulled out from a appearing in Google shopping a week ago.

[00:13:52] Ralph: Yeah, I, I know that. Okay. 

[00:13:54] Lauren: Sorry. I, I was like, oh, okay. I was like, wait, wait, wait. 

[00:13:56] Ralph: Crazy to think about. But anyway, so the point was, is like, this was prior to that, [00:14:00] so they were being price shopped. For the keyword phrases that you guys were all managing, you and Rashna as I recall. Uh, and it was just like, you could see it right from the start.

[00:14:12] Ralph: It’s like, what are we, how can we win? You know? There was no particular, like, our seeds are better because they do X, Y, and Z versus everybody else. At the end of the day, they were seeds. So how can we differentiate in Google shopping? And we realized that’s abl. It’s really, it was a bloodbath. And the reason for the decline was that there was no differentiator at that particular moment of that you know, that that ZMOT, that zero moment in time where somebody actually makes that decision.

[00:14:47] Ralph: And that’s what you were sort of facing at that, at that particular, like you didn’t have any control over pricing, you didn’t have any control over the product itself. There was competitors, there was a large competitor that came into the [00:15:00] space and just outbid everybody with huge volume, you know, massive ad spend as well as maybe a better mousetrap, sorta kind of, but maybe not.

[00:15:12] Ralph: The point is, is like you’re, when you’re trying to compete in that type of space, my immediate response is. Get outta that bloody ocean as much as you possibly can or minimize it and look at other sources where you can do more interruption marketing and then differentiate yourself without the comparators on either side’s.

[00:15:33] Ralph: View on Google shopping is that. Was that your assessment as well? 

[00:15:36] Ricardo: Yes, definitely. That’s also why we steer more towards meta. ’cause then at least our ads are not right next to the competitor’s ads. Um, so even though we were more expensive, people might not see it and might not Google the brand. So at least we had that part going.

[00:15:52] Ralph: So talk about the pricing here. Let’s talk like, this is something that we discuss a lot when we’re in the [00:16:00] discovery phase of understanding, okay, what is your pricing versus the competition? Also you, you even referred to some of the NPIs, like your, your nac. Like what’s your nac? What’s your allowable NAC for on a global sense as well as your NEOV, your N mer, your NLTV, like all of those different factors.

[00:16:21] Ralph: How did you break that down? And I think that breakdown was something that they didn’t really have a true grasp on at that particular moment. And that was all part of this sort of discovery phase. We realized. Oh my God. This is going to be really hard to win at Google Shopping based upon the metrics and the business metrics behind the actual products itself.

[00:16:42] Ralph: Mm-hmm. 

[00:16:43] Ricardo: Yeah, I would say pricing, the pricing issue was quite unique for this client because it’s not like you’re comparing a $20 product to an $18 product where the difference is quite small and you might, uh, simply pick the $20 product because you like the brand a little bit more. Uh, we’re talking [00:17:00] about seeds, so they come in quantities and people were out bidding us, so they had a lower price for four times the amount of seats.

[00:17:08] Ricardo: So that’s. Simply four times as expensive at least. So there’s a a significant difference going back to the NPIs. We started tracking that from the start, but it was definitely a challenge to educate the client on the role of these NPIs and explain that we could still grow the new customer revenue efficiently while their existing customer revenue was still going down.

[00:17:32] Ricardo: The debt might not have anything to do with. Paid media. Um, we did see amount for the NEC and both improved, so we were more efficient in, um, acquiring new customers through paid media. But because the top line metrics got worse, ’cause of the laws in existing customer revenue. They still saw that as a loss and did not allow us to kind of push through with that strategy.

[00:17:58] Ralph: So I’m actually [00:18:00] looking in an incognito window right now for a couple of the keyword phrases. I don’t see them being advertised at all, which is good ’cause people on the show here will probably start looking for this. And there’s a reason for that is that, you know, some of these were all right, get it for $4 and 99 cents for.

[00:18:21] Ralph: I, I forget the, the, the amount, like 10 seeds versus 4 99 for the competitor and get 40 seeds if there’s no differentiator right then and there, it’s like, well, why should I buy from the guy who’s, you know, it’ll literally 10 x more expensive. We didn’t really have any answer for that. And Google Shopping just sort of highlights that deficiency in the product itself.

[00:18:43] Ralph: I’m not saying that this isn’t a great company with great products. The point is, is competitively they were at a competitive disadvantage for whatever reason cost of goods sold. There was sort of like Chinese competitors that we kept sort of talking about. Uh, obviously it was the [00:19:00] incursion of Amazon.

[00:19:01] Ralph: Like that’s a, that’s a bloody mess over on the Google side when you don’t have a major competitive advantage. If you’ve got something that no one else has and as a big differentiator and you’re a price premium. Okay, you’ve got a reason to be on Google shopping, but in this case, it was like all the strikes were kind of against them, and so it was a platform that we really struggled with early on and then got some of the numbers from the business on the back end.

[00:19:28] Ralph: That sort of backed a lot of these decisions up. So the next strategy was, all right, so pull, pull back a bit, but what, what was your recommendation once we sort of realized that a lot of these metrics weren’t really working? 

[00:19:44] Ricardo: So we went through a couple of different phases. Um, so initially we tried pumping up our meta budget over the course of a couple of weeks, making that 5% split from meta to like 35 ish percent, that they only gave us essentially like three weeks [00:20:00] to see if that made an impact on the top line metrics.

[00:20:03] Ricardo: Which unfortunately it didn’t. It was a quick scale up and we did not see any signs back then that numbers were improving, but we also didn’t have the opportunity to compare year over year, um, ’cause of the reporting we were using. We could only look back at the previous weeks and only see kind of the top line me year over year.

[00:20:23] Ricardo: So that was a bit of a limiting factor there. After that, we. Decreased Meta’s budget again, and they stopped creative production. So that was another challenge. ’cause creators were not produced by us, but by them. So that’s a good learning point too. Then we went through that phase of trying to make it work with just Google ads, which they try to do.

[00:20:43] Ricardo: The last three to four years that did not work either. No difference at all in performance, slightly worse performance actually. And then afterwards, because we were pushing a new customer acquisition strategy, uh, they were thinking that we were not going after existing customers at all. That our heads were not showing to [00:21:00] existing customers, which.

[00:21:01] Ricardo: Isn’t true, of course, because the brand ads would still show up. Met exclusions are not perfect. Uh, we were not excluding customers debt aggressively either. So existing customers would still see our ads. It’s just that we were not going after them very aggressively or actively. Um, but at that point they believed that we should do that.

[00:21:24] Ricardo: So we opened up our exclusions, uh, started putting a little bit more ad spend behind an existing customer audience. That made things even more inefficient. That just didn’t work at all because for this product, it’s not like people buy it week after week after week. They buy it once, maybe twice a year.

[00:21:42] Ricardo: Right? So you’re not getting anywhere by keeping your ads in front of them over and over again. Especially not if there’s no. Added benefit of branding. You’re not building a brand. It’s a simple commodity. Like if they shop again next year, they simply Google the product name, uh, look around for the best [00:22:00] price and then buy from that brand.

[00:22:02] Ricardo: Yeah. Um, so that did not work either. And then we finally got approval to increase the meta budget again. That’s when we saw a little bit better performance. Uh, we saw there was the month where we saw NCA and improve. So we were more efficient on the new customer front, but their existing customer revenues still kept going down, uh, and we could not make up for that gap.

[00:22:27] Ricardo: And because they were still stuck in looking at just overall MER or roas, like the store rollis, um. They didn’t see that as a win, you know, so we did not get the approval to keep going with that strategy, uh, keep making the new customer side more efficient. They needed to hit a certain, like top line mirror, and therefore we had to drop our budgets again.

[00:22:51] Lauren: What would’ve been the ideal amount of time you wish that you could have seen? The consistency behind those numbers come down. So like I’m thinking if someone’s just listening to this [00:23:00] and they’re also like, ’cause let’s be real, those Chinese competitors that we’ve talked about, like there’s big brands like Temu and Chi and like they’ve entered the market with buckets of money and in completely lower cost products.

[00:23:11] Lauren: So the substitution cost was ridiculous for a lot of these brands. So I’m sure there’s some people here that are in this like mousetrap of, I can’t compete in shopping because I don’t have the reviews. Because I don’t have the previous spend and volume, and I don’t have enough real estate to provide usps.

[00:23:27] Lauren: It’s just commoditized at that price point. But when you’re seeing those, you know, those marketing performance indicators that are showing you progress towards growth, especially of new customer acquisitions and decreasing costs for acquiring new customers, which can. Increased brand value, what timeline would’ve been ideal for that client to have understood to see that this is not an isolated incident, but this is a trend.

[00:23:53] Lauren: Like at what point for someone who’s listening, being like, Ugh, I don’t wanna bleed. ’cause it’s still a bleed. Like the reality is, is the client was like. [00:24:00] They’ve been bleeding for a really long time. Right, and they’re looking for years for you. All of a sudden like, yeah, yeah. They’re like, I’m not ready to amputate.

[00:24:06] Lauren: And you’re like, okay, well we have to amputate some way. ’cause like you’ve been talking about how they’re just squeezing the juice out of the existing customer. It’s like you, you have to, you have to stop the bleed and you’re like, what is it cauterizing, where you’re like putting the metal on it, but like at what point do you know that it’s you?

[00:24:22] Lauren: You’ve stopped the blood loss and you can recover. Limb, like how long would that have been and how long did you have were their expectations? You said earlier on like, might have been a misalignment. Um, what was the time period that they looked at and what would’ve been the time period to show that you can like, get out of the weeds and get back to a stable place?

[00:24:41] Lauren: ’cause earlier you were saying like you just had to get back to net zero versus you want, they wanted to go from red to green. You wanted to go from red to black. What was that timeline been 

[00:24:53] Ricardo: correct? Uh, I would say to see the first signs that our strategy was working at least a month. ’cause there was [00:25:00] quite a lot of volatility week over week as they were running a lot of promotions.

[00:25:04] Ricardo: So one week it was great. Then there was like a sales hangover. Next week was just poor again. So at least a month. So in my opinion, there were some signs that that strategy was moving in the right direction. Uh, when we had to mount for NEC and Ember improved. Uh, but to recover, if we’re talking about this client to get back to black, that would’ve taken at least like three to four months, depending on how quickly we would’ve been able to, to scale up.

[00:25:32] Ricardo: But there would’ve. I’ve had to accept that if we were to push more money into it, um, kind of fueling their new customer growth, the top line more was going to suffer ’cause that, that part of the business is not as efficient as the existing. 

[00:25:48] Lauren: Yeah, and this was, you’re talking about this started in January and at the time we’re recording this, we felt like half a year through, and I’m sure it’s the same for you, Ralph.

[00:25:55] Lauren: For us, any contracts or relationships that we start with clients that are [00:26:00] intended to be less than two years is a short-term solution because we’re trying to make long-term growth. I mean, even just on the episode we had with Corey, right? Like he was talking about how he was able to 10 x over the course of seven years, like it, it has growing pains and there’s this like level of sustainability.

[00:26:17] Lauren: So in a six month lookback period asking for miracles to happen, it has happened. You guys definitely have had incredible miracles and you’re putting in the playbooks that have worked time and time again. Again, it’s just that like short term focus, for me, short term is two years or less. That’s, in my opinion, I don’t know Ricardo or Ralph, if that short term focus changes for you guys.

[00:26:41] Ralph: I, I wouldn’t disagree with that because I mean, I, I think this, you’re in a really hard situation here because you’ve got major brands spending enormous amounts of money, and I look at, like, I was in the market. Two, three weeks ago for weed killer. All right. [00:27:00] Like related market, but we’ve got like a bunch of crab grass.

[00:27:02] Ralph: This 

[00:27:03] Lauren: Ricardo’s new title. We killer? No.

[00:27:08] Ralph: Oh, he is, he’s a, uh, he’s a C killer. He, he kill, he kills it. So it comes down. Uh, careful. That boss 

[00:27:16] Lauren: accent might sound Frazier. 

[00:27:17] Ralph: Watch out, watch out with that Boston accent. I might, uh, screw it up. I’m not gonna use the F-bomb there. Um, so anyway, so I’m in there and I’m like, all right, well, which weed killer do I want?

[00:27:27] Ralph: And Ortho and Roundup spend gazillions on like paid media tv. Like look at any sporting event in the United States, Ricardo. It’s like, it’s like every other one is either insurance company or something about beer or like lawn when it comes to like springtime sports, like geared towards my demographic.

[00:27:48] Ralph: Of course, you know, guys that actually watch tv. But the point is, as opposed to like watching everything on my phone, the thing is, is like when I was there, I’m like, oh. Which one do I trust? Like who’s built up the most Brand [00:28:00] equity because they were all basically at the same price. I’m looking at ’em right now on, you know, on Google shopping, there’s one that is a little bit more premium and it’s almost like, you know, 30, 40% more than the rest of them.

[00:28:17] Ralph: And I believe that’s the one that I bought. Because I had seen enough commercials, and it’s ortho by the way, ’cause it’s like crabgrass and dandelion. ’cause you gotta kill the ions first. The point is like they built up a brand equity using hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising. So it put a position in my mind that this business was actually better in a largely commoditized market.

[00:28:42] Ralph: And you’re asking a very good question, Lauren, which is how long would it take? Ortho and Roundup have taken. Decades. 

[00:28:50] Lauren: Decades 

[00:28:51] Ralph: to build that up. And here you are going into a space thinking you can compete with everybody else. Maybe not was like the big brands. ’cause there are some big brands [00:29:00] that are in here when I’m looking up Zia seeds here.

[00:29:02] Ralph: But not huge. But all the prices are basically equal. But we had price the same. And in essence, 10 x more expensive. It’s like how do you, how do you compete? So the question then becomes, how do you put the brand at the forefront of the consumer’s mind to say, oh, well I will pay 10 x more because that brand has higher quality.

[00:29:25] Ralph: I’m not gonna get the roundup, I’m gonna get the ortho instead. 

[00:29:29] Lauren: I think three months. Think, want small caveat, because you talked about you being the demographic. Mm-hmm. You are in a different income level than someone of a different generation. And so I just wanna be mindful of like one piece to it. Is that.

[00:29:44] Lauren: Gen Zers traditionally lack loyalty, and it’s an absolute race to the bottom. Interesting. And when you’re in shopping, that’s what you’re competing against. So I’m just being mindful of like, you talked earlier again about the, the, if you’re not dominating in reviews, you have to dominate in price because you [00:30:00] don’t have differentiated.

[00:30:00] Lauren: I mean, I would. Like wanna think like, hey, if someone’s looking at why is this four times 10 times more expensive, this could be better. And you have that luxury premium stuff. But then I’m gonna click and I’m gonna be curious. So my click isn’t a conversion, it’s a curiosity driver, and then I’m expecting your sales product page or the PLP product landing page to tell me why this is premium and convince me.

[00:30:26] Lauren: For that possible consideration of a conversion. But for the most part, I’m gonna do a curiosity click if I am comfortable going for value and better in quality rather than price. But that’s where it’s like, I’m like mindful, Ralph, that like you’re watching tv, you’re aware it’s this. Gen Zs traditionally have been assumed as the most loyal, disloyal generation of consumers.

[00:30:51] Ricardo: Yeah. 

[00:30:51] Lauren: That Gen Zers and millennials are taking to gardening. I believe way faster than previous generations [00:31:00] because it’s just a part of like a, like anti screen lifestyle. It’s a how do I get grounding? How do I, how do I have this type of non device dependent hobby? So in that, I’m just, I’m mindful of like.

[00:31:14] Lauren: When Ricardo and team, again, like why I’m saying like two years is really short term. Anything less than two years short term is you have to look at how is this positioned across the multi-generations you’re going after the regionalization of those areas, like maybe where Ortho’s headquarters, oh man, good luck.

[00:31:31] Lauren: Like everyone Ortho’s a big company, so like maybe half of a town is supported by Ortho in that capacity. Like so there’s so many things that you need to look at, but when you’re inheriting a new account. We always say the first 90 days are the worst because you have to learn so much about the brand and the history of the brand.

[00:31:47] Lauren: You came on record and you said you didn’t have full visibility to a lot of the numbers that could have empowered this decision making to happen. Earlier on, you were reduced by the number of creatives that are [00:32:00] happening, and it is just, it’s a lot of stuff where you are on a fire sale and you’re. You are fighting, like you said, you have sales hangovers, you’ve offered fatigue.

[00:32:10] Lauren: I mean, everyone, well, not everyone, many people are aware of like what happened to JC Penney, how they were just offered out and they went from being a place to go after to a place. You’re just, if you don’t have a coupon, you don’t go. So there’s a lot of things to that where I’m just saying like. If you’re listening and you’re like, oh, you feel you’re in the same space?

[00:32:26] Lauren: Like I, I’m just gonna be honest, take a look at what are your expectations and have some mindset like, do you have a roadmap of how you’re going to overcome this in two years? And if you don’t, I invite you to look at one. And you need to have a budget with the expectation that you’re gonna suffer your MUR in the beginning so that you can grow a brand that will be sustainable, which is what Ricardo, you were working towards.

[00:32:48] Lauren: Yeah. But you only had such a short period. To raise the dead. Yeah. 

[00:32:54] Ralph: Yeah. Because there, there were in a steep decline for three years and you were just trying to get back to baseline. [00:33:00] 

[00:33:00] Ricardo: Yeah. 

[00:33:01] Ralph: You know, that was like the immediate need. It was like a fire sale every day. Not because they were doing sales too, but the point was, is it was a frantic chase to get back up to where maybe they were the year before.

[00:33:14] Ralph: You know, utilizing nac, utilizing aac, like trying to get the returning customers, trying to get new customers. And it was just this constant uphill battle. Um. You know, due to the, but 

[00:33:28] Lauren: he had wins. It was a battle and he was going absolutely. To win the war. You lost some battles, but you were constantly fighting and you were working towards, we started the in the green room, right?

[00:33:37] Lauren: We were talking about the Battle of Nema Mine, 

[00:33:41] Ralph: n Megan 

[00:33:42] Lauren: Maima, and there we go. Eddie Va. Van Halen. Van Halen. 

[00:33:46] Ralph: Eddie Van Helen. Yes. See? Yes. He was not born there, but he moved to Pasadena from there. So. Ricardo has some kind of, you know, the [00:34:00] guitar history there in the town of NY Megan, which I will visit someday, uh, and we’ll hang out.

[00:34:05] Ralph: Anyway, the point is, is yes, there is a battle there and I think we lo won a lot of battles. And actually one of the battles that was starting to win was when the, when the budgets were shifted over to meta. We started to see the algorithm actually starting to work because we weren’t being compared side to side with the other competitors that were 10 times less expensive on a volume basis.

[00:34:31] Ralph: However, you wanna sort of slice the, you know, slice the apple there. The point is, is like you started to get wins, but then the patients, because of the urgent need to save the business, was so much, it’s like they couldn’t wait any longer. Am I paraphrasing that or am I accurate there? ’cause that was my understanding.

[00:34:50] Ricardo: No, that’s pretty, pretty accurate. And we were trying to fix business issues with just big media with very limited tools. Yeah. Um, so when I mentioned that like the three to four [00:35:00] month timeline was just talking about hopefully getting their new customer revenue up enough to get back to black. But if we’re talking about creating true grant loyalty and getting them to a place where they’re not competing on price and reviews, we’re definitely talking years, not months.

[00:35:18] Ralph: Yeah. 

[00:35:18] Lauren: Yeah. Because you have to revolutionize how you’re with your competitors and like all of your existing, like what’s your referral strategy? How are your current comms, how are you talking to new customers versus how you’re talking to existing customers and VIP customers. Like this is a full holistic approach that cannot be solved.

[00:35:33] Lauren: And saying this to a lot of listeners, ’cause I know you think that Meta and Google are ATMs, that when you put a dollar in, you demand and expect many dollars back. I love that for you. That’s very cute. And it works a lot of the times sometimes, but. Sometimes it does. I like, I just can’t emphasize more of like, Ricardo, you obviously did your, like we, you can never promise and guarantee results.

[00:35:54] Lauren: We’ll say like we cannot guarantee results, but we can guarantee you that we will put our full effort in and that we [00:36:00] will try our best. There’s outside factors that you can’t control, but the component of why I think this is such a good case study to talk about, like we’re also like, Hey, yeah, like we learn.

[00:36:07] Lauren: We learn. I mean the biggest learning here was there was probably a misalignment and of expectations and potential. Fit as a customer for your team, because what you guys can do is amazing, but you can’t always create miracles. You have, but in this time, like you weren’t necessarily set and no one could have been set up for great success in that capacity.

[00:36:25] Lauren: The biggest thing though is that like we’re coming onto Black Friday. If you’re even close to this scenario, you’re gonna have the worst margins and the highest costs. So if this is resonating for anyone that’s listening where you’re like, I, I just, I keep feeding in. What was the number, Ricardo, of return customers that they had for the top line?

[00:36:46] Ricardo: That was about 60%? Yeah. 50. 

[00:36:49] Lauren: Okay. That’s, that’s a lot. And they’re gonna be expecting like. A lot more like, I mean, 40% new customer growth. I, I, I don’t know what the subscription size of it, but there’s a lot of things that need to be considered [00:37:00] that anyone that’s listening where you’re like, Ugh, I see my Google ads declining.

[00:37:03] Lauren: I’m seeing my new customer growth declining. You have to be prepared ’cause it’s only gonna get worse as we get closer to Q4. So what’s really good is if, like you, you take in some of those things and the, the NPIs that Ricardo’s been talking about and how his team is looking at how to. Accomplish red to black, then go black to green.

[00:37:23] Lauren: I’m just, you’ve gotta be mindful of seasonal. You talk about volatility. This is a, uh, seasonal forward item, especially in different regions. I don’t know if this was international, but you know, you’re not planting new seeds in Chicago in January. So the, the, there’s those types of components. So I’m just asking you to look and like, if you take nothing from this episode, other than that, like sometimes everyone does their best, but you need a longer roadmap and a longer runway.

[00:37:51] Lauren: And unfortunately a lot of that runway may be dependent on money and you’re competing against VCs and, and international firms that are. Pumping in money right away. So some of the [00:38:00] best things you can do is ensure that your brand and your foundational things are tight before you just start spending money to solve business issues.

[00:38:07] Lauren: And by spending money on paid media. 

[00:38:09] Ralph: Well, paid media will never, ever solve a fundamentally flawed business model. I wouldn’t say it’s a flawed business model here ’cause I, I don’t want to cast dispersions on this client because they’ve got a very solid business. They sell solid products, they sell great products.

[00:38:25] Ralph: The competitive landscape has changed dramatically. The course of the last three to four years. We came in at the tail end of it, hoping a paid media strategy would at least get us back to break even. And rarely does that ever work. I mean, I, but it’s 

[00:38:42] Lauren: hard to, you started to show 

[00:38:44] Ralph: it. It did. It did. I mean, like to turn around an entire business based upon a paid media strategy, like yes, absolutely.

[00:38:51] Ralph: Does it have impact? Ricardo and the team made major impact there. The timeframe had to be [00:39:00] extraordinarily short though because there was a, remember this is a incredibly seasonal products, like it’s March to May, June really is like their hot season, as I recall. And then that’s why they get like one purchase per year on average, like their NAOV and their LTV was virtually the same.

[00:39:19] Ralph: As I recall, it was like maybe 10 or 20% higher on the LTV side. But the point is you’ve got a very narrow window of opportunity and we were like scrambling the whole time and 

[00:39:29] Lauren: we have opportunity to capture the conversions, but they’re a huge opportunity for ’em to build a brand because I, yes, I would bet If we look in the Facebook ads library, they’re not doing a lot of brand building initiatives now, so that when you’re in your Super Bowl season 

[00:39:41] Ralph: Yep.

[00:39:41] Lauren: You have Super Bowl superiority. My guess, that’s my assumption based off of the cutback on creatives and, and the. The decrease of spend on meta shifting only towards that bottom of funnel. Race to the bottom. Right. Purchase or new. 

[00:39:55] Ralph: Yeah. Last click attribution, the whole thing. So I guess in summary, like, uh, [00:40:00] Ricardo, gimme like your analysis on what would be an ideal scenario, like if a, a client, like there’s plenty of people, of plenty of businesses that are listening to this show that may fall under this scenario, maybe not exactly like this with the seasonality, et cetera.

[00:40:16] Ralph: Like what would be. Your advice to them when it comes to paid media and or business metrics? ’cause you figured out all their business metrics and their NAC numbers and their NEOV and all. They didn’t know any of that. So what would your advice be if you had to start on this all over? What would be the strategy from your standpoint?

[00:40:38] Ricardo: Um, I think it starts with setting the right expectations and to really, uh, doing a proper assessment of your business. Like, are you declining? Are you growing, are you still profitable? That changes the strategy completely, in my opinion. 

[00:40:51] Lauren: For what time period are you growing? What time period are you declining?

[00:40:55] Lauren: Like what point is the. 

[00:40:57] Ricardo: Ideally year over year, if they have like a [00:41:00] couple of years of data, it’s not always possible for clients. But if it’s not a seasonal business, it can be month over month. So either year over year or month over month. 

[00:41:09] Lauren: But you would look at at least six months or like what time period, at least looking at it.

[00:41:14] Lauren: Because if you’re like month over month and it’s like three months good, three months bad, like does that neutral out in your opinion or where is that? 

[00:41:23] Ricardo: I would try and take as big of a timeframe as possible. Say if we’re doing year over year, at least like three to four years, if we’re doing month over month, because we have some startups as well that just started a year ago in a start.

[00:41:37] Ricardo: More limited. Um, so then you look at at least a couple of months, um, but hopefully you’ll see some month over month growth. Um, what’s also important to keep in mind is, um, the time it takes for conversions to happen, which is wildly different from business to business. For 

[00:41:55] Lauren: sure. You’re, you’re just saying it depends in a long way of saying it, which is like the [00:42:00] two best.

[00:42:00] Ricardo: Yeah, I don’t want to give that answer. That’s kind of the default answer, but it is what it comes down to. But for this client, conversions were happening relatively quickly. Um, but we needed to have that assessment before we started working with them, like the visibility on new versus existing customer revenue.

[00:42:18] Ricardo: ’cause then we would’ve seen that their existing customer revenue was declining. That would’ve made things a lot different from what we knew when we started with them. Um, ’cause we were under the assumption that they were, I think, growing, uh, and they had growth goals. So we were under the assumption that we were taking on a growing client and just needed like a 5%, 10% improvement and that we have time to work towards it.

[00:42:44] Ricardo: But that wasn’t the case. Um. What I would’ve done differently for this client specifically is yeah, really set those expectations in the beginning. That would’ve brought us hopefully more time to let our strategy kind of play out [00:43:00] and to really explain the difference of the new customer efficiency and the existing customer revenue.

[00:43:07] Ricardo: That both can be true at the same time that we can be more efficient on the new customer side, but as long as they’re not solving their business issues. They will see their existing customer revenue decrease and then they simply had to face the difficult reality that if they want to grow their way out of this kind of decline, they will have to accept a lower Merv for like months, if not one to two years, and to really work on brand building or figure out a different way to not compete on price and reviews.

[00:43:40] Ricardo: Right. So that would’ve been kind of the overarching. Strategy and then media buying wise. It will pro, um, probably still have come down to spending a lot more on meta, less on Google, and spending even less than we were spending on brand and remarketing, [00:44:00] uh, because we were kind of trying to meet in the middle, uh, trying to.

[00:44:05] Ricardo: Run some remarketing ads, um, probably spend a little bit more on branded than I would’ve liked to because they were really hammering on making sure that we were getting in front of existing customers, et cetera. Um, but we were just seeing diminishing returns, uh, if any significant improvement at all. So those are the major things that I would’ve done differently.

[00:44:26] Ralph: So last question here is a lot of people will be listening to this like, well, why didn’t you focus on email? If they’re, if they had clients or they had customers from a year or so ago, or two years ago, three years ago, just rely on email to get ’em back, to get ’em to buy again, which I know was part of the strategy, but it just wasn’t quite that simple.

[00:44:47] Ralph: Remember, these are purchases, like when we talk about N cac, and if you haven’t listened to our NAC series. If I’m gonna leave links in the show notes for that because you have to listen to it because this is one of those cases where I think I actually [00:45:00] use it as an example. Like you need to look back a year and or longer.

[00:45:04] Ralph: Sometimes it’s. Three months to determine NAC because you’re trying to figure out what your LTV is, but literally like this is a once a year purchase because it’s gardening, it’s springtime, it’s depending on where you are. I think it was largely us. Let’s just say it was largely us. So it’s, you know, seasonal fluctuations.

[00:45:22] Ralph: Yeah. So the point is, is you have to look back. Your end C calculations are always going to be different based upon the type of business. And this is definitely one where it would be absolutely 12 months. So. Having said that, to get those repeat buyers, people who have bought before, you have their email address, you have their name.

[00:45:39] Ralph: Why not just like layer in, like, just overload everything on email at the hottest time of the year, which is March, April, may, thereabouts. Like what? What’s your thoughts there? 

[00:45:50] Ricardo: Yeah, definitely. And um, so there’s a lot more to it, but we recommended sending out more emails, which they started doing, I think at the end of the season.

[00:45:59] Ricardo: They were [00:46:00] sending out maybe like three emails a day. Uh, so they were definitely going very heavy on email, which helps in the short term, but at some point you’re just exhausting your list. Right. Um, but our email revenue is also going down year over year, a month over month. So it wasn’t just the paid media that was, that was getting less efficient.

[00:46:19] Ricardo: It was emails, it was across the board. Even organic traffic was down year over year. Um, that was one part of it. Another what was feed issues? ’cause they were so heavily reliant on Google shopping and they were having product feed issues because unfortunately they were not on Shopify. Uh, so their setup wasn’t quite as easy.

[00:46:41] Ricardo: Um, for example, for most products they are like two options. Like, for example, a five seat pack and a 20 seat pack. But if one of those was out of stock, I believe that was causing some issues for the overall product. It wasn’t work anymore. So we were also trying to help them with the feed issues [00:47:00] among all the issues.

[00:47:01] Ricardo: Like we flag the fact that they didn’t have upsells anymore, which they used to have before when they were on a different, um. Website platform, store platform. That was not our thing that they needed to improve on. So there were all these factors and kind of missed opportunities. The biggest issue was still like the pricing, the reviews, that even if they find those like 2, 3, 4, 5% improvements across the board, they were still not where they needed to be.

[00:47:30] Ralph: So the email would, which if you’re listing, you’re like, well, that’s the easy solution. Just like blast ’em with email, oh, we did that. 

[00:47:38] Lauren: Oh, oh, he talked about this in other episodes where you, I know, complete your list and piss everyone off and you’re gonna have. 

[00:47:46] Ralph: At some point you need to reload. You know, you need to get more on that list.

[00:47:50] Ralph: And I know that list, if the list 

[00:47:52] Lauren: isn’t growing. Yeah. That’s for us, one of the biggest indicators when you were talking about earlier about like looking at growth month over month, year over year and stuff like that. For us [00:48:00] at least, something that’s worked well for us is just saying like, is your email subscriber list growing?

[00:48:05] Lauren: If you’re not doing any lead acquisition, especially for you e-commerce people. You should be doing lead acquisition, especially right now, ahead of Labor Day and Black Friday. But, um, if your email list isn’t growing, you have no chance to really grow your net new customers and that you might not even be doing lead acquisition strategies.

[00:48:24] Lauren: Do you just have more people signing up in general? If you don’t, you’re not having people indicating that they’re interested in it, but just not right now. So that kind of stuff like. You’ll deplete it for. That’s hard. You’re in a tough spot, Ricardo, and like Ralph, you and your team did everything you can, but like we have to look long term if you’re looking for quick wins and short fixes, you know, get into the NFT space or the crypto space or drop shipping.

[00:48:49] Lauren: I mean, you did drop shipping earlier, Ricardo, which is you cut your teeth and learned how to do this. But those quick things like. Uh, do you want like a firecracker or do you want an entire show? Like, ugh, [00:49:00] hard. Those are hard conversations. 

[00:49:01] Ralph: I know, and you’re mixing so many analogies here. I’m just, I’m not sure which one to latch onto, but No, you’re absolutely right.

[00:49:07] Ralph: It’s like, there’s, there’s so much, there’s so many things going on with this. Now, I just wanna say this as a caveat. First off, we really appreciate you coming on here today. Uh, first time on Perpetual Traffic. It’s only been, you know, 10 years or, or three years, I guess, in your case. The point is, is that.

[00:49:24] Ralph: Your success is far outweigh any of your, um, air quoting failures. ’cause I don’t look at this as a failure. I look at this as like we got a full debrief on what we could have done. And I don’t know as if there’s any other marketing agency like that could have figured out a better way of doing this.

[00:49:41] Ralph: ’cause fundamentally. There was flaws in a lot of places, and that’s no knock on this business. But the point was, is we did everything that we possibly could. And, uh, Ricardo is one of our top people at two 11. And this is a, an exception rather than a rule, but I love talking about failures [00:50:00] because failures are where you learn the most.

[00:50:02] Ralph: So your successes are like, oh, those are easy. Yeah, we did all this great stuff, we know how to do that. But really like, this made us. Double down on the filtration process before we actually get to the production and the proposal side to really look into those metrics. And if you have not downloaded your MPI checklist, I dunno why you haven’t, you should get it over@tiereleven.com slash mpi because that was the key to this whole thing.

[00:50:29] Ralph: Marketing and business at the end of the day is just a math problem. Like if you can figure that out, you can realize very quickly whether or not the business is healthy or it’s really on the rocks. And this is what we sort of found with this one. And Ricardo did an amazing job deciphering all that and, and pushing that in front of the client, which was new news to them.

[00:50:47] Ralph: In many cases. We’re actually doing that a call later today, client, they don’t, they’re like, I don’t know what my cost to acquire a new customer is on my, you know, my. Info site, my membership site and my e-commerce site, and they [00:51:00] kinda work together and we figured all that sort of stuff out with ai, which by the way is gonna be a great episode at some point in time.

[00:51:06] Ralph: The thing is, is like all of that really matters here. And marketing is just a tool to grow the business. And I think you did a tremendous job in this account and I’m just glad that you come on and explain it. ’cause I don’t think you really wanna do

[00:51:23] Ricardo: I do. 

[00:51:23] Ralph: Uh, 

[00:51:23] Ricardo: anyway, I think it’s useful. Yeah, definitely a good learning experience. Uh, one more thing I wanted to add is that I think for businesses in this situation where you’re maybe getting desperate, um, try and avoid. Removing budget from top of funnel campaigns, it’s very easy to start getting stuck into looking at last click attribution, and assuming you have like some awareness campaigns, some just top of funnel prospecting campaigns, some remarketing, maybe some branded campaigns.

[00:51:52] Ricardo: It’s very easy to look at any attribution model and see that awareness is just not working. And maybe like top of funnel [00:52:00] conversion campaigns aren’t as. Profitable as remarketing and branded campaigns, and to start cutting budget from like the top layers. What has just a race down to the bottom? Does that, and eventually you’re left with just remarketing ad spend and branded campaigns.

[00:52:15] Ricardo: And then to Lawrence point, you’re not building your email list, has no new customer flow, and you’re just slowly killing the business. 

[00:52:24] Ralph: Yeah, for sure. I wonder what this would’ve looked like now with the new Advantage Plus sales campaigns. That would’ve been really interesting, you know, using the different ad types that John talks about all the time, but been on the show many times talking about all that.

[00:52:38] Ralph: I wonder if that would’ve changed much. But still, fundamentally, you have a product that price-wise, you’re, you’re gonna get beat on it. Unless you have some kind of differentiator. But it would be a really interesting sort of, in retrospect to sort of run those types of campaigns and what kind of ads is what kind of results we would’ve gotten with that.

[00:52:58] Ralph: But hindsight’s always 2020. [00:53:00] So anyway, having said that, Ricardo, amazing to have you on today’s show. Really appreciate that. Uh, of course you can check out Ricardo and us over@tiereleven.com. Well, you know, there’s your, there’s your, uh, you know, shameless plug. For what we’re doing here. And of course, get those MPIs over at the MPI checklist, which is tier eleven.com/mpi.

[00:53:22] Ralph: And of course, wherever you listen to podcasts, leave us a rating in review. We try to be transparent here, Lauren, don’t we? We talk about our, our not so successes and our, our successes. And I think that’s what makes this show different than all those others. So, 

[00:53:41] Lauren: I mean, we’re not a LinkedIn account that just like hire me, look at the great things that I’ve done.

[00:53:46] Lauren: Oh, this life is dandy. Like I. All we fucking often about challenges and how we overcome them then just like wins. Because if you wanna see the wins, you can just put either of our websites and look at our case studies or Oh yeah, [00:54:00] it’ll be, go over there, hit with all of our ads. This is just more of like, except transparent, brutally honest conversation, business owner to business owner with the people in the weeds.

[00:54:09] Ralph: Yeah. And hopefully learning a few things along the way and hopefully, you know, avoiding some of those traps that we talked about here on today’s show. 

[00:54:16] Lauren: Yeah. Let us spend the money. Let us make the mistake so you don’t have to, 

[00:54:20] Ralph: so you don’t have to learn what not to do or what to do in particular cases.

[00:54:25] Ralph: So anyway, leave a rating and review wherever you listen to, uh, podcasts. We get this podcast out to the audiences that we really wanna impact and effect, and. Teach people how to do this stuff the right way. So appreciate that. When we’ll read your review out on air, we have yet to do that for about three or four weeks here, so we’re well overdue, Lauren.

[00:54:45] Ralph: So, uh, Ricardo, thank you so much for coming on pt. 

[00:54:49] Ricardo: Thank you for having me. 

[00:54:50] Ralph: Yeah, absolutely. From n Megan Netherlands. Ricardo. Um, and so on behalf of my amazing [00:55:00] co-host, Lauren e Petrillo, Al Till next show, see ya. 

[00:55:05] Music Playing: You’ve been listening to Perpetual Traffic. For more information and to get the resources mentioned in this episode, visit digital marketer.com/podcast.

[00:55:15] Music Playing: Thank you for listening.

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