CPAs look awful, so you pause the ads, and then revenue drops across channels. That’s not you. That’s the new reality of Meta Andromeda and the GEM-style ecosystem where “underperformers” can be the very ads feeding your whole business.
John Moran is back to help us break down why cost per result and conversion columns can completely derail your decision-making. We walk through a real example where shifting spend away from a core set of ads didn’t just hurt Meta; it dragged down Amazon, Google, and everything else.
Stick around to learn how we analyze ads by spend, identify themes the market is responding to, and only layer in conversion data after we’ve found the real winners.
In this episode:
06:57 Why you should stop pausing “underperforming” ads
10:00 Case study: analyzing active ads differently
14:01 How spending shifts affect performance across channels
18:51 Using ad spend instead of conversions to find winning ads
23:42 Real-life example of using spend to analyze ads
31:47 CPA and conversion data challenges
Mentioned in the Episode:
- Previous Episode On Why Meta Is The Best Ad Platform: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRnglXjlwMo
- Partner With Our Meta Ads Experts: https://www.tiereleven.com/apply
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Connect with John Moran
Connect with Ralph Burns:
- LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ralphburns
- Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/ralphhburns/
- Hire Tier11 – https://www.tiereleven.com/apply-now
Connect with Lauren Petrullo:
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- Consult Mongoose Media – https://mongoosemedia.us/
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READ THE TRANSCRIPT:
Stop Pausing Winning Ads With Meta Andromeda, Kill Conversions Instead – Part 1
00:00:00:00 – 00:00:04:22
John
ad spend to a specific group of ads will affect all channels.
00:00:04:22 – 00:00:08:10
John
this is where the CPA is going to completely screw you up.
00:00:08:19 – 00:00:14:29
Ralph
how we manage ads has radically changed. So stop causing your underperformers. And
00:00:14:29 – 00:00:15:23
John
So here’s
00:00:15:23 – 00:00:17:01
John
what we want to do. First
00:00:19:15 – 00:00:40:15
Ralph
Hello, and welcome to the Professional Traffic Podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns, founder and CEO of tier 11. And today’s show is a part two on one of the most popular episodes that we’ve ever done here on perpetual traffic, especially in the last couple of months, which is counterintuitive advice
00:00:40:15 – 00:00:42:12
Ralph
For those of you running meta ads
00:00:42:12 – 00:00:43:09
Ralph
and
00:00:43:09 – 00:00:48:03
Ralph
John and I, in today’s program, we go through why you should never
00:00:48:03 – 00:00:48:26
Ralph
pause
00:00:48:26 – 00:00:56:21
Ralph
ads inside of meta until you actually have a source of truth, because you just might be pausing and killing your best ads.
00:00:56:21 – 00:01:06:27
Ralph
And that is counterintuitive to how everyone has done media buying over the course of the last ten years, with the exception of the last 6 to 12 months when Meta Andromeda hit the scene here.
00:01:06:27 – 00:01:16:15
Ralph
So if you’re running ads and we’ll show lots of screenshots here on today’s show, you’re running ads and you’re seeing horrible metrics inside ads manager and meta.
00:01:16:15 – 00:01:19:21
Ralph
Well, you might actually be on the right track.
00:01:19:21 – 00:01:21:13
Ralph
And we’ll explain why
00:01:21:13 – 00:01:22:05
Ralph
on today’s
00:01:22:05 – 00:01:22:26
Ralph
episode.
00:01:22:26 – 00:01:26:18
Ralph
This is really part two of the original
00:01:26:18 – 00:01:38:23
Ralph
episode where we talked about this. And then we’ll do a third part to continue with the education here, because this is some of the biggest stuff that we’ve seen happen inside meta in ten, 15 years.
00:01:38:23 – 00:01:53:12
Ralph
And if you’ve gone back and you’ve listened to the evolution of meta, why it’s the best advertising platform on the planet right now through that series, we’ll leave links in the show notes here. Today, you’ll understand why. So without further ado, John. Ralph, take it away, boys.
00:01:53:26 – 00:02:13:01
Ralph
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the ad lab, cooking up chaos in the performance kitchen. John is driving. I’m driving. Everything is jiving, right now. We are just so excited to be here. Yet another edition of Fridays ad lib. Good to see you again, John Moran.
00:02:13:02 – 00:02:38:25
John
You as well, sir. This is I love these. These are so much fun. I do, there’s so much that happens during the week. And, you know, it’s always a it’s always a fun time to kind of go through and kind of revise what, like a big learning that has happened during the week, what we’re testing. And it’s, it’s something that I think that even most agencies don’t do during the week and they don’t even have a show, which is kind of which is why I think that we get such a good following here like this is this is the hard part, you know, like, this is the true nitty gritty.
00:02:38:25 – 00:02:49:00
John
So it’s just kind of fun to like hop in here and be like, look at all the crap that happened this week. And this is what we figured out. Like this is this is legitimately a full time job. So if you’re if you’re running your own ads, stop. This is hard.
00:02:49:02 – 00:03:03:17
Ralph
But it is it is. Hire us instead 11 forward slash apply. I mean the the yeah. Somebody asked me one time because we’ve been doing the Perpetual Traffic podcast for ten years now. Can you believe.
00:03:03:17 – 00:03:05:06
John
That? My gosh, that’s amazing.
00:03:05:10 – 00:03:25:13
Ralph
It’s unbelievable. I approached I approached Ryan Days in 2015 because he mentioned our war room. He said, hey, you know, I’d really like to start a podcast. And nobody went up to him. I’m like, all right, the guy has a list of half a million people. Mark was probably like, I was sort of starting this whole thing at 1011.
00:03:25:15 – 00:03:43:06
Ralph
Like, might be a good idea to get in front of them on a regular basis, or maybe get an email to them. And, you know, you can launch a podcast with a half a million people list and probably get some traction. So that’s exactly what we did. So we did that with Molly Pittman. And then there’s been a variety of different, co-hosts.
00:03:43:06 – 00:03:54:14
Ralph
But yeah, ten years in the making and people ask me like, well, how do you think of like twice a week? How do you figure? Do you think of stuff to talk about? It’s never ending now.
00:03:54:14 – 00:04:00:05
John
It’s never it’s it’s always something new. There’s like ten things that happen. We have to choose, like the 2 or 3 things that we want to talk.
00:04:00:05 – 00:04:16:06
Ralph
About so much to watch. You know, I have to record another episode later on today. This is like the third or fourth episode that we’ve done this week because, like, there’s so much stuff going on. So it’s like there’s never there’s never a lack of it. And you and I do, cause, well, I get on at least one.
00:04:16:06 – 00:04:38:04
Ralph
I try and get on two of them. You do two calls per week with the growth strategist in the media buyers, a tier 11. And there’s never like any dead air, you know, like somebody always has some kind of question. You’re always showing something because this stuff is changing so much. And that’s why we do these every single week, to get them out to a wider audience, teach people how to do this stuff the right way.
00:04:38:06 – 00:04:41:28
Ralph
And today is no different today. Yeah. So it’s definitely.
00:04:41:28 – 00:05:00:00
John
What’s it’s crazy. Like we’ll have a twice a week and obviously we, we do our like a three step triage. And then we, we kind of do anything that is essentially like roundtable discussion on how to fix things so that all everyone can kind of chime in together. And then we do like, you know, the advanced learning that also kind of, you know, goes back into the triage, like, okay, this is what happened.
00:05:00:00 – 00:05:14:24
John
This is how we fix it, and this is why. And then, you know, we kind of just, you know, work reactively during triage, which is great. And we start to see sort of like similarities, things that kind of always pop and reared their ugly head every week. There’s things that are like, well, this veered off course, like, like that was the reason.
00:05:14:27 – 00:05:37:28
John
And I’m like, well now this is weird. And of course be like, okay, now that’s the reason. So yeah, as as we use a scientific method and base our theories and then test our theories to come up with a hypothesis and then a result, it is basically just a scientific method is how you optimize the creative. But what you’re basing the scientific method on those metrics are extremely important, and a lot of times can get very confusing when you have engagement versus metrics versus conversion metrics.
00:05:38:01 – 00:05:38:17
John
Yeah. So,
00:05:38:17 – 00:05:40:28
John
what we’ve been doing lately as a whole,
00:05:40:28 – 00:05:42:27
John
at tier 11, with media buying and the creative,
00:05:42:27 – 00:05:44:22
John
that we’re going to be producing is
00:05:44:22 – 00:05:53:11
John
starting to look at the, the ad spend and the engagement and the conversions in a slightly different sense. And I think one of the things that
00:05:53:11 – 00:05:58:14
John
becomes difficult for most, media buyers, marketers, companies, agencies, whatever it is, or even the creative teams
00:05:58:14 – 00:06:00:05
John
is what’s working like.
00:06:00:05 – 00:06:10:12
John
What do people like, you know, that kind of thing. And a lot of times we base a lot of emphasis on, well, look how many conversions that are and what is a conversion rate and the cost per conversion, etc.. And we started to
00:06:10:12 – 00:06:11:17
John
look at it in a different light.
00:06:11:24 – 00:06:12:07
John
I think,
00:06:12:07 – 00:06:16:09
John
forget the person who, who kind of said it best or kind of coined this,
00:06:16:09 – 00:06:17:00
John
strategy in your,
00:06:17:00 – 00:06:17:25
John
brain.
00:06:17:25 – 00:06:27:14
John
But when you do everything the same way every single day, time speeds up because you’re doing the same mundane task and you’re not necessarily identifying new or different or creative ways to solve different problems.
00:06:27:14 – 00:06:49:01
John
So taking a different way to work or going to walk in and around the neighborhood, like in a different direction, or rather than playing basketball today, you you do tennis like something that is different and new throughout your normal mundane task. And I think that with the Andromeda and Jim framework, sometimes we fall into the well, it’s the same kind of mundane tasks that we had to do was the CPA.
00:06:49:01 – 00:06:51:19
John
Those are expensive. Pause those. I’m done for the day.
00:06:52:10 – 00:06:57:27
John
That part now just does not. So we sort of have to take a look at things in two different lights
00:06:57:27 – 00:07:16:24
Ralph
yeah. And I think what John is, is gearing towards here is like one of our more popular episodes that we’ve done in the past is this idea of pausing ads like, stop pausing your underperforming ads, because that isn’t necessarily the way to success with the meta and or gem and or a lattice of data however you want to say.
00:07:16:26 – 00:07:32:00
Ralph
But basically everything’s shifted in the last year and how you did media buying two, three, four years ago like I was telling you about like this minimize, optimize, minimize, maximize, optimize worksheet that we used to have we call it the memo checklist.
00:07:32:00 – 00:07:33:29
Ralph
Yeah. You know like if,
00:07:33:29 – 00:07:41:07
Ralph
if you’re ad in the last seven days doesn’t have a conversion for whatever it is that you’re trying to get the conversion for, you need to pause it.
00:07:41:07 – 00:07:41:23
Ralph
And
00:07:41:23 – 00:07:58:07
Ralph
if you’re ad all of a sudden, stops getting conversions like it was like your best performing ad, and then all of a sudden it stops getting conversions. Check your landing page to make sure that you have like a buy button on there. I think it was like such a stupidly simple like step by step stuff.
00:07:58:07 – 00:08:13:21
Ralph
And I found it the other day. I’m like, oh my God, this is all completely outdated with the exception of if you stop getting conversions zero for all your ads, you might want to check your landing page to see if there’s other. And that did happen more than once, by the way.
00:08:13:22 – 00:08:17:16
John
Oh yeah. Yeah. I remember when like chat bots were coming out and they were like covering the buy now button.
00:08:17:18 – 00:08:21:03
Ralph
Yeah, right. Listen, you’re like, all right.
00:08:21:05 – 00:08:26:08
John
Begin checkout in the pop ups like, hey, it looks like you have trouble checking out. It’s like I do because of you.
00:08:26:10 – 00:08:46:24
Ralph
Yeah. I, you know, I, I was talking to a friend of mine this morning, like, get on, calls with every once a month is actually a referral partner for your 11 super sharp guy in Serbia. And he’s, like, the first thing that I ever do, like, whatever I do like a website audit. As I say, take out your phone, try and buy something on your website.
00:08:46:27 – 00:08:58:00
Ralph
He’s like nine times out of ten, they’re like, how do I actually do that? It’s like, there you go. And I was like, I closed the sale. Yeah. You know, it’s stupid stuff like that that I think
00:08:58:00 – 00:09:03:00
Ralph
we all want to learn the latest trick. We all want to learn, like what John Moran’s doing, you know, like what?
00:09:03:00 – 00:09:18:06
Ralph
What’s. You know, what’s he cooking up in the ad lab? But a lot of this is going back to kind of basics to, like, acting like your own customer, going into your website on a mobile device, maybe not on your iPhone, but like if you’re with somebody who has an Android, like trying it over there to the point is that,
00:09:18:06 – 00:09:21:09
Ralph
those things are a base level foundation.
00:09:21:12 – 00:09:21:23
Ralph
But
00:09:21:23 – 00:09:28:03
Ralph
how we manage ads has radically changed. So stop causing your underperformers. And
00:09:28:03 – 00:09:34:04
Ralph
that’s what we’re going to get into here today with a little bit of more like some Google stuff maybe. Yeah, Google in a while.
00:09:34:11 – 00:09:48:26
John
Which is cool because pausing the non performers then we’re going to look at a first click versus non first click new customer only how that actually affected the Google Ads platform. And why you sometimes get tricked. So it’s right. Beautiful beautiful stuff I love this stuff right.
00:09:48:26 – 00:09:59:04
Ralph
This is very very cool. I’m like saying nonperformance I should like air quote that. Yeah yeah. Oh so anyway, so that’s what, that’s what we’re going to talk about tonight. So excited about this one.
00:09:59:04 – 00:10:03:25
John
Let’s do it. All right. So I’m going to go ahead and dive in and share screen. And
00:10:03:25 – 00:10:18:01
John
we’re going to start with the typical way that we would start to analyze all of our creative. So what I’m doing right now is AI. All I have is a filter of ad delivery active. So this is not everything is just kind of what’s active as of right now in an account.
00:10:18:03 – 00:10:34:19
John
And it doesn’t even really matter what the account is. We have like a grant and spend. And this is the reason why we start here from all active ads in the last 30 days. We’re going to go and move it down to last seven days and give you the reasons why and all that kind of stuff, and track the trends and the shifting of the ad spend, yada, yada, yada.
00:10:34:19 – 00:10:35:14
John
But
00:10:35:14 – 00:11:03:21
John
when you’re looking at things as a whole, you have to say, okay, if I spent eight grand on meta and if I close my eyes, and as the CMO of a company, I should say I’ve spent $8,000 and I know the products that I spent it on. That’s the first thing that you have to do in your brain as the media buyer, because what that will do is tell you what the majority of the users currently in your pixel are being being targeted with what type and what messaging.
00:11:03:27 – 00:11:18:04
John
So if I was a company that sells landscaping, and I know that hard scaping is 50% of my top line revenue and landscaping, so hard scaping is like pavers and block walls and that kind of stuff. And landscaping is more like bushes and trees and grass and shrubbery.
00:11:18:04 – 00:11:25:00
John
If I if 50% of my husband is hard, scaping it, but only like 10% of my ads is mowing lawns, I should be able and that’s my revenue.
00:11:25:00 – 00:11:34:10
John
And that’s what I’m trying to grow. I should be able to close my eyes and say, I only spent $800 out of $8,000 on mowing lawns, and if you open your eyes and that’s wrong, there’s a big issue.
00:11:35:02 – 00:11:38:06
John
So that’s kind of how we have to take a look at this is
00:11:38:06 – 00:11:52:04
John
if you have a campaign and the default that we’re used to is what’s performing. You’re not in control at that point in time. You’re like how did meta made me make me look good or bad today.
00:11:52:04 – 00:12:01:24
John
That’s kind of what we’re doing. We almost like roll the dice with a with a lottery ticket rather than a purposeful spend amount tracking specific type of engagement.
00:12:01:27 – 00:12:24:14
John
And that’s where things get a little bit more interesting. So if I if we did that kind of like an exercise yesterday, we’re looking at ad performance. And this is not an account that’s doing poorly at all by any means. But we’re trying to get really right. Exactly right. It’s going really well. We’re just trying to get aligned on are we spending the appropriate amount of spend on the correct ads for the audience we’re trying to attract for the purpose of achieving the topline goal?
00:12:24:16 – 00:12:41:15
John
Right. And that is a blueprint that you’re looking at. Because if you have a high ad spend globally on a product, typically you’re going to have the most amount of your sales on that product, right? So it is more so high ad spend dictates the future of your company.
00:12:41:15 – 00:12:48:02
John
And if you’re saying, I wonder what we spent a lot of money on, you’re coming into your own management that is only built by you.
00:12:48:02 – 00:12:55:06
John
You are in 100% control technically saying, I wonder what my company’s going to turn into tomorrow. That’s that’s a scary way to wake up.
00:12:55:06 – 00:13:04:14
John
So that’s the type of mindset that we have to have going into Andromeda in GM is now what is the audience telling me they like not
00:13:04:14 – 00:13:10:04
John
what what the like what performed this week? We have to we have to start to break down a.
00:13:10:04 – 00:13:12:27
Ralph
Barrier force performance on right.
00:13:13:04 – 00:13:14:18
John
And we break down the barrier between.
00:13:14:19 – 00:13:18:14
Ralph
Is it hard scaping versus landscaping to your original analogy?
00:13:18:21 – 00:13:27:05
John
Exactly right. Is it is it spending and achieving the goal I wanted to achieve to my business goal, rather than the CPA inside of meta that week. Right? Exactly right.
00:13:27:07 – 00:13:50:02
Ralph
And of course, with every business and I know this business really well, there’s always internal discussions and, you know, launches in allocations and rounds, you know, you know, departmental stuff that you’re dealing with. So like let’s set all of that aside. Let’s just use this as an example of all right. We’re looking at this with fresh eyes. Forget all that stuff.
00:13:50:02 – 00:14:01:11
Ralph
We realize that business is complex and it’s made of people that have different agendas and different things that they want for the company, so forth and so on. So we’re going to set that all aside right now. But just looking at pure performance.
00:14:01:13 – 00:14:23:10
John
Exactly right. And what’s funny is spend dictates performance more than anything else. And I honestly I understand that now more than anything that Mem is actually the multimedia mix modeling and where that multimedia mix modeling is allocated not only by channel, but also the product slash service with the creative is actually probably the biggest lever that anybody can ever pull.
00:14:23:13 – 00:14:45:20
John
And for a small, just a small example as to how rising tides floats all ships. There was a, a time period this last week that someone that essentially kind of watched the video, that we’re producing, sort of try to do it on their own a bit, and it didn’t necessarily fail in terms of the top line performance, but it failed on volume.
00:14:45:22 – 00:15:04:25
John
So just I’ll give you this one, two second example. This is a company that still uses North Beam. So that’s how we’re just looking at the the men perspective from the top line. And what was funny is it’s like everything is tanking. We we swapped over to feeder strategy and everything started to die off. And I was like, well, let’s let’s pause there when we say die off.
00:15:04:28 – 00:15:28:17
John
Because this is actually kind of interesting. The only thing that was changed is they went from one big campaign. They’ve reduced the ad spend in that big campaign, like by 30, 40%, and then pushed it into new campaigns. I was like, don’t do that. Like theater strategy is designed to keep your main campaign high spend and protected, and you put incremental ad spend on top to steer it further into a growth direction.
00:15:28:19 – 00:15:49:23
John
And they’re like, oh, okay, that makes sense. But what’s funny about this is this is the only thing that was changed between January 7th to January 13th was the Aspen was decreased by 30%. It didn’t get any more or less efficient. Technically, you’re it covers conversion. It actually went up by 2%. So this here as an example is not a oh this is doing worse.
00:15:49:23 – 00:16:10:03
John
This is spend allocation was pulled out of these ads and pushed into those ads. And those ads versus these ads did approximately the same 5% difference. When you’re talking about 600 K ad revenue a week is not is it’s actually fairly stable. But you can see that everything started to take down after that. Now, the reason, one
00:16:10:03 – 00:16:16:25
John
of the reasons why, when you take a look inside of a campaign structure like this, we can’t say, okay, what’s a CPA and how many conversions do we get?
00:16:17:01 – 00:16:25:14
John
And you know, this ad got that CPA that I got. Oh, that’s a bad CPA. It’s like, well not necessarily what if there were what if they were coming through and actually purchasing on Amazon.
00:16:26:11 – 00:16:36:15
John
Oh well okay. So that can’t go into meta. Well I mean we can’t ignore the 230 out of 600 grand. That’s like 40% like don’t ignore that. And you can’t judge that by and platform metrics at.
00:16:36:15 – 00:16:56:26
Ralph
240 Ncac over on the other side for this particular product would be very bad. However, if you’re looking at in the context of how’s the business doing overall, we were on an earlier call earlier this week where things in Amazon are looking really good. Right now we’re spending on Amazon, so it doesn’t look quite as good, but it’s getting all the credit for all the stuff that we’re doing on the meta side.
00:16:56:28 – 00:17:10:29
John
Exactly. Now and now. Now you even double down on the fact that spend is more important than what the platform metrics are, because that also affects things like your email, your Amazon, your LTV, depending upon the type of product, because the ad spend is on the wrong product with low LTV or low LV, etc.
00:17:10:29 – 00:17:14:09
John
but if we look at yesterday, we I’m like, hey, change it all back with an ad feature strategy.
00:17:14:09 – 00:17:19:02
John
Now watch this. This is where I think is also really important. Look at all of the metrics in the revenue column yesterday.
00:17:19:02 – 00:17:27:07
Ralph
And this is by the way, I know we didn’t talk about this one before. So feeder strategy for meta or feeder strategy for Google in this beta.
00:17:27:07 – 00:17:28:03
John
Strategy for meta.
00:17:28:05 – 00:17:29:10
Ralph
Format. All right. Yeah.
00:17:29:12 – 00:17:46:18
John
Yeah okay. What’s funny about this is after they just swapped everything back and start a feeder strategy, they still have a low spend of 15.9. But now everything is kind of, you know, heading up now. So once they just started putting ad spend towards the right ad inside of meta, do you see all of the entire column that used to be read for the entire last week?
00:17:46:18 – 00:17:51:21
John
Now, yesterday the entire column is green except for like discount site lit that didn’t really track, I think before me.
00:17:51:23 – 00:17:57:29
Ralph
I was wondering why you weren’t. You were only showing January 13th and that other one. I’m like, all right, what is he revealing here? Okay. Ahead.
00:17:58:02 – 00:18:03:09
John
That that was actually the same people. So is like they’re like, hey, we we changed everything and everything is going down.
00:18:03:09 – 00:18:16:21
John
All they did though is they changed the amount of ad spend on the ads and meta and killed meta killed app love and killed Amazon killed Google, killed the basically everything because the ad spend shifted to a different group of ads and meta and killed the entire company.
00:18:16:21 – 00:18:26:08
John
Then yesterday they shifted ad spend back into those ads and everything came back. Now the top line is growing. Facebook is growing. App loving is growing. Amazon is growing. Google is growing.
00:18:26:08 – 00:18:27:29
John
So
00:18:27:29 – 00:18:32:21
John
ad spend to a specific group of ads will affect all channels.
00:18:32:21 – 00:18:38:18
John
Because if you just look at the law of averages, well 8000 out of 12,000 come from that group.
00:18:38:28 – 00:18:51:27
John
So yeah, that’s 66% of all of your traffic protected. So that’s what we’re looking at today is that ad spend on ads affect way more than obviously your cost for results inside of the platform.
00:18:51:27 – 00:18:54:14
John
So here’s what we what we want to do. First
00:18:54:14 – 00:18:57:01
John
go ahead and remove the cost per result.
00:18:57:01 – 00:18:59:18
John
Go ahead and remove the results. You can get a that’s.
00:18:59:19 – 00:19:01:06
Ralph
Climax is what you’re saying.
00:19:01:06 – 00:19:01:19
John
Exactly.
00:19:01:19 – 00:19:06:22
John
You are now blind to what worked in the traditional now incorrect sets.
00:19:06:28 – 00:19:10:24
Ralph
Fall into that trap of pausing ads that you shouldn’t be pausing
00:19:10:24 – 00:19:13:03
Ralph
when you’re not really looking at the big picture right?
00:19:13:09 – 00:19:15:10
John
So once you remove the conversion metrics
00:19:15:10 – 00:19:27:07
Ralph
What did you take out? The conversions you’re using matter. Now you’re saying, oh, that out. That doesn’t even matter. It’s almost like you’ve become like a programmatic media buyer over here.
00:19:27:09 – 00:19:30:08
John
I know, and trust me, like the comments are the future.
00:19:30:10 – 00:19:33:27
Ralph
Trust me, I’m running right into.
00:19:33:27 – 00:19:35:04
John
A sad is like second.
00:19:35:04 – 00:19:41:28
Ralph
Way in comments. Like what? Like I remember that like we first started with 2015
00:19:41:28 – 00:19:48:27
Ralph
before conversion track. There was a time when there was no conversion tracking. Remember that? I don’t know if like you like where I think I.
00:19:49:00 – 00:19:51:20
John
I think that was before my time. I think I started in 2015.
00:19:51:20 – 00:20:00:05
Ralph
It was like, yeah, it was literally like likes, comments, shares. That’s it. That’s like those in effectiveness. Do you want to know how funny this stupid thing is?
00:20:00:05 – 00:20:12:16
John
We went from likes, comments and shares as like the, the, the main thing. And then it was like now like get hook rate and click the rate. Now you got cost per conversion. Then we kind of went back all the way to like happy import. First click new customers. And now we’re right back into like oh it’s.
00:20:12:16 – 00:20:15:12
Ralph
The start of the year because it means engagement.
00:20:16:00 – 00:20:19:12
John
Right now. They they’re looked at a different light. But you know.
00:20:19:14 – 00:20:28:02
Ralph
It’s repeatable that know I’m like that’s funny I know right. But it is color like all marketing is like full circle in a lot of ways.
00:20:28:03 – 00:20:30:23
John
So yeah, it’s it’s definitely I mean,
00:20:30:23 – 00:20:36:11
John
people haven’t bought something differently in their mind over 100 years. Like they
00:20:36:11 – 00:20:38:11
John
what used to be a poster walking by,
00:20:38:11 – 00:20:43:08
John
a shop in the 1700s is now the same poster just on a meta feed.
00:20:43:08 – 00:20:44:27
John
It’s the same thing.
00:20:44:29 – 00:20:57:28
Ralph
Just the more, a product name, like, painted on the side of a, you know, a brick building. It was just in, like, a month ago. I was like, wow, this is like an old advertisement on this building in this warehouse district, right? Yeah.
00:20:57:28 – 00:21:01:20
John
It used to be like the red brick would have, like, the logo of, like, the Walgreens on the rack.
00:21:01:20 – 00:21:06:20
Ralph
And they were selling stars to, which is like, never in a million years to get that one.
00:21:06:20 – 00:21:12:10
John
Like they just pull that off. The building is stuck in on a city bus now. We’re like, marketing much?
00:21:12:17 – 00:21:15:02
Ralph
Yeah. So that.
00:21:15:05 – 00:21:18:17
John
Exactly right. No, but but we it’s around themes and that’s kind of what
00:21:18:17 – 00:21:39:11
John
we’re going to be starting to grow into is okay. So once we remove the conversion metrics now what’s the next thing that we look at. Well let’s look at spend descending because that’s how Andromeda and GM are agreeing that these ads are having a good, a good, impact in the marketplace based on everything likes, comments, obviously reach your frequency and then you have your cost per results in, hey, amount of results.
00:21:39:11 – 00:21:57:24
John
And then you also have like your hook rates and click the rates that are going to be earning and reallocating spend. And re shifting the narrative between all of the sequencing that the ads have. So it’s a live moving ecosystem, but because it is a live moving ecosystem becomes much more harder to control, which means we have to be much more diligent and restrictive on what we want to show.
00:21:57:27 – 00:22:19:27
John
So you get that double edged sword. If spend can go anywhere, it’s almost like a dog on a leash. A dog is going to go anywhere. But if you give it a 20ft rope to a leash, it can only go 20ft. Like that’s a that’s a methodology that we now have with our Aspen and our creative. Do we want to have 100 ads, say 100 different things with a dollar each for $100 a day?
00:22:20:00 – 00:22:45:21
John
I don’t think anybody would agree that that is the optimal setup, but for the same in the same thought process, sometimes we say, well, yeah, we don’t have 100 ads at $100. We have 70 ads and $2,500. It’s like, what? That’s a little bit better. But that’s still pretty. That’s pretty. That’s pretty wide, right? Like that’s a fairly stretched thin budget when you’re talking about what how many themes and products are we sharing with just that simple $2,500.
00:22:45:24 – 00:23:05:20
John
So we start looking at this after the last and looking at the last seven days. I like to start with a seven day period because that is the highest amount of new warm and buyer traffic that you can see. 30 day view, you know, people ten to 20 to 30 days ago probably. I’ve already bought if your sales cycle is, let’s say ten days
00:23:05:20 – 00:23:15:07
John
now, if you have a 30 day sales cycle, yes, you can go up more like 60 days, but you have to look at your lookback time period and what messaging delivered what result based on how much you spend
00:23:15:07 – 00:23:16:15
John
in that sales cycle.
00:23:16:19 – 00:23:31:09
John
So your sales cycles are seven days. Well, after 28 days, you’ve gone through four sales cycles of the general population. You should have some consistency. That’s why we don’t just tinker every other day and turn things on and off based on the last view, this is where CPA is now removed.
00:23:31:09 – 00:23:43:04
John
You can’t do that anymore. It’s gone. You actually has to force your mind into thinking not just what was last seen before the click, but what was the group of messaging that was seen first or least seen most often?
00:23:43:06 – 00:24:06:10
John
So we start to look at things a little bit different. Like we say, okay, let’s let’s try to find some similarities here. We have a chameleon, coffee mug and then we have a food jar. Okay. Then we have a chameleon water bottle and then we have a chameleon coffee cup, and then we have, another chameleon. This one is a non chameleon water bottle as a partnership.
00:24:06:13 – 00:24:22:24
John
And then we look at a kid’s snack and then we kind of see that it starts to break off into like the onesie. Twosies. So there is a theme here in the last seven days that we’re seeing which out of 70 ads, if we look at the top three, what are the top three ads? We have a
00:24:22:24 – 00:24:24:04
John
chameleon coffee.
00:24:24:07 – 00:24:30:26
John
Then we have a food jar, then we have a chameleon water bottle. Okay, so two of the three ads are about the chameleon style
00:24:30:26 – 00:24:40:18
John
of water, water bottle or coffee. But the chameleon design is new and exciting. It’s really cool looking. It looks kind of like cotton candy. It’s exciting. It’s three out of four.
00:24:40:18 – 00:24:44:26
Ralph
If technically if you’re going now to the fourth one. So to make your case more.
00:24:44:29 – 00:25:03:09
John
Exactly, I was going to say the first three is you got the you got the chameleon in the food jar and the chameleon the top four. You still have chameleon food drug chameleon, chameleon the top five. Well, if you look at the DPA catalog, that’s usually usually going to be shown more often. I could probably guess it’s going to be the same as the top four, because it kind of has to be because it’s remarketing.
00:25:03:11 – 00:25:19:10
John
So, you know, we’re going to have your chameleon and food jar in the top five. Now, after the top five, you get like a partnership post, which is more like you’re the influencer. Then we have like a snack cup and some product iterations and a catalog and accessories. Okay, so we have a top five now of the top five.
00:25:19:10 – 00:25:24:27
John
Let’s look at the chameleons. So because we know the chameleon has a really good impact.
00:25:24:29 – 00:25:35:05
Ralph
You’ll see themes, commonalities and themes in order to say okay this is what the market is gearing towards. This is what the market likes. So got it.
00:25:35:05 – 00:25:54:28
John
if you look at the top five and this year, if we start to look at the top five comparisons of the spend. So we know we have $2,400 and five, ten, 15, 16, so 16 of the 24, so 1600 of the 24 out of 70 ads are to the top. So if you look at 16 times two, that’s 32.
00:25:54:28 – 00:26:02:01
John
This is basically two thirds of all of our ad spend is on the top five as out of 69.
00:26:02:03 – 00:26:02:11
Ralph
Yeah.
00:26:02:18 – 00:26:30:10
John
Okay. So we have a high amount of concentration right. Two thirds of 70 is five. Wow. That is a that’s a fat five. When you’re comparing it to the to the lower amount of your allocation. That’s when okay. So now we’re starting to see the majority of people are seeing chameleon and food jars. Now let’s break it down a little bit just comparatively and say if we have to say ad delivery is active and the ad name contains, let’s do this here.
00:26:30:13 – 00:26:53:29
John
Chameleon contains any of. So if we look at our just our chameleon here now, we can say, okay, this is $1,200. In chameleon, we know that the top two ads here are within the top five ads of the entire account. Okay. And now we have a $1,000 approximately out of $1,200 on basically these two ads, or at least know a thousand or about 950 out of 1200.
00:26:53:29 – 00:27:15:25
John
Okay. So it’s like 80%. Yeah. So 80% of our chameleon, our 80% of our ad spend in the chameleon solid split between coffee and water bottle. Okay. So what does this tell us. Well let’s look at some of the look. Look at the hook rates and click the rates. Now if we look at the chameleon we have a 2.16 up on click the rate and an 18% hook rate average.
00:27:15:27 – 00:27:35:14
John
So if we then look at just the video ads. So let’s see how the video ads did as a whole. And we’re starting to start to whittle down to all the chameleon ads that are here. Let’s look at the I can’t whittle down to those, unfortunately. I don’t think it will allow me to filter to rows with with a filter on it.
00:27:35:17 – 00:27:56:03
John
But if we look at this 28, 2016, they’re actually a little bit higher because that is a little bit off. So it’s a 32 hook rate. And then we got to look at the hook right here which is 20. And then we have to look at the hook rate here which is probably 1920. So 32 or 2020 you got about a 25% hook rate, 25% hook rate in the ad engagement here, which is
00:27:56:06 – 00:28:00:06
Ralph
The why is this not there we go.
00:28:00:08 – 00:28:19:28
John
25% hook rates, kind of like the healthy keep scale. So it’s falling within that average. Now what do we have to say is how much ad spend has this been delivered. If we have $3,000 in ads, do we want to have 70% of our ad spend globally be spent on chameleon, and have it be almost like a 50 over 50 between the coffee and the water bottle?
00:28:20:00 – 00:28:25:02
John
Is that appropriate for what we’re trying to achieve for this company
00:28:25:02 – 00:28:37:08
John
in my opinion, we could probably do this a little bit differently. We might be able to do this in a little bit of a different way. And let’s start to look at the themes. So you have coffee here. So you got a coffee in the top one.
00:28:37:08 – 00:28:48:25
John
Then you have a water bottle in the second one. And then you have a coffee in the third one. You have a water bottle in the fourth one. And then you have a coffee in the fifth one. So three of the five are coffees when you’re looking at ads when descending.
00:28:48:25 – 00:28:49:09
John
So
00:28:49:09 – 00:28:52:02
John
coffee chameleon, that is about
00:28:52:02 – 00:28:57:13
John
the highest performing ads that people are resonating with with hook rate with, spend with gem,
00:28:57:13 – 00:29:07:07
John
with click the rate right now if we closed our eyes and did this all over again and looked at it right here, we can kind of see the same thing, which is ad spend descending.
00:29:07:14 – 00:29:24:01
John
Yes, it does seem like the the coffee and the chameleon just kind of dominates everything. If we’re looking at all as a have been on or off in the last seven days, like this is this is primarily most of what we’re seeing. The ad spend is high. The click the rates are above average. The hook rates are above goal.
00:29:24:03 – 00:29:29:06
John
This is it. We have basically chameleon water bottles, chameleon coffee and a tiny bit of food jar.
00:29:29:27 – 00:29:49:03
John
Now is food jars what we want to push I don’t know, I couldn’t answer that right now. I know that we are pushing about 5 or 20. About 20% of all of our ads been to food jars. So that’s where we have to stop now. So we can say people really like the chameleon. There’s this 5050 split between the chameleon water bottle and the coffee.
00:29:49:03 – 00:29:56:20
John
But coffee does spend a little bit more, have a little bit better hook rate, have a little bit better click to rate. Let’s produce more Chameleon coffee.
00:29:56:22 – 00:29:58:17
Ralph
Chameleon coffee I know.
00:29:58:24 – 00:30:01:28
John
That is our iterative process. Those are the winners.
00:30:02:01 – 00:30:23:08
Ralph
Now you haven’t even looked at CPA. No conversion. You haven’t looked at anything. But you know, just from that analysis like that now, all things being equal, there could be supply chain issues. There could be other things that we’re not privy to on this call, but we’re just saying like agnostic and agnostic, like every business has its own individual story.
00:30:23:10 – 00:30:39:05
Ralph
Point is this is that you can look at this and analyze it. You can say, this is what Meta Andromeda is really, really telling you. It’s screaming at you. You have a smoothie and fire has these ads, is what it’s saying.
00:30:39:05 – 00:30:40:11
Ralph
Yeah, but
00:30:40:11 – 00:30:50:29
Ralph
if any of those ads, especially in the chameleon coffee ones, have zero conversions, back in the old days, we’d say, oh, that’s bad at, let me shut that one off.
00:30:51:06 – 00:30:51:23
Ralph
Right,
00:30:51:23 – 00:30:52:16
Ralph
right.
00:30:52:16 – 00:30:53:25
John
And here’s what’s funny.
00:30:53:25 – 00:31:05:17
Ralph
Let’s say they have deleterious effects downstream, which I believe, you know, in this particular case, this is this is a short window from first impression to actually conversion. It’s under a week in most cases is as I recollect.
00:31:05:24 – 00:31:22:19
John
Yeah. I would say that it’s definitely it’s definitely under a week. I would say if it takes too long to buy a water bottle, you’re probably in the minority, not the majority. Right. And if we look now at the results and then the cost per result, let’s do this here. So we removed everything and we said, hey, we think Chameleon Coffee, probably is doing the best.
00:31:22:21 – 00:31:39:12
John
So if I just look at now I have all of my, my columns back in here for cost for results. And if we look at chameleon here as an example, the, wish I could do the cost per result here. But I can’t because we have too many different variations at this at this group level, which is.
00:31:39:13 – 00:31:41:06
Ralph
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah we do.
00:31:41:06 – 00:31:45:03
John
So first click water bottle. So first good coffee and tumbler which is completely fine. Coffee.
00:31:45:05 – 00:31:46:29
Ralph
And see for each individual one which
00:31:46:29 – 00:31:49:07
Ralph
which is fine. Yep. And that’s what you want now.
00:31:49:09 – 00:31:51:08
John
Now here’s where ad copy
00:31:51:08 – 00:31:55:19
John
is going. Oh, this is where the CPA is going to completely screw you up.
00:31:55:19 – 00:31:57:06
John
And this is where I love
00:31:57:06 – 00:32:12:03
John
how. We just looked at everything and said, you know what? We unanimously agree that Chameleon Water Balls and Chameleon Coffee seems to be the best. And if I look over here and said, Ralph, I need you to tell me which one of these exact same ads is better, okay.
00:32:12:06 – 00:32:21:12
John
Is it 1.6 or 1.4? I mean, you’re kind of split here, all right. No, no. You know, is it 19.1 or 19.0 Ralph.
00:32:21:15 – 00:32:22:25
Ralph
I like well.
00:32:22:27 – 00:32:28:25
John
Okay. Is it 18 or 18. Well is it 14 or 50? They look about the same, right?
00:32:28:27 – 00:32:36:19
Ralph
Yeah. I don’t know what the variation is because I can’t see the ad name I should like I have to assume in the nomenclature somewhere in there, it is. Or maybe it is.
00:32:36:21 – 00:32:38:22
John
Exact same added two different campaigns.
00:32:38:24 – 00:32:40:21
Ralph
Oh, okay. That’s the reason I got it.
00:32:40:21 – 00:32:44:02
John
But you see how they’re both basically incredibly consistent.
00:32:44:04 – 00:32:44:15
Ralph
Yes.
00:32:44:15 – 00:32:51:04
John
But you know, it’s not incredibly consistent. One got a $200 sale, one got 40 600.
00:32:52:24 – 00:32:57:23
John
So wait a minute. If you have more people clicking first year in that one second.
00:32:57:26 – 00:32:59:22
Ralph
Well, that ad, that’s the.
00:32:59:22 – 00:33:07:04
John
Same exact ad with the same exact click, right click, their right impressions and frequency. That one is, you know what I think that’s three times better.
00:33:07:06 – 00:33:08:06
Ralph
Right? Right.
00:33:08:12 – 00:33:14:19
John
Why? Well, I don’t know. It said and this is where CPA and more time times better.
00:33:14:19 – 00:33:16:14
Ralph
Really. Well yeah.
00:33:16:21 – 00:33:44:25
John
Yeah yeah. Taking two and then turning to two faucet. Yeah 300%. Right. So is this ad 300% better than the same ad when you’re comparing the same hook rates, the same impressions, the same, reach the same click the raise the same frequency. Oh, wait a minute. No, it’s one ad simply did more remarketing because it had lower spend and that had more last views before they bought probably on the website and the later on on Amazon and probably walked into Costco.
00:33:44:26 – 00:33:49:05
John
It doesn’t matter. Did more people buy the chameleon period?
00:33:49:05 – 00:33:56:06
John
Like that’s all what we’re trying to do here is meta is going to play Whac-a-mole with conversions. It’s like it’s it’s kind of like, Oprah
00:33:56:06 – 00:34:04:03
John
like. And the crowd people didn’t do anything. But you get a conversion and you get it. I mean, it just kind of spreads it out over what was last viewed is a lot of inspiration.
00:34:04:03 – 00:34:05:21
Ralph
Trophies. Yeah. Exactly.
00:34:05:21 – 00:34:22:29
John
Right. Yeah. So yeah, you’re here and you have spend. So you win. Why? Because if we don’t tell the media buyer that they’re going to get take money away from us, so they just dump it. So that’s what’s really interesting is you look at all the engagement metrics from the same ad and they are exact same, but one is three times 300% better performance.
00:34:22:29 – 00:34:41:06
John
And that’s where this that’s where we chase our tail if we play whac-a-mole or like exploding conversions where the fallout just lands everywhere, and then we are trying to chase where the fallout is landing, not where the explosion happened. We’re going to chase our tail. We don’t want to see where people land. We want to see where people are starting.
00:34:41:06 – 00:34:53:22
John
Like that’s kind of the methodology. So you do that in, well, what is ad spend? What is click the rate, what is engagement? What is hooked rate. When you layer and conversion and conversion value and Roas and CPA on afterwards you.
00:34:53:22 – 00:34:56:16
Ralph
Go it doesn’t make sense.
00:34:56:19 – 00:35:14:26
John
It it really it especially if you check the top line and you see like the majority of our sales are coming from chameleon water bottles and chameleon food jars and or sorry, chameleon water bottles and food jars and chameleon, coffees. If a high amount of concentration is is being spent there and the high amount of concentration of sales are happening there,
00:35:14:26 – 00:35:26:09
John
even though meta can’t see even things like Amazon or email or direct or organic and all of ways that, you know, we may be losing the conversions because the loss of cookies in content mode, that that’s that doesn’t matter.
00:35:26:15 – 00:35:45:12
John
There’s only there’s two the two truths. Well, it’s actually one truth and a lie. I know I spent the money. I know that’s solid. The money’s gone out of my bank account. Click the rate fairly static, the engagement rate barely static. But we’re looking at things like hook rate and hold rate and that kind of thing. All of those I know are extremely true.
00:35:45:15 – 00:36:08:21
John
Then on the flip side, the conversions I know are extremely false. And if the extremely true side is showing some consistency and growth and performance, but the what what the conversions showed, if those are not aligned, which one do you believe. That’s kind of the methodology. So we’re looking at what is performing this week. By taking I mean it took us what ten minutes 15 minutes to go through.
00:36:08:24 – 00:36:26:06
John
And this is me teaching it to ten, 15 minutes to identify what is the best top performing ads. It would take you another ten minutes to hop in the back end and track a trend of the sales. Will ad spent increase on chameleon? Did revenue increase on chameleon? If so, yes that worked. I’ll give you a really good example of this where we have, another one.
00:36:26:17 – 00:36:48:25
Ralph
All right, so I hope you enjoyed this week’s show. We are going to be coming back with another show next week as a continuation of this week’s, with another case study on why you shouldn’t be pausing ads that look horrible inside meta, when in fact they’re actually driving your business and driving new customer growth. It will come back with that episode next week, so stay tuned for that.
00:36:48:25 – 00:37:07:25
Ralph
In the meantime, head on over to Perpetual traffic.com for all the links that we mentioned here in today’s show. And of course, wherever you listen to podcasts, make sure that you leave us a rating and or review. It helps us get out to a wider audience, teach people how to do this stuff. The right way through metrics to matter and growth that scales.
00:37:07:25 – 00:37:11:26
Ralph
So on behalf of my amazing co-host, Lauren E Petrullo,
00:37:11:26 – 00:37:12:27
Ralph
until next show,
00:37:12:27 – 00:37:13:18
Ralph
see you.
