Episode 783: One Budget Shift. 21.9% More Revenue: Here’s Exactly What They Did

March 13, 2026

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Are you still throwing money at ads, hoping to get better results? Well, that approach may be holding you back. In today’s episode, I’m sharing a powerful case study where a simple shift in marketing strategy resulted in a massive revenue boost, all while spending less.

I break down how we adjusted our budget allocation across platforms, focusing on top-of-funnel channels to increase awareness. We shifted ad spend, and the results were incredible: 21% increase in revenue, 34% reduction in cost per acquisition, and significant growth in organic sales.

I’ll walk you through the numbers and show you exactly how we made it happen. This isn’t about spending more cash on ads; it’s about getting more with less.

In this episode you’ll learn:

The simple budget shift that led to a 21% revenue increase
Moving ad spend to top-of-funnel channels to boost awareness
Why cutting Amazon’s spend by 91% didn’t hurt, but increased sales
How data from the Tier 11 Data Suite improved decision-making
Using native ads and Meta campaigns to drive brand awareness
How we increased organic search by 24% with zero ad spend

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READ THE TRANSCRIPT:

One Budget Shift. 21.9% More Revenue: Here’s Exactly What They Did

00:00:00:00 – 00:00:26:01
Ralph
$1.1 million in spend. This only represents a 2.7% ad spend increase, but revenue increased by 21% before they missed five forecasts in a row. Their cost per unit or their cost to acquire a new customer. CPU is the term that they use here. I was at an all time high, nearing about $200, and they’re really concentrated on. I’m not.

00:00:26:03 – 00:00:56:00
Ralph
The attribution was hiding. The real picture is simple, but hard to pull off. And I’ll show exactly how we pulled it off here. We. Have. Before we get into today’s show, my marketing manager finally convinced me to run a wild experiment in this episode because he wanted to prove what the conversion engine can do for your brand. So we are giving away three of our $10,000 deep dive audits for free in this audit.

00:00:56:00 – 00:01:21:20
Ralph
And this isn’t one of those audits that you get from some AI generated bot. This actually takes us two plus weeks, 7 or 8 of our team members, and it is incredibly in-depth. It will give you insights into your media, buying your creative, your actual business metrics, and find out exactly where the gaps are and where your growth is stalled and what we can do about it, or what you can do about it when you get the audit.

00:01:22:00 – 00:01:58:02
Ralph
Now here’s the catch. We only have three spots. So head on over to tier 11.com/audit right now. Fill out the form and let’s see how we can scale your business in the coming year. Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic Podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns, founder and CEO of Tier 11. And today is a shorter episode than normal because the results are so astounding in this case study, we really didn’t feel the need to expound on it because the shifts were so simple.

00:01:58:04 – 00:02:29:01
Ralph
And this is really where digital marketing is heading today. It is not about spending more on your advertising or spending more on your marketing. It’s about getting more results with less. And if you can do it in the right way, you can shift budgets between platforms. And we did this with this client. Some of the details of the client might actually be blurred out here.

00:02:29:03 – 00:03:09:13
Ralph
The point is this is that the goal of digital marketing is not to spend more, to make more. It’s actually to spend the least amount you can and get the maximum results. And in this case, we just shifted a couple of channels around. And this is the beauty of having a tool like this year 11 data suite. And you can actually see the effects on different channels based upon what actions your people or your team or your you know, if you’re a director of marketing, your internal team, or if you’re running all your marketing and you’re a CEO, maybe your video producer, maybe your media buyer, maybe your creative person.

00:03:09:15 – 00:03:32:19
Ralph
The point is, this is when you get all the channels and all of them working together, and we’re not just talking about paid channels here. We’re talking about search engine optimization, we’re talking about Google. We’re talking about email, SMS, all of it together. Really came together for this case study here. And I think it’s one of the most important ones that we’ve ever talked about here on the show.

00:03:32:21 – 00:03:55:14
Ralph
And it’s about shifting budget and really having very good data. If you don’t have good data to be able to guide those actions, you’re really flying blind. In today’s world. And obviously we use the 211 data Suite Insights year 11. We get reports is the engine that powers that. We also use an edge tag server, which allows us to get incredible degrees of accuracy tying into the back end with the CRM.

00:03:55:14 – 00:04:19:04
Ralph
And that’s exactly what we did here. And we had a, you know, a team within this particular company, which is not a small company. This is a very large company and a rabid, just absolutely passionate niche that was just a great and continues to be a great partner. And, working alongside those folks have just been, absolutely ideal.

00:04:19:04 – 00:04:37:23
Ralph
It’s been, nirvana for us, at tier 11. So here’s today’s case study. One budget shift, 21.9% more revenue. And here’s exactly what we did.

00:04:38:01 – 00:05:14:06
Ralph
All right. Excited to share this case study with you. The 2.7% that changed absolutely everything for this brand. How spot on. Leverage native advertising to drive 21.9% revenue growth in literally less than three months due to our efforts. So here’s some of the statistics here. About $1.1 million in spend. This only represents a 2.7% ad spend increase, but revenue increased by 21%.

00:05:14:08 – 00:05:42:16
Ralph
Up to 13 new customer revenue was up 26%. New customers were up 25%, and number or media efficiency ratio for new customers rose 23% to 7.75. So basically, for every dollar we’re putting in for a new customer, we’re getting $7.75 back for all the platforms that were driving all of this growth on. And we’ll get into it in just a second here and there.

00:05:42:16 – 00:06:10:18
Ralph
Cost per unit, otherwise known as their Ncac or their cost to acquire a new customer, new customers not returned customers dropped by 34% from 192 to 128. So their organic increase by 24%. Their email increased by 13%, their Amazon sales increased by 33%, their Amazon spend dropped by 91%, and their Google brand spend dropped by 95%. And we will show exactly how we did this here.

00:06:10:18 – 00:06:33:19
Ralph
So when you scale up, spend doesn’t necessarily equate to scale in the business. Oftentimes you can spend less on certain platforms and make more. And that is the goal of this whole thing is to make more money, make more profit, which is exactly what we did here. So a 2.7% increase in ad spend, but a 21% increase in revenue, which is just fabulous.

00:06:33:19 – 00:06:58:21
Ralph
We love these kinds of case studies. So a little bit about the client spot and GPS. Dog fence is wireless dog fence provider uses a technology called True Location to create custom virtual boundaries anywhere with no wires and no subscriptions. And it’s assembled here in the US of a in New Hampshire. And they sell through their Shopify store, Amazon, as well as chewy.

00:06:59:03 – 00:07:27:05
Ralph
So this is what was happening before they missed five forecasts in a row prior to us coming on board. Tune into October 2025. The unit targets were missing every single months, their cost per unit or their cost to acquire a new customer. CPU is the term that they use here. I was at an all time high, nearing about $200, and they’re really concentrated on bottom of funnel, not top of funnel, top funnel is where you find the new customers bottle funnels where you just scoop them up and convert them.

00:07:27:07 – 00:07:46:21
Ralph
But they’re spending most of their money and bottom funnel of their previous agency was and the attribution was hiding the real picture. They were using triple whale and we converted them over to tier 11 data so we could actually, through real click data, determine who has a new ad, who was a returning customer. And also Amazon and Google brands spend looked great.

00:07:47:00 – 00:08:10:16
Ralph
But the point was, is that was a lot of wasted spend as we’ll get into in just a second here. So how tier 11 approached it. First off, we launched native ads and I’ll show you the sort of the timeline here. In this case study, we launched native ads on Taboola. We’re now doing connected TV and programmatic, other types of very top of funnel brand awareness consideration, as well as meta ads.

00:08:10:16 – 00:08:28:17
Ralph
We’re launching brand new meta campaigns. So we moved the budget from bottom of funnel spend, which is what the previous agency was doing to top of funnel, we cut their Amazon spend by 91%. Oftentimes we find this to be the case with a lot of brands. They overspend on Amazon because people are just going to go there naturally anyway.

00:08:28:17 – 00:08:49:00
Ralph
There’s no reason to advertise. So we did the same sort of thing on Google and Bing. That freed us up to spend more on meta YouTube, which I haven’t mentioned here as well as native. So all of those are really working top of funnel, create awareness, great ads that then bottom of funnel branded search. And on Amazon that’s where they convert.

00:08:49:00 – 00:09:13:14
Ralph
Simple but hard to pull off. And I’ll show exactly how we pulled it off here. We tracked real metrics, not vanity metrics, real empties, marketing performance indicators. That is the key to this whole thing. Like and measure media efficiency ratio for new customers. Okay. How are you spending to acquire a new customer. That’s what is blended CPU all the individual platforms together.

00:09:13:14 – 00:09:45:20
Ralph
How much are we spending on all of them and blended that in a cost per unit sold? Okay. Not looking at these platforms in silos like meta here. And Google does this and TikTok does this. And YouTube does this and Amazon does this. All of them work together. This is the key to success in today’s digital marketing. And the tier 11 data suite does this seamlessly by not relying on in platform metrics like return on ad spend, which can be very easily manipulated inside the app platforms themselves.

00:09:45:20 – 00:10:06:07
Ralph
So here is a killer graphic that shows the cost per unit. Once again, cost per unit. Is your Ncac your cost to acquire a new customer? Maybe it’s cost to acquire a new client, whatever it happens to be the blended CPU. This is when we say blended. This is all platforms together. We take all the costs from all the different platforms that we’re spending money on for the client on behalf of the client.

00:10:06:12 – 00:10:24:00
Ralph
And then we determine how many new units we’re selling or how many, in this case, all units. This is new and returning. They don’t have as many returning customers. Most of the people that we’re really targeting are really top of funnel or brand new, have never bought this product before. So you can see very clearly where things were going.

00:10:24:00 – 00:10:45:07
Ralph
They were heading upwards, their cost per unit was increasing, their Ncac was increasing their CPA. Technically it’s not CPA, it’s really it’s Ncac or blended CPU was increasing. We made all these changes in and around the October-November area and the effects were pretty remarkable. You can see the cost per unit actually decreased in and around 120 hundred and 340 in that range.

00:10:45:09 – 00:11:04:17
Ralph
These are their slowest months. Keep in mind this is a seasonal product. So what we’re going to be able to do for them in springtime. In summer, I can’t even imagine. We’ll have to come back with another incredible case study for you at that point in time. So the inverse correlation this is reverse thinking. Here we created more demand but we got a lower acquisition cost.

00:11:04:17 – 00:11:23:22
Ralph
So here is once again our blended cost per unit decreased over time okay. So it was upwards of 200. All right. But now it’s in and around one 3140. My team just told me they hit 120 for the first time in a week. This past week as of this recording. So the top of funnel spend was what we ramped up.

00:11:23:22 – 00:11:41:17
Ralph
This is top of funnel spend. This is not bottom of funnel. This is not brand. This is not Amazon. This is not all the stuff which gets to the last click. You can ramp up your spend there, but you’re never going to get new customers if all you’re doing is just retargeting or just targeting the same people over and over again, you have to go after new.

00:11:41:18 – 00:12:00:20
Ralph
You have to have really great creative. You have to be able to get them to stop the thumb, scroll on Instagram, take notice of your product and then look over Amazon. Can I get this over at Amazon? Or they Google search your brand name. That’s how this works folks. This is the new way in which to market. Spending more doesn’t necessarily equate to scale.

00:12:00:20 – 00:12:28:10
Ralph
What we found here is that when we spent less on some of those bottom of funnel channels, we actually made more. And that’s the case. Weight. My marketing manager, finally convinced me to run a wild experiment in this episode, because we want to prove what the conversion engine can do for your brand. We are giving away three of our $10,000 deep dive audits for free.

00:12:28:12 – 00:12:52:12
Ralph
We’re going to look at your creative, your media, buying your actual business metrics to find exactly where your growth is stalled. This is two weeks of our best work, but we only have three spots. So go to tier 11.com/audit right now. Fill out the form and let’s see how we can scale your business. We did this through lots of incrementality tests through what we would call controlled experiments.

00:12:52:12 – 00:13:15:05
Ralph
We cut their Amazon budget by 91%. You can see their budget decrease over time from October through February here just down to about $7,000. So we cut it four consecutive times. We didn’t do it all at once. We did gradually so that 91% reduction is now actually down to $4,700 a month, but their units on Amazon stayed basically the same.

00:13:15:05 – 00:13:32:21
Ralph
You can see here there’s obviously there’s a spike for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, but their unit sold on Amazon pretty much stayed the same. What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to gear more of their sales over to their main site on their Shopify store. That way they can control the customer. They can actually own the customer unit as opposed to sharecropping.

00:13:32:21 – 00:13:57:22
Ralph
Over on Amazon’s land. At the same time, we cut our Google branded search 95% budget cut and the clicks and the conversions over on Google, we can obviously we can measure last click attribution. Over on Google, we found that when we cut that brand budget by nearly 95%, the clicks and the conversions barely moved. This is a great case study for anyone who is focused a lot on bottom of funnel.

00:13:58:02 – 00:14:19:14
Ralph
You really need to create a lot of top of funnel awareness and get all these platforms to work together. So this is a halo effect. The channels grew without additional spend. So their organic search, their organic search for their name not even clicking on an ad, but just organic searches we could see through the tier 11 data suite increased by 24% zero ad spend.

00:14:19:14 – 00:14:48:05
Ralph
Keep in mind their email revenue increased by 13% zero ad spend. Keep in mind their Amazon revenue actually increased slightly 33%, while we spent so much less 66% less ad spend 91% over time, and Google and Bing were restructured. 20% to non brand and 80% to non brand. And January February exceeded forecasts by 20 to 30%. So very excited here.

00:14:48:05 – 00:15:14:13
Ralph
This is the native AD campaign here the Taboola campaign performance. And you can actually see these are all new visits. Now when you have the tier 11 data suite you can differentiate between new and returning visitors, new and returning customers. In most cases for this product they’re mostly new customers. So we really wanted to focus on top of funnel and Taboola was able to do this, create that top of funnel awareness, maybe not get the attribution, but they did get the contribution.

00:15:14:13 – 00:15:35:05
Ralph
It contributed to the bottom line sale. It created the awareness top of funnel. And that’s what this shift is really is all about. And this is how you win in the digital age. Here. You acquire new customers, new visits. You get your cost to estimated cost per new visit. Over here on the right hand column is only cents on the dollar.

00:15:35:10 – 00:15:56:09
Ralph
These platforms are absolutely amazing at creating top of funnel awareness, and then you can scoop up all those conversions, bottom of funnel on Google and Amazon and reduce your Amazon spend at the same time. So this is the timeline here from five missed forecast to four consecutive hits. And we are just continuing to knock the ball out of the park here.

00:15:56:09 – 00:16:25:14
Ralph
Mid 2025. They came on with us. We started with meta and TikTok which is about 20% of their spend in June through October. They had missed forecasts for five consecutive quarters. Their CPU is climbing up to 193. We took over Google, Bing and Amazon in October, and the big turning point was when we launched our native ads. We paused their connected TV ads, and we cut their Amazon ad spend immediately, and we shifted that budget over to top of funnel.

00:16:25:14 – 00:16:46:22
Ralph
November was the first month where they had actually hit their forecasts, with 4200 units sold and a $134 CPU. This is a 44% year over year unit growth. And then December. In January, CPU costs per unit hit an all time low of 128 in January. Like I said, we just got word hit about 120 this past week, so we’re pretty excited about that.

00:16:47:00 – 00:17:19:12
Ralph
And keep in mind, these are historically their slowest months. So we can only just imagine what we’re going to be able to do in the springtime and are pretty excited about that. So if your forecasts hit consecutively, our Amazon spend is incredibly low and we just relaunched their connected TV ads under tier 11 as of this month. So if you want similar results for your brand, click the button in and around this video here or visit us over at tier 11.com.

00:17:19:14 – 00:17:38:09
Ralph
That is today’s case study. If you like these types of case studies, definitely leave a comment in wherever you listen to podcasts. We, we really do enjoy, the comments that you leave over on YouTube, whether it’s Spotify, whether it’s on Apple Podcasts for reviews, ratings and reviews, this is the kind of stuff we’re doing all the time.

00:17:38:09 – 00:17:58:22
Ralph
And, put this one together relatively quickly because it was really it was a we didn’t expect these results to happen so quickly. Quite honestly, it sort of surprised us in a lot of ways. So anyway, all the channels working together, really coming together to, achieve the goal of the client and, send this off to your team, send this off to your agency, and hopefully they can learn from it.

00:17:59:04 – 00:18:20:11
Ralph
Just like we did here. And this is constantly evolving and digital marketing and how all the channels and I’m not just talking about the paid channels, the non-paid channels, the search engine channels, the email channels, all the channels that you’re maybe not paying for your content marketing side, how they all work together, and when they do work really well together.

00:18:20:11 – 00:18:40:04
Ralph
It’s scary how great results can be. And this is an example of that. So obviously wherever you’re listening to podcast, please leave us a rating and review. We’d love to hear what you think. On behalf of my incredible co-host, Lauren Petrillo, who couldn’t make this one but will in the future until next show. See ya.

Episode 783: One Budget Shift. 21.9% More Revenue: Here’s Exactly What They Did

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READ THE TRANSCRIPT:

One Budget Shift. 21.9% More Revenue: Here’s Exactly What They Did

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