Running ads across multiple channels and not sure which ones are actually driving growth? Our teams can audit your attribution and show you where your budget should really go. Talk to us at: https://www.tiereleven.com/apply
A video is soaking up your ad spend and showing almost no conversions, so the obvious move is to kill it. But what if that video is the reason your cheap last-click image ads look so good in the first place?
Ricardo Pouwels, one of our growth strategists at Tier 11, joins me again to break down how attribution and creative measurement change as a business grows from one channel to ten. He explains how he finds a client’s true scaling channel using historical spend data, why he’d rather run a real budget test than trust an incrementality study, and why so many brands are hitting a ceiling on Google Search.
Ricardo also shares the scaling campaign structure he’s using right now: ad-level spend minimums that keep top-of-funnel videos funded so your account stays a funnel, not a pile of discount images. If you’re spending across multiple channels, this one is for you!
In this episode:
- Why last-click attribution breaks in multi-channel marketing
- How to measure no-click channels like CTV, YouTube, and radio
- Using historical ad spend data to find your true scaling channel
- How Google branded search and Amazon ads often steal last-click credit
- The limits of incrementality testing and why budget tests tell you more
- How to state a hypothesis and timeline before shifting ad spend
- Why Google Search ads hit a scaling ceiling while Meta ads keep growing
- Measuring top-of-funnel videos with hook rate, hold rate, and first-click CPA
- Why image ads and carousels get credit that video ads earned
- Using ad-level spend minimums to keep your Meta funnel balanced
- How “spend to message” and creative diversification prevent account fatigue
Mentioned in the Episode:
Watch the Previous Episode with Ricardo Pouwels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P8Fs7DVjDg
Join Ralph Burns and John Moran every Friday for The Ad Lab Live: https://www.youtube.com/@Tier11/streams
Listen to this episode on your favorite podcast channel:
Follow and listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/perpetual-traffic/id1022441491
Follow and listen on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/59lhtIWHw1XXsRmT5HBAuK
Subscribe and watch on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@perpetual_traffic?sub_confirmation=1
Connect with Ricardo Pouwels:
Connect with Ralph Burns:
- LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ralphburns
- Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/ralphhburns/
- Hire Tier 11 – https://www.tiereleven.com/apply-now
Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Perpetual Traffic?
Have some feedback you’d like to share? Connect with us on Apple Podcasts and leave us a review!
READ THE TRANSCRIPT:
Why Your ‘Winning’ Ad Is Probably the One You’re About to Kill
00:00:00:06 – 00:00:12:06
Ricardo
Sometimes you also just have to rely on, I guess, logical marketing as opposed to getting lost in the data to make sure that your funnel actually remains a funnel. And it’s not just a bunch of ten images. As a.
00:00:12:07 – 00:00:31:09
Ralph
VP of marketing, I might look in, I’m like, oh, why is Ricardo keeping that one? That one that Ads is soaking up all the spend, but it’s not getting any conversions. Why the hell is he keeping it on? Like, how do you sort of validate that? And what’s your philosophy on how you look at performance and like what your best ad really is or grouping of ads?
00:00:31:10 – 00:00:40:11
Ricardo
Yeah, I’ll try to explain it simply, but what we recently started doing for one of our better performing clients is that we built.
00:00:40:13 – 00:01:11:08
Ralph
Hello, and welcome to the Traffic Podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns, founder and CEO of tier 11. And if you have 15 different channels that you’re running, meaning maybe you’re doing cable TV, you’re doing newspaper, you’re doing direct mail, you’re doing affiliates, you’re doing meta Google, programmatic SMS, email organic, all of that. Or maybe you’re running one channel, maybe you’re a startup and you’re just actually running Google, or you’re just running meta.
00:01:11:13 – 00:01:44:09
Ralph
Well, today’s show is all about how you look at your creative, how you look at your attribution completely differently. And if you’re somewhere in between, maybe you have just a couple of channels. Today’s show is definitely for you because we have got growth strategist extraordinaire from tier 11 here who has dealt with both sides of this equation. Clients that have dozens of channels which are growing their business and some that are actually just one channel and they’re startups, well funded startups, both ideal clients of ours here at tier 11.
00:01:44:09 – 00:01:58:09
Ralph
And Ricardo Powells is here to talk and decipher all of that for you on today’s show. So welcome back to Perpetual Traffic, Ricardo. Show number two for you, or this is the third one, I think on perpetual.
00:01:58:09 – 00:02:02:13
Ricardo
Traffic, they might have been a ferd one. Yeah, it’s been a while now. Third one.
00:02:02:16 – 00:02:25:16
Ralph
Yeah. So I’ve coerced both Thomas and Ricardo to come on these shows, because I get tired of talking all by myself. And these are the guys that are actually doing the real work here inside the organization, running, you know, tens of millions of dollars worth of traffic. And this is the kind of stuff I think, that people really want to hear about is not necessarily me just talking about theoretical things, but you’re actually doing it.
00:02:25:16 – 00:02:54:02
Ralph
And obviously media buyers, creative strategists, you’ve got a great team inside your pod there. And exactly what I said in the intros, like, you have a diversity of different clients that you work with, which is great from one perspective because you can take learnings from one client, apply them to another one, maybe a lead gen client over to a software client or a e-commerce client over to a digital products client.
00:02:54:04 – 00:03:15:06
Ralph
Like all of that, it all works together. It’s one of the reasons why we have a diversity of clients at the agency itself is because we can learn from different channels, and we can learn from different industries. And you’ve got a couple right now which are really complex, and some we manage all of their channels and some we manage just a portion.
00:03:15:06 – 00:03:30:21
Ralph
So maybe just talk to us about like how you measure performance in a multi-channel environment versus a single channel environment, and sort of what you see on a day to day basis. As far as like the challenges that you face, how you overcome them and all of that. Right?
00:03:30:23 – 00:03:53:08
Ricardo
So the challenges are completely different. I’ll start with the easiest one, which is let’s say we have a startup. They don’t have any brand recognition whatsoever. If they don’t run any ads, they don’t have any sales coming in. So we might just run, let’s say, meta ads for them to start with. At that point, attribution is pretty simple, especially if it’s a lower price product.
00:03:53:08 – 00:04:15:21
Ricardo
It’s more of an impulse buy. Then we can typically just look at input for metrics, look at the spend by creative or by campaign or whatever we’re testing, and just rely on Meta’s less click in platform attribution because we know even if meta only captures 80% of the conversions, we just know that there is no other traffic sources.
00:04:15:22 – 00:04:39:21
Ricardo
There’s no brand to begin with. So even if there is 20% of the sales that we’re missing, they might be coming from email or organic or some of that tracking is lost along the way. We simply give credit to meta, right? So that is by far the easiest one. Over time, hopefully all of those companies grow. They will start exploring other channels.
00:04:39:21 – 00:05:08:11
Ricardo
They will start doing more and more revenue and attribution, and the business becomes a lot more complex. So let’s take a business that has ten channels, especially if they’re top of funnel channels that don’t necessarily have clicks associated with those ads. So think about YouTube ads, CTV, maybe even cable TV, radio ads, like there’s no good attribution for any of those channels.
00:05:08:14 – 00:05:37:13
Ricardo
So for those businesses, businesses you have to rely more and more on like M.M.M or taken away a channel completely, or let’s say doubling or tripling the the budget of a specific channel and run your tests that way to see what happens if we double the budget for meta ads for, let’s say, 1 or 2 months, depending on the sales cycle, do we see efficiency improve, meaning like the cost to acquire a customer?
00:05:37:14 – 00:05:59:18
Ricardo
Does that go down or does it stay the same? But we simply do more volume. That’s still a win. Or do we see that the keg just rises and we don’t really get incremental sales? If that happens, that might be an indicator that we bought that money into the wrong channel, and we should take it away again and push it towards a different channel.
00:05:59:20 – 00:06:09:19
Ricardo
So that’s like in a simple explanation, what’s way different from a small client versus a client that grows. And that’s more and more channels to the mix.
00:06:09:20 – 00:06:32:02
Ralph
Yeah, I mean, I think there was a time and when we first started this thing here, we were a Facebook ads agency. So it was it was literally one channel. So it was so simple. And you didn’t have eight prompts and privacy and all the other things that sort of go along with now the complexity of being able to measure in channel.
00:06:32:03 – 00:07:09:07
Ralph
I mean, in the channel itself, in the app itself, you can we still do utilize a lot of those metrics, obviously, you know, for effectiveness of ads hook rate, hold ray, click through rate, all of that. We look at conversions. But as soon as you start, you know, adding in additional channels, especially ones that have no click, I mean, we have a client that I know that you work on that has direct mail and has, you know, radio, for example, like that now gives an inordinate amount of complexity.
00:07:09:08 – 00:07:48:14
Ralph
I mean, I’ve actually heard some of those radio ads for that client, believe it or not. And like, how do you know how it’s all kind of working, especially if we might not control all of those channels. Maybe they are ones that are controlled by either internal media buyers or outside agencies, like, what’s the best strategy to be able to achieve the goals for the client, especially if you have some blindness and even our attribution tool within, you know, data suite won’t track any non click channels, it’ll just track the actual ad spend as long as it’s piped in.
00:07:48:14 – 00:07:53:10
Ralph
So how do you manage all that? Like what’s the best way to do that?
00:07:53:12 – 00:08:14:10
Ricardo
Yeah, I would say for us it’s especially challenging when you get a client who’s already on ten channels. They’ve already grown their business and you don’t really know which of those channels were like their first 1 or 2 channels. It’s typically just one channel that they grow their business on, and over time they started adding more and more channels.
00:08:14:12 – 00:08:39:22
Ricardo
Most of them are just supplementing channels, so they might be doing some remarketing. You might get some low hanging fruit, but they’re not your scaling channels. So what I try to do when I’m onboarding those types of clients, ideally there’s still someone on their team who can tell me, okay, we started a company, let’s say ten years ago, and we grew it initially only using Google ads or only using media.
00:08:40:00 – 00:09:08:00
Ricardo
That typically tells me that that is their scaling channel. Often that’s also their highest spending channel. If they cannot tell me that even if they can, I still like to verify with data. I start by looking at at least the last 12 months if they have a good amount of data, maybe last 2 or 3 years to see, okay, over the course of the last 12 or 24 months, what has changed in terms of ad spend by channel?
00:09:08:04 – 00:09:39:13
Ricardo
Like when did they increase meta, when did they decrease another channel? And what happened to that top line metrics. And based on that data, I can usually put together some type of picture that helps me understand, okay, these one or 2 or 3 channels are there, driving channels and everything else is just supplementing because it typically shows that during certain months or quotas, they might have been spending a lot of money on Google Ads and Amazon.
00:09:39:15 – 00:10:03:14
Ricardo
But there were very inefficient when we looked at the calls to acquire a new customer. And then maybe a year later, they came to realize that they should spend more on meta and CTV, for example. And when they looked at money away from Google and Amazon and pushed it towards meta and CTV, all of a sudden their new customer acquisition cost just came way down.
00:10:03:14 – 00:10:21:14
Ricardo
So those are like pretty clear indicators that there was the right decision for them, that they should invest even more into meta and CTV this instance. So using that historic data helps make put that put those puzzle pieces together.
00:10:21:16 – 00:11:01:18
Ralph
So let’s try and explain this to someone this past week. And I think I was using you as an example of one of the case studies that we had done here on the show a while back. And, and this is something that’s all too common now as we see certain channels, Google, for example, taking last click credit might be a lot of brand search, Amazon taking the last click credit for a sale because they might be the agency might be overspending on branded search or some kind of keyword that is related to the product inside Amazon, and budgeting like shifting budget away from those channels like you discussed here.
00:11:01:20 – 00:11:26:05
Ralph
It I mean, there’s ten years plus of experience of doing this. But then there’s also to a lot of folks, they say, well, why wouldn’t you do some kind of incremental tests to begin with as opposed to just making an educated guess on hey, you seems like you’re overspending on these bottom of funnel channels. Let’s push that to more top of funnel.
00:11:26:09 – 00:11:57:09
Ralph
Like, how do you make those decisions? And isn’t incrementally testing tools something that you consider using, or even the ones that are provided by meta? They’re always pushing that certainly in the account manager program that we belong to. So like how do you make those decisions? Because I mean, these these are significant amounts of spend. These are and sometimes, you know, hundreds and thousands of dollars a month and spend and making an educated guess versus an incremental test.
00:11:57:11 – 00:12:01:10
Ralph
Some people would be opposed to that. So how do you sort of answer that question?
00:12:01:11 – 00:12:31:07
Ricardo
Yeah, that’s a good question. I think those incremental tests can be helpful. I think the only way to truly find out, find out which of your channels are most efficient is to run the test, because even incremental tests, they’re always a snapshot in time. If you if you run such a test in November and you forget, you forgot the fact that you ran a Black Friday Cyber Monday promotion, like those results are not necessarily going to apply for in March, for example.
00:12:31:09 – 00:12:51:13
Ricardo
So those tests you kind of need to keep doing in a way, which to me kind of destroys the purpose, then you might as well just run the test and see for yourself what happens to the numbers. And then you’ve already done the test. If it’s successful, you just keep the additional ad spend that you’re allocated to that channel.
00:12:51:16 – 00:13:11:03
Ricardo
If it didn’t work, you just pull away again from that channel and move it to someplace else so they can be beneficial running those tests. But at the end of the day, you still have to run the test. And then you might realize that maybe the study told you that meta was your most efficient channel and you could spend an additional six figures.
00:13:11:04 – 00:13:23:18
Ricardo
But after you ran the test, maybe that wasn’t actually the case because you forgot the context, or there were other factors playing a role during the the month for the two months when you ran the test.
00:13:23:20 – 00:13:55:08
Ralph
How do you actually, I guess logistically, how do you do that? And I’m thinking of, you know, one of the software companies that we’re working with right now, there’s lots of different channels and we control only a set amount, like how do you make the case to the business owner or to the marketing director or the contact within the client itself to say, okay, this is like we’re seeing our channels starting to move the needle on Ncac, for example, or media efficiency ratio.
00:13:55:09 – 00:14:24:03
Ralph
How do you make the case to say, all right, I think we should pour, you know, a more significant amount of dollars as a percentage of overall spend into these channels because of track record of success, like, how do you kind of make that transition? And then how do you convince the client to to make that decision and say, okay, that’s a good choice, and you’ve done this times very successfully, but what does that process look like internally?
00:14:24:05 – 00:14:50:13
Ricardo
It’s typically educating the client. Doesn’t always happen like on the the first time that I explain this to the client, most often it doesn’t. It typically takes at least a couple of weeks, sometimes longer, to build enough trust to really educate the client on why this is the right way to go about it. It helps if I have their historic data and I can kind of show to them, hey, this is what you haven’t.
00:14:50:13 – 00:15:13:18
Ricardo
When you spend most of your money on paid search versus when you spend most of it on CTV and mirror, for example, that helps. Typically when they have those those numbers and I put it in front of them, it’s a lot easier to convince them. It also differs. If I’m talking to a person who’s been there since the start, yours.
00:15:13:18 – 00:15:45:08
Ricardo
Typically that means that they were there when they just have one channel, and they are kind of used to being able to rely on in platform attribution. But over time, it requires that person kind of updating their understanding of marketing and expanding their like skill set so that they don’t just rely on employed for metrics, but for the point they’re running five channels they should move away from just relying on in platform metrics and move more towards like the.
00:15:45:10 – 00:16:10:05
Ricardo
Process. So that makes a difference as well. But it just helps if I have the numbers and I always try to state my hypothesis upfront. So I would tell them okay, based on these numbers, based on this data, I believe that meta is your most efficient channel. And if we have an additional 50,000 to spend we should push it towards meta, for example.
00:16:10:05 – 00:16:38:00
Ricardo
And then I say if the test is successful, I expect this to happen, which is typically we see more new customers without too much of an increase in the gig, which means we’re scaling volume, but the efficiency stays the same, which is a win. So I stayed at as well I in advance or before the test. I think about the timeline that I want to run the test for, which typically depends on the complexity of the business.
00:16:38:00 – 00:17:06:19
Ricardo
So if it’s a lower price product, which with a short buying cycle, it might take a couple of weeks. If it’s a higher price product that people need to think about for months, the test might need to run for 2 to 3 months before I can tell if we made the right decision or not, so I stayed up in advance as well, and then hopefully by that time, I’ve convinced them enough so that they let us run this test.
00:17:06:21 – 00:17:29:16
Ricardo
And then it’s a matter of just not making any other major changes like budget wise. We’ll still optimize the channels in their own way, but we avoid making big budget increases or decreases so that we don’t run 2 or 3 tests at the same time. And then after those 2 or 3 months, even if the numbers were better, we don’t really know.
00:17:29:17 – 00:17:53:01
Ricardo
Was it because of the budget increase on meta, or was it truly because we took a big portion of the budget away from Amazon, or we decided to completely change the strategy on Google or whatever it is that’s also challenging, right, to kind of sit on your hands for that period of time to stick to more like smaller incremental gains as opposed to running the bigger tests.
00:17:53:03 – 00:18:20:15
Ralph
Right? Right. Like the big shift. All right. We’re going to add 20% more budget to meta. And then okay the buying cycle is 30 to 40 days. Like you need to wait and literally not change a whole lot in that month while you’re waiting for those customers to actually come through. If new customers is the goal or, you know, hopefully there’s a correlative increase or at least maybe a change in media efficiency ratio, especially if you’re changing some other things.
00:18:20:15 – 00:18:41:10
Ralph
But yeah, I mean, I think that’s the hardest part is for because people want results immediately and it doesn’t happen that way. Obviously, with buying cycles for products that are thousands of dollars in some cases, or high consideration purchases like, you know, changing the software you use to, you know, to do your HR or your workforce management like those things take a bit of time.
00:18:41:10 – 00:18:48:16
Ralph
The bicycle is longer than just a week or two. So I would imagine the waiting, as Tom petty said, is the hardest part.
00:18:48:18 – 00:19:20:00
Ricardo
It is. Yeah. And those are also the tasks that simply take the longest. Like maybe the client is used to running their own tests on emails, or they’re doing some headline tests, which typically you get like a conclusion relatively quickly versus if you have a long buying cycle, you’re doing like a significant budget increase on cable TV or meta, or like a true top of funnel channel is just a completely different type of test that needs a different amount of time before you get any type of conclusion.
00:19:20:02 – 00:19:40:02
Ralph
Yeah, we seem to recently and we’ve done a few shows on this and I’ve done a few videos on it. We seem to have come into a fair amount of businesses that feel like they’ve tapped out on their Google ads, like their Google search ads. No matter how hard they try, they can’t seem to scale up past a certain point.
00:19:40:02 – 00:20:04:01
Ralph
And if they add more budget, it doesn’t add many new customers. If anything, it increases their cost to acquire a customer. And then the shift, especially between yourself. Thomas, some of the other growth strategies within 211 is to say, all right, let’s look at these other channels that are really top and funnel. Maybe it’s time to start shifting towards meta or programmatic or CTV or native.
00:20:04:03 – 00:20:15:18
Ralph
Have you had those types of conversations and how common is that in your experience? Because it seems like every discovery call that I’m on with our sales team, it seems like that’s a big issue right now.
00:20:15:20 – 00:20:49:21
Ricardo
Yeah, it definitely is. I would say those conversations are pretty common also, because Google usually looks better than better. So people think that Google is a lot more efficient than meta. And they also believe that there’s a lot more opportunity on Google than on meta. But from my experience, it’s kind of the opposite. I think there’s fewer levers that you can play with on Google does not like a different type of setup or magic button that just cut your CPC in half, like this X amount of competition.
00:20:49:21 – 00:21:14:04
Ricardo
In certain niches, you have just an insanely high CPC. Think in terms of like law firms. That’s very little you can do to get that to like $5, right? And I think that if we think of it like a graph, I think for Google, it’s a very distinct like if you increase the budget, like your CPA goes up pretty quickly because all you’re doing is just increasing the budget.
00:21:14:05 – 00:21:48:13
Ricardo
There’s nothing else you’re doing really. So you’re competing a more expensive auctions, and you start competing more with like your the biggest competitors in your niche that usually have a lot of budget to to play around with versus a channel like meta. We have a lot more to do in increasing budgets, right? Especially creatives. There are such a big factor that there’s just a lot more efficiencies that you can still gain meta that allow you to improve your budget more and more over time.
00:21:48:15 – 00:22:13:20
Ralph
Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It just I don’t know, I sense a, you know, just especially within the last six months, just a real frustration with the Google platform not being able to really scale past a certain point, which then points towards what you’re talking about. You know, the other interruption platforms, there’s there’s a whole blue ocean out there if you can message it.
00:22:13:20 – 00:22:37:19
Ralph
Right, if you can have the right creative. We’ve talked about this many times here on the show, which is creative diversification, leveraging the Andromeda platform, all the things that we talk about twice a week with our chief growth strategist on all of this sort of stuff, that’s really where the expansion and the growth is happening, at least right now in digital marketing, especially with how good the Andromeda platform is on on meta.
00:22:37:20 – 00:23:06:20
Ralph
Which leads me to my next question is between the multi-channel clients and then the ones that are single channel. How do you measure creative efficiency or creative sort of production creative performance? It’s obviously it’s very different for the multi-channel clients, but then on the single ones, it’s probably a whole lot more simple. Tell me about that and like what your thoughts are on just created or just in general.
00:23:06:22 – 00:23:36:20
Ricardo
Yeah. Let’s say the amount of channels play a role, as well as the complexity of the product or service that we’re selling. Like the more of an impulse buy, the easier it is to identify winning creatives. If we’re just selling like a $20 t shirt that has a particular design on it, like the design itself usually does all the selling, and it’s a lot of impulse buys, so you can somewhat safely rely on just less click and attribution in platform.
00:23:36:22 – 00:24:03:12
Ricardo
Right? So you simply look at your creatives. Which of these creators has the best CPA according to meta implied form data? That does not work at all. If it’s a more complex business that needs a lot of touchpoints, that has a lot of touchpoints across the different channels. So think like multi 100 or even multiple thousands in price points for products or services or whatever it is.
00:24:03:14 – 00:24:36:01
Ricardo
When you start to look at creative performance in meta, for a company like that, you will typically find most often images or carousels that look great when you look at it in platform, because those are typically the ads that just take the last click credit, right. But then you hopefully also have a lot of videos which are like color the rich are more middle and top of for audiences, which will never look as good because they don’t convert people on the last click, which is not their purpose either.
00:24:36:02 – 00:25:03:13
Ricardo
Right? So for those types of businesses, you simply cannot just look at the CPA and platform because the creators play a different role. So what I would do for those companies is I would analyze and measure top of funnel videos, completely different from more middle and bottom of funnel images. For the middle and bottom of funnel images, I would just look at CPA or more or less click attribution.
00:25:03:14 – 00:25:30:00
Ricardo
Do does creatives convert the person because their purpose is to convert and get the last click? But for the videos, we look at the hook rates. Holt rates frequencies as well, which kind of tells me if the video is actually going cold or if it’s if we believe it’s cold, but it’s simply doing remarketing as well. So for those videos, we just want to make sure that they engage people so that they have a good hook.
00:25:30:00 – 00:25:53:21
Ricardo
Right? They stop the scroll. They keep people engaged, interesting and watching. So they have good Holt rates as well. And ideally those videos also have a good first click CPA, which is what we then use our data suite for, right? So we need a little bit more time and data before we can look at those types of metrics.
00:25:53:23 – 00:26:08:20
Ricardo
But ideally we’d have strong videos that engage people, that hook people and that are their first click touchpoints. And then for the middle and bottom of funnel credit is looking more safely rely on like last click attribution.
00:26:08:20 – 00:26:42:18
Ralph
So what would you do in the case of, you know, a video that is in a meta campaign for multi-channel? Obviously that would be a certain amount of this for the The Simple channel. The only meta is what you’re running is a little bit more line of sight. But for the type of business that, you know, the buying cycle is longer than just a week or a couple of days, it’s not an impulse buy, but you’ve got a video that’s got all this spend, and it doesn’t really have a whole lot of in platform conversions associated with it.
00:26:42:19 – 00:27:05:06
Ralph
It might have some use ruse to a certain degree, but it’s gobbling up all the spend. It’s got, you know, good hook rates, good hold rates, good link click through rates. But it doesn’t have the conversions attributed to it. But then you’ve got other ads that maybe do have like less spend, but they might be image ads or maybe shorter videos.
00:27:05:06 – 00:27:23:20
Ralph
And they’ve got all the conversions, like how do you manage all of those ads? Because you know, they’re all working together here. But what’s your strategy? Because as a VP of marketing I might look in I’m like, well, why is Ricardo keeping that one, that one that ads soaking up all the spend, but it’s not getting any conversions.
00:27:23:20 – 00:27:35:06
Ralph
Why the hell is he keeping it on? Like how do you sort of validate that? And what’s your philosophy on how you look at performance and like what your best ad really is or grouping of ads?
00:27:35:08 – 00:28:01:13
Ricardo
Yeah, I’ll try to explain it simply. But what we recently started doing for one of our better performing clients is that we build kind of scaling campaigns where we drop in maybe like 7 to 10 different creators, but we keep a mix of videos that we know are very cool, top of funnel videos. So we test them inside kind of a traditional testing campaign.
00:28:01:15 – 00:28:40:02
Ricardo
That’s when we get an initial read on, like the behavior of those creatives, though sometimes we miss judge, right? Sometimes I think it is a great double funnel video, but in reality it’s just hitting warm audiences and just remarketing people. And sometimes it’s the opposite. So we pretest those creators, we get some initial insights and then we pick, let’s say, the 3 or 4 best performing top of top of funnel videos, and then we pick the tree, or for best performing middle funnel videos, and then maybe like two images that are more one or more formal that might have a promotion or an offer.
00:28:40:05 – 00:29:04:02
Ricardo
So we put those all together and we use ad spend minimums on the ad level, which is a more newer feature, which is somewhat similar to like ad spent minimums on the asset level. But this time it’s on the ad level. So we make sure that the top of videos and middle of all get X amount of minimum ad spent.
00:29:04:03 – 00:29:30:03
Ricardo
So maybe it’s 40% for top of one, over those 30% for middle of funnel. And we leave like the remaining 30% for bottom up funnel to make sure that our funnel still makes sense logically, regardless of what like the implied four metrics say. So sometimes you also just have to rely on, I guess, logical marketing as opposed to getting lost in the data to make sure that your final actually remains a funnel.
00:29:30:03 – 00:29:54:07
Ricardo
And it’s not just a bunch of like ten images with all great last like CPAs. But as soon as you put that together and you remove your top of funnel videos, those CPAs will rise, right? Because you don’t have anything else to create and find new audiences. So you can have to make sure that remains a funnel, even if those top of funnel videos just look worse than the Medal of Honor.
00:29:54:07 – 00:29:55:21
Ricardo
I am bottom of an alliance.
00:29:56:00 – 00:30:15:15
Ralph
It really is like a it’s a it’s a delicate balance. I mean, I think, you know, John and I talk about this all the time on our Friday lives, which, which is the testing ground for everything that we try to do within tier 11. And by the way, that’s over on YouTube every Friday at 230 eastern. Check that out.
00:30:15:16 – 00:30:42:23
Ralph
We’re actually doing one here today. But then the the actual judgment of how to manage the campaigns inside the ad account itself is a little bit more art than science, and it’s more I was trying to explain this to someone earlier this week. It’s like you rely on your expertise and what you’ve seen before, and you’re a seasoned marker, like you’ve been doing this for a long time now, and a lot of these decisions that you make isn’t necessarily because the data says so.
00:30:43:00 – 00:31:00:01
Ralph
It’s also a bit of intuition. How do you how do you sort of explain that to a client? I mean, I guess after a certain point they start trusting. You say, well, Riccardo actually does know what he’s doing, so I’m going to trust what he’s saying. But there is that part to it. But how do you sort of explain that or at least validate it?
00:31:00:03 – 00:31:19:19
Ricardo
Yeah, that’s typically what happens, right? They would get to a point where the client just trust us and then we I don’t have to explain those things again. Or like the decisions that we make in the ad account, which is ideal, I think, for both the client and for us. But in the beginning, like it’s understandable that we need to earn the trust.
00:31:19:21 – 00:31:50:07
Ricardo
It just helps repeating myself and explaining the same thing from different angles and trying to find as much data that helps my case, or that kind of helps explain what I say. Like, I’m very much of a numbers guy. I kind of live in spreadsheets, but I know that not everybody is like that. So sometimes I need to maybe paying something or find other analogies that kind of explain what I want to explain to this client.
00:31:50:09 – 00:32:16:03
Ricardo
So that helps as well. And sometimes it’s just, for example, if I tell the client, do you think it makes sense to put all of our heads behind images that say, ten, 10% off by now, 10% off by now, that’s all that our audience is seeing. Like, it might look great from a less like standpoint, but if that’s all that we’re saying, how are we ever going to find new audiences?
00:32:16:04 – 00:32:50:04
Ricardo
Right? We also need to talk about the fact that your product is durable, or if it helps find relief with the audience’s pain, for example. So if I try and explain it that way, that we need to speak to different types of people and speak about the different about the different pain points that the product is solving, for example, as opposed to just focusing on the promotion or the discount, because that’s typically what gets people over the edge when they’re kind of thing considering buying the product.
00:32:50:06 – 00:32:55:00
Ricardo
So sometimes, like explaining it that way helps as well.
00:32:55:01 – 00:33:20:14
Ralph
Yeah. No. Absolutely. It’s it’s it’s a bit of a learning curve. I think this is a whole new realm right now. And multi-channel is, is challenging. I mean unless you if you don’t have a, you know, an attribution tool that can show you how all the channels are sort of working together and really be able to trust that data.
00:33:20:18 – 00:33:44:08
Ralph
It’s hard to market in today’s environment, which is, you know, one of the things that we obviously have a two year old, but the point is this is that even if you don’t have it, if you’re single channel, you almost like really don’t need it to a certain degree. But once you start branching out and you start working different channels and everyone sort of has multiple channels, whether they like it or not, even if you’re just advertising on meta, chances are you probably have some email.
00:33:44:10 – 00:34:07:12
Ralph
Chances are you probably have certain amount of SEO. Maybe you have some content marketing that goes along with it. Before you start expanding outward into all the other paid channels, you’re still going to ultimately need a way in which to measure how they all interact. And it’s a little bit more art than science. Sometimes it’s not just all numbers which which is great to hear you sort of talking about it in that way.
00:34:07:12 – 00:34:11:20
Ralph
So do you have anything to add to that before we we wrap things up?
00:34:12:00 – 00:34:51:19
Ricardo
Yeah. Going back to like the messaging, I think that is something that John typically explains very well. I think he calls it like spend to message. That’s what I meant to say when I say, if all of our ad spend is going to to like the 10% of message and we don’t have anything else, like no messaging going to durability or relief like those types of messages, I think that’s when the account things where you typically convince people with different messages, maybe someone buys because we tell them the product is durable and that’s what they needed to hear to buy the product, whereas for someone else, it could be that are trying to find relief
00:34:51:19 – 00:35:13:10
Ricardo
for be more efficient or whatever the USBs of the product are. It’s typically different reasons that people buy a product for. And if you’re just limit the account and the business to one of those reasons, you’re automatically limiting your reach. And over time, you’re just will struggle to to grow the business as well.
00:35:13:11 – 00:35:38:09
Ralph
Yeah, absolutely. Well, whether you’re multi-channel, whether you’re single channel, I think, you know, today’s show is, is understanding sort of the intricacies of all of that and whether it’s attribution or how you judge your creatives, it’s different for each type of business. And like I said, it’s a it’s a bit more art than science. Obviously, the science is going to be there to back up that art part of it.
00:35:38:09 – 00:36:02:03
Ralph
But at a certain point, it’s like a lot of this is a judgment call. And yeah, really appreciate all the stuff that you’re doing internally for 211 and all of this that you talked about here today on today’s show. And hopefully we can get you back on a monthly basis so you can talk about what’s going on inside all these accounts and clients and different industries that you’re working on right now.
00:36:02:05 – 00:36:05:06
Ricardo
Yeah, I love to a lot of fun.
00:36:05:08 – 00:36:30:17
Ralph
All right. Well, we will leave all the links that we mentioned in today’s show notes. If you haven’t listened to the first episode that we did with Ricardo, we’ll leave a link for that as well as wherever you listen to podcasts. We’d appreciate you dropping a rating or a review helps us get out to a wider audience. Teach people how to do this stuff the right way through metrics that matter and growth that scales.
00:36:30:17 – 00:36:35:15
Ralph
So Ricardo Powells, thanks for coming back on Perpetual Traffic.
00:36:35:17 – 00:36:38:00
Ricardo
Awesome. Thank you for having me.
00:36:38:02 – 00:36:55:22
Ralph
Yeah. So like I said, everything that we mentioned here today will be over a perpetual traffic. If you want to check out our YouTube channel you can check that out on Perpetual Traffic YouTube. So on behalf of Ricardo till next show. See you.
