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- [00:00]
Connor
The reason a new influencer unlocks a new audience is the same way that launching a new language unlocks an audience. We're never going to reach Italian speakers unless we put those ads out in the world.
- [00:10]
Cody
Our entire jobs are trying to figure out, how do you get it to continue spending dollars in Germany? You got to equip Meta with better creative, better offers, new products.
- [00:18]
Connor
I think we could launch Italian ads, Spanish ads, French ads, and almost instantaneously drop CPA because these audiences have never been tapped into.
- [00:27]
Cody
What are the top three things you're doing to impact net new reach?
- [00:32]
Connor
All right, we're back with episode 107 of the Marketing Operators podcast. I'm in LA recording from the Office today. Connor's coming through. Have you seen the Office yet, Connor?
- [00:43]
Cody
I haven't, no. So this will be my first time at the. At the Hexclad. The Hexclad digs.
- [00:47]
Connor
Nice. Yeah. Well, they're. We have. We got plenty of room for you, so you can. You can post up wherever you want. Excited for you to come in and see the space. You know, for a split second, I was like, feeling inspired by open residency. I'm like, maybe I'll do a little. A little in person, like in the same room podcast here. You know, I'm sitting at a big, long table right now. I was like, this could work. But, yeah, I don't. I don't think we're ready for that yet.
- [01:09]
Cody
You know? You know what's funny on that is, like, we had our Ridge retreat recently, so we did a little bit more working IRL in person, and it's just funny how the systems just break down. I'm like, we're, like, having substantive, good content conversations and meetings. And I'm like, dude, I don't have my AI note taker running right now. Like, we don't have Gemini transcribing this conversation, so we couldn't possibly do an IRL podcast. It would take us just. The technical difficulties would be insurmountable.
- [01:38]
Connor
Yeah. I mean, even at. Even at Meta last year, I mean, we had a whole. We had a whole, like, hour, hour and a half run through and, like, figuring there's a whole team trying to get that setup going for us.
- [01:49]
Cody
Totally.
- [01:51]
Connor
Sweet. Well, Cody's got a board meeting today. Good luck to Cody with that. Let's get into it. We're doing a bunch more hotline questions today, so it'll be fun to kind of run through some of these. We have a bunch that are related to one another. Talking about how to reach new people, which is something that comes up a lot on the show. Then we got some other one offs that are also very interesting. Before we do that, thank you to the sponsors. Motion after saw how is prescient and rich Panel
- [02:18]
Cody
Motion just dropped their 2026 creative benchmarks report and it's been getting shared everywhere. Slack channels, LinkedIn, Twitter, sharing it in our private group chats. And it's great because everybody's been asking the same four questions forever. What is normal? How many ads should we actually be shipping? What is a healthy hit rate and which formats really win? The report analyzes over 575,000 creatives from 6,000 advertisers and over a billion dollars in ad spend to answer these exact questions. And the report has some really interesting findings, like the fact that only 4 to 8% of ads actually become winners and over half of ads actually lose. And for Motion customers, this report is especially helpful. You can upload it into your Motion dashboard with their runneth AI chat and compare it directly against your vertical benchmarks. Hit the link in the show notes. I promise you won't regret it. And as always, go to motionapp.com and tell the marketing operator sent you.
- [03:11]
Connor
And I guess before we get into the first question, like how about Zach stuck right now on an absolute tear, sold homestead like three weeks ago maybe and now yesterday just announced a 27 and a half million dollar round raised by El Catterton. Damn, that guy is just ripping right now.
- [03:30]
Cody
And, and you know, in addition to that, not to be overlooked, but hired a GM at Hollow a couple months ago. So Zach is just operating, firing on all cylinders, operating on all fronts. You've got the El Caterton raise for Mars men of 27 and a half million dollars, massive raise. You've got selling the agency that he started and then Hollow is doing, you know, I don't know what the run rate is, but I know it's crushing. And I know he's also hiring the leadership that he needs to kind of remove himself from that and then go raise and focus on Marsman, which is a massive opportunity. So happy to have a, a member of the pod, a friend of the podcast, winning.
- [04:05]
Connor
Yeah, yeah, he's crushing right now. He also just hired hexclad's former director of retention. Not from Hexclad, but Andrew Windle was here for like, I don't know, a couple years that went somewhere else and he just went on to Marsman to be their director of retention. So yeah, they're building a They're building a powerhouse team over there. What you said they, they hired the, someone that was at Nike, Nike Strength. What, what role did they hire that person in?
- [04:32]
Cody
Like general manager. It was like a big, big, big strategic leadership role for Hollow.
- [04:37]
Connor
Okay, very cool. Well, yeah, it's been, it's been fun. Obviously I, that's, that's where I kind of got my, my start in Ecom. So it's been fun to, to kind of see where Zach's taken it over the last, you know, four years. He's, he's crushing it.
- [04:49]
Cody
I was thinking about you in that, in that, on that like line of thinking as well because it's just funny. Zach's just hanging out in Wisconsin like driving his boat around on the lake and then just absolutely operating at the top of Ecom. There's a, there. You guys got a quite a stronghold out there of Wisconsin peeps.
- [05:07]
Connor
Dude, it's crazy. I, so I didn't know Zach at all in high school. Like I, I got into Internet marketing in college just because I was interested in it and kind of self taught myself. So I was doing that for like three, four years maybe like in college and throughout. And then I was just like posting stuff on LinkedIn about it. And then at the time Zach's partner, they were hiring media buyers. There was like five or six employees at Homestead. It was like Zach Riley, Tim Ryan Doney who's like their, their dev and then the two partners. So there's like five people there say hey, we're hiring media buyers. And I went and visited him at the office and like right away I knew, I'm like, oh, this is what I want to be doing. And it was just random like because Zach's, you know, three years older than me maybe and went to a different high school so didn't know him. And luckily I went back to my hometown after college because I don't think I would have gotten connected with him if I didn't. And yeah, just.
- [05:58]
Cody
And it's just become a hot, a hotbed for e Comm marketers.
- [06:01]
Connor
Dude, it's crazy. It's, it's, it's crazy. Yeah. And you're totally right, it is hilarious. Like Zach is operating at the top of his game just in, in Appleton, Wisconsin. Like there is, there's like no one else in Appleton or probably even like the greater Fox Cities, which is like the, you know, the five or six cities that make up that portion of Wisconsin even like do the same work as Zach, let alone operate at the level that him And Riley are operating. Well, Riley's not in Appleton, but it's just funny that he's there and he's like operating at this level and it just, it's just a, it's an interesting place to be, to be doing what he's doing.
- [06:37]
Cody
Totally.
- [06:38]
Connor
All right, let's get into it. So we got a bunch more questions from the, the MOPS hotline today. So want to start off with. I thought this was a very interesting question because we talk a lot about reaching new audiences and how to do that. And as you scale, it becomes harder and harder to do. You know, you see your frequency and meta go up, you see your reach stagnant, you see a rolling reach stagnant or go down and there's all these different levers you can pull that we've talked a lot about. But I thought this was an interesting question because it kind of breaks down three different levers. There is creative landing pages and signal strategy. And the question is which one has the bigger impact on reaching new audiences. And then I added in this constraint, let's say it's the same channel and it's, let's start with the same channel purchase conversion campaigns and then we can move and like kind of remove that constraint. But like, if you were, if you were to think about those three levers with that constraint, like, what, what do you feel like has the best impact on reaching new audiences?
- [07:42]
Cody
I, I mean, I think that the answer here is creative diversity is probably the most impactful. It probably requires, you know, close to the most legwork to actually get up and running. So there's almost like a, like a time to launch component of this. If I needed, if I was concerned about reaching new people and I had to do so today. Creative diversity is going to take me a couple days, a couple weeks probably, if I need to be engaging with new creators or influencers or you know, designing new content. But that's probably far and away, I think, the most effective. That's where I land on it. Signal strategy. Now with the constraints, Let me ask you this. With the constraints of it having to be a purchase optimized campaign, what does signal strategy look like?
- [08:27]
Connor
Yeah, I, I think signals, I think with the constraint in theory, like this is one of those ones, in theory it like makes sense, but I don't think it always actually like pans out and drives a new audience or a good performance because in theory people will be like, oh, make a lookalike audience of like just your top 10% LTV customer or like targeting. Yeah, targeting now. Like there's targeting and then there's exclusions. And I think we're all doing like, we're all trying to max out. Like we haven't had just because we're not like a repeat business like Cody, like just natur. We, we get good repeat business but like it's not to that extent. Like we haven't had the same problems that Cody's had on like only acquiring new customers with meta. So like we haven't had to do a lot of the exclusion jockeying that a lot of brands I think are doing these days where they're uploading, like they're doing their pixel exclusions and their clay VO exclusions and they're also upload, uploading Shopify lists. And I know there's all sorts of like, like I think blot out. And some of those kind of like matching tools now are also helpful for exclusions. It seems like we, we luckily haven't had to do a lot of that and we also don't do a ton of, we don't do a ton of like audience signal engineering. Honestly, like, I agree with you. I think creative is the biggest lever. Landing pages isn't really a lever in reaching new audiences. I mean you're not gonna, you reach new audiences by putting new things outbound. Like, you're not gonna attract that audience unless you go outbound and like meet them where they are. And like, obviously you're not doing that with a landing page. You might be able to convert that audience better and then maybe if you convert that audience better, you're going to like get more favorable CPMs in the auction and like, it kind of can go back to the, to the ad and help you there. But we're not doing a ton of the like signal jockeying on exclusions that I think some, some brands probably do. And I think it seems like it's mainly brands driving big ltv. Like I bet Groons has to do a lot of those. I'd be curious like what Connor and Derek over there are doing.
- [10:25]
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- [12:18]
Cody
Now I'll give this we were we did like a deep dive on a bunch of stuff over the last couple days and I thought this data point was interesting. It's not quite on the topic of reaching net new audiences, but it's on the topic of signal engineering in purchase optimized campaigns. Because what we do is we we have like a mix of like custom conditional pixels that just fire on certain categories. So we fire travel purchases over here, wallet purchases, ring purchases, things like that. I've talked about it at length on this, on this podcast. Sometimes we're just doing custom conversion so we're like filtering down a subset of our like main non conditional pixel and we optimize towards that. People do some mix of the two. I'm not directionally, I don't have a super strong opinion about how people do it. What I do care about though is being more specific with Meta with the type of event that you want to optimize for. Meta will say and I, I like keep coming around to like disagreeing with this, like consolidate. Some people will say throw all, you know, if you have all these different product categories, throw them all in one campaign. Tell us to optimize for value. Just use the same pixel across the whole thing and like let Meta do the job from there. And I just keep coming back to like that not being as optimal as it could be. And the data point that I have recently is we've had a couple rough weeks of travel growth so selling our carry ons and check ins year over year. So we were diving into some of the reasons why that might be the case and one of them was we'd moved back to a non conditional pixel. We were allowing our travel ads to convert on whatever purchase it wanted to. Last year at this time, of all of the revenue attributed to travel ads, 6% of it came from non travel products. Does that make sense? So we like went through the North Beam, I forget what it's called but like the product dashboard where you can see what were the products that were, that were purchased in, in the orders attributed to our travel ads.
- [14:16]
Connor
So are you saying 6% of, 6% of travel revenue came from ads that were not promoting travel. Is that, is that, how do you read that?
- [14:25]
Cody
Okay, so if we spend a dollar on travel ads and generate $2 in revenue, that $2 is attributed to Meta and it's attributed in, in the Meta ads platform and in North Beam. And then what we did was we analyzed well of those $2, like what products did people actually buy and 6% of it came from non travel products. It was attributable to travel ads, but it didn't drive travel revenue. That was last year, 6%, which is fine, like very little. What we see all the time is naturally there's very little cross category buying. What we saw this year was 40% of revenue. In this, in this period that we were looking at relatively short period. In this period, 40% of revenue attributed to travel ads came from non travel products, which the point of that is just we'd Moved away from telling Meta, hey, we specifically want these luggage orders and we'll instead allow you to attribute whatever conversions you want. And what ends up happening is Meta finds warm traffic of people ready to convert on wallets and rings and power banks and whatever else. And they are no longer driving sales in the products that we want to be selling when we, when we run these travel ads. And it's one of the reasons travel as a category was having this rough couple weeks. So just to the point of signal engineering, and the reason I said it's not on the perfect track of reaching net new people is I don't quite know whether we're reaching net new people or not. What I care about is are we driving growth in our travel business and signal engineering? I just, I keep coming around to the conclusion that it's one of the best things that we can do. So I just, I group those in there because obviously, you know, creative diversity important, but then also telling Meta what you want it to do. I think there's, there continues to be a lot of alpha in that.
- [16:08]
Connor
So, so I. To summarize and make sure I'm clear on this. So there's. You have these custom purchase events set up outside of just like this blanket purchase event which fires on every single purchase that happened. You also have a custom event set up for travel, for rings, for wallets. And we do that too. Like, we have, we have those set up for the same reason. Because I want to be able to go and say, hey, what percent of my knives orders on knives ads are actually coming on knives? And what we find is that the, the further, like it would make sense to me that you guys like that when you're optimizing for a travel purchase event that you're seeing like 94% of the orders actually come on travel because your categories are like fairly distinct. Whereas us, they're, they're a lot, they're a lot more related. Right. Like, it doesn't shock me that when I go look at our knives ads, like over 50% of the orders coming on those ads are on knives. But again, there's like 50, 40% happening on other products. That makes sense, like it's cookware. But as we get more into our niche products, you see the percent of people actually buying that product go higher and higher and higher. It's like Hex Mills, for example, which is very different than a lot of our other products. We have funnels built around like I think 80, 85% of the orders happening on those ads are on hex mills cocktail shakers. That other one where it's like very unique, very distinct, very different. Again, 80, 85% of the orders happening on that product. So I think like product itself can be like, yes, the signal engineering, but also just like the product funnels are such a great way to reach new audience. Like, you proved this with some of the holdout tests that you ran. But we do not actually optimize like for those events. We are still optimizing for the, the, the overall blanket purchase conversion event. We still are, I'd say leveraging product signal engineering in the sense that we don't break them out. Like we don't have knives and mills and cookware are usually like blended all under the same ad set. Because if you look at the, if you look at the stats between the ad sets, like, they're very different. Acquisition costs are very different. AOVs, the product makeup is very different. So we think there's value into keeping them separate, which is a form of signal engineering. But we haven't actually done the like, hey, let's go optimize for the, the knives purchase conversion event. Because, like, our performance has been good without doing that. But I'm. Now I kind of want to go do it. Because you're saying that it's actually driving a lot more orders on that product category. Is that what you're saying?
- [18:31]
Cody
Yeah. And, and you bring up a really good point that our categories are so distinct. I think it makes sense to do it. One thing, I had a conversation with a marketer at a home goods brand and she was saying that what they really find, what they consistently find over and over is that their, their customers shop by rooms that like, they know if they're in market for. And I'm, I'm in the funnel for like Wayfair in West Elm right now. I'm getting patio furniture. And it's like they know Connor is shopping stuff to go outside and they just keep hitting me with emails and things like that. And that makes sense. I'm like, I'm like building it out. That's clearly like what I'm thinking about from like a home decor perspective for you guys. It's like the kitchen, all the products are people shopping kitchen items. So you're going to see naturally a lot of crossover. Our version of that is we see so much crossover between power bank and phone case purchases. It would be silly for us to try to signal engineer our way to acquiring those customers separately. We just think about that as like tech revenue and a tech order. We don't see all that much. We see slightly more, but really not all that much crossover between something like tech products and our wallet products. But that's just an example because people also misinterpret that sometimes and they say, oh, I've got, I've got to break out T shirts from sweatshirts, I need a bunch of different pixels. I'm going to be doing all these different things. It's like that's not quite right. It's something to be careful with. But I continue to find signal strategy as a way to reach new audiences and I thought that this product example in terms of driving the product revenue we intended to, was a good example of that.
- [20:01]
Connor
Yeah. And I didn't think, you know, for the people listening, they're like, oh man, like I don't know how to go set up custom events and this and that. First off, it's actually not that complicated. You can figure it out. But also just start with separating them at like the campaign ad set level. Like that right there is going to give different signal between your different product funnels and it's going to start optimizing for new audiences. And I think you'll be able to see it in the data. Like we, we can clearly see that the, the audit, the person that's buying the cocktail shaker and the Hex mill is very different than the person buying the, the 12 piece set or the knives in their first time order. We've also really, really changed how we are thinking about this. Like we're building out funnels now for products that a year or two ago I don't think we would have. Like we just launched these, these Japanese inspired products and based on some of the data we saw with like our cocktail shaker in our hex mill, we're actually building out acquisition funnels around these when historically we probably wouldn't have because I don't see them being like massive. Like I don't see them moving into like our top 10 or top 5 first time order products. But like first off, the launch has gone really well. But I think that if we activate with the right creators and we present these products in the right way, I think we'll reach new audiences. Like we're working with a bunch of, you know, Japanese American creators that you know are going to be making very different meals and speaking about the products and what they care about very differently. So I'm bullish that like we're going to reach new audiences that way whether they're buying the Japanese products or not. I'm Curious to see that. We also see very different things between, between platforms. Like if you look at our cocktail shaker, like it's driving a lot of first time orders on the cocktail shaker and it's a high net new visit rate. So we're pretty confident it's driving an incremental audience we wouldn't be getting otherwise. If you go look at our like still Gin Gordon tvc, the one that you know, we produce with Dre Gordon and Snoop Dogg, that's running in CTV and YouTube and linear TV. If you go look at the CTV breakdown, that ad has almost the same exact acquisition cost and the same exact AOV as all of our other ads which are primarily pushing cookware. So it's interesting to see that in meta, meta is a lot better at going and actually finding people to buy the product we're promoting. But in CTV it's just the creative so compelling that people are, are seeing it visiting the website and then they're going and building carts that are very similar to the carts that people are building after they see like you know, whatever other CTV ads we're serving that are promoting cookware. So it's also curious to know that yeah, in meta, maybe meta is better at going and finding the person to buy that product. Maybe it's also a function of the creative like it's a lot more kind of doctor product focused and meta. But also just interesting to see the, the difference between these like upper funnel channels and, and a meta which is obviously really good at going and finding, finding the right people.
- [22:48]
Cody
I totally agree. So to like round out this first question we've got here, I think we're in agreement. Creative diversity number one, a little bit more legwork involved. Signal engineering number two, I think we listed a few ways to get at that. I'd also put landing pages at a distant third. The idea that you'd have landing page diversity without creative diversity also seems odd. Like it just seems like you would of course invest in creative diversity before landing pages. I am like generally skeptical about landing pages influence on something like net new reach. I have heard from people who I very much trust that having a mix and this just comes down to like the funnel I think a little bit where like if you're, if you have listicles, if you've got advertorials, if you've got PDPs and collections, pages in the mix that like meta will perform better which like kind of tracks for me. But it does fall into that bucket of feeling hard to measure, hard to prove and maybe More just anecdotal than like a true best practice.
- [23:48]
Connor
Yeah. I don't know, mean, if you think about like just logically, like you can't, like we're thinking a lot about this with the EU right now because what we're noticing in the EU is that year over year it's shifting spend into some more niche countries. And if you look at the year on year changes in the countries that it's shifting spend away from, like acquisition costs are up. So my conclusion is Meta's kind of gone and acquired all the people it could acquire at a certain CPA because it's having to spend more. Now it's shifting spend into these other countries that like, we, that don't have that much upside. But Meta's trying to go and find like, where can we go and get that CPA that's, that's, you know, as low as it was last year. I think like new languages are a very, are, are very good way to think about this. And it really applies to creative too. Like the reason a new influencer unlocks a new audience is the same way that launching a new language unlocks an audience. It's, you're. We're never going to reach Italian speakers, we're never going to reach Spanish speakers, French speakers, insert any language unless we put those ads out in the world. Like, we're, we're never going to attract that person. So it's, it's no different than creative. Like if you want to go reach a new audience of people, like go and develop creative or go and work with a creator that, that speaks to that person, it's as simple as that. And unless you do that, you're never going to reach that person.
- [25:09]
Cody
Yeah. So I have a quick question for you and I'm just going to throw in some placeholder countries here. Let's say Germany's probably your biggest market. Let's say it's shifting spend away from Germany into the Netherlands. CPA in Germany's up. You're saying even though spend has been shifted away from there. Is the CPA in the Netherlands technically lower than Germany right now? Yeah, so, and that's like, that's such an interesting example because that's, that's Meta really doing its job. It's like you've given it a certain set of things to do. This is a product I want to sell. Here's a creative, here's the offer. Offer. You go do that in whatever. We can use Germany as the example, but for Ridge, it might be 40 year old men where it's like, okay, this is where I'm going to get the best cpa. This is where I'm going to spend all the money. As I exhaust that audience, I'm going to go try to find new audiences for you guys. It's shifting budget into Netherlands for Ridge. It might be. Oh, it's actually going to try to serve younger, it's going to try to serve more female and net net. Our CPA is going up year over year even though that like marginal customer it's acquiring is technically more efficient than it would otherwise get in that original core audience. So yeah, you just, our entire jobs are trying to figure out like how do you get it to continue spending dollars in Germany? And that just you got to equip Meta or whoever else with like just better creative, better offers, new products, et cetera.
- [26:23]
Connor
The whole EU is, it's very tricky and if, if you've like expanded into the European Union before, you'll, you'll understand this because we have certain P. Ls for different markets and at the same time you want to give like, it's generally better to give Meta more flexibility. Like you generally don't like if your audience is, I mean this is like the classic example. If your audience is primarily 25 to 35 year old males, you generally don't want to go into Meta and set the ad sets to that, that constraint because it's, it's kind of hamstringing that like you want to set it to 18 plus and let it serve ads to whoever you want. And it's not that different in like when you're, when we're kind of trying to scale the EU like you want to, you want to kind of leave it broad and let Meta decide where to push. But then you see things like this where it's like, oh no, well, we have a piano, we have a revenue target that we need to hit in Germany. So like we also need to kind of like force some spend into there. And then there's like the, the nuance that you can select targeting based on language but you can also select targeting based on country. And we found both to work. But obviously if you're, if you're saying, hey, only target German language, well, there's like five countries in the doc that, that speak German. So of course you're going to see Germany be a big makeup of that. But then all these other countries are also going to get a good amount of spend if that's the way that you're setting it up. So it's a tricky, it's a tricky balance to like, serve the business P L that you've set and also try not to like, hamstring the way that Meta works best in order to hit that in or trying to find that balance right now. But yeah, for us, it's like, you know, there's a lot of talk about, well, how, how can we do this and that all in the context of English ads. And I'm like, I think it's a, a wasted effort for us to try and scrape out like a 10 efficiency approve improvement. Whereas I think we could launch Italian ads, Spanish ads, French ads, and almost instantaneously drop CPA because these, these audiences have never been tapped into. So I think there's tons and tons and tons of people that we can acquire at low CPAs again. Now, granted, that's a lot of work to like translate all the funnels. That's why we can't just do it, you know, Italy week one, French week two. Like, it's hard to do, but that's, that's what we're learning is like, we just gotta stack these localized funnels on top of each other. And again, goes back to the initial question, like, our creative in Italian is gonna reach native Italian speakers, whereas right now we're only reaching Italians. That resonate with English ads. And obviously that's probably not the, the primary audience that we ultimately need to tap into if we're gonna go and take over that market.
- [28:51]
Cody
Um, yeah, totally.
- [28:54]
Sponsor Representative
We talk about incrementality a lot, but how do you actually operationalize it to make your business better? That is one thing that I've been really leaning in with my team recently. And HAUS has played a tremendous role. We use it for all of our experiments, all of our geolift testing, but we now use it for our MMM as well. I've been a design partner. I've been one of the early design partners on House's cmm. C stands for causal. So it's one of the only MMMs, if not the only MMM that I've seen that's actually using your causal experiments to build the model. And so that allows me to just trust the data so much more. So it's not a black box, but actually informs our roadmap and has been so crucial for allowing us to operationalize around incrementality. The Houzz team is world class. I can't speak highly enough about them. They've also built a really amazing community with some of the best DTC growth operators out there. They have A few exciting events coming up soon that they call the Houzz Growth Lab. One is in LA on May 19th and the other is in New York on May 21st. I highly recommend checking it out if you're in the area. If you want to check it out, learn a little bit more about cmm. Go to house IO operators to start making better data driven decisions today.
- [29:57]
Cody
So we've got like a 2B question here. What are the top three things you're doing to impact net new reach? We've hit a lot of them. Do you want to talk about non purchase conversion campaigns?
- [30:08]
Connor
Yeah. Yeah. Well I think yes, I think for us like creators has been one of our biggest unlocks there. You know we creators in product, right. Like we, we've, we're promoting new product. We just talked about that we're activating with more creators that are, that are spanning outside of our, you know, your traditional cooking creator. And that without a doubt has been one of our, one of our biggest unlocks. Like last year we signed, signed this creator for a hundred thousand dollars as a nine month deal. I think she's like lifestyle female, skews a little bit older and like totally different demographic of people that were engaging with that ad creative compared to like our account wide. I just think that's the way to do it. I think, I think so many brands get kind of siloed into their like their core Persona but they, they don't expand into creators outside of that. Like I like there's this honey brand that, that I'm close with and it's like really premium high end honey. It's really good, high price point and they're really hitting on the biohacker angle and they've done it really well. Like they, they have like all these different creators that they whitelist from that they've scaled really well that are kind of fall into like health, wellness, biohacking space. But they haven't, they haven't they you know they're talking about channel expansion, asking these questions. I'm like yes, I think you should do that. But there's also like you guys sell honey. Like parents want to feed this to their kids. You know the average person wants to eat this in the morning with their coffee. Like yeah, you guys are nailing the biohacker health and wellness like extreme audience. But there's so many other person is that I think your product is really, really relevant for that. You're just probably not hitting because you don't have any creators that speak to that, that Persona. So I still think generally brands are not leaning like horizontally enough into more creator niches and reaching new people. Like we did a deal with you know, the Puckets like Campbell and Pookie Pucket which are you know, kind of this like cringe lifestyle like fashion couple on Instagram and like that's the type of, of people that we're going and activating now because it like they have our audience and we want to tap into them. So I think more brands need to be doing that. And then yeah, for us we've really leaned heavy into non purchase conversion campaigns in the last two years. I mean we spent can't speak to the exact number but like low to mid seven figures of our meta spend last year was on non purchase conversion campaigns. And we're trying to test into and unlock even more of these objectives. Like for us we tested view content first because I think you, you had had success with that and I had talked to some other brands that had success with that. And it also isn't intuitive. Like I think when you're thinking about non purchase conversions to optimize for like where do you start? I mean you want to make sure it's for far enough away from the purchase event that you're, that it is different. But also like I wouldn't go right to reach because that's pretty far away from your ultimate goal of getting an order. So a view content, well what actually is a view content Page view fires on any page view content's a product page view, right? At least that's how we have our pixel setup. So it's kind of intuitive that that would work because you're still optimizing for someone to like hit your product page which is a pretty high intent action. So like we started there, we tested it with a, with a household out test and now we have like that multiplier and we basically scale up or down based on that multiplier which is a north beam one day click row as number and now we're testing reach, we're testing video views I believe. So we're like moving further up funnel and just trying to unlock more and more and more of these. And it's very clear that you know these non purchase conversion campaigns have a, have a much better cpm, they have a much better rolling reach so they're reaching more new accounts. So I think that is a really awesome one for brands to try. It's just really hard to validate unless you have a tool like House. So that's the tricky part is like I don't I still don't know of a true like full fully trusted way to validate that without, without having like an incrementality test running. I guess you could do, you could do a user level, user level test in house too if, or in, in Meta as well. But you know, I haven't, I don't fully trust that like a hundred percent the way that I trust like a house test.
- [34:21]
Cody
But better than nothing for sure.
- [34:22]
Connor
Better than nothing.
- [34:23]
Cody
Like I think as soon as we start talking about getting away from purchase optimizations like some form of measurements key and I want to hit that one in just a second. But yeah, optimize like, like when you optimize for view content you're optimizing for like a browsing user of somewhat interested person and it's like as a brand you want to be doing that. You want to be getting people in interested and going back to the example of, of Germany and the Netherlands. If you just pound Germany for a year and spend millions of dollars optimizing for purchases, it's going to exhaust that audience. It's going to start spending into Netherlands, it's going to start increasing cpa. But if you all of a sudden turn around and say hey all actually I want from these German users is for you to bring me people who are interested who are going to click view some of the landing page, make it to a pdp, that's the event I'm optimizing for. Then obviously meta can say oh there's a whole different set of people that I can now serve ads to because I can find people who will do that. So I do, I do think it's really key. I do think measurements are really key component. So I like that one. In terms of. Net new reach I will say so. I think people misinterpret this sometimes too. It's way more of a larger brand issue. Like if you're doing 10 million a year, your goal for your, your your what you need to do to succeed is not begin optimizing outside of purchases. Purchases should work for a very long time.
- [35:37]
Connor
Yeah, you should focus on the creative bit first once you find you know what's interesting. I'm curious. So actually I have two questions for you. What, what are you optimizing for on the non purchase conversion side in meta is it still mainly view content? Have you unlocked any other events like how diversified are you
- [35:56]
Cody
in meta? It's really just view content on YouTube we'll do some like view optimized stuff or CPM optimized stuff in the past and we've seen success with those. But on meta it's just been the view content so far. I'm with you. I'd also like to be diverse. I think there's a lot of additional value to get even the view content you're still optimizing for clickers. So like I'd still, I'd still love to unlock the person who's like not clicking on ads, which I think is a big part of the user base. So I, we've got it as a part of the roadmap this year.
- [36:25]
Connor
Yeah, that's a good call out. We're actually, we're, we're finding some Nice wins in YouTube as well on the non demand gen stuff. And for that we're actually not, we are not running a holdout test on that. Like I think that's, this is like you don't have to run a holdout on everything. I think if you have an anchor point from a previous holdout you can kind of connect that and create a relationship between that and this tactic that's maybe one like one layer lower or one layer removed. So we've, we've run a bunch of holdouts on YouTube and we also measure YouTube impression. So we're kind of looking, we're, we're basically saying all right, we know YouTube's super incremental like at not. We've run pure holdout tests. We run scale up tests and then we're basically able to say okay now with this new campaign tactic, how does this prescient reported roas compared to like the demand gen roas? And as long as it's in the same ballpark, we're comfortable saying okay because we have that holdout test data is our like backbone giving us a lot of confidence here. And it's the same with like dsp. Like we did a holdout on online video with Amazon. It looked good and now we're running more prime video, we're running more streaming with Amazon's DSP and we're just looking at prescience mmm roas and saying okay because we know the OLV was very incremental and because we're seeing similar readouts on the Prussian MMO as like we're, we're confident in scaling that up. So because we like we don't have unlimited slots at house and we have to run our test for a very long time. So you know, you can kind of be creative about how you like measure some of these adjacent tactics after you've already ran a household out, which I think is interesting.
- [37:54]
Cody
Totally. My last point here on measurement as it relates to net new reach. I'm going to use the European example again because one mistake that we've made in the past, I guess my point here is going to be, if possible, measuring the incremental impact of these different tactics, creative diversity, signal engineering, different targeting, however you want to put it like are all are. It's very important to be measuring them differently if you have the bandwidth to do it. We made the mistake in the past in Europe saying we tried localized ads a couple years ago. We were like, yeah, to justify the effort of doing all this, like local language content, we need to see 20% better performance. And that's actually not the point at all. The point is actually that every dollar spent might be incremental to what you would otherwise do. So it's really. And that's the main metric we'd want to be influencing, not necessarily driving up performance or driving down cpa. Ideally you'd want it to be a very similar cpa. But even if it's the exact same, that those budgets, if the local language ads are working or at least doing what you'd want are just incremental dollars you're able to spend. Um, and I think that's a key point. The other thing that I would say is it's extremely possible that on like a North Beam MTA basis or a Facebook in platform basis, that your Italian ads might look different than your English ads, that they might have a different incremental impact. And it's the exact same where we typically see higher incrementality factors from something like partnership ads than we do our brand page ads. And there's all sorts of reasons why that might be the case. But like developing an understanding of these different tactics as you search for net new reach, I think is, like I said, hard to do. Takes a lot of time and energy, but a key point of figuring out what's working and what's not.
- [39:42]
Connor
Yeah. And also the, you know what's interesting for us, like, you know, if you look at our German ads versus our English ads, actually on a, on an MTA measurement basis, the English ads actually look better right now than the German ads. But then if you go look at the German business and its growth, like that business unit as a percent is growing at a greater clip than the entire like EU as a whole. So it, it's something again, I don't know. I don't know why that is exactly. I don't know if like Germans are Like if the attribution is more leaky there, right? There's a ton, a ton of data. Like there's a lot of legal around data and consent in the eu. So like I'd say the EU is probably the, the leakiest bucket in terms of, of tracking goes like if someone opts out of, of tracking, it's really a block, a black box. I think that's part of it. Maybe people are less likely to click an ad and then convert. They're like watch seeing the ad and then going to the website and converting. But it's just, you have to like have that again going back to triangulation. Like if we only looked at the German ads and the MTA performance, you're like oh, like just turn them off. But it's like not no, like go look at the, the growth of that market on Shopify versus everything else. Like clearly there's something happening here and you're totally right. Like it might look different than, than your other funnels, but you have to have that, that nuance and how you look at the data points to make that decision.
- [41:04]
Cody
And that's my exact point is like, like what you're saying is theoretically, if you ran an incrementality test, you would find a higher incrementality factor on the, the German local language ads. And that doesn't surprise me at all. I mean even for the fact that categorically it's going to be probably a colder audience. You probably haven't reached those people before. They probably haven't read about Hexclad in their native language ever. So it's like, will it take them a couple more days to convert? Like I would not be surprised.
- [41:32]
Connor
Yeah. Yeah. And what Connor means by like incrementality factor, like there's a, there's a bigger gap between the, like the roas that we're seeing in North Beam and that cost per incremental order that we're seeing in, in house. So maybe the incrementality factor is like I don't know, 10x right? It's like take the, take your, your one day click row as multiply by 10 and like that's your actual cost per. Who knows what it actually is. I mean it's really big when you look at like a View content campaign. I mean we're, we're running that thing and like we're happy with like a 0.14x one day click row as a north on. On View Content. So it's, it's cool to create those relationships and Then you're giving your media buyers like really like good, confident KPIs to scale up or down or keep spending flat at. Yeah.
- [42:19]
Cody
Okay. Cause the last point and then, and then I've got a question for you that's way different is I just came across this recently but like I was talking to a brand who was really struggling introducing new tactics because they were measuring all of the tactics in the same way. And there are going to be times where a new tactic will be so will work so obviously well that you don't need a new form of measurement. Be like this looks really good. But for them they were like, yeah, look, we think we're just like kind of meta stuck targeting the same people and we're measuring it the same way. And every, all the new things that we're trying in the way that we measure it don't seem to be performing any better. And it really just comes down to that, that difference in like the incrementality factor that they might be driving actually a different total impact from this new channel or strategy or content than they're seeing in the standard MTA or in platform way that they're measuring it.
- [43:06]
Connor
I think that is a really good, good thing to be aware of. Like it's actually, I'd say it's actually more often than not that you need a different way of measuring than you. Then you can use the same one. Like going back to that creator that I talked about that we found a lot of success reaching a new audience with their one day click out of the gate was really strong comparatively to like our entire account and like we were confident scaling it that way and that is the same way like that is looking at it the same way as we were, we were looking at everything else. But after about a month the one day click really fell off. But the engagement rate was so good and it was such a high percent new visit rate that I was like to our media buyer, I'm like, hey, let's keep spending on this and just see what happens. You know, the business performing well. We're not going to like hurt ourselves if, if this doesn't pan out. And sure enough we, we stayed consistent with how we were spending on it even though the one day click roas started to fall kind of below our benchmarks because the percent new visit rate was so high because the, the demo breakdown in Meadow was so different than our account wide. And sure enough we got to the end of the year and if you go and look at all the data from the moment we launched through the end of the year and you add that ROAS lift metric to our north beam table. These ads, her ads had the highest ROAS lift. I think it was like a hundred percent growth and return on ad spend going from like the one day click to the LTV compared to the rest of our account. So like we ultimately made the right decision and how we scaled on it because it just had a longer like a longer half life. It took longer for that audience to convert. But that's a great example where we had to shift how we were thinking about how to measure her performance. Like if we would have only looked at one day click we would have turned her ads off in a month and probably spent $75,000 on a hundred thousand dollar deal and not got our money's worth. And in the on the contrary we spent 6700 grand on on their ads. You do have to think about every single tactic thoroughly and you can't just have this like blanket cookie cutter way of measuring or you're probably going to make bad decisions on on tactics that you know just are doing different things and they have different data points because of that. Multi touch attribution tools are great, but there's one big downfall and it's that most brands are using them to make next month's budget decisions with last month's data. Your attribution tool cannot tell you what happens if you shift 50k from meta to CTV or whether your best channel has already hit saturation. MTA and platform reporting will only tell you what happened. Pre MMM tells you what will happen. You can see where your next dollar will perform best, catch where channels are maxing out and hitting their saturation curves and move money before you waste it. Models update daily for online and weekly for retail, so you're always working with current data and it also maps out how your channels work together. This is one of my favorite things about Prescient. It tells you things like how Meta drives Amazon sales, how CTV lifts branded search. We use it at hexclad. Other brands like Safa and Coterie are also using it and it ultimately is like a GPS for our performance marketing and you'll get your first insights within a week. If you're interested, go to pression AI.com operators p r e s c I ent AI.com operators to see how Prussian can give you your next best move.
- [46:22]
Cody
Okay, all right, I've got a question for you. This is another I talked to a different brand recently so I'm going to lay out the scenario for you okay? Founders don't have DTC backgrounds, fantastic operators, but they don't have DTC marketing backgrounds. Brand is doing like $30 million a year. It's a consumable, it's high LTV. They're currently 75% retail so far and away they're selling in, in retail stores. They are hiring their first kind of senior marketing role. I don't want to say the exact title but like you can imagine it's a director of acquisition. Head of E Comm is something, something like hey, we need someone in here who's going to solve a bunch of problems. It's like basically the scope of the role and actually what I should say is we need someone to come in and solve a bunch of problems is like their goal for hiring this person. And my question for you is, given that no strong marketing leadership, relatively established, established brand, obvious product market fit in retail, how do you scope the role for this director of acquisition, head of E Comm sort of person? That's my first question. What skills are you looking for? What backgrounds are you looking for? It's my. This is what I'm laying out for you.
- [47:33]
Connor
Are they going to, are they trying to go into like D2C? Is that their goal?
- [47:40]
Cody
They want to grow the DTC business? It's a. Yeah, great question.
- [47:45]
Connor
Well, I'm certainly finding someone that has experience at like a high LTV brand. Like I'm not going to go and hire someone that is like I wouldn't hire someone from Hexclad where it's like we're very acquisition first order driven because they're not going to really probably understand the unit economics that, that need to make sense. I'm hiring someone that knows how to model out like a, like a 12 month like cohort based LTV and they can measure that over time and they can, they know like all right, based on this lifetime value, I can spend it at this cac. I think that would be box number one to check. Definitely a performance like an analytics person. Like someone that is a, is a performance marketer but leans heavy analytics. Especially with the, the trickiness of like halo into retail which is already an established channel. Like I'd want someone that knows how to model that as well. And then yeah, I mean they have to have just like deep D2C because that has, they have to be complimentary to the, the founder that doesn't. Presumably the founder is like a product person. So this person have to be super complimentary to that person. So I would say hopefully has worked at a high LTV brand that has both retail and D2C and is very analytics, like performance driven is going to make decisions based on the numbers. And then I would have them hire someone that's more of like the creative brand side. But I would start with the, I would start with that like really quantitative brain person so they can start to like model out what, what makes sense for the business from a numbers perspective. And then they can make scale decisions based on like, all right, you know, I know our, our LTV to cat like our LTV 12 months is 300 bucks. So I can spend it a hundred dollar cac. And I also, you know, they have some way to model out the halo into retail, right? Maybe they're, they have the ability to like do some sort of correlation analysis between what they're spending on, on media and how they're, how they're like retail is growing. So they can also say, okay, and we, we can assume like 20% spillover into retail or something like that. So they just have this like super buttoned up model of the business that considers all those things. So yeah, that's probably like a media buyer I'm guessing that would have that like quantitative background.
- [49:55]
Cody
Because what I was gonna, what I was gonna ask and you've basically answered it. I think you, you hit on a lot of really good points that I wasn't really thinking about. The high LTV nature. Someone who's comfortable modeling out the cohorts, understanding like exactly what CAC do you need for what type of person? Really love that as a skill set? I think like they can go a couple different directions. This person needs direct experience in like I'd say roughly one of three things. Or you, you'd need at least one of these. The measurement. I'd put media buying measurement, channel allocation all in one bucket. I'd put like web optimization in another bucket, like really strong funnel building. And then I'd put like creating the, you know, performance creative ad content supply chain as another one. Now you have the ability, this person will have the ability to then hire some sort of manager or director beneath them. So are you prioritizing that media buying skill set? And then what would you, if you're that person, then who are you hiring first?
- [51:00]
Connor
I'm prioritizing like if it's a, if the D2C channel is like pretty new, like I would, I'd want the per, like the leader to be the one actually buying the ads at first because it shouldn't take up that much of their time, right? It's a brand new ad account. It's gonna be mainly upfront work and then probably like an hour a week right of just like adding new ads or optimizing the account. And also that forces them to be closer to the, to the data early on. So I actually wouldn't hire a media buyer under them right away. I'd be hiring someone super complimented to that person. Like a great creative strategist, maybe a creator that is both creative strategist is like can, you know, just someone that can like brief out concepts that can maybe do a little bit of editing and design or even shooting on their own. So that way that the person who's like really thinking about the numbers from or from the business from a numbers and like performance lever standpoint has a bunch of inputs. So this person hopefully could like brief outlanders, brief out ads, maybe even shoot and design some of their own ads, their own landers. So that way that this person that was like great, now that I got the unit economics dialed, let's go optimize this thing right? And well how do I optimize it? Like more creative, better landing pages, all the stuff that we were just talking about. So I would hire that creative person to complement this like very analytical performance marketing person probably and let those two people just go and, and cook together.
- [52:23]
Cody
I like that. A couple other thoughts I had throughout. So my, my I really like your answer and you're, you're kind of winning me over a little bit. The, the way that they had written the job description was very like tech oriented. They more have like a tech almost software background. So they were thinking of head of E Comm. They were thinking like website first. They were like someone's going to lay out the roadmap, do the CRO, do the design, things like that. And I do think that's important. And if you look at brands like IMA or even Marsman, I mean like they are so good on like the CRO front and for a high LTV brand getting that subscription is so important, getting that subscriber that there's obviously value in that. But if I'm hiring this marketing leader, head of E Commerce, that's probably not the first skill set I'm looking for. And I think we're in agreement there you went media buying. I went more creative side at least someone, someone deeply familiar you would need obviously like you have to hire someone who's analytical, who's going to understand the, the how to model out the cohorts and understand like what CAC do you need but direct experience in like either bringing in agencies or creators and like really building out that funnel for new content, big affiliate programs, things like that. Like if I'm, if I can find someone who's done that in their past and I think has all the attributes they need to like be leveled up or have already leveled up into a more senior leader within an org. Like I kind of like that as the direct experience.
- [53:49]
Connor
When would you bring in? You know, I'm very curious about this because I have a friend who, I have a friend who runs a medical device company. It's a direct to consumer medical device company. Like 7 to $10,000 average order value. Very unique, very unique business model. But like huge nurture play. Right? Because, but ultimately what, what happens is like they're capturing a lead, they're putting, they run a lot of Facebook ads, they're getting people, they're getting a lead and then ultimately they have this nurture funnel where like they need a doctor to write a subscription for this person so this person can get the, the product covered by insurance. So there's a massive, like, there's a lot of steps this person needs to take. So they're trying to figure out like God, who is that person? Like who is that that life cycle brain. And it probably doesn't come from a D2C background. It actually probably comes from like a B2B background where there's a long sales cycle or like another healthcare company, maybe like a pill club or something like that. Or like a tech, like a tech life cycle where you're selling like higher ticket tech products where like yes, you get this lead in the door, but they have to nurture, nurturing, like really guide them step by step. So at what point would with this being like a very like a consumable high LTV brand, when would you bring in that, that life cycle person that's going to be focused on pretty much all things from like point of conversion CRO, what you just said, like we got to get that subscription early on and then everything after that. Like how do we extract as much value out of these people as possible? Is that coming? Is that like your next wave of hire for this brand?
- [55:22]
Cody
Totally. I mean it's such a good question. When you and Cody and I talked about this months ago about the first three hires we'd make if we were like, if we were director of growth, what are the first three hires you'd make? And for a long time I said I would hire a retention marketer earlier and Cody was Like stupid. And he totally won me over on that because I'm like oh yeah. It's like it does feel that that might be a more I mean for like this is in the sense. Let's just think about it from like a, it's a non high LTV brand perspective that a lot of the retention. You can get a lot of the value of retention with like just you know, set up the, set up the right flows, set up the behavioral flows, do a couple campaigns. That's probably the 8020 of a retention program for a business like Ridge that is not repeat purchase heavy. What I don't have a lot of insight into is how impactful can that role be for a high LTV business like reducing churn. What is that? What value can you generate if you're constantly iterating and, and testing on, on you know, lifecycle marketing and retention. So the answers I don't quite know. Aside from the fact that when it comes to growing the DTC business so much of it is just going to come from getting the customers up front where I'm like oh yeah, I'm. It's probably my first like two or three hires are like let's just figure out how to get great content, get across the channels that we need to get people to our site, get that site up to snuff. So it's converting people at a decent rate. And then it's really only after I solve, feel really good about having solved all those problems that I'm bringing in someone who's like hey, I need you to fix the, the churn that's happening at month four.
- [56:57]
Connor
Right. You know I actually see, I think the like I see the person pulling the levers in retention being you know the like basically email, SMS and then some other channels different than the person who's owning that like LTV metric. Like I see the person that like I see the retention manager call it or life cycle manager reporting into this person who is maybe like I don't know what the, the title would be but basically I think there's, there's two roles, right? Who, who owns acquisition and, and then like you know, driving down CAC as much as it possibly can be and scaling top line as much as it can be. And then you have the person who kind of takes the baton and says great. Now my role starts again with like it's, it's not just retention, right? It's, it's a lot of on site CRO, it's a lot of cohort analysis, a lot of Offer testing. And then it is a lot of also owned media to do what you said to drive up LTV to reduce churn. Maybe direct mails in there. You know there's probably loyalty programs and like logged in on site experience stuff. But I see that role again, I don't know exactly what it's called. Maybe it is like the director of lifetime value or something like that. But I see that as a different role and then I think like the, the channel manager of email SMS would actually report into that person. Because what I have found that like when you talk to a lot of, a lot of like, like life cycle marketing managers or email SMS folks, a lot of them actually don't really have a good sense of what we just talked about like the entire lifetime value chart. A lot of them are like great tacticians in email SMS and that's not a knock on them. That's super important. But just because someone's a great email SMS tactician doesn't necessarily mean they would be the right person to drive lifetime value and reduce churn and all these things for a brand like this. Because that really spans more than just email sms. That spans on site, that spans like again account logged in multi channel.
- [58:50]
Cody
You're bringing up direct mail. Yeah, totally. There's a, there's a paid component potentially.
- [58:55]
Connor
Yes, exactly. So um, but I think for like if you're a brand like Men Go to Mars, like that role makes a ton of sense. Or if you're a brand like Cadence or Absorb Me, like that role makes a ton of sense because you have your huge consumable product. You have a lot of breadth now too in your product category. So a lot of opportunity to like get someone into the sachets that's buying the RTD drink. Like there's so much opportunity and you need to have that, that like that call it like lifetime value leader that's gonna own all the own media, direct mail on site, zero all these things, that's like kind of the right hand person to the acquisition lead.
- [59:38]
Cody
All right, so I've got some interesting numbers to share from Ridge from our beloved sponsor Rich panel. We switched our support stack at Ridge to rich panel about 15 months ago and our cost per ticket has dropped over 70%. That means same team, same volume and over $500,000 in annual savings. CSATs have not changed. We've been sitting at 96% week after week. So the automations did not come at the cost of customer experience. Our last platform talked a lot about AI but nothing was really changing. Under the hood, Rich Panel is genuinely AI first. They came in, they rebuilt our workflows and we were live in under two weeks with basically no lift on our side. And they're about to roll out a returns portal which for us is huge. Because if they can do the same thing for returns as they did for customer service, that would be sick. If you want to cut down your support costs now and save on returns platform with an AI first platform, talk to Rich Panel. Go to richpanel.com/demo. Tell them Connor from marketing operator sent you and they'll take good care of you.
- [60:26]
Connor
Thank you.
- [60:29]
Cody
Okay, last question. This director of acquisition, head of E Comm. We've scoped out the role. I love it. What do you, what do you pay that person?
- [60:38]
Connor
200,000 at least for, for a, for a 30 million per year brand remote. Oh well, maybe less than if you can find someone that's like, you know, not in NYC or Austin. But I think, I don't think you're going to find the right person for especially if you're trying to like I'm assuming this brand's like we can be a nine figure brand in two years, right? Or three years. Like we found product market.
- [61:00]
Cody
They have, they have really great ambitions for sure.
- [61:03]
Connor
Yeah, I'm, I would go and pay top dollar to attract a really good leader or top dollar plus some skin in the game. It's like, all right, $200,000 plus we're going to put you on a pretty solid equity package that vests over four years and like really incentivize this person and then also give them the goals and get out of their way kind of, kind of ordeal. Right? Like, hey, I think we can hit this much top line revenue this year over the course of three years. You know, we think we, we need to be roughly at this cac like set those guardrails and get out. Like that's what I think Chad from Groons does incredibly well is like he sets the guardrails for his team from a numbers perspective. Then he gets out of their way. So then like the team can go and make decisions. They don't need to go to Chad and say hey, like can we scale up by 30? It's like no, you're, if you're under your CAC target and we know that that CAC target backs into the out like the CACT LTV like go do what you want to do. So I'm, I'm going higher price point because if you're this founder, you don't Want, you want this to be additive to you. Right. You don't want it to be like oh we're paying. We hired someone with three years experience. They're good but they're still pretty junior and now it's requiring more of your time when in reality you were trying to like offload this and have it work and grow and scale so you can go and develop new products or find new retailers to sell into and like have a, have a bigger surface area. So I'm, I'm going, I'm going more experience probably, probably spending at least $200,000 on, on this role. I would have big expectations from someone getting paid, paid that amount and a lot of experience and, and yeah, shots on that.
- [62:37]
Cody
That's what I said. Yeah, I said 180 to 220 remote being a big advantage. Like I think, I think this the type of quality that you're looking for here in like in the city of New York. I think it's like a $300,000 higher like it you like easily. So 182.20. That's pre bonus also.
- [62:54]
Connor
There's a lot more. Yeah, pre bonus. Yeah. So this is probably like rolling up to 250 to 300 even and if it's working. Yeah, I think there's a lot more people that there's a lot more people in like the, the acquisition bucket than there are in the like lifetime value bucket. I just think because generally the, the lt maybe the business model is a little less, less common than like a business that just has to like every business has to figure out acquisition regardless of whether or not you're, you're very like a first order profitability driven business or if you're, hey, we're going to spend it into being unprofitable on the first order but over 12, 24 months we're going to make our money. Like everyone has to go and figure out acquisition but not everyone has to go and figure out this like complex web of life cycle marketing and driving lifetime value. So I think that person because of that becomes even more valuable.
- [63:44]
Cody
Totally.
- [63:46]
Connor
What's this product category? Do you, do you have any. Is this a, is this a hypothetical or is this a real.
- [63:51]
Cody
No, no, it's a real. Yeah, yeah. No, I won't say the product category. It's something you consume every day. It's like a supplement. It was a brand I talked to this week.
- [64:00]
Connor
Okay, cool.
- [64:02]
Cody
All right, tweet, let me wrap up. I got a test of the week for us. Our, our quarterly Test of the week.
- [64:07]
Connor
We're. So we're back on the test of the week. It's been 50 episodes but we're here.
- [64:14]
Cody
Okay. Test of the week. I thought this was a good one. I was really excited about this. It's not, it's not, it's not super revolutionary. We ran A great YouTube test, new content. It was still purchase optimized. And we did actually, yeah, we did a YouTube test and what we found on this test was that over 50% of revenue generated was being captured on Amazon. Have you ever gotten a test back? So this is obviously, this is, this is purchase optimized campaigns on YouTube. We're driving to our site, we're optimizing for on site purchases. Google has no idea who's buying on Amazon. We, we get a great incrementality readout and one of the reasons that's the case is because over 50% of revenue generated we observed on Amazon. And the way that happens is we're feeding in different revenue streams into House our geolift testing tool and beloved sponsor so that we can see the exact lift in the market that we're targeting on both Shopify and Amazon. Now I'd never seen something as high as 50%. Have you?
- [65:13]
Connor
Dude, we've had like, we run CTV tests that have been like 7 to 1. Amazon.
- [65:18]
Cody
Amazon.
- [65:19]
Connor
Oh yeah.
- [65:19]
Cody
Oh wow.
- [65:20]
Connor
Oh yeah. We see a ton, a ton of Halo and YouTube is similar. Not as much as CTV, but yeah, we see. I think it wasn't, it wasn't even one to one. It was like it's been like four to one. Three to one.
- [65:34]
Cody
Really?
- [65:34]
Connor
Oh yeah, we see tons. It's crazy.
- [65:37]
Cody
Purchase optimized on YouTube driving Amazon purchases 4 to 1.
- [65:41]
Connor
Yeah. I could go back and look at our most recent scale up test. Like it, it's, it skews. We find that anything that the further we get away from a click to our dot com. So like YouTube, CTV, all these I would assume podcast is probably the same although we haven't run a holdout on it. I would assume linear is the same although we haven't ran a holdout on it. The further away we get from a direct click path to.com, the larger distribution of incremental orders we see on Amazon against dot com. And I don't care necessarily. It's not like a bad thing I think, you know, I want people to go and buy where they're comfortable buying and it's also one of the reasons we're able to like grow Amazon and not have to Do a ton of like micro optimizations like with our sponsored ads or, or with, you know, we still do those things but it's like, hey, just by spending up on CTV and YouTube this year, we should see Amazon grow and, and, and reap the benefits of that.
- [66:35]
Cody
Yeah.
- [66:36]
Connor
Have you had any others that have been that high?
- [66:39]
Cody
No, not that I can remember. I remember there's an X. I think it was an X test like last year that we saw 40% get captured on Amazon. So it was like almost one to one. But otherwise, yeah, we're still, we're A lot of the tests we run are heavy. Heavy. Com.
- [66:58]
Connor
Yeah, I'll send you some, I'll send some screenshots of some of the tests we've ran after this and show you what we're seeing.
- [67:04]
Cody
You know what I will say is I think a lot of these are very category dependent. So like I wouldn't be surprised if cookware didn't skew towards Amazon just naturally. Or like I see we see rings really skew towards D2C and I don't, I don't quite know why, but I think just like different, different categories, different products cons who you're targeting. And that's probably what it comes down to is like maybe our, our ring buyer is older. So it's like yeah, maybe they're, they're less, they're shopping on Amazon at a lower rate. Something like that. There's just a lot of things that dictate how significant that split can be.
- [67:44]
Connor
It's. Yeah, it's really interesting. I'll take a look at our holdout test after this and send you some screenshots on some of the different channels so you can get a sense of the, of the distribution. But yeah, I think I'd be curious too if like any of our audience sees anything and they want to comment in the, in the YouTube comments and let us know. But my, the pattern I'm recognizing is the more video based, the more upper funnel it is, the more incrementality there is on, on Amazon. Cool.
- [68:10]
Cody
I see we call that an episode.
- [68:11]
Connor
All right, that's a wrap on this episode of the Marketing Operators. We hope you enjoyed it. If you are enjoying it, make sure to like comment, subscribe and share with your friends. Thank you to the sponsors Motion after sell House Pression and Rich panel. We'll see you next time.