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- [00:00]
A
Hey, real quick. Before we dive in, if you've got a brand or marketing tool that marketers need to know about, sponsor the show here at Perpetual Traffic. Perpetual Traffic puts you in front of thousands of seasoned marketers, CMOs and agency owners. So head on over to perpetualtraffic.com to apply to be a sponsor of this show.
- [00:19]
B
People are searching for your brand. If you don't show up at the top every time, your competitors are going to grab them. Now, in theory, that's an easy thing to understand that's driven a ton of spend on brand across many brands that we see, but that as this case study is going to improve, that's not always true.
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A
This is the biggest challenge with brands right now that have a performance marketing mindset. You have an impression without a click. How do you read into your secondary metrics to know that you're going to make the right decisions to shift allocate spend from the bottom of funnel channels to the top of funnel channels? They had a real problem and they had five consecutive missed forecasts before starting working with us. Here's visually representing what we did.
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B
You're listening to Perpetual Traffic.
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A
Hey, real quick. If you're looking to get your brand in front of growth minded marketers, CMOs, directors of marketing and agency owners, we're opening up our sponsorship spots for Q1 and Q2. Get in front of a quarter of a million marketers every single month at Perpetual Traffic. All you have to do is head on over to perpetual traffic.com for the details or check out the link in the show notes to apply. Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic podcast. This is your host, Ralph burns, founder and CEO of Tier 11. And today we have a special guest, and this time, I guarantee you I'm going to pronounce his name correctly. We have none other than Scott DeGrossi from Wicked Reports. That's only French Wells years.
- [01:56]
B
We.
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A
We just realized we've known each other for over 12 years and I've never been able to pronounce your goddamn name.
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B
No, you haven't.
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A
You have tolerant.
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B
I am. I know, I know.
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A
I just call you Wicked Scott. It's just so much easier. Anyway, so, like, what. What are you. Where does that come from again? It's like you're a farmer of some sort.
- [02:14]
B
It's French. It means the gooseberries, because my ancestors were gooseberry winemakers, which it turns out doesn't taste that great. That's why you drink cabernet and not gooseberry Sauvignon. That's why I Work.
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A
I've heard it was like a lottery. Yeah, like elderberry wine, blueberry wine, but. But gooseberries. I don't even know how does that feel? Tart.
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B
Tart. Kind of like us main French people, we're pretty tart so it kind of fits pretty tart.
- [02:46]
A
Well, we've got a pretty tart case study here today which we're going to talk about. It's a doozy. So the title of today's show, as you probably saw, probably the thing that you clicked on to listen to this or watch it is five missed forecasts. Then one budget shift. One massive budget shift by the way, and then four straight quarters of growth. Four straight hits. And this client of ours is in the pet ecom space. Very high end. Product names and financials shall remain confidential. But we're going to talk to you today about what's most important for you all which is the types of problems that these guys came to us with. And I think it's a great example of how to use tech enabled services together. How to use the Wicked Reports platform specifically we obviously use tier 11 data suite. We use an edge tag server which it gives us a bit of a competitive advantage when it comes to attributing specific clicks back to their original source. However, Wicked Reports is our preferred partner without a doubt as far as like anything that you want with regard to attribution and without their help we never could have produced these results here today, quite honestly because if we were relying on in app data we would have been absolutely screwed and absolutely lost and that's where they were when they came to us. Scott. So here's the problem, okay, like if you're a director of marketing or a VP of marketing, how often have you ever increased ad span but watched your results get worse? That's where that happens. Stories, you know, I mean this case
- [04:25]
B
study is a beautiful use of stitching together the data, the story it was telling, but also then using multi touch attribution combined with an incrementality mindset but with a few advanced shifts that not everyone, everyone can see this data or they'll come and they'll understand the philosophy of what we're going to talk about. But few just have the stones to make the move. So we have to talk about like what went through your mind when you get you were like okay, this is the plan, we're going to do it and then how you communicated that to the brand's important and then when you cut in a certain area that will reveal and moved it to the Other area which didn't look as good. Like these are things that you know, anyone in the, I'd say 10 to 50 million dollar, well actually all the way up. But 10 to 50 million dollar revenue range when you've got a budget that's supposed to be top of funnel and then you got brand spending and Amazon bottom and how to, how to read those numbers and make changes that meaningfully move the overall north star of the business is. That's why this is just a beautiful case study. I love it.
- [05:30]
A
Yeah, it really is. I think quite frankly, I mean we're not talking about this case study to say how brilliant we are but to talk to you about like how to look at the same data that we're seeing and be able to understand it and then make strategic decisions based upon the client goal. And the client goal was very clear to us. Like they came to us with a big problem and it took us a few months to figure out the strategy and the direction. And it wasn't just spend more on this channel and everything's great. It was, they had a real problem and they had five consecutive missed forecasts before starting working with us. Like the tail end of the summer of last year, they came to us in the summer. This is a seasonal product. So the summertime springtime is really is their busy season. Into the fall, into the winter a little bit less. So most of the results that we actually got were in the fall and the winter. So here we are sort of on the cusp of, you know, spring going into summer and we're seeing even better results. Like this is from, you know, three, four weeks ago. I'm seeing even better results right now. But the point is this, is that from June through October of last year, their unit targets, they have very specific unit targets. And if you're an E commerce brand or you're just a, a brand in general, you probably have specific goals for units sold or new customers acquired. And so they were acquiring less customers but their monthly costs were increasing, their spend was increasing, but they're getting less new customers. They couldn't figure out why. Combine that with the fact that their cost to acquire a new customer or their ncac, which is one of the most important things that WICKED reports can really specifically measure like new customer versus returning customer. Kind of important to know those two things. NCAC versus rcac. It was, it hit an all time high in their case it was $193 I believe. But it was going in the wrong direction. It was trending upwards as opposed to down. So typical in a lot of these scenarios, and we can dissect this a little bit more is that you know, the Amazon and the Google looked great in the dashboard and they're they were using triple whale which is as we've talked about many times is not our preferred vendor, very pretty interface. However, they use a lot of model data, it's not actual click data. So they couldn't really figure out what to do. But they did know that Amazon and Google looked great and they should and we'll realize why. But it's not a productive way to scale. What they were not doing is they were not creating demand at top of funnel and this is where it's really tricky because top of funnel, whether it's Meta, whether it's YouTube, whether it's programmatic which we're going to talk about here, native advertising, connected tv, you know, any sort of like programmatic we're using, you know, any of the individual networks you don't see a click oftentimes but you're spending and so it's really hard to measure how does this all work together. So they were doing connected TV and they had no idea, they just were spending it but they had no idea how that was affecting the bottom line. So top of funnel was real problem. And this is, this is the real thing that I think you as a marketing manager or director of marketing you're spending more, you're hitting nothing. Your boss wants answers as like you don't have an answer for them. Like I don't know what's going on. It seems like Google and Amazon are doing well let's spend more over there exactly the opposite thing that we did here. So that's sort of the layout, that's sort of the crisis that we were faced with. I'm sure you see this a lot of times with a lot of businesses that you work with. Scott this is not atypical. It's fairly typical in a lot of ways. But what they do about it is really the differentiator.
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B
It's what they do about it. We get a couple of large GLP1 brands using US which this is going to be my retention video most likely like hey do this because they have
- [09:28]
A
this situation or they can just hire
- [09:29]
B
chair 11 I know some other, I know others that do as well and in it's when that the if you strictly use the actual in platform roas you just you're going to cost yourself money and that's going to be when you see higher return on ad spends reported but it doesn't move whatever the North Star metric is because this customer, for example NCAC was their overall goal. As long as we're buying new customers at this certain price, we can spend infinity theoretically. And then, but what happens is that, well, I mean Meta's algorithm optimizes for the fastest conversion and the fastest one is people that are already aware and in your funnel or you know, already in market. And so that can keep nice return on ad spend numbers. But it's not going to get any new fresh eyeballs or enough in that are eventually going to convert. And that's why you get caught. This recycling loop is what I call it, where you have your budget, you want it for cold traffic, but really it gets spent on people that are ready to convert now. And so the numbers seem good because oh man, I'm getting sales. But no, it's sales that are either happening because Meta is retargeting or Meta is retargeting them and then they're closing on your email and SMS or direct and then Meta is taking credit. The same problem that's existed since the beginning of measurement time. And so the fact that then you have to have the, you will, first of all you got to have the cohesive strategy of getting aligned with your client on the goal. Like if you, they came with a crystal clear goal and then you supported that and didn't try to argue, oh no, I want to measure it this other way. You said okay, well we're going to use new customers, really. And then you got to show them the reality of the new customers and they have to accept the reality of what the new customer acquisition baseline performance is. They come in, they miss the forecast, they're open. But then they're like oh well the numbers look good, why not? But they're at least now after missing forecast enough time, you know, they say okay, I will listen. And then you're like, well here's the problem, here's the new customers. What you say you got this 600%, you know, six ROAS in Google, but on your brand it's like 10x. Well guess what, it's mostly repeating customers, right? You're not gonna recycling, you're not gonna grow your business, keep doing the same thing.
- [11:41]
A
Yeah, yeah. And for this brand, this is not a CPG brand. So I mean for this is typically A1 sale or maybe there might be a secondary sale. If they have a secondary, like as they have two dogs for example, they might, or they might buy one time. This is not a cheap product by any stretch however, you know, it's over $1,000 NAOV, which is new average order value. So LTV is roughly equal to aov.
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B
That adds to the challenge.
- [12:12]
A
Yes, that added the challenge. So you've got to be really precise on that first acquisition because you're not going to buy them at break even. Let's say you have a $50 products and you've got a, you know, it's
- [12:26]
B
dog food and you can just sell them more bags, you know, in a month or whatever. And you can't be that with this thing. It's too expensive and big.
- [12:33]
A
Exactly. You gotta be profitable right from the jump. Which is, which makes this case study more compelling because in a lot of cases, like we have a lot of customers in the supplement niche and beauty niche. Those are CPG products. They're pros, are like, all right, we can break even or maybe lose money on the initial sale because we know that $100 average order value any of turns into a 700 LTV. So which is very different. So by month two or three, they're profitable on that customer that maybe we can acquire for $50 or $70 or whatever your gross profitability is. You can sort of, you need, this is where you really need to understand what your margins are, what you can and are willing to pay to acquire a customer and then how much that win back period is from a profitability standpoint. Is it month 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Some cases they never go profitable. It's just about like a case study that we always use when John and I go live on our Friday lives is we always use his individual business with a partner of his. They don't even care if they're profitable. They just pour everything back into the business. So they pay $300 to acquire a customer. And the LTV I believe is like 6, 700. The point is this is like it depends on what your goal is. And their goal is to acquire as many customers as possible and then sell. So it depends on what the goal of the business is. And that's the thing, like when I go out and meet clients, like that's the first thing I ask them. I'm like, what do you want? Like what's your goal? And the goal with this client was we haven't hit like in five quarters. Like we need to get new customers at a cost that makes sense and that because of that we need to acquire more customers and we need to do it at a lower end cac. And it was very, very clear from the start that they Had a lot of wasted spend in a lot of places because they didn't have visibility into what was actually happening in the entire ecosystem. Not just channel by channel by channel by channel. And that's how way most businesses work right now. They look by channel and make decision by channel as opposed to looking at the entire ecosystem. How does it all work together? Because they all do work together
- [14:42]
B
when you're looking in. So when you set like in this client's case they had an NCAT goal, what was it ballpark like 500 bucks. And if they sell it for a thousand want to make double?
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A
No, it's, it's more in like 150 below range. So it's aggressive.
- [14:59]
B
Yeah, I just, I missed. I didn't see that. Okay, so you're trying to make 6, 7 to 1 on initial purchase which anyone drool over. Yeah, which is great.
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A
Very good.
- [15:11]
B
Wow, that's. I didn't see that detail. So then when, when you see that in that case. So when you see that the overall because what normally would happen you get all your click based attributions set up or all whatever sources of truth you're going to use and then those NCACs are going to be all over the place based on the ethic down at the granular level. So like your, your branded Google campaign can have a nice low end CAC and AS& all the Google alerts going to tell you scale, scale, scale, you're leaving demand on the table. And that's not true. It's just actually not. You're not, it's not what's happened but they've created a very good case of well this is. People are searching for your brand. If you don't show up at the top every time your competitors are going to grab them. Now in theory that's an easy thing to understand. That's driven a ton of spend on brand across many brands that we see. But that as this case study is going to prove that's not always true. Now you can't immediately cut your brand spread to zero and then move it all. But you, you have to take steps to get there where you're lowering it and finding out when I move ad spend from this channel that I know isn't bringing me new customers to channels that I know are bringing me more new customers and then I wait however long it takes normally for new customers to convert. Does my overall North Star stay the same because it or improve? Because if it stays the same and you've moved like a hundred grand in budget to the top of the funnel and your new, new, your overall NCAC stays the same regardless of the tracking. Let's pretend you have no tracking. You could have no tracking but if that happens then that means you have more overall money from new customers at a massive profitable spend. And so you just keep pushing that needle as far as you can go. Which I think you guys did to the tune of millions of dollars a
- [17:06]
A
month at the base level. When we looked at this we realized two things were wrong is we did incrementality testing for bottom of funnel. So when I say bottom of funnel they sell on Amazon. They also get a lot of business through last click through a Google branded search. So either Google branded ads and. Or SEO. Yeah.
- [17:31]
B
So like if they were in GA4 they're probably going to show a lot of direct traffic, some organic and then the amount that was going to show for Google and Facebook would be just the retargeting or brand. Brand if it's on Google or the retargeting on Facebook, maybe Google shopping it's going to show that revenue. And so all that direct. You got to think of this brand. They're not, they're, I mean they're solid great business but they're not a household name. It's not like yeti mugs or you know, Microsoft. So if people are going direct, it's something up funnel that led to that direct. So every penny there is being misattributed.
- [18:08]
A
Right, so explain direct because I think direct unattributed, unknown is a, is, is a epidemic in this industry because if you were using GA4 or Google Analytics 4 you will see a large portion, maybe 50, 60, even some of the attribution softwares. You're seeing a large portion in that bucket which basically tells you nothing.
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B
Yes. So a direct click means someone just typed in your website and went straight there.
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A
Right.
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B
Or yeah, because if they clicked on a link from somewhere it would show up in Google Analytics as a referral. So direct means all they know is that they have the URL loaded and the user checked out. However your tracking is set up in GA4 usually fire a tag or something. And so that again, I mean almost any brand, particularly 100 million and less you had to do something to get them to know your URL. It wasn't like you were on, you know, you're just everyone's talking about you in the streets. That'd be great.
- [19:10]
A
Unlike awareness had to be created somewhere else.
- [19:13]
B
Awareness, some sort of funnel. And then after that they became aware of you and then you know, however you define your funnel, there's a top where they hear about you, a middle where they contemplate in the bottom where they debate between you and whatever other options they're going to choose. And so direct is saying, oh well, they knew you well enough at that point to type in your URL. So wouldn't it be great to know what led someone to know your URL, type it in and then spend a thousand bucks in this case, like that's valuable info. Every single one's worth a thousand dollars is worth six to one profit. Every single one in there. And so we try to, and so you got to try to decode that to say okay with your incrementality approach it's not just I'm going to cut brand spend or other activities and move them to the profitable channels, it's I'm going to move them to the top of funnel campaigns within those channels that are specifically segmented the messaging. The approach is all around acquiring new customers in the, in this premium pet E comm. It's a mostly a one time purchase. So it's the same type of marketing but in many brands you have a smaller AOV and you're doing different marketing to get the LTV or the bigger upsell or whatever. So it's what you're moving the spend to top a funnel first time purchasers that become worth the value you need them to become in the time period you need it. Which is very different than just saying oh, Google looks good, let's move ad spend to Google. It's no, we're going to take specific cuts from the budget and move them to the top of funnels that we believe are driving the bottom. And if we're right, we're going to hit our North Star goal and we're going to have more overall efficiency, more money in the bank, more profit or more revenue growth for the spend is done by blended row as myrrh or just hitting the NCAT goal, the overall one. And that was just a huge lesson here. It's a little tactical but a lot of people, oh yeah, that's great. And they face the numbers and they don't do it. They just, they're terrified to cut like Google brand because they see like a 10x I took the other day, I see a bunch of people with 10x and they're like ooh, I have to report roas to the boss. I don't want to cut my thing to 10x. That's propping up my overall stats and that's where you got to have alignment with the person cutting the checks. Because then the agency is like, why
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A
did I get cut?
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B
Like, oh, we're the same, we're the same revenue. We were. You were reporting all this great roas and with the same revenue and the same new customers. So why not just do it ourselves and take it in house or try another agency out? That's why they do it. But the agency doesn't change their mind because they see that big roas number and they, they should just have the combo because otherwise it's a lot of agency churn and a lot of reasons for that. But this is a key one in the, in the 10 to 100 million revenue space that I see that you guys. So how you went through that combo, they came to you because they'd already had the frustration and who knows what they were using before. Yeah, but then how did you start the. To me, the fascinating one is, well, the two things for me that I'm curious about. Okay, when you decided you're going to do this move, how'd you communicate it and then how dramatic did you cut and then did you just throw it on top of funnel everywhere? Or did you then use click as directional or what'd you do there? Because that's like the thing that people don't dare to do and they need to do.
- [22:39]
A
So that's the ballsy part of this whole thing is like you have to use and the team that's on this has been doing this for 10 plus years. Knows attribution understands contribution different than attribution. What contributes typically in a media mix that attributes to the bottom line. Hey, real quick, before we dive in, if you've got a brand or marketing tool that marketers need to know about, sponsor the show here at Perpetual Traffic. Perpetual Traffic puts you in front of thousands of seasoned marketers, CMOs and agency owners. So head on over to perpetualtraffic.com to apply to be a sponsor of this show. And we knew that Amazon and Google looked great.
- [23:21]
B
Okay.
- [23:21]
A
And we said we thought. And this is part of the overall strategy is like what we look at, we're not looking at. All right, let's just spend more on that channel because that's easy to do. If I'm spending more on Google brand because I'm getting 10x, that's easy to do. But does it actually help you get more customers? No, it just you spend more to acquire customers at the bottom of the funnel. What the team understood is they had to create demand at Top of Funnel. And there's a real differentiator in this product versus the competition or this product versus no competition. A lot of people don't even know it exists. And it's a great product. And you might be thinking to yourself as a listener of this show, I've got a great product. Nobody just knows that I exist. Well, a lot of it had to do with top of Funnel messaging. And we realized through a lot of the metrics that we saw in some of their meta ads and some of their. They hadn't even done much in the way of Google couldn't really measure anything on the programmatic and, or the native advertising side because we didn't have that as we saw a ton of direct, a ton of unattributed inside GA4 as well as through Triple Whale, which is, you know, the attribution software that they, they still use to a certain degree. However, it was not the North Star. So what we found is that if we really analyze the numbers, Amazon was not creating the demand. Amazon was just capturing that bottom funnel last click. And we said to ourselves, what if we cut that spend? And then determined and measured how many units we're continuing to sell even as we cut spend. Google Brand, like they're googling the name. People find out who you are somewhere else if they've never heard of who you are, they see it on Instagram or may they see it on Facebook. Maybe they see it on YouTube. Maybe they see it just because a friend of theirs talks about it and says, hey, this is a great product. And they go Google it. They go look for it on Amazon. This is how people buy. So that traffic we knew was coming in was ready to buy. And so we said, hey, why are we spending so much on Google Brand for this particular keyword? So our first theory was to do incrementality testing on Amazon and Google. And the hypothesis was is that Amazon was taking credit for conversions from the other channels and that Google Brand was charging premium cost per click for traffic that they would have clicked anyway. So they're overspending on these. So what we started to do is we started to trim down those budgets over time. And I'll actually show you a visual here if you go over to our YouTube channel, Perpetual Traffic YouTube, you can actually see what I'm talking about here. So here's visually representing what we did. So we cut Amazon budget by 91% over the course of many months. You can see October all the way through February. The spend going from fifty some odd thousand down to about four or five thousand dollars a month. We didn't do it all at once. We didn't cut it, didn't hack it. We cut it basically by 50% to start and then measured the amount of units that were sold. So this was a challenging time to do this. And this is where strategy really becomes so, so important is that you cut spend but you're also realizing, okay, this is Black Friday Cyber Monday, so you're going to get a lot of lift here anyway. But what we wanted to see is if can we cut Amazon spend and the units sold basically stay flat or maybe even increase over time. And that's the key. So spending more doesn't necessarily equate to more sales in many cases, as long as you are generating demand somewhere else. We'll get to that component in just a second here. This is the ballsy move that the team was able to make and talk to the client, say, listen, we really feel that you're overspending. On Amazon. This was mostly branded search for their brand name. If you create top of funnel awareness over on meta over on YouTube, people are going to go to Amazon, hey, can I buy this on Amazon? And they're going to type in the name of your product or maybe the product name or maybe the company name, whatever they can remember, or maybe the basic keyword that's similar to it. In this particular case, we're not going to name what that is. However, we said, all right, this was our theory, if we cut spend, can we get the same amount of sales and then as a result of that, spending less on Amazon and spending less on Google, which I'll show you in just a second, will increase their media efficiency ratio and they'll make more money overall. And that's the goal, to get new customers but not overpay for them.
- [28:00]
B
So when you, here's the result spend. Did you, you didn't just put in their pocket, you moved it else. We, we don't have to talk about that yet. But you moved it somewhere. That's also key.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Okay. Because otherwise you could cut it and happen, but looking on the units to the right, they wouldn't stay flat or it looks like they might even ticked up a little from the normal baseline.
- [28:20]
A
Yep.
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B
But basically that spend went elsewhere and it didn't hurt Amazon and it helped the overall business everywhere.
- [28:27]
A
Correct? Correct.
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B
Then, yeah, Your, your, your blend of roas would go up temporarily, but it's because of what you did with this spend that also matters.
- [28:38]
A
It's two, two part exactly. So this is the first part. So I said there's two parts to this whole thing. So we knew that we had good top of Funnel awareness. We knew that Meta was creating a lot of awareness. Their YouTube was spending was creating a lot of awareness. We're also going to introduce Native and Programmatic into the equation in November. So we knew we had a lot sort of top of Funnel we could create as long as we were representing the product from a creative standpoint in an original way which captured interest, captured like that's the key, captured attention, captured awareness, maybe even consideration. And then is like, they're like, wow, that's a really cool product that I just saw on Instagram. That's a really cool product I saw over on that pre roll ad that I saw on YouTube. Hey, once we introduce Programmatic, I saw this cool native advertising, like people don't say this but they saw an ad on native on some website somewhere that says, hey, this is a really cool product. I'm going to go find out if I can buy it on Amazon. So I might not click, I might just view. So we knew we were creating that top of funnel awareness. We're like, why are we overpaying at bottom of funnel? So we started to cut spend on Amazon and you can see the Amazon units basically stayed flat. Now overall units increased, but we'll get that in just a second. So same sort of thing we did same sort of thing we did over on Google Brand. So Google Brand, we're like, they're overspending on Google Brand.
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B
Like let's cut that budget, cut 50% and then move it to where you will tell where you moved it later. And then how long did you wait to measure that? The top line using cpu. That's. You really mean ncac?
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A
I think yeah. This cost per unit, this is the, this is what their vernacular is. But it's ncac, it's cost to acquire in custom.
- [30:25]
B
Okay, so how long did you wait you cut the spend? Because I know how long I would have waited based on the data. I just went and peaked. But how long did you guys wait?
- [30:36]
A
We knew right here we were on to something because we knew that if we could we create the top of Funnel awareness, we would also realize organic revenue would increase. We also realized that email revenue would increase. And then subsequently we also saw that Amazon revenue started to increase. So but
- [30:59]
B
when you cut it though, the first 50% cut were you like, okay, well we're just going to wait like a week and see or a month. I see what you're Paying how long first timeline were you willing to give your hypothesis?
- [31:10]
A
Because that it was really like within weeks. Because in most cases this is anywhere between a 7 and 30 day sales cycle between first impression click 16. Okay.
- [31:23]
B
So that we have a. We have a thing that we. Once we have enough data, we can track first click the first purchase.
- [31:29]
A
Yeah.
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B
And do the average. And it was 16 days was their average. So right in the middle
- [31:35]
A
trip. True. But remember, you're tracking clicks and I think we're getting a little bit in the weeds here. But you're tracking clicks. We're also tracking impressions. Like this is based upon data that our growth strategist is reading. He's reading the tea leaves. Like oftentimes we're not getting a click on that first impression. The thing about like Wakeup Reports and Tier 11 data suite is that it can't show impression like first impression, but it can show click. So we were using our insights on impression versus click to say, okay, anywhere between seven to 30 days we're going to start seeing some movement as we reallocate this budget. Bottom of funnel to top of funnel. Does that make sense?
- [32:17]
B
It does. I would have said so the idea is the click path. I advise that you double. Not because it took two weeks of impressions. But that's just what I've been doing this like 12 years. You need that. That's the first day's cohort of the click people. And then there's the delay of the view people. So to really give top of the funnel. So if you don't have any data and you just have an opinion. Oh, my leads take two weeks to buy or my traffic. Then you should double it. Because if you double it, then you've actually given the top of the funnel strategy enough time to give actual input impact.
- [32:52]
A
Absolutely.
- [32:52]
B
So seven to 30 is the same. Yeah. You want to check seven day. Because the seven day it was like everything's in the tank. That next week would have been tough. But you should have held out at least two. But I would argue it's double what? Whatever. You generally know your if you don't have ideally get data. You guys had granular data. But if you don't, whatever you think it is, double it. And that's how long top of funnel needs to make an impact on the bottom. It's like just always proven out they think that's a number.
- [33:17]
A
Yeah. Double your click. So I think that's the reason why the team realized, okay, if we start shifting this and this was right in the middle of Black Friday Cyber Monday too. We also knew there was going to be a surge just based upon promotions, based upon their promotional calendar. So but this is when you make these types of shifts, it's always a calculated risk. You have to be able to read the data. We did not do this. The first thing that we did, like we had been working with these guys since mid, you know, mid summer. So we knew how everything flowed from top of funnel to bottom of funnel. The growth strategist was reading those tea leaves, so to speak, and knowing that, yeah, there's impression share, but then there's also qlik data. We're looking at inside tier 11 data suite Wicked reports and we're realizing that okay, if we start to shift budget, we'll start seeing the effects of that budget in and around 14 to 30 days thereabouts. And that's precisely what happened. So that was the first hypothesis is cut ad spend and reallocate it to other areas. And that's really the keys to this whole thing is that I wouldn't say that, you know, cutting budget on Amazon and Google brand was the key. The next key was moving budget from bottom.
- [34:34]
B
You had no way to put it.
- [34:36]
A
Where are you going to put it?
- [34:37]
B
If you just moved it to bottom funnel on the other channels, you wouldn't have had this result. You might have had a little blip, but it wouldn't have been this dramatic result. Because that's the issue with incrementality we talked about at the beginning. Like it's worth repeating. So if you, you did, you had the perfect approach right now. But if you just said, oh, I'm going to put it on high row as other channels including meta and you just then looked in your meta in platform and dumped it all in your reach. It would have, you know, retargeting would have had the best stats in all the in, in your meta and in, you know, Snap or TikTok or Pin. Retargeting would show the best. Never mind CTV, it's all impression based. You wouldn't have got these results. So you had to deploy it specifically. The deployments is key. So let's get into that to share.
- [35:28]
A
Here we go. So here you go. So here's what basically happened. So we did it sort of all at once. So like I said, we had been working with them for quite some time. We knew what we wanted to do, but we didn't want to do it all at once. But we knew the data. So we realized that all right, now is as good a time as any because we started to change the mix of top of funnel spend. And in August when we're sort of still formulating this strategy, our top of funnel spend was only 39% thereabouts of overall spent. Most of the funnel was being spent, most of the ad spend was at bottom of funnel, meaning Amazon, meaning Google, Google search, Google branded search specifically maybe some of the keywords that they were trying to rank for. But here's where it changes is like I said, we cut spend but then we simultaneously started to increase on top of funnel channels. We added a new channel in November and December which is programmatic and native. So this combination, this increase in spend is a combination of both meta, very top of funnel, lots of user generated content testimonials, you know, sort of very lo fi types of ads, really good from some of their affiliates that they had used in the past. The point is this is we started reallocating a lot of those creative resources, creative assets under these top of funnel sources which like I said, YouTube, Facebook, you know, Instagram, the meta platforms. And then last but not least, we added in programmatic, so very high end on the top of funnel here. And you can see this shift starts to happen from the 30s into the 50s and we've now increased this about 60 or 70% into March and April right now because right now is actually sort of their busiest season. So you can see the correlative change here is that this is once again CPU is cost to acquire a new customer. The change happened without being able to measure cost to acquire a new customer. Not just any customer, like most of their customers are new because typically it's a one time or maybe a two time purchase is that we were able to measure what the blended cost per acquired customer was. And you can see it perfectly correlates with the shift in spend between bottom of funnel to top of funnel. And now we're under 120. We're actually under 120 now ongoing into April as of this recording.
- [38:04]
B
Yeah, you have to update your chart here.
- [38:06]
A
Yeah, well I mean, hey, it's now it's real time stuff here as much as possible.
- [38:10]
B
Snap, Claude, do it real quick. Hey, here's another month of data.
- [38:14]
A
Slap it in there. Month of data. Well, I'll have to do that as a follow up because I mean what would what I really like to see is how this relates to the busier seasons into spring into summer. Keep in mind we're doing this and the, you know that the least busy season, although there's always like the Christmas rush and there's the, you know, Black Friday Cyber Monday. The point is this, is that it was very strategic as to how you would actually, you know, shift spend here. Hey, quick heads up. If you're marketing to marketers, this is where you want to be. Sponsor Perpetual Traffic and get seen and heard by thousands of seasoned marketers, CMOs and agency owners. We get hundreds of thousands in downloads every single month, all to marketers. So go to perpetual traffic.com to apply for a spot on the show in Q1 or Q2 of 2026. That. The other part to this, like I said, is that we started spending far more on Native and Taboola specifically.
- [39:13]
B
And we don't hear about Taboola a lot.
- [39:16]
A
Yeah, don't hear about Taboola a lot. Well, it's sort of a, it's a sleeper because Taboola and Programmatic, just in general, all the programmatic platforms, which includes CTV Native, you know, all the individual ISPs. The point is this, is that this is very, very top of funnel and does not typically, does not typically have a click, especially on ctv. There's no click on ctv. A connected tv, which is basically the ads that you see. You know, if you're watching Fubo or you're watching, you know, Amazon, like that, that's connected tv. So anything that's, you know, you're actually watching on a connected device, those are the ads that you see there. So that's something that we're now rolling in. And like part two of this case study is going to be how connected TV is now getting them even lower cost to acquire a customer.
- [40:04]
B
Here's the, here's the TikTok. Yeah, TikToks. Absolutely. We haven't even really that are going to just say, here's some content. I love this hair product, or I love this premium pet product, ppp. If they did that and it was just video and it's like, hey, go use my code, which they may or may not use when they go there. That's normally challenging to track. But by taking this macro approach, the click data is just the directional. And then you guys are, you know, executing it flawlessly here. It's awesome to see.
- [40:35]
A
Well, I think you're gonna like this slide right here though, to your point. You can actually start to see changes here. And this is inside, you know, this platform here at all. I don't know if you know anything about these guys.
- [40:50]
B
Yes.
- [40:51]
A
So soon to be updated platform, Scott. This is when we first started working with them in and around, like I said, like late spring, early summertime. So this is comparing. I wish this was over there. If you guys can change that sometime. Anyway, this is comparing May to October and then versus November to today as a matter of fact. So what we are looking here, we're looking inside Wicked reports inside. What the hell is this one called? Command Central Mission control.
- [41:24]
B
Mission control.
- [41:27]
A
New customer value. We see this is comparing the two. So we can see our costs have increased but our revenue has increased. Okay. 44% costs obviously our ad spend has increased. We have scaled up quite a bit. Like in present day our NCAC has come down. Now it's down to new cost to acquire new customers. 109. I said it was under 120 and this is to basically yesterday. So this isn't even counting like to be more fair I should probably show this like from 30 days ago where
- [41:58]
B
the new customer ratio is that up 40%. My old eyeballs here.
- [42:03]
A
New customers are up 42% and then
- [42:07]
B
what your NCAT is down down 3% and then the revenue is up how much?
- [42:14]
A
40 revenue is up 44% and what's the cost?
- [42:22]
B
Bail the bejesus out of it. Over to the left there. Yeah I mean that's.
- [42:26]
A
Oh you can't see it. That's what you're.
- [42:28]
B
This is just an orgy of good news.
- [42:31]
A
Right. So costs are up 37% however new. New customer. Yeah to acquire cost to acquire a new customer is up.
- [42:37]
B
Yeah but then cash down. That's the whole point. When you would want. You want costs to go as high as you possibly can because you're making. This is a thousand dollar products. They're making nine to one.
- [42:48]
A
Yeah, nine to one.
- [42:51]
B
I need to get into premium.
- [42:52]
A
So far so good. Yeah. Anyway I know it's fabulous product and gray era client of ours. So this is one of the things that inside Wicked reports that you can actually see. You can see this is part of our. This is. This is why we need a programmatic like a native advertising little.
- [43:10]
B
Yeah it's under other which stinks for now.
- [43:12]
A
That's.
- [43:12]
B
That'll be changing now that we see how good it's going with other channels. As an other channel becomes prominent enough it earns a seat at the channel table.
- [43:21]
A
I see. So if we. We just clicked into the other channel. This is the reason why we need a connected tv. We need a taboo low. We need all these other channels anyway. We even see their direct mail like they do direct mail. These guys are like a marketing machine and we now can even track that inside here. But you can see connected TV which we just started adding in and started spending on, which is now incrementally like adding to the result here. But these are all the native ads. These are the native ads down here. So you can go into the individual channels and you can see like this is up to present day. This is a preview, you know, part two of the case study. But anyway, the point is this is that you can go into the individual channels here and see exactly what the activity here and everything here is looking up now. Costs down here. Google Ads is down, of course, which is what we want. YouTube spend is up. Influencers is up. Facebook obviously meta is up. Amazon spend down dramatically. But all of these are combining together. We even see the AI assistance line here, which is fantastic. It's a new feature outside. Wicked.
- [44:33]
B
Pretty cool.
- [44:34]
A
Like, this is the number that we really want, which is the top line Mer. This is blended roas. I wish you guys would actually change this too. I'll change it.
- [44:43]
B
Yeah, yeah, change it right there.
- [44:46]
A
Yeah. All right.
- [44:47]
B
There you go.
- [44:47]
A
Look at that. I can just apply changes. Same thing. Yeah, it's the same thing. So it's blended myrrh, which is basically all of the channels together. How much are you spending? How much are you getting back in revenue? And it also includes, of course, your text, SMS measures, email here, last click email, obviously, and then organic. Where's your organic here? I guess that'd be on a different channel down.
- [45:19]
B
Maybe you have. You probably don't show organic. Go into the filters and include organic. A lot of people don't want to see organic, so you'll actually have even more revenue.
- [45:27]
A
All right, so we've now sorted all these columns where we now include organic. Hopefully there's your organic down there. So we've gotten 364 clicks. Organic searches, oddly enough, have increased 122%. Yeah, our total sales have increased 176% and our revenue has increased 128%. Now we know that those organic sales as well as the Amazon sales as well as the Google Ad sales are coming from top of funnel, from here, from our programmatic native connected tv, from Facebook, from meta platforms, probably from influencers and affiliates to a certain degree from YouTube ads as well, maybe even less so on the Microsoft ads. You can see we've increased TikTok dramatically here. It's definitely a channel that we want to explore. The point is this is that you're getting organic sales down here that came from that top of funnel spend. And as a result of that, all of the channels working Together now that we've added in organic, the media efficiency ratio or I put $1 in how many dollars do I make out on all of my media equals $1 in $9 and 74 cents comes back out. And that's what this metric right here shows. And you can sort of see over time exactly how this has worked since the time where we made a lot of the dramatic changes. As I said, this is the time stop that we're using here is basically November 1st when we added in more meta spend, more YouTube spend, more native spend and flip the script on bottom of funnel versus top of funnel. And the changes just continue to move in the right direction here.
- [47:23]
B
So this has been a really valuable recording.
- [47:27]
A
All right, so the principles that we've talked about here on today's show is what this means for every direct to consumer brand that's spending at $50,000 a month. Like Scott, like what, what does this mean? Like if. What are the action steps? If you're a director of marketing, a marketing manager, how do you apply this to your business? Especially if you're D2C and you're whether you have a, you know, CPG product or whether you have a high end E commerce brand or whether you have a service brand or whether you have the software.
- [47:58]
B
Like really it doesn't matter. It applies to all of them is first get aligned on your overall goal, your market and then measure what is that current overall goal doing with a source of truth. It could be many options once you have that, determine where you're trying to get to when you have the source of truth and you're aligned on where your your overall goal is. The strategy and the tactics that you take have to support that and they never end up meaning go spend more. Because Facebook's retargeting roas looks good inside of Facebook. It's just never the case because that's not aligned with your overall goal. All of the platforms are doing their own homework. They're grading their own homework.
- [48:45]
A
Yeah.
- [48:45]
B
And everyone's given themselves an A plus and I mean we know that's not the case. And so your job is to get a to be. You have to get aligned on the right strategy first and then you've got to use, you got to get a source of truth that you trust and will act on. But use that source of truth effectively. Don't go then use it just like just go and say oh, they're going to measure it perfectly based on the overall multi touch and I'm going to use that. Use that as my guidance because then you'd still spend on brand and Amazon because those are always performing the best based on any click based only model.
- [49:18]
A
Right.
- [49:18]
B
What you got to do is use the right either attribution when we get too into tactics. But you got to use things that move your spend in a way that moves your overall North Star metric in the direction you want to go. And if it's that's not happening, you've got to change your approach.
- [49:34]
A
Yeah. I would say this is the biggest challenge with brands right now that have a performance marketing mindset is that there is a certain part to this where there is a bit of an unknown like we were talking about before with Data Suite and Wicked Reports we could track the click. However, what you need to understand is that if you have an impression without a click, how do you read into your secondary metrics to know that you're going to make the right decisions to shift allocate spend from the bottom of funnel channels to the top of funnel channels. So you use a tool like Wicked Reports to give insights to that. But then there's a certain amount of strategy and understanding of the brand and really understanding what are the other metrics that I can view that will give me better insights so I can make these big changes. So like if you're cutting an Amazon spend by 91%, you better know what you're doing. And the only way to have that is to have really good click data. And when you see Amazon revenue going up 33% like we did in this case, like sometimes your best channels, like your best channels, the ones that are reporting the best numbers might actually be your biggest problem in a lot of cases. And those are the ones that you should look at as the ones that you should really think about. What strategically can I do in order to change the result, knowing what the result is? The result here is growth and lower NCAC and increase media efficiency ratio. And the working channels that being able to look at all the individual channels that you're working on. I'm not just talking about your paid media channels, we're also talking about your organic channels as we saw in our screen share here today. Are they actually just harvesting demand that's created elsewhere? And you really have to ask yourself that question, where can I spend or where can I spend my time or my resources? Everyone has limited resources in order to create the result that you're ultimately looking for, which is in this case, lots of new customers, better media efficiency ratio and lower cost to acquire those customers.
- [51:47]
B
Amen. That's a perfect close.
- [51:49]
A
Well, obviously, Scott, I'm not even going to say your name, but I am going to say your name. DeGrossi, where can people find you as the impressed co host today?
- [52:01]
B
If you can find me in Marblehead, Massachusetts, Actually, I'm over in Salem today. I'm over in Salem, Mass, at my office. If you can find me wickreports.com that's best. I'm also pretty active on LinkedIn. Wicked reports. Scott should track me down and that's where I'm at.
- [52:21]
A
Why don't you just get Wicked Scott on all your handles? Like that's the best I know ever.
- [52:26]
B
You know, that might be a good Instagram personal, But I don't have Instagram personal. Actually, I should search for Wicked on here.
- [52:36]
A
All right, we will leave links in the show notes for everything that we talked about here today. Obviously, a lot of this is blurred out, so can't give you all the details here. But I think understanding the concepts of, like, how you actually, you know, scratch that itch. And it's an itch that's very, very prevalent a lot of businesses when you increase ad spend and you get worse results, that's really what this whole thing is about. And thankfully, we were able to remedy the problems that this client had, which was five missed forecasts and then we just shifted budget with Deep Insights and all of a sudden they're on a growth trajectory. Just absolutely amazing. So always helps to have a great product. They've got a great product too, obviously. But everything together is really working to achieve the goals of the client. So anyway, we'll leave links in the show notes over@perpetualtraffic.com make sure that you do check out the video on perpetualtraffic.com YouTube on behalf of my incredibly smart Wicked Smart guest host today, Wicked Scott till next show. See ya.
- [53:45]
B
See ya. You've been listening to Perpetual Traffic.