Why the Funnel Is Dead (And What Actually Drives Growth Now)

Summary

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Perpetual Traffic: “Why the Funnel Is Dead (And What Actually Drives Growth Now)” – Part 2

Podcast: Perpetual Traffic
Host: Ralph Burns (CEO, Tier 11)
Guest Co-Host: Lauren Petrulo (Founder, Mongoose Media)
Date: March 31, 2026

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Episode Overview

This in-depth episode sees Ralph Burns and Lauren Petrulo dissect the changing landscape of digital marketing, asserting that the classic sales funnel model is “dead.” They debate what actually drives growth today, especially in light of evolving advertising platforms (like Meta’s Andromeda Update), content’s ever-rising importance, and the interplay between different sales and ad channels. Real-life case studies—especially in Amazon and Shopify—anchor their discussion, leading to lively disagreements, actionable insights, and a focus on holistic, brand-centric growth strategies for 2026 and beyond.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The “Death” of the Classic Funnel

• Traditional Channel Siloing Is Outdated
  Ralph claims most brands “are still running their marketing like it’s 2019, trying to chop up individual channels” instead of measuring cross-channel impact, which no longer reflects how buyers interact (03:10).
• Attribution Is Broken
  Last-click and channel-specific attribution often misleads brands about where growth genuinely originates.

"We break that down here today and we don't necessarily agree… most brands are still running their marketing like it's 2019, trying to chop up individual channels… The classic funnel is dead."
— Ralph Burns [03:05]

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The Case for Content Investment

• Shift Paid Spend Into Content
  Lauren challenges the “80/20” media split:

  "I'm going to say pull out 30% and invest in content marketing… better content that you're sending your paid media traffic to."
  — Lauren Petrulo [04:08]

• Content and Ads Are Now Intertwined
  Ralph acknowledges that content marketing and paid advertising are increasingly “all the same”—success comes from amplification, not separation (07:29).

• Proof With Case Studies
  Lauren shares how enhancing Amazon product listings (not increasing ad spend) dramatically increased conversion rates, leading (in one case) to “16 products out of stock” due to capacity issues—a testament to the power of improving on-site experience (04:39–06:44).

• Creative Is a Growth Lever
  Both agree that future marketing efficiency will depend as much on content and creative as on media—the “golden ratio” is at least 20% of ad spend matched by creative investment (23:27).

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Understanding Amazon’s Place in Omnichannel Growth

• You Don’t Own the Amazon Customer
  Lauren drives home, "You don’t control your customer over at Amazon. You get a product insert and maybe like 1% of people scan the QR code" [07:54].

• Amazon Ad Spend: Sometimes a Waste
  Ralph recounts a case where they cut Amazon ad spend by 97% with no change to organic Amazon sales, exposing the “halo effect” (08:19).

• The Halo Effect
  Both describe how interventions on one platform (like Facebook Ads or live events) can drive sales on another (like Amazon), and why isolating channel ROI is misleading.

  "You can't isolate to the efforts that you're making and only look at it…they work cohesive together. So it's called the halo effect."
  — Lauren Petrulo [08:58]

• Exclusive Product Strategies
  They debate pricing across Amazon and DTC sites, the use (and rules) of MAP pricing, and how “website exclusives” or bonuses can move buyers to owned sites (12:52–15:37). Ralph cautions higher-volume brands about MAP compliance.

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Metrics That Matter: From Silo KPIs to MER

• Stop Looking in Silos
  Ralph criticizes the obsession with channel-specific ROAS, urging marketers to unify reporting (20:19):

  "Everyone looks at the last click…Well, if you cut…see how well Google and Amazon do and your organic if you completely cut all your spend on Meta…do it for a week and see what the effect is on your business."
  — Ralph Burns [19:37]

• Media/Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER)
  The real measure is MER: total sales divided by total marketing spend, across all channels—including paid, organic, email, SEO, affiliates, and creative labor (21:26–23:45).

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Platform & Creative Trends for 2026

• Meta’s Andromeda Update & Creative Diversification
  Content repurposing becomes a pillar of paid strategy:

  "If you're doing that, you're going down the right path…that’s what’s really resonating on platforms like Meta with the Andromeda Update. It's not just get this thing for 20 off…In your content marketing, you're telling, you're teaching, you're telling your brand story."
  — Ralph Burns [24:55]

• Building Brand > Pushing Products
  Lauren sums it up:

  "Brands that grow their brand will have more success long term than those that only sell a product."
  — Lauren Petrulo [29:47]

• Old Is New: The Soap Opera Example
  The best content marketing was always about integrating products into stories—as with the first soap operas, which were invented to sell soap (27:57–28:37).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Shifting the Mindset:

  "What we're talking about isn't new. It's novel for right now, but it's not new. I mean, since the Babylonian era, that's how you had to look at…wherever your dollar was going."
  — Lauren Petrulo [26:17]

• On Amazon Margin:

  "You lose up to 30% of your cost of sale. Like, it sucks."
  — Lauren Petrulo [07:54]

• On Attribution Myths:

  "As soon…not the Hammock client…but another example…everyone looks at the last click. Everyone looks at everything being siloed…Well, if you cut to…see how well Google and Amazon do and you're organic if you completely cut all your spend on Meta…do it for a week and see what the effect is on your business."
  — Ralph Burns [19:37]

• On Soap Operas and Content Marketing:

  "Soap operas were the original integrated advertising to sell laundry detergent and soap…That's why they're called soap operas."
  — Ralph Burns [28:23]

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Segment Timestamps

• [03:05] – Why the “classic funnel” is dead and the trouble with attribution
• [04:08] – Content investment vs. raw media spend: the 20–30% challenge
• [04:39] – Real-world case studies: Amazon listing optimizations & conversion lift
• [07:29] – Content and ads are fundamentally converged in 2026
• [07:54] – The Amazon customer & the “1% QR code scan” insight
• [08:19] – Case study: Slashing Amazon ad spend (97%)
• [08:58] – The “halo effect”: how channels amplify each other
• [12:21] – Amazon SKU strategies, website exclusives, and pricing tactics
• [14:06] – How brands manage MAP pricing and coupon workarounds
• [18:10] – The dangers of liquidating inventory and arbitrageurs on Amazon
• [19:37] – Attribution’s blind spots & how to test for cross-channel impact
• [21:26] – The only metric that matters: MER (media efficiency ratio)
• [23:27] – The future: creative spend rising with media
• [24:55] – Creative repurposing and Meta’s Andromeda update
• [26:17] – Marketing lessons from the Babylonian era to 2026
• [27:57] – The soap opera: content marketing’s origin story
• [29:47] – Why brand-building wins in the long run

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Takeaways & Action Steps

• Stop planning in silos: unify channel strategies and metrics, focusing on media/marketing efficiency rather than platform-specific ROAS.
• Allocate significant budget (20–30%) to content creation paralleling your paid spend—great content powers both organic and paid growth.
• Rethink Amazon: Don’t just dump all products and ad spend there—use “halo effect” awareness, exclusives, and pricing nuances to move some buyers to your owned platforms.
• Analyze overall efficiency: Use MER as your guiding KPI, factoring in total sales and all marketing costs, including creative and labor.
• Brand equity and story are key—outsmart fleeting tactics with sustained, demand-generating brand-building.

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Perpetual Traffic delivers sharp, actionable advice for 2026’s digital marketers—reminding listeners that what’s old is, indeed, new, but only for those measuring what matters and playing the omnichannel long game.

Transcript

[Ralph Burns]

Hey, before we get into today's show, my marketing manager finally convinced me to run a wild experiment in this episode because he wanted to prove what the conversion engine can do for your brand. So we are giving away three of our $10,000 deep dive audits for free in this audit. And this isn't one of those audits that you get from some AI generated bot. This actually takes us two plus weeks, seven or eight of our team members and it is incredibly in depth. It will give you insights into your media buying, your creative, your actual business metrics and find out exactly where the gaps are and where your growth is stalled and what we can do about it or what you can do about it when you get the audit. Now here's the catch. We only have three spots, so head on over to tier11.com audit right now. Fill out the form and let's see how we can scale your business in the coming year.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Spending more isn't going to result in better sales. What I would rather you do is like maintain current spend or even if you have to take a little bit of our spend, invest in.

[Ralph Burns]

If you are selling on Amazon and your Amazon looks extraordinarily great, it might not be because your Amazon agency is so brilliant. It might be because we had a

[Lauren Petrulo]

client that wanted to turn off all their Facebook ad spend. It's not working well and we said hey, like we just be mindful. You're going to have immediate MER now, but it's going to hurt you long term and within three months we saw you're listening to Perpetual Traffic.

[Ralph Burns]

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 Tier11. Obviously not in my regular office where I usually am. I'm on this Florida tour here for a couple of weeks seeing some clients, seeing some of our employees at tier 11 as well as doing a couple of podcasts with Lauren. This is part two of one of those and just so much fun to do these when you're actually in person as opposed to doing it through Zoom or Riverside is the software that we use here. You can really get deep into exactly how she looks at things, how I look at things. And I think there's a happy medium between the two of our opinions. And we don't necessarily agree on this one here today because we, we really look at meta and the creative diversification Andromeda Gem update as just a transformative update for a lot of businesses. And a lot of businesses are looking at the wrong metrics and they're not looking at the right types of metrics because the classic funnel and we can blame Amazon, we can blame Russell Brunson from Click Funnels for this is dead. And most brands are still running their marketing like it's 2019, trying to chop up individual channels and figure out which channel is the one that's getting the most conversions and or engagement, all of that. And we break that down here today and we don't necessarily agree on this. We don't see eye to eye. Usually we see eye to eye in a lot of our shows here, but on this show we did not. So the goal here is to learn and get better at this stuff because it's constantly changing and constantly fluctuating in the marketplace right now. So that's probably why you're listening to this show here. So today's show, part two, the funnel is dead. Here's what the full funnel actually means to you now. Part two, take it away, guys. Really, your branded spend is really is the only spend that you should be spending on is your the keywords for your brand.

[Lauren Petrulo]

I'm going to challenge your 8020 flip. I'm going to say pull out 30% and invest in content marketing. And that's producing the content that tells the story, that's creating the blogs or videos.

[Ralph Burns]

Media.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Yeah, but like if someone's like, oh, I'm going to flip it up. Like I'd actually take 20 to 30% of the media spend, pull it out and make better content that you're sending your paid media traffic to.

[Ralph Burns]

Okay, fair enough. Like in this particular case, these guys are doing a fair amount of content, but they look at that as that's content market. We're talking about like pure spend. But yes, to your point. Absolutely.

[Lauren Petrulo]

We've like, we did this huge test. Like we have a client that's like, hey, I want to grow our sales 10% month over month and like the listing and the product display page. So selling across multiple channels in multiple marketplaces, we're like, here's our current conversion rates. We can increase spend and we'll increase volume marginally, but our profit is going to Start deteriorate. Spending more isn't going to result in better sales result. Spending more is going to result in more sales. What I would rather you do is like maintain current spend or even if you have to take a little bit of our spend, invest in improving your listing, improving your product display page, improving our conversion rates there. And then that's where you're like turning on the money and turning on the faucet. And we did this again for the Amazon because in the product display page it just takes longer for Shopify stuff. So that's why I'm like on the Amazon it's way easier. We did an Amazon experiment. We saw an immediate conversion lift and we also use like a pickfu tool. So pickfu we're allowed to like when we look at listing or a plus content that we're changing out, we can do and pay for consumer insights and have predictability forecasting. Will this perform better or not guessing? I mean you never know until you actually launch it. But those small changes led to significant rise. Like we, we finally hit or roas that surpassed our tacos at Amazon. And then for like the product display pages on, on Shopify stores, like one of our clients that we worked with, they're in a consumable space, they're in a beverage additive situation. When the product display changes and that conversion rate uplifted, they didn't have to spend any more money on it. To the point where we had a capacity issue and we had 16 products that were out of stock because we were able to have a park display page that told them where does this work? How do I want to use this? Other things that this fits through. So that, that's just the piece of sometimes spending more to get more sales volume. Doesn't make sense. When if you look at again the other pieces of funnel, what is, what are the paid ads interacting with? That's all. Like I would just, I would consider if you're looking at investing more in social, you need to have content you're sending the social stuff to or you need to have content that you're producing that will be socializable, not just do a full shift of budget, which I'm sure like you're saying like they already have that content stuff.

[Ralph Burns]

Talking about media spend just in general. But that's no, I, I hear what you're saying. I, I don't disagree. I think that a lot of that content and that content marketing can be turned into advertising within the Meta Andromeda platform.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Yeah, I mean I love doing that like I told you, like my Horsemen strategy. I'm bringing all the Horsemen to the ads. Apocalypse, you've got everything inside of your Avengers playback. So you're sending a lot to product sponsors, like pages or in this use case, the homepage. I love sending traffic to existing content that's already proven itself. If you look in search console, what are the words that are ranking? If you're looking at analytics, what are the pages that have an ex. An exceedingly above average page time. That content has proven itself organically and I want to amplify the F out of it in a paid social play.

[Ralph Burns]

I back to my earlier point, like you used to think of content marketing and your socials. I think we can lump content marketing in on that as a separate thing from your advertising, when in fact it's actually, it's all the same.

[Lauren Petrulo]

It fits into the umbrella.

[Ralph Burns]

The entire umbrella. Absolutely. I would say this on your Amazon example, and we get this question a lot is you don't control your customer over at Amazon.

[Lauren Petrulo]

So when you get nothing, you get, you get a product insert and maybe like 1% of the people are going to scan the QR code. If you have a good reason. Do you have a product warranty? Do you have like an additional product you're giving to it? Yeah, you, you just, you give Amazon everything. You, like, lose up to 30% of your cost of sale. Like, it sucks.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah. I mean, it's anywhere between 15 and 18% oftentimes. I mean, that's.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Yeah. And then if you're also paying for storage fulfillment, like, oh my gosh.

[Ralph Burns]

I mean, if you can flip that script like that. There's another example of this is probably going to be another case study that will do during professional traffic is where we decrease the Amazon ad spend by 97%. 97% for a client. We're spending 50, $60,000 a month.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Okay. Do you remember their ACOs?

[Ralph Burns]

Their Amazon sales did not change at all.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Okay. So all their PPC efforts was just taking credit. And then they were just doing brand initiatives. There's no way that they were doing there. Okay.

[Ralph Burns]

But anyway, like, they're better now. The point is, is we're like, why are you selling anything on Amazon? Like, yes, you need to be on Amazon, of course. But the thing, however, you should incentivize the. Those buyers to buy on you.

[Lauren Petrulo]

I mean, yes, you want to incentivize them. Okay. So on this, I, I'll like take a little bit. You're going to have people that are only ever going to buy on Amazon and they're the halo lift. Just like Facebook and Google Ads have to work together. A different example, we had a client, so completely different. They did an info product, they did a masterclass, an online event and that event they only looked at the Shopify sales and I was like, wait a second, we had a huge uptick the same day. We don't like, I can't say oh look how much better our stuff did. No, look at this. If we look at a 30 day lapse and we lurking at tacos like that went down and you can look at the daily average and when you did this live event, it had an impact on your Amazon sales. So you can't isolate to the efforts that you're making and only look at it to that because they work cohesive together. So it's called the halo effect. And for the Amazon, for people that are not Amazon, look, you're missing out on buyers. There are people that are only ever going to buy on Amazon and they're loyalists.

[Ralph Burns]

We all do it.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Yeah, we all do it.

[Ralph Burns]

Discover a brand over on Instagram or Meta or Facebook or wherever on Chromatic, you name it and then the first thing you do is like geez, I wonder if I can get that for you know, one day shipping.

[Lauren Petrulo]

And there's Amazon, there's marketing stuff.

[Ralph Burns]

Basic thing it is, I do it, you do it, everyone does it if

[Lauren Petrulo]

I want it faster. And then it's like if you have FBA fulfilled by merchant, all that stuff, it's like. But at the same time you can do price arbitrage and you might have a strategy where like I want more people on my.com so I'm going to have a higher price on Amazon or you'll have website exclusives.

[Ralph Burns]

Be careful though.

[Lauren Petrulo]

I. Yeah. Oh. I mean I've done it in both ways. I've got case studies in both examples. Well that's assuming like especially like we have clients that are reselling so like not if it's just a seller account but a merchant. All of this stuff like I've seen it in both ways where we have better pricing on Amazon but we have exclusive inventory on dot com. We have better pricing on dot com but then we have a higher price on Amazon because we want to own that customer. But I think you should. Well, I mean I have my opinions. We've seen it work in both ways. I don't have an opinion straightforward to say one is better than the other. It's just those are considerations you have to dig into because you don't Own your customer on Amazon but you'll get subscriptions. The subscribe and Save on Amazon is worth its weight in gold and people have a hard time doing that on their dot coms. And I hate when someone's gonna be like I'm gonna sacrifice it on Amazon. I'm like, you have subscribe and Save on Amazon and that's predictable cash flow.

[Ralph Burns]

You need to understand what your metrics are. Yeah, I mean you need to know what your profitability is. Like this does go back to MPIs marketing performance. It always understanding your metrics, like you need to know your metrics. You know your subscribe and Save on Amazon might be insanely profitable for you.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Or you might have aces that don't have like your cost of sale. Like it doesn't make sense. So again we had, there was one that we had taken over and we looked at all, I mean yeah, branded keywords, that's a notorious one. But what we saw was spend was being put on a product where we knew the cost of goods and the like we were losing 70 cents on the dollar on this one product. Well we weren't, they were. And so we shut that entire product off and that's where we're like, hey, we have to understand is this a good product? And you have to look at all the marketplace, how many competitors are, what is the seasonality of your keyword terms. Like all that stuff comes into play.

[Ralph Burns]

You need a, you need an Amazon strategy specific to Amazon. If you're an E commerce brand and you're putting, you're just putting all your products on there without any consideration. We see this all the time. Different prices, different bottles, you know, ounce sizes.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Like oh, and there's like unparented listings.

[Ralph Burns]

Unparent, like just chaos. And people are going in there and then could be price shopping against your website. Like wow, I can get the 8 ounce bottle for $3 cheaper over on Amazon than I can on the, on your website. Like wait a second here. Like that. That is the reverse. You gotta be able that. You have to have a very specific Amazon strategy. If you have lots of SKUs. No, you don't necessarily have to put all your skus on Amazon.

[Lauren Petrulo]

You don't, you don't.

[Ralph Burns]

You can have a very, very strategic way of approaching it.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Website exclusive, website prints, website flavors.

[Ralph Burns]

You know they're going to see your ad, they're going to click over on Google, they're going to look on Amazon, they're going to find out like where can I get this thing for the best price? The Quickest and fastest shipping. I get that. I understand that. Not a problem. There's also another way that you can do this, is that you can actually, you got to be careful about map pricing when it comes to Amazon because if you undercut Amazon on site for your advertised price versus what you sell it for on Amazon, you could get banned.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Look, let's get real. There's. There's a lot of stuff that Amazon does that's shady and shiesty. I, I'm like, I'm feeling like PTSD right now of like, do check.

[Ralph Burns]

They do check again.

[Lauren Petrulo]

They'll shut stuff down.

[Ralph Burns]

Like, we've had brands who have had unequal. And map pricing is basically the price that you anyway in their terms of service for Amazon. If you don't know, you need to have the same price on your website as you advertise on Amazon. That I'll have.

[Lauren Petrulo]

I mean, like, you could be right. I, like, I, I don't recall that. I know that there's issues, especially like MSRPs, like the minimum price that you have to do if you are, if you're a reseller and stuff. But we have done different pricing across the both. I mean, maybe like, I'll have to check what this is.

[Ralph Burns]

If you're high volume, you got to be very, very careful. We have a supplement customer who has very high volume. And the way that we get around that is we actually have this.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Oh, but you have coupons that you can apply that's what onto the. Okay, sorry.

[Ralph Burns]

It's a good way. But also you can actually say you can, you can have the price on Amazon. Let's say it's 69. 59. Whatever it is. 59 on Amazon, you can have the same pricing over on your website. $59. But exit out and say 20% off sale.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Yeah. Okay. When you were saying, I was like, I was like, I know. I have client examples where we have different pricing.

[Ralph Burns]

Right. You can get it for, for whatever it is.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Shoot. For a second I was like panicking and being like, oh, my gosh, am I violating terms of service?

[Ralph Burns]

You got to be careful.

[Lauren Petrulo]

I mean, I'm done. Double check. Of course. But like, we have done this for years.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah. All I'm saying is that if you're higher volume, you're on their radar for that because they want to make sure.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Because they want to buy you out and replace them with your own basics. Let's be real.

[Ralph Burns]

We're talking like this is a client that spends hundreds of thousands a day.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

So very, very like and pushes a lot of volume through Amazon that it's just an eventuality. They list on Amazon, of course, but we want to get them over on our continuity program over on the website itself.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

So that's how we deal with that issue because Amazon has been an issue in the past. The point is this. It's like you want to, sure, you got to sell on Amazon, but what can you do potentially to incentivize people to buy on your site? Maybe it is a better discount after like the continuity purpose or you have

[Lauren Petrulo]

a different purchase or you have what other bonuses, a better unboxing experience because Amazon is going to do their fulfillment in their own place.

[Ralph Burns]

That's right. It's going to send.

[Lauren Petrulo]

You have to be careful of Amazon arbitrage in that same capacity. Because someone could then say, so this has happened. They did a huge bulk sale. So they were trying to clear out inventory that had near expiration date. And so they had done like a buy three get five free moment. And then there were some Amazon arbitrageurs that bought like 200 units, put them all on Amazon, listed it a little bit lower than their current sold all the inventory and they made money on your products.

[Ralph Burns]

Hey, one of the reasons why you're probably listening to this show is because you're trying to figure out how to finally scale and grow your business. And if you've been a longtime listener here, you understand that a lot of the things that we talk about are because we've tested them and done these exact strategies, including creative diversification, all the Andromeda changes, all the stuff we talk about with Google, with social, with email, website conversion, CRO, all of that stuff. If you're listening to this show, you're probably wanting some kind of deeper level of understanding of what does this all mean to you. Well, we want to prove that to you by giving away three of our $10,000 deep dive audits. In that audit, we'll look at your creative, your media buying, your campaign structure, your website, your actual business metrics, including all the MPIs we talk about on the show all the time, to discover where the gaps are and why your growth has stalled. Now, this isn't one of those AI audits that's automated. This takes our team about two weeks to put together and it's so comprehensive, it blows away customers like this. So here's the catch. We only have three spots to give away here. So head on over to tier11.com audit to claim your spot. Right now. Fill out the form and, and let's see how we can scale and grow your business in the coming year.

[Lauren Petrulo]

It showed up as a great sale within Meta. Like, holy smokes, is row. Is that really high? And then we went into asking the client, like, oh, yeah, we have this huge, like, wholesaler. They had 200 orders. It's like, what one? I was like, I didn't know. We didn't put limitations on that. And they're like, look, we're just happy to get that inventory. It's going to expire in nine months and we don't want to sit on it. And then two weeks later, we saw the listing and I was like, cool. We've now been undercut on the pricing. Not by a little, by a lot, because they were giving away anyways. Yeah, don't do that, don't do that, don't do that.

[Ralph Burns]

So that's one aspect of the funnel here. That's the sort of. We talked about the halo effect here a bit. Obviously, you know, when it comes to Amazon, if you are selling on Amazon and your Amazon looks extraordinarily great, it might not be because your Amazon agency is so brilliant. It might be because your meta agency or your programmatic agency is creating all the awareness that's being fair. Over at Amazon, we had a client

[Lauren Petrulo]

that wanted to, like, turn off all their Facebook ad spend because it had a lower roas and app. And I'm like, it's, it's not working well. And we said, hey, like, just be, just be mindful. You're going to have immediate mer now, but it's going to hurt you long term. And within three months, we saw their Amazon sales. Organic went down. Organic sales went down. That's why tacos went up. And then we had also seen that our Google Ads weren't performing as well. And so that's like, like, hey, there's a consideration of the person who's learning about it. Like, these all have to work together. And I know it's really easy to say, well, Google's bringing me the best leads, so I'm only going to put all my money into getting phone calls from Google. But it's bringing awareness. And if you are remiss to think that awareness on these other channels means that this user is like, I only look at Google art Meta, you're ignoring that your funnel is beyond the marketplace that they're seeing and interacting your ads are. This counts for dark socials, this counts for referral marketing. All of that stuff makes a difference.

[Ralph Burns]

You're making fun of it, but it's Such a epidemic of misinformation. Exactly what you're talking about. Because as soon like in this example for this other client, not the Hammock client, but I do have another example on the Hammock client on related to this is everyone looks at the last click. Everyone looks at everything being siloed like, oh, I want you to improve my meta. Google's doing great and Amazon's doing great, but meta is the problem. Well, if you cut to, here's the easiest thing to do. See how well Google and Amazon do and you're organic. If you completely cut all your spend on meta, like just do it, do it for a week and see what the effect is on your business.

[Lauren Petrulo]

I give you at least two weeks because you're, you'll have results because you have people that sell the life cycle

[Ralph Burns]

of the product is. But like if you really do believe

[Lauren Petrulo]

that, but don't do it, don't do it. Please don't do it. You're gonna like hurt.

[Ralph Burns]

That's the best way to do it.

[Lauren Petrulo]

I mean it's like petty me inside. It's like, do it, do it. I want to show you like prove me right. But I don't need to be proven right. I've, I've seen it proven right multiple times. So I don't recommend doing it. You can scale back.

[Ralph Burns]

The best case scenario for when I look at our best performing clients, like whether it's in the personal injury law niche or whether it's in E commerce or whether it's in digital products, is if you're spending ad spend. If you're spending the majority of your ad spend on interruption based platforms, we'll just use meta.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Okay.

[Ralph Burns]

You know, Programmatic is also a big play and a lot of our clients now, and all you're really doing is spending just a little bit on your branded search on Google and maybe a little bit on some of your higher intent keywords on Google. That's the best scenario because you are creating all that, all those conversions happening bottom of funnel.

[Lauren Petrulo]

When people break the demand elsewhere, the

[Ralph Burns]

demand and the awareness and the consideration is happening on the other platforms. And so if you're looking at things in silos, you are mistaken. That's not how you do digital marketing in 2026, not how you did it in 2025 either, by the way. But here we are in 2026 and for people who still continue to look at individual silos, it's like, oh, my Meta does this, my Google does this, my TikTok does this. You're looking at the only metric that really matters for us when we look at clients is media efficiency ratio, which is how are all the platforms performing together? And that includes email, that includes SEO, that includes affiliates tracking everything in one place. Yes, we do tier 11 data suite to do this. Okay. So we want to get that, get that over at tier 11, of course. But you can do it on the back end, on your back end CRM and you can pull manual spreadsheets to be able to show this. And that's the thing that really matters. So add up all your ad spend and then figure out what your sales were for that particular week, month, divide that into this and then you got your media efficiency ratio and that's actually how you're advertising and how you're marketing.

[Lauren Petrulo]

I'm gonna think of like in the 2026, like in the coming months because like I keep going back to like the content marketing investment. And I know that we were talking about like the ad spend and that's, that's where you were focused earlier, but I think now at least I'm having better conversations with new people of understanding that there is an investment required in the creative. Like we talk about creative demands, like we have, we call it like the golden ratio. If let's say someone is spending a hundred thousand dollars a day, they should have at least a $20,000 a day, same matching rate. So a 20% invested into content that you're going to be using in that type of ad spend. So and like that, like I'm, and all the things that you're saying like counting ad spend and that's your marketing efficiency ratio. I think in the next six months the investment people are making into the content that empowers the ads is going to start having a play in someone's marketing efficiency.

[Ralph Burns]

I would say that. I mean I look at it two ways, like if for marketing efficiency for mer, for my company, for example, I actually look at, I substitute the media efficiency ratio, which is how we do it with our paid advertising.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Right. What's the spend which makes sense marketing.

[Ralph Burns]

So I look at what am I paying for my marketing manager for my video, you do labor and I include I labor in addition to the ad spend. You know, like I don't even add in like my time if I really wanted to. But we don't go that far. So to your point, yes, you have to have a well rounded marketing plan. It's not just all advertising. However, the marketing and the content marketing that you're talking about can be very easily amplified like this show right now. Like, we could use this. This is a podcast. It's an audio, there's a transcript, there's a video. We can use that in our ads to promote Tier 11 or Mongoose Media. Like, this is content we're producing here, so we're investing our time into doing it. To your point, I do think that all of that content that you're talking about can be repurposed into part of your advertising and marketing on that side of the equation as well. And I find that's. And if you're doing that, you're going down the right path right now because that's what's really resonating on platforms like Meta with the Andromeda Update. Because it's all the other things that you're doing. It's not just like, get this thing for 20 off, here's my thing, go buy it. In your content marketing, you're telling, you're teaching, you're telling your brand story through, you know, education, through maybe something that has something related to your business.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

So I would agree with you there. I just think that the worlds like, to start off today's show, like the worlds have really completely intersected and they completely overlap almost.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Didn't this, didn't they used to be completely intersected? Like, I think of like Jon Hamm and Mad Men days. Everything was intersected. We like got into this like, yo, yo of a space where like I need, I get overwhelmed by the KPIs and because I have more KPIs available, therefore I must be smarter. But, but you used to look at like our grandparents marketed that way where everything was intersected and then we like went in the swing of the pendulum the opposite way. Almost. Like, how are you talking about? Like with AI, we become over reliant on it. We are over indexing on KPIs. Yes, they matter and they're leading indicators, but we have to look at it at large. And I feel like I'm going to blame the Bezos and the Brunsons of the world that had us so focused on one click upsell had us so focused on like same day, like buy right now, this instant gratification that a lot of digital marketers hurt themselves by getting like horse with blinders on. And they this, what we're talking about isn't new. It's novel for right now, but it's not new. I mean, since the Babylonian era, that's how you had to look at all of your. Wherever your dollar was going.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah. I mean, what's old is new. Again, really?

[Lauren Petrulo]

With this and Benjamin Button case of marketing, we should call this episode the Benjamin Button case of marketing case. That's not gonna fly through.

[Ralph Burns]

I don't know. That's gonna fly.

[Lauren Petrulo]

It's funny in my head.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah, it's funny in your head. I don't know if Claude will like it too much. My best friend. No, it's. It's true. Like, I even think back. And Dice uses this example all the time, which I think, like, it's too bad that he's no longer a marketer, because he really is. Like, wait. My marketing manager finally convinced me to run a wild experiment in this episode. Because we want to prove what the conversion engine can do for your brand. We are giving away three of our ten thousand thousand dollars deep dive audits for free. We're going to look at your creative, your media, buying, your actual business metrics to find exactly where your growth is stalled. This is two weeks of our best work, but we only have three spots, so go to tier11.com forward/audit right now. Fill out the form, and let's see how we can scale your business.

[Lauren Petrulo]

He's never going to give it up.

[Ralph Burns]

He's never gonna give it.

[Lauren Petrulo]

It's like how Harry is no longer a royal. Okay.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah, exactly right. Dice is still a marketer. Ryan Dice, that is, if you guys don't know who is who. Used to own this podcast, by the way. But we bought it from him about four years ago. He said, you know, the soap operas.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Oh, my gosh.

[Ralph Burns]

The greatest mark content marketing invention ever, I think, in so many ways, because the whole concept behind soap operas was to get women to watch content and see women in the soap operas, actually using the soap that sponsored the soap operas.

[Lauren Petrulo]

That's where soap opera came from.

[Ralph Burns]

Soap operas, where our content marketing was the original integrated advertising to sell laundry detergent and soap. That's why they're called soap operas.

[Lauren Petrulo]

What?

[Ralph Burns]

Yes, it is absolutely true.

[Lauren Petrulo]

I'd like. Yeah, by Procter Gamble, 1930s. When you're talking about soap operas, I think of, like, the 1990s IntelliNovelas. And I know they existed before because my godmother, like my best friend's mom, was on a soap opera for, like, 10 years. One of the guys I dated, his mom has been the lead writer for a huge soap opera for her entire career. But I didn't know that soap operas were around in the 30s, because when you're saying soap, I'm thinking, like, 1950s. I thought soap operas came out in the 90s. Going back to everything at the beginning, everything that relates to the Hammock brand, why you had success is because you're looking beyond the demand for the sale. You need to build demand for not just your product, but for your brand and for what is distinguishing your product against the others. And we went back and forth a lot today. You got to do the open. I'm going to do the outro. We went back and forth a lot today about how control. Yes. This is my podcast now in that, like, there's a lot that goes on. And so I know it seems hard and it seems easy and it seems complicated. And every day it's like kind of like a hormonal shift and what's happening in marketing. But the bigger thing here is brands that grow their brand will have more success long term than those that only sell a product.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah. Well said.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Thanks. Well, thanks for listening to this in person library podcast. I am Lauren Petrulo, founder among US Media, and I'm in front of my amazing and wonderful real person. Whoa. It is sweaty.

[Ralph Burns]

I don't know why I'm so sweaty.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Can't take the heat of our discussions.

[Ralph Burns]

That's it. Ralph Burns. That's right.

[Lauren Petrulo]

That's my amazing co host.

[Ralph Burns]

Thank you so much, so much.

[Lauren Petrulo]

We're so happy you had you on this episode. Thanks for joining on behalf of Ralph.

[Ralph Burns]

See ya.

[Lauren Petrulo]

Da. You've been listening to Perpetual Traffic.