A (3:08)

I am. I am a nerd. I am a bookworm. I've danced under the party tree. I've been to Hobbiton. Hobbit town. Hobbiton. Yeah. I. Yeah. No, like, I've been exactly where they filmed in New Zealand as a total nerd. Gandalf the White over Gandalf the Gray. But, you know. Yeah, I'm glad that you've at least consumed all. All films now. Like, I remember listening to, like, the books on CD back when there were books on cd, like, there's a road trip. And I was like, oh, what is this? And we rented them from the library so I could listen to, like, some 1920s rendition of the different books. So it was one of my first ever audiobooks.

B (3:49)

Wow.

A (3:49)

In the car. Yeah. But we would drive to Florida every year, and that was 24 hours, so that's.

B (3:55)

That's perfect for a Lord of the Rings audiobook. So if I'm a little bit off today, Lauren, it's just because it's like the jet lag is for real. Like, I'm not on any other drugs aside from caffeine here, so. But we are not going to get too far into portable rounds lore off Ralph. I'm high on life just doing this show with you and also talking about some cool stuff that we're just going to continue to beat into your heads as perpetual traffic listeners. Sorry. Because we're finding this is just. Everything that we're seeing right now is counter to how you've done marketing in the past, especially when it comes to the meta platforms and how Google and how Amazon and how TikTok and how they all sort of work together. But most Importantly, top of funnel, we're really seeing there is a tremendous amount of education that we need to do, not only for our own clients, but for new people that are maybe coming on board tier 11 and also training our staff, like media buyers who have been doing this stuff for, you know, 10 years or so is. And thankfully they're all moving in this direction as we learn more and more how to navigate this new world of the Meta algorithm, which we call GEM Andromeda Lattice. Like, there's a lot of different names for it, but it's transforming how we market ourselves and transforming a lot of businesses. I was just actually on a client call just within the last hour and we were talking about the exact sort of stuff that we're going to talk about right now, which is if you are optimizing all of your ads and you're just looking for sales inside the platform and you're turning stuff off that doesn't have sales but has impressions and has spend, you are going to be in a world of hurt. And we tested this with over $50 million of our own money. We're now doing it in the last six to 12 months in our own client accounts. And we're seeing we're learning more every single week, it seems like. And myself and John have been on many of these shows here with rebroadcast from our cheerleven lives that we do our ad labs, we do every single Friday, 2:30 Eastern, over on the Tier 11 YouTube. But every single week it seems like something new is happening. So I know you've had a tremendous amount of experience with all of this, but the theme of today's show is that meta really isn't optimizing for your sales anymore. And when you really think about it, you're like, why would they not do that when in fact they are? But it's not what it appears to be. So you and I talked before we hit record here today. What are your thoughts on that and sort of how are you managing this? Because it's a very different way of looking at how to optimize and how to scale ads in order to achieve the results that you want for your clients and or your own business.

A (6:47)

I think the biggest shift that we've been pushing on this subject matter is that like, yeah, Meta is not just optimizing for your sales. Like, it's not an atm. It's not. I expect sales and I want my ads to do the heavy lifting of the sales, at least from our side at Mongo's Media. We're like shifting a lot to say, like, what is the responsibility of the ad itself? And on Meta or any platform, it's to curate. The ideal audience is to find a qualified buyer to introduce your service or product to. So the ad's responsibility is to, like, you're earning, you're earning trust, you're buying attention of qualified buyers, and then your ad is earning their trust to jump into the next step. What happens after the glitch, which is going to a landing page, which is going to a calendar, which is submitting a lead to which then the sales cycle starts. Your ad can promote a sale and your ad can be responsible for sales. But I think a lot of this is where matters. Not just pushing for the sale anymore is because your ad is not responsible wholly for the sale. Your product, your reviews, the landing page experience, all of that comes together. And Meta has been preaching for a while that it's not just a sale. The landing page experience can impact whether or not your ad gets any delivery. And I think, Ralph, what you and I have been talking about a lot is that your ads that are not optimizing for sales are just as important because it's optimizing for your funnel. It's marketing and advertising in one that.

B (8:15)

Requires us all to look at different metrics as opposed to just the conversion numbers. And I think to determine whether or not an ad or an ad set or a campaign is actually is working in a lot of ways. John and I have talked about this multiple times. He actually shut off conversion tracking in one particular piece. He still got the same result. So it's almost like conversion tracking doesn't really matter per se, although I wouldn't suggest doing that. But it's all these other metrics. It's impressions, it's hook rate, it's your attention, your retention, hold rate, all of these sort of secondary metrics that we used to look at and say, all right, those are nice to look at. But now we just talked about, like I said on this client call, we're like, we're looking at hook rate and hold rate as the two metrics to determine, okay, which creatives do we need to make more of? Which ones do we need to do more iterations of? Not necessarily, you know, even using the same creator for that type of content. I'm usually talking about, like, video here. So the vast majority of the creatives that we're finding working right now, and with very few exceptions, are video content that is typically is either ugc some kind of creator content and or free content that's done by either affiliates or whoever it happens to be. The point is this is that video right now is absolutely moving the needle. But we're not looking at the CPA that's associated with it to determine which creatives we should iterate upon. Which is really interesting. And it's still, I mean, as an old school marketer here, like I have a hard time sort of, you know, wrapping my head around it. And if that's the case, I know that's the case for a lot of listeners here and especially for, you know, clients when we're on client calls or even prospects that we're talking to that might want to hire us as their agency.

A (10:04)

So much of media buying, like we don't even have media buyers anymore. Like they're growth specialists because you have to care about the entirety of the funnel. So so much is now in on the ad. It's like so many marketing agencies need to be creative studios in order for them to compete with the creative diversification demands of Andromeda and just to meet with the evolution of what the consumer is wanting for the ads. But when you're looking at on a creative level, like individual ad, you can't look at the acquisition to determine in isolation is that the leading indicator of this being of a successful ad. Then you have to like pull a bird's eye view out, look at the campaign and understand how they're all working in aggregate. Because there's that concept where these ads work in tandem with each other. It might not be the reason why they take action, but it's adding more and more knowledge so that the user who has survived a trust recession, who is going through an AI blitz right now and is just needing to know more before they invest their dollars. You have to know that looking at the cost per acquisition, cost per result or whatever it is is not the only thing that matters to your account. Like I know what we talk about like MPIS and the metrics that matter, but there's other leading indication, leading indicators. These like hook rates we have retention rate, ramp rates, all those numbers like if you're using status, because I like statics for warm, they're still working for us. And carousel statics are some of the, the cheapest inventory we can have right now. Because people don't make carousels. They're just, it's a burden on the resources. But even so like the see more rate which is the button to expand any copy. Like all of that comes into play and meta's evaluating all of those additional metrics to determine whether or not the campaign at large and the success of your sales is going to work or not. So if you're hyper focused only on the sales, meta doesn't care about it to that extent and you shouldn't either.

B (11:51)

Yeah, this is just a whole different way of, of looking at things. And I'm not discounting images by any stretch. I'm just finding that the thing that is really carrying most of the weight.

A (12:04)

Performance weight.

B (12:05)

Performance weight is video because that is top of funnel and you, you may get the conversion like the last click conversion is typically is some kind of more either sales or product focused type of ad but to buyer like bottom.

A (12:25)

Funnel solution aware everything. But the thing doesn't matter is you look at it I think like what 70% of all time on Instagram, their inventory, what's available, what people are consuming is definitely video. Video are reels in the meta ecosystem. And when you think about a picture is worth a thousand words, every second of a video is worth a thousand more. You can do much stronger storytelling when you're able to expand upon a video which takes more time to consume. And then you have like you said, the retention rate that you guys are looking at is important to know. Are people consuming the content they don't consume? They can't convert. It's it's very like you consume, I want to convert, you give me information, I want to consume more. So videos, yeah, absolutely. You can tell a much bigger story. And then of course when you're either doing white listening or ugc, whatever those components are now you're also understanding someone's intonation, you're understanding their reputation. They're putting more into it than a single image can do. Yeah, and again, I'm not saying that like videos convert really, really well and then they just tell a bigger story. It's just a last click attribution. It's the static at least for what we're seeing across is getting all the credit. So again if you're not looking at everything in aggregate, you're like, oh, I'm only going to invest in static images. But the reality is is all of the consumption, all of those other leading indicators are telling you that these video ads are being consumed. Remember, social media is social first. So if you're able to socialize, you can have more direct comments on people reacting to more content in your videos and then your videos. Like when you're using Instagram and you're sharing the stories or you're reposting, when do you ever share an individual Image, like a static image isn't socialized the way a video is.

B (14:03)

All right, so what we're really talking about here, this is just a quick Google search. And I think this is really important because usually when we get any kind of insight and or direction from Meta, we're very skeptical as to whether or not it's accurate or not. This is just with Meta, with Google, I think as soon as you get on with a Google representative, you are going to be straight to the wrong.

A (14:29)

You're going to be worried.

B (14:30)

We have tried like dozens of Google reps, for whatever reason, they just steer you in the wrong direction here. But what we're really finding is that.

A (14:38)

They'Re sales members, they're not customer service.

B (14:41)

They're really not customer service. So this is just a quick Google search. So if you, if you're not watching this, make sure that you do head on over to perpetualtraffic.com forward/YouTube. This is just a quick Google search that I'm doing. And this is how easily available this stuff is now because all of this is very valid. So what you're seeing on your screen here is hook rate and hold rate on meta ads and what is considered good, what is considered sort of average and what is considered low. So let's first define and these are not things that, and I'll show you just a quick example inside one of our ad accounts here. This is not the stuff that you would normally think meta ads would be optimizing or giving more spend to, but it absolutely is correlative. And we're seeing this with more impressions, more reach, because hook rate and hold rate, especially on video, are the two things that we really find that alongside with outbound click through rates to a certain degree. These are the two different metrics here that we're finding that meta is really optimizing for. So the whole title of today's show is that meta isn't optimizing for your sales anymore. It is, but it's doing it in a different way.

A (15:51)

Like technically it is. Yes, because that's how you're going to spend more money. But Adam Mosseri, the CEO of Instagram, who talks about GEM the most, he's like saying whether it's an ad content or organic content, their goal, meta's objective. Yet they want you to make money, but they need people to stay on platform for them to make money.

B (16:07)

Yeah.

A (16:07)

And in order for them to stay on platform, you have to have quality content, whether that's an ad, organic. It's the same thing that's the whole purpose of the, the gem update. But what you're like here, it's like, it's so quintessential to it. You have to understand what does Meta want for you to get what you want? What you want is sales. What Meta wants is retention time on app. Of course, clicking off of it, everyone knows it's like, oh, I don't want that. But if it's solving for a consumer or person's like relevant need, that product or service answers their question, meta's fine. Like, yeah, take that traffic off there so they can come right back and learn more and more and more. So like, again, it's, yes, you're optimizing for sales in terms of like where you are in the bidding auction. But in terms of success, Meta is not focusing on the sales. It's these, it's these leading indicators.

B (16:49)

It's these leading indicators. So when you're, when you're running ad campaigns, you're not looking for lagging indicators, you're really looking for leading indicators. What is going to lead to more engagement and ultimately sales. And these are the metrics that we're finding right now with video specifically. So let's just define what these two factors are. First off, hook rate is three second views over impressions, so measures how well the ad stops. The scroll makes sense. Hook people in. We always talk about the hook. It's the first three to three seconds.

A (17:23)

So and we aim for 30%. Like we, we have it on our like weekly sheet. We have to look at, at the account. Like, are we hitting. So we have like at least amongst you every week we do a full like account and we have. Hook rate is like one of the KPIs we have to look at to see if the new creative made a difference. And then our performance review meetings every Friday we look at on a per ad basis, is it hitting at least. We say 30%. That's our target. What you can see on Your screen is 30 to 40%, which is amazing. I don't know what number you use. We use 30%.

B (17:53)

So we use as a benchmark 25%. Like if it's below 25%, which is exactly in line with what I mean. Our friends over at Motion, we obviously had the CEO of Motion on just a couple of weeks ago. We'll leave links in the show notes for that. Yeah, so Raza was a great guest, so definitely listen to that show, watch that show. So 25 or greater is sort of our benchmark. It's sort of like our Mendoza Line, so to speak, which I don't know where that actually came from. That's a base.

A (18:22)

Mendoza's in Argentina.

B (18:23)

I know it is, but apparently like it, the Mendoza line is, I think in Major League Baseball, it's a line that if you're below that batting average wise, you're probably getting sent down to the minors anyway. The point is, is like if you are below a 25% hook, your ad is probably being sent down to the Minor League. Okay, 30% and higher is great. And I'll show you an example of one that's hitting both of these metrics so pretty strong on the hook rate. Average hook rate, 30, 30 to 40% is great. Average hook rate. You should be. No, you should be no less than 25. And you'll see this. If you actually go into Meta, the ad platform, you'll see this and we'll show it in just a second here because Meta will sort of self select those ads that are getting a hook rate less than 20 or 25%.

A (19:13)

Well, all of a sudden, only for videos.

B (19:16)

Yes.

A (19:16)

Static SL do not have it. It's only for videos. So if you're like, oh, I have zero verification. Remove the statics.

B (19:22)

It's okay, it's all right. The statics are probably getting you a fair amount of the conversions on the back end. But the point is everything is working together. And that's what content diversification or creative diversification is all about, is different pieces of content and hitting or striking, probably that's not the greatest word. Or engaging your prospect in different parts deal with depending on where they are in your funnel, to show the right ad at the right time to the right person. And usually at top of funnel, we see video is a great way to engage. And we were using these hook rates and these hold rates as leading indicators as to what we we should iterate on to ultimately continue to scale up to get new customers. And that's the goal here, is not to just sell to the same old customers over and over again. You can do that through your email marketing. You do that, you can do that through your socials to a certain degree. What we're talking about here is new customer acquisition. So what we're finding is an average hook rate of at least 25% is sort of that line. Anything less than that, probably something that meta will not give a whole lot of impressions to, not a whole lot of frequency to. But if you're in the 30, 40% range on hook rate, you're doing pretty well. That means your video is engaging. There's some exceptions to this which we're not going to get into, but that's one of our first indicators.

A (20:47)

And that hook rate just on the video because it's the first three seconds, like that's the visual hook. So again, going back to the raise episode, like there's different types of hooks and again I'm just going to go on the static. It's the See More rate where that's you're getting people to click that See More. We use that as a 1.05% as a benefit. I want at least every one in a hundred to be engaged with the first 140 characters and click See More to read it. But it's like in this hook rake, it's making sure that you have something that's visually appealing. So that's where you know, people have like lo fi or hi fi type of videos. You just want to have something that stands out in someone's feed that visually gets them to watch at least 2, 3 seconds. So that like in that when you're like I'm looking at which ones and how to improve for us, at least I don't know how you do it. Like our. The hook rate for us is really more on the visual hook because I, I need to stop the scroll. It's like we call it thumb stopping magic. Like because assuming everyone's on their phone and using their thumb to scroll, I need it to be interesting enough that I want to see what more has to be said. And then the hold rate which you're going to get into next is more about the quality of the content. I've. That's how I use it like that hook rate has to be attention grabbing because you're buying attention ideally of qualified buyers.

B (21:55)

Absolutely. It all sort of plays into each other. So the big thing here is hook rate is 3 second video views. And you can just do this as a setting. We'll show it inside Ads Manager. We're going to have to blur this out a bit for privacy for one of our clients. But hook rate is one of the things that we keep on on a regular basis in order to determine is the content actually engaging the potential prospect. The second one is this one here, which is something that I don't think too many people know about, which is hold rate. So this is 15 second views divided by three second views. So this measures how well the video retains attention after the initial hook. You've hooked them in, do they stick around? And that's really sort of that secondary. I Would say these are sort of 1, 2 on metrics, hook rate obviously really important, but if you lose them after that three seconds, then are they going to get to the point where, you know, you're actually presenting the part of the video content that's going to engage them to the next level or maybe convince them that this is something that they need or produce a desire that they didn't know that they had? All these two things really do work in concert with each other. And hold. Right. Once again, it measures how well the video retains attention after the initial hook. So we look at both of these things here pretty strenuously, like on each individual ad. And this usually correlates with impressions and with frequency. So a strong hold, super strong hold rate is 40% to 50%. You know, low hold rate is anywhere between 20 and 30%. We've got right around like 30% thereabouts is sort of our line of demarcation here. So anything that's below that. Mendoza line, you know, Mendoza line, so to speak. But yeah, so those two metrics right there are key. And you can kind of see like just through a Google search, like, yeah, this is what meta is actually stating this specifically. And it's just a Google search away. We obviously were taught this and were passed along this information. We found it to be exactly the same way in the wild, which is not always the case with all these ad platforms. You always need to be a little bit suspect. You need to actually put your own money behind it and validate it. And I would say that these, these percentages are dead on. Thoughts? Concerns?

A (24:15)

No, I mean, I think it's, it's for sure, like it's your, your hook rate is. Can you stop scroll. Did you, did you buy their attention? And then the holder is, can you retain their attention? Because if they don't consume enough, they won't know to convert. Like a lot of people. Like, maybe if you're listening to like, well, your hook rate is too low, then what you want to consider, like how to improve that is you have to remember that you're designing for second zero. As soon as someone gets it, it's second zero. It's showing up before anything even plays. You have to capture the attention. And then you, you don't want to have that bait where I'm like, oh, hey, like, boom, I popped a balloon. Whoa, that got my attention. What's happening here? And then if you don't have that thread through, if the storyline isn't going, you don't have an engaging enough ad. For someone to get to the answer. So like those two pieces like you, while Meta, you're optimizing at the campaign level for the conversion event. You need to have so many conversion events in a 50 day period so that you can escalate. But with the demands of creative investigation, with a shift of people being just media buyers and really a lot of agencies are now becoming creative studios, is that at the ad level of what is being consumed by the individual, not just the content? Like Meta is prioritizing that a lot over just going for the sale. And that's where like you and I have both been like screaming like stop turning off ads. Because people are turning off ads that don't have credit to the acquisition, but they could have really strong leading indicators, a hook rate, the retention rate, like all of that to tell you that this is what well consumed and that's where I'm like really bullish on. Your ad is not responsible for the sale. Their ad is responsible for buying attention of qualified potential prospects and then earning their trust. Your ad has to earn their trust into why you're going to earn their dollars. And then you'll complete the conversion with either more ads and more content or the content on the landing page. It's a content consumption play. I mean sometimes you'll get the person where you're like oh my God, this is exactly what I need. Because they've been consuming someone else's content nonstop but never got the exact answer they're looking for. Like that happens. But this really shows that if you are ignoring these ad KPIs like INS in app platforms to know and understand the success of the images and the videos and the carousel. Whatever your ad assets are, you are ignoring one of the most important, important things to Meta's opinion on whether or not you're going to win at the auction.

B (26:39)

Yep, exactly. Let's go into a real world example here. Hopefully you can see my screen here. We're just going to go into an ads manager account. This is just a, this is a newer client. We're ramping them up basically from zero sales to now significant sales, a couple hundred a day. They're basically zero before they started with us. And you won't be able to really see the creative here nor the ad account name. But this is really more instructive than anything else. So I actually have here on our column like book hold rate and you can, what we always do is we will customize our columns and this one here is one that we actually saved as a, as a Default setting. You can simply search for either hold or for hook right here. There's a lot of different ones. Hold rate percentage is what you want to find. And then here's your hook rate. Hook rate percentage right there. And obviously we just saved that as a preset. So when it comes.

A (27:34)

But it's also great because let's be clear, they you had to manually calculate those. Like you had to create a custom KPI last year. Because if you want to do. You had to do these calculations, create a custom conversion so then you could sneak it in and then it's fine. Like okay, we get it. Landing page percentage, consumption, hook rates. All this is finally showing up. So anyways, just for all those that have been doing it for more than a year, you do not have to do the calculations anymore.

B (27:58)

Yeah, you don't have to do the calculations. That's a really, really good point. That's why I'm showing it here. I think it's so vital. If you're running a marketing department and you have people that are doing this, they should have this as a preset and they don't have to figure out the math anymore. It's pretty simple math. But like these are the two biggies. Like I said there are a couple of others. There's click through rates, there's frequency, there's a few others we can talk about on other shows. But important is this. So this is one of the campaign. I could click on any one of these. I just sort of pick this one just as a random. You can actually see I've forced ranked this by amount spent in the last 30 days. No, actually by impressions. Sorry, the last 30 days here. This is a relatively newer campaign which.

A (28:36)

By amount spent an impressions. You almost have a one to one correlation. So yeah, it's the same.

B (28:41)

Absolutely. And you know you've got the reach obviously you've got like I don't have frequency in here but the frequency is probably like 1.5, 1.4 thereabouts for this ad. So we're inside a campaign. We've got actually four or five different campaigns for four or five different products as an E commerce brand. And this is one ad set. Broad targeting once again, like no targeting. The creative creates the targeting us. And now let's just click into this part which a lot of people always go over to edit but click on charts and you can actually see. Yes, this is getting some purchases which is. Yeah, you might not be able to see this here but it's within KPI. It's not quite where we want it to be. The overall KPI for the entire brand is actually decreasing week over week which is great. This ad keep in mind is the top of funnel ad. This is the ad that is engaging the user, just introducing them to the brand, talking about how great it is, giving the features and benefits to a certain degree. But also the most important part. And don't look at this, this purchase new client, this is new customer. This is a capi import with edge tag. There's something that we do for every one of our clients. The purchase NC or purchase new client or new customer is 34 bucks which is good, not ideal. But the overall is as this ad is being used with other ads. Your image ads like you said, sort of all the different types of creatives that we use inside creative diversification. It's creating a blended cost per acquisition, not just by ad. And I think that's the key here. So this one actually is just one that I randomly put and it's got a hook rate of 46%. So you actually go back to our.

A (30:28)

Hook 25% benchmark, mine's 30. And then this is superseding which shows again like whatever is the prompt for the beginning, the hi fi, the lo fi production. Is it like a face in front, is it product forward, whatever the like designing for second zero. The first three seconds has engaged people enough that they didn't just blur past it.

B (30:49)

Right. I mean I would like to see this on the hold rate maybe a little bit higher. Like it's at 18% they said we're, we're around 20, 30% hold rates but the hook rate is so good at 46%. This is a winning ad. This is a reason why Facebook or Meta is giving spin to this particular ad. You won't be able to really see it but it is a video ad and you can actually go down but.

A (31:19)

You can see there's a well like for like us not to it for ld blurred out. But you can see there is a face to camera and a product that's showing. So it's, you know that there's two things. It's a real person and then there's a product. So that type of component. If you were to see this like looking at this again in the charts what you can see is like you have the information, the video play, the average play time, the hook rate, the whole break. If you do anything on YouTube, this is all the information at a content consumption on YouTube that's applied to the ad. So you can't neglect what is happening with the ad itself. It's just like you can't look at only the sales performance because Meta is not looking at only the sales performance. Like you can take this and see that like at there's like the steep happens at like second three or four where the average plays eight seconds is an entire. The video in and of itself is 33 seconds. Like what someone could do of an iteration is okay, maybe this video gets reshot with a different person and then they tighten up how long it takes for this or the. The meat of what happens in that slope decline. We did a really good episode with Tom Breeze where he was talking about like the video stuff. It's like you're looking at the. The ad itself, the creative and like opening up this charts. Like I've. We. I don't think we've ever even shown this on the show of someone going into the charts to look at like how the individual ad is performing. Like you're looking at last 30 days. I definitely don't recommend looking at anything less than seven days. But you want to understand how was this video done so that you can make more visual hooks like this 46% rate phenomenal. And then you can find what this next one you're showing has now a 21.45% hold rate, which is even better. But it has the same intro hook is my guess.

B (32:58)

So we just actually played the video. So if you're not watching this over on premature, I don't know if you're really going to be able to see this, but we'll blur it out so that you can see some of it. We're obviously going to blur out the brand here, but the point is, is people are being hooked in by the initial three seconds. What I would love to see is them hanging around longer and maybe the product presentation of how it actually works maybe a little bit earlier in the video. So this is the feedback that we're going to give to our creative team and say, okay, this is a winning ad, where it's a winning hook rate. How can we get the hold rate? Maybe upwards of, you know, 30, 40, 50%. And so there's always a way in which you can optimize this. This one has a hold rate. The last seven days was 21% hook rate of 54%. So the hook rate is great hold rate. I'd like to see it a little bit higher. The point is, is this is actually pulling in a lot of awareness and. And leading to a lowering of an overall ncac. And this is how you look and analyze your ads, especially video ads now, because I'm not going to show you all the images. You can actually see on the left hand side here we've got a ton of ads. I mean there's at least 25 in this.

A (34:08)

Creative diversification.

B (34:10)

Creative diversification.

A (34:11)

And they're all.

B (34:12)

Not one video. None of those.

A (34:13)

Meta only. Only have meta turns them off.

B (34:16)

Absolutely. Meta will turn them off. I'm air quoting. By just simply starving them out for impressions. And that's how they turn them up. And then once we see those impressions basically going down to, you know, just very little, like in the single digits, maybe a couple of hundreds, we might just pause that ad just because that is paused it already. Just so we don't have to think about it, just for optimization. But the point is this, is that, you know, the average play time here is like this is a 33 second ad. Average playtime is about 9 seconds. I think we can probably do a little bit better job. But the point point is like the overall how this is working in aggregate with all of the other creatives in this creative diversification strategy. It's working and it's scaling this company. And those are the types of things that you really want to look at. And not just pure cpa, which is a very different shift for advertisers and for marketers just in general. Because if you're shutting off those ads and if you're shutting off some of your most engaging content, like I said, there are some exceptions. One other example of the exception to this where we have a client which can't really say what their industry is, but their ad is like an ASMR ad. It's their product, it's the people that are actually providing the service, creating like this ASMR kind of feel to it without any pitch. So it's like we're getting tremendous hook rates, but the hold rate and the sales conversions of the entire campaign are not where we want to be. So what we decided, we said, okay, we're getting great on the ASMR sort of hook rate side of it. How can we introduce the product a little bit earlier and then do some audio overlay? It was, the audio was actually just sort of the asmr, like the rubbing, like that sort of rubbing your hands together kind of thing that people love.

A (36:08)

I was like rubbing what? Ralph, Careful now.

B (36:11)

Okay. I can't really say exactly what it said. It's not in one of those niches. You're, you go right to like the, you know, you go right to the gutter.

A (36:20)

It could have been like a bowl full of jelly, like Santa Claus. Look, the money God, it's about to be lunar New Year. Think about the buddy God, and you rub his belly for some luck.

B (36:28)

So, so what I'm saying is that if you can use hook rate and hold rate in combination, plus looking at the entire ad set as to how you're doing from a new customer acquisition standpoint, that's how you're going to be able to read this data here. So I think bottom line is this, is that yes, Meta is in fact optimizing your ads for sales, but not the campaign.

A (36:50)

They're. Let's take it back. They're optimizing your campaigns for sales, but the way they're evaluating the efficacy of your ads, the way they're saying, how am I going to choose you in the ad retrieval engine? How am I going to choose you? They're not choosing you based off of sales and at the campaign level. This is an individual race and the ads are being chosen and the ad ads are being qualified. It's like almost like if you're evaluating dogs, right? Like it like dog shows. There was that really funny movie RIP Katherine o'. Hara. What was it like? Best in show where you're like, what's the like length of the tail between the two legs? All of those things. Met is evaluating your abs as if they're dogs and best in show. And so they're trying to put the best dog forward so that you can optimize whatever. It makes sense in my head.

B (37:34)

Okay, Ralph, only you would and draw that analogy. I love it, though. Anyway, however you get this, like, you have to understand that there is a different way of, of looking at all this right now. The point is this, is that you can't look at your ads and your campaigns and your ad sets in Meta the way that you did years ago.

A (37:53)

You have, because you're not a media buyer anymore.

B (37:55)

You're not a media buyer anymore. You are a growth strategist. And yes, that means utilizing the data that we've seen here, leading indicators that ultimately lead to lagging indicator, which is conversions. This is the kind of stuff that we're looking for right now. And this is the sort of thing that's really moving the needle with creative diversification especially. So, of course, wherever you listen to podcasts, please leave a rating. A review allows us to get this podcast out to more folks to teach them how to do this the right way with metrics that matter and growth that scales. So on behalf of my amazing co host, Lauren e Petrulo, ciao till next show. See ya.

A (38:40)

You've been listening to Perpetual Traffic.