9.7X MER in 2 Months: Meta Advantage+ Case Study Pt. 2

Summary

Perpetual Traffic Podcast: Episode 9.7X MER in 2 Months: Meta Advantage+ Case Study Pt. 2

Release Date: June 27, 2025 | Hosts: Ralph Burns and Lauren E. Petrulo

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1. Introduction to the Case Study

In this episode, Ralph Burns and Lauren E. Petrulo delve into a detailed case study focusing on the implementation of Meta's Advantage Plus Sales campaign. They explore the strategies and outcomes of running a diversified creative campaign for a specialized glove company based in Vermont. The discussion emphasizes the critical role of creative diversity and strategic adaptation in modern digital marketing.

2. Creative Diversification in Paid Ads

Ralph introduces the concept of creative diversification, highlighting its increasing importance in the landscape of paid advertising. He shares insights from their internal document, the Content Diversification Grid, which outlines eight different types of ad creatives:

• Founder Story
• Us vs. Them
• Product Demo
• Customer Testimonials
• AI Ads
• Features and Benefits
• Face-to-Camera Whitelisting
• Positioning Test
• User-Generated Content (UGC)

Quote:
"Content diversification. These are eight different types of ads... sometimes in this particular case,... we refer to them a couple of different times during today's show."
— Ralph Burns [00:53]

3. Meta's Advantage Plus Sales and AI Integration

The hosts discuss Meta's substantial investment in AI, noting that Meta and Google have been pivotal in advancing technologies that power tools like ChatGPT. This integration aims to make advertising campaigns more intuitive for media buyers. However, Ralph points out that while AI handles technical optimization, it does not generate creative content, underscoring the ongoing necessity for diverse and engaging ad creatives.

Quote:
"Meta and Google invested in the technology that is now powering ChatGPT... they're investing $65 billion in AI right now to make campaigns like this one that we're highlighting here even more intuitive for you as a media buyer."
— Ralph Burns [03:43]

4. Content Diversification Strategies

Lauren elaborates on how content diversification aligns with Meta's changes, emphasizing the need to educate and engage users through varied ad formats. She explains that breaking down comprehensive content, such as a webinar, into smaller, digestible ad pieces allows for continuous user engagement and education prior to conversion. This approach not only improves user experience but also enhances campaign performance by aligning with how users consume information today.

Quote:
"We're taking our landing page content and syndicating it now as an ad and then throwing ads behind it the same thing."
— Lauren E. Petrulo [16:37]

5. Improving Conversion Rates through Content Education

The hosts highlight a significant improvement in the glove company's conversion rates by implementing content diversification. By educating potential customers through multiple ad formats before they reach the landing page, they observed a 68% increase in conversion rates year over year. This strategy ensures that visitors are already informed and engaged, reducing friction during the purchase process.

Quote:
"Our conversion rate's up 68%. Hey. And it's. This is where we started to launch."
— Lauren E. Petrulo [20:55]

6. Analyzing Campaign Metrics and Performance

Ralph and Lauren examine the metrics of their Advantage Plus Sales campaign, discussing how scaling ad spend did not negatively impact the cost per acquisition (CPA). Instead, the CPA remained relatively stable even as the budget tripled, demonstrating the effectiveness of their diversified creative approach. They also touch upon the importance of focusing on top-line growth rather than getting bogged down by in-platform metrics.

Quote:
"And my CPA rarely goes over 20 to $25 more. More under 20s."
— Lauren E. Petrulo [33:46]

7. The Evolving Role of Media Buyers and Strategists

A significant portion of the conversation addresses the changing landscape for media buyers. Ralph asserts that media buyers remain crucial but must evolve to incorporate strategic thinking and creative collaboration. The role now intersects more with strategists, requiring adaptability and a deep understanding of both traffic management and creative execution.

Quote:
"Media buyers as a whole a hundred percent needed. But the media buyer has to learn, adapt and leverage."
— Lauren E. Petrulo [36:51]

8. Handling Campaign Challenges and Guardrails

The hosts discuss scenarios where campaigns may not perform as expected, emphasizing the importance of patience and allowing the algorithm to optimize over time. Lauren shares experiences where initial negative metrics were reversed, leading to improved performance. They stress the need to measure success through top-line metrics rather than solely relying on in-platform data.

Quote:
"The hardest thing to do though, is to not touch this. That's the bad part."
— Lauren E. Petrulo [42:51]

9. Conclusions and Key Takeaways

Ralph and Lauren conclude by reiterating the significance of creative diversification and strategic adaptability in leveraging Meta's Advantage Plus Sales. They advocate for a holistic approach that combines effective media buying with engaging and varied creative content to drive sustainable business growth.

Final Quote:
"If you're not experimenting with some of these new fangled campaign types, especially within the meta platform Advantage plus Sales, this is the place where we're going to be giving this type of advice for you and your team."
— Ralph Burns [43:25]

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Key Insights:

• Creative Diversity: Utilizing a variety of ad formats can significantly enhance user engagement and conversion rates.

• AI Integration: While AI optimizes technical aspects of campaigns, human creativity remains indispensable for generating effective ad content.

• Strategic Patience: Allowing algorithms to optimize over time is crucial for campaign success, even when initial metrics appear discouraging.

• Evolving Roles: Media buyers must adapt to include strategic and creative responsibilities to remain relevant in the changing digital marketing landscape.

Conclusion

This episode of Perpetual Traffic provides an in-depth look at the practical application of Meta's Advantage Plus Sales campaign through a real-world case study. Ralph Burns and Lauren E. Petrulo offer valuable insights into the importance of creative diversification, strategic patience, and the evolving role of media buyers in achieving substantial growth and improved conversion rates.

Transcript

[Unknown Speaker A]

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[Ralph Burns]

Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic Podcast. This is your host, Ralph burns, founder and CEO of Tier11. Flying solo here today. But today we're rebroadcasting a formerly known as Tier 11 Live. Now it's called the Ad Lab. Every Friday, 2:30pm Eastern over on the Tier 11 channel. That's tierleven.com YouTube. You can check these out. It's myself and John going through the latest in in advertising traffic. And today's show particularly is about a test that we started about three weeks ago and we talk about the importance of diversity of creative. And I'm going to show a screen share here just for a second because I think this is super important and sort of run you through this a bit because we're now seeing this diversification of creative as one of the most important things when it comes to running paid ads these days. It's not necessarily the strategies. John will go through some of the strategies here today. This is the lower spend campaign that we started a few weeks back. We rebroadcast part one of this, this is part two. This is the follow up. I think these are super important as you sort of follow along very tactical episode. If your media buyers are not onto this right now and you're looking at your internal team or maybe you're running your ads yourself. Advantage plus Sales is the future and it is because Meta, one of the early investors in some of the founders of Chat GPT, if you can believe that. I was actually listening to a podcast today when I was traveling. Meta is very, very smart. Meta and Google invested in the technology that is now powering ChatGPT, powered obviously by the Nvidia chips. Like the super powerful Nvidia chips. This was the start of AI six, seven, eight, nine years ago. They're investing $65 billion in AI right now to make campaigns like this one that we're highlighting here even more intuitive for you as a media buyer. But the thing that they're not creating is creative. So I'm going to share my screen here, something that we use as an internal document. We haven't ever shared this with anybody. John has talked about it multiple times on these ad labs or formerly known as the tier 11 lives. And here it is right here. This is called the content diversification grid. And these are the types of creatives that John and our creative team are now putting into all of our campaigns. Sometimes in this particular case, the case study that we're talking about here today, part two, he only has three or four of these. So we refer to them a couple of different times during today's show. And by the way, this was a show that I did on the road.

[John Moran]

So the audio is a little bit.

[Ralph Burns]

You know, less than ideal, but doesn't really matter. Just listen to what John is talking about here and also head on over to our YouTube channel at perpetualtraffic.com forward/YouTube so you can actually see how this campaign is taking shape.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

You can still hear my voice here.

[Ralph Burns]

Still suffering some of the effects of lingering effects of COVID even two, three weeks later. So content diversification. These are eight different types of ads. Founder story, us versus them, Product demo, customer testimonials, AI ads, features and benefits, face to camera whitelisting, positioning test and ugc. And John will be talking about three or four of these in this campaign that we're testing here today, which is basically he has not touched it in two to three weeks. So he started this test with Advantage Plus Sales and is still getting $15 NCAX on $120 NAOV. And if you don't know what that stuff is, if you don't know what NCAC is and NAOV is, you need to refresh yourself and get the copy of Our download for MPI's marketing performance indicators because this is the future of marketing right here. And that's [e-mail] MPIM as in Mary PI. So check that out and also check out our YouTube channel because I'm showing this content diversification here in a screen share. So without further ado, let's get to the episode with me and John. This week's show is part two of our experimentation on a low volume, low ad spend account for Advantage plus Sales. Take it away boys.

[Unknown Speaker E]

You're listening to Perpetual Traffic.

[John Moran]

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[Unknown Speaker E]

Straight from the performance kitchen. Actually, we have a tagline here. I was just read live from the lab. Join us in our performance kitchen cooking up chaos. Watch our weekly test. Go live, learn what converts and steal the formulas.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

That's awesome.

[Unknown Speaker E]

How about that?

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

I love it. Sounds great.

[Unknown Speaker E]

So anyway, all right, well, here we are in the ad lab and John is cooking up performance in the performance kitchen. You've got some really tasty recipes brewing, I hear, and especially some follow ups and some of the ones that some of the recipes that I think we, we, we got the list of stuff we have to get in the grocery store. We put all we got at home, put it all together, mashed it all up, threw it in the oven and I think right now you're ready to like pull it out and tell us like, is it done yet or is it, you still need another 20 minutes, like, what's going on? So yeah, give us an update on some of the things you've been doing in the ad lab.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Absolutely. I think to continue on with that analogy, you were like watching every step where it's like, now we're going to like, we're going to cut it this way. Now we're going to put in the oven like we're, it's been baking for a while and what we expected to happen is sort of happening, which I like to back up a little bit. And rather than just diving right into the metrics, what we are absolutely going to get to, especially on my small test of the new Andromeda update and how it is acting and what the new model is for kind of go forward. I want to talk about the philosophy, a bit of the reasoning behind Meta's changes and also even Google's changes. The interesting part about the Andromeda update and the interesting thing about having all of the ads inside of one ad set and also having the users locked into that ad set is forcing almost advertisers to go back to traditional way of marketing. It also is providing a better user experience for the people who are on Meta and Instagram, which is I think the number one factor for the change. Because people don't want to be like picture of a dog, 20 off. Then it's like my update from my cousin at 30 off. And so it's not. They don't want it to turn into kind of like this big, big sale platform. They're going to ruin the user experience. People are going to just send a hop off. They want to grow, learn, engage, educate. They want to be involved like a form, like a community. And so what Meta has been producing terms of the content diversification, the founder story, the ugc, the ad AIs, the testimonials, like all of those different ways that they're doing content diversification is to educate the user on a story, engage them where they may be at in their funnel and lock them into that ad set so that they can continue to produce results from that campaign because they're finding more and more opportunities. It essentially removes a lot of the highly structural technical media buying, not the technical media buying, but the highly structural technical, like if they did this on Tuesday, then we do this with them on Friday kind of thing. And I have another test that I'm running with another company that, that I show a little bit of it on this live here. But then I also have my main case study. But I want to give you some different variations. But the reasoning as to why is something I think I kind of skip over a lot. And what I have been seeing more often in the way that Meta is deploying those changes is more to how people are subconsciously buying nowadays. And I believe this is something that we all do, but we all have that cognitive dissonance where it's like it's not necessarily our frontal lobe as aware it's more subconscious when we start to engage with purchases on social media. What we're actually doing is being force fed content on the front end of our phones like through Facebook and meta and YouTube. And then the landing page is simply a confirmation of what I've already learned. So an extreme case of this. And it's something, someone, something I'm working on with another company now, but they have an hour and a half webinar that they push people through for an education and then they sell them the full course at the end. And it is a fantastic company, fantastic product like their core offering is spot on, second to none, excellent. But I think that the original thought process on deploying the model might be still a little bit old school. And I say old school as in like a year ago kind of thing. Like it's not old school at all from a digital marketing perspective. But what we're testing now is taking their hour and a half webinar and breaking it up into smaller chunks. And those smaller chunks are becoming creative.

[Unknown Speaker E]

Oh yeah, great idea.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Yep. So exactly. So this way I now don't have to put up an email wall and then ask for your digital currency, which is your email to then tell you why I'm special or what are the gate and as you're scrolling through I'm educating you in micro micro chunks. So it's like I'm now convincing and selling even pre click. And it's the reason why Amazon is 40% of the E commerce is because that is how people are being educated and are purchasing. They are being educated via ad landing page. But the conversion will happen on meta. But if I didn't have a landing page, could this still work? Of course. That's why Amazon businesses are in place. So due to the fact that Amazon is a thing, due to the fact that Amazon businesses are a thing, due to the fact that people are educating themselves in content pre click on meta. We're sort of skipping the PDPs in terms of levels of importance. It's almost like a shopping cart now or a confirmation of what I'm already, what I'm already engaging with. So for meta to say hey, you need to take your landing page, break it out into bite sized chunks and create ad copy with it. It's essentially what they're asking us to do. So what we're looking at is when we ran this test for the glove company and I'm going to go ahead and share screen and explain this, we broke out the landing page into educational pieces of content. This that first week where we only had like the two click attributeds and we still have 19 ads live. We had 50 but it was like a Mother's Day, then a Father's Day, then a Memorial Day and so we ended up having to stop those sales. But we still have all the original ads that were not seasonal still running and still live all the way back from over a month ago. I have not touched anything else besides shutting off the seasonal ads and then tripling the ad spend. It's the only thing I've done people.

[Unknown Speaker E]

Haven'T seen the previous episode. This is a bespoke glove company from like handmade in Vermont. Not something that people are waking up in the morning and say hey I need a luxury high end glove.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

I need 120 leather glove.

[Unknown Speaker E]

120 like I can get a pair of gloves at Home Depot for 10 bucks.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

But exactly, exactly The I use this as example earlier today because I'm educating a lot of our clients on the type of content that we need to start to produce for them and the reasons as to why. And it's exactly right. The if I never visit the website and of this glove company and I'm only engaging in the ads, there is nothing the website is going to tell me that I don't already know. And that's the purpose of this is if you're engaging in the first ad, the one that people have engaged with the most which is interesting. The one that we have the most amount of sales, we have an 18 CPA in platform. We have a it was $1800 in ad spend. The next one down is only 318. But that $1700 in aspirin that has got gone to the first ad here, the one that has the highest amount of engagement has 737 day click attributed conversions and it is pumping out 93 totals. So it's much much higher than the other ones. However, this is one of the most informative. It is an inseam stitching for dexterity. It is seamless pointer finger for performance. It is additional welt on the secondary seam so there's no this a high wear area. It is double walled palm for longevity. It's vent a vein protector. So if you're working and something slices the glove it's got additional flap to cover your veins. It is a 2 inch goat leather cuff. It is made in our own factory right here in the United States in Vermont. Now would you pay $120? I'm getting closer because that's much different than the Home Depot off the brand Shelf so and then when you're looking at now the actual process of it like you're seeing people who, and I know this is going to sound weird, but look like who I am if I'm in this industry, more blue collar esque and they are hand making these things right here in the United States. It is what it looks like after a thousand days of use. The before and after I know this will be around forever. Like I'm now understanding everything that I need to know about this product and also how durable it is through like chain testing and stuff like that. Like I now know it lasts long. It's made here. There's seven features that I didn't know of before. It is all of this information that I am now getting off of these ads and getting off of this information is all before I went to the website.

[Unknown Speaker E]

Yeah.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

So conversion rate on our site has actually increased exponentially. Now I'm just gonna, I'm gonna talk about that here in a moment, which makes complete sense.

[Unknown Speaker E]

Can I just mention one thing? That the ad that is getting conversions, it seems to like it's a very feature not benefit based ad, but it seems to me, I don't know if this is accurate. It seems more of a bottom up funnel. Like oh, I just want to reinforce that the thing is really good because you caught my attention with another ad, maybe with a video ad or like the story or like how it's made. And this is like the last click ad because it's sort of the final thing I need in order to say I'm going to pay 120 bucks for a pair of gloves. Right.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Right.

[Unknown Speaker E]

Is that what you're seeing in your data here or is it getting a lot of just like, hey, that looks really cool. I've never seen a glove like that before.

[John Moran]

First click.

[Unknown Speaker E]

Is there any way to tell based upon how the algorithm is working? Like what is top of funnel primarily what is bottom of funnel?

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Right. And what's interesting is we don't know because we have not started our iterations yet. That's my first test is just let's say if I let this thing ran, how would the users flow through it? But since we don't actually have a founder story or why we create or why this glove company even exists, was there even a need for it? We haven't touched that. We haven't even scratched that surface yet. So the closest thing to a top of funnel is. Thank God everyone knows what a glove is. If this was the brand new WYSIWYG we'd be in a lot bigger trouble.

[Unknown Speaker E]

But there's a thing you can wear over your hands.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

I know, right?

[Unknown Speaker E]

Oh, my God. I never knew that existed.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Yeah. If I'd be like introducing the glove. Whoa. Tell me more like, whoa, we skipped that part. Part.

[Unknown Speaker E]

It's not a mitten. Oh, my God, John. This is.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

What's a work glove now I have a snow glove. What we saw is like whether it was right or wrong. This is what the first ads that people started to click and buy from, which is. Which is what we saw. It ended up being the first pushed and the first essentially to. To market. And it got the majority of the Aspen up front. And that trend did not change. This one here, that's the first week that got sent $60 in spend with a $20 CPA in the first week. If we look at since the inception, that $60 spent has turned into $1700 and that 19 CPA is now down to $18. That's a dollar cheaper after going from $60 to 1700.

[Unknown Speaker E]

Yeah.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

So it still is leading the charge now, is it? Right? Probably not. Could we have a better ad that we could have led with? Absolutely. Was this good enough? It was.

[Unknown Speaker E]

If we're talking, you know, metrics that matter in growth, that scales, something tells me that's a very effective ad from a business standpoint at that particular ncac. I mean, we're talking about cpa, but we're really talking about NCAC because we're assuming everybody's a new, new customer in this particular case, because it's a relatively new brand.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

So. Right. And when we're looking at year over year performance, where our sessions over time has only changed 6%, but our conversion rate's up 68%. Hey. And it's. This is where we started to launch. This is year over year performance.

[Unknown Speaker E]

So February, warming them up off site before they even get there.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Right, Exactly. Like we had February was 3% better, then we went 22 better. Then we started these campaigns and went 70 better. Last month was 115 or better. 115 better. So far, month 874 better and we've actually spent less. Which is quite interesting when you compare this whole op, this whole account year over year. Let me turn off the Is active. If we look at the overall account year over year, there's 17 total campaigns and we spent. Let's do this here. Yeah. Compare previous year. There we go. Yeah. That is 5146-1920-2451-4619, 2025. We spent 6% less and are scaling up now 174 better with the same amount of customers, same spend, same sessions. 68 better conversion rate. Excellent. So we already know this is more effective. But that is what's interesting is your website's conversion rate could be drastically affected by how educated were these users before the click.

[Unknown Speaker E]

So people don't think about that though. Like that's just a novel concept just unto itself. Like that's a big takeaway just to think about, like, oh, my conversion rate is 1%. Well, okay, that probably means that a lot of cold traffic who have no idea or maybe stumble on your site for whatever reason or maybe aren't pre educated on your brand, are coming to your site. You're getting a 1% conversion rate, which I believe is about average in the industry. It's about 1 to 2% maybe. Yeah, less than 1% is sort of suboptimal, but overall that's where we were really. Yeah, Yeah.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

I mean AOV didn't change 0.1 sessions over time, year over year, less four months did not change at 6%. But our conversion rates are up across the board. 6% more sessions, 70 more added cards, 61 more reach checkouts and 78 more completed checkouts.

[Unknown Speaker E]

All because increasing average order value in LTV in this client. But anyway, I'll refrain from any.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Well, that's when we're looking at CRO though. Like CRO. It's like CRO is. Yes, it is a portion, but judging CRO by conversion rate by it's lonesome is half the battle.

[Unknown Speaker E]

CRO is largely determined about how effective your media is.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Absolutely. I mean if I was like, hey, I got a free Xbox360. Just click on this ad and you get there and it's just like, do you need more Viagra? Yeah, no, the what I knew I was getting into is way off of what I got there.

[Unknown Speaker E]

Is that on john moran.com by the way?

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Oh yes. Use coupon code lifeishard and you. So that's what's interesting is even the way that we're educating these users pre click is what I say is people are now being fed micro education through feeds. They're. They have a news stream every day. And that news stream is not. Hey, trust me, this landing page kick ass. Everything you want to know, it's over there. I gotta do. I got a product. I'll tell you about it, but only when you click. It's dead and gone now. And that's where we have to definitely look at to say anything that we would want to show them in on our website, segment that out and then create that into its own ad that is telling the story the way that a person now wants to learn. Remember when we had like content creation, syndication, app publication and amplification? You remember all those like 10 years ago. It's the same. We're just taking our landing page content and syndicating it now as an ad and then throwing ads behind it the same thing. Ryan Deiss was the godfather of genius, but still true to this day.

[Unknown Speaker E]

So is it safe to say that you should take your best gated or hidden content that is the webinar that you were talking about? We talked to a client this week that was doing an hour and a half webinar. I'm like why are you gating that? What I kept thinking. And we've done this in many cases. We actually have a great case study where we did exactly that. We turned it into an ungated either singular video or multi part video and just undated the thing and people watched it like hundreds of times and then eventually just filled out an application to like to get a coaching call or a consulting call to eventually sell a $2,000 bump.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Right?

[Unknown Speaker E]

Same kind of thing. So it's like I'll just undate your best stuff and use that as ads. Is that sort of the bottom line here?

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

That's exactly right. And I think what we're doing is I don't have permission to share this, so I'm just going to give some snapshots of like the technicals. I'll get permission to do a deeper dive and we can share this. But we have this company that offers this like a medical billing encoding type of class and you can buy it online and you can start your journey in your education. But there's a webinar that goes through why you're going to buy this. And it's a long form of a sales sales presentation. So we started to do that where we're taking the stuff that is gated and trying to bring it to the forefront. And then we're using the first click imports to see optimized torque. The actual people who finished. As an example, this one, we still have the webinar viewers. There's 2, 500 people that have started the webinar. Only 1300 have finished the webinar. So a little about half. But that's been optimizing now towards these ten dollar leaders and we're already starting to see that those people who are going through and finishing the webinar are purchasing the course at 8. At 8 where this one is 4. However, this one is spending a whole lot less. So I have a new test I'll be able to dive into. But what we're looking at here is taking that gated content, pushing it to the front and then saying, can we just start to get you to purchase the class by pushing the webinar in front of you versus having to push you through the webinar. And so far again, this just went live not too long ago. Yeah. And basically the test started. I mean we're looking at, I mean, what's it the 14th? So six days ago when we actually like turned it on. So I mean we don't even have enough to, for us to really be able to showcase this as a case study just yet. But as a quick example, we know that on 1400 we have 8 or 14,000 we have 8. So as so quick math here, one 14,446 divided by 8 is 1800 CPA. The one right here is a thousand dollar CPA. So it's like 45 cheaper to take the webinar, push it as an ad. And we have some ad is webinars that still goes through the webinar funnel. But there's going to be some more information that we're going to be, we're going to be trying this year where our thought process is. If I don't get it, if I just take the webinar, break into chunks, show it to you, you're now getting a webinar before you click and then I can push you towards a purchase. So it's definitely a newer test, a newer style of thinking. Everyone I've talked to about this, which is basically me, my mirror and like two other people all agree. Exactly. So. But it's weird. When I've been presenting this, it starts to click. They're like, okay, I think I learned that way. I engage with content that way. I don't want to sit there and read your landing page. But if I'm bored on Facebook and you have more interesting cool things that you want to share with me, I'll listen if it's good enough. And that's what we're up against now. Is your content good enough? Can I tell you a story? Can I convince you? Can I use my traditional marketing that hasn't changed in 200 years to do the same thing? And so that's where we have to take our, our thought process is now. It used to be, I've been saying this where it's Email used to be digital currency. Now it's becoming a click.

[Unknown Speaker E]

It is and it's. You can retarget those clicks probably more effectively than you can the emails in so many ways. It's like the click is so much easier to get but then the email has deliverability issues and all the other sorts of things that go along with it. You're not going to get as many as a result of it because you're gating and people are like, is this content going to be good enough that I'm going to give up my name and my email address? We still have that sort of quandary every time you're faced with like an opt in box for anything. I certainly am. I mean just look at your phone. How many friggin, you know, spam messages do you get every single day? Because you gave out your phone number to all these people and all, you know, God knows who. The point is, is that this is how people truly do interact. And I remember this lesson very early on and I just said it here on the ad. I was about to say Tier 11 live is that when I first bought my first info product it was product launch formula by Jeff Walker. And I watched that thing, he dated it. You had to like put in your name and email address. But I watched the replay like eight or nine times before I decided to buy a $2,000 program which at that point in time was all the money in the world for me. Oh yeah, Jeff Walker still gated everything. But now if you look at like how he does things, he doesn't gain anything.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Right?

[Unknown Speaker E]

It's exactly what you're talking about here. And that always stuck with me. It's like people don't necessarily, you don't think they're going to do what you want them to do. Like oh, I'm gonna watch the webinar once and then I'm gonna apply for the coaching. It's like that's not how it works. They need to consume it in a lot of different ways through retargeting ads, through maybe other snippets, reminders, things that they see in the newsfeed and oh yeah, the big, the big one hour presentation that shows like the value of the program. All of that together, you ungate it. It makes so much more sense because that's how we as humans buy.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

I mean that's, that mean that's back in previously previous agency that will not be named. We had tons. I had a thousand videos on that YouTube channel of like my brain just out there and everyone could have taken that, stolen everything I've ever done in my life, put me completely out of business and did them themselves. They didn't.

[John Moran]

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[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Appreciate the education and they are happy to learn and they feel not to get too touchy feely, they feel more connected with me. They're like I'm a brand now because I've been explaining the story. And so those were what client Our clients and our people watching this say they can do that. If you are able to teach a user the way they want to be taught, which is right now, Meta is still the best platform for ads on an outbound perspective. And as long as they're learning in chunks and you're speaking to them in all of the different variations that Meta wants us to use inside of ad set, that's where we're seeing. I'll jump back into this one screen share because this sort of now starts to explain the explain the reasoning why this is doing this here. There we are. So since we've started up until today, these are Obviously, the ads that we had to turn off because of the seasonality and like Father's Day and stuff like that. So we just look at the ones that are even just still active. Each one of these ads here, whether they have $1700 in ad spend or $5 in ad spend, my CPA rarely goes over 20 to $25 more. More under 20s. I have a, like a $31 here and there. That. That makes sense because it's duplicated and I'm gonna turn this off soon. I just told myself I'm not touching anything until this is. I mean, $5 and $5 sale, $8 sale, $13 sale. I mean, I'll take all these little onesie, twosies, cheap CPA, because I'm spending a whole grand total of $150 a day. But we started to see that when you're looking at the all ads and view charts, the amount of ad spend that we have in this campaign here, we're spending $30 a day. I bumped it up to about $60 a day. Then I bumped up again to $150 a day. And my per purchase has stayed relatively flat when you're talking about tripling the budget in 30 days. And so our website purchases went from 4, then dipped down to 0, then peaked up at 8 and dipped down to here. But we can see that my three chunks of getting my feet wet scaled up a little bit and then a larger scale. The median points are at a higher level each time, and it is becoming more effective. And it's easier to scale because these people are more warmed up. And there's more new users being added to the existing funnel where they're going to learn everything. I've now sort of in our first test, which is this is not the best way to do this. Honestly, I would have had. If I could have taken six months and built the best creative in the world and then deployed this, I would have been happy. I just took the most diverse content we could find over the last few years and try to put this thing together. But now I have set up essentially a museum, and I'm now bringing you into the museum. Like, this is where Vermont Glove Company was made and this is. And I'm now showing you and educating on the other side. You're in the gift shop. Oh, grab a glove. That's what this is. This is turning into. So it's really interesting to see how the technical aspect is less important, but the creative aspect is now spotlight.

[Unknown Speaker E]

So on that point, I had a question about this Today on a client discovery call, like, how relevant are media buyers today? More so or less so than they ever were because of Advantage plus sales, et cetera, et cetera. Creative is obviously is the big thing right now. So media buying is just a commodity. Like what is your step, what is your status on that as of right now? And I'm gonna keep myself muted because Starbucks seems to have turned up the.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Volume here for some the nightclub that excels coffee. So I don't want to lump media buyers all together. I'm a media buyer. If you think about it, I do most of my days like media buying and strategy kind of thing. I think that our. We have three groups of people. You have the business owner, you have the traditional off the shelf, I will call it standard operating procedure media buyer. And then you have the media buyer that's also a strategist, the business owner. We need to pull out of the digital marketing more and more. I, I want Vermont Glove to make the glove 2.0. I don't want them to be taught what click. The rate is on Tuesdays. So I think from a media buyer, they're still more relevant now more so than ever because the business owner or the person that is actually in the position to build a brand and do iterations of creative, I.e. or sorry, iterations of their products. So doing product development, building a better, faster, quicker engine of their company is the sole thing they should be focused on. The media buyer doesn't need to be adding value by saying, look at the complex structure I created. The media buyer adds value by saying, I understand the way that I need to work with the next iteration of this algorithm and I will take it from here and you need to follow my lead. So if we're measuring media buyer as in are they technically advanced or are they less technically advanced, that is, I would say are you decent at your job or are you faking being a media buyer? That is how I see it nowadays is if can you learn, adapt and grow, okay, then you're a professional. If you're like, no, I got my SOP the same way I've done it since 1986, well, those are dinosaurs that die. And that is moving faster and faster, faster. So media buyers as a whole a hundred percent needed. But the media buyer has to learn, adapt and leverage. A bad media buyer is going to be just as valuable as the owner doing it themselves. And I think that's where I find the point of demarcation is if you have a bad media buyer, you're not going to be any better than the owner because you both are just winging it. A good media buyer understands that things got more simple. The creative is doing the targeting, the structure has changed, the transition has to be implemented and the optimizations have to go a certain way. It may have gotten easier with less buttons, but this became more complex to understand.

[Unknown Speaker E]

I think the role of the strategist. I've changed locations as you can tell here. This is getting way too loud. I'm on the car. This is what we do here. But I'm so close to the Starbucks and still connected to the wi fi.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

It looks great.

[Unknown Speaker E]

It's actually better. It's way more comfortable and quieter. Anyway, sorry about that. Before there was a dance party going on in Starbucks. I just think the strategist role becomes so critical because they're the intersection of traffic and, and creative because it's not one or the other, it's both together.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Yeah.

[Unknown Speaker E]

I think that's really where all of this is going because the pushing of the buttons for advantage plus sales. Like you said it yourself, we showed this campaign what, three weeks ago. Have you touched anything since then?

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

It took 10 minutes to build. I mean if you have to create it, it takes 10 minutes to build. And I haven't touched this in over a month.

[Unknown Speaker E]

The caveat is if you have the creative too and you have some good creative there, you don't have like the classic John. We can even show people sort of your matrix of all the different types of creative, which should probably turn that into a lead magnet at some point in time because it's so good. The point is like if you have like any creative, like think about like what people are going to need, what do they need to know in order to be interested in your product? If you are the avatar that you're trying to target and it's literally, it's those types of videos, that type of content and you didn't even like get all of it here. You just got a little bit of half.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Yeah. Maybe a quarter and a half movie. Yeah. I mean probably 30% of the content. Diversification, 30% of it we got. And we're going to be making a lot more. But creative is very difficult and this is a very small, very well operating, but very small rural farmland company. So they're not ivory tower New York City with, with photo shoots. They're out there yanking on barbed wire. So. But it's exactly right. Exactly. After a thousand days you can see what they look like. So again that it's great. So what's really interesting about this is I think it's almost like media buyer is agnostic. The person that is is in charge of informing the owner of what needs to happen in Meta can be called a media buyer, could be called a strategist, whatever you want to call them, whatever label you want to put on them. But I think what we have to look at is the person that owns the company should be focusing on building their company. Again, to bring up Ryan Dice, I want my dentist to be the best at drilling my tooth. I don't want to teach them email marketing. Right, that's exactly right.

[Unknown Speaker E]

It's a classic. Like you always say that when he did marketing, which apparently he doesn't anymore.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Yeah, right. And, and so that's why I think it's interesting is like media buyers are obsolete. If they cannot adapt quickly, then yes, I would say then you might as well just do it yourself because you're not any better or worse. You need to hire the people that can understand this and leverage it. And that doesn't need to be. It doesn't need to be anybody specific. It's. Can you. Are you up to speed on everything that is happening at the time it's happening and testing what makes sense logically to both Meta and your particular business instance?

[Unknown Speaker E]

All right, so before we get to questions here, which I know we've got a lot here, which we're going to have to do a lightning round on, I really want to ask you this question. So you set up an advantage plus sales campaign. You have 30 or 40% of the creative that's ideal based upon sort of the model that we use. Your campaign's going in the right direction. You're getting $15 NCAX on $120 average order value. Things are going great. What happens if I start a campaign and I'm getting 220 NCAC on 128 NAOV? And I was like, all right, John says wait, wait for the algorithm to figure it out. But I'm losing money every single day and how long do I wait? Like, what is your experience been with that type of scenario? Because we really haven't shown that quite as much here. We've shown more of a success side. But like when it doesn't go your way, what's your guidelines, what your. What's your guardrails?

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

So I have three other companies that we've launched that looks like it's failing in platform but is successful to top line. I have yet, knock on wood, launched this new way of doing it and Having top line look worse. I have had in platform look worse. I can share well, I can't share the back end. I have a company that we are a part like equity partners and owners of through another firm that I've had for a few years that had a negative 30 and negative 40 year over year drop since February, March and April. May, year over year drops of 40%. And we went from about 20 to 30 growth to negative 30 and 40 reduction the first week of killing all 16 campaigns and launching two. And NCRC, we're back up 12 in the last 20 days, which is the month of June when we started. Now in platform looks like NCAC metrics that are in the high hundreds for, for like 6, 7, $800 for a product that's $200. So in platform looks terrible. But what we saw as a byproduct of this is the reason why it was working is that an Advantage plus took over and the creative did the targeting. It went off of Instagram and went to Meta. And they are a fashion brand with clothing. So that is like where you want to stay on Instagram. We do not want to go to Meta. Where we did first click Happy Imports that got more new customers. All of a sudden we saw go off of Meta and then go back to Instagram. And before even all of the metrics have started to come in, we went boop, right back to year over year growth. So that was the only time where I'm like, oh God, this failed horribly. And then we look in at top line, we're like, oh, everything's fine, wait a little bit longer. And the metrics are rapidly changing. So they're all of a sudden it's like 80 CPA reduction every like week. So it's catching up. But I have yet to see this fail from a top line perspective, which is the only way I measure it. Interesting.

[Unknown Speaker E]

Okay, well, I mean, I'm sure a lot of people have tried it, but yeah, I mean, so far so good.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

I mean, the hardest thing, I will say that the hardest thing to do though, is to not touch this. That's the bad part. People are like, okay, I did it in two days. I didn't see it, so I wiped the whole thing. I'm like, nope, not gonna work.

[Unknown Speaker E]

Right, Right. That's what I was gonna ask you. And you're up to like 4. You're 4 million plus in this test, in this new campaign type. And this is. You're pretty much wouldn't say you're batting a thousand, but you're getting pretty close.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Like you're yeah, it has that one account has gotten worse. They've all had small amount of better success. While this is getting in, getting going or to like attend next home run kind of thing.

[Ralph Burns]

Hope you enjoyed this week's show. We're going to continue to drop in episodes from this campaign because I think it's so important that you as a marketer understand exactly how all this stuff works. If you're not experimenting with some of these new fangled campaign types, especially within the meta platform Advantage plus Sales, this is the place where we're going to be giving this type of advice for you and your team. Most importantly and of course if you need our help in managing this kind of stuff, we are absolutely cutting edge. We're the only ones that are teaching this stuff right now. You can check us out [e-mail] apply so make sure you leave a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts. We will read those rating and reviews on the air, good, bad or otherwise. We love the feedback here because we do this show for you, the listener, and on behalf of my amazing co host, Lauren E. Petrulo, until next show. See ya.

[Unknown Speaker E]

You've been listening to Perpetual Traffic.