← Perpetual Traffic
Loading summary
Transcript161 lines
- [00:00]
Ralph Burns
Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic Podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns, the founder and CEO of Tier 11. And today's show is a follow on episode to a show we did back on April 25th where we talked about some of the changes that are coming down the line or were just about to happen full bore inside Meta and having advertised on this platform for wow, well over 15 years at this point in time, being one of the first Facebook ad agencies on the planet, 10, 12 years ago, these are big changes. These are huge changes. I can remember when they installed Power Editor, that was a big change. This is nothing by comparison to that. Remember when they took away the Pixel five or six years ago? There has been huge changes in this platform and one thing that's constant with this entire industry is change. It's a good thing that you're listening to this show because we break this stuff before anybody else does in the marketing space. Today we're going to be getting into a lot of things that we talked about we didn't really know back in episode 691, which was only literally a week or so ago when we were really starting to see this roll out. They made sort of an announcement Meta did on their earnings call and then a couple of subsequent communications, some communication that we got through our partner manager program, a new sort of program that they have for agencies. But John Moran, who is going be the star of today's episode, has even more in depth understanding of it and in a very short period of time has spent over $1 million in many cases of his own money in his sort of his test bed, which we refer to as the lab. He's going to be revealing that here today. So if you're a Meta advertiser and you've seen these changes, you've seen Advantage plus, maybe you can toggle to manual or maybe the manual is now disconnected or blacked out or not even there at all. We're sort of seeing it in different ways in every single ads Manager. This is the show for you and I highly encourage you to watch this over on our YouTube channel over at perpetualtraffic.com YouTube if you are listening to this the day or the morning that it comes out that might not be up as of yet. So I would encourage you to head over to the Tier 11 channel on YouTube. That's you can go over to tier11.com forward/YouTube. Very easy. It's the best way to find it and then also subscribe to that channel because we did this on a live about Two weeks ago, about a week and a half ago, actually right around the time that we released the episode that was episode 691, which we'll leave links in the show notes to listen to that one. If you haven't seen any of this, you're not aware of the changes. These are massive changes, guys. So John, fortunately is on the bleeding edge. Not the cutting edge, like the bleeding edge. And really leading our team and the entire advertising world in my opinion, when it comes to this stuff. So there is Advantage plus, but then there is also a tactic that he has deployed. We haven't even named it yet. It's basically Cap. It's a cappy custom event, which I referred to in back on episode 691. But I think he explains it. You can actually see it in action even better over on the YouTube channel. So definitely check that out over perpetual traffic.com forward/YouTube. Listen to today's show. Go over and watch it over on the YouTube channel. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any of this sort of stuff. And this is the kind of cutting edge stuff that we're going to be bringing to you in the coming weeks here as this story evolves. And you know, we spent $100 million a year well over that now on Meta. About the same over on Google. You know, John is one of the leading authorities in both spaces now. So I would encourage you to really listen and learn and figure out what your plan is as to how your business, how your accounts, if you're an agency, how your department, if you're a director of marketing is going to handle this because this is a massive change right now. I know a lot of folks will say, oh, well, this basically means like the end of the media buyer. Maybe it does at some point. Not now, though. You need smart media buyers who understand this stuff and have seen the changes coming and can adapt to it. And that's why we did today's episode. So without further ado, here's John and myself with all the changes with Advantage plus, as well as the capi integration custom event diabolical strategy on today's show. Take it away, John. Ralph, you're listening to Perpetual Traffic.
- [04:55]
John Moran
Hey, everybody out there in Internet land.
- [04:57]
Ralph Burns
I'm excited for today's show. Man, oh man, is there some cool stuff going on right now.
- [05:02]
John Moran
It's something we've been talking about for at least I think three months now, ever since I was working with that Meta team that I will not oust them because they gave me, you know, A three month head start on what was coming down the pipe. And then 23 hours ago, a launch happened inside of Meta that isn't necessarily completely wiping out Manual, but it's as close as you could possibly be without causing a Meta boycott from advertisers. And to share screen for a moment to kind of catch everyone up out there that may have not heard about the new update that just came about. We now have a new update to Advantage plus Shopping is now called Advantage plus Sales and this now defaults into each Meta advertiser's account. Essentially what this means is that what we were kind of, you know, whistleblowing for like the last three months is that it doesn't look like any of our targeting or exclusions are working. Our solve for that was to do capi imports by new customers, returning customers, the product, new customer by product, the returning customer. And this has been our fight against the man, I guess I would say into regaining some sort of control so that we don't end up in a situation where you launch just a simple Advantage plus sales campaign and then let you know the targeting, decide the exclusions be decided by Meta. I mean it basically it goes into like Meta's little black box. It is a very, very, very powerful campaign type and when you can leverage it appropriately is actually a lot easier than us fighting against it. So we've seen this inside of, you know, inside of Data Suite where we knew that the paid media platforms were messing up. I've basically made my name by saying this is what they tell you, this is what actually happens. Right. The problem though is that we develop feeder strategy, we develop dogpile strategy, we develop, you know, non brand brand versions. You know, existing customers go this way, optimize for new customers go that way. And we've been at the mercy of asking permission and begging and pleading the paid media platforms to do what we've been asking them to do because they were listening to us for a decade until recently they said, you know what, my AI is smarter than your technical media buying. And sometimes that's right now, a lot of times that's right. The problem is it is so powerful that the technical media buying that has now kind of gone away, that has been replaced by AI, is in fact so powerful that it can attribute and contribute conversions extremely well. The problem is it may be on conversions you don't necessarily want. So we've been running some import tests and those import tests that we have been actually now utilizing the new structure that I learned in Iceland that Meta wants all the advertisers to now use, which is actually way dumbed down and simplified. And it's because of that that the paid media platforms such as metangoogle are punishing you with conflicting data and results if you're not following it that way. So what does this mean for the general advertiser? It's actually become a lot easier for the general advertiser if a person that has no technical BD buying experience, meta is trying to say, that's okay, you don't need it. Five years ago, you know, me and Kasim like joked around with a prediction where it's like, just give us your website, give us your credit card and we'll take it from there. We're now closer to that portion of the journey than ever before. However, you have now even less control. And that is a scary, scary thought when you're talking about, well, I have to make new customers for my clients. It's the only way to grow. You can only grow new customers. You can re engage, you can get existing customers to buy. It's a little more difficult, but it's much harder than trying to go after something that is new. And interestingly enough, the ABO model is now failing inside of Meta because of this update. And the team that I've been working with inside of Meta has explained the opportunity dedupe ad set algorithm that just went live. The deduping algorithm that just went live essentially means that when an opportunity is found in a same conversion event as in two different campaigns and or ad sets, Meta will now dedupe that opportunity into one and you do not get to choose or identify which one that is. So what's interesting is if you have something that is a. I'll give you a very simple example, a campaign with a certain amount of ads that are going after a prospecting audience that you used to define. Now that definition is gone and now it is prospecting based on your words, phrases, your creative, the interpretation of that creative and the landing page that you're sending those users to.
- [09:56]
Ralph Burns
Right?
- [09:57]
John Moran
That is now your targeting. Well, when you launch another campaign with a different potentially piece of creative for the same product, the people that are found now in ad set slash campaign A cannot be found in ad set slash campaign B.
- [10:15]
Ralph Burns
Therefore, what becomes very important all of a sudden, but not all of a sudden, but even more so, what has.
- [10:22]
John Moran
Become the most important thing so far that we can leverage is your conversion actions. Your conversion actions now dictate how opportunities move. So you have add to cart campaigns, view content Campaigns, purchase campaigns, great. But APO's gone creative testing is more complicated. They're no longer sharing users with your other creative with your other non creative. They're going after the same audiences, but they cannot be found in both audiences. So everything that we've kind of known has been kind of flipped upside down. And we've been testing it and leveraging it and we've been seeing some pretty unbelievable results when we're using our data suite to import these conversions back into to Meta and even into Google, so much so that it is scaling at a ridiculous rate. And also we're now no longer at the mercy of the algorithms, essentially choosing the type of customers new versus returning that it can go after we now get to dictate it. I made an analogy that instead of buying the bath water and buying the baby, but only really wanting the baby and you kind of throw out the bathwater because it's like, ah, you know, I got some existing customers, but I paid a lot for them. And what is my actual cost require first time customer? Well, let me dive into, you know, data suite and let me see how the campaigns are kind of messing up. We're able to take back that control. Now this, the control that I think we've shared before, but now it's in a bit of a different structure. Looks more like this now. And I go ahead and share screen please. Thank you so much. So what we found is that if I have a creative testing campaign, and this creative testing campaign is using the new version that Meta wants, which is cbo minimal assets, almost all of your creative inside of one ad set. Now what we ask for, it's kind of like genie. What we ask for we get. But it's like, you know, this is like if Genie had a weird, sick, twisted sense of humor. Like this is kind of what we're seeing. Like Meta is now Genie. Because when we're looking at, you know, those 32 purchase of immunes, we said, okay, I want immune purchases, which means I want my product of critical immune defense to be sold. And we have 35 sales, 32 of them are the product that's being sold. However, only 16 were new. We're like, well dang, when we exclude existing customers, when we set our existing customer bid cap to zero, it gets ignored. Even Advantage Plus. Let's try it again. 44 purchases, 42 immune, only 20 less than half our new customers. Same structure setup. We said, okay, well what if we wanted the immune purchases but what if we had them only new customers? That's what it says, okay, 50 sales, 42 new customers. 42 new customers of your immune. Perfect. We've increased this from a 50% to now like an 85%. We're 42 out of 50. Yeah. Okay, now we're getting somewhere. A 80% increase in the amount of new customers in a campaign's massive. So now we're seeing. Okay, this is what's really crazy too is we look at the NFCPA and we have 109 with per purchase immune. We spent 35 17, 35 17. Divide that by the only 16amount of new customers that came in, we're spending 219. This one is already beating it at 203. This one got 219 NCAC. This was getting 203 NCAC. I spent more than twice as much on this. And this one was only running for a day. So I beat the other campaign running for two weeks because I said, no, no, I want this. Okay, here you go. At a cost, it's cheaper.
- [13:48]
Ralph Burns
There is a reason for all this, right? If you look back to February, like their quarterly, I think it was their quarterly earnings call and they talked about their investment in AI and also they announced that Advantage plus is going to be this non manual. Advantage plus is going to start appearing. So we started hearing about it, we started seeing it in some of our campaigns. Obviously the Meta contacts that you have are giving you even more insights. The point is this has been coming. If you look at the history of advertising, just in general, if you haven't seen this coming, then you probably haven't been paying attention. There's also. Bless you. There's also a reason why in that same earnings call, Meta said we are investing 60 to 65 billion in AI in 2025. That's billion with a B. And the data, the amount of data centers that they're actually building, it's not just to create an open AI platform that will rival OpenAI. Obviously they have their own llama platform, but this is to make the algorithm, to leverage the AI, to leverage all the data that they have to leverage their advertising platform more effectively and to automate and utilize that AI. Because when you think about the algorithms inside the platforms, it's really, it's AI, it's machine learning at the end of the day.
- [15:09]
John Moran
Sponsored by Nvidia.
- [15:11]
Ralph Burns
You got it. Absolutely. The GPUs, baby. The point is manufactured in Taiwan. But anyway, the point, I'll set that aside for right now. The point is, is that this has been coming for quite some time and if you didn't See it back in February. I actually, we dropped the link inside the notes here, in case you didn't see that. But that was like your first shot. And our Meta, I don't know what they're called now, has been saying like, this is coming, this is coming, this is coming for quite some time. We've been seeing it starting to appear, but it's basically, it's the degradation of Manual, everything within Meta and that's a big deal. It was always an option. Now it's like gone. It's like you have to live by this new rule that we are setting. So big sea change there.
- [15:57]
John Moran
Yeah.
- [15:58]
Ralph Burns
Obviously the cappy stuff we want to get into here in today's show, my big question for you is this. I know we were talking yesterday, I didn't ask you this question. Right. Because I was thinking it. I was like, did I ask him that? I don't think I asked him that. How do we know or how do you know from your standpoint that this just isn't another freaking pmax?
- [16:17]
John Moran
Oh, it absolutely is.
- [16:20]
Ralph Burns
It is. So talk through that is how is it different in your opinion? Or. And like, what's your view of that? If people say, yeah, it's just another AI thing that now I have less control, but I'm still going to have the other options. You kind of don't know.
- [16:36]
John Moran
No.
- [16:36]
Ralph Burns
So there is that as a differentiator.
- [16:39]
John Moran
The Performance Max has always been, since day one, contrary to popular belief and even official literature that I actually have proof now last week that that was a lie from Google themselves. I can have that shared. But the thing that we notice most often is that the metric that Meta quoted on Advantage plus compared to Manual, that was the. From the variable group, not the control Group. The 85% of advertisers out there that had this turned on without them understanding or knowing or agreeing to it. Which means their campaign started using Advantage plus audiences in manual campaigns. Their metrics that they went to and said this is the results that we'd like is a 24 reduction in CPA and a 22% increase in ROAS. Yes. If you target people that I may not want you to target and you claim credit for them anyway, your metrics look good, my business hurts. That sounds exactly like Performance Max sure. Goes after brand. Which Performance Max now has a leg up in terms of in platform CPA and roas because it's the last thing people do and it's the least expensive channel to advertise in is last click brand. It's the easiest One to make work you can basically not even try. They're doing that on prospecting, however, because the prospecting is not trying to compete with another advertiser you're now stuck with a whomever can deliver the most engaging, amazing content wins, which benefits the meta user. The meta experience you have inside that platform now in VR, now in ar, now in, you know, all of the ways that Meta is trying to bring you from the desktop into your whole mind of thinking is now based off of whomever can make the best content win. Yep. And their targeting is now based on content is no longer based on audiences and interests and segmentations and psychographics and demographics, still geographics. But that's the only one that's left.
- [18:41]
Ralph Burns
Sure.
- [18:42]
John Moran
So your content, what meta came out and said or you're creative, really? Right, yeah, the content. Sorry, the creative. That's what I meant. Right. And so what Meta has kind of released to us in Iceland last week was the way that they are ultimately moving to is one campaign, one ad set when possible, and then multiple pieces of creative from top, middle and bottom of the funnel all within one ad set. And then it's the advertisers, slash, the creative director's job to iterate each portion of those videos or images or statics or gifs in order to make that ad better in that campaign supports the theory that they can go after purchases as much as they want because it's new or returning. Doesn't matter. They're sales and they're doing it because of your creative. Okay, fine. But the way that meta said is be mindful of when you do that, your creative testing is no longer creative testing in the traditional sense. What they say is that you're going to find something like the founder story that is actually the first ad in the ad set is going to have a large amount of spend and clicks, but very poor performance. But the longer it goes on, your middle and your bottom of the funnel will have less clicks and really low CPA and really high roas because it is pushing it through a funne, which is why they're locking an audience into the ad set.
- [20:02]
Ralph Burns
Yeah, sounds too good to be true. John Moran, what makes you so damn convinced?
- [20:10]
John Moran
Well, I put a million bucks into this model and it worked.
- [20:15]
Ralph Burns
But I like playing the D. Oh, I'm pulling you anyway.
- [20:18]
John Moran
Go ahead. I know, right?
- [20:19]
Ralph Burns
You flew your ass out to Iceland. Or maybe they flew it out for.
- [20:23]
John Moran
You, but no, I. I flew myself out, unfortunately. Yeah, I. I had to pay for this knowledge out of my own pocket.
- [20:28]
Ralph Burns
Is Iceland green and Greenland is ice, right? Well, it's black really.
- [20:33]
John Moran
Iceland is black with green moss over the lava rock that has taken over everywhere. There's a bear. I saw seven trees and I went through like an hour of that country. I was like, there's one like, it is just a barren wasteland, beautiful, but it is like, I mean just lava fields as far as your eye can see. I saw, I didn't see like one animal. I'm like, what do they eat here?
- [20:53]
Ralph Burns
Oh my God.
- [20:54]
John Moran
It was very strange, but it's like, check this out. This is what I was looking at to say like, can is this even plausible? And that's what was interesting is when we look from 937 to 2.1 million, so we're up 126%. And interesting is we said, okay, like we have to segment them out by the way. And that's the secret sauce here, being able to first click capi import, not capi import because you capi import last click on a first click campaign and you're so first click happy import of true first data is now king. So if you're doing like your Shopify imports, like if you have a direct integration with Shopify and you're sending in your Shopify purchases, even though Shopify is actually measuring 44 accuracy based on even Shopify's public data, they say their attribution model is only 44 accurate. You're going to copy import that and you're going to be, you know, 56% wrong. So it's really interesting to see that when we started to scale up and hopefully this starts to load for us. I don't know why this is going so slow, but we've been still seeing this as a. When we increase our cost on everything outside of a nc, a new customer version, we ended up getting a lot of existing customer growth. So much so that we even saw this inside of Google Ads where the new customer imports are finally actually starting to grow in a good sense where we're actually seeing, you know, more new customers than returning customers. So even, you know, even Google Ads is doing this as well. So it is really interesting to see that what we're optimizing towards because there's so much and I can talk in such detail about how the AI and the targeting works. There's reasons that this is way less simple than we all assume and it's because of the competitive ecosystem that they're trying to maintain control over. So you versus the other advertisers that are selling Products just like yours. And so I'll share with that in a moment why this benefits meta more than the advertiser. But the way that we're fighting it against is going after those per purchase and sees. But this can become very, very, very scalable. Adding a million dollars, getting 8% less cost of acquired first time customer, Adding a half million, getting 37% less cost. I've already shown all this stuff here and I backed it up with all of our subscribers that are just continually scaling up to the moon. But what was very interesting is whenever we didn't ask for a new subscriber, we saw that it was like 53, 30 new. Like, dang it, 900, 600 new. I paid for 300 existing customers right there.
- [23:20]
Ralph Burns
Still not bad though.
- [23:21]
John Moran
Drivers. Not bad.
- [23:22]
Ralph Burns
It's not bad. I mean, considering the platform the way that it is, we're trying to obviously change that paradigm, but still, I mean, we've seen cases where it's like 20% new, 30% new. So.
- [23:34]
John Moran
But then he asked for a new customer and now I'm missing it. What I have 15, 14.
- [23:38]
Ralph Burns
Yeah.
- [23:39]
John Moran
Out of 131.
- [23:40]
Ralph Burns
That's a massive improvement.
- [23:42]
John Moran
And it's every single time. It's a massive improvement. 175, 148.
- [23:46]
Ralph Burns
Good.
- [23:46]
John Moran
I'm only 27 off. Out of 175. Not bad. Now, now I'm buying the baby at the cost with cost caps that I'm comfortable with and I get the bath water for free and it's coming in at cheaper than I actually even care about.
- [24:00]
Ralph Burns
So let me ask you this, all right? So there's two different things that you're doing here. We're talking about Advantage plus, obviously changing, but we're also talking about this. You know, I don't even know what we want to call it here. We have to name everything, of course, but like the capi optimization diabolical strategy, whatever it is. So separate those two things out here. Like Advantage plus is obviously this is a big deal here. Like, this is huge breaking news that, you know, we're going to get this into the algorithm, by the way, so that we rank for like Advantage plus meta news. Anyway, the point is, is because there's literally nothing, there's nothing out there on this. I sent you like the only video I could find last night. I'm like, hasn't somebody else discovered this? So anyway, so separate the two pieces of news out. There's the cappy stuff and then there's Advantage Plus.
- [24:46]
John Moran
Yeah.
- [24:47]
Ralph Burns
How do they how do they overlap? How do you keep them separate? That kind of thing.
- [24:52]
John Moran
So absolutely. So Advantage plus now says, I'm gonna go after anybody I want, regardless of what you say, regardless of your targeting, regardless of your exclusions, I'm going to go do whatever I want. Which we already know. That was a thing for a little while. That's why you're all are here to get the news before everyone else gets the news. Right. So we already knew that that was a thing, but we have the advantage plus that basically says, I, Meta, do not care advertiser, what you want to go after. All you can tell me what to do is get a conversion. And what is that conversion? And 99% of advertisers is like, well, a lead. Well, a purchase. They say you got it. Is it the purchase of the product that you wanted? Maybe. Is it the purchase of the customer that you wanted? Maybe. Is it a purchase even from the person that even started in this channel of meta? Maybe it's my standard event purchase. Exactly.
- [25:47]
Ralph Burns
All I'm using. Right.
- [25:48]
John Moran
So Meta says, excellent, because I can go after purchase. You are allowing me to go after traffic that I didn't generate from emails that maybe from a year ago, from organic traffic that you're already paying your SOT for. So SEO team for and Google traffic that you're buying on different channels and the influencer people that are returning to your brand from your influencer channels that you're doing it. The rack, the ra. I mean, I can go on and on and on now.
- [26:16]
Ralph Burns
And they've got, they invest 65 billion this year in AI and they know exactly where you've been before, let's not forget that.
- [26:22]
John Moran
Exactly. So they're like, I will know how to sell everybody from everywhere whether you want it or not.
- [26:29]
Ralph Burns
But you told me you want me to get a purchase.
- [26:32]
John Moran
Exactly. I pat myself on the back. And not only that, I can engage view and just view conversion. Those people.
- [26:38]
Ralph Burns
Right. And I look good in the platform for you.
- [26:43]
John Moran
Exactly. So that was the big news that came out that already was happening. We already have a solve for it, which we'll get to next. But that's the news that we got stuck with. So we said, what lever can we pull? Can't do targeting, we can't do exclusions. What levers can we pull? And that's where we came up with the idea of, well, if it's going to be such a conversion greedy machine, how do we leverage that rather than fight against it and stop it? Because I'm not going up against Mark Zuckerberg, I will lose. But if I can.
- [27:16]
Ralph Burns
You don't have 60 billion in 2025, right? Your own AI platform.
- [27:21]
John Moran
I started in video. No one's public.
- [27:25]
Ralph Burns
Nobody's buying my damn GPUs.
- [27:28]
John Moran
I call it Face Magazine. It's kind of like Facebook. Less pages, more compact, summarized, friendly, softer. We then said, okay, what levers can we pull? And that's where we came up with this here, and this here is now the answer. This is now the levers we get to pull.
- [27:46]
Ralph Burns
And those are EMQ scores. I am assuming here, because I didn't.
- [27:51]
John Moran
So we'll go through these and match rate perfect.
- [27:53]
Ralph Burns
A perfect match rate for EMQ is 10, obviously. Nines and eights are fabulous.
- [27:58]
John Moran
It's better than any grade I got in all 12 years of my schooling.
- [28:02]
Ralph Burns
I wish my report card looked like that right in elementary school. Do the maths a little bit better.
- [28:11]
John Moran
I have to take off my socks. If I on account past 10, I run out of fingers.
- [28:14]
Ralph Burns
That's right. Here you are talking about math.
- [28:17]
John Moran
All right, so this is our answer to this is, okay, fine. If you are going to be so good at getting conversions, what if I only allow you to be good at the conversions I want? That was our answer. That was the lever we can still pull. And thank God Cappy's around. Otherwise we would be in a world.
- [28:35]
Ralph Burns
Of hurt conversions API. For those of you who don't know.
- [28:38]
John Moran
What that is, that means we get to import the conversions from our own data. We essentially remove the pixel's capability of feeding itself the conversion. And now we feed the pixel the data we want the pixel to optimize for. We're back in control now. So fine, you want to go after existing website traffic, new customers, okay, fine. But you can only do it if a the click is actually coming from your campaign. If you get a second click, which means if a first click is Google and the second click is meta, you do not get to take credit for it. Now, if you sell the wrong product in that campaign, if we're trying to sell hair, if we're trying to sell a water bottle and you sell a shoe, you now do not get credit for it. If you sell a returning customer of one of ours, you no longer get to take credit for it. Or if you're selling a new customer in a returning customer campaign, you now again no longer get to take credit for. So now we're limiting what the camp.
- [29:39]
Ralph Burns
Narrowing the focus of the campaign and of that in this case, really custom conversion at the End of the day. Or do you call it a custom event?
- [29:49]
John Moran
Yeah, custom event.
- [29:51]
Ralph Burns
Custom event.
- [29:51]
John Moran
Okay. Yeah, I've just been calling them like Capi Imports. But yeah, custom event is kind of what they're called. So now what we're looking at here and we say, okay, that's great for new customer acquisition, but what if we want to sell upsells? What if we want to have a sale to only existing customers? What if, you know, there's a lot of these what ifs. So then we decided, okay, we're going to make a few different of these custom events as conversion API imports coming from first click data from Data Suites Warehouse, Data Warehouse, because that is very clean data, cleaner than anybody else's data essentially, plus your meta, which they don't even tell you that data. But now we say, okay, I'm going to have a campaign going after people are buying my digestive product for the first time. So that is the nc. This is the new customer. Hey campaign you're now allowed to go after digestive product, new customers. Here's my creative, here is my landing page. You're only going to pat yourself on the back if you can provide me a score that I deem to be good. Not you deem to be good. Now the other campaign though, to people who are actually already an existing customer, I want to run a sale to those people of a buy one, get one. So this is going to be optimizing for my digestive of returning customers. Or maybe I'm going to be selling digestive products to people who have previously purchased a joint product or an oral care product or an immune product. So now I'm able to actually cross sell, upsell and optimize towards it. And it has to be the product that's actually sold in that campaign, which is massive. People have no idea the little troll that's lurking underneath the bridge that they're standing on of the I'm selling pizza in my pizza campaign, but no one's bothered to look if it's actually selling hot dogs. Yeah, your AOV is wrong. Yeah, your handicap targets wrong. Your cost caps are wrong. If you haven't verified that the product you're trying to sell in that campaign is actually selling also to new customers. You're not marketing, you're hoping.
- [31:46]
Ralph Burns
Isn't this kind of old news though? I'm playing devil's advocate again because custom events and custom conversions have been around forever. Why is this so important now?
- [31:55]
John Moran
Yes, custom events have been around for a while. However, you could still have levers that you don't need to utilize that as an only source of truth. Your custom events typically, and this is the first time I've been able to see it because we sort of created it, which is that new customer only or return customer only, which is something that people have been attempting to before, but not with first click data.
- [32:17]
Ralph Burns
Right?
- [32:18]
John Moran
They were using linear data or they're using even old school time decay data or they're using no full funnel data. So what's really interesting is the secret sauce here is that the source of the upload has to be accurate to the campaign that it actually came from. Because if it's not, you're going to take your middle and bottom of the funnel campaigns that you do not know are middle and bottom of the funnel campaigns and you're going to try to copy import a new customer there. That would be incorrect. You're trying to optimize for a new customer and when you upload your linear data, it gets distributed linearly. And you're now going to confuse yourself by saying I didn't think a new customer would come from that campaign. That's kind of remarketing. Well, yes, it's true. It happened. You did get a new customer for marketing. Where did they start? We didn't upload it that way. My data doesn't support it that way. So when you're looking at where your actual conversions, the source of those conversions are if you're not tracking this with a high, high, high, high, high degree of accuracy. If you're missing the first five days of a 30 day sales cycle, your imported data is junk. If you're missing the first five days of a 30 day sales cycle, that data is junk and you're only going to hurt yourself. It's better off just letting Google or.
- [33:37]
Ralph Burns
Makes sense. Could we show like in your meta, I don't know if it's in the PWD account, but can we show specifically what we're talking about when we talk about Advantage plus in the manual toggle sort of screen share? Just so people understand that part of it. Because my guess is that a lot of people are going to watch this video. They're going to be fascinated by the CAPI import or custom event CAPI import side. But also like what am I seeing where. How is it all changing? All right, here we go. Right from campaign start, right from the, right from the jump as they say.
- [34:11]
John Moran
Right from the get go. So for this one we're going to be doing sales because we're selling physical products. So I'm Going to choose the sales, like the campaign objective. And now this is where you could do a manual setup for your manual sales campaign. This is not also available in many accounts. Now, this is what the differentiation is. Yeah. This one here.
- [34:34]
Ralph Burns
This is cool, because this is gonna. In two weeks, you're probably not gonna see that manual setup part.
- [34:39]
John Moran
No. And I actually have another account. All right, so watch this. This is a different account.
- [34:45]
Ralph Burns
Yep.
- [34:45]
John Moran
Watch what happens when I hit create Sales continue. It bypasses. Is no longer there.
- [34:55]
Ralph Burns
No. No longer a choice, no longer an option.
- [34:58]
John Moran
And that's what we saw is the future. This right here, this update, this is introduced gradually. You may not see it yet. So it's. What happens here is basically saying, like, I have one account that still has it, but very soon you're going to click it and it's going to go, all right, cool. You're on. In your Advantage plus campaign. Well, how do I turn this off? Go away.
- [35:17]
Ralph Burns
I can't.
- [35:18]
John Moran
Good luck. You are in it now. You're stuck. You're in. You're done. Yeah.
- [35:22]
Ralph Burns
And if you did it before your campaign score, if you went to manual immediately, it would, like, drop down, like, 60 or something like that, wouldn't it?
- [35:29]
John Moran
Yeah. Yeah.
- [35:32]
Ralph Burns
You already have a D on the exam, man. You need extra credit.
- [35:36]
John Moran
It's so funny, because even, like, they were trying to sell you, it's like, hey, you're gonna get 100, like, quality score as soon as you just use ours. Like, okay, cool, thanks. Like, the teacher's gonna give me an A if I do it their way.
- [35:47]
Ralph Burns
And then so inside here. So this is your campaign level for those of you maybe listening or maybe not watching. So we're inside the meta ad platform. We're actually showing, like, how this is the future. If you don't see this yet, this is what you're going to be seeing within weeks.
- [36:00]
John Moran
Rolling out. Yeah. I have two different campaigns. One I can still do manual. The other one, I know. No longer able to.
- [36:05]
Ralph Burns
Yeah, this is.
- [36:06]
John Moran
So that's the difference.
- [36:07]
Ralph Burns
It's gonna be a classic episode here.
- [36:09]
John Moran
Oh, my God. Yeah, look at this. Like, this is.
- [36:11]
Ralph Burns
It's like a collector's item.
- [36:14]
John Moran
So now we have our campaign sales objective, which you can still control. You have a campaign spending limit. You can launch a catalog sale. We don't have a catalog here because it's not a product campaign. So I can't really turn this on. Yep. But you can kind of see Advantage plus on, like, awesome. Can I. Advance plus Office is the, you know, budget strategy, which Most people actually use to finish those budget anyway. Yeah, yeah, you can have your, you know, cost per result, you can have your high volume, you can have your bid cap. Your ROAS goal is not available in this campaign. We're not eligible for it because we don't really do conversion value in this campaign. It's just leads and sales. But you still have your same bidding strategy, your budget scheduling, ad scheduling. You got your augments, audience segment reporting, which you can define here, but that's ta da. There's your technical beta buying all rolled into one.
- [37:02]
Ralph Burns
Now where's my targeting, John?
- [37:04]
John Moran
Right, what do we target? People who like puppies. Like, don't worry, upload a video of a dog and they'll find puppies.
- [37:11]
Ralph Burns
We'll figure it out for you. We know more than you do.
- [37:14]
John Moran
Right? So now you're like, okay, so here's my asset. Asset has a little bit more control now. So I have my ad set. You see that I'm still kind of stuck with, you know, Daddy Zuck telling me I'm got 100. Thank you, that's great. And so I have my Facebook page. My performance goal is basically, you know, still kind of locked in. You could do your cost cap if you're doing it this way. That's still available. That's pretty much now gone with your advanced settings. It's just, you know, here, what do you want and do you want me to cap it for you? You got your budget with your normal spending limits. Everything right here is still essentially the same. And then audience, this is what's really kind of interesting is the only thing that you can do is you can control your, yeah, I guess a small amount of the demographic, which is like a minimum age and then a custom audience exclusion that is now basically used also with Advantage plus audiences as a suggestion. This is now considered a suggestion. Please know that you're like, oh, I can still exclude my existing customers. No, it is a suggestion now. That's what it's actually being optimized for. And you can also suggest an audience to go after if it's optional. But meta's like, I'm not even really going to use it. I dictate by the creative now. Yeah, and then you have your.
- [38:28]
Ralph Burns
If you click on that, you're clicking on that right now, you're not able to affect that suggest audience ad suggestions option.
- [38:36]
John Moran
Oh yeah, this is my options here now.
- [38:39]
Ralph Burns
Okay, got it, got it, got it. Okay. Like no interest. I'm looking for if there's any interest, targeting. And I'm Changing glasses here. But there really is nothing.
- [38:47]
John Moran
And that's what's interesting here is you see how I can suggest an audience and that's where it looks like custom audience inclusions look very similar to custom audience exclusions. They're still all suggestions. Yeah, it's please don't they say, well unless the ROAS is high and there's your placements which you can use advantage plus audience on your placements. This is actually a really good thing to do. Be like, hey, I have, you know, I want to include the feed but I don't really want to have this in story. It's the kind of a boring static image so that's going to just fall into fears kind of thing, blah blah, blah. So but that's, I mean there's your technical media buying now in a nutshell, like you just have to skip manual.
- [39:21]
Ralph Burns
Now going back to like the custom event sort of capi tactic that we're talking about here in both of those suggestions, either inclusions or exclusions. Let's go back to the joint product. I know it's not pot unfortunately very disappointing there. But anyway, so like the joint product like you would upload technically, is there any advantage that you've seen so far? I mean I know it's obviously very, you know, this is early days, right? Just uploading your customer list for the joint product specifically. Or would you suggest, hey I'll upload customers from the entire catalog because it's using it as exclusions but you know, it's using it as targeting to say what do these people look like? Because especially that in combination with the capi custom event tactic that could be potentially really powerful thoughts.
- [40:11]
John Moran
Yep. So I've been working with another company that reached out to me after they kind of, you know, heard about what's going on. John Joe is the guy, I don't want to say that the name of the company, but what was interesting is he actually has a company that has a very, very, very good audience. It's like first party data of audiences and that company was designed to use as exclusions and what that mean is that you can build your whole technical media buying strategy inside of Meta and their audiences are much higher quality, much higher match rates, everything. And their, their sole purpose of that company is to go in and basically allow you to not waste ad spend on existing customers and that kind of stuff. He's been seeing the same thing and his data is fantastic and that's where he's like I need something like your import strategy because if I can combine that where I can at least have a safety net of Please take my suggestion Meta about people to not go after and then we can cappy towards who we want to go after. We have a double whammy. So it's not that it won't be used. It is not dependent to be used. As Meta said, it is probabilistic, not deterministic was their verbiage. So your inclusions and exclusions are probabilistic, not deterministic. Which means we can use them if we want.
- [41:20]
Ralph Burns
We're using them the way that we want to use them to hopefully get you the result that you're looking for.
- [41:25]
John Moran
Yeah. If you want to hear another like I had a heart attack when I was looking at an email from. From a little while ago. There is a person I really like at Google who gives me kind of like, I thought you hated everybody over there. I hate everybody except for this dude. I won't call him out because he's like my spy and I really don't want to get him fired because I don't even know if he was supposed to share this with me.
- [41:48]
Ralph Burns
So nobody watches this show.
- [41:52]
John Moran
I'm actually going to pull this up because he actually went back to the horse's mouth and I'm going to take a screenshot of this so that I don't actually end up having having his name in here. And yeah. Right. I definitely. I'm going to actually. I have to inspect element his name out real quick. So I am changing one piece in here, but it's just to hide the person's name because I really don't want to get this dude in trouble. He's been a great friend of mine.
- [42:16]
Ralph Burns
See how honest John Moran is?
- [42:19]
John Moran
I know. I really don't want to hurt any ethical standards. Exactly. So here's perfect. Let's do this. Okay, this should work. I'm going to upload this now and. Perfect. So I'm going to share screen and let me just do a quick. Let me do this. You know what? I'm going to play a fun game. I would like everybody here to chat. Okay. And I'm going to give you an option to chat. And this is just. I'm going to take Bully Stick Central. It's my fun little company here. If you were to hop into a campaign and you grabbed like the PMAX feed only just for fun because we're doing all of our advertising on Meta. So I just got a feed only remarketing campaign. If you hopped into here and I said to you ralph people on the podcast right now, do you want to only bid for new customers and that means your campaign is going to be limited to only new customers regardless. Regardless. Okay. Would you think that this is only bidding for new customers regardless of your bidding strategy? Please. I would love for the happy chef.
- [43:21]
Ralph Burns
I trust Google implicitly. I would say yes, of course.
- [43:24]
John Moran
Right. Well, I connected one of the PMAX product experts this week around you're concerned about the accurately optimized specifically to new customers. Google's new customer acquisition optimization versus strict exclusions. Google's NCA goal, even when used is an optimization strategy not a strict only show as new customer switch. I'm sorry. So now the algorithm aims to find users. It believes our new customers bases based on Google's data. Things like search history and purchase activity. Again, however probabilistic, not deterministic. I love that. I'm sorry, only regardless. Those are pretty strong words for maybe.
- [44:04]
Ralph Burns
They might be new. It gives us a lot of leverage here, a lot of latitude, I suppose, to get whoever the hell we want to make ourselves look good. At the end of the day, majority.
- [44:14]
John Moran
Of things that we've been told by these platforms is a lie. We figured that out with data.
- [44:19]
Ralph Burns
Yeah.
- [44:20]
John Moran
Now we have action. So I wanted to call out the third party attributions of the world. And the reason why I want to call them out is because this is what I've been dealing with for years is we know the paid media campaigns are messing up. They come in and say your paid media campaigns are messing up. I know what we're solved for here today is now the fix because we can have a report tell us, hey, it's going against warm traffic. You're like, what do I do about it? Be like, oh, I'm just telling you it's going against warm traffic. Okay, excellent. Now Meta just came in and said it stuck like that way permanently. Okay, so now what happens to the third party attribution software companies? Well, they can tell you that it's going to do whatever it wants. Now what? What do you do? How do you stop it?
- [45:09]
Ralph Burns
It depends on the veracity of the data itself and it depends on the individual platform what the third party attribution softwares do depending on the veracity, meaning the truth of those individual platforms. How truthful actually is it by platform? How is your media mix actually working together to get to your end goal? And that varies greatly based upon platform. However, in platform, what the big pain in the ass is is that you have to go outside of the platform. To determine some of the steps that you want to take in platform and what we're doing here with this solution, the capi custom event solution is you actually have both all in one inside the platform itself. How that will work with this new advantage, plus how truthful this is actually going to be that you can pump all your creative in with all your ad copy and they'll just figure it out. You know, the founder story is going to be at the top and the you know, reminder add to cart is going to be at the bottom.
- [46:11]
John Moran
Even your shopping campaign, your DBA or whatever we call them DPAs, DPAs or whatever 100% like.
- [46:17]
Ralph Burns
So we're putting our faith back into that. But still the fact remains, it's like how does all your media work together? And I'm also including like your sms, your email, like even your SEO, some of your other platforms, bula campaigns if you want to do that. How do they all work together? To look at your grand total, your blended mercury layer, blended roas, your merge top line, how is that moving your business forward in a trajectory that's profitable, right? That still remains in the third party attribution softwares, you know, but the truth in those platforms varies greatly from one to the next, as you and I know.
- [46:54]
John Moran
Well if you're not doing an import then and Meta says, hey, I made you 12 sales. And then you know, you hop into Data suite, says they actually made four sales. Then it's like that helps. But how do I fix this? Like what physical activity can I do? And that's these imports of actually for Meta, for Google, for everything that we've been importing and pushing it the right way is now, now we actually have a solve. And so now when you hop into Data Suite it says, hey, it's messing up. You're like, okay, we can cap the import, we'll fix this here. Now I don't care what the platform data says. Obviously the cappy imports are accurate. But now is going colder. Is it selling the right product? Is it engaging the right new customers? Are they overlapping at all with other campaigns or other channels? So you still have that third party attribution software that will tell you if it's going good or bad. But now you can actually do something. Before it was like theater strategy, dogpile strategy. Like this seems to be going cold. Let's get rid of pmax. Maybe this brings pmax back.
- [47:46]
Ralph Burns
You know what I love about this is that this all might be getting a little bit too in the weeds, but I don't care the people on this call are you smart is that this now goes from a global NCAC to a product based NCAC because your NCAC per product varies greatly. So I just did a demonstration on this. Like we're you know, in the beauty and wellness space. We do a fabulous job. By the way, tier1onebeauty.com is the new URL over there. Anyway, the point is we have multiple customers and one in particular. So it's a basket of products about six different products. Their gross profitability varies from 70% down to 40% based upon the individual product. The global NCAC for that basket is X. But if you're selling it individually, product a at a 70% gross profit, you should not have the same NCAC as product b with a 40% gross profit. Like it just doesn't make sense. That's why all of this getting specific to the actual action for the actual product is groundbreaking.
- [48:48]
John Moran
Right. And because you know if you were going to cost cap half your existing customers too and half your new on products that it gets to decide what to sell. What target do you set? Well yeah, I hope it doesn't go over 50. I don't know like why would you.
- [49:03]
Ralph Burns
Cost cap something that you have greater profitability on when you know that you can afford to acquire that customer at a greater price. Like all things being equal them having the same, you know, price everything else. But the point is is like why would you do that? This starts giving you more granularity and more control inside. That's safer. It's safer, much safer.
- [49:23]
John Moran
Scale like that's what we put in. We went from $25,000 to over a million dollars in spend. Our cost of acquired first time customer went down 9%. However it was selling any product it could find. Right. So my cost cap was actually incorrect. I was happy to get a new customer for under $200 now.
- [49:40]
Ralph Burns
Still good though, don't get me wrong, that's pretty good.
- [49:42]
John Moran
Now we had six SKUs and we only marketed two.
- [49:45]
Ralph Burns
Yeah.
- [49:46]
John Moran
What happens if you have 6,000 SKUs? Yeah. What do you do? You're back to square one now that's where those per product new and returning customers, you do get to have the visualization and optimize towards it inside of your one platform and then you do have data suite. Now to say here's how all this is working together for your top line.
- [50:01]
Ralph Burns
Yes, there's still value there 100.
- [50:04]
John Moran
However I'm not saying that the data suite is, it's not. I'm saying it's so accurate at telling you how bad everything is. But you, you couldn't stop it. Yeah. Taking that control away from you until now.
- [50:13]
Ralph Burns
I know we've got questions here, which I really want to get to, but this is obviously, this is kind of an exciting thing that we've got. It's a big deal. So, I mean, you and I have been doing this for a while. Like, we've seen a lot of changes here. My guess is that Meadow rolls this out, they're not going to roll it back like this is it. Like they rolled out changes. I can think of five off the top of my head that they rolled.
- [50:32]
John Moran
Back because iOS14 happened.
- [50:36]
Ralph Burns
Gloves are off. Like they don't care now. The point is, is that I'll bet, like the future strategy here almost goes back to a lot of the things that we were doing seven or eight years ago, which is granularity in your campaigns where if you can target, you create one advantage plus campaign for one specific product and one specific custom event. And it targets that based upon all the creative that's geared towards that particular product.
- [51:00]
John Moran
I. I almost could have paid you before this to cue me up like that. I do want to share this.
- [51:04]
Ralph Burns
Oh, don't you just love it?
- [51:06]
John Moran
I know.
- [51:07]
Ralph Burns
Comes together.
- [51:07]
John Moran
I think we'll probably have to get to questions the next time because this I know. Extremely valuable to everybody. Because the ad sets in, the campaigns are deduping by conversion event locked in with opportunities. Now, creative testing is actually amazing, and I truly mean amazing. If we're looking at a creative testing here on purchase immune and then we have a new campaign right now, it's just. It's using this one here as we're testing this. But if you have a purchase immune and a purchase immune, these two campaigns now no longer share the same physical person, but they are sharing the same physical audience. Very important distinction.
- [51:48]
Ralph Burns
That's killer, right?
- [51:50]
John Moran
Yeah.
- [51:50]
Ralph Burns
What you're saying.
- [51:51]
John Moran
So, yep, Ralph and John both like tennis, but Ralph's got that campaign, John's got that campaign. Right.
- [51:57]
Ralph Burns
We both like golf. I've got a hook, you've got a slice.
- [52:01]
John Moran
Exactly right. And so what's cool about this though is now my purchase immune that has 10 people and this purchase immune, that may be having 30 people because I spent 2 grand versus 6 grand. Yeah. I have the same audience. But this goes back to like email marketing testing, which means I'm going to take one third of my ad spend, do creative testing on this. When it's good, it stays there. But now these are added to my larger campaign. That spends more. Yeah, same audience, different people. So if it works good with a small one, it's almost like testing your ad headline before a massive blast. You're like, all right, I have 10,000 people. Take the first hundred, try that headline. Take that first, second hundred, try that headline. Which one wins? Blast it to 10,000. That's what we get to do is we have 10,000 people in our purchase immune audience that meta is going after. We said, okay, there's 10,000 people, give me 1,000. I'm gonna do some creative testing while it works. Release to the masses.
- [52:55]
Ralph Burns
Then what you could do is create another one, test another hook and then see the same audience. You might have maybe some overlap there. I mean, let's not kid ourselves because sometimes I hook it too as a slicer. You know what I mean? I don't know why I'm using your golf analogy because I know you don't play sports.
- [53:13]
John Moran
But anyway, I'm great at driving ranges. I can hit that thing 300 yards. What direction is unknown. I know.
- [53:24]
Ralph Burns
Flying everywhere, car windshields.
- [53:28]
John Moran
Yep.
- [53:28]
Ralph Burns
Well, we've got three minutes left. I mean I know we're kind of excited about this change here and a lot of things that are happening. Let's go right to brain by question here. Launching a new T shirt campaign, new brand new pixel, no conversion history, all that.
- [53:42]
John Moran
Yeah, I heard you mentioned starting with a vanish plus campaign with only catalytics catch all would still recommend in case it tries to Yo. I actually I always like the bottom up funnel which is actually the first podcast I did with you Ralph, like three years ago is a bottom up funnel strategy where I said start with people who are going to buy. If you have something that people are going to buy like an established in stream shoes, T shirt, hats, whatever it is those people that want that now start there and then work your way up. So don't try to figure out how to get people interested when they are ready to buy from you. There are already people ready to buy from you. Work your way up.
- [54:10]
Ralph Burns
Yeah, catch the low hanging fruit first before you go to the top of the tree. So you're loading up on 5 or 6 creatives. Top of fundamental funnel, bottle funnel and ads set with productore NC event. How many creatives I guess is the question.
- [54:21]
John Moran
You know what's so funny is we're not even drinking our own kool aid. We've been doing all bomb on the funnel and that's where I think we're limited. This last week we are changing our creative strategy to produce more Creative. Because we're like 10 bob on the funnel ads. Which one wins? They're like that one scale. Now we're like, we need. We have a lot of the stuff, like C. We have founder story, unique hook. Like, why buy your turkey tail mushroom from us versus anybody else? What makes you special? That needs to be in there? Like, so we're actually expanding our creative a lot in order to test this. And I will have more information for you all soon. When we're done in the lab, I.
- [54:50]
Ralph Burns
Highly recommend you go out and buy a creative agency if you're an agency at this point in time. So anyway, been there, done that. All right, Archer. The cost caps of highest volume and treating it like a YouTube campaign as a funnel.
- [55:01]
John Moran
Yeah, honestly, if. Yeah, we're using cost caps. Not always. Initially and not always. It's more of like a stride without like, which would work better. So we're still testing. There's no standard yet, but we are testing high cost caps first.
- [55:13]
Ralph Burns
Okay. Right. Actually didn't a month ago on an account because I saw some weird activity work. Well, then I turned. We got a little bit carried away today. Bring back your questions next week. We're going to do this every single week. Every Friday, 2:30 tier 11 live.
- [55:28]
John Moran
Hopefully. I think we'll do a Q&A one. Maybe we'll do like a spontaneous like, Monday or Tuesday call where we just go through Q and A for an hour. That'd be fun.
- [55:35]
Ralph Burns
We should. Although there was so much news this.
- [55:37]
John Moran
Week, we couldn't help ourselves.
- [55:40]
Ralph Burns
All right, so make sure that wherever you listen to podcasts, you leave a rating and a review. Really do appreciate that. We're in the top five now very consistently, especially on all the AI searches. So we really do appreciate everyone listening and leaving ratings and reviews. We take your criticism to heart. By the way. I responded to a guy on Spotify this morning who gave some criticism and it's good to hear. Like, we are here to serve you, the listener. So if there's some stuff that you want to hear or you want to listen to or you maybe don't like. Yeah, I have my notifications open for Spotify, so definitely check it out over there. We're. That's almost the platform that's actually more popular now than on Apple. So wherever you listen to podcasts, check it out, leave us a rating, leave us a review, make some comments. We'd love to know what you think here, especially on today's show. This is pretty cutting edge stuff and we're going to continue to have these types of shows to keep you abreast of all the information, all the changes that are happening on all these crazy platforms. So all the show notes, all the links, everything that we mentioned here in today's show is over@perpetualtraffic.com make sure that you do watch today's episode if you were listening to it. Another hint, hint, reminder. That's over@perpetualtraffic.com YouTube if you want to subscribe to our Tier 11 lives. We do every Friday, 2:30pm Eastern. Myself and John. Usually you can subscribe to that over@tier11.com YouTube but you already knew that, so. All right, thanks everyone. Till next show. Let me end that different Kevin. All right. Well, that's it from here until next show. See ya. You've been listening to Perpetual Traffic.