How Meta Ads Manager Is Lying to You & What You Can Do About It

Summary

Perpetual Traffic Podcast Summary: "How Meta Ads Manager Is Lying to You & What You Can Do About It"

Release Date: February 28, 2025

Hosts: Ralph Burns and Lauren E. Petrulo
Produced by: Tier 11

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Introduction

In this episode of Perpetual Traffic, hosts Ralph Burns and Lauren E. Petrulo delve into the inaccuracies within Meta Ads Manager's reporting mechanisms, particularly focusing on the discrepancies in tracking New Customer Acquisition Cost (NCAC). They explore the limitations of Meta's in-app metrics and introduce alternative solutions for more accurate data-driven decision-making in digital marketing campaigns.

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Meta Ads Manager's Data Reporting Issues

Timestamp: 50:32 – 55:45

Ralph initiates the discussion by highlighting a critical issue: Meta Ads Manager often misreports key metrics, leading marketers astray. Using a real-world example, Ralph illustrates how Meta's platform reported an 88% allocation of ad spend towards "new audiences," whereas their internal data revealed it was actually 42%.

Ralph Burns [38:24]: "If my media buyer was looking at this specifically and broke this down with new audiences, I'm acquiring new customers at $149. That would be very bad. That is 50, 60% higher than it needs to be."

This discrepancy arises from Meta's limited attribution windows and the blending of audience segments, which do not accurately reflect the true cost of acquiring new customers.

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Audience Segmentation and Attribution

Timestamp: 22:01 – 35:38

Lauren provides a comprehensive breakdown of Meta's audience segmentation within Ads Manager, categorizing audiences into:

1. New Audience: Individuals who have never interacted with your products or services.
2. Engaged Audience: Users who have interacted with your business but haven't made a purchase.
3. Existing Customers: Those who have previously purchased or subscribed to your offerings.
4. Unknown/Uncategorized: Users who fall outside the defined segments, often due to data limitations like disabled pixels or cross-device usage.

Lauren E. Petrulo [12:00]: "Your customer service team should be a revenue-generating line of business and they should not be a liability on your books."

Properly defining these segments is crucial for accurate attribution and understanding where your marketing dollars are truly being spent.

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Comparing Meta Data with Tier 11 Data Suite

Timestamp: 26:13 – 46:06

The hosts introduce the Tier 11 Data Suite as a superior alternative to Meta's in-app metrics. This tool provides a nearly 100% accurate data alignment by integrating with external CRM systems and leveraging advanced data matching techniques.

Lauren E. Petrulo [44:19]: "For ACAC, being all CAC or when I'm like this is your CAC, it's all of it together. So 99.9% of the time it'll be cheaper."

By cross-referencing Meta's data with their own suite, Tier 11 uncovers hidden revenue streams and provides a more precise measurement of NCAC. This allows marketers to make informed decisions, ensuring that ad spend remains within profitable thresholds.

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Impact on Campaign Management

Timestamp: 37:35 – 54:26

Understanding the true NCAC is vital for effective campaign management. Misreporting can lead to overspending on underperforming campaigns or misallocating resources based on faulty data.

Ralph Burns [54:09]: "The old way of doing things is comparing it with the CRM and it's incredibly manual. But that's the source of truth."

With accurate data from the Tier 11 Data Suite, marketers can:

• Optimize Ad Spend: Allocate budgets based on reliable NCAC metrics.
• Refine Targeting Strategies: Focus on segments that provide the highest ROI.
• Enhance Campaign Hygiene: Ensure all audience segments are correctly set up to prevent data leakage and misattribution.

Lauren emphasizes the importance of not solely relying on Meta's data, advocating for a layered approach that combines platform data with external analytics for a holistic view.

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Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Timestamp: 55:35 – End

Ralph and Lauren conclude by reiterating the necessity of accurate data in navigating the complexities of digital marketing. They caution listeners against treating Meta Ads Manager as an infallible source and advocate for integrating third-party tools like the Tier 11 Data Suite to attain a more truthful representation of campaign performance.

Lauren E. Petrulo [55:45]: "If you are cross-checking it with your source of truth, then you can benchmark a profitable CPA."

Key Takeaways:

• Inaccurate In-App Metrics: Meta Ads Manager's reporting can significantly overstate metrics like NCAC.
• Need for External Analytics: Tools like Tier 11 Data Suite provide more accurate data by integrating with CRM systems.
• Proper Audience Segmentation: Correctly defining and managing audience segments is crucial for accurate attribution.
• Data-Driven Decision Making: Reliable metrics enable better budget allocation, targeting, and overall campaign effectiveness.

For marketers seeking to enhance their digital advertising strategies, this episode underscores the importance of not solely depending on platform-provided metrics and highlights the benefits of leveraging advanced data analytics tools for more informed and profitable marketing decisions.

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Notable Quotes:

• Ralph Burns [38:24]: "If my media buyer was looking at this specifically and broke this down with new audiences, I'm acquiring new customers at $149. That would be very bad. That is 50, 60% higher than it needs to be."

• Lauren E. Petrulo [44:19]: "For ACAC being all CAC or when I'm like this is your CAC, it's all of it together. So 99.9% of the time it'll be cheaper."

• Lauren E. Petrulo [55:45]: "If you are cross-checking it with your source of truth, then you can benchmark a profitable CPA."

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Listeners are encouraged to tune into future episodes for deeper dives into setting up audience segments correctly and enhancing campaign hygiene to ensure the utmost accuracy in their marketing efforts.

Transcript

[Ralph Burns]

Hey folks, Ralph here with something that could seriously upgrade your Top of Funnel ad game. If you've been a PT listener for any period of time, you know that we talk about top of Funnel all the time and how challenging it is for you to get quality Top of Funnel clients or leads or customers and then convert them typically at bottom of funnel. Well, TV advertising is one of those areas that we haven't discussed here on PT all that much. But our friends over at Ad Critter have figured this stuff out. They do connected TV ads so you can be everywhere without spending millions on super bowl ads. But they pair it with display retargeting. So you're hitting the audiences with a complete approach. You reach them, then you remind them and then you collect the revenue. It's a strategy designed to deliver and let me tell you, it really works. We're testing this at tier 11 and so far the results have been very impressive. Now with Ad Critter, creating custom audiences are so easy. You don't need to reformat files, you don't need to mess around with complex spreadsheets. You just upload any file in any format and you're ready to go. And the match rate is awesome. They make it easy to connect with the right people, the actual people that have interacted with your ads in the past and then allow them to naturally flow through your funnel so you can convert them at bottom of funnel. Now, the folks at AdCritter, we twisted their arm to get us a great deal for you, the PT listener. They are offering a special deal for y'all and that is you can get a $500 campaign credit, meaning $500 in free money to test out the platform or dollar for dollar matching on any TV campaign up to five grand. Imagine the impact of that match spend five grand. The they'll add another five grand in display. That's a huge opportunity here. Now it's only offered to you, the PT listener. Head over to AdCritter.com PT and check it out. Hey, it's Ralph here. Let me tell you about a lifestyle brand that we recently worked with where they grew their revenue by 49.8% year over year and hit eight figures in top line revenue for the very first time in their history. And they are now on track for 25 million in revenue in 2025. We are so excited to be working with this company. And the reason why is they started using Tier 11 data suite about a year ago and re reduced their unattributed traffic by 90%. That's right. They're unattributed, direct, unknown traffic that probably frustrates the hell out of you. Over in GA4 or one of those other crappy attribution tools, we reduced that unattributed traffic by 90%, uncovered $850,000 in hidden revenue revenue, and scaled their ad spend by over 3x. These results are not magic. The results of clean, accurate data and a system designed for today's privacy world where everybody is trying to block your data. If you want to see these kinds of results for your business, reach out and let's make it happen. [e-mail] apply and discover how tier 11 data suite can finally allow you to scale your business acquiring new customers at a cost you can afford. Head on over to tier11.com apply.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

You're listening to Perpetual Traffic.

[Ralph Burns]

Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns. I'm the founder and CEO of Tier 11 alongside my amazing co host, Lauren.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

E. Pedrillo, founder of Mongoose Media.

[Ralph Burns]

You always chuckle whenever I say that. It's like, oh, he said something nice about me. Well, you're in a pretty nice spot right now. You're a much better place than I am. I'm in Brookline, where it's like 40 degrees outside. You're in tropical paradise in Mexico. Where exactly are you?

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

I'm in Punta Mita at the Four Seasons near Puerto Vallarta. Recording this in a swimsuit right after this call.

[Ralph Burns]

The only thing that's standing between the end of this call and what our obligation here is. Lauren jumping in the pool. So for me it's like lunch. But anyway, so you're down there for digital marketers who like digital marketer used to own this podcast and we used to do it together as a partnership. We parted ways about three years ago. Tier 11 ended up buying it. Actually a media company that we own ended up buying it. So we've got a great relationship still. Like I text with Ryan all the time. Super good guy. Been on here many, many times. If you're not familiar with who Ryan Deiss is, just Google. Who is Ryan Deiss? There actually was website for a while. Who is Ryan Dice? How I got to know him. But anyway, one of the smartest marketers on the planet and he runs a mastermind which you're in this week, right? And it is called Founders Board. Founders Board. Okay. So for those of you who aren't familiar with it, we'll give a little plug to Ryan and the boys there because of many, many years working together on this show and also being a speaker myself there for many years. Like this is their highest level Mastermind, correct?

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Kind of. Kind of like, yeah. So it's Scalable is parent company Digital Marketer is one of their smaller brands. So as you know, I'm a coach for Elite, formerly known as M3, which is a mastermind for brands that want to grow their business closer to a million or they're like really focused on their marketing side. So I coach on that. I call every week, I review their ad campaigns. Then Scalable is the brand, is the company entity for brands doing at least a million a year. But they're really trying to grow. Like they're trying to go from 3 to 10 or from 10 to 50 and that is a higher price Mastermind. So that's called Founders Board. And then within Scalable there's another tier which is Roundtable. So they only have 10 clients and that's at a significantly steeper investment. But that gives you founders board for three years plus direct access to the three Rs, Ryan, Richard and Roland, so that they're consultants for your business directly. So while Founders Board is the mastermind there because, I mean, they also have epic separate group for mergers and acquisitions. But Founders Board is the higher tier mastermind because there's Roundtable. It's access to the Mastermind with exclusive consulting as an add on. So I don't know how they look at it, but I'm like, yes, sure, yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

I think at that level they're pretty intimate with those clients and then those customers rather. And they might even be working on some kind of equity deal in exchange for working with them, taking ownership. I know that there's that component to it, obviously with Brolin being involved there and Ryan, I'm not sure with Richard, but obviously he's a great operational guy, which you obviously need to scale that next level. So much of his stuff we've actually implemented here at tier 11, which he's been a great advisor for me personally. But yeah, there's different levels. So this is really sort of the larger Mastermind group. This is sort of the thing that war room maybe was at one point in time migrated to. Got it. Yeah.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

So they have retreats everywhere. We're going to Nashville next. But this one like was set up as a retreat, so we only did three and a half hours of work during the day. So we're in a conference room. But it was a lot more like discussion based. And then the entire afternoon and evening minus this, like, major luau blowout that we did, which was fun. You're, like, networking. And so I spent, like, an hour and a half building some strategic planning in the hot tub. Fully working, 100% working, just barely dressed swimsuit on, fully unveiled marketing strategy. Yes, but, like, let's be real. There's one in Mexico. There's different levels of swimsuits. I was not in a burkini.

[Ralph Burns]

You are not on a what? A Burtini.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Burkini.

[Ralph Burns]

Burkini. Oh, a burkini. Got it. That's how you say it there. Mexico. Well, so obviously this is like a burkini.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Wait, no. Burkini is, like, if you're conservative and you're not showing any skin, it's like neck, full coverage.

[Ralph Burns]

Oh, got it.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

Okay.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Anyways, I didn't even know that I have minimal tan lines. I'll just leave it at that. Ralph, this is not what this episode is about. But, yeah, I worked on my tan lines. I saw whales jumping Free Willy style on the sunset while doing things for my business growth and discussing ways that the colleagues in the hot tub could grow and scale their businesses. Sorry. Not sorry.

[Ralph Burns]

Sorry. Not sorry. Well, it's a great. I mean, we're huge believers in masterminds here. Both of us have belonged to masterminds for years and years. Even previous co hosts, not to be named, been involved in that as well. Going all the way back to Molly Pittman. Way, way, way, way back. She actually. Obviously a mastermin. So I think they're just a great place for business owners to get together and help grow the business, but also be in a pretty cool environment in which to do it. Doesn't get much better than that place. I've been to that resort before. That place is fabulous. So, nuggets, before we get into today's episode, anything that you picked up, like, one of the cool things about these masterminds is that there's always something that you learn from somebody else or a nugget that you learn from stage. Anything worth mentioning here before we get into the show?

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Well, I got to do my own mini breakout, so I got to do a full session on AI with customer service. So in teaching that and having this intimate group, like, it was super packed first day. My takeaway nugget, at least for my business, was that most people were still asking if AI assistants make sense for their brand. Where I'm in my own closed world, we're eating and breathing. But there are some, like, really large brands that are leaving money on the table. It's not like a learned nugget from something that was taught I can share the next. But for me, the big nugget was like, oh, my gosh. Some of these brands that are doing 10, 30 million a year are still ignoring comments on Facebook. They're still having terminal conversations. Their customer service team is, like, liking and validating comments, but they're not turning those conversations into conversions, even at minimal for, like, lead generation and lead qualifying. So it was an amazing moment because they were notable brands in the room. And it's not that they're not doing it. They just. Because AI is so evolving. It's so complicated. They're accustomed to hiring offshore VAs or bringing in someone's nephew to handle that. And, like, the brand's voice gets a little lost. There's still a level of fear that I hadn't anticipated. So that was an awakening moment for me. I'm like, oh, well, this will help give really stronger language and connectivity for what we sell and provide. So that was like my biggest takeaway. I was like, oh, yeah, this is still super new for a lot of people, but We've been doing AI chatbots with Manychats since, like, 2018.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

When we were both at the Conversations conference. Even so, like, so that was. That was a really big takeaway for me personally. And then I think in terms of.

[Ralph Burns]

Like, these larger brands have not engaged with this technology at all. That was really. So it was more of a surprise than anything else.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

It was a surprise, but also of the simplicity of just, like, simple implementation for FAQs. I mean, we've talked about case study before where we have teams, like, we've taken over accounts where they have, like, multiple customer service agents and they're still bogged down. They can't keep up with it. But it was just the shift, watching the shift, saying, like, for me, my language is, if your customer service team is a liability, they're an expense. You've hired the wrong person or they're doing customer service wrong. Because customer service by itself, with AI, with all the automations and like, scalable systems you can do, your customer service team should really be an extension of your sales team.

[Ralph Burns]

Right. And a retention tool.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Buyer's remorse is a real thing. Getting into that customer, ensuring they got the product, ensuring they're using the product correctly. That's customer service. I don't know how or when the switch changed. And it might be like, sorry, I'm just like, thinking about this now. It might be like a cultural thing because there was such a shift to taking customer service outside the US and maybe that's why it's a little different. And then like culturally we've adapted and accepted that just responding, just showing up just is just good enough. And I'm like, absolutely not. Your customer service team should be a revenue generating line of business and they should not be a liability. On your book of account, on your chart of books, book of chart, insert accounting language there on your P and L. So it was just like reminding things that everyone already knows. I believe there's just been a cultural shift to say I just want to acknowledge. And I'm like, not at all. Comments should become subscribers, Subscribers should become leads. Leads should become prospects and conversions. We use AI to have like 200 people on your account at any hour of the day, no questions asked. You don't have to retrain them on all your products and services. But it was like going through and like, yeah, we're making people feel seen. I'm like, cool. They feel seen because you liked it, but they don't feel heard. And if I don't feel heard, I don't feel inclined to buy. That was just a really big. I assume, especially in the marketing bubble that we're at, everyone's using AI. People are definitely using ChatGPT and they've adopted into like refining their creativity. Some people are using operators as well. But still the more simpler installations are not being introduced. Even if, like you do nothing else but train it on your FAQs you're paying for in house or offshore talent doesn't matter. To do low priority tasks, like low productivity tasks versus like, okay, what if you collated all of those responses and used it for consumer insights? Hey, we're getting a lot of comments about this product working at the beach. We've never marketed it as a beach resource. Here's an idea that we can take something with that data and run with it. That's what a customer service person, if they're just replying, needs to then be providing consumer insight. But they're not doing that either. So that's why I was like, that was my big breakaway. I was like, oh, wow, Lauren, you live in a bubble.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah, yeah. I think with AI now and being able to create your own individual large language model based upon your documentation, based upon information that's on your website PDFs that you have on your business, I mean, it's easier now than ever to do it and like to get. So if you're not doing this, you should be at least doing it or having somebody in your business starting to do it. We have someone that's doing it. We have not implemented the chatbot on the site yet. However, we're building because we've added so many new services. We want to make sure that they're all accurate and they're all correct before we put it on, because it does take some time to write it all out. Our latest project is tier 11 data suite. There's so much to know. We have all this documentation. We're making sure that that's done. But the point is, the end result is a chatbot on the site to be able to answer questions, but also use that for training as well, training.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Your customer to know you, training your team, because then they can keep going back to it. But, like, what you're saying too, is a really common thing. People are afraid because once I let it go, it's going to use everything on my website, which there's a fair amount of fear because I don't know what's on my website. People have been building blogs. I think I've got like 300 blogs on one of my brands. Even on Mongoose Media, we're doing almost a blog a week. So we've got a lot of content and some of it could be outdated. We've done Facebook ad strategies, and so probably blogs from 2022 aren't super relevant. That's a real thing. But where I do try to warn people is like, if it's on your website, it's fair game for the AI chatbot to pull and crawl from. So the only danger is, do you have outdated pricing? And if you do, that's fair game for the bot so someone can find access to it. But at the same time, I'm like, I get it, you want to make sure everything is right. But if you don't install something and someone finds those inconsistencies, it's still going to be out there for the world. See, like, there is a page on my website that shows really outdated pricing. I'm like, oh, my God, I better remove that before this is launched. Because a few times someone has found that. I'm honoring it because it's what was as advertised. It's a security feature that helps you find inconsistencies because you're always going to have someone monitoring the conversations, or you build an agent that's going to send you a summary of the conversations from that week, that day, that month, depending on the volume of comments and messages and chats that you're getting. I would just Invite you to consider that. So for anyone who's listening, like I don't know, I need to check, I need to check first. I'm like you can or you can use the chatbot to do those checks for you and when someone finds it, you want it and respect it and then you pull it down. You can do it in a reactionary thing in a mea culpa situation.

[Ralph Burns]

So bottom line is if you're not working on it right now, you should be working on it.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Bottom line is it's more affordable and allows your brand to be more accessible than ever. We've seen pretty much across the board 25% conversion lift when you install a chatbot on your paid traffic pages. And the way I say that is as marketers make assumptions of what people want to see and read on your sales page, we hire people like the highest I know is $50,000. It's gentleman charges 50,000 plus a 30% to do all your copy for your sales converting copy. I know other individuals that charge $1,800 an hour to have really good converting sales copy. Amazing. You invest all of that but then you don't install like a fifty, sixty dollar widget a month to help those that you assumed wrong.

[Ralph Burns]

Right.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Someone has a question, maybe they don't want to read that long a sales page and they just want to ask direct questions. And by opening that conversation, that two way dialogue, you can address their immediate points of friction for them without assuming because pages are made to talk to one to many, but customers buy as individuals. So anyway, sorry, that was totally not the purpose of this episode, but that was my biggest takeaway.

[Ralph Burns]

Well, I mean it's amazing that you're there with some very large businesses and this is not a priority. It sort of seems like to me it's like this is old news. Shouldn't it have been a priority way back when? But if you're not doing it, you should at least be considering it or working on it to a certain degree. And assumptions are when you assume that these things are being done, usually you're shocked at what you find. Today's show is actually about assumptions because we talked about this in an episode a few weeks back. We'll leave a link in the show notes to that. We were talking about how to determine your NCAC if you don't know what the NCAC is. It is the cost to acquire a new customer. Just got off a call with a brand new potential prospect and we determined through we do sort of an analysis before they come on it's like, all right, well what's your number? Because we can start traffic today and if we don't know what our number is and if we don't know the accuracy of that number, which is two things, know the number, know how accurate it is, then we could run a lot of traffic, spend a lot of money on paid media. But put you out of business. That's not the goal. The goal is for you to have profitable growth so you can ultimately achieve your vision as an organization. How do you do that? You go back to determining your ncac. And we're not doing this for just clicks and likes and shares. We're doing this because we're trying to sell stuff online and how much you can pay to acquire a customer. We did a pretty extensive show on that, like I said. And that NCAC number is like new visits, new customers. Getting that actual number from in app very hard. And I think people are assuming that what they're seeing inside the apps is the correct number when in fact it isn't. And you discovered this. I know we've since implemented this on our side in our media buying. Is that there is a way inside Meta. We're going to talk about meta here specifically and Facebook. I guess it's meta. Doesn't really matter. Meta, Facebook, we're going to say the same thing is that there is a way to show new audiences, engaged audiences and existing audiences because you want to know who those new people are and how much are you paying. What's your cost per purchase which is really a new customer coming in. And the numbers that the in app metrics show versus what we see when the data is actual is two completely different things. And I think today's show is not a pitch for any service here. We just so happen to have a data solution that shows exactly like within 99%, 99.99%. It's like 99.44, 100 is like ivory Soap. It is so accurate so we can make actual data driven decisions. But the point is, is that if you're looking in app, you're going to be led astray. And I think everyone that listens to the show needs to understand that at a base level and what are they going to do about it? So you found this out, this audience segmentation. We're going to do a screen share here today. So does that accurately depict what we're going to be discussing today?

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Fair, fair, fair, fair. And the piece has been around not even like a year like the way you can find these audiences Because Meta wants you to see and understand who is new, engaged and existing customers. It's like the two way conversations from the data you know and have into the data that Meta can have access to to help shape how you do your campaign planning.

[Ralph Burns]

Right. So the three categories are basically new, engaged or existing new audience. Okay, that's pretty straightforward.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

It is straightforward because it's new, but in the nuance of it, it's new to your product or service, not necessarily new to your brand. So the new piece is that they haven't visited your site, they haven't left Meta to see a product or service of yours. So it's like new visitors to your website, but then you have, if you're in E commerce and you have catalog or shop, it's excluding visitors to that shop or catalog interaction because it's new visitors to the product or service you have most time. Like easiest is website visitors, but if you're in commerce, it adds the shop because that's like a separate website. So it is new. New. New. But I'm just going to like. Small, small impression. Yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

All right, so we're going to do a screen share here today just to sort of show you where this is, because this is important for you to know and it's also important to up correctly. And we're going to sort of go through sort of a step by step. I think we're also going to do this in one of your accounts where you set it up, it wasn't set up and then you did set it up and then the before and after. So we can get into this a little bit more deeply here because this is super important because the data that you see when you're making decisions has to be accurate data. And we all know that even with the addition of CAPI or Conversions API, which we talked about here many, many times, the data is still faulty and it's not a true depiction of what's actually going on when you're running. In this case. And we're going to, in this example, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in spend. So I'm going to do a screen share here. If you don't subscribe to our channel over on YouTube, make sure that you do. That's [e-mail] YouTube. All right, so we are inside. We're going to have to. We're blurring some of this out, obviously to maintain confidentiality. This is a tier 11 client who has been on Conversions API for well over a year. They have also been on and have been gathering data inside tier 11 data suite, which we talked about many times. So it's a good depiction. So this is really. This is about as pure data as you're going to get on the Facebook Meta side, because capi is integrated here. If you don't know what capi is, we'll leave links in the show notes. We did two different shows about two and a half years ago on how to do capi, how to unlock, install CAPI on your ad account, and it's pretty straightforward. We actually had two engineers from Meta that were on. I'll leave links in the show notes for that. So if you're not familiar with Capi and Conversions API, it's the best way in which to get data back into the ad platform, especially in light of the iOS 14 updates from 2021. So we're still sort of living in that shadow to a certain degree. There is a certain amount of visibility that is just being blocked right now. And inside the platforms themselves, whether it's Google, whether it's Meta, the reality is, is that a lot of the data that comes back into the platforms, it is modeled based upon what Meta actually thinks is happening, as opposed to what's actually happening. Until you actually have fingerprinting and tying the user, the click data to the purchase outside of the platform, you really don't get a true depiction as to what's going on. So I'm showing my screen here and maybe you can take us through some of these columns here. This is a campaign. This is actually at the ad set level. I've selected one particular campaign. If you're watching this over on YouTube, great. We've gone into Ads Manager, we've selected one campaigner, probably our most popular campaign for this particular client. And then we're at the ad set level and we can actually see the individual ad sets sorted by impression reach, as well as amount spent for the last 30 days. So this campaign has spent $250,000 just the past month, and the ad set that we're looking at here has actually spent about $141,000 in the last 30 days. So take us through these audiences here. I'm going to highlight where we actually find this data, but also sort of take us through what it actually is as far as like, new audience, engaged audience, existing customers and unknowns.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Yeah. So just as you were hovering over underneath the ad set, what you need to do is break this down. But before I show you how to break this down, I'm going to explain what you're seeing in this breakdown, if that's all right. The first I that you're hovering over in the breakdown of this ad set is new audience. So again, the meta language here, if you're not watching on YouTube says these are people who have not interacted with your products or services. So again, that nuance being they haven't visited your website or your shop or your catalog, they haven't interacted with. That's, that's your true new audience. Because if you go down beneath that, you have engaged audience and when you hover over that info icon, it's saying that this is engaged audiences, an audience that you defined key you, the advertiser, you, the brand defined in the ad account settings as people who are aware of your business or interacted with your products or services but have not made a purchase. So this could be super debatable of what do you include as engaged audiences? For me, the new audience is always going to be shop, website visitors and catalog. Engaged audience now is bigger expansion. They could have watched your videos, they could have interacted with your Facebook profile, your Instagram profile, all these. It's a much bigger audience, right, because they've engaged, not purchased. And then underneath engaged audience, we have existing customers. So existing customers as defined by meta as an audience that you defined in an ad account setting as people who have purchased your products or services or site purchase your products are signed up for your services to big disclaimer here. Engage audiences and your existing customers must be created in your meta ads manager. So you go to the audiences. So if you hover on the left for those again watching, we're hovering on the left underneath campaigns, ad reportings is the audiences. It looks like three little people. You go into that audiences tabs and that's where you're creating the custom audiences that met is going to blend into your engaged audience and your existing customers so that they can then determine who are your new visitors and new customers. So if we hover back onto the ad set level, those are the three like critical audience.

[Ralph Burns]

We're not just interrupt you there. We're going to do a show on that particular subset. That audience is just to make sure people understand this because these are people who have interacted with your catalog video view audiences. You know, if you're using obviously website custom audiences, which is basically your retargeting audiences. But setting these audiences up correctly is the key to this whole thing actually working. And in this particular account, it's been set up accurately. It's been set up correctly. But we're going to go through that in a separate episode. So anyway, continue.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Yeah, no, no, it's good because again, it's what is correct. And even if it's not correct, you start somewhere. But we can totally go to that. So those three, you create the engaged and existing audiences, Meta creates for you, then the new audience. And then there's other options you might see as unknown or the other one is untracked or unaccounted for. But there's two additional ones which they count as uncategorized and unknown. So here we can see that there are unknown. This is going to happen because people turn off their pixels, people switch different devices. Like, it's an imperfect system. Here you've got two impressions from unknown. It might be someone that's using the Dark Web or whatever. In all of that, you can hover over unknown. So we can see, as defined by meta, unknown as audience segments that weren't defined for this campaign at the time of the impression. So the results were categorized as new audience, engage, or existing. But there is an additional two, unknown as an uncategorized. So we know that this was set up well because we don't see uncategorized.

[Ralph Burns]

Right.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

So those are the five. And if we look at this, Ralph, go up to that top one. What is that discrepancy? What is that percentage for those that can't see? The first ad set here has 11 million impressions.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah, like I said, we're on the ad set level inside Meta Ads Manager here. So I encourage you to watch this over on our YouTube channel, perpetualtraffic.com YouTube but we're gonna try and call this out as much as possible here. So in this particular ad set we've got, in the last 30 days, we've got over 11 million impressions. Okay. Reach, you've got a frequency potentially here, like probably two thereabouts. I didn't put frequency in here. But anyway, we've spent about $141,000 in the last 30 days on this ad set. And if you look at new audience, engaged audience, existing audience, you'll see that the largest portion, if I highlight it here, of that $141,000 in spending is $124,000. So Meta is telling me that of the $140,000 I spent on this ad set, 88%. 88%. Thank you for the math. I was going to say 87%, but 88%. 88% is new. Now, new as defined, these are people who have not interacted with your products or services. So it's dependent upon your audiences. But the misnomer here is also let's talk about attribution windows here. Another big factor we are not looking at all time. These are not people who have not interacted with your products or service all time. These are people just that are in your audiences but also really in a 28 day look back window at the max.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Because depending on how this ad set is set, it's going to report the attributions. If it was a one day click, one day view, seven day click one, whatever that is at the attribution level you assigned. This too is what it's going to attribute in the breakdown. But there's like here there's ways that you can also see even though it's not attributed to, you can add additional days up to a 28 day look back. But it's optimized for the attribution window you set. But the other attribution windows are available. But 100% that 28 day it went away and then it came back and it's not super easily accessible. But yeah, you're still looking at a very marginalized attribution window.

[Ralph Burns]

Okay. We've got new audiences, engaged audiences, existing customers and unknowns. We're assuming it's within a seven day look back period. Okay. That's the default. We're not breaking it down. There is a way in which to break it down Inside Ads manager to show 28, 7 and 1, but by default we're going with 7 here. So where do you actually find how to enter these in and actually show in your ad set? You can also see this inside campaigns. We're just using ad set here it is, I believe under the breakdown setting, which is right here.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Correct. So if you're running or you're listening in the car, forgive me if I butcher this explanation, but bear with me. You're probably familiar with your columns. Those are the three parallel lines. We do that to look at performance and clicks. We make our own custom columns arrangement because I want to look at the KPIs that matter to me when Meta gives you like 200 plus I care about my 40 immediately to the right of columns and breakdowns.

[Ralph Burns]

Right. And I have here, I've made it super, super basic, just keeping purchases, cost per purchase, purchase conversion value, amount spent, frequency and impressions and reach. So just for the purposes of today's call, however, you can add a ton of stuff. Yeah, these are the columns that we just need hundreds.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

So then there's hundreds. The columns as they are saying are what's happening on the X axis. So when we're looking from left to right, that is what's the KPIs that are showing. Breakdown goes on your Y. So that's why we can see under each ad set. Underneath the ad set is new audience, engage, existing, unknown. And then you might also have uncategorized. So the breakdown is going down on your Y axis. So it's immediately to the right of the columns button with the carrot. It says breakdown. So what you want to then do is if you scroll down, you could either search and type in audience segments, but if you scroll down on breakdown you go to demographics and then in demographics you have audience segments. So it's to the right of audience segments. You turn that on and then full disclosure, it's a really good cheat if you're auditing an ad account to know if the media buyers are doing this because you want to make sure that they're setting up your audiences. Because it's not just about clicking buttons. I know there's a lot with AI, but there's so many things that go into Ads manager, they're like 16 different places to go to. So we're going deeper, going more ninja to this. So if you go into breakdown, you go to demographics, you click on audience segments, then what that will do is add to your Y axis up to five additional lines to which you can see the columns break down. Which is how we knew 124,000 of the 141 was spent on new audiences. New in quotations, air quotes being what meta identifies as new based off of what you've identified as existing and engaged.

[Ralph Burns]

Right. So just knowing that this even exists and using it as a benchmark at the very least is an education unto itself because.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Yes.

[Ralph Burns]

When did this actually get installed inside Ads Manager?

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

I want to call, I want to say November 2023.

[Ralph Burns]

Okay, so it's been around a while.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

But not that long. I mean, yes, just barely over a year. Then it does a lot of these rollouts. Like unless you're like. So we have seven full time media buyers. Right. They live in the platforms and even they will find stuff that's new.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah, they might not announce it either. Yeah.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Or if they do, it's in like buried pieces. We're really lucky we have access to agency reps, account reps. So they're often promoting newest updates. I'm part of Meta Business Leaders Network. I've gotten to be on their global innovation committee. Like there's benefits to having the Access because they'll tell us about stuff sometimes if you follow that as like Instagram for business accounts or Adam Mosseri, he's the CEO of Instagram. Like he'll often share a lot of updates on his broadcast channels. Like there's just different resources you can go and like I'm just saying it's a lot of different places. If you didn't know, it's okay. Even if you're a media buyer and you're like, oh, this is like another. It's okay because there's a thousand and a half things that can affect your campaign. But now you're empowered to understand the distribution of your media across the various audience types to get a better understanding of meta tries and meta guesses and meta will guess wrong if you don't give it direction. These algorithms are like toddlers. You have to give them guidance, you have to feed them data back. It's almost if not more important than how you set up your campaigns is how you feed that data back, which is where in this you can see. Okay, cool. I know that there's still over 10% of my budget on this ad set that's going to non new. So that can help you decide how you do your messaging. However Ralph, what you then have is an additional layer because we know that meta's doing the best it can.

[Ralph Burns]

This is doing the best that it can. And our media buyers and I know the media buyer quite well on this, he's been on perpetual traffic a couple of times. Like I know he's got this stuff dialed in, but he's also looking at a cost per purchase here for new claiming new. Let's see, it is $149 which is not within their KPI. Their KPI is 80 to 90. Ideal as sort of a scale range, but definitely under 100. So if my media buyer was looking at this specifically and broke this down with new audiences, I'm acquiring new customers at $149. That would be very bad. That is 50, 60% higher than it needs to be.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

So but also wait before you jump to this, like look at that. Your new is 149, your blended is 128. So you're already given a different handicap if you're not breaking this down because you can see existing customers, our last click attribution is to this ad within the seven day window they clicked or viewed the ad and you have 21 purchases from your existing customers. So that 28, 74. I mean they might have had an email, they might have had an sms, there might be. This is where like you can have multiple attribution pieces, but if you're like oh, 128, that's not as bad as 150. Can we break it down? But if you don't do this, you're not looking at the 150 number, you're looking at the 128. And you're not excluding that you're engaged audience, that your returning customer. Not returning customer, but like your warmer audience. Your acquisition cost is $66.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

And maybe that's again without a scope because you're relying on email to do more of that. All that data. Again, it just helps you make more informed decisions. But then you're saying, Ralph, you would turn this off because it's outside.

[Ralph Burns]

I mean we would probably say, well, this is a terrible ad set. This is clearly coming in way above KPI. I mean if I didn't know about any of these individual columns here. Breakdown under the breakdown section, which is engaged audience segments or audience segments rather with new, engage and existing, I wouldn't really even have an understanding as to how Meta is focusing their efforts. Is it what they think are on new customers, what they feel are engaged, existing? It's kind of a big mess unless you actually have a way in which to you can benchmark this saying, okay, in this particular ad set, 128 is actually is okay if you double check it with a third party attribution tool. And so the reason why we're exemplifying this is first off, to say like the ad account itself is not giving you a true measure of what's actually happening. It's using a seven day window, it's blending audiences together. Clearly they're stating that 88% of your traffic is new. That is totally not the case. And that's one of the biggest things like John Moran and I talk about this in our tier 11 lives every single Friday. We're like in app roas is a faulty metric because of this particular issue right here. As long as I know that even with all my exclusions in this ad set, and I know all the exclusions are made, the audiences are set up correctly. If I exclude all of those audiences, for me to try to target new customers, I still can't do it because Meta is going to blend those audiences together no matter what. And the reason we know this is that if we look inside data suite, the exact same thing, exact campaign, all the ad sets, we're going to show this in just a second here last 30 days. Look back, let's look at this ad set here, which we spent $141,000 on last 30 days. If we go into last 30 being.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

January 27th to February 25th. So this is at the time the recording, like this is 2025. This isn't skewed to Black Friday or anything. It's like truly last 35 days. Right? 30 days.

[Ralph Burns]

It's last 30 days. And here is the ad set. Okay, the numbers actually match almost exactly. 141, 372. It's only off by like a few dollars, which is insane. But also there's reporting they match. Basically it's 100% match. So here's how we would then look at this. We would say, okay, 141,372 for this ad set, we know that Meta is going to put your ads in front of previously engaged either customers, audiences that know about your brand, they're not truly cold. And we know that because we can then fingerprint or tie this together with a click. As long as there is a click, we can then determine about 42% of these individuals who are targeted in this ad set are new. It is not 88% as Meta says over here. In this particular, going back into the Meta ad account, which is 88% of all of our spent, we're using spend here impressions. You can do the same sort of thing. So we realized that, okay, there is 42% that is new. But unless we know what we are paying to acquire a new customer, and there's the number right there, we know in this campaign, cold traffic, okay, there's some warm in here, obviously. All right, 57% is warm, 42% is cold. But we separate out the new versus the returning by using this NCAC metric. And this is why the tier 11 data suite is so powerful, because it's actually pulling real data, piecing it all together, matching it with the user on Meta, and then showing it inside the interface here. So we know inside Meta, in this campaign, it says our purchasers were coming in at a CPA or CAC of 126. And this particular ad set was coming in at 140. What we actually know is that the new customers, the cost to acquire the new customers, the 42% that are brand new, is well within our metric, which is our NCAC metric right here, which is 89.92. And this campaign is actually doing really well. Yes, it is targeting return visitors. Yes, it is targeting people who have bought previously. Absolutely and if we do even a further breakdown, we can actually see acac, which is different. ACAC is all cac. This is new visitors. Okay. These are engaged visitors, but also returning customers. And that ACAC or the all customer acquisition cost because you are going to get some returning ones is even lower at $82. So it'll always be lower.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Always.

[Ralph Burns]

Because it is going to be lower. And let's just explain for people like the difference between how you explain it ACAC versus just CAC or acac.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

So for ACAC being all CAC or when I'm like this is your cac, your cost to acquire a customer. It's I don't care who or how that customer has been with you. But your mcag, a new customer always has extra friction unless you have some like viral one off exception where your MCAC ends up being cheaper because it penetrates a new audience that was never exposed to it and you've minimally spent into that audience. Your all CAC because it blends your evangelists and you're returning and your warm audiences like it's all of it together. So 99.9% of the time it'll be cheaper. I'm leaving that 0.001% for the exception. But NCAC is new. They are not in your existing customer database. They have not given you a dollar before.

[Ralph Burns]

Right.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

So you have upselling ascensions that are in your all cac.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah. So yeah, ACAC is always going to have there is cac. A lot of people talk about cac, but you really do need to differentiate the two between everybody because you're always going to be as long as you're using Meta platform and the Google platform, they're always going to target some of your warm traffic no matter what. But they are going to claim as we see over an ads manager, that most of it is brand new here. And that's the learning from today is like you can't just look at these platforms and assume that the data is correct. This AD account has CAPI installed and a lot of people are asking well hey, what's the difference between Data Suite and capi? Well, CAPI is good. It's a good first step. However, it doesn't even compare to the precision that you actually see inside here. And it's because of the way that it works.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

I think like a lot of the component for people to understand is that meta's not doing this maliciously. No, they're doing the best they can based off of the information they're able to Glean in on your account. It's to their benefit for you to want to spend more. If you were to turn that campaign off, Meta would then lose $140,000 in profit because, I mean, that's their asset, right? But with legislation, with privacy policies and cookies and all that type of stuff, it's restricting what Meda can do. So it's doing the best that it can. But if you take nothing away, it's like Meta's trying and they're trying their best and they're always going to try, but you have to take it with a grain of salt and that the assumptions and dependency on in app numbers only is never going to paint the full picture correct. What we're showing with the breakdown is adding more color to your picture, which can inform your campaign planning, your campaign management, campaign messaging. Maybe you're introducing some more direct mid funnel language because you're not just capturing new as much as you are. I only want new. I know we all only want new, but it helps you make more data informed decisions. And then what you're showing with here is when you're able to add in a supplemental additional information, you can have even stronger informed decisions because you're not. It's your picture, you're zooming out and zooming out and zooming out. And when you're spending more, well, you know, even for the small business owner, even if you're spending less, every dollar is important to the end user. So if you're not incorporating an outside party tool and you're doing nothing else, just bring in the breakdown so that you can again start to understand what's happening. Because a lot of people will try to treat meta like an ATM. You could 10 years ago put a dollar in, get $20 out. There's campaigns that are still treating Meta like an atm, but when you put it a part of your bigger media mix, you have to understand that where is this, where are these assets playing? Is it like a billboard, Is it like a radio ad, Is it like a TV sponsor, Is it satellite? It's an element of your greater marketing strategy. And when you see that there's new and middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, people exposed to your Facebook ads has to help understand, like does it become brand awareness stuff? Is it beyond just conversion? Like all of this comes into effect where I'm just like, if you take nothing away from this, know that in app numbers are inaccurate and providing the best that it can. And then additional tools like this provide a way better picture.

[Ralph Burns]

So there's two things in this. So the tier 11 data suite you cannot manage the campaigns inside here. You still have to toggle and our media buyers toggle between the two. But my guess actually asked the media buyer about this is like we use something that's called benchmarking and we know he probably knows that. But if I'm getting a cost per purchase in this ad set that's about $128, which is in essence 30, 40% above what I'm actually getting for NCAC, then that's okay. So even though inside Ads Manager 128 per purchase or a CAC of 128 is unacceptable for the client, we know that the in app metrics are faulty. And so that benchmark he probably my guess and we should probably on to talk about this is hey, if I'm getting a cost per purchase between 120 and 130, I know I'm well below my NCAC when I double check it with data suite. And the way that we used to do this is we used to compare what we were doing inside of Ads Manager as well as Google with the CRM and then pull manual reports. And it was such a manual process because we wanted to just make sure are we bringing in customers that actually make sense for the business at a price that is profitable for them. This customer has a longer term view of their business but they realize if they can acquire a customer for $92, their lifetime value is hundreds more. They know their numbers infinitely. So if we have an accurate way of figuring out exactly what we're paying to acquire a customer and then double checking it against what's actually happening inside the campaign or inside to a really granular level inside the actual ad set itself, then we know that we're within their KPIs and we're helping move their business forward. Does that make sense?

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

It makes 100% sense for a 25% accurate I'm making those arbitrary numbers. But no it makes sense. It's just, it's foundational marketing in a time where we used to have so much more data than we had before and then the data is getting pulled back, pulled back, pulled back. So it's looking at, I mean we talk about myrrh all the time like these are non negotiables that must be incorporated for you to understand where you're putting your money and how you're making revenue.

[Ralph Burns]

Absolutely. So yeah, so I mean the old way of doing things is comparing it with the CRM and it's incredibly manual. But that's the source of truth.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

The CRM or the bank account, where you're like the bank account, look at the CRM, I can see what was attributed, what goes through and does it match what's in the bank account? That's manual. That's. That's almost counting Florida election ballots.

[Ralph Burns]

Right. Well, what we do is on a weekly basis we would do a true up with the CRM or inside Shopify. I believe this is a Shopify store. And we would just double check. All right. For all customers that have come in this week, what is that cost, how many are new, how many are returning inside Shopify? It's a little bit harder to determine that, but it's more accurate data than it is inside of Meta because once again you're using, I mean people can change their email address and subscribe or buy and they're using a different credit card. Like there's all sorts of ways in which it can be not 100% accurate inside the CRM or inside Shopify or whatever your E commerce platform is. The point is, is that's the best way of doing it and that's how we used to do it. And that's how you use mirror in order to guide decisions here on how much you should spend on which campaigns. Problem is, is that true up takes a long time to do. We would typically do it every seven days. Now you can actually see in real time exactly what's happening. What is my NCAC by campaign, by ad set by individual ad. We haven't even gone into the individual ads here, but you can actually break that down even more so and you can see which creatives are the ones that are getting the majority of cold traffic, that are actually getting the best ncac. And on this particular case, we can actually, we're looking inside one particular ad. About 42% of this is is. Is new, which is pretty good. That's pretty good. That's pretty healthy. So this creative here is probably one that we've iterated on multiple times. And it's the reason why this ad set and this campaign overall is getting such good results because we're making those decisions based upon nearly 100% accurate data. Like I said 99 and 441 hundreds. I'm not going to ever say it's 100%, but it's pretty damn accurate. It's nothing like I've ever seen before. So it's like this secret weapon that you have. The point is, and this is not a pitch for data Suite by any stretch, however, you're probably going to take that. It is, well, whatever, like if you want to get it, come to tier 11, we can certainly talk to you. But the point is we're so excited by this because we were living in such like the stone age prior and making all of this incredibly manual. But I think for those of you who don't have a solution like that, the bottom line this is that the platforms are not accurate and you have to take that with a grain of salt. And if you are cross checking it with your source of truth, then you can benchmark a profitable CPA in essence which is in this particular case inside this ad set. CPA or cost per purchase which is acceptable is around 128 even though it's above what your allowable cost to acquire a customer is. Does that make sense?

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

It does because you might have even further monetization opportunities because other people that are going after that customer might even be shutting off those campaigns. There's a lot of opportunity with the data and so not knowing is not an option.

[Ralph Burns]

Not knowing is not an option, but also being aware that the data isn't 100% accurate I think is the biggest. We've never really talked about this. We've never actually done a screen share where we've gone in and shown it it side by side. We always say, well in app roas sucks because it does, because it's a faulty metric. In app CPA is not accurate because it's not.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

However, in app is doing the best it can. Ralph, we gotta give them. There's no motivation for them to lie. No, they make money by showing you good results so they're going to capture all the results that they can. Which is why there's attribution. There's an attribution war of everyone taking credit. Sorry, I'm still going to go after Attentive. And they have the assumed 28 day attribution window for a text but everyone's competing to claim credit for the same component. And then so Meta, like any other platform, is doing the best it can to show you all of that it has available. But there's legal restrictions, cookie restrictions and setup restrictions that will never provide accuracy. So you again, we say this all the time. You cannot be solely dependent on in app they, they provide very strong trend recommendations and can give you a lot of campaign insight. But there's still more to the picture.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah, absolutely. So all right, we're giving Meta the benefit of the doubt here. Google's the same way. I mean but you have to be aware of it. That's all.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Yeah, yeah, you listen to this, you take it with a grain of salt or take it with a splash of salt in the ocean. That's literally right behind me from this view.

[Ralph Burns]

That's why we're going to end the episode so you can go, yeah, use your bikini. Anyway, we are going to do an episode where if you found this episode helpful, first off, comment and obviously share like the episode as much as you possibly can over on Spotify and wherever you listen to podcasts, leave us a rating and a review. We love you guys for doing that. We so appreciate it. And we are going to take you through in a maybe the next episode or one within the week or so over on how to set up audiences correctly here because that's one part of today's show which we didn't really discuss quite as much and those have to be set up correctly. So at least you're seeing more accurate data inside the platform itself so that you can make better decisions. Obviously, always cross check it with your source of truth to make sure that what you are seeing is accurate. But the point is like setting this stuff up for what we refer to as campaign hygiene is super, super important. We'll go through that in a secondary show here. So once again, check us out over on our YouTube channel. If you didn't, if you were listening to this, you're walking the dog. You can definitely check it out over there [e-mail] YouTube but you already knew that. And Lauren E. Petrulo is going to be heading into the ocean momentarily. So on behalf of my amazing co host, Lauren E. Petrulo, adios, vamos a la playa. Until next show. See ya.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

You've been listening to Perpetual Traffic.