[INSANE Case Study] How to Spend LESS & Make MORE on Meta & Google

Summary

Perpetual Traffic Podcast Episode Summary

Title: [INSANE Case Study] How to Spend LESS & Make MORE on Meta & Google
Host/Author: Tier 11
Release Date: November 19, 2024

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1. Introduction and Special Offer

The episode kicks off with Ralph Burns addressing business owners and marketers who felt their 2024 efforts fell short, leaving money on the table or dealing with underperforming internal teams or agencies. He introduces a special offer for six businesses to receive free human-conducted business audits, emphasizing a comprehensive analysis beyond mere ad accounts.

Notable Quote:
Ralph Burns [00:01]:
"This is the number one complaint we hear from potential prospect clients who want to work with us potentially."

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2. AdCritter Collaboration and TV Advertising Insights

Ralph shifts focus to discuss a collaborative effort with AdCritter, highlighting the effectiveness of connected TV (CTV) ads combined with display retargeting. This strategy aims to maximize reach without exorbitant spending, such as Super Bowl ads, and ensures consistent audience engagement through a multi-channel approach.

Notable Quote:
Ralph Burns [08:37]:
"TV advertising is one of those areas that we haven't discussed here on PT all that much... it really works."

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3. Deep Dive into the Insane Case Study

The core of the episode features an in-depth case study presented by John Moran, showcasing how reallocating ad spend from Google’s brand campaigns to Meta resulted in substantial revenue growth while reducing costs.

a. Identifying the Problem

John Moran identifies that the client was overspending on Google’s brand campaigns, which, despite high ROAS, were not contributing effectively to business growth. This setup constrained the ability to acquire new customers and scale efficiently.

Notable Quote:
John Moran [09:00]:
"It's about taking your head out of the singular channel, looking at the business goals, then optimizing the spend regardless of what the platform says in terms of performance."

b. Reallocating Ad Spend

By pausing the $13,000 brand campaign and reallocating $37,566 instead of decreasing, Moran shifted the focus to Meta, which resulted in a 16% revenue increase and a 21% increase in conversions.

Notable Quote:
John Moran [15:17]:
"With 38 bucks of additional spend, all of my brand traffic just flew into here at 100,000 dollars."

c. Metrics: ROAS vs MER

The discussion highlights the limitations of Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and champions the use of Media Efficiency Ratio (MER) as a more comprehensive metric. MER accounts for all marketing expenditures and their overall contribution to business revenue, providing a clearer picture of marketing effectiveness.

Notable Quote:
John Moran [25:05]:
"ROAS might be an indicator of overspending. Unless you do something with the money I saved you, you're not going to grow."

d. Results and Business Impact

The reallocation led to a $130,000 increase in in-app revenue and significantly improved MER from 4 to 36, underscoring the effectiveness of optimizing spend towards channels that align with broader business goals rather than focusing solely on high ROAS campaigns.

Notable Quote:
John Moran [20:58]:
"So this is a case study as to why the ROAS is bullshit... you just get more out of less."

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4. MER vs. ROAS: A Paradigm Shift

The hosts delve into the importance of Media Efficiency Ratio (MER) over traditional ROAS. They explain that MER provides a holistic view of marketing effectiveness by considering all media expenditures and their aggregate impact on revenue, rather than isolating the performance of individual campaigns.

Notable Quote:
Ralph Burns [12:13]:
"When you actually see things going on and how he thinks and how things are moving inside the ad accounts... you'll understand why you want to watch this."

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5. Audience Questions and Expert Responses

The episode transitions into a Q&A segment, where Ralph and John address various listener questions related to ad strategies, campaign optimizations, and metric interpretations.

a. Feeder Strategy with Performance Max and Standard Shopping

For clients with high media budgets on Meta Ads managed in-house, John recommends an 80-20 split favoring Standard Shopping over Performance Max (PMax) to ensure better signal alignment and efficiency.

Notable Quote:
John Moran [38:07]:
"I would heavily segment out those campaigns so that you have either categorical or SKU separations... then start to scale both of them equally."

b. Handling High Return Rates in E-commerce

When faced with high return rates in specific product categories, John emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between customer-driven returns and product-driven returns to tailor optimization strategies effectively.

Notable Quote:
John Moran [52:18]:
"Demand Gen is very poor at generating demand and very good at capturing demand."

c. Ad Allocation for Small Budgets

For small businesses, such as a one-man appliance repair company with limited daily budgets and high CPCs, John advises a 60-40 split between manual CPC or max clicks for incremental cold traffic and TCPA/TROAS for conversions.

Notable Quote:
John Moran [53:45]:
"If you're not on Search, be on Search. If you're not on Exact Match, go on Exact Match."

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6. Tools and Recommendations

The hosts recommend leveraging advanced tools like Wicked Reports for enhanced attribution and accurate measurement of marketing performance beyond standard platforms like GA4. They stress the importance of comprehensive data integration to avoid misattribution and optimize marketing strategies effectively.

Notable Quote:
John Moran [61:09]:
"Invest in Wicked. The Wicked Reports tool just to get only the difference between your first click, your last click, and your customer journey."

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7. Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Ralph and John wrap up the episode by reiterating the superiority of MER over ROAS for sustainable business growth. They encourage listeners to adopt a holistic approach to marketing spend, focusing on metrics that genuinely reflect business performance and scalability.

Notable Quote:
John Moran [50:39]:
"Growth is about MER. Those are the numbers that matter right there."

Ralph Burns [63:17]:
"This is how you need to succeed right now in digital marketing... smart, creative ways to scale and grow business will never go out of style."

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Final Thoughts

This episode of Perpetual Traffic offers a transformative perspective on digital marketing metrics and ad spend optimization. By prioritizing Media Efficiency Ratio (MER) over traditional ROAS, and strategically reallocating budgets based on comprehensive business performance indicators, Ralph Burns and John Moran provide actionable insights for businesses aiming to maximize revenue and achieve sustainable growth.

For a more detailed analysis and visual insights, listeners are encouraged to watch the accompanying videos on Tier 11's YouTube Channel.

Transcript

[Ralph Burns]

Do you feel like you could have done so much better in 2024? Do you feel like you left so much money on the table? Or maybe your internal team or your agency just wasn't getting it done for you? You were maybe the one that was coming up with all the ideas and then they were doing the implementation. That is not how it's supposed to work. If you're the boss, your internal team or your agency is supposed to direct you and tell you what to do to scale and grow your brand, let me tell you, you are not alone. This is the number one complaint we hear from potential prospect clients who want to work with us potentially. They say their agency or their internal teams have run out of steam and they're the ones who are giving them all the ideas. Well, that's the reason why we put together a very special offer for you for 11 lucky businesses. And quite honestly, ever since we announced this promotion just or four days ago, we've already filled up five of them. We have six of these left. And the reason we're only giving away 11 with 6 left is because my internal team, I have to give them some time off in December and we want to get this done for you before the end of the year. So much so, in fact, my sales team has actually opened up more time to book these calls with you, the business owner, with you, the director of marketing, you, the person that's frustrated with the results that you got in 2024 and you feel like you can do better in the coming year. Well, we are offering 11. Well, now six, because we've already given away five of them. Free business audits for six lucky businesses. And this is not an audit that's done by AI. It is done by actual humans, where they go in and they actually look at your entire business, not just your ad accounts. They look at your tracking, they look at your after the click, they analyze your emails, they analyze all of your ad accounts, everything that you're doing within your business. And we figure out where the holes are. And usually there are plenty of holes and areas of improvement. Yeah, you need an unbiased, unprejudiced viewpoint on how you're going to hit your goals in 2025. And that's what this business audit is for. So if you are interested in being one of the lucky six remaining, there was 11. Now there's six remaining businesses who qualify for this business audit. Head on over to tier11.com2025, fill out the application and we'd love to see how we can help you scale and grow. And oh by the way, you will also get first mover access to the Tier 11 data suite, which we haven't even launched to the world yet and we'll be doing so in January. So you'll get early access to that. One of the greatest things about the Tier 11 data suite is you know, all those unattributeds, all those unknowns, all those directs inside your Google Analytics, or if you're using Triple Whale or if you're using Hiros, well, this lifts the veil on all of those. Up to 99% of your unattributed and your unknowns in your direct are now going to be known in the knowns that are going into individual channels. Your Google, your meta, your organic, your email. Those are more accurate. That's how great datasuite is. It lifts the veil finally, for data tracking unlike anything we've ever seen because it uses three Martech tools pieced together with an integration that we wrote here at tier 11. And you will get early bird access to that as well. When you fill out the application over at tier11.com forward/2025. Make 2025 the best year yet. Start by planning it right now. Book a call with our team today, fill out the application and let us help you scale smarter, not harder, in the coming year. 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 spend 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 AdCritter, 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 Adcrator, 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 plaque platform or dollar for dollar matching on any TV campaign up to five grand. Imagine the impact of that match. Spend five grand, 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. 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. Every time I do a Tier 11 live with John Moran, I always say, you know, we're not going to rebroadcast this over on Perpetual Traffic because we just keep going back to that. But the point is, this podcast deserves to have this content on today's show because it is so damn good, it's so insane, you might not even believe that it's true. And this is a client that I didn't really even know about too much. And John did a bunch of things here that I've never seen a marketer do before. So as a result of that, we decided that we would air it over here on the Perpetual Traffic side of the equation. So this is an absolutely insane case study. This is just the power of looking at your marketing performance indicators, figuring out what makes the most sense to change. And in many cases, it is doing the opposite of what the client wants and what you think will actually increase the business. It's doing something counterintuitive. And that's exactly what today's case study is all about. The client is actually in the clothing store niche. We can't reveal who they are here, obviously, for privacy purposes, because they are a very big business. But this is the kind of stuff that you and or your team can perhaps start implementing inside your ad accounts to get these types of results that we got today. The results are crazy, crazy good. And John Moran thought of this strategy all on his own, and fortunately, he's a part of our tier 11 team here. So why wouldn't we put this on today's show? Why wouldn't we show the world this is what we're doing. We've really only started to work with them in a very limited capacity to start. And as he talks about it, we're going to be adding a lot more as far as services Data, the tier 11 data suite, which is a whole thing that we're going to be talking about here in many different shows coming up in a very short period of time. But without further ado, let's just get to this case study here so you can digest it. As always with John, it is not about just listening. You really do have to watch it. And it's not a shameless plug for our YouTube channel. It's just that when you actually see things going on and how he thinks and how things are actually moving around inside the ad accounts, both Meta and Google, you'll understand why you want to watch this over on YouTube. So check that out over on perpetualtraffic.com YouTube. Without further ado, take it away. And this insane case study. Ralph and John, you're listening to Perpetual Traffic.

[John Moran]

Yeah, yeah. Beautiful beauty, baby.

[Ralph Burns]

All right, now I have to figure out how to get rid of those guys. Oh, there we go. Here we are.

[John Moran]

Hey, look at that.

[Ralph Burns]

Those guys.

[John Moran]

We figured it out.

[Ralph Burns]

The fake John and Ralph. This is the actual John and Ralph, right?

[John Moran]

No one needs those. Get rid of those people.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah, we were just talking off camera here about a case study that we're going to be talking about here today.

[John Moran]

Yeah. So it's a, it's a clothing store, which is pretty cool. We're just going to dive right in and start cruising. But there was a newer consulting client that was basically getting a bit of a feel for strategies that we employ at tier 11 and made a pretty drastic change that is more like atypical than what people are used to. And I haven't talked about this topic for years, but it's a topic that I deploy almost every single account that we take over or we manage or every single account that we audit. It's something always top of mind. And that is obviously we already know that Roas is going to be the topic for today, but the brand campaign spend versus brand campaigns attribution, there is a lot of times you can increase your value of your company by a hundred percent in a week. And it sounds like, okay, well, yeah, that's cool. But I've seen it before. You can much more often really increase the new customers and new growth for sometimes basically the same amount of spend that you are spending now if you're Omnichannel. But you're overspent in brand. If you're overspent in singular performance maps or if you're overspent in a brand campaign on search. I have a pretty wild idea that panned out really well, thank God. But I figured it was going to happen with the new client, and that's a case study for today of taking your head out of the singular channel, looking at the business goals, then optimizing the spend regardless of what the platform say in terms of performance, but optimizing the accounts spend for a proper goal alignment, which is so foreign. I don't know why it's so foreign to a lot of people.

[Ralph Burns]

Why do people not ask that? I just don't. It seems so obvious.

[John Moran]

It really is. And it's. For some reason. It's so obvious, yet so foreign. But I know why it's scary. It is really freaking scary to say, hey, take all of your brand spend that has hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue. Just pause it, just remove it. Don't worry about it. You don't need it. People are like, okay, well, that's the only one that's over 500 roas. And that's the only reason why I'm getting an in app. Performance is like, that's why you'll never go. It's almost like in Troy when. It's like when breath hits. Like, that's why no one will remember your name. It's kind of like, that's funny. Like that situation.

[Ralph Burns]

Just watched that movie last weekend.

[John Moran]

Did you? First time, like, it just kept coming.

[Ralph Burns]

I'm like, I finally. I've got to watch this.

[John Moran]

You. Oh, that is. It's like a rite of passage. It's like that. A bar mitzvah. Your puberty, like, it's right there.

[Ralph Burns]

Watching Gladiator hundreds of times. All right, so we're going to get into this case study here in just a bit. Before we get into it, the question that I have for you is, and I always say the different thing when asked, why is MER so important? But also, what is it? Because when I look at mer from tier 11, I actually look at it as the M being marketing because it's spend plus salaries. That's how I look at it as a CEO. I know you look at it as media, paid media, in both cases, pros and cons to either one, the other. Where do you sit on that?

[John Moran]

Yeah. So for media efficiency ratio for mer, my opinion. And everyone has a different interpretation because there's never been Webster's Dictionary to come by and correct everybody it's mostly towards paid media. You can have MER without paid media like or you can include other things outside of paid media. However, I think for our position as who we are as professionals, which means performance marketers, now we are paid to increase things, scale things, grow, things become more profitable. I like to use media efficiency ratio as a measurement of what I know we can increase and what I know we should see as return. So if you have an email campaign that's hitting the same thousand people every month since 1986 and it can't ever grow and no one can ever be added, I wouldn't count that as in your MER calculations because it's not affected by anything that you're doing marketing wise it's revenue, but it's not going to be affected. Okay, so where I look at Myrrh is where are the areas we're currently spending on and you can even take into consideration like what it cost you to hire the employee to go and chat GPT a bunch of blogs every month that yeah, that that could be increased, that cost could increase and that is media. And what is the ratio of that return? Because if you pay them twice as much to produce twice as many blogs, but they're not getting twice as much out of it from the cost, if you spent six grand more a month, you should see 12 grand or more per month. That if you're trying to achieve a 2x MER and if not that's not being achieved, it's a very simplistic way of saying was that more effective, whatever that is when I increased it or was that even important after I decreased it? That's kind of what we're looking at with media efficiency ratio is in this area. For this case study we took a client who was spending majority of their money on brand instead of Google and the same client that was seeing the majority of return in Google on brand and we paused that campaign that had thousands of dollars and we left the one on that was spending like 300 bucks. And some crazy shit happens because we actually took that Aspen and we reallocated it to Meta because this is a large brand, they have multiple physical locations that you can shop at, they have an online store, they have a good following, they've been in business 10 years or more or 15, 20 years is a great, great company. But they have brand loyalty. Yeah, don't pay for it, stop paying for it. If you're a Nike buyer and you're like oh man, I only see one search listing instead of two when I want to buy My new Nike shoe that I've been waiting for six months to come out. You're going to buy it. You probably buy it on Amazon. Who gives a shit? But you're going to buy that product. So I'll share with you something that is kind of crazy. Let me share a screen here. We're going to talk about the Merck, because that's in this calculation here. Last seven days compared to the previous seven days. So everything that we do here is live as it flows. This was 13,000 of their $23,000 in ads.

[Ralph Burns]

Live without a net. John. John Murray.

[John Moran]

Yep. Live without. Live without a net. We're going live. So this had $13,000 in cost last week. And the biggest brand campaign, it was bringing in $151,000 in revenue out of the 250. And I said, yeah, just shut it off.

[Ralph Burns]

And they're like, has John lost his mind?

[John Moran]

Yeah. Well, instead of broad, campaign spent a grand total of 38 bucks more. Okay? And it's the brand and it's in broad. It wasn't spending nine grand or ten grand or eight grand. It's spending 500 bucks. And for the low, low price of $38 more, all of my brand traffic that everyone used to overpay for in that other campaign just flew into here at 100,000 dol.

[Ralph Burns]

Unbelievable. This is actually why. This is a case study within a case study within a case study. But it's a case study as to why the ROAS is bullshit. Row ads is bullshit, first off. But secondly, the model that we now have, we're converting all our old customers off of a pay by the ad spend, because ad spend, in some cases, it does not equal scale. This is a great example of that. You're just getting more out of less. Less spend, more revenue. So if you are an agency and you're running that outdated model, you're probably getting fat and happy on just scaling up stuff like this. Hey, I'm tripling my spend on my retargeting campaigns. And Meta, the easiest thing is you're.

[John Moran]

Doubling down on the brand campaign. Because I'm measured by Ross.

[Ralph Burns]

Exactly. But you're not moving the business forward by acquiring new customers. Hence your media efficiency ratio then becomes a much more important indicator as opposed to ROAs.

[John Moran]

Yeah, and what's funny is this one said, all right, fine, we're charging you 30 cents. We'll charge you 2 cents. Now we'll take your 1700 clicks, we'll move it up to 26,000 clicks.

[Ralph Burns]

Holy crap.

[John Moran]

For 38 bucks, you know. All right, fine. For $38 more, here's all these thousands of clicks. And this is why you have disciples, by the way.

[Ralph Burns]

Disciples and dogs.

[John Moran]

Right? Let's just take your cost per conversion, reduce that by 90%, and here's your 42 cent conversions. And then let's take your roas, which is going to be really funny to see. Yeah, I don't even know if I have roas in here.

[Ralph Burns]

Well, you don't even have as a column. That's how little you think.

[John Moran]

I don't even. I really don't care about it. But conversion value by cost. There you go. It's like this thing is so fluffy that the brand campaign is like, here's a 20,000 ROAS. There you go. Because if you don't do it in decimal points, if you do it in percentiles, that was conversion value cost. That was a 1600. And now it's a 20,000. And now here, watch this. And you're like, yeah, but John, probably affect the top line, right? Or probably affect the bottom line. Nope. So this account just. We happened to save seven grand and we're like, thank you very much, we'll put that in the bank. And guess what? Our conversion value went up 16%.

[Ralph Burns]

Unbelievable.

[John Moran]

How the hell did that happen? Look at that. So you saved seven grand, you made 41, and then you also have. What about your conversions? Well, that went up 21%. Well, John, why did happen? Well, when you drop your CPC to pretty much nothing, you get unlimited clicks and then you even get more attribution. But guess what? I'm not. I'm no longer paying for it. That's it. That's all that is. Now take all that good money and you say, let's just shove it into meta, go top three and put up to 13 funnel. Exactly.

[Ralph Burns]

Exclusions, obviously, as much as possible, doing.

[John Moran]

Catalog sales, DPA sales, like all those other stuff, your evergreen campaigns, we're just going to spike. So take that money.

[Ralph Burns]

Their business model online, but as well as offline. But you're only measuring the online sales here.

[John Moran]

And we're really only marketing for online if it naturally flows into the stores. Great. That's actually a phase two that we already have a plan on, but it's fine. Oh, yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

Oh, especially with these campaigns, Top funnel.

[John Moran]

And especially one of their. One of their actual good executions is pickup in store, which means that person walks in, even buys more stuff after they try on the dress that they really like. So this is now up. So they're like okay, add in 100% here. Add in 356% here. Add in 100 2019. So we took our money out, which is we took seven grand out of here and put 27,000 into here. So it's a $20,000 incremental. Yep. Now the in app results went up in Google and went up in meta. Okay, so this one's website purchases conversion.

[Ralph Burns]

In this particular case in meta.

[John Moran]

It is.

[Ralph Burns]

It is.

[John Moran]

Okay, no, not purchase conversion. Website purchase conversion. So this is. Yes, over here. It collapsed that one. This is the actual one. This is the off of the right conversion actions. Got it. Okay, so this, we gained 255 grand. Now, I already did a presentation to the C suite, like the first week that we started this because everyone was panicked and I was like, okay, this is before. This is after 111 to 11 4. Because everything was paused, as you see in Google, after the 31st. That's where it ends. And it starts on the 1st. That's the day of the change. The first four days, Google spend went from 15 grand down to 7. Metaspend went from 10,000 up to 30. So there's a delta of $11,000 there. The in app, Google Rev went from 126 to 158. Meta went from 223 to 450. So now you have a revenue increase of 130. That's a 44% increase in top line costs between the two and a total in app increase of 130,000. So like, all right, cool. So in app went up total between the two, up 130 grand. And you spent more, which is 11 grand. Okay, good. So yeah, you definitely spent more. The incremental blended ROAS is 11.09. And you see, I'm saying incremental blended roas, not Merck.

[Ralph Burns]

Right.

[John Moran]

Incremental blended ROAS. Now that was $130,000 increase. But because it's in app, it's missing a whole bunch of shit. So let's hop into their GA4. On the same date range, their total revenue went from 677 up to 1.1 million. Okay, so the purchases went up 65%. The revenue went up 62%. So MER calculations, if you look at an incremental MER scale, you have 1102656 -677307. So you have $425,000 in additional top line revenue for a total increase of a. Divide that by $11,720 for a 36 MER. Holy.

[Ralph Burns]

Holy is right.

[John Moran]

And this is before Black Friday.

[Ralph Burns]

Really now, are you double checking this with the back end? I assume this is a Shopify store or.

[John Moran]

Shopify store. Yeah, right now they're doing well. No, I'm sorry, not Shopify. BigCommerce.

[Ralph Burns]

BigCommerce.

[John Moran]

So we're using GA4 because they're like, we've been using GA4 for years. It's accurate enough. We're getting them on a third party attribution software platform. Guess which one it would probably be.

[Ralph Burns]

Wicked reports is my guess.

[John Moran]

That's right. So once they're in there, cloud integration.

[Ralph Burns]

As well there will be.

[John Moran]

Yes, yes. Because they're using GA4, which is just a dumpster fire. So anything is going to be better. So I threw the whole kitten caboodle, Mike. We need stronger data. We need a better data stream. We need to have our tagging be fixed where fires and we need to have accurate attribution. Omnichannel.

[Ralph Burns]

I know a little thing called the Tier 11 data suite which they might need.

[John Moran]

So I'm glad you mentioned that. I should probably tell them we're the.

[Ralph Burns]

Only ones that have that too.

[John Moran]

Yes. And all the shit I'm doing by freaking hand can be done for you.

[Ralph Burns]

Unbelievable.

[John Moran]

Yeah. Shameful self plug.

[Ralph Burns]

So wait a second. Anyway, all right, so yes, Shameless plug. Yes. Higher tier 11. Of course. That's the bottom line for doing all these. We're not doing it for our health. Well, actually we are doing it for our health. We just love spending more time together on Friday.

[John Moran]

It buys me Lacroix that nice.

[Ralph Burns]

The point is this is that it's amazing. They're using GA4 because it's close enough. How close is GA4 to the back end? You said bigcommerce in this particular case. Do you even look at that? Or they're like, don't worry about it. We trust GA4 to a certain degree. It's close enough for us. It's like horseshoes.

[John Moran]

No, they. They actually Fairly believe that GA4 is like pretty good because it's always been pretty accurate.

[Ralph Burns]

Okay.

[John Moran]

It's accurate to totals, but not accurate to attribution.

[Ralph Burns]

Okay, so total sales. Got it.

[John Moran]

That's actually firing on the site.

[Ralph Burns]

Yep.

[John Moran]

Mer. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like when it went from 600,000 to 1.1 million, that is very accurate how it's represented as to what happened. Really inaccurate. But this is actually kind of cool. Check this out. This is something I wasn't really expecting.

[Ralph Burns]

This is an we look insane case study, by the way.

[John Moran]

I know, Right?

[Ralph Burns]

Like, this is. This is one of the craziest things. But it's so fundamentally like, it just makes so much sense. Why overpay for people that are already looking for you and know who you are?

[John Moran]

I know. And that's what's great too, is like, it's in here, this paid search. You can even see that the revenue actually went up. And that was after I took the paid search. One of the campaigns just paused. I was spending the most. It just funneled so well into it that even third party. Not third party in app tag and GA4, two separate sources. Because GA4 is not pumped into Google Ads. Not this particular instance anyway. It can't be. But it's not here. But this went up. Now, obviously, organic search went up because guess what, we don't buy their brand name anymore. So direct is like, okay, cool, I'll just go here and save with organic. So all of this traffic just. Just flew into here. Yeah. Great. Basically, once we get WICKED reports and once we get a better data stream, we'll be much smarter. This is what's funny is I've used tools like Wicked, and I've done this for such a long time where I'm like, I'm fairly confident. Just take the biggest campaign that has the most amount of money deposit. You'll be fine. If you Google search their brand name or any variations of the branding, because it is a difficult brand name to spell. Yeah. That's why you use broad, cheaper CPCs. But it still can. It's like, okay, I know who you're trying to go after. And what's funny is we still have tons of people Googling everything. Nothing changed. They're still finding us. We're still number one. And here's what's great is even with this off, taking their biggest campaign, replacing $7,000 a week with 300 bucks or 500 bucks a week, okay, you're still number one. All here. You still have your Google my business, you still have your ads, and you still have your listing here. You're fine. Right? No one's gonna be like, damn, where are they? They're freaking everywhere.

[Ralph Burns]

Okay?

[John Moran]

But now when you look inside of here, if you look inside the brand core and you look inside your auction insights, who are we bidding against? Nobody. Don't worry about it. Don't overpay. Yeah. If you are looking in your branded campaign and you're the only one there and you're paying more than 2 cents a click, like what we are now, stop it. It tells you, right? There. That Google's just like, sure. I mean, you'll pay it, I'll charge you for it.

[Ralph Burns]

This is a case study of why MERV matters.

[John Moran]

Exactly. Operational efficiency, reallocation of proper spend to the proper channels to grow towards the business goals that you're expecting to achieve.

[Ralph Burns]

Right. Just because you're not making more doesn't mean that you're actually making more.

[John Moran]

And raw is bullshit. ROA is bullshit. Yeah. Because I can make you 25,000. Yeah. But unless I do something with the money I saved you, you're not going to grow, you're just going to save money. It's like, you save money on one area, you grow incrementally in the other.

[Ralph Burns]

I guess I'm trying to simplify this for people who. This is a foreign concept. It's like a lot of the clients that we've had recently, we've reduced their spend, which is counterintuitive, you would think. All right, you're an ad agency, you just want to spend more money. No, that's not the goal. The goal is not for us to spend money and us to look good. The goal is for you to look good for your business to grow. And then we make sure that that's the case by looking into the back end and making sure that all the numbers work. Obviously, in this case, we're using GA4. Fine. They're happy with that. There's obviously better solutions.

[John Moran]

Close enough.

[Ralph Burns]

Close enough.

[John Moran]

Yes. Close to our first test.

[Ralph Burns]

And you're also getting the waterfall effect in all the regions in which they're covered. That's happening. There's more people that are just going into the store now that you're upping your top of funnel spend on Facebook or Meta.

[John Moran]

So, you know what's funny is, like, that's coming in like a 30 mer incremental crazy. Like, like, I could be off by half and we're still dancing.

[Ralph Burns]

Let me ask you a MER question. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You could be a 15. You're still like, you could have your official. And you're still like so high. So just in general, when people getting people to wrap their heads around this idea of, like, not roas, but mer, what is a general. What's a guideline? When you first talk to an account, do you talk to them? Because this is usually like, I've been on hundreds of discovery calls and nobody knows what MER is. Everyone knows what ROAS is. Like, yeah, I want a 3x roas. That's all they say every sales call. I think I've ever Been on. That's what they want.

[John Moran]

Oh yeah. It's been a standard since like 2016 for some reason.

[Ralph Burns]

How do you change that mindset? And then how do you benchmark what a good mirror potentially is for any particular customer? Or is it a. It depends on what their profit margins are. How do you determine it?

[John Moran]

Yeah, so the way I know it's funny is I actually started working lately with the war room person on helping them because they want me to kind of like partner with their company. So it's still kind of in discussion. But one of the things I would say is whether you're higher tier 11 or whether you would be like, I'll give you part of my company if you just make it big, no matter what, you still ask the same questions. And those questions are actually really, really, really particular. So here's my questions I always ask. What is our break even Myrrh? Breakeven MER means how much cash out versus how much cash in does your company need to spend and make before you're like, okay, I'm not losing any money. That is a really great first step is what is your break even mer?

[Ralph Burns]

Do they know what that is most of the time?

[John Moran]

No. So what I would say is everything that you're spending in terms of marketing or media, including TV spend, SEO, email, campaigns, like that kind of stuff, everything they're spending in those areas, what is your total revenue? Because that will tell you if this is a lost cause or if there's a lot of capability. Because where's the break even if someone comes to me and says, hey, my Breakeven Mer is at 10, you have to 10x every dollar you put into that entire ecosystem. Now, if your break even MER is at three, great, that's easy. Every dollar put in, I just need to make three back. I need to spend a dollar in meta and I need to get three dollars in, you know, meta, Google brand, organic and email and direct and returning customers and returning purchase says, okay, that's very plausible. But when that target's too high, it tells you how well is the business operating, how well do they have their pricing versus margins? And is this even scale possible? Because as digital marketers, especially performance marketers who pay money for growing a company, I have a dollar cost associated with every scale. And usually it doesn't get cheaper when you get hired, you spent more money or sometimes a diminishing return and upper level. So really high MER targets really hard to continually scale. So that breakeven MER is important to know. And what is the Myrrh. And so that would be like, okay, I'm currently at a four, I need to be at an eight. But okay, can we double the efficiency of everything everywhere? If you're a fairly good company, no, maybe not. And you're at a lost cause, don't even try unless you're like, okay, I see massive opportunity. You're under, but you're underspent. Your pricing is atrocious. You know, unless they're like, okay, you're paying twice what everyone else is paying for the same product. There's things that you can obviously look at and say, okay, I do see opportunities for efficiency. But if it's like, man, you know, you got a $12 product and it cost you $3 a click, you need a two 20x mer. It's not possible. It literally won't work. So that's the first thing. Then what is the LTB of a customer?

[Ralph Burns]

And we've had customers like that that we've let go.

[John Moran]

Yep. It unfortunately sometimes doesn't pan out. Or what we thought was is happening after we factor in all the other costs is like, oh, this is actually a lot higher.

[Ralph Burns]

Right.

[John Moran]

And we don't have any room to reduce our CPC that much and we can't increase our pricing. Like, that's a scary position to be in. Yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

Or change something in the business model from a cogs perspective.

[John Moran]

Yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

Like get better suppliers. You know what I mean?

[John Moran]

Yeah. Or manufacturing yourself. Yeah, there's always those kind of like bigger changes that you can make. But it also tells you like, do I want to go down a performance marketing approach and hundreds of thousands of dollars of Aspen for the next year? You know, the check engine lights on. Let's try not to enter into the Grand Prix. It's like, yeah, you know, it's maybe, maybe a good idea to pop the hood and kind of, you know, move some things around there. So then you got to look at the ltv, the LTV of customers that will kind of tell you what your NCAC targets can be. Those are two things. So after you get top line mer, if those seem like they're appropriate, then you go into the next thing. Okay, what is our and current and CAC and NCAC target and then what is our ltv and maybe even an LTV target. Those can be had by bundles, upsell, cross sales, product development, etc. So you're looking at what is the LTV versus the NCAC. That'll tell you. Okay, we buy them always for 20 bucks and they always make us $100 every year. Now the $20 purchase may only end up giving them a five dollar first sale and then they will spend an additional 95 dollars the rest of the year. Okay great. So it tells you your ROAS doesn't actually even matter in app. It can never matter. I have a client that does not matter at all because their first sale is $12. Their second sale is 1800. They get a sample, they order a lot of that product. So great. I really don't care what in app ROAS is. It does not matter. I can't spend anything to get a ROAS above anything if I'm selling a $12 sale. So that's where that will tell you is it possible to continue to buy on them and what channels is that possible and what is going to make? And if it's like we spend $25 and we only make 29. Oh again, trouble in paradise, right?

[Ralph Burns]

A lot of the things that you're mentioning here and sort of saying very quickly some people might not know what they are. That's why I put down on the bottom of the screen there get the marketing performance indicators over at tier11.com forward/mpi.

[John Moran]

So much better than this than I am. I'm just rabbit holing over here and you're like here's where all of our.

[Ralph Burns]

Listening, here's what all this stuff actually means. So if media efficiency ratio is the first time hearing this or you don't know what NCAC is, you don't know what LTV is AOV all that you can get it all here. It's like the most comprehensive guide. We actually built out an entire page on this which isn't quite done but it's zero11.com marketing performance indicators with little hyphens in between. But get this checklist. It's totally worth it because this is a new way of looking at marketing. It really is. It's before we got spoiled by attribution and by meta and by Google and by in app metrics like 10, 15 years ago. We've been going that road ever since. It's like when we started to lose visibility we started to switch over to Myrrh and now we use Myrrh almost exclusively I think with every client because as you explained so well in this case study, ROAS is not an indicator of growth. ROAS might be an indicator of overspending.

[John Moran]

It was scary is I could make your in app roas the totals on the report look like whatever I want.

[Ralph Burns]

Whatever you want. You can look like a Hero. But are you moving the business 1000 brand or.

[John Moran]

Yeah, 1000 roas. Cool. More money in the brand. One two X. All right. Less. Yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

Double down. And you're retargeting over on that.

[John Moran]

Yeah. It's so funny. You know, it's like telling the kid that cheats in school come back with an A. They're like I'm writing the nay in the parking lot.

[Ralph Burns]

As opposed to studying for the test.

[John Moran]

That's right. Sure.

[Ralph Burns]

Are you? And I studied for medi tests that way.

[John Moran]

I used to pay a kid in math class hour skittles for his homework.

[Ralph Burns]

That's brilliant.

[John Moran]

You know, so I will kind of bring it back to the beginning. This is a really good case study for omnichannel traffic spend level allocations. Ignoring roas in app, really ignoring it and focusing on just top line mer because as you can see what Google says versus what meta says versus what ga4 says versus what actually happened. Those are four different things.

[Ralph Burns]

Right.

[John Moran]

Do you have a different metric? And then when we overlay Wicked, that's even going to be the fifth different thing. Now that's gonna be the most accurate but it's still the fifth different story. Right. So we always have to remember your roas is indicative of what that step in the funnel in that channel cost. But if you do not add it up to everything else you failed at marketing.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah, that's it. Can you show. I think that's like what you're mentioning right now is super important. We've got a lot of questions so we are going to get to is that Meta and Google are both claiming credit for the same sale and double counting but I didn't see the numbers being that far off. Or did I just miss that?

[John Moran]

No.

[Ralph Burns]

So like the total revenue was X that was in GA4, but meta was claiming credit for it from website conversion purchase value and then Google was doing the same. So there is like if you take the two of them together it should be actually a larger number than it really is. But that is not the case inside GA4.

[John Moran]

Well, you know what's interesting is they do. They're a large brand with a lot of brand recognition. So they have a lot of direct.

[Ralph Burns]

Yep.

[John Moran]

They have a lot of return users. They have a lot of return purchasers that overshadow what Meta and Google can produce at this time.

[Ralph Burns]

Right.

[John Moran]

So it's almost like saying everyone that buys Rolexes in the world still buy Rolex. But add a dollar to the ad spend, that dollar has no actual impact on the people that just Continually buy Rolexes every year. That's a little bit what's happening here. We have a great brand recognition and people just come to our store every day and buy millions of dollars worth of stuff and we're like, I made you seven grand. I sent $7,000 less. So like, hey, way to go. But I'm still making my my money. Now when we start to double down on it, that's when you see the growth. What's interesting though is our in app attribution, what we went to and from actually got lower. So check this out. Let me share a screen.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah, that's what I thought I saw actually. So I'm not just this double checking.

[John Moran]

Yep. So if we take our before. So Google spend 15263 plus metaspend of 10, 58 3, that's 25. Now let's take out another calculator and then say the 2584. Oh, it's right here. So then revenue is 350, 835 divided by 25846. You have a 13.57. So 13.57, this is blended ROAS. This is not MER, is the return traffic of all users purchasing on any channel that could have actually started from a paid media channel. So there could be direct email and organic. That's not going to be indicative. Not always inside the paid media platforms because they miss those a lot. So let's look at the after though. So now we have our total spend. Actually the rev is 480845. That's right here. Divided by 37. 566-37566. It's a 12 8.

[Ralph Burns]

Yep.

[John Moran]

So our blended ROAS went from 135 down to 12 8. Now that was the reduction but because this is not mer, it's blended roas, which is also a metric because as this went down, the total spend increase was vastly outshadowed by the total revenue increase at a much higher mer. Right. So blended roas between the paid media platforms went down. When you count everything that those paid media platforms can attribute, it went up. And that's why in app roas is good benchmark but bad at saying okay, that's it, that's the full story. Right. The other part though is that sheet, the before and after was only four days. So in four day time period, day one, two, three and four have been spending 100% of its efficiency more. But the revenue is like day one, then day two, then day three, then day four, you have the time lag of return. Right. So there is a mer delta There because a spike of immediate spend is not equating to yet a spike of immediate revenue yet it grows into it. So this may normalize. That's the time lag we always talk about. That may normalize back up to a 13.5 MER. But you always expect your MER, your ROAS to go down when you increase spend because you're warming up. New audiences love this.

[Ralph Burns]

If somebody didn't get that, it's a good thing that there is a recording of this that will be posted over at the Tier 11 YouTube site or wherever actually, wherever you are watching. We're actually on X now. I don't know if you realize that, John.

[John Moran]

Really.

[Ralph Burns]

Yes, we are.

[John Moran]

I'm proud of you.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah, we figured it out. We finally. Yeah, somebody typed in weeks ago.

[John Moran]

It was still Twitter. Yeah. Are we on Twitter? I'm like, I think it's called X now.

[Ralph Burns]

Brilliant. Our brilliant marketing team figured that one out. Somebody just had to insert the credit card in the right place. Anyway, thank you, Allison, for that. All right, so we get to some questions here.

[John Moran]

Let's do some.

[Ralph Burns]

Some questions past the hour here. John Moran's dog is in full effect. He says hello. Of course. Let's get him here. Asking the first question. As a client has a high media budget for meta ads managed in house, would you recommend the feeder strategy with pmax plus Standard shopping or just standard Shopping?

[John Moran]

Absolutely. The feeder strategy, it's worked every time I've deployed it, but because the high amount of ad spend. But excuse me, Aspen and Meta, you want to spend your spending allocation 80% on standard shopping, 20% on PMAX, and you really won't be increasing your performance max budget until you see your blended in app roas. Between those two campaigns, not being a one to one scale of ad spend increases on Standard shopping and a total of revenue between standard shopping and performance max. Once they don't match one outpaces the other, then you're going to have to start to pump up PMAX again. Always measure top line. Always. I can't tell you how many times. I can't answer that really Well, I feel like how much you're tag firing, how much attribution are you losing? What is your sales cycle? How long is it over five days? Because half the data is gone now. But we can't have time to go through all those questions. But I would recommend starting with a higher standard shopping first because there's signals that are coming into performance max right now are so meta heavy, it's not even really caring what Google's doing at the moment, it's really not. So if you spend equal, you're going to have have fit ton of remarketing and warm traffic and returning customers and then half the ad spend is trying to teach the other half the ad spend and this audience here is so massive it's like, yeah, I don't really care if you get a couple first clicks. I have 7,000 people that I can market now because you gave me all that budget to do. So. So what do you want to do is you want to have your ad spend on standard shopping be higher, less than performance max. Performance max is going to look fantastic right off the bat. It's also going to ebb and flow much more with your meta. Now as Google starts to increase and do really good job at standard shopping campaigns, do feed optimizations, negative keywords, make sure your bidding strategy is low enough that it's going to go after cold traffic like low T row as that is going to be really a good and aggressive and then you're going to start to see your performance max is going to be a little bit more stable. It'll stop ebbing and flowing so much with how meta does. It'll be independent. Once you see those correlations between meta ebbs and flows reduce the effectiveness on the ebb and flow of performance max. It's a signal that you're actually getting more of. Well, it's a sign that you're getting more signal from your standard shopping into your performance max because that link between those two tags is much more accurate than the link between the tag and the pixel. So Google can remark its own traffic better than it can remark at meta traffic. Make sure econ priority and IDs are firing properly so that the item ID is matching the same item ID as the feed so that your remarketing is perfect to performance max. I would heavily segment out those campaigns so that you have either categorical or sku separations so that you can double down on the fact that that P max is getting a signal from that standard shopping campaign. So if you hyper segment they're more popular to each other and then 80, 20 split until you find that point where there's no normalization. Then start to scale both of them equally. What that means is that if this is always at 80%, it's always at 20% of the budget. $800, $200. Add 15 or 20% to both equally to get them to scale up in a stair step model that is equal to each other. Don't do this because Then nothing happens. You're basically saying, okay, we're finding good performance here, finding good performance here. Let's grow this mini funnel, add 100% budget. So if it's $800 a day and $200 a day, you get 800, you get 200. Your equal percentage increase creases.

[Ralph Burns]

I'm just glad you're on our team.

[John Moran]

This is funny. I love this.

[Ralph Burns]

My kids call you Otani, by the way.

[John Moran]

What does that mean?

[Ralph Burns]

He's like the unicorn baseball player. He's like. He's like Babe Ruth. I was like the Otani of Google Ads. Well, Ohtani of traffic. Like, how's Ohtani doing these days?

[John Moran]

I was like, who's Otoni? Oh, Tony.

[Ralph Burns]

Or Sh. They might say sh every now. Amazing. All right, so Artur is back. Good to see you, artur.

[John Moran]

Hey, became LinkedIn friends with me. We're buddies now.

[Ralph Burns]

That's nice. Demand gen audiences leveraging audience signals instead of true audiences that we specify. Have you been testing it or are you hoping Google reverts the stupid move to demand gen?

[John Moran]

I have been kind of anti demand gen for a while. If you guys look on YouTube, you'll see a year ago, a video that got over a million views where it says initial results of demand gen. And in my opinion, demand gen is a very specific use case function. For me, it is top of funnel and it is is more list building. So list building is fantastic. If you're trying to say I'm getting demand gen to warm up cold audiences to get them to the bottom of the funnel, you can, but YouTube's way better than that. I don't think that adding in Gmail ads and a homepage of Google feed is having a large impact. And I also would double down on the fact that what we saw, and I actually saw this yet again with a consulting client in Germany this morning, he has a more ad spend to the account and starts to spend in really shitty channels. Demand gen will charge you per click for an open of a Gmail ad. That's scary. They never made it to the site. But if they open a Gmail ad, you pay per click. So my opinion would be because Google is basically using this tool for more remarketing, which is what we saw, it actually does more overtakes your good YouTube ads and then targets more warm traffic with the feed and then the GSP ads. Where this failed for me is it couldn't scale it anymore. Turned into just singular pmax where it's like, nope, I'm gonna do whatever I Want where YouTube. I can still hit an audience without expansion. Really? Well, that's 1, 2. The reason why they don't allow you to direct the audience and more suggest the audience is exactly that fact. It's going to go where it wants and it's going to ignore your suggestions and exclusions. Which means again, it's just a row as machine. And that's. That's wrong. It doesn't need to be a ROAS machine. It needs to be a cold traffic machine. And Gmail ads, in my opinion, are not the way to do it.

[Ralph Burns]

Interesting. His follow up here is sort of hits on that. I'm frustrated with this update because the efficacy of the vacs are way more effective because of the targeting. What's your take?

[John Moran]

Oh, video action campaigns. Yeah, okay. It's exactly right. And I would say that, yeah, it's funny, I haven't seen them called vacs. I don't know why I'm surprised I haven't come across that anymore. That makes so much sense.

[Ralph Burns]

I think Archer just like coined it himself.

[John Moran]

Trademark that I got mer. You got vacuum. It's cool. Now if someone does it like with the. You. We got a mer vacuum. Sweet. Right? So, yeah, but the video action campaign is exactly right. It overtakes your YouTube ads. It just sucks that in and then it blasts all of the additional ad spend that you wanted to go into good audience. It's like Gmail ads. It's like, fuck no. And it's like, what about impressions off the feed? You're like, I still don't want that either. It's basically like we took the good and then they bolted on the bad. They're like, man, no one wants Gmail ads. What if we force you to use it? It's like, that's never a good idea.

[Ralph Burns]

Did they ever work?

[John Moran]

I've never had them work and I had so many times I've tried them so much and until I started looking at actual. Well, here you go. Ecpnv. Yeah. When you look at actual ecpnv, which is one of our standard core metrics of MPI that we measure your ecpnv, you'll find out and pioneered by you.

[Ralph Burns]

By the way, There was no ECNV before John Moran. So anyway, to see if.

[John Moran]

What if cost, I want to give.

[Ralph Burns]

You a little prop there.

[John Moran]

Thank you, sir. The cost per new visit, the effective cost per new visit. That there, you'll see it sometimes go up because you're going to get more clicks but potentially less people to the site. So Google's like, got a hundred clicks now. 200 clicks and 300 clicks. You're like, then why is my visitors going 198, 102, huh? It's because they click on a Gmail ad. Never make it to your site because.

[Ralph Burns]

Of what load speed. Like what. What happens if you. I've never seen one, by the way. I've never clicked on one.

[John Moran]

Oh, a Gmail ad.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah.

[John Moran]

All right.

[Ralph Burns]

I don't think I ever have. I've never seen one in my inbox. You know what I mean?

[John Moran]

All right, so, yeah, so let's do this here. Hold on. All right, so you're probably going to get a little bit of an insight as to the crap that I look at. I hope it's not too embarrassing stuff.

[Ralph Burns]

To the side there.

[John Moran]

Yeah, I know. Right, so, all right, so go ahead and share this. All right, so there's 90. Yeah. So this is a product that we use. If I navigate over to my promotions tab and then go here and I click, click. Okay, that is a click. I just costed 90 money.

[Ralph Burns]

So you click, but you've yet to go. Got it. Okay.

[John Moran]

I've not made it to the site. All right.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah.

[John Moran]

So if you look at your ecpnv, I can send you a Gmail ad. And hopefully if you're a person that's like, you know what? I wake up every day, I ignore all the important email in my inbox. I jump right over to the promotions tab and I just go to town.

[Ralph Burns]

All right.

[John Moran]

You may be a believer in demand gen. I've never met that person.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah. All right. I just clicked on my promotions tab, which I never actually opened, and they all go. They all go to my Sane black hole folder. That's the reason why I never see them.

[John Moran]

But that's demand gen. You're generating demand. Trust me, I am.

[Ralph Burns]

That's incredible.

[John Moran]

Everyone's like, wait, that's what that is? Yeah, that's Gmail ads.

[Ralph Burns]

So you click on it and then it goes. And then you have to click again to go to the site.

[John Moran]

So it's like, But Google charged you when you open Gmail.

[Ralph Burns]

Of course, right? Now I understand why.

[John Moran]

Look at the message. Exactly. And now all of a sudden, it's like you got 7,000 clicks from demand gen. It's like, where's my site traffic? It's like, nothing. We just didn't go anywhere. Right. It's like, why don't. How about this? Why don't you just send email?

[Ralph Burns]

It's free. Well, that's why Google's profit this past year was what was go profit? $87 billion revenue.

[John Moran]

Yeah, I mean, 87. My tech ETFs are extremely happy, but as an advertiser, I'm pissed off.

[Ralph Burns]

That's unbelievable.

[John Moran]

Exactly. Uh, oh. So, all right, that's. There we go. Let's move on.

[Ralph Burns]

Let's move on, let's move on. Thank you, Artur, for that. Yes. John is constantly in the lab. Yeah, we'll have more stuff coming out of the lab very, very soon. Jose V says, does PMAX still need lots of conversions to work?

[John Moran]

Well defined work. Just kidding. So Performance Max scoops up easy traffic.

[Ralph Burns]

We know that.

[John Moran]

Yeah. I've said this since day one. Demand Gen is very poor at generating demand and very good at capturing demand. And I need everybody who watches this to really get intimate with what that means. Performance Max will use every channel to go after every single person that they think will convert. Doesn't matter if it's the owner of the company that's running the ads or someone that never heard of the company before. It will go after anybody. It thinks that's good and bad because it's good. When you're beginning out, you have no brand recognition, you have no existing customers, you have a very little warm traffic. Pmax crushes it. That's why it works so well. Like two years ago, it was a bell of the ball.

[Ralph Burns]

Why not?

[John Moran]

You were one of the first, right? I was on the development team at Google. I worked with those people and it was like, hey, this is pretty cool. I was like one of the first people to get a beta program. And then I was introduced to the client. They're like, hey, John, this is the guy that's on there. John is, you know, helping us and YouTube meet and they literally just walk. Google Handheld a client. Right. To me, it was actually really cool. They sold tile. Bathroom tile. Go figure. Anywho, so this P Max, it does need a lot of conversions to work, but you have to also look at the fact. Is it the conversions that you want? Is it newer returning conversions? Is it newer and cold traffic? Did it generate the traffic to begin with? That is where you have to dig into it. Because if you're like, well, three out of ten people that click are new. And of the five conversions, three are people who made purchases one, two, and six months ago.

[Ralph Burns]

Right.

[John Moran]

So my question to you is, does that work? Yeah, it's got a lot of conversions. Does it work? It's up to you. And that's what is goal definition? It's Goal dependent.

[Ralph Burns]

Exactly. Will it get you fired?

[John Moran]

Absolutely.

[Ralph Burns]

And once they.

[John Moran]

I was gonna say it also can give you a raise until the company goes under.

[Ralph Burns]

That's it. That's it. You make yourself look great there, but you're not actually adding any more value. You're not actually helping the client achieve their goal, whatever that goal is. And that's the number one question.

[John Moran]

You want to see something scary? Here's scary. I'm going to share screen again. We use performance max.

[Ralph Burns]

Your case study was scary, scary good. So. All right, so it's a tough time topping that. Right.

[John Moran]

We use performance max in this account on purpose in order to do the remarketing from everything that we're pumping on meta and we're, we're really cranking up like we are. New leads, MERs holding new customers are increasing. Awesome. And we throw in performance max and it's like 500 roas. We're like, yeah, I'm so glad I'm getting that from my Google Ads campaign with 5.8% new people.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah.

[John Moran]

Right. Does that work? Sure.

[Ralph Burns]

It's working.

[John Moran]

You want it to remarket. Right? Yeah. Fuck yeah. It's definitely working. Right. Look at all that revenue. 17 grand. That didn't have anything to do with it. So my NCAC is a truck. Why? Because they're not new. Yeah. Yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

Those are the numbers that matter right there. Those are the metrics that make mattering growth. That scales there. John. John Moran.

[John Moran]

And that metrics work as long as my client loves paying $500 every single time he gets a new customer. Right.

[Ralph Burns]

It doesn't make sense.

[John Moran]

Not a good idea.

[Ralph Burns]

No.

[John Moran]

Bingo.

[Ralph Burns]

There's a whole different thing. I think this whole conversation here is all about roas is basically is trash and it can be manipulated. And MER is the way in which you should be measuring. It might not make you look as good as you're looking right now, but it will help the client.

[John Moran]

Growing profitable companies don't fire those people though. Right.

[Ralph Burns]

You will have longer term clients if there's, you know, agencies that are listening or watching here. Not that I want to give you any free advice but like we've done it both ways. Trust me, this way is better.

[John Moran]

I have something at the end. I'll just leave everybody with about Murr. So don't, don't let me forget. I will leave everyone with the best advice I can at the end.

[Ralph Burns]

All right.

[John Moran]

All right. So we got 10 minutes left.

[Ralph Burns]

This.

[John Moran]

Yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

You know, as we start answering the questions, a lot more questions come in and then I Find myself like, you know, running out of time at the end. So. All right, so let's try and answer these as quickly as possible. John Moran's disciple. Of course, he always gets a good question in here. You can read that.

[John Moran]

He jumps in quick or she jumps in quick. Does the feeder shopping, feeder strategy, PMAX standard work for 3 tier standard shop? No, it does not, unfortunately. So the performance max actually replaces number two and three. That's the goal. You want that always being secondary or not as important or cheaper, traffic or brand. And that's supposed to be being the receptacle of what is being fed from standard shopping.

[Ralph Burns]

Got it.

[John Moran]

All right.

[Ralph Burns]

John Ryan's title. John Moran's dog. Lots of John Moran's here.

[John Moran]

I'm gonna get John Moran's left toe.

[Ralph Burns]

John Moran's head. That's what we need. Floating head.

[John Moran]

That's why it's not here.

[Ralph Burns]

Moran's hair. I'm gonna sign in as John Moran's hair.

[John Moran]

I'm gonna wear a wig next time.

[Ralph Burns]

All right. You can read this one here. Optimize. Yeah.

[John Moran]

How do you optimize Google Ads campaigns for a direct to consumer e commerce apparel client when the best selling category is a 50 return rate, while other categories have much lower return rates such as 10. I'm hoping that return rate. And this means that people. Oh no, you could be meaning that these people return that item and not people that like they return to buy. I'm. I'm imagining that's what that is. Let me just let me know in the comments again and I'll. We'll come back to this one here. But tell me what the 50 return rate is at existing customers or people return that product? Way two different. Yeah, yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

Very different things.

[John Moran]

Yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

Dave actually has a question. What models are you exploring instead of targeting off ad spend? Well, we use a flat fee model now, but above a certain amount of ad spend, then we then add on and we renegotiate the agreement. It's just that simple.

[John Moran]

Yeah, people like it really high.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah. I mean people like it a hell of a lot better. Of course we've got blog posts that we can show here. Yes. If you want to learn more about mer, this is actually one of the better. It ranks for Mercury, believe it or not. Like in Google.

[John Moran]

So amazing.

[Ralph Burns]

Anyway, go figure. Lucas. Oh, this is where the Friday. Oh, he was confused. It was over on the perpetual traffic channel. Well, that's cool too. You can go there but you won't see us. We do rebroadcast these every now and Then on perpetual traffic because they're so freaking good. All right, Marcus Hagen says how would you divide a hundred dollars for the feeder Strategy for a one man appliance repair company with 5 to $12 clicks and 100 a day budget, Would you stick with max clicks with conversion tracking? Feels like we've answered this kind of question before.

[John Moran]

Yep. I would know if it was about plumbing, this was about the appliance repair. So I would do, to start off, I would do 60, 40, $60 a day inside of either a max clicks or a manual CPC to start and then $40 a day into a TCPA or TROAS depending upon if you're using VBB which is value based bidding or if you're using just conversion based bidding. So I would do a 60, 40 split because with a low budget but still high CPC you're going to see can you buy any more incremental cold traffic in your manual or max clicks or manual CPC campaign at a decent price and see if you're over getting overcharged in your TCP and TROAs. And it's not actually needing to be 5 to $12 a click, it could be 2amanual, but it's $5 when Google decides that it can sell you a conversion and that's the price that they choose to fix it to. So that'd be how I structure that.

[Ralph Burns]

And then send 10% of your fees over to John Moran at John Moran Enmo. Thank you.

[John Moran]

And come prepare my fridge.

[Ralph Burns]

That's right, come prepare. You know, my fridge is always seeming like gone the fritz. So anyway, I'll be.

[John Moran]

Mine's always running. Yeah, I gotta go catch it. That's the hard dad joke.

[Ralph Burns]

It's so big and you know, even with you being like so muscular and strong now like the new John Moran. Lucas does have a question. Are you live somewhere else than YouTube at the same time? I believe we're live on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and somewhere else, maybe Instagram.

[John Moran]

So we're in both of our houses.

[Ralph Burns]

Both of our houses. Yeah. But you can't come here. So anyway, Marcus. Oh, sorry. We just answered that question. Marcus has another question here. I think that's the same question.

[John Moran]

Oh, here. So it's close now that ECPC is gone is what he added to it.

[Ralph Burns]

Ah, okay.

[John Moran]

Yeah. So I actually like max clicks better than ECPC only because it can also react to competitive pricing. And it works its way down. It starts high, then works its way down to the absolute minimum CPC that it possibly can to still get enough clicks. So it usually gets you like a fairly decent second third position, sometimes fourth and top of fifth, which is really shitty because that's at the bottom. But check your search impression chair and then you might have to just manual it for a while if it's too fluctuation. Got it. Or doing within too much volatility.

[Ralph Burns]

Very cool. We definitely helped him there. All right, Bridge.

[John Moran]

Yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

Trying shopper shopping feeder PMAX T row has 300% and shopping troas 550%. PMAX is spending mostly on shopping, not much on display. CPC is close to shopping. CPC is this normal?

[John Moran]

I would actually do this. So check if your positioning is good for your keywords in both campaigns. A couple things what you want to do is you want to have a larger separation of your T roas. So I usually use like a 40% standard shopping and like a 350pmax. I want the. I want those to be farther out. I don't want them to be so close that they photo the same person and nothing ever gets fed. They just bounce off each other. Okay. Keep one really aggressive. So standard shopping. I pushed it down to like 40, 50% t rod and your PMAX ran up to like sometimes 3, 350, 400. Because then it's like okay, Google doesn't know about this person goes to standard shopping which is where the first click needs to be due to the fact that Google doesn't know. And then when Google knows, they only bid on them if they have a high chance of success if they don't bid on them anyway because they're probably not going to convert. So that's why you want those things to be spread apart further. Makes sense.

[Ralph Burns]

Our tourist says Murr is cooler than vac, but great vac equals great myrrh. So anyway, now that we know what VAC is, Video action campaigns. Hey John, how do you top new something new today? Hey John, how do you explain seemingly unexplainable drop in conversion rates? I'm running a Google lead gen campaign for some strange reason conversion just fell off cliff. Could not find a answer or he ran out of space.

[John Moran]

Could not find a technical issue or anything of a theory that it might be due to election or something. C if conversions are dropping, especially this time of year and it's a lead gen campaign. That's odd. I could see a conversion or e commerce campaign because someone's running the Black Friday Cyber Monday sale at the same time. But I would look into do it before and after and look at all of your competitive metrics search Press share search pressure top Absolute top lost due to budget lost due to ranked on both impression Share top and absolute top. Click share look through to see and look through auction insights. Did anybody come in to start taking your lunch? Yeah, exactly. Did anybody knock you down or anything? Because usually lead generation is so sensitive to be at the top that if you're number three versus number one, you went from first, considered, first clicked and first talked to two. I talked to one person. I talked to the second person. I don't want to talk to a third person. So that positioning is ultra important. I checked their first. Okay, got it.

[Ralph Burns]

Campaign was destination wedding packages. Does that change your.

[John Moran]

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Because this is a long process with a lot of phone calls and a lot of drawn out process. You being number one is important. So nothing is going to look out of spec. You're still going to get a bunch of clicks. You may have even have more clicks. Your CPC dropped, maybe a little bit better. All that stuff could be bad though, if you want a good high position. Got it. Makes sense.

[Ralph Burns]

All right, a couple more questions here. I am not even going to try and like pronounce this person's name. I don't even know what the little like. Mallory.

[John Moran]

Mallory.

[Ralph Burns]

Mallory.

[John Moran]

Mallory.

[Ralph Burns]

Hi. We're a small Swedish.

[John Moran]

Mallory. You do Mallory. We got it covered.

[Ralph Burns]

We got it covered. Let's call the whole thing off. We're a small Swedish agency. After one to two weeks of ads, two 2500 impressions, 175 clicks and $2 a click. We haven't received any leads. Is this normal? Normal? They're advertising.

[John Moran]

I don't know what channel you're on. I don't know. Yeah, well, I was gonna say I don't know what channel you're on. And that is a high amount of impressions for low amount of clicks. Not too bad though. It almost seems like a surge. But $2 a click could be really low. Again, I would check your position. $2 a click. If you're an agency. Again, I don't know. CPCs for agency in Sweden. I don't have that off the top of my head. But if it. It does seem on the lower side because typically you're just going after every single person in Google Ads.

[Ralph Burns]

I would say, yeah, that's low.

[John Moran]

Yeah, I think your positioning could be important. So if you're not on Search, be on Search. If you're not on Exact Match, go on Exact Match. So go on Search, go on Exact Match. So you can control intent and positioning and then use manual CPC and Look for placement, you're going to probably need to be in the five to $10 CPC range if it's possible. And that's where you should be number one. Number two for lead generation on search. Positioning matters. Google knows it. That's why they charge you a hundred times more between the first position and the fourth.

[Ralph Burns]

The real question is, should you be advertising on Google for your agency at all? Because we found it, they're dog shit leads. Now.

[John Moran]

The other part is my consulting client in Germany is running a Facebook ad. A hundred dollars a day and closed like eight clients in a week. Wow. So country does matter quite a bit.

[Ralph Burns]

Like we did it primarily us, Canada and I think Australia.

[John Moran]

Yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

For a while.

[John Moran]

And we. And we got nothing. No, no.

[Ralph Burns]

So anyway.

[John Moran]

But we're the land of bullshitters. Sweden might be pretty honest.

[Ralph Burns]

A lot of happy clickers over here.

[John Moran]

Why do I see the best Google Ads? They just see 48 times in a row. Who's lying here?

[Ralph Burns]

Somebody can't be the greatest of all time.

[John Moran]

We're out of time for I think one more hour.

[Ralph Burns]

One more.

[John Moran]

Here I'm tracking, tracking Google Organic and pay clicks on Facebook for each one. Searching. After viewing the ad last month, 5K. My question is how to avoid spending money from both platforms on the same person. My question would be do it. If you're looking at Google Organic and pay clicks on Facebook, you're going to probably see the same thing. So if you're doing Google Organic and pay clicks on Facebook for each one one, you're not going to spend money on both. Because if it's organic on Google, if you're running brand on Google and pay clicks on Meta, that's you're at the beginning stages of a customer journey. What's. What's your need developing? Here's what I would really, really, really suggest. Invest in Wicked. The Wicked reports the tool just to get only the difference between your first click, your last click and your customer journey. I'll share the screen for 30 seconds. I promise won't be long. Wow. Right here.

[Ralph Burns]

We're in bonus time here.

[John Moran]

I know, right?

[Ralph Burns]

I know. They're not going to.

[John Moran]

If you said, hey, I have 49 grand in Facebook after four days, 90% of these people end in Facebook. This will tell you, do you need Google Organic? Is there anybody coming from Facebook and converting on Google Organic? Because right now it's 1%. The people that were driving from Facebook. No, they are not converting on organic. Look at your funnel. Look at the efficiency of the funnel and then say, oh, Shit, I didn't even need that. That might save you thousands of dollars a month for the low, low cost of awesomeness and wickedness.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah, that's a great screen by the way. Hats off to the wicked guys for creating that one. I believe we requested that and they created it.

[John Moran]

It's getting upgraded too, which I'm super excited.

[Ralph Burns]

I know Wicked used to be a dumpster fire. It really was, but now it's.

[John Moran]

Sorry, Scott.

[Ralph Burns]

It's fucking great. So there you go. All right, last question here. Can we answer this one?

[John Moran]

Yeah, I got it.

[Ralph Burns]

You got it. All right.

[John Moran]

Since we know Google Ads charges higher average CPCs based on conversion value, how does Facebook handle this? Actually, we have not really seen the same thing in Facebook. We tested the crap out of it. Facebook is really starting to optimize for lower CPCs and lower CPMs. A better efficiency when it gets more conversion value. Google is more evil than Facebook in this opinion, in this situation.

[Ralph Burns]

There you have it. They're both evil.

[John Moran]

They're both evil. Google's eviler. If that's a word. Word of the day.

[Ralph Burns]

Ev, do no wrong. What did they say? Like to start off, they do no evil.

[John Moran]

They said, do no evil.

[Ralph Burns]

Do no evil.

[John Moran]

Yeah. And now they actually just appended it, it's do no evil to the stock price.

[Ralph Burns]

You know what? I just googled how much Google actually makes in a year. Like net profit, 100 billion.

[John Moran]

Yeah. That is through nothing but. As nothing but honest, hardworking individuals there.

[Ralph Burns]

Unbelievable.

[John Moran]

All right, well, take a politician.

[Ralph Burns]

We are over time here. You've paid absolutely nothing for this. Free advice here. Thank you very much everyone who did attend. It's great to see you, John. I hope you have an awful weekend. We will be back. Same channel, same time. Actually on Twitter like we were on Today or X, as well as all the other tier 11 socials. We'll see you next Friday, everybody. Thanks for coming and thanks for everyone who asked questions and participation in today's.

[John Moran]

Yeah, thanks everybody.

[Ralph Burns]

Tier 11 live. See ya. So I hope you all enjoyed that case study. We're going to be doing more of these as they come up because if they're super good, we are going to bring them over here to perpetual traffic. And I do promise, for those of you who are listening while you're actually out and not watching it on YouTube and maybe you're listening, you're at the gym, you're walking the dog. I've talked to people at many conferences where they say, you know, you need to describe this stuff more. I get it, we'll start doing that more. But when we actually record these, we record these on our Tier 11 lives, which you can subscribe to over on our Tier 11 YouTube channel, which is tier1.com YouTube makes it super easy to subscribe to that so you don't miss any of those episodes. Not all of these are rebroadcast over on Perpetual Traffic, just only some of them, the best ones. So we're culling the best ones and bringing it to you here. But I highly encourage you to watch the video or send your team to watch it. Even better, if you're a CEO, a cmo, a director of marketing, a VP of marketing, send your team over to watch this. Whether it's internal or it's externally with an agency, they should be doing this kind of stuff. They should be thinking this way. This is how you need to succeed right now in digital marketing, in the digital landscape that we're currently in. And it's not going to get any easier in 2025 because costs are going up. But smart, creative ways in which to scale and grow business will never go out of style. Like the Bell Bottom jeans that never go out of style. That's what we're trying to do here. So anyway, so check that out over on perpetualtraffic.com YouTube of course, wherever you listen to podcasts, we certainly appreciate your support. So leave a comment and or a review. And on behalf of my awesome co host, Lauren E. Petrulo, couldn't make this week's show until next week. See ya. You've been listening to Perpetual Traffic.