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Hey, before we get into today's show, my marketing manager finally convinced me to run a wild experiment in this episode because he wanted to prove what the conversion engine can do for your brand. So we are giving away three of our $10,000 deep dive audits for free in this audit. And this isn't one of those audits that you get from some AI generated bot. This actually takes us two plus weeks, seven or eight of our team members, and it is incredibly in depth. It will give you insights into your media buying, your creative, your actual business metrics, and find out exactly where the gaps are and where your growth is stalled and what we can do about it or what you can do about it when you get the audit. Now here's the catch. We only have three spots, so head on over to tier11.com audit right now. Fill out the form and let's see how we can scale your business in the coming year.
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I don't understand. How can you spend 30, 40,000 and not have phones ringing? And even like at minimum, subscribers of inquiries, None.
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No tracking whatsoever.
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I mean, they were getting calls, they just couldn't have any trip.
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No, they were getting bot traffic. We talk about this problem right here because performance really should be measured on the thing that matters most, which is
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you're listening to perpetual traffic.
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We all know this as marketers and business owners. That growth is amazing until something breaks or some catastrophic event, heaven forbid, should ever happen to your business. And I don't mean just your ad campaigns going sideways. Maybe a client slips on a wet floor or a shipment suddenly goes missing, or a contractor gets hurt or, or an employee gets hurt. Suddenly the thing you've been building can take a huge financial hit, maybe one that you worry might take down the company. And you should always be thinking about that as the business owner. Most people don't think about business insurance until after something goes wrong, when it's already too expensive or it's too late. That's why we're big fans of what next insurance is doing business insurance is so important for every any business, whether you're online or offline. And they've basically taken the pain out of business insurance. It's 100% online, ridiculously fast, and designed specifically for small businesses. You answer just a few questions and next tells you exactly what coverage you need. No phone calls, no waiting, no holding the line for the next representative. Just fast, affordable production that actually has your back when things go sideways. Policies start for as little as $29 a month. Don't, don't wait for a crisis to remind you you're not covered. Get protected in minutes@nextinsurance.com perpetual. That's nextinsurance.com perpetual. Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic podcast. This is your host, Ralph burns, founder and CEO of Tier 11, alongside my amazing, soon to be live in person
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co host, Lauren E. Patulla, founder of monkgoost Media.
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So glad you joined us here today. If you are a VP of marketing, director of marketing, or a CEO, just acting as the marketing person or maybe you want to fire yourself. Today's show is for you. And if you have an agency especially that you're maybe frustrated with, this is not going to be a pitch for tier 11among US media, just so you know. Yeah, but you clicked on the episode here and you wanted to watch it and you wanted to listen to it because it's probably struck a nerve with you and this strikes a nerve with both of us as well. Is your agency performing or is it just reporting? Well, this is one of the bigger, I would say, problems that we see for new prospects we talk to every single week here at tier 11. And sometimes I'm just flabbergasted at the the that is slung in the agency space. And it's just, it's sort of sad. Like, we actually looked at a new account today, me and my Google guy. This is in the PI law space. We did a whole series on this and we were just shaking our heads like, what is this agency doing? It was just, it was so terrible. They were spending 30, $40,000 a month, 10,000 plus a month in fees. And they were creating no results whatsoever. And I'm just.
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None, none, none, none, none.
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No tracking. No tracking whatsoever.
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But there were, I mean, they were getting calls. They just couldn't have any.
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No, they were getting bot traffic. It was all vanity metrics. All freaking vanity metrics.
B
I don't understand. How can you smash 30, 40,000 and not have, like, phones ringing and even like, at minimum, subscribers of inquiries.
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I don't.
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People get hit by buses all the time.
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I think hopefully this, this show will clear up some of these misperceptions that you might have about just reporting and performance overall.
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Because I'm gonna say it's also not as bad vulnerabilities, Ralph. Yeah, because we have both evolved as agency owners ourselves. And there's things that, like, we're constantly improving and it's like, it's not like, oh, yeah, you're perfect. And everything is like, we're not marriage Poppins. But like, when we were chatting this pre episode, I'm like, oh my gosh, I know stuff that we were doing two years ago and I look back and I'm like, yeah, how could we do that? But then I'm like thinking, we've evolved so much. Like, there's a lot of this, like, reporting, like I tell you, like the before the click, after click, after the click. Exactly, click. Like, I'm really excited about what we're doing. And then I'm like, oh my gosh, in two years from now, am I going to be like, so cringe and say, how were you not even better? Or like, how like two years ago and the things that we were doing, I'm really proud of and like, it made sense and like, what we were doing. But where I've evolved from two years now, I'm just like, oh, I could have been better. And now I'm like, in two years from now if I play this. And like, you could have been better.
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And it's not just about the tools too. I mean, you know, we launched Tier 11 data suite about two years ago, which was transformative for us. And even if you, you can't, if didn't. That's not your source of truth. There is other ways in which to get the source of truth. When we talk about this problem right here. Because performance really should be measured on the thing that matters most, which is money in the bank account. At the end of the day, like, an agency is not hired to just simply make a business look good with clicks and likes online, I guess. Unless you're a social media marketing.
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I mean, it depends when you say revenue in the bank, yes, performance, yes.
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But performance should be backed by revenue, should be backed by hard data, should be backed by marketing performance indicators, which we talked about here many, many, many times, which you can get over@tier11.com MPI of course, the point is this, is that vanity metrics are not the things that your team should be reporting on on a regular basis. However, there's caveats to all of this. All I'm saying is that what I saw this week just was disgusting and
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I think it's like they missed the
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plot, just missed the whole thing. But that happens more often than not. Having said that, same clients, same industry. Few weeks back, we looked in there and we're like, wow, they're doing really, really well. It was like they had 70% of the stuff that we would do and all we're doing is just adding the additional 20, 30% sort of over time. So you can get both sides of the equation. That's also in PI law as well. So the point is this is that different agencies have different skills. They're not all bad. Okay, I will say that. But I, you as the client, need to be very discerning in looking for the right things and cross checking, cross referencing as much as you possibly can. Because it's your business and it's your ass on the line if you're the
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VP of my responsibility. Let's be clear, like, someone asked me the other day, like, hey, like, what's a client that you no longer work with or a PAC member you no longer work with that you would have changed? And I was like, well, first and foremost, it's. The ownership is on me for either engaging in a relationship that wasn't a good fit or bringing on someone that I didn't vet well enough. So I think, like, if. If you're in charge and you're managing the agency or you're bringing on a new agency partner, there's a level of responsibility you have to know. So if you don't know your own numbers, you don't have any numbers to know kind of situation. So I think a lot of the things that we'll be talking about is how to equip yourself to be dangerous enough to hold someone accountable without being sucked into this becoming your only job.
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Yeah, Your job should be checking in with the agency, not doing their job for them.
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Yes.
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I think there's a lot of factors into this, but you should be able to trust what they're telling you first and foremost. And if you have any skepticism, that is one of the warning signs right then and there, even. It's like, it's just a feeling on the back of your neck because you've listened to multiple shows here on Perpetual Traffic. The point is this, is that I think the trust factor is a huge factor here, but we're getting into more of the content of the show, so let's just take a step back here. So I think this is one of the more uncomfortable truths that VPs of marketing, directors of marketing are facing right now. They might be spending, let's say you're spending a couple hundred thousand dollars a month, or maybe a hundred thousand, maybe $30,000 a month. We both agree that we could do a whole episode on this. If you're not spending at least 10 to $30,000 a month and you're, you know, you might want to consider maybe not hiring an agency like, either under
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10amonth, there's no reason to have no reason. Like if you have different lines of businesses, if you have multiple brands, like there's things of that. But if like in combination or without complication, it doesn't make sense. Because like when you're a, again, when you have like parent brand with multiple sub brands or you have different regional accounts, like one of the clients that we consult with, they have Middle Eastern account, an Australian account, a North America account, then they have an E Commerce and they have events. Like there's different lines of revenue and reporting. So even though some of the accounts are spending minimally, it's in combination, where it fits into the enterprise is different. But if you're a small business owner and you're spending less than $10,000 a month, let's say you're doing between 1 to 3 million dollars a year in business, it's easy to want to be like, I can hire an agency because where I'm at. But you're only running one source of ads. You're split spending, let's say six to $7,000 a month when you bring on an agency. Unless you've caught an agency early on and you're getting consulting in addition to execution, the reality is, is like most agencies are going to start at minimum of $5,000 a month. If you're spending $5,000 a month and then paying an agency to manage something for at least $5,000 a month, it's better for you to pay a dummy tax and get more impressions and get more out of it and learn for yourself to the point where when you get to that $10,000 to $30,000amount where you can pass it over so that now you're going for efficiency. I just, I think like, it's hard when someone's like, I'm going to take five to eight or 12 grand a month of your business and your invoice exceeds the ad spend investment, it's better to be less efficient, suck it up or hire someone to consult you and to do it quickly versus everything that comes with an agency. Like for us at least, like it's the copywriting, it's the CRO, it's creative, it's the strategy, it's the execution, it's the reporting, it's the communications. It's like there's a lot of, and, and, and, and, and, and you're not necessarily meeting all of that yet.
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Anything less than that and I, I think there's the spend amount, which, you know, we do a lot on the paid traffic side. But I mean, just keeping this also in mind is that if you're looking for somebody to run all your marketing or be your marketing team because you're the CEO and you're doing it yourself right now, which is a lot of folks that listen to the show and a lot of folks that are way larger than that and they're still the CEO and they're still running their marketing or maybe they're managing their agency, you know, as the CEO is that we also look at a revenue threshold as well. Another case where, you know, we typically don't work with clients just because we don't want to be the last check that they write every single month. That are at least like 3 to 5 million of them. Like 3 on the very low end, 5 million on sort of the moderately, you know, low end. Because we talked to a, you know, a business this week which is part of a multitude of different businesses. But anyway, the business that they wanted to hire us for was a million dollar a year business. I'm like, it's too small.
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You know, it's for an agency. For an agency especially of your size. Like there are boutique agencies and like I'll own it. The first two ish years of Mongoose Media, I was a freelancer posing as an agency owner. And then for me like I hit this second era where I was a team of contractors posing as an agency. And then now like we're the place where I've got full time hires. And it's like, it's like we go into these elevations. So I want to be mindful of like what are there 40 plus thousand agencies in the United States? There are still boutique ones, but there might be 60. Oh my goodness, 400,000.
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400 and some odd thousand in the world.
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But that's usually like there are solopreneurs or smaller boutiques. And I think like everyone here is like when an agency does everything, then they need to have an executive level team. If there's an agency that's doing like one thing, like hey, we do images and we do development or we do Facebook ads or we do email. Like when you're more the smaller team, the smaller the focus should be. And we've had clients that were amazing like again like early on. And we charged dramatically different pricing than what we charge now.
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Right.
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And we're like, I want to do everything for you. And it was like bringing in more contractors to make sure that we could maintain a three thousand dollar a month invoice with six different people on the account. And like managing those type of things. It's just like in that space of agency, I want to be mindful that when you are like bringing on an agency to fulfill, yes, there's a revenue solution, but then there's also the like investment solution. And just be mindful that for a performance marketing agency you really need to understand who's compiled of that team because it's easy to fake being an agency. And I own. I like, I don't want to say like I was faking. I was just, I was thinking I was an agency and I look back now, I'm like, oh my gosh. Oh Lauren, you silly little rabbit, you, you are.
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I mean you were basically a freelancer with some team. So I mean, I think or maybe you were a freelancer and then you had a freelancer plus team and then now freelancer plus full time team and then moving on from there, like every sort of step of the way. So I do think that a business that's, you know, a million dollars, like that's like 1.2 million. Let's say that's $100,000 a month.
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Sure.
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If you're going to be hiring an agency, you're also going to be spending a fair amount, especially if you're going to have traffic spend. So let's say you're spending between 10 and $30,000 a month in traffic costs.
B
Okay.
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At bare minimum, you're now looking at 30% of your marketing budget just towards ad costs. How are you going to be able to afford an additional 5% or 10%? You tack on a 5,000, $10,000 retainer on top of that for an agency. Now you're looking at $40,000 a month. And let's say your gross profit is 50%. The numbers don't add up. Yeah, you're scaling yourself to potential financial doom.
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Well, it's like there's two ways to ruin a company financially. You overspend in labor, you overspend in marketing.
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Hey, real quick. If you're looking to get your brand in front of growth minded marketers, CMOs, directors of marketing and agen owners, we're opening up our sponsorship spots for Q1 and Q2. Get in front of a quarter of a million marketers every single month at Perpetual Traffic, all you have to do is head on over to perpetual traffic.com for the details or check out the link in the show notes to apply.
B
And when you end up overspending in your marketing labor, in addition to the marketing, I think that like it's, it's true. Overspending, marketing, Overspending labor. And then I think so much is like when you. I don't know, it's like the Amazon Spring like oh, an agency is going to just automatically fix it when like you were saying like looking at some of the stuff you have to understand are you bringing in an agency to amplify what's working and become more efficient or are you bringing in an agency under the guise of amplification? But the reality is product market fit adjustment and offering solutions and getting to a place where like again that revenue things because you know it's like to get to a million dollars a year of a business most of the time it's proving a product to get to $3 million is pruding is like proving a scalable solution. So again that factor will come into it of when do you bring on an agency versus doing this in house or like freelancing or those type of resources. We had to tell someone today like I love them, I love their business model but they don't have a team equipped to manage and work with an agency otherwise it's going to fall back on the owner. So they shouldn't tire an agency. They should bring an in house solution.
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I empathize with business owners if they're struggling with that. And it's not necessarily the subject of today's show. We've kind of gone down that path here because I think it is a good. I think it is an important distinction to make. And when I talk to business owners on discovery calls is what we call them if they're in between. I don't know if I should hire an agency or maybe, maybe I should hire in house or maybe I should just go find a consultant somewhere. It's. It really depends on the sort of the risk tolerance of the individual who's running the show. And in most cases it's probably the CEO most of the time. Especially at that level because they don't have a team that's doing all the other sorts of things. The CEO is typically is the one who's doing the marketing or overseeing the marketing. Whether it's one individual doing their social posts or somebody who's doing their email or a bunch of different people together. Like if you're at a million or so, I don't know is if an agency for us you've got like seven people on a team and a pod that are like all those people are expensive. Like our payroll is not cheap and yours isn't either. So you know that that price is just going to be. It's not going to make sense, if you put in 10 to $30,000 a month in ad spend and you're throwing in at least 10k a month in agency fee, you're talking about 40% of your monthly revenue is going towards marketing. It doesn't make sense for you to hire that type of, of agency.
B
So maybe I love you said that type of agency because it's going to be the boutique ones because we're talking about performance marketing right now. And like you have like creative and the media buying. You know I don't believe in that word but it doesn't exist anymore.
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Episode.
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But then you have like the data, the reporting, all of the things that like you want when you hire an agency. But sometimes like it's, it's the type of agency you want that's going to deliver all that information and the type of agency you might need where it's like I want someone to be the strategic oversight and I want them to have maybe some offshore talent that's going to do the moving of the numbers. So I like that you said type of agency and I think where VPs like people that have a different level of need because they have a team of employees that are going to interface with it is, is a different. So that's why I like, I want to be mindful like 60,000, there's stages if you're at a million ish a year and if you're looking at the hard cost like the math has math and I invite you to consider that the management fee plus your investment into marketing costs, if it's going to be that high, then the contribution that that agency is going to provide to your top line better be significant.
A
Yeah, better be really significant. I mean that's, that's why it's a slippery slope at that level of revenue. From, from my standpoint too, whether or not you actually go in house, whether you hire a consultant or whether you hire a full blown agency like our businesses, it typically is revenue related. It's not necessarily just ad spend. But the numbers and the math just don't really add up. I mean I think just as a good threshold, I mean you should be, if you're in the startup phase, you should be probably spending anywhere between 10 and 20% of your monthly revenue on marketing efforts. Not necessarily.
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I'm gonna like usually like a spend.
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I'm gonna push you marketing, not marketing spend. I'm saying marketing, that's everything.
B
You always bring in the labor to it. Like I like thinking like a small piece of when you should bring in an agency, like, I think it's, it's like a, how are you going to be more efficient depending on where you are in your business and where you are in the marketplace. Like what people know and understand about your brand. It's an agency comes in when you're looking at diversifying your lead source. Most of businesses like they start and it's like 50 to 90% of their businesses business comes from referrals and then you start doing. Usually people do paid ad investment which should be last, but whatever. And then you're like 90, 80 to 90% of my business is coming from paid ads. When you're at a place where like outside of referrals and then paid ads are taking up too much of your business and you're looking to scale and more diversify. I think that's when you look at bringing in an agency and that agency type might be an SEO agency because you need to diversify your dependency on an 80% of your business is coming from paid ads, 20% from referrals. It should be like 30 to 40% should be paid ads. But it's like where are you in the growth of your business? So that you have a marketing media mix that allows you to scale. And I think a lot of times that people will bring out an agency and looking for more solutions than just scaling what's been a proven offer. But like you're talking about like the marketing investment. I just ask people to consider also the contribution of or even like the dependency allocation, like what percentage of that lead source makes up your overall revenue. And then that's when you start looking at I need to bring in an agency because I'm over dependent or I need to bring in an agency to make it more efficient.
A
So you're saying like this is a diversification strategy in a lot of ways.
B
Yeah, yeah, that's. Yeah, yeah. This is how you make it. You're like Lauren, you can just talk and talk and talk. I can say it in three words.
A
Diversification strategy. All right, well, let's get into the. Now that we have talked about, like whether or not you should hire an agency, apparently this is an entire show unto itself, which we should probably do. But. And at what point in time do you hire an agency versus a contractor or an independent freelancer or an internal team? Those are sort of all independent questions. I do think the, the advice that we're giving here is extremely relevant to those levels of business. But also you got to keep in mind your risk tolerance. What's your Runway? Are you private equity backed? Are you bootstrapped? There's all these other factors which get into in another show, but let's get back to the agency itself. Like the agency performing. Hey, real quick. If you're looking to get your brand in front of growth minded marketers, CMOs, directors of marketing and agency owners, we're opening up our sponsorship spots for Q1 and Q2. Get in front of a quarter of a million marketers every single month at Perpetual Traffic. All you have to do is head on over to perpetual traffic.com for the details or check out the link in the show notes to apply. Yeah, this is the central question. Oftentimes it's like the truth in numbers oftentimes is very cloudy and this is what we hear all the time. And usually when we go through sort of like what are your biggest problems? This is one of them is I don't feel like my reporting or what my agency is actually describing to me as far as performance is concerned is accurate. Agree, disagree. What's.
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I guess it's not accurate, but I, I think that's, I think that's a really bad start to relationship. It's like you have to understand what's your source of truth. And like you said earlier, like are you growing in revenue? Sometimes people are trying to grow in new customer acquisition. Sometimes people are trying to grow in, they're decreasing the latency between reorders so that you can increase your lifetime value. I think you have to like start what do you want more of more customers, more revenue, more efficiency or more subscriptions? Like that's just like a side caveat kind of thing. And so when you're like, hey, I don't trust the numbers, I'm like well what was your KPIs to your point
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though, that rolls up to what are your goals? And I think, you know, one of the things we're going to talk about here is some of the big questions that your agency should be asking you or agency. And we can probably forward slash this to internal team to a certain degree. If you do have an internal team. The point is this is that what you're talking about is a lot of different scenarios based upon a goal. And I don't necessarily think that you know, customer retention and, or increasing lifetime value and, or getting new customers is the goal. It is an outgrowth. It is the way in which you achieve the goal. So what is your goal for the business? So for some folks it is to make the world a better place. We actually had a client, we're like we don't want to have any profit. We want to send everything back to everything that's left over after all of our costs. We want to contribute to charity. So. And they didn't have a number in mind, so it was.
B
Yeah, they did. The number would have been the year they wanted to run for president.
A
Yeah, exactly. But for some clients it's a revenue goal, for some it's a new customer goal, for some it's a vision goal. And to your point, there's all of those things, all of those goals have different sort of milestones in which to reach. I mean usually it's, it's attached to some kind of marketing performance indicator, whether it's a lifetime value or it's AOV or anyOV or it's an NCAC number. So what you're saying is, yeah, we're going to shoot towards this, but what's the bigger goal? What's the thing that you're really trying to achieve as the VP of marketing this quarter, next quarter, for the entire year into the next year. And I think if your agency doesn't ask that you and them are not on the same page.
B
Can I give a separate example? Just because I'm like, take it to like the software space, there's the business owners or if like you're a public traded company, it's what the investors like, what is the true outcome. But then like say you're a VP of like one line of business or, or like you're ahead of marketing over one item. I think like Alex Schultz does this really well in he's a CMO for Meta. He had talked about how with WhatsApp when they were doing this like product launch, they ended up finding that their marketing teams were both chasing diff or like they were all chasing different numbers. So some were looking at daily active users and increasing the daily active user das, the daily active users, while others were hyper focused on downloads. But if you have a million people download and no one actively using it and you don't have that retention while you need both, right. You have a team that's like, you know, direct to consumer and then you want to have the product. An example was though, if you don't know what your North Star is or if you don't define what those KPIs are, what he had for that quarterly sprint was two teams going in completely opposite directions and then they spent more time fighting with each other because their North Stars, like you'll have teams that'll have different North Stars and stuff, but they were disconnected with what the VP actually wanted and what was going to drive performance. Because at some points, like they were trying to renew investment and those different, like sub secondary KPIs come into play. But like, I liked his example of daily active users versus downloads because you need to have so many downloads to show that you have growth. And like, when we think about meta, we've talked before that there are more people with Meta than there were individuals under the Roman Empire.
A
Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah, it's crazy. You liked that one, didn't you?
B
I love that one. But that counts as downloads, right? And then it's just like, how many active users do we have?
A
And like I recently had two different numbers. We had users and daily active users. There was also monthly active users, but yes, absolutely, two separate numbers. Downloads is, I would submit, is a precursor and, or a predictive metric for the ultimate, which is daily active users, which if you are a software, that's obviously essential. If you are a E commerce brand or a retailer online. An online retailer, then it is. Those are people that are coming back to your site. Repeat purchasing, repeat purchases.
B
The number of new customers can be stupid. Like, you can say like, I get a lot of new customers and like, forgive me on this, like, but someone that we've worked with, we were growing new customers, but no one was coming back. That's a product issue. It's like, I want to grow, I want to grow, I want to grow. And then I'm like, okay, but look at this. We've got 15,000 new customers in the last four months, of which we have less than half a percent of people that have repurchased. There is something happening. Is this a product quality issue? Is it a delivery issue? Is it a mistaken identity of the product? Like, you know, for example, the picture shows me what looks like a giant wine glass, but then in reality comes out as like an E. Didi toaster for a Barbie. Like that. Like, I need to understand what is happening. Why are we giving away all this product and buying new customers that aren't staying with us? So it's like, so the E commerce side, like your daily or monthly active users, the equivalent is like, how many of your new customers are becoming repeat customers? And then I'll push you a bit further. Again, like for the subscription side, if you offer a subscription for your product, how many of those repeat customers or new customers are becoming subscriber customers?
A
Right? And so that does go back to one of the points that we want to discuss here today, is that the Agency dashboard. Your, your agency should be giving you some level of dashboard. And it's on the metrics for you that really do matter. And whatever that thing is, you should be able to very easily and accurately describe what the problem is based upon those metrics. So great example for you is. And we had a client that unfortunately took about two. This is about two years ago, they hired us and they went out of business within three months. Because everyone would come in based upon their social posts, Buy once and then never buy again. They had a. Their AOV and their LTV was the same damn number. We kept saying like there's something wrong with everything after that.
B
And it wasn't like a product like a mattress or a car.
A
That was, it was in the supplement space. So.
B
So they didn't want to retake the supplement. It wasn't good.
A
That was.
B
It promised.
A
That was it. And like they had a. They had a product problem.
B
Yeah.
A
And so.
B
Or customer service. You could have a great product.
A
We never got to the bottom of it because they sort of disappeared.
B
You only got three months.
A
They disappeared. Yeah, they went out of business. So they.
B
I would want to know their consumption rate. Like how long does it take for someone, I mean like if they're not reordering and like, so say you're like, no, I know this product really works. Then you have where it's maybe not a product in the, like the formula, but the way that the bottle is being delivered. They're not taking it or they're not being told. The frequency of taking like a lot of supplements is like you have to take it. Like Lion's mane is like, it takes like three months before you have any noticeable difference. You're not communicating how long you need to take it before you see noticeable difference. So I blame that not on the product formula, but the product packaging. Because you haven't informed someone how to properly consume the product and find the results that you promise on your marketing.
A
Yeah, I mean a great example is there's a supplement that's sitting on the island in my kitchen right now is a friend of ours who's trying to, I guess pitching my wife on taking it. It's for, you know, it's. It's actually a former client of ours that was with us for three plus years and they took everything in house. Great, great product. And it was the new package. It was the new client or new customer package that had just come in and there was a booklet on this particular medical condition that this supplement affects in a positive way. I will Say that because it's a supplement, because it doesn't cure. It doesn't. Cause it doesn't do anything like that. The point is this, is that that was like the customer experience of here's the best way to use this product. It was a full booklet and it's. It's clearly meant for 50 plus individuals because that really large. It had really large font. I'm like, oh, my God, this is like, for old people. I was thinking to myself, because it's in that sort of generalized niche of the 55 plus. Really 65 plus. I don't know.
B
Hey, hold on. I have friends that are 45 plus. Like, I just went to like a book club at the Barnes and Nobles by me and like, I had some amazing friends that were 45 plus and they literally were like, okay, A Vow of Vengeance is our next book. And they open it up and they're like, I can't read this.
A
Can't read it, glasses. Anyway, the point is, like, in that booklet, they tell you exactly how to use the product, when to use it, when you can expect. Like, does everybody read it? I have no idea. But the fact that there was a booklet that went along with it exactly to your point. So they don't use it and consume it, that might be part of your problem right out of the gate.
B
Not going to reorder.
A
Yeah. So we're talking about a lot of different things here.
B
But let's go back to the reporting.
A
The reporting should be able to reflect this and should be able to suss out, like, what your problem is. If your problem is declining revenue or your problem is flat revenue and you're getting lots of customers, but no repeat orders. Your agency dashboard should show this for new average order value, lifetime value, like, whatever the specific product is. Like, one of the examples that we're doing a case study on right now, in this particular client's case, we just did a case study on this. Their NAOV was $1200 and their LTV was $1220. Thereabouts, it was just slightly higher. Not 1000 people bought again, Right, Exactly. But it's not one of those products. Like, you literally, you buy it and then that's it. Like, there's nothing else with it. But if you can acquire customers and it's an excellent product, the point is, like, if you can acquire customers for 200, $250, which is what we're doing right now, that math works out every day of the week. It's like, how many more customers one time can you buy the point is, this is what I'm trying to explain here, is that every business has the differences. You need to understand those differences and your agency needs to understand those differences and and then report in a dashboard back to you what those KPIs are, or as we talk about it as marketing performance indicators, MPI's, what those are and how those are moving forward, how those are maybe being stagnated and then diagnose the problem like a metric on fire. That's what you should be looking at every single week when you talk to
B
your agency so that you know the truth behind their impact is the investment into them and the management and that traffic source or whatever that solution is driving real impact.
A
Because, hey, stay tuned for part two of this episode. By subscribing to the channel so you don't miss the gold nuggets for the metrics that matter and grow your business.
B
You've been listening to perpetual traffic.
Podcast Summary: Perpetual Traffic, March 6, 2026
Episode: Is Your Agency Performing Or Just Reporting Well?
Hosts: Ralph Burns (Tier 11) & Lauren Petrullo (Mongoose Media)
In this thought-provoking episode, Ralph Burns and Lauren Petrullo challenge marketers, business owners, and executives to reevaluate their agency relationships. The core question: Is your agency truly driving performance, or are they just generating impressive reports based on vanity metrics? Through candid dialogue and real-world examples, the hosts tackle the dangers of empty metrics, the pitfalls of misplaced trust, agency selection mistakes, and the crucial distinctions between reporting and genuine business outcomes. They deliver actionable insights for both hiring and managing agencies—sharing ideal spend thresholds, revenue guidelines, and strategies for aligning agency output with your business's real goals.
Minimum Spend & Revenue Thresholds
Agency Fit Depends on Business Stage
On Wasteful Agencies:
Self-Reflection as an Agency Owner:
Universal Ownership Principle:
Agency Dashboards Must Diagnose:
Agencies Must Challenge the Right Problem:
For deeper resources and episode tools, visit perpetualtraffic.com.
This episode is essential for anyone considering scaling their paid marketing or evaluating their agency ROI – listen for strategic guidance grounded in real-world, not just reporting, results.