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- [00:01]
Ralph Burns
Hey, folks, Ralph here with something that could seriously upgrade your Top of Funnel ad game. If you've been a PT listener for any period of time, you know that we talk about Top of Funnel all the time and how challenging it is for you to get quality Top of Funnel clients or leads or customers and then convert them typically at Bottom of Funnel. Well, TV advertising is one of those areas that we haven't discussed here on PT all that much. But our friends over at Ad Critter have figured this stuff out. They do connected TV ads so you can be everywhere without spending millions on super bowl ads. But they pair it with display retargeting. So you're hitting the audiences with a complete approach. You reach them, then you remind them and then you collect the revenue. It's a strategy designed to deliver and let me tell you, it really works. We're testing this at tier 11 and so far the results have been very impressive. Now with Ad Critter, creating custom audiences are so easy. You don't need to reformat files, you don't need to mess around with complex spreadsheets. You just upload any file in any format and you're ready to go. And the match rate is awesome. They make it easy to connect with the right people, the actual people that have interacted with your ads in the past and then allow them to naturally flow through your funnel so you can convert them at Bottom of funnel. Now, the folks at AdCritter, we twisted their arm to get us a great deal for you, the PT listener. They are offering a special deal for y'all, and that is you can get a $500 campaign credit, meaning $500 in free money to test out the platform or dollar for dollar matching on any TV campaign, up to five grand. Imagine the impact of that match spend five grand. The they'll add another five grand in display. That's a huge opportunity here. Now it's only offered to you, the PT listener. Head over to AdCritter.com PT and check it out. Now, our friends over at AppSumo started with one simple idea. The tools you need to grow your business shouldn't put you out of business. That's why they work directly with developers to get exclusive discounts of 80 to 90% off software, the software that you're probably going to be buying anyway. You might as well buy it through AppSumo and save yourself a bundle. In fact, they have saved entrepreneurs over half of a billion dollars since 2010. That is $500 million for those of you who can't do the math at home, some of the biggest names in tech like Mailchimp, Zapier, Dropbox, all got their start on AppSumo. With a rotating selection of hundreds of tools, the ones that you're using anyway and probably paying too much for, you'll find all the software you need to make your life easier in 2025. Plus, with a 60 day money back guarantee, you can try any tool risk free. Oh my God, What a deal. AppSumo rarely offers discounts, but they are going to offer a deal here for you, the Perpetual Traffic Listener. Because prices are already so low, but we got the biggest discount we could possibly get from them anywhere. You get 13% off your first order with the code TRAFFIC13. That's right, that's code TRAFFIC13. All lowercase. And yes, you do have to spell out the number 13 traffic 13 for 13% off your first purchase. Over at Appsumo, these guys have been saving entrepreneurs like you and marketing people like you hundreds of millions of dollars since 2010. Don't miss out right now because they don't offer discounts like this. Head over to appsumo.com Enter the code TRAFFIC13, all lowercase, and get 13% off your first purchase at appsumo.com hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns. I'm the founder and CEO of Tier 11. Not alongside my awesome co host, Lauren E. Petrulo, but today you will hear, I think all of these are Lauren and myself from this past year, the five most engaged, not most popular, but most engaged podcasts. We have a little tool that we use tells us which shows get the most engagement, meaning which ones are the ones that people listen to all the way through. And it's not a function of how long the podcast actually is, but how good the content is. And these are all from later in the year, in 2024. We're going to get into a bunch of different things here today, but just pull out the most salient, the most important nuggets that you need to know for the coming year here in 2025, but also even planning for later on in the year. Maybe some of the mistakes that you might have made in Q4 and even into Q5 of 2024 so you can start that planning process with your team in order to get even better. But mostly these are just a lot of tips as well as some strategies that we have seen that work really well. Us spending over $200 million a year in PA and Lauren's team doing a portion of that as well. This is the stuff that actually really works. That's the reason why we do the show every single week, because we're actually doing it. So a couple of things to listen for today. First off, we had an awesome guest on back a few months ago about CRO and three big myths that he debunked with our buddy Rafael, Paul and Daigle. So listen for that one as well as what you can do for Q5 and some of these strategies you might be able to do in and around some of the holidays that are coming up. Okay, if you are a business or an e commerce store that has periodic sales or periodic holiday sales, whether those are Veterans Day or Labor Day or more importantly the ones that are most recent, Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, some of these tips that we use in that episode here today got a 90% CPA reduction. Lauren drops a few knowledge bombs on that one, so pay attention for that. We also talk about the three category changes that you have to pay attention to if you miss this show. This is one of the ones that we did late last year. Super important, especially for you meta advertisers. And I know there's a lot of you that are listening out there and you need to know about these three cataclysmic ad category changes. And then we forget finally cracked the code on lead generation for Google Search ads. This has been something that has been really a challenge for us for going on two, three years. Ever since Performance Max came on board. We really had a struggle finding this and our chief's traffic strategist John Moran from Tier 11 Crack the Code on that. So we'll be talking about that as well. And then last but not least, make sure that you fix these 17 mistakes I know you're making because I still see them every now and then I see them inside of the tier 11 AD accounts. Maybe not all 17, but 1 or 2. Point is is no matter how great your in app or your ad platform hygiene is, that episode will pull out some of the most salient points there to make sure that you're not making any mistakes in making sure that your ads, especially on meta, are working to their fullest capacity in 2025. So without further ado, here is our most engaging five perpetual traffic episodes of 2024. Take it away.
- [07:37]
Lauren E. Petrulo
You're listening to Perpetual Traffic.
- [07:44]
Rafael Paul
My mission is not just to increase their numbers, but it's hopefully to get them to think around optimization their websites the right way so they can one day maybe fly on their own or at least integrate a bit more of just the optimization or CRO way of thinking in their day to day. I mean I think it's a big, I'm saying that it just sounds like a big mission. But when you, when you're, when you collaborate closely for a client over many years and you're not afraid to share kind of the mistakes, the learnings and so on, that I guess that learning develops itself, that process develops itself inside of many companies and, and it makes for a better relationship. But also those are usually the brands that are most successful at growing as well. I look at those brands where it's happening and they are some of the most D2C brands I've seen to date.
- [08:39]
Ralph Burns
Yeah, they're taking the longer term view. They realize this isn't an overnight thing. It's double my conversion rate, double my business kind of thing. Let me ask you this in closing here. When did CRO become so SEO ified, especially on LinkedIn and you've got some strong opinions on this. Shares, likes, comments don't necessarily equate to what's in line with your mission. We just see this all the time. So when did it happen? What's your take on it? Why do so many CRO agencies feel like they need to do this? Because it's just vanity metrics that they're after now when all is said and done.
- [09:18]
Rafael Paul
I mean I think it's just a reflection of society in general. TikTok taking over, making everybody impatient. People can't watch, can't stand to watch long videos anymore. People don't want to read long blog posts anymore. And I think what happened is we had this E commerce boom right like around the time of COVID or like a little bit after I think 2021 if I'm not mistaken, were probably some of the peak E commerce years and everything boomed and so many brands that probably never would have worked in a normal economy or also working and booming and it made no sense. But that also led to this Shopify boom and so many people just starting Shopify stores and then everybody just jumping on the opportunity to like hey how do I consult or do marketing for those stores? And then there's also been, and you probably remember the year better than I do but you know, like the iOS changes that happened, I think it was around the same period or towards the end of those years.
- [10:20]
Ralph Burns
21 yeah, 21.
- [10:22]
Rafael Paul
Right. So it was perfectly aligned and that was kind of the beginning of the end of that boom because all of a sudden brands started to Realize I can't just spend my time optimizing my Facebook ads, only do that and be successful brands. Started to realize I can only control Facebook or the other ad platforms up to a certain extent, but my website I can and I can do a lot there. And that's the second half of the equation. So I think really starting at that point in time, we really started seeing more brands care about conversion optimization, wanting to take more control on increasing their conversions and their website. And all of a sudden that became more important than ever. And gradually. Well, then just five years earlier, conversion optimization was mostly a thing that was taught through like super long skyscraper style blog posts that we called at the time right now it was like, okay, well what's the method of consuming information? Well, it's usually short videos, short posts, quick things and people just want the quick, the quick wins. And before that there were fewer people doing CRO and it was more like enterprise people and people that had that were very deep into it. So the knowledge was maybe a bit more sparse, but it was maybe a little deeper. Now that same level of knowledge exists, but it, the. The. But it often gets lost within the sea of engagement which is now. So many people has got businesses where they want to profit from CRO people, consultants, every single agency from dev agencies to ad agencies to new CRO agencies, to kids coming out of high school. I mean I was one, I was that guy once. Right. So I'm not complaining.
- [12:09]
Ralph Burns
New York is junior high school, but that's all right.
- [12:11]
Rafael Paul
Exactly. So I can't complain about that. But it just. What it means is all of a sudden so many people are trying to profit off CRO. What's going to happen is, well, how do you do that in today's day and age? Well, it's all about engagement and there's going to be a lot of things shared.
- [12:29]
Lauren E. Petrulo
If someone fails to find what they're looking for, they'll fail to be found a customer of yours. So that's where it's like again, someone who's searching like is looking for a solution that based off of how you do it can send greater signals to what your sales team needs to be looking at and all that stuff.
- [12:42]
Ralph Burns
So we are tracking behaviors here at the end of the day. And if you think like everyone who comes to your site has the same behavior, you are very wrong.
- [12:53]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yeah, all visitors are creating people. So we're just going to fly through the last few. We've got start trial, which is the start of a free trial. A lot of people will do like a free sample, like a week trial, 14 week trial. Just look importantly here, predicted lifetime value people, if you do start trial, great. But you can enhance it by saying, hey, if I know. And this is why, if you don't know your numbers, you have no numbers to know. Like you have to know like why you're providing someone a free trial. And having that predicted lifetime value again enhances the weight because you might have a 14 day trial or a different type of trial. And again it signals different hierarchy of who that visitor is.
- [13:32]
Ralph Burns
That's revenue and waiting in essence. So kind of important to track that submit application. Talk to me about this one.
- [13:39]
Lauren E. Petrulo
So this one some people will mix with complete registration. Not the world's leading authority. But like this is submission of an application for a product, service or program you offer, for example a credit card, educational program or job. So again this is where you have to determine are they registering for something like I like to do for webinars, are they submitting an application? Are they applying to see if like a lot of agencies will have applied to work with us. And there are questions on there that are more than scheduling an appointment that are more than just a lead. Like they're applying to see if they're a good fit.
- [14:09]
Ralph Burns
Absolutely.
- [14:10]
Lauren E. Petrulo
So this can be. I'm not going to split hairs on those pieces. They get used interchangeably. But the way I would look at it is at the basis are they registering for something, are they an actual lead that your team will work or are they applying for this one? The use case of credit card, educational program or job.
- [14:25]
Ralph Burns
This one's pretty important, I would say. I mean this is one that we've used for years and years. All right, subscribe.
- [14:32]
Lauren E. Petrulo
No one uses, no one uses to start a paid subscription for a product or service you offer.
- [14:39]
Ralph Burns
Rarely.
- [14:40]
Lauren E. Petrulo
No one.
- [14:40]
Ralph Burns
Rarely if ever. I don't think I've ever seen this on any audit anywhere.
- [14:45]
Lauren E. Petrulo
If you have a what a supplement business and your business is based off of a subscription model. If you're using recharge or anything like that, here again you have predicted lifetime value. If you have an info product and you have average subscriber is with you for six months and you're paying 999 or $149 a month, you need to incorporate that predictive lifetime value because what will then happen later is if that person exceeds that, then you get to have again more information that you're algorithm can find people that have a higher propensity to invest more with you.
- [15:18]
Ralph Burns
Exactly. And last, but not Least. Last but not least, our friend view content. Everybody knows this on E Commerce.
- [15:25]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Everyone that like you say everyone knows this on E Commerce. No, I think it's even more important.
- [15:30]
Ralph Burns
I shouldn't say everyone knows, but I would, I would say in E commerce people understand what this is. I don't think people understand in every other space. So how would you describe this one? I look at this as like high value.
- [15:43]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Any page. Yeah. A visit to a webpage you care about, for example a product or landing page. View content tells if someone visits a page but not what they see on that page. But you have an important page. This should be on your about us page. This should be on your landing pages. This should be on your upsell pages that don't have an issue like these are important pages that have more value than your privacy policy. How about blog posts and your terms and conditions?
- [16:05]
Ralph Burns
I always sort of go back and forth on this.
- [16:08]
Lauren E. Petrulo
I don't. Unless it's a pillar blog that is generating sales for you. View content should go on something as a page. Are you optimizing for that blog? Then I would recommend that you do a custom conversion with scroll depth or time on page.
- [16:21]
Ralph Burns
Yeah, we do a lot of view content for blog posts just for clients. We optimize for view content specifically just because it's an intermediate event. Because the next logical step is like there's lots of calls to action.
- [16:33]
John Moran
We generate the lead, we sell it. Once we sell it, we Google only sees what we sell. And that is going to stop the performance max from trying to go to YouTube, getting a whole bunch of junk conversions, getting a lead from those conversions, patting itself on the back and blasting spam to the moon. That's what ends up happening. It spirals out of control on itself because it identifies activity must be good, identifies leads, must be better. Dumps more aspen into it, gets more spam leads must be even better. We got to stop all that. We got to make sure it's OIC, make sure there's no YouTube. But you know, I know we've been talking only for 21 minutes, but we have a new feeder strategy for search with performance max. And you also found out probably how to remove the performance max spam the areas as to which you can identify and stop that and even push YouTube in out of performance Max into its own YouTube campaign until. Until Google screws that up next year where they get rid of YouTube and push on the demand gen, we'll have a new strategy. I'm testing it right now. We have a new strategy for that coming soon. So that'll be something to stay tuned for. But yeah, it's, it's insanity what Google's doing. But I like some things. I hate some things. I like the fact that deprioritized Performance max. I hate the fact that it's gonna kick YouTube in, in the shorts. So we'll see what that, how that goes. But for now between that interim you can pull it out of Performance max, put it into YouTube, keep YouTube clean. With looking at the click the rates if they're above percent, you're probably getting some spam. Make sure remove those channels like you saw after I removed the channel also made a complaint. Google wiped that channel. Pretty cool stuff. So Google does seemingly kind of have our back. When it's the obvious one where it says one impression, one and one view and 127 clicks it's like all right, I can see the spam there. So that's an area that we, we found in Performance Max that was spam and everything for lead generation. But these two steps to protect ourselves should keep that clean. And the third step of adding the feeder strategy is good. The fourth step of making sure that the T ROA targets are purposely making the performance max have 5A less add rank. So that was 22 minutes. Hopefully, hopefully that went well. I'm doing this just got out of my own. So we might have to kind of like play this back at half speed because there's no one there stopping me asking questions and all that kind of stuff. But let get into some questions to see if you guys have any questions so far about this strategy and how to stop the performance max from spamming the crap out of you and your clients and your customers and the world. It just, I hate it. I hate how much that that Google just allows that to flow through and then charges you for it. Like it's, it's like, like a con. Here's your spam. Thank you for your money, then I'll see you in court. That's basically what happens. So it's up to us to protect ourselves. So hopefully this is working.
- [18:59]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Small business owned company that I have is a swimsuit diaper for children. If I'm not using personalized advertising, I'm going to be advertising swim diapers to single men that don't have any children. I don't have the budget to compete with the Disney's and the Warner Brothers of the world or even like the Huggy brands because they have super bowl budgets. Small business small budgets with personalized, relevant Targeting that I'm able to leverage on platforms like Meta. I can only do that because it lets me tap into their demo and psychographic information that Meta's collected over the 15 years since they've been using their platform for free. But by instituting this, it's being harshly hit against these categories, health and wellness being the two that I am. It's going to stink. But yeah, that's what I testified on and I tried to fight the good fight.
- [19:58]
Ralph Burns
Well, thank you for testifying on behalf of all small businesses in the United States. Like, that's. We never realized that you were. Well, who was it who called you up? What is it? It wasn't Meta, it was your congressman.
- [20:14]
Lauren E. Petrulo
No, no, no. So I testified at the Senate bill and the House representative bills that had been instituted and what they were doing is they're imposing restrictions on privacy. Like, again, you don't want everything to be tracked. Remember the, like, Ashley Madison break that had happened? You don't want stuff to be taken advantage of, but it's leveraging for relevance. Like you don't want your device to be listening to you so that you can be manipulated into something. Now, marketing, one of the best books I've ever read, Ryan Holiday, is like, trust me, I'm lying. And it talks about like, manipulation and marketing. There's a fun, fine line. But when you are using an app like Facebook or Meta and you're not paying for it, they should be able to leverage the activity you're doing on app to subsidize the cost of servers and allowing you to have free access on the platform to an extent. I agree. Kids, yeah, don't track children. They shouldn't be advertised for. There's lots of protection laws against it, but for me it's like, you're not paying for it. No one is forcing you to use the apps. You can absolutely delete the app, not participate on it. But what they want to do is impose these very restrictive tracking metrics which we're seeing here, especially for bottom of funnel, because they don't want you to provide Meta ammo to make more and more money because it's perceived, like politicians will see, like, oh, big bad corporate evil. But it's not them that's going to be affected. Yeah, their, their dollars will be hurt. But people are still going to keep advertising. It's a small business owner that now has to spend on this top of Funnel to hope that they're going to get some conversion and some return on their investment. Sorry, I'm going to get really mad because I'm just remembering like how passionate I was about this. It's like our, we're starting a marathon two weeks before anyone else is even entering the race.
- [22:11]
Ralph Burns
So just to clarify, if you're not familiar with the term Q5, we have used it here on the show before. But this is basically the period like, you know, the time right after, right before. Some people say after Christmas, not really, but it's right before it. It's sort of in this period where you're still maybe getting some Christmas time sales to a certain degree. But it's really, it goes into like after the first of the year. So it's sort of like a lot of people have different definitions of it. What's your definition of Q5? Just so we're clear on what we're talking about.
- [22:43]
Lauren E. Petrulo
So it started December 17th. US Post Office said you specifically in the US because it's the largest consumer market that we work with, you cannot ship anymore. If you order something on December 18th or later, you're likely not going to get it in time for Christmas or Hanukkah. And because of that, brands decelerate, they can't sell. And then the for sure is Christmas Day to New year's Eve. But Q5 ends on New Year's Eve because on January 1, every health and wellness brand is like on their own new Black Friday because everyone's New Year, New Me. So that category that vertical explodes where you have this like mini increase of competition in January because that's their Black Friday.
- [23:21]
Ralph Burns
So the first day sort of back from work is technically is. Well, it's really, it's like the sixth. Really look at it. I mean if you look at the calendar, because a lot of people are going to be taking obviously the first off. And then there's like two days, there's Thursday, Friday. So I almost consider like Q5, like almost through to the six because that's like when people are actually back from work and then they're like thinking about other stuff. But anyway, it's this in between period here which a lot of people take off.
- [23:51]
Lauren E. Petrulo
I love it. Please take off.
- [23:54]
Ralph Burns
Which is an opportunity for you, the marketer who's listening to this show. So let's get into this case study here which we basically just like this is in real time, ladies and gentlemen. So talk to us about the space. I know you don't want to talk about the company specifically. What are they trying to achieve? What historically have their cost per lead been for? Marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, what are we Trying to sell here hundreds.
- [24:19]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Of dollars high ticket lead gen. We're talking about a product that's five figures. It's an investment.
- [24:26]
Ralph Burns
This is an info product.
- [24:28]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yes. Okay, so it's in the info space. It's an achievement.
- [24:32]
Ralph Burns
Like what are we kind of doing here? Yeah, okay.
- [24:34]
Lauren E. Petrulo
It's in the coaching space. So think it's like a mastermind but it's like coaching in that kind of environment. So in that their cost probably hundreds of dollars, they're booked calls, all the show up rate because you're selling high ticket. We know that high ticket is a long Runway. And so taking advantage of Q5 immediately. We saw immediately. I'm looking at the numbers in 24 hours. 110 of the annual cost per lead price with a 63% sustained quality lead.
- [25:06]
Ralph Burns
So we're talking hundred dollar leads down to hundreds, multiple hundreds. Just give us some round figures here. Come on, we need more specifics.
- [25:16]
Lauren E. Petrulo
$700.
- [25:17]
Ralph Burns
$700 a lead for quality lead. And that's actually a good qualified lead. So a sales quote. I'm talking sales qualified lead. They meet all the criteria they have. They have the characteristics that they're looking for. Maybe it's background, maybe it's past occupation, maybe it's current occupation, maybe it's income need.
- [25:38]
Lauren E. Petrulo
It's like the budget to afford this high ticket. Do they have the need where we can provide them the group coaching environment and then specifically that they are going to take action within the next two years.
- [25:50]
Ralph Burns
Okay, good. So you've got a definitive time frame. You've got like some sense of scarcity obviously, like with a time constraint. So in this particular niche, in this particular company, we are looking at what's the most important characteristic that you say yes, they are qualified, no, they are not qualified. Or is an aggregation.
- [26:11]
Lauren E. Petrulo
It's the affordability. Yeah. Because this is a very high ticket product.
- [26:15]
Ralph Burns
Okay.
- [26:16]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Tens of tens of thousands of dollars.
- [26:18]
Ralph Burns
Like how much?
- [26:19]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Close to 50.
- [26:20]
Ralph Burns
50. Okay, so it's an information based. All right, got it. I get it now. Like you haven't even told me this stuff. I'm like pulling teeth here for the perpetual traffic listener. Trust me, they won't figure it out. Our audience isn't that smart. Just kidding.
- [26:36]
Lauren E. Petrulo
They are that smart.
- [26:37]
Ralph Burns
They're like, who is Lauren talking about? Let's see, they're all googling it right now on their phones.
- [26:41]
Lauren E. Petrulo
There aren't that many people.
- [26:43]
Ralph Burns
Just don't Google while you're driving. By the way, I hopefully enjoy week's episode. We will leave all the links to all those episodes if you want to go back and listen to them in full inside the show notes over@perpetualtraffic.com make sure that you do watch all of our podcasts over on perpetualtraffic.com YouTube. That's our YouTube channel. We are doing a lot of screen shares. We are taking some of our tier 11 lives, which you can tune into every Friday at 2:30 Eastern. Every Friday we do these. They're very Google heavy.
- [27:17]
John Moran
Now.
- [27:17]
Ralph Burns
We're bringing in a lot of meta stuff. So a lot of paid traffic, a lot of really great strategies there with screen shares, strategies that you can use and start deploying in your business. So make sure you check that out over on our YouTube channel for Tier 11@tier11.com YouTube on behalf of my awesome co host, Lauren E. Petrulo, mba by the way, until next show, see ya. You've been listening to Perpetual Traffic.