One Budget Shift. 21.9% More Revenue: Here’s Exactly What They Did

Summary

Perpetual Traffic Podcast – Episode Summary

Episode Title: One Budget Shift. 21.9% More Revenue. Here’s Exactly What They Did
Hosts: Ralph Burns (Tier 11)
Date: March 13, 2026
Main Theme:
A breakdown of a transformative multi-channel marketing case study in which a simple shift in ad budget—less than 3%—drove over 21% revenue growth, with detailed strategies and actionable insights for scaling profitably without waste.

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Episode Overview

This episode spotlights a dramatic growth story from Tier 11’s client portfolio, illustrating the profound impact of strategic budget reallocations across paid and organic channels. Ralph Burns details exactly how a 2.7% increase in ad spend led to a 21.9% rise in revenue. The hosts emphasize the increasing necessity of unified cross-channel strategies, accurate data integration, and correct attribution for driving scalable results without simply ramping up spend.

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Key Discussion Points & Case Study Breakdown

Why Results Mattered

• Astounding ROI from Modest Budget Shift
  • The case stands out for its simplicity and outsized results.
  • “We really didn’t feel the need to expound on it because the shifts were so simple. And this is really where digital marketing is heading today.” — Lauren Epicullo (03:13)
  • Main theme: “It is not about spending more … it’s about getting more results with less.” — Ralph Burns (03:36)

Understanding the Client & Context ([06:03])

• Client: SpotOn GPS Dog Fence (wireless dog fence, Shopify, Amazon, Chewy)
  • Prior to Tier 11’s involvement, the client missed 5 revenue forecasts in a row (June–October 2025).
  • Cost per unit (NCAC/CPU) was at an all-time high: nearly $200/acquisition.
  • Spending was heavily concentrated at the bottom of the funnel and not on new customer acquisition.

Diagnosing Attribution Problems

• Previous reporting (Triple Whale) obfuscated true acquisition costs and new vs. returning customer data.
• Transitioned to Tier 11’s data suite (powered by Wicked Reports and edge tag server) to achieve more granular, actionable insights tying back to CRM and actual business metrics.

What Was Changed: The Budget Shift ([06:03], [09:47], [11:32])

• Move budget away from oversaturated, bottom-of-funnel channels:
  • Cut Amazon ad spend by 91%
  • Cut Google brand search spend by 95%
• Reallocate to top-of-funnel platforms:
  • Launched native ads on Taboola
  • Expanded into Connected TV, Programmatic, Meta Ads, and YouTube
  • Focus on acquiring new customers and increasing upper funnel awareness

“Oftentimes we find this to be the case with brands. They overspend on Amazon — people are going to go there naturally. No reason to advertise.” — Ralph Burns (09:47)

Real Metrics Over Vanity ([11:32])

• Tracked true business KPIs:
  • NMER (Media Efficiency Ratio for New Customers): For every $1 in, $7.75 out
  • Blended CPU (Cross-channel cost per unit)
• No siloed measurement — “All of them work together. This is the key to success in today’s digital marketing.” — Ralph Burns (11:32)

Measurable Results ([06:03], [16:52], [18:20])

• 2.7% ad spend increase → 21.9% revenue increase (to $1.1M spend)
  • New customer revenue up 26%
  • New customers up 25%
  • NMER up 23% to 7.75
  • Blended new customer CAC dropped 34% ($192→$128)
  • Organic sales +24%, Email +13%, Amazon Sales +33%
  • Amazon ad spend down 91%, Google brand spend down 95%
• “Inverse correlation: We created more demand, but got a lower acquisition cost.” — Ralph Burns (13:30)
• Four consecutive months hitting sales forecasts after five straight misses

Controlled Experimentation and Timeline ([14:52], [18:20])

• Budget reductions were gradual, not abrupt: Four consecutive monthly Amazon spend cuts, keeping steady sales volume.
• “We were trying to gear more sales over to their main site on Shopify … so they can actually own the customer rather than sharecrop over at Amazon.” — Co-host (15:15)
• Native ads drove net-new site visits at low cost per visit; top-of-funnel flows fed bottom-of-funnel efficiency.
• “This is the new way to market: spending more doesn’t necessarily equate to scale.” — Ralph Burns (13:42)

The ‘Halo Effect’ Across Channels ([15:55], [21:45])

• Incrementality tests proved that pulling back on last-click channels didn’t hurt direct sales; organic and email improved instead.
• "Organic search increased by 24% — zero ad spend. Email revenue: up 13%, zero ad spend. Amazon revenue: up 33% while we spent so much less." — Co-host (15:55)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "The goal of digital marketing is not to spend more, to make more. It's actually to spend the least amount you can and get the maximum results."
  — Lauren Epicullo ([03:51])
• "All of them work together. This is the key to success in today’s digital marketing."
  — Ralph Burns ([11:32])
• “We did this through lots of incrementality tests, through what we would call controlled experiments. We cut their Amazon budget by 91%. … Their units on Amazon stayed basically the same.”
  — Co-host ([14:52])
• “We really didn’t expect these results to happen so quickly, quite honestly. It sort of surprised us in a lot of ways.”
  — Lauren Epicullo ([21:10])
• “When they do work really well together, it’s scary how great results can be.”
  — Lauren Epicullo ([21:49])

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Timestamps – Key Segments

• 03:13 — Why this simple strategy reflects the future of digital marketing
• 06:03 — Case study results summary and initial stats
• 09:47 — Why Amazon and Google brand spend was wasted
• 11:32 — Explaining real metrics tracked (blended CPU, NMER) vs. vanity
• 14:52 — Controlled experiment: stepwise Amazon ad spend reduction, organic and email gains
• 15:55 — Halo effect: Non-paid channels grow as a result of the shift
• 18:20 — Native ad campaign explained (Taboola), timeline of forecast reversals
• 21:10 — Reflection on results and future potential

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Actionable Takeaways

• Audit your channel mix—are you over-indexed at the bottom of the funnel?
• Invest in cross-channel attribution and real business metrics, not just in-platform ROAS.
• Shifting budget from overspent channels (Amazon, Google Brand) to top-of-funnel platforms can:
  • Drive incremental growth
  • Lower blended acquisition costs
  • Raise organic, email, and owned site sales
• Controlled, data-driven reductions to paid channels may reveal hidden efficiency in your mix.

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Summary in the Speakers’ Own Words

• “The goal is to make more, not spend more. And this example shows you can often do just that.” — Ralph Burns ([03:36])
• “All the channels—paid and non-paid—when they work really well together, the results can be scary good.” — Lauren Epicullo ([21:46])

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For more resources and deep dives, visit perpetualtraffic.com.

Transcript

[Ralph Burns]

Hey, before we get into today's show, my marketing manager finally convinced me to run a wild experiment in this episode

[Marketing Manager]

because he wanted to prove what the

[Ralph Burns]

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.

[Marketing Manager]

This actually takes us two plus weeks,

[Ralph Burns]

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 tiereleven.com audit right now. Fill out the form and let's see how we can scale your business in the coming year.

[Co-host]

$1.1 million in spend. This only represents a 2.7% ad spend increase, but revenue increased by 21% before they missed five forecasts in a row. Their cost per unit or their cost to acquire a new customer. CPU is the term that they use here. I was at an all time high, nearing about $200 and they're really concentrated on not the attribution was hiding the real picture. Simple, but hard to pull off. And I'll show you exactly how we pulled it off here. You're listening to Perpetual Traffic. Hey, real quick. If you're looking to get your brand

[Ralph Burns]

in front of growth minded marketers, CMOs, directors of marketing and agency owners, we're

[Co-host]

opening up our sponsorship spots for Q1

[Ralph Burns]

and Q2, get in front of a quarter of a million marketers every single

[Co-host]

month at Perpetual Traffic. All you have to do is head on over to perpetual traffic.com for the

[Ralph Burns]

details or check out the link in the show notes to apply. Hey, before we get into today's show, my marketing manager finally convinced me to run a wild experiment in this episode

[Marketing Manager]

because he wanted to prove what the

[Ralph Burns]

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.

[Marketing Manager]

This actually takes us two plus weeks,

[Ralph Burns]

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 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.

[Co-host]

Now here's the catch.

[Ralph Burns]

We only have three spots, so head on over to tier11.com forward/audit right now. Fill out the form and let's see how we can scale your business in the coming year.

[Lauren Epicullo]

Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic podcast. This is your host, Ralph burns, founder and CEO of Tier 11. And today is a shorter episode than

[Ralph Burns]

normal because the results are so astounding.

[Lauren Epicullo]

In this case study, we really didn't feel the need to expound on it because the shifts were so simple. And this is really where digital marketing is heading today. It is not about spending more on your advertising or spending more on your marketing.

[Ralph Burns]

It's about getting more results with less.

[Lauren Epicullo]

And if you can do it in

[Co-host]

the right way, you can shift budgets between platforms.

[Lauren Epicullo]

And we did this with this client.

[Co-host]

Some of the details of the client

[Lauren Epicullo]

might actually be blurred out here. The point is this is that the goal of digital marketing is not to spend more, to make more. It's actually to spend the least amount you can and get the maximum results. And in this case, we just shifted

[Co-host]

a couple of channels around. And this is the beauty of having

[Lauren Epicullo]

a tool like the Tier 11 data suite. And you can actually see the effects on different channels based upon what actions your people or your team or your, you know, if you're a director of marketing, your internal team or if you're running all your marketing and you're a CEO, maybe you're a video producer, maybe you're media buyer, maybe you're a creative person. The point is this is when you get all the channels and all of them working together.

[Co-host]

And we're not just talking about paid

[Lauren Epicullo]

channels here, we're talking about search engine optimization, we're talking about Google, we're talking about email, sms, all of it together really came together for this case study here. And I think it's one of the most important ones that we've ever talked about here on the show. And it's about shifting budget and really having very good data. If you don't have good data to, to be able to guide those actions, you're really flying blind in today's world. And obviously we use the Tier 11 data suite inside 2.11 Wicked Reports is the engine that powers that. We also use an edge tag server which allows us to get incredible degrees of accuracy tying into the back end with the CRM. And that's exactly what we did here. And we had a, you know, a team within this particular company, which is not a small company, this is a very large company and a rabid, just absolutely passionate niche that was just a

[Co-host]

great and continues to be a great

[Lauren Epicullo]

partner and working alongside those folks have just been absolutely ideal. It's been nirvana for us at tier 11.

[Co-host]

So here's today's case study. One budget shift 21.9% more revenue and

[Lauren Epicullo]

here's exactly what we did foreign.

[Co-host]

Excited to share this case study with you. The 2.7% that changed absolutely everything for this brand how spot on leveraged native advertising to drive 21.9% revenue growth in literally less than three months due to our efforts. So here's some of the statistics here. About $1.1 million in spend. This only represents a 2.7% ad spend increase, but revenue increased by 21% up to 13. New customer revenue was up 26%, new customers were up 25% and Enmer or media efficiency ratio for new customers rose 23% to 7.75. So basically for every dollar we're putting in for a new customer, we're getting $7.75 back for all the platforms that we're driving all of this growth on. We'll get into it in just a second here. And their cost per unit, otherwise known as their NCAC or their cost to acquire a new customer, new customers not return customers dropped by 34% from 192 to 128. So their organic increased by 24%, their email increased by 13, their Amazon sales increased by 33%, their Amazon spend dropped by 91% and their Google brand spend dropped by 95%. And we will show exactly how we did this here. So when you scale up spend doesn't necessarily equate to scale in the business. Oftentimes you can spend less on certain platforms and make more. And that is the goal of this whole thing is to make more money, make more profit, which is exactly what we did here. So a 2.7% increase in ad spend but a 21% increase in revenue which is just fabulous. We love these kinds of case studies. So a little bit about the client. Spot on GPS Dog Fence is a wireless dog fence provider uses a technology called True Location to create custom virtual boundaries anywhere with no wires and no subscriptions. And it's assembled here in the US of A in New Hampshire and they sell through their Shopify store, Amazon as well as Chewy so so this is what was happening before. They missed five forecasts in a row prior to us coming on board June through October 2025, their unit targets were missing every single month. Their cost per unit or their cost to acquire a new customer. CPU is the term that they use here was at an all time high, nearing about $200. And they're really concentrated on bottom of funnel, not top of funnel. Top of funnel is where you find the new customers. Bottom of funnel is where you just scoop them up and convert them. But they were spending most of their money on bottom funnel or their previous agency was and the attribution was hiding the real picture. They were using triple whale and we converted them over to tier 11 data suite. We could actually through real click data determine who is a new and who is a returning customer.

[Ralph Burns]

Wait. My marketing manager finally convinced me to run a wild experiment in this episode.

[Marketing Manager]

Because we want to prove what the

[Ralph Burns]

conversion engine can do for your brand. We are giving away three of our $10,000 deep dive audits for free. We're going to look at your creative, your media buying, your actual business metrics to find exactly where your growth is stalled.

[Co-host]

This is two weeks of our best

[Ralph Burns]

work, but we only have three spots. So go to tier11.com audit right now,

[Marketing Manager]

fill out the form and and let's

[Ralph Burns]

see how we can scale your business.

[Co-host]

And also Amazon and Google brand spend looked great, but the point was is that was a lot of wasted spend as we'll get into in just a second here. So how tier 11 approached it. First off, we launched native ads and I'll show you the sort of the timeline here. In this case study, we launched native ads on Taboola. We're now doing connected TV and programmatic, other types of very top of funnel brand awareness consideration as well as meta ads. We were launching brand new meta campaigns. So we moved the budget from bottom of funnel spend, which is what their previous agency was doing, to top of funnel. We cut their Amazon spend by 91%. Oftentimes we find this to be the case with a lot of brands. They overspend on Amazon because people are just going to go there naturally anyway. There's no reason to advertise. So we did the same sort of thing on Google and Bing that freed us up to spend more on meta YouTube, which I haven't even mentioned here, as well as native. So all of those are really working Top of funnel create awareness, great ads that then bottom of funnel branded search and on Amazon that's where they convert. Simple but hard to pull off. And I'll show you exactly how we pulled it off here. We tracked real metrics, not vanity metrics, real MPIs, marketing performance indicators. That is the key to this whole thing like nmer media efficiency ratio for new customers. Okay, how are you spending to acquire a new customer? That's what NMER is, blended cpu. All the individual platforms together, how much are we spending on all of them? And blended that in a cost per unit sold. Okay, not looking at these platforms in silos like meta here and Google does this and TikTok does this and YouTube does this and Amazon does this.

[Ralph Burns]

All of them work together.

[Co-host]

This is the key to success in today's digital marketing. And the tier 11 data suite does this seamlessly by not relying on in platform metrics like return on ad spend, which can be very easily manipulated inside the app forms themselves. So here is a killer graphic that shows the cost per unit. Once again, cost per unit is your ncac, your cost to acquire a new customer. Maybe it's cost to acquire a new client. Whatever it happens to be the blended cpu. This is when we say blended, this is all platforms together. We take all the costs from all the different platforms that we're spending money on for the client, on behalf of the client and then we determine how many new units we're selling or how many, in this case all units. This is new and returning. They don't have as many returning customers. Most of the people that we're really targeting are really top of funnel or brand new, have never bought this product before. So you can see very clearly where things were going. They were heading upwards. Their cost per unit was increasing, their NCAC was increasing or increasing their cpa. Technically it's not cpa, it's really, it's NCAC or blended CPU was increasing. We made all these changes in and around the October, November area and the effects were pretty remarkable. You can see the cost per unit actually decreased in and around 120, 130, 140 in that range. These are their slowest months. Keep in mind this is a seasonal product. So what we're going to be able to do for them in springtime and summer, I can't even imagine. I'll have to come back with another incredible case study for you at that point in time. So the inverse correlation, this is reverse thinking here. We created more demand, but we got a lower acquisition cost. So here's once again, our blended cost per unit decreased over time. Okay, so it was upwards of 200, all right, but now it's in and around 130, 140. My team just told me they hit 120 for the first time. In a week, this past week as of this recording. So the top of funnel spend was what we ramped up. This is top of funnel spend. This is not bottom of funnel. This is not brand, this is not Amazon. This is not all the stuff which gets to the last click. You can ramp up your spend there, but you're never going to get new customers if all you're doing is just retargeting or just targeting the same people over and over again. You have to go after new. You have to have really great creative. You have to be able to get them to stop the thumb scroll on Instagram, take notice of your product and then look over Amazon. Can I get this over at Amazon? Or they Google search your brand name. That's how this works, folks. This is the new way in which to market spending more doesn't necessarily equate to scale. What we found here is that when we spent less on some of those bottom of funnel channels, we actually made more. And that's the case. Wait.

[Ralph Burns]

My marketing manager finally convinced me to run a wild experiment in this episode.

[Marketing Manager]

Because we want to prove what the

[Ralph Burns]

conversion engine can do for your brand. We are giving away three of our $10,000 deep dive audits for free. We're going to look at your creative, your media buying, your actual business metrics to find exactly where your growth is stalled.

[Co-host]

This is two weeks of our best

[Ralph Burns]

work, but we only have three spots. So go to tier11.com forward/audit right now.

[Marketing Manager]

Fill out the form and let's see

[Ralph Burns]

how we can scale your business.

[Co-host]

We did this through lots of incrementality tests, through what we would call controlled experiments. We, we cut their Amazon budget by 91%. You can see their budget decrease over time from October through February here, just down to about $7,000. So we cut it four consecutive times. We didn't do it all at once. We did it gradually. So that 91% reduction, it's now actually down to $4,700 a month. But their units on Amazon stayed basically the same. You can see here there's obviously there's a spike for Black Friday Cyber Monday, but their units sold on Amazon pretty much stayed the same. What we were trying to do is we were trying to gear more of their sales over to their main site on their Shopify store. That way they can control the customer, they can actually own the customer unit as opposed to sharecropping over on Amazon's land. At the same time, we cut our Google branded search, 95% budget cut in the clicks and the conversions over on Google, we can obviously we can measure last click attribution over on Google. We found that when we cut that brand budget by nearly 95%, the clicks and the conversions barely moved. This is a great case study for anyone who is focused a lot on bottom of funnel. You really need to create a lot of top of funnel awareness and get all these platforms to work together. So this is the halo effect. The channels grew without additional spend. So their organic search, their organic search for their name, not even clicking on an ad, but just organic searches we could see through the tier 11 data suite increased by 24% 0 ad spend. Keep in mind their email revenue increased by 13% 0 ad spend. Keep in mind their Amazon revenue actually increased slightly 33% while we spent so much less, 66% less ad spend, 91% over time. And Google and Bing were restructured 20% to non brand and 80% to non brand. And January and February exceeded forecast by 20 to 30%. So very excited here.

[Ralph Burns]

Hey, one of the reasons why you're probably listening to this show is because you're trying to figure out how to finally scale and grow your business. And if you've been a longtime listener here, you understand that a lot of

[Co-host]

the things that we talk about are

[Ralph Burns]

because we've tested them and done these exact strategies, including creative diversification, all the Andromeda changes, all the stuff we talk about with Google, with social, with email, website conversion, CRO, all of that stuff. If you're listening to this show, you're probably wanting some kind of deeper level of understanding of what does this all mean to you.

[Co-host]

Well, we want to prove that to

[Ralph Burns]

you by giving away three of our $10,000 deep dive audits. In that audit, we'll look at your creative, your media buying, your campaign structure, your website, your actual business metrics, including all the MPIs that we talk about on this show all the time to discover where the gaps are and why your growth is stalled. Now, this isn't one of those AI audits that's automated. This takes our team about two weeks to put together and it's so comprehensive, it blows away customers like this. So here's the catch. We only have three spots to give away here. So head on over to tier11.com audit to claim your spot right now. Fill out the form and let's see how we can scale and grow your business in the coming year.

[Co-host]

This is the native ad campaign here, the Taboola campaign performance. And you can actually see these are all new visits. Now, when you have the tier 11 data suite. You can differentiate between new and returning visitors, new and returning customers. In most cases for this product they're mostly new customers. So we really wanted to focus on top of funnel and Taboola was able to do this, create that top of funnel awareness. Maybe not get the attribution, but it did get the contribution. It contributed to the bottom line sale. It created the awareness top of funnel and that's what this shift was really is all about. And this is how you win in the digital age here you acquire new customers, new visits, you get your cost to estimated cost per new visit. Over here on the right hand column is only cents on the dollar. These platforms are absolutely amazing at creating top of funnel awareness. And then you can scoop up all those conversions bottom of funnel on Google and Amazon and reduce your Amazon spend at the same time. So this is the timeline here from five missed forecast to four consecutive hits and we are just continuous continuing to knock the ball out of the park here. Mid 2025 they came on with us. We started with Meta and TikTok which was about 20% of their spend In June through October they had missed forecasts for five consecutive quarters. Their CPU was climbing up to 1 93. We took over Google, Bing and Amazon in October and the big turning point was when we launched our native ads. We paused their connected TV ads and we cut their Amazon ad spend immediately and we shifted that budget over to top of funnel. November was the first month where they had actually hit their forecast with 4,200units sold at a $134 CPU. This is a 44 year over year unit growth. And then December and January CPU cost per unit hit an all time low of 128in January. Like I said, we just got word hit about 1002020 this past week. So we're pretty excited about that. And keep in mind these are historically their slowest months. So we can only just imagine what we're going to be able to do in the springtime and are pretty excited about that. So if four forecasts hit consecutively, our Amazon spend is incredibly low and we just relaunched their connected TV ads under Tier 11 as of this month. So if you want similar results for your brand, click the button in and around this video here or visit us over at tier tier11.com. That is today's case study. If you like these types of case

[Lauren Epicullo]

studies, definitely leave a comment in Wherever you listen to podcasts, we we really do enjoy the comments that you leave over on YouTube. Whether it's Spotify whether it's on Apple podcasts for reviews, ratings and reviews.

[Co-host]

This is the kind of stuff we're

[Lauren Epicullo]

doing all the time and put this one together relatively quickly because it was really, it was, we didn't expect these results to happen so quickly, quite honestly. It sort of surprised us in a lot of ways. So anyway, all the channels working together, really coming together to achieve the goal of the client and send this off to your team, send this off to your agency and hopefully they can learn from it just like we did here. And this is constantly evolving digital marketing and how all the channels, and I'm not just talking about the paid channels, the non paid channels, the search engine channels, the email channels, all the channels

[Co-host]

that you're maybe not paying for, your

[Lauren Epicullo]

content marketing side, how they all work

[Co-host]

together and when they do work really

[Lauren Epicullo]

well together, it's scary how great results can be and this is an example of that. So obviously wherever you listen to podcast, please leave us a rating and review.

[Co-host]

We'd love to hear what you think on behalf of my incredible co host,

[Lauren Epicullo]

Lauren Epicullo, who couldn't make this one,

[Co-host]

but will in the future.

[Lauren Epicullo]

Till next show, see ya.

[Co-host]

You've been listening to Perpetual Traffic.