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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. Hey, PT listeners, what if you could stop overpaying for your software? The software that you're using every single day to run your business or your department? What if you could never have to pay full price for software again? Or what if there was a place where you could get deals on software that would save you hundreds over what you buy for it on retail? Well, appsumo is the best place for entrepreneurs like you, for marketers like you to get deals on software. In fact, they have saved entrepreneurs and marketers over half a billion dollars on software costs since they first started back in 2010. We just did an expense analysis for 2024 and we are paying way too much for our software, which is the reason why we've now partnered with AppSumo and they are giving you, the Perpetual Traffic listener, an incredible discount. Because they don't give discounts, ladies and gentlemen, because their prices are already so low. But we got you the biggest discount available anywhere because we wanted it ourselves. You can get 13% off your first order with AppSumo with the code TRAFFIC13. That's code TRAFFIC13. To get 13% off your first order over at AppSumo, don't wait. This offer is not going to stick around because, like I said, their prices are already so low, it's absolutely insane. Get 13% off your first order with code TRAFFIC13 over@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. And welcome to our Best of 2024 episode. Today we're bringing you highlights from five incredible shows that actually surprised me a little bit as to which ones were the most popular. Didn't think that these were the ones. It shows you how much I'm looking at our data. But thankfully our production team keeps a close eye on these sorts of things and obviously we'll do more of these types of shows in 2025. And obviously we're here to give you the tools and the knowledge to help you scale and grow your business, but also to make you more productive as a human being, which is part of today's show. So these are just the best snippets that we've pulled out from our most popular five shows of 2024. Which speaks to you, listener. This is what you want to hear, this is what you want to learn about. And we'll do more of these types of shows, which are pretty wide in their variation. So first off, We've got episode 591 where we tackle the challenge of delegation using Is delegation your kryptonite? Conquer the four levels to free up your time. And it seems like a lot of people here listening to the show have a challenge with delegation, myself included. So in this episode we'll teach you the four levels of delegation, which we do go over quite in depth. Also, tips for overcoming common delegation hurdles, some of the challenges that I've had and I think Qasem has had and how effective delegation is done to free up your time and focus on the stuff that's Most important, then we've got episode 575, which I was not on, and I went back and listened to this episode. This is absolutely amazing. John Jantz was our guest here and he wrote the book Duct Tape Marketing. And then this show, he gets into the duct tape marketing method. It talks about fractional CMOs, talks about the importance of you actually having somebody on your team dedicated to marketing, which I know going back to the first most popular episode here, delegation seems to be a challenge for you, the perpetual traffic listener. So definitely listen to that one. We are actually doing this this year in 2025. We are eating our own dog food, as Ryan Deiss always likes to say. We also get into how to identify your ideal customer avatar and a lot of strategies to develop a marketing plan on a shoestring budget.
- [05:50]
Kasim Aslam
Next.
- [05:51]
Ralph Burns
This doesn't surprise me. Episode 623, the seven bedrock principles of influence for any marketer. With Dr. Robert Cialdini, we tried to get him on this show for about five years. So it does not surprise me that he and his awesome admin babette ended up becoming one of the best shows of 2024. So definitely listen to that one. That's episode 623. And we talk about the psychology, why people say yes. That is his whole book. The book Influence is one of the books that I read every single year. You should too. Pre Suasion is his other book, which he talks about quite a bit. And he talks about the seven principles of Pre Suasion, which include reciprocity, liking, authority, social proof, scarcity, commitment, and unity. Get all those. He actually invented the idea of social proof. So you got to listen to that episode. Onward onto episode 630. We talk about three essential marketing performance indicators. We beat this over your head this past year. Sorry, but we had to. And of course you can get the download for that episode over@perpetualtraffic.com MPI but you already knew that because you've already downloaded it. And we talk about the MPIs, the three essential marketing performance indicators that we're using right now. This one is with John Moran. And then the last episode is all about marketing performance indicators. So sort of tied for fourth and fifth here is these MPIs, not KPIs, MPIs, marketing performance indicators. And those are super important because they focus on the business metrics that matter in your business to get the scale and growth that you're looking for. And we hit on that in episode 613. What are marketing performance indicators and why they are important? And like I said it's absolutely essential that you download that. If you go to tier11.com, it's right there as a hover pop as soon as you hit that site. So opt into that and get that marketing performance indicators checklist. So without further ado, here is the best of 2024. I thank you so much for listening to this show, making us one of the top 25 marketing podcast in the world. The top 3% of all podcasts on the planet. It's because of you and it's the reason why we do this show every single week. So here's the top five podcasts for Perpetual Traffic of 2024. You're listening to Perpetual Traffic. I did a talk last week for an agency group and they were all, what's the key to scaling from like six figures to seven figures? Like a lot of that sort of talk. And I did my talk and three other people had already talked about it, like the importance of hiring. So I didn't feel like I was all that unique. I think our process is unique. It's changed over time. But without that process, you can't possibly delegate, you can't possibly get results through others. That's really what we're talking about here, is just getting results through others and then getting the hell out of the way. We just redid our website. So my son, who used to do our social media, I did a thing in one of the local universities this week. He's like, dad, I had no idea you guys redid your website. Quite honestly, I don't love it. I like it. It's too wordy. It's all of these things. But you know what? Here was my instruction. We need a new website. We need it in line with the way that we're thinking right now. I don't need it to be perfect. I just want it to be done by X date. And that doesn't mean we're going to be sloppy. But nobody showed me any color schemes. Nobody showed me anything. And I entrusted the one person that is responsible for that to get it done, get it out the door. I could have, if I was a real impediment to delegation, micromanaged every aspect of it, but I didn't. And it's out the door. It's producing leads, it's probably producing better leads and articulating our message better than it has. It doesn't need to be improved. Absolutely. It's the first iteration. But like, I wouldn't have been able to do that 10 years ago. Not a chance. Not a chance. I would have fussed over every little detail. It's like, let it go. I mean, I know Sheryl Sandberg made this statement, done is better than perfect. Like, everybody starts to use it now. And that's. But that's not an, that's not an excuse to be sloppy. That just means, like, you do need to ship if you feel like you have. I think it's. Reed Hastings actually said this. If you've shipped and you're like, you don't have some kind of reservation on something going wrong, that means that you have shipped too late. And that's the key to delegation, is that you're not going to get everything absolutely perfect. This is like that perfection mindset of an entrepreneur. Like, if you have that, you have to overcome that. Because with delegation and with scale and with influence and with building something that you want to build that you think is going to be great comes with an element of trusting others and not worrying about every single tiny little detail and putting yourself out there. And like on this thing that we did Tuesday, this past week, we had all these college kids at Suffolk University critique like what we're doing and they picked out all these things on the site. I'm like, oh my God. But it's like, I wasn't embarrassed. I'm like, I shipped. You know what I mean? I got it done, my team got it done. I didn't do it. I got the outcome. And I think I said this yesterday in our driven call. It's like I put my to do list is outcomes, it's not to dos. And then I delegate that to the right person that I feel is going to do it and then empower them, give them the resources in order to get it done. That's how we ship, that's how we produce. And I think that's taken years to refine it. And I've still got a long way to go. But I think that's the key to scale, it's the key to building a business, is entrusting other people. And it's a hard thing to do. And I've met a lot of people in our mastermind, because there are a lot of folks that are sort of on that cusp of like doing it. Like, I still want to do this and I want to touch that. And my guy, like, figure out your activity that is the most high impact activity that you're doing right now that you shouldn't be doing and get somebody to do it. And that's delegation.
- [12:21]
Lauren E. Petrulo
You said something on the driven call that I really appreciated. And it's so funny because here I am talking about delegation, pretending to be an expert, and yet I'm leading a mastermind where we had just decided to start doing an implementation day. So, you know, you've got the two days of the mastermind and you learn so much and it's overwhelming and we bring in the smartest people in the world and you just get like, just drowned in value. It's all actionable and then you go home, you don't do any of it. And so our solution was to add a third day where, you know, we do conference rooms and whiteboards and everybody gets together and we actually do the implementation. And here comes Ralph Burns raising his hand, saying, hey, that's stupid. What did you call it? You said we shouldn't do an implementation day. Did you say we should do delegation day?
- [13:06]
Ralph Burns
I said, if you're going to do an implementation, count me out. I think is what I said. And then I said, but if you're going to do a delegation day, count me in.
- [13:15]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yeah. And that's what it should be. That's the way an entrepreneur and a business owner. And I don't want to leave out executives, by the way, because I always think of them as entrepreneurs, right? Like they're entrepreneurial within an organization because they have to think and move and really drive implementation. It's not the name of the game. If you're doing the work, you're doing it wrong. The biggest red flag for me, especially for anybody that's in leadership in any of my organizations, is if they take work back. So I come to you, you work for me, and I say, hey, Ralph, I need you to do this job. And then you do it and you come and you're like, all right, it's done, here's where I got. And then I say, oh, you know, thanks, man, really appreciate you. And then I take it back. It's a red flag because that just means, like, you didn't do it exactly the way I wanted you to do it. I feel like I can do it better. I don't want to hurt your feelings. And now all you're ever going to do is produce half assed work. So you know what, dude? There's an archetype. There's archetypes of delegation. So that's archetype one too. Nice to coach. Archetype two is worse. And I see this very often too, where archetype two says, change red to blue, change square to circle, change blue to red again. And then they just keep tweaking keep tweaking, keep tweaking. And what Archetype two does is they keep. Kill really good employees because a really good. I used to have this young man who worked for me. His name was Andy Akers. And I'll give Andy a shout out on the show because he was brilliant. He's the best graphic designer I've ever known him in my entire life. He's amazing. True artist. Andy, however, was a little temperamental. And if we had a client make, I knew Andy had about three iterations in him. And the first thing he'd produced for a client was always epic. Like Sistine Chapel. Good, because Andy would just get so excited. He'd learn the client and he'd learn the ethos. He'd learn the mission, he'd learn the customer. He would do a deep dive and he'd do research. And you just sit there in his office sketching. If we were designing a website or a logo or product, it didn't matter. The first thing he'd produce was epic. The second thing he. And then the client would say, oh, thank you, but I don't like this, or I do like that. And then the second iteration would be okay. And by the third iteration, Andy was just phoning it in. He did not give a shit because he was an artist and he'd lost all connection to his art. Now that's maybe a problem with Andy. And I love him enough to have this conversation with him one on one. And we had those talks and I'm sure he's improved since then. Hopefully if he hears this, he doesn't feel like I've said anything out of sorts. Because he really was a very brilliant, brilliant young man. We do that to our resources. If you take a really smart person who's really capable and does a really good job the first time, and then you run around and you dick with their. And you start to kind of tweak like they're gonna. The next time you ask them to do something, they're not gonna put their heart and soul in it because they're like, you know what? Kasim's gonna just sit there and mess around with it anyway. So let me just bring him something that he can mess around with. Whereas if you just said, hey, Andy, run with it. Whatever you think is best is what we're going to ship. Now they actually double down because they're kind of afraid. You know, it's like, oh, well, gosh, if they were going to go public with this, I need to make this as good as it could possibly be. So commit to delegation, commit to allowing it to ship. And it's so funny. You said your website, dude, I've been on your website since you said that, just poking around. I think it's awesome. I think I'd be interested what other people think. Go to perpetualtraffic.com telegram check out the tier 11 site, tier11.com all spelled out and let us know. Because like Ralph is like, oh, I'm not super happy with it. But dude, I think it's, I mean that's the thing. I don't see what you see that's wrong with this. And that's the whole point, right? You want to do the 20% of the work that gets 80% of the results and then just leave the rest of it alone and be happy being imperfect. I used to look at some of those folks, especially when I was a very young man. I'd go to early stage masterminds, smaller but still same concept. And I'd see the people that were successful and I'd be like, how did, how are you more successful than I am? Because they weren't any more put together, they weren't any more polished. They sure as shit weren't any more organized, super diligent, super disciplined and very habit driven. But they were making way more money. And it took me way too long to realize they ship. And I don't. I'm trying to make everything perfect and they're just like, oh, get it out there, let's see what happens. That's not a paradigm for everybody. But if you really want to grow and scale, and if you want to do cool stuff too, by the way, because if you're, if you're trying to be innovative, you have to shift. If you wait till it's done, it's always too late. What are the biggest mistakes you see people making, John? If somebody brings in a fractional CMO or a director of marketing, I mean those are all basically the same things, right? Is there a semantic nuance here? Is the nomenclature important?
- [17:27]
John Moran
Yeah, I think semantics is a big part of it, frankly. I mean half the people we work with, they don't really need a fractional cmo. They need somebody who is directing their marketing. You know, that's at least can give them like we talk about, narrow their market focus, set up some metrics. You know, they don't need somebody coming into a weekly meeting saying I'm the CMO necessarily. They just need somebody giving them direction and holding them accountable. So that's a lot of what we do, between you and me, I mean, whatever you want to call it, we've leaned into the positioning just because it's a trending terminology that a lot of smaller businesses are starting to realize they need some of. But it is just semantics, quite frankly. You started asking me about mistakes, so we've hit on a lot of the mistakes. But the number one that I see is there's a heck of a lot of people that hang a shingle out as a fractional cmo. Maybe they've done CMO work, maybe they haven't. But, hey, you know, I can call myself, you know, whatever I want to call myself. And so they feel like the role is to just come in and hang out and see what you need and be almost like an employee. Our approach is much more scoped. If you're working with somebody who's a fractional cmo and they don't have a methodology, they don't have a framework, they don't have something that they can really get to very quickly, they're just going to hang out and like, kind of see what you need. That's the biggest mistake. So when you hire a cmo, a fractional cmo, a fractional marketing manager, whatever you want to call them, I would ask them what their framework is, what their approach is, what they're going to look at first so that you're not just wasting a bunch of time with sticky notes, you know, on a whiteboard.
- [19:01]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yeah, I like that. Well, sort of. What's your methodology? Right. Because, I mean, I look at CMOs almost like theologians. You could be the best in the whole wide world, but if you and I don't worship the same way or at the same altar, and I guess, to be more specific and maybe less incendiary, somebody who's really good at organic as a cmo, that's the tool on their tool belt that they're the best at. Organic's a slow burn, and organic requires a type of lift that an organization just might not be good at or have the resources for. And paid being the exact opposite. Paid's like quick and dirty. And so even though a CMO is good and a business is good, doesn't necessarily mean that match is going to be good. And so it's sort of about finding, like, who's the best match for you? Which I guess the question there is, how do you kiss that frog? How do you test or interview a fractional cmo? Or can you. Is there, like a trial project? Or where do you start?
- [19:54]
John Moran
It's Tough to do a trial project because just like the organic is a slow burn, I mean, to some degree, coming in and figuring out what needs to be done can take a little time. We actually have a methodology, we call it strategy first. We actually have a 30 to 45 day engagement that people can hire us to do. In fact, that's what they hire us to do. We won't pass go unless, you know, unless we start there. And at the end of that they will have kind of a plan for the next year, what we think are the priorities. They can either hire us to do those or we'll manage their team that they might have internally to do those. So we believe that that trial period goes both ways because we want to make sure that if we're working with somebody that we can move the needle on because if they won't participate, they won't do what we need them to do. We don't want to waste our time either. We've fire clients early on in engagements because it's just we know how to get value for somebody and if they won't let us, you know, it's too frustrating for my team.
- [20:50]
Lauren E. Petrulo
No, that makes sense. And does a cmo, if I'm hiring a fractional cmo, do they have to have a team? In your experience, is it a red flag if somebody comes in solo and is just going to be the quarterback? Or what is it should people should be shopping for if they're shopping around?
- [21:03]
John Moran
I think they should have a resource network at the very least because every engagement might be different. I need to bring in this expert for this, this expert for this. I do think you want them to have trusted resources that they can plug in when the need arises. But I don't think it's mandatory that they have a team necessarily. In fact, there are a lot of fractional CMOs that are solopreneurs, so to speak, that their model is. We'll come in, you've got like, you've hired a social person and you've hired somebody to write content. You know, we'll come in and actually manage your team and if need be plug holes or gather gaps where you have. They don't have to have employees necessarily. We've gone that route because a lot of the people we work with then they're like this plan's awesome, who's going to do it? And so then we move into implementation. So we can actually call ours fractional CMO plus and the plus being plus implementation.
- [21:57]
Ralph Burns
Dr. Cialdini, if you could just explain the seven laws of rare, the seven principles of persuasion. I think of them as laws, but really principles of persuasion, that or influence from the book itself. And then we can sort of base our conversation on those and go dig deeper.
- [22:16]
Dr. Robert Cialdini
Well, let me tell you how I got to those seven. I started out being a university researcher studying persuasion in my laboratory with college students as my subjects. And I realized that wasn't really tapping into the evidence of what were the most powerful drivers of change of opinion, of behavior, of belief and so on. In my laboratory, it was outside in the world where people's lives, financial success depends on it. The people who use the influence process to move people in their direction. So I started infiltrating on incognito. I was a spy of sorts. Various influence training programs, marketers, salespeople, advertisers, fundraisers, recruiters, and so on to find what were they saying, move people in their direction across this whole range. And the interesting thing was not, well, what's the difference between advertising and marketing? Because they would always talk about that. And between marketing and sales and between public relations and recruitment. It was what's the same, what works in all of those places. And there were only seven things that all of them were using to make a profit from the influence process. So here they are. The first is reciprocation, the idea that people feel obligated to give back to those who have given to them. We say yes to those we owe. So the implication is we have to give first, Give benefits, give advantages, give information before the sale, not after, before the sale. Not as a thank you, but as a way to make people feel grateful to what we have given to them. There was a study done in McDonald's for one week, all the families that came in, the kids got a balloon. Half of them got a balloon as they left. As a nice thank you for patronizing McDonald's. You know, that's what we always do. The other half got a balloon as they entered. Their parents bought 25% more food because they owed McDonald's for their kid. If you do something for my kid, you do something for me. So the point is, go first, go first. Okay, next principle is one nobody will be surprised at it's liking. People prefer to say yes to those they like. Those people who they approve of and who approve of them. There's a study of 6700 online commercial websites. They looked at conversions. What things could you put in and take out in a B tests that produce the most transition from visitor to customer? And the liking principle showed up There. Well, how do you get liking online? Those people don't know you, you've never met them. There's no history with them. How do you. If you put a welcoming statement on the landing page of your site, you get significantly more conversions before they ever see one offer of a product or a service, before they know anything about you, you welcome them the way you would welcome somebody to your home that you approve of them. Everybody can do that. We do that on our site now and we see the effect. Okay, so that's the liking principle. The next principle is authority. People, when they're uncertain of what to do in a situation, don't look inside themselves for evidence. They look outside. And one place they look is authorities, true experts on a particular topic. So if you want to increase the people's perceptions of your own authority and credibility in a situation, when you give them a budget or an outline for the cost that it will require for you to do a project for them, never make it a round number. So let's say it's 25,104. You usually wipe out the 104. It's a mistake. If you leave the 104, you get more people to buy because they see you as being honest and knowledgeable about the costs. So that's one thing that you can do also. The other is bring in the authority voices of experts who have given testimonials to you or have voiced support for the kind of thing that you're doing and put them first so that their authority aura imbues everything that you say before you say it. Why would you bury that information where the first half of your message doesn't have the authority support that is warranted that it deserves? Put it first and make it multiple authorities. Research shows that multiple authorities out distance the effect of a single authority testimonial. Some advertising marketing firms say, just put your best testimonial there. No, because they think that the subsequent ones will dilute it. No, subsequent ones reinforce it. And the data show you get more conversions with multiple authorities at the top than a single one. Next principle is social proof. The idea that again, when people are uncertain and those are the only people we're interested in, right. The people who are certain are either going to buy us or they're never going to buy us. The people who are uncertain, well, they're look. They don't look out inside themselves for answers. They look outside one place's authority. The other is to their peers. What if the people around them like them doing right? What are they doing. And if you can show evidence of especially a trend in your direction of more purchases, more market share there ever, you can honestly move people in your direction just by citing what's true. Especially and here's how it has to do with something that maybe you have multiple products. There are other products that you have, but one of them is your most popular. Just mention that that is the most popular of our other or our upgrades, let's say. And that's enough to cause people to want to buy it, whereas before they weren't paying attention to it. Label it, honestly, it's ethical, you're most popular and it wins the day. Another principle is one that people will be familiar with scarcity. People want more of those things they can have less of. So if you have something that's unique, uncommon, rare, bring that to consciousness early in your presentation. So people, when they know that they can only get this from you, they want it more. Sometimes there isn't any one thing, but I bet every one of your listeners has a combination of things, a suite of features that none of their rivals can provide. That's what you elevate to consciousness, the combination that only you can provide them. Another principle is commitment and consistency. People want to be consistent with what they have already said or done in a situation. So here's a great story from the city of Chicago. I don't know how many of your listeners are from Chicago.
- [30:02]
Scott
I'm from the city of Chicago. I have a huge back tattoo of the flag, actually.
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Dr. Robert Cialdini
Do you remember Gordon's restaurant?
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Ralph Burns
Yes.
- [30:11]
Dr. Robert Cialdini
Yeah, great, great. Classic Chicago restaurant. He was having a problem that many restaurateurs have no shows. People would call, book a table, and then they wouldn't appear and they didn't call to cancel. So he listened to what his receptionist said and she said would say to people after they made a reservation, thank you for calling Gordon's. Please call if you have to change or cancel your reservation. Heard that a million times. He asked her to change two words. Not please call, but please will you please call? And then he asked her to pause. What would you say inside the pause? Most people said, yes, of course, sure. And they made a public commitment to coming. And no shows at unannounced. That is unannounced, no shows dropped by 64% that day. Wow. And never went back up. So asking people, what can you give me? What are the things you're looking for? And so on. And then you show how what you have fits with what they've put on the table. We did a consultation Once with a company, and they were having a very difficult time getting people to move away from their current vendor. To my client, I said, what do you say to them? And he said, well, I say, why did you choose? Can you tell us why you chose this person instead of mine? That's getting them to make a public commitment to your opponent, getting them to announce publicly and to themselves reinforce to themselves why they think your rival is better. So I said, try this. Say if there was one thing you could improve in your experience with the company you're working with, what would it be? And now they're making a public commitment to a deficit, a weakness in their opponent's case. And now the rival, my client gets to say, we can help with that. And it's the only thing that ever changed. Okay, one other thing. You get people to say yes to something that it by asking the right question that makes a commitment to them. I have a friend, a colleague, who's head of a Boy Scout troop. He has two boys who are boys and they sell popcorn outside of supermarkets as people leave. And he said, we're having a terrible time. Only about 15% of people will buy our popcorn. I can see why they would. If they wanted popcorn, they'd have got it in the supermarket and they just spent all their budget. Again, I said, what do you say when they come out? We say, would you like to buy some popcorn? It would help support the Boy Scouts. I said, try this. Oh, Lauren is exactly right. If you say first, do you like the Boy Scouts? Everybody says, yes. Oh, well, would you like to buy some popcorn to support them? Now you go from 15% to 55%. And the best thing is people who have just committed themselves to wanting to support the Boy Scout but don't want popcorn say, you know, I don't want your popcorn, but here's five bucks for the Boy Scouts. You're not even drawing down your stores of popcorn. So that's the commitment and consistency principle. And then the new one is the principle of unity. People want to say yes to those people they share an identity with, share a category that they feel is a we ness where you would use the term we for these people. And there was a study done at a university. For example, researchers took a young woman dressed the way a college student would about college student aid to stand in front of a table asking for donations to the United Way. And she was getting some donations because she was similar to them. That influences liking. But if she added to her her pitch to say instead of just, would you Give a contribution to the United Ways. If she said, I'm a student here too, like you, she got a 450% increase in donations. People want to say yes to those who are of them, who are one of them. And if we can arrange for people to see those commonalities that between us and them, they will be much more compliant with our requests. So those are the principles of influence.
- [34:46]
Kasim Aslam
Okay, so these are your different ad sets. Now let's say are any of them over 50% and are they meant to be top of the funnel? So it always starts with attribution or with getting insights. What's your intent or goal that you want from the metric? In this case we're saying, are these ad sets? If they were for cold traffic, yes, no. If they're for cold traffic, are we getting at least 50% new visitors, yes or no? If the answer is no, we got to fix the ad set targeting. There's two things that can go wrong when you're under 50%. One is your exclusions aren't good enough. The second, and much more common is you're using one of the AI tool AI campaigns or you've checkboxed Advantage plus Audience. Use an Advantage plus audience because when you do that, it basically ignores what you set up and expands on its own AI logic. And why that's a problem is because when you're trying to go for top of the funnel, you want brand new traffic. However, the AI has decided, well, if I need to hit your conversion goal, I need to target these people that the highest probability to convert. And they're never new traffic. It's always repeat. So the AI correctly tries to do what you told it, which is I want max conversions. And it says that's going to happen from all these people that have been the website five times already. This is an example. Or these persons already bought. They're definitely going to. They obviously like you. That's the highest signal I have. I got to target those people. And then it does that and then you bang in your head wondering why your top of the funnel isn't scaling and it's because it's hitting repeat.
- [36:20]
Scott
So Scott's saying this is the PMAX of Facebook Advantage plus audience.
- [36:24]
Dr. Robert Cialdini
Exactly.
- [36:24]
Kasim Aslam
Pmax is the same way. Pmax is brilliant at that.
- [36:27]
Ralph Burns
Pmax. I mean, I think all platforms default to the warmest traffic. Unless you purposely or are intentional about excluding your warm traffic audiences. And in this particular case, and even when you do exclude those warm audiences, you're still going to get a fair amount of Warm traffic, which is what we found, even with exclusions. But it should be greater than 50% in this particular case. Case he's actually got. This is not one of our clients, by the way, but it has actually the tier 11, like, nomenclature on the campaigns, which is 1 to 5 levels.
- [37:05]
Kasim Aslam
Well, I. I know you're nomenclature, so L1 would be cool, but someone's piling in 1 to 5, which defeats the whole purpose.
- [37:11]
Ralph Burns
Right.
- [37:11]
Kasim Aslam
So they're not.
- [37:13]
Ralph Burns
This is not managed by tier 11.
- [37:14]
Kasim Aslam
No, but it's good that it points it out for people that are following your methodology. You should have an L1, B and L1, not pile them all in like, and then say, I'm going to let the AI figure it out. The AI is smart for retargeting campaigns. It kills it top of the funnel. You can't have it expand. It ignores your exclusions. So that's the thing we have to suss out first.
- [37:33]
Ralph Burns
Right.
- [37:34]
Kasim Aslam
Any other questions? I mean, right away, is my cold. Am I getting enough cold? Because if you're not, you got to fix that first. Will you do anything else? Because you're retargeting might be great. Your email sequence might be killing it. If the top turns into leads and you're just not getting enough fresh eyeballs.
- [37:48]
Dr. Robert Cialdini
That's the number one.
- [37:49]
Kasim Aslam
It's like an epidemic of retargeting.
- [37:51]
Ralph Burns
Right.
- [37:52]
Kasim Aslam
There's a little slogan. Ralph already trademarked it.
- [37:57]
Ralph Burns
As soon as it was out of your mouth. All right, so if we're just looking at this here, obviously this is not set up. We probably should have used a better example of this because I can just tell we're mixing all our traffic. L1 to L5, which is crazy. We now call it L1 to L3. We just simplify things. But basically, L3, 4 and 5 is people that are very at the very, very bottom of the funnel. L5 is purchasers. 4 is add to cart. 3 is they viewed a product page. 2 is that they just hit a page on your site. And L1 is supposedly cold traffic. So in this case, you've got everything bundled in together. So it makes sense that new visits are only 36%. So if you bring over here, though, one of our other metrics that we talk about in the MPI's download is ECPNV. So almost as important as percentage of new visits is this right here?
- [38:49]
Kasim Aslam
Correct? Because when you're trying to do your forecasting, because you have some sort of goal, you're a marketer, your marketing team, you get assigned. Well, we're paying you guys, here's the budget. CFO's looking at it, they want to see growth. And then, well, when you say, okay, I'm going to get my new visits up, you've got to keep those new visits. And the cost structure is that the math has to make sense. And the cost per new visit is looking at how much did you spend divided by the new visits and that determines the cost of the new visit. So if you spent 10 bucks and you got five new visitors, your ECP NV is two bucks per new visit. That's what it costs you. And then you use that math as part of your funnel. Stepping through. Okay, how many new visitors convert to my next stage which might be. Let's just go right to sale for simplicity.
- [39:36]
Ralph Burns
Sure.
- [39:36]
Kasim Aslam
Okay, I need every hundred new visitors I need to get a sale and I'm paying $2 a new visit. Well, that means my NCAC is going to be 200 bucks. Does my profit margin and my product pricing support a $200 NCAC in this case? Let's use the real example. A buck 88 for this particular campaign, ninety dollar NCAC. So that means they're converting it 1 out of 45, 1 out of 46. Well, if you back into your NCAC from your profit margin you need minus your cogs, minus your profit processing fees if you want to take let's say 10 off the table. If 90 bucks is what you can do, then you're golden. You spend more here. Now you still want to optimize your new visits for more, but if your math already lines up that ECP and V to NCAC makes sense, then you can focus on rather than having to wait, let's say your sales cycle seven to 20 days and you're like man, the NCAC I think is going to go down. The first initial NPI that you focus on is I want to drive my ECP ENV down or I want to invest more at top of the funnel where ECP ENV is already low because I'm buying more fresh eyeballs as cheap as possible, which is only going to have benefits downstream for every other campaign.
- [40:49]
Ralph Burns
Right. Makes sense.
- [40:51]
Scott
Can we pause and just like look at some of this screen right now? Because you're talking about people that are optimizing only on your in app metrics if they're looking at the click through rate or likely like the cost per outbound click. That's within the meta ads ecosystem. And not looking at the NCAC here. If you see there's a difference of like a 3x difference almost well like a 2.75. I'm not going to math that, but that's so significant. Whereas in this, if you're looking at the cost, the cost per new website visitor, we have a comparable cost between two of the assets that are being shown here versus a significantly different average order value, a significantly different customer, like an NCAC. Like if you're avoiding these bigger KPIs, these NPIs, these marketing performance indicators, you're neglecting severe opportunity here because this is off like, like a 50 versus $122 end cap. Like that's your margin and that takes away from the cash immediately received. It's massive.
- [42:02]
Lauren
So how your agency should measure, Right, this is over the years of hard fought wisdom here that we've acquired. This is what we have found to be the most successful method for measuring success for speaking to partners and clients. This is what folks at the cmo, the VP level want to be hearing from an agency. So if you are that VP level, you should expect to hear type of terminology and measurement. Not just terminology, but also what types of numbers are they reporting back to you? This is what we recommend any agency be providing and any anybody in leadership or strategy level be expecting to hear from their agency.
- [42:37]
Ralph Burns
So and I would just add also internal teams because we've got a lot of VPs of marketing that just have an internal team, no agency and is true for them as well. I mean you might have some part of it where you outsource to an agency in one way shape or form. But I mean this holds true for any marketing team. Marketing teams tend to think about marketing metrics and we're here to tell you that could really lead you down the wrong path. So whether it's an agency, internal team, this is totally relevant for you. The reason why all these metrics are so important.
- [43:08]
Lauren
Yeah, so that's why exactly why we call them marketing performance indicators. So the way we set this up, any organization has been in business for any stretch of time, the finance folks will usually have a pretty strong handle on things like gross profit, profit margin. Of course there are a million others, those are kind of the top line ones that are pretty easily accessible by anybody who's in finance that could be a founder, could be a cfo, folks that are in the numbers every day. On the other side, kind of over on if you're watching on YouTube, right over on the other side of the slideshow here, there's the marketing numbers, right. This is things we're all familiar with this is traffic and referral sources, new versus return website visits. There's the in app metrics, things like cost per click, cost per acquisition. Of course there's roas in there, but these two sit fairly well apart from each other in what I'll say is too many marketing organizations are disconnected from the finance numbers. So we see it as our job to connect and sort of bridge that gap with these marketing performance indicators. So for us that's things like your customer acquisition costs, right? The cac, there's MER immediate efficiency ratio, there's aov, right? The average order value. There's those same metrics but one level down. Looking only at new customer acquisition, new customer average order value. There's customer lifetime value, effective cost per new visit. You could even have things like cac payback period could go in here and it starts to turn into what looks like almost a periodic table of elements, if you will.
- [44:26]
Ralph Burns
Right?
- [44:26]
Lauren
The way these are laid out, having these metrics kind of grouped this way. But the point is that marketing performance indicators are the ones who sit in the middle connecting marketing to finance so that the business health gets, you know, a much broader, much more kind of specific view so that marketing can speak to finance. And we're all kind of on the same page there, right?
- [44:46]
Ralph Burns
I think in every client that I've ever Talked to, these two things and if you're not watching this on YouTube over at perpetualtraffic.com YouTube just sort of explain what the screen looks like here on the way left hand side we have the metrics that probably the cfo, the CEO, the founder really care about, which is gross profit, profit margin, obviously gross revenue, like you said, there's a lot of them. Gross profit and profit margin, the two ones that we focus in on because we found that most of our customers care about that more so than anything. Profitable growth, top line revenue could be in there as well. But then on the other side, on the right hand side is what the marketing team is focused on is like cost per click. It's cpa, it's cpl, it's roas in app, it's maybe vanity metrics like new web visits, return web visits, likes, shares, you name it, like impressions, frequency, all that stuff. And Lauren is shaking her blonde hair on this 1. Justification KPIs Justification KPIs, they are absolutely bull crap. KPIs not in the case of ROAS and CPL and CPA, I mean there is some value there. But all of this can be manipulated and especially when it comes to I remember we used to report on like likes, shares, clicks and impressions. It's like those days are gone. Like if your marketing team or your agency is reporting on that, it has no bearing on whether or not your business is actually gaining customers or gaining traction. That could be all bot traffic for all you know. So. So on the two sides of sort of these two worlds, in the middle though are these marketing performance metrics. And that bridges the gap between those two things, brings those worlds together. And that's what we found through a lot of trial and error are the things that really matter to current clients, prospects, businesses that are serious about taking their business to the next level. So anything to add, Lauren, aside from your just utter disdain for all of those vanity metrics, I mean they have.
- [46:50]
Scott
A place to provide performance indicators specifically in app and the effectiveness of the ad and hook. But at the end of the day, you're trying to get growth, not just traffic. If you're driving unqualified traffic to your offer, you're just setting money on fire and not knowing your new customer acquisition. If you're not acquiring new customers, you're eventually going to pummel your existing database to the ground. And I've seen it. I've seen clients burn their list to the ground. And most recently, the worst example was during a previous election year where it was just they knew every time they sent an email, every time they sent a text, they made money and they never cared about any of these numbers besides just the cap back. And so they were like, oh, we're getting a new cac. And so anyways, that business declared bankruptcy. They neglected the most important numbers and paid attention to the quick wins, fast indicators of a burning down ship.
- [47:57]
Ralph Burns
All right, thank you so much for listening to this week's show. Make sure that you do subscribe and leave a rating wherever you're listening. And I'm starting to listen to these podcasts over on Spotify because I have Spotify, which my kids convinced me of getting three years ago and it's absolutely amazing for music. If you don't get it, definitely consider they should be a sponsor of this show. But anyway, the podcast section is super easy to navigate and you can also put in comments which we do get notified of. So definitely do that and leave a rating and subscribe obviously wherever you listen to podcasts, obviously we're everywhere. I'd heart radio, you name it, it Apple Podcasts as well as obviously over on Spotify. So make sure that you do subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's perpetualtraffic.com YouTube I've already reminded you of the marketing performance indicators. I don't think I need to do that again. And of course, all the links, exactly where the snippet was for this show is actually bookmarked thanks to our awesome producer kevin over@perpetualtraffic.com so on behalf of my awesome co host, Lauren E. Petrulo, who ain't here today, it's just me until next show. See you. You've been listening to Perpetual Traffic.