The Future of Media Buying: John Moran on cAPI Imports + Edge Tagging (Part 2)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Perpetual Traffic

Episode: The Future of Media Buying: John Moran on cAPI Imports + Edge Tagging (Part 2)

Date: October 3, 2025
Host: Ralph Burns (Tier 11)
Guest: John Moran

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the future of media buying with a focus on how artificial intelligence (AI), modeled data, Meta’s Andromeda engine, cAPI imports, edge tagging, and content diversification are radically reshaping how performance marketers optimize paid media. John Moran shares actionable insight on attribution accuracy, creative strategy, and why marketers now need to build ads for AI first—rather than humans.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. From Human-First to AI-First Creative

• “We don't create ads for people anymore. We have to create ads for AI first.”
  (John Moran, 00:00; 25:25)
  The digital ads ecosystem now requires marketers to prioritize how AI systems (especially Meta’s Andromeda engine) perceive and process creative, which then guides delivery and results.

2. Understanding Modeled Data and Attribution Shortcomings

• Definition and Importance:
  Modeled data refers to conversions "filled in" by AI algorithms using probabilistic matching, not actual user action, leading to potentially inaccurate stats within Meta and Google Ads dashboards.
• Optimistic vs. Pessimistic Views:
  • Optimistic: Platforms try to fill in missed conversions to help advertisers.
  • Pessimistic: Platforms over-credit themselves to capture more ad spend.
• Real-World Example:
  • A large promotional company ran a Meta campaign, spending $120 and supposedly generating 4,000 sales—a result driven largely by modeled/over-attribution, not real performance.
  • Quote: “We launched a meta campaign. We spent $120. We had 4,000 sales... we have like a 62 million robots.”
    (John Moran, 03:57)
• Attribution Issues Across Channels:
  In platforms like Shopify, email is often incorrectly credited as the first click—demonstrating how “every channel claims every sale.”
• Quote: “Every campaign is like TikTok, I have 10 sales. Meta, I have 10 sales. And Google, I have 10 sales. And you only have 10 sales.”
  (John Moran, 11:12)
• Summary: True business growth is only reflected in actual backend metrics (like Shopify sales)—not just platform-attributed conversions.

3. How Much of Ad Platform Reporting is Modeled?

• Estimated Proportion:
  • About 40% of Meta/Google ad platform reported conversions are modeled data; up to 60% for video-heavy campaigns (07:38–08:50).
  • Quote: “Forty to sixty percent of what you see inside the ad platforms is modeled. It’s not actual data.”
    (Host + John Moran, 08:50)
• Implication: Media buyers must be cautious trusting platform data at face value.

4. Why ROAS Alone Is Misleading

• ROAS Critique:
  Relying solely on in-platform Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) is dangerous—it's essentially a "directional" metric, not truth.
  • “ROAS sucks... because it’s an in-app metric, it’s directional” (John Moran, 11:26)
• cAPI Import / Tier11 Data Suite:
  The team’s own method pulls first-click, new customer events via edge tagging and cAPI, getting closer to real, de-duplicated attribution.

5. The Challenger: Content Diversification (Creative Iteration)

• Major Theme at Meta’s 2025 Agency Conference:
  True scaling depends on creative diversification—testing different types, angles, and stories in coordinated sequences.
• Quote: “Every single speaker talked about diversity of creative…have lots of creator content, obviously video content. You name it.”
  (Host, 12:03)

How to Build Effective Creative:

• Andromeda Engine’s Role:

  • Meta’s new Andromeda update (rolled out by May 2025) uses a “creative retrieval” process to decide which ads to serve and how to sequence them.
  • Ad accounts should consolidate campaigns and test many variants within a single ad set—not spread them across multiple campaigns.

• The Ad Sequence:

  • Use founder stories, product highlights, UGC, testimonials, competitive comparisons, and more.
  • The AI will select and sequence these based on what it "thinks" will convert each user.

• Quote: “You’re basically building a logical sequence to a sale inside of an ad set that the Andromeda engine can start to show this ad first, second, third, fourth. Or maybe it needs to show the second ad first...”
  (John Moran, 17:05)

Creative Fatigue & Iteration:

• Meta auto-allocates spend to top-performing ads, lowering spend on underperformers.
• Rule of thumb:
  When an ad gains most of the spend, iterate new hooks on that concept rather than pausing it—capitalize on algorithmic “pockets of gold.”
  • Quote: “If you know, you might—a lot of people just say, oh it's spending too much money, let's pause it. No, you want to make five new versions of that.”
    (John Moran, 22:32)

6. Ad Spend, Attribution, and “Follow the Money”

• Attribution Problems:
  With last-click models, only the last touched ad gets credit, even if the sales process was multi-step and cumulative.
  Example—The final, trivial detail (e.g. “it also comes in gray”) could get attribution, ignoring prior impactful messages.
  • Quote: “Because honestly the last thing may not really have much of an impact at all on the decision making process of that person.”
    (John Moran, 24:16)
• Solution:
  Focus on creative concepts, hooks, and iterations—their ability to win more ad spend is a better indicator than CPA alone.

7. Building for the Algorithm, Not the User

• Shift in Mindset:
  Ads must be explicit and clear for the AI, not just appealing to people. “We have to convince Meta that this is what product we have. And that Meta says, okay. Understand, I will go find the user now.”
  (John Moran, 25:32)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote | |-----------|---------|-------| | 00:00, 25:25 | John Moran | “We don't create ads for people anymore. We have to create ads for AI first.” | | 03:57 | John Moran | “We spent $120. We had 4,000 sales... we have like a 62 million robots.” | | 08:50 | Host + John Moran | “Forty to sixty percent of what you see inside the ad platforms is modeled. It’s not actual data.” | | 11:12 | John Moran | “Every campaign is like TikTok, I have 10 sales. Meta, I have 10 sales. And Google, I have 10 sales. And you only have 10 sales.” | | 11:26 | John Moran | “ROAS sucks... because it’s an in-app metric, it’s directional.” | | 15:09 | Host | “We'll leave links in the show notes for this one. It's a great article. It's actually a great image.” | | 17:05 | John Moran | “You’re basically building a logical sequence to a sale inside of an ad set that the Andromeda engine can start to show this ad first, second, third, fourth. Or maybe it needs to show the second ad first...” | | 22:32 | John Moran | “If you know, you might—a lot of people just say, oh it's spending too much money, let's pause it. No, you want to make five new versions of that.” | | 24:16 | John Moran | “...the last thing may not really have much of an impact at all on the decision making process of that person.” |

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:00–08:50: Modeled Data, Attribution Challenges, How Platforms “Overcredit”
• 08:50–11:30: True Incrementality vs. Platform Reporting
• 11:30–14:50: ROAS Limitations and the Rise of cAPI/Edge-Tagging Attribution
• 14:50–18:40: Creative Diversification and Meta’s Andromeda Engine
• 18:40–25:47: Sequencing Creative, Iteration, and Interpreting CPA in Context
• 25:25–27:00: Building Ads for AI, not People
• 27:00–31:20: Next Steps, Where to Learn More, Wrap-up

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Action Items & Takeaways

• Trust—but verify—platform-reported conversions. Check backend sales data to measure real impact.
• Prioritize creative diversity. Build ad sets with founder stories, product features, UGC, and more to enable the AI to find angles that work.
• Focus on iteration. When spend accrues to a particular ad, test variations on that theme rather than pausing it.
• Leverage consolidated campaign structures. The Meta Andromeda engine works best with single-campaign setups for sequenced creative testing.
• Always build ads for the algorithm. Clearly communicate benefits and product details so AI can identify and target the right users.

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Where to Learn More

• John Moran LinkedIn: Best way to contact John.
• Tier 11 YouTube – The Ad Lab (Fridays, 2:30pm Eastern): Case studies and advanced campaign breakdowns.
• Tier 11 Services: For hands-on help, visit tier11.com/apply.

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For digital marketers, this playbook—adopted by agencies spending millions a month—offers ground truth on campaign measurement, creative best practices, and evolving platform AI. The future of scaling paid media is not just about better targeting or bigger budgets, but about harnessing AI-driven attribution, precision creative iteration, and true business-impact measurement.

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Transcript

[John Moran]

We don't create ads for people anymore. We have to create ads for AI first.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

At what point do you say, well, that creative isn't doing anything to acquire new customers. How do you guide the media? Buyers say, all right, well, that's when you have to shut that one off. That's when you have to do more of that one.

[John Moran]

It's actually fairly simplistic. And what the Andromeda engine does is.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

You'Re listening to perpetual traffic. All right, I get it.

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[Perpetual Traffic Host]

One of the other big questions that I always get is, and I've, we've been at this conference for two days now and this always comes up like you guys talk about model data all the time. Explain that sort of in layman's terms on the meta and probably on the Google side. Because people say, well, you know, I look in my meta, it looks like, looks like everything's accurate.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Yeah.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

And I said, well, part of that, a large part is models. Because the, the AI algorithm, the algorithm for meta, is so good. They're saying, all right, if these six people did this, then we're going to extrapolate that these other six people did the same thing. So is it that simple or what's your take on model data? How do you explain it to people?

[John Moran]

Yeah, and I've, I've learned a lot about the model data this last two months and basically just by changing what we're sending meta, I can see how it displays the results. So model data, and I'm not saying that it's, it's. This isn't as negligent, I guess I would say there's a positive side or a negative side, depending upon how you look at model data. It could either optimistic or pessimistic. The optimistic side says, we know that conversions have happened because we can see people going to the checkout page. We believe it came from us, so we will give ourselves credit. Or you could say, we see everything happening on the site and due to the fact that we probably missed it, we'll count it as us. So model data means pessimistic, optimistic.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Representative]

It depends on which way you look at it.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

Exactly.

[John Moran]

Exactly.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

For the average business owner, it's helpful.

[John Moran]

It's helpful exactly. For scaling really specific events, such as a, you know, a launch of a new product that you need new customers to buy. It could be really poor. So I'll give you an example. There's a very, very, very large promotional company, a lot of TV commercials, and they wanted to try meta. And I said, I'm going to predict what, what is going to happen. And I told them, I said, this is a, this is a few months ago. I said, you're going to start your campaigns on meta and you're going to see some unbelievable results. Now I asked them, how many sales do they have a day? They have about 12,000 sales a day. And I said, just, just wait to see that. And they said, yeah, we're. John, you were right. We launched a meta campaign. We spent $120. We had 4,000 sales. And I was like, were they all.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Representative]

Wow, that is amazing.

[John Moran]

He's like, we have like a 62 million robots. I'm like, I bet.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Representative]

Yeah, I'll bet you. Yeah.

[John Moran]

And so that's, that's what happened is now, is it? The pessimistic side says, well, they did it on purpose so that you see such good results that, that you want to give it more money now. The optimistic side says, well, they could have had ad blockers. I mean, even Shopify says that their attribution is only 55% accurate in US territories, 45% accurate in Asian territories. Because of those issues.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Yeah.

[John Moran]

So, yeah, if you go into the back end of your Shopify and you use the marketing attribution and you hit first click, sometimes a ton of those first clicks came from email.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

That's not possible.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Yeah.

[John Moran]

You know, people have to come to your site, sign up for the email, leave, and then come back through email. So I was first click email, right? So every channel, it doesn't make any sense. First thing about it, first click buy a list.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Representative]

That's right.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

Like you've never touched the site, but suddenly you're magically on an email list and that's how you buy. So even Shopify doesn't quite get this on the back end.

[John Moran]

And they're a big, publicly traded, publicly traded, great company. Exactly.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Yeah.

[John Moran]

But they, they, they, they just can't get it right. It's not possible. So you can use that to your advantage or disadvantage. And that's why I think like as Shopify, they have no advantage of having more accurate attribution. That's not their job.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Right.

[John Moran]

But if Meta just gets better at attributing them to themselves, that's good for Meta. Now if Google is better at attributing sales to themselves, it's, it's better for Google. Now what you have is two hungry platforms that are getting really, really good at attributing sales to themselves through the guise of, well, we probably missed it. And that's, that's where it is both good and bad. So that's where it's hard to scale is if you give it more money, I'll give you a good, good visual. Let's say you have a hundred sales every single day. So it starts down one goes all the way to 100 and you have $10 and ad spend and every $10 you spend can attribute one sale. So now as you add every $10, your sales go from $10 one sale, $10 one sale. Then you're like, okay, now $22 sales, then $44 sales and then $88 sales. You're like, wow, I'm giving this more money. And, and it's just showing more and more and more sales. Now snap back to your back end of your Shopify and you're like, well, I still only have 10 sales. And that's what, that's what it's doing is says I have more money. I can attribute more to myself because I am running longer and I'm seeing those sales on your website for longer periods of time. And people have been confusing that with scale. And that's called attribution, not contribution is scale. And so when you only allow it to have a first click new customer of a product that come from a ad on that channel. Now when you add in money and another customer comes in, that's when you see the back end of your Shopify go from 10 to 11. Like you'll actually See a growth, you'll.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

Actually see incremental growth because it has.

[John Moran]

To be first click, it has to come from there. It cannot be 10 first click emails and then show up in Google.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Right, Right.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

So it's the most stringent measurement really, but most accurate, most honest and the most honest.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Right, yeah.

[John Moran]

And if it can retrain the algorithm to develop a repeatable action, like those search terms are working. Those are giving me new customers. You know, this channel is working well. You know, I'm using reels in this audience that I'm testing in the Andromeda model inside of Meta and they are buying. It's working well. We already saw that the black box of targeting will spiral out of control in a good way when it finds a pocket of success. And sometimes it's a bad way. Like when you get spammed, all of a sudden you're like, yeah, we had 7,000 leads come in. They're all fake. The reason why that happened is because the number went from 0 to 1 and then the targeting got a little tighter on that audience and focused more and ad spend grew on that audience. Now the conversion skyrocketed because it says, holy crap, I found a pocket of gold. I had the main line, I found the gold. The gold line. Exact spam leads. Exactly. And all of a sudden spam goes. Now imagine if those were like a vein of gold. Exactly, exactly.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Yeah.

[John Moran]

Imagine if those were first click new customers.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

Yeah, that's, that's doing what it's doing.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Right.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

How much? Before we get into the content diversification, which I do want to hit on that. How much? As a percentage, if you look at Meta and or Google, like, what percentage do you think is modeled? Oh, 40%. It's 40%.

[John Moran]

As much as I can identify it, about 40%.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

Okay.

[John Moran]

Now if you have videos, it's a little bit more like 60% because you got your one day view and then your one day engage view. One day view is imagery, one day engage view is video.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

So if you have all image ads. Yeah, it's 40% of what you're seeing inside the platforms is modeled. So it's depending on how you're looking at it. It's either optimistic or pessimistic. They're trying to help you out. Let's take the optimistic view. These platforms are trying to help you.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Yeah.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

The pessimistic view is they're just trying to take your money.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Representative]

And both are true. Both are true.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

So it's 40% if it's image ads which require more of a Click. But then if you have video heavy, I mean we've got some campaigns that are practically all video oftentimes.

[John Moran]

I know. And those click contributed conversions come in a little bit less. But we just measure them different. We understand that we're going to get less clicks. So we be okay with a higher in platform CPA as long as the actual business goal is still being met. Yeah, you heard it Here first show.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

40 to 60% of what you see inside the ad platforms is modeled. It's not actual data.

[John Moran]

It's modeled. It's what we believe. And then unbelievable. And that's if they click accept on the consent mode. Yeah, like God, like. Now what's funny about this is here's the optimistic side. Everything that Meta and Google, all of the users that meta and Google bring to your site, they are going to use approximately 30 to 40 cents of every dollar in ad spend remarketing them to bring them back. So that's why you see those that, I mean that's frequency that that exists because you know as long as frequency is above one you have remarketing.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Right, right.

[John Moran]

Well, re engagement also.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Representative]

Well it's a signal back to the.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

Algorithm saying like this person is interested because they were on your site.

[John Moran]

Exactly.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

So I got to show more ads.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Yeah.

[John Moran]

Now you took a campaign and we said hey, I need you to not only go find new customers but you also have to remarket the people that you're bringing into the site and try to bring them back to get those new customers. Like that's the functionality of it. Now the way that it is executed, this is the optimistic side is there is no choice. For Meta and Google to do this any other way means that if they bring a person to your site, they are going to remarket them and try to bring them back to your site. But the area where they dive into in order to to tag that person to remarket and has all users from every other channel in there. So as soon as they bring one person to the site and they say perfect, you're there. Did you buy something? No. Okay, you left. I have to have my pixel tag you to remarket so that one click turns into technically now potentially a 10,000 user remarketing campaign because that's how many people are on your site. So the reason why that large promotional company had 4,000 sales that day is because meta again doesn't. It's not going to remarket only its own traffic. It has to remarket everybody on your site because it might have brought them there. We don't know.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Yeah.

[John Moran]

So by virtue of Meta and Google.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

They might have seen an ad, right? Maybe it's sometime during that day or maybe that week or whatever.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

But yep, yes.

[John Moran]

So that's why the platform's over attribute because due to the simple functionality of remarketing they inherit users from every other channel.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

It's crazy stuff.

[John Moran]

And then they model data to say it was probably Ben. So that's why all of a sudden all channels start showing all sales that are the only sale that you have. So every campaign is like TikTok, I have 10 sales. Meta, I have 10 sales. And Google, I have 10 sales. And you only have 10 sales.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

10 sales, yeah. Check Shopify, you're like how many sales did I have?

[John Moran]

10, right?

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Yeah.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

And I have you know, four platforms telling me I have 40.

[John Moran]

Exactly.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Yeah.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

And that's really like the dilemma, that's the thing that we were really trying to solve with all of the this because we have a video when I.

[John Moran]

Think one of the times we were.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Representative]

On here like the, the headline was ROAS sucks.

[John Moran]

And here's why.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

Because it's an in app metric, it's directional. However, this cappy import, whatever we're, we need a name for this. I know we really do need a name but anyway I'm a bad marketer.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Representative]

I got compare than this chat GPT. Figure this one out. Grok. What's the, what do we call this thing again? Anyway, we know it works.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

It's tier 11 data suite. Last but not least here the one of the parts of all of this which we really haven't talked about and this is this. Once again this was. I was texting you while I was at this meta conference.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Representative]

I'm like hey, they just mentioned content diversification.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

So I was at this meta conference in New York and it was an agency conference and every single speaker talked about diversity of creative and they said it in many different ways. Content. They did say content diversification which is your term, content diversity. Have lots of content, have lots of creator content, obviously video content. You name it. You've identified sort of 10 different types which you know, I always. The caveat is like you don't necessarily have to get all the types exactly right, but it's like directionally it's a tool, it's a toolbox. So yeah, can you explain the strategy?

[ActiveCampaign Representative]

This is what you actually see.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

So we're talking about sort of the mechanics behind it obviously with this capi import solution that we have. But the front facing ads, they can't all be the same they can't all be, you know, pictures of the red shoes.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Right, right.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

You know, so what is content diversification? Just explain its ripple there. How important? Hey, if you're an agency, one of.

[ActiveCampaign Representative]

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[John Moran]

Yeah, and this is actually more important because of the Andromeda update that happened for everyone back in May. It started in December of 2024, finalized in May of 2025. And what the Andromeda engine does is it uses what they call creative retrieval. So a creative retrieval is. And this is actually just Google Meta Andromeda. It's right there in the free.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

We'll leave links in the show notes for this one. It's a great article. It's actually a great image.

[John Moran]

Even shows like Nvidia's chips how they're using it.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

Oh yeah.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Representative]

So Cool.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

It's crazy.

[John Moran]

I know, right?

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

So cool.

[John Moran]

Yeah. So the, the, the ads retrieval engine, which is Andromeda, basically says I need to tell a story to these users. Because the functionality of Andromeda means that when the creative does the targeting, you have to consolidate your campaigns. Because campaign A with ad A and campaign B with also at A is now one campaign. Because they're going to target the same person. You're just going to double up on your, on your spend.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Right.

[John Moran]

So it has to be consolidated. Only one piece of creative can be in a campaign. It cannot also be in another campaign. So as important point there. Absolutely, absolutely.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

And we're talking about one campaign, one ad set and really a bunch of ads. Yeah, which we'll talk about.

[John Moran]

Yeah, exactly. And you can diversify your ad set if you wanted to diversify your, your, your, your hook and offers. And we'll talk about that here in a moment.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Right.

[John Moran]

But if you have, let's say 10 ads and you're like, okay, I want to create 10 ads, I want to get started. What we're going to do is what Meta wants is how do you capture the attention, build interest, get them to also want to take an action and be happy with that action. And you have to do it all inside of one ad set. So they have something called like the founder story. People like buying products from people they don't really necessarily want to buy from brand brands. They want to buy from, from users and from people. That's why UGC is so popular and, and social media. So social. So the founder story is like telling a person, hey, this is. I'm John Moran. The reason why I started this company is because I saw a need that, you know, that is, is that needed to be filled in the industry. And you're telling the reason why that story came about. Okay, now I understand why they're here. And this is my product. Okay, well what is that? I'm going to do a product highlight. That's another, that's another ad type, is a product highlight video. Very, very simple. Like product that is, is highlighting. And maybe my three different product highlight videos is about. Well, it's got an easy to carry handle, it's dead proof, and it keeps your drinks cold for 12 hours, whatever it may be. And then it says, okay, now what else do we show them? Well, we want to have some ugc, some testimonials. I love this product, this water bottle, and I've used it for 12 years and it's the best thing since sliced bread. Okay, perfect. So now I know why you're here, what the product is. I understand that people like it. You're basically building a logical sequence to a sale inside of an ad set that the Andromeda engine can start to show this ad first, second, third, fourth. Or maybe it needs to show the second ad first and the first ad second, then the, you know, third, fourth and fifth. So it's identifying what people are resonating with. And then they want you to constantly iterate it because you're not going to constantly do product development intra week. You're not going to come up with a new product they have to do a new ad for, but you have to. Then you have to do iterations. The reason why is with Andromeda, once they start to show an ad with a frequency of, let's say two or three to a user, it says, okay, I'm not just going to show that up to 10 times. Like I need something else to show them. Like, give me something so I can go re engage them. Well, perfect. So like we'll use the Remarkable tab again. Remarkable, yes. So it's green, that's cool. It's lightweight and thin. Awesome. What else?

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

What else?

[John Moran]

The battery lasts 18 hours.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

Oh, that's great.

[John Moran]

I, I actually can use this instead of my laptop. It's maybe that's another one. You can use this instead of your laptop. When you're taking notes, you don't have to have this big clunky thing like. So all you're doing is imagining you're sitting at a booth at a convention and I have a Remarkable tab comes up here and I'll show you what bad marketers do. I'm sitting at a booth and I have the Remarkable tab. And I work at Remarkable and someone comes up and says, what's that? I'm like 20% off. I said, what is that?

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Buy it.

[John Moran]

What is it? Credit card. So that's what it is. That's what we do.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

That's not how humans buy.

[John Moran]

No, no, but that's how we build ads.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

Right.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Representative]

So it's really cool ad.

[John Moran]

We'll make some like a starburst come out the back of it and say 20% off sale. It's like, well, it's right. So you have to tell them, well, what is it? It's remarkable. What's that? It's a drawing tablet. Okay. Pen and paper. Does that buy?

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Yeah.

[John Moran]

So you have to think about how you're actually doing like old school belly to belly sales and telling people about the product and why it's unique and why people like it, that kind of stuff, you have to do that remotely and all kind of inside of one campaign and one asset. And so that's the, that's creative diversification is as long as you're constantly iterating good points, developing new concepts and new hooks and new offers in order to identify what has a good, good reception in the market, and then you're going to steer more into that. And as long as you're continually optimizing those ads and doing iterations, it's constantly re engaging those people who are converting. And because you're using first click edge tag new customer imports, those can be repeated and grow in a very, very specific way.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

Yeah, so the, the on that. So we used sort of those three sort of examples of the multiple ones that we use. We sort of have a box that we look at. It's really, it's 10 and it's also got like, you know, in addition to founder stories like us versus them, there' product features and benefits. There's a number of different ones. But anyway, the point is, is when you're putting these ads into an ad set, the question came up yesterday on the same client call was, all right, we're doing this content diversification strategy that is highlighting different parts of your story, who you are, what the benefits are. It's resonating with certain audiences. At what point do you say will that creative isn't actually doing anything to acquire new customers for me, at what point and how do you guide the media buyers internally at tier 11, say, all right, well, that's when you have to shut that one off. That's when you have to do more of that one.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Yeah.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

So how is that all?

[John Moran]

And it's actually fairly simplistic. Meta will do a lot of that for you initially. What I mean by that is if you have, let's say 10 ads and you always have Pareto rule where 80% of your sales are coming from 20% of your ads, and even though you could, you may have good spend allocation, which means 10 ads you have, you know, if you look at the last 30 days, you're going to have spent 10 grand, that 9 grand on that 8 grand and that 7 grand on that, you always see the waterfall of the ads basically from top to bottom and usually see the results. And when you start to see ads that have a higher and higher CPA and then you'll see the ads, those same ads that have higher CPA also start to earn less ad spend. So meta feeds more ad spend to what is working. And that is typically by your hook rate and also your cpa. Like you got click the rate in there. But it doesn't seem to really take up much of an effect because it could also be a video that is shown to them. So, you know, you don't really need to have the clicks. But since it can count, one day engage view and one day view, you still have cpa. So a lot of times what you'll see is an ad will have like a trend line of spend that is kind of like in a heartbeat. And then all of a sudden it just kind of like starts to die off and it's like, okay, I was spending 100 a day and now I'm only spending about 12. And then even last week it was down to 7 and yesterday was a dollar. Like it will actually just start to kind of turn it off when it no longer needs it or when it says I'm not actually finding any audiences that are resonating with this or I have other ads that are resonating better with okay. And so when you start to see what ads have the highest amount of ad spend or what ad spend is increasing or growing, especially as you're scaling, if more money is being given to that ad, that's your first indication to say, okay, that is a winning ad. Or at least meta believe so, because my company's also doing better. How do I iterate that? How do I make a new version and maybe do a different hook or a slightly different concept of that ad? And that's, that's where meta is basically saying like, hey, here's your winners, here's your I'm spending the most amount of money on it. If you know, you might a lot of people just say, oh, it's spending too much money, let's pause it. No, no, you want to make five new versions of that if it has a high amount of ad spend, because that is what is finding really good pockets of users. And if you can create five additional points now, the people that just found out about what, like what your company is and or what your product is, you're going to now be able to tell them five other things about that to convince them through the logical sequence of a sale to buy your product or service.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

So the platform itself does dictate the winners and losers, which is was never the case before now it was like, I don't really care where I spend just as long as I'm spending your money. Yeah, so those ones that just sort of peter out are eventually Just going to be paused by the media buyer in that particular case.

[John Moran]

Yeah, Meta basically just got rid of evo.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

Yeah, they figured it out for themselves. So how about in the case where are there scenarios? And this was actually another question that I had where there is more spend. But the CPA in Apple is horrible. But you're seeing on the CRM things moving in the right direction. What do you do in those cases? Like what's that scenario?

[John Moran]

And that's what we have to look at is we already know that not common where people are just going to like see an ad, click the ad.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

And buy the product.

[John Moran]

The first time that happens, it does take some time. There's that time lag. There's a sales cycle, there's a sales process. Now if you have 10 ads that all had an actual impact on the user in order to purchase something, but the attribution of meta says will you get to have one point and it's last click. Remember Meta's attributions, last click attribution. So if I have 10 ads and but I can only give credit to one of those, but they all are equal, what do you do? Like where do you put that? Where do you put that? So it has to go to the last click. So what I've been using as is CPA is good, I understand it. But just because it wasn't the last thing doesn't mean that it wasn't, you know, the best. Because honestly the last thing may not really have much of an impact at all on the decision making process of that person. Is if I said like, hey, it's remarkable tab again.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Yeah.

[John Moran]

So this is a remarkable tab. Wow, that's cool. It does this, this, this, this, this is this. Okay. And then the last thing says it also comes in, could be a sponsor.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

I know, right? Like, oh my God.

[John Moran]

But if the last thing was just like it also comes in gray and you're like, I don't give a shit, I want the blue one. And you click the ad anyway and you buy it. It's not like, oh my God, this ad is amazing. Not really. It was everything combined together. So we have to look at ad spend and interactions more so than what was the last click that they did because we, we're going to skip over the other nine reasons on how they got there. So CPA in app is okay, it's directional. But I use actually very, very little when we're looking at how the ads are performing. And that's where I kind of go back to the statement. I think we were making originally, which is if you have good concepts and you're testing those concepts with good nomenclature. So concept one, hook one, offer one, concept one, hook two, offer one. Concept one, hook three, offer one. You can identify. Okay, this one seems to have more ad spend. This is a better hook. Okay. Does it, is it working well? Can you make two or three other variations? Does it also perform as good, maybe a little bit worse or even better than that was happening? Yes. Do we see the other hooks now earning less ad spend? Yes. Okay. That's the direction we headed. That's the one.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Yep.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

It's just that simple.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Yeah.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

Well, it's that simple if you have the right data really. And it's, it really does come back to you. You need a, like a top notch creative.

[John Moran]

Oh yeah. What's funny is this is the other point that is actually really interesting. We don't create ads for people anymore. We have to create ads for AI first.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Yeah.

[John Moran]

We have to convince meta that this is what product we have. And that meta says, okay. Understand, I will go find the user now.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Yeah.

[John Moran]

So if, again, if your ad is, hey guys, what's that thing on your table over there? And I say 20% off.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Yeah.

[John Moran]

Imagine telling that to a robot.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Yeah.

[John Moran]

You're going to be more confused than the person.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

Absolutely. Most AI tools are like a helpful.

[ActiveCampaign Representative]

Assistant that just waits for your, your command.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

You have no idea. You type it in, you just give it a piece of content and that's a start.

[ActiveCampaign Representative]

And it's all about the prompt.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

Right.

[ActiveCampaign Representative]

If you don't get the prompt right, then pretty much everything falls apart. Or you spend more time with prompts than you do actively doing the work. But at ActiveCampaign, we believe AI should be more than a passive tool. It should be a proactive partner. Imagine that. We call it autonomous marketing. It's a full AI agent that works in the background. And to help you imagine, activate and validate, you don't just ask it to write, you give it a goal and it helps build the entire campaign. It suggests high value segments you didn't even know you had. It predicts your deal's win probability before you even make the call. Our AI handles the busy work so you can focus on the big ideas. It's the difference between a tool and a true teammate. ActiveCampaign is the autonomous marketing platform. Find out for free [e-mail].

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

Oh my God.

[John Moran]

So true.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

The big thing is, is lots of different types of content, lots of different angles. Obviously don't Necessarily believe everything that you see inside of the platform itself, knowing full well that we're talking about anywhere between 40 to 60% of it is modeled, you know, whether you take a negative or a positive view on that. I mean, they're trying to do what's best for them, but also they're trying to keep you coming back, obviously, to spend money. So there's sort of a fine line between all these things. I guess the, the real question here is, is if people wanted to find out more and understand this and if they said this is all great. John Moran, like, where do they, where do they go? Are they going over to, like going over to the website that I think you might be directing them to over.

[John Moran]

At the Ad Lab? Yeah, yeah.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

I mean, if you want to learn more about this, obviously tune in every, every Friday, the Ad lab over on the Tier 11 YouTube channel. We'll leave that link in the show notes. And of course, if you say, screw this, I don't want to do any of this sort of stuff. I don't want to teach any of my media buyers or my staff how to do it. I just want somebody else to do it for me. You know, you get John's expertise.

[John Moran]

John's expertise.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

Like, you really invented this concept. You discovered it through your own, your own money and your own businesses, like 6, 7, $8 million worth of testing.

[John Moran]

And spending 600k a month in our one campaign now. And.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

Unbelievable. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah, it's nuts. And you're getting the CPAs that you guys know. We obviously, we use that as an example. There's a number of other examples that we use in screen shares on those, those Friday lives.

[ActiveCampaign Representative]

Of course, if you want our help.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

You can get it over at tier11.com forward slash, apply, and you get this type of expertise. So we talked about some of these individual businesses that. The results that we're seeing are pretty remarkable. The key is, is to set it up right, you know, remarkable. You should be, you know, filling out the perpetual traffic advertise with us form.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Representative]

Getting on as a sponsor here, or maybe not as like, why would I pay?

[John Moran]

Hopefully they'll keep begging and keep saying our name.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Representative]

Well, I said it like 17 times.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

Where can people connect with you specifically?

[John Moran]

Yeah, my LinkedIn is the best. Yeah, so my LinkedIn, I don't have like a website or anything, but LinkedIn is, is the best. But if you want to like, kind of also learn about this where we, we do a lot of testing in the, in the Ad Lab and then Fridays at that was it 3:00 clock Eastern.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

Right. 2:30.

[John Moran]

2:30, yeah. 2:30, yeah.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

We're on Pacific time right now. So yeah, no idea what time it is.

[John Moran]

And I just got back from the UK like three days ago. So I was like, I went six hours ahead to normal to three behind.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

I'm like, oh man, I'm going there from here tomorrow. So I'm like, I won't even know what day it is tomorrow.

[John Moran]

So weird.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Yeah.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

But yeah, Fridays, Friday, 2:30 Eastern, over at the Tier 11.

[John Moran]

Yeah, we, we, we teach him case study style. That's what I love is, you know, conversation is great. Like this seems like theory, but we do a lot of case study. Like once we did this, see here, we pressed that button, then we rose it, this is what happened. And like it's very hyper specific. It's probably over a lot of people's heads, but stuff's getting harder. So, you know, I mean you could, you could take the approach where it's like, well, as long as it's counting a conversion from somewhere, I'm happy. But it always will work until it doesn't. And then I always say if you're not understanding why it's doing well, you won't know how to fix it when it's not doing well. And so that's, that's what this does is it allows you to identify. Okay, that is actually doing well. And I know why, because I can see it. You know, it's good data in, good data out.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

Yeah, very sage words of advice. Well, of course, all the links and everything that we mentioned here are in the show notes over at Perpetual Traffic. Of course. Like I said, if you need our help, you need John's help at tier11.com forward/apply.

[John Moran]

Obviously, we'd love to talk to you.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

About how we can help you out doing all the things that we mentioned here inside your business to scale and grow businesses. Because that's what we love doing. Oh yeah, we love doing it.

[Tier 11 Team Member]

Yeah.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

It's an addiction. There's nothing like it.

[ActiveCampaign Representative]

So from sunny San Diego.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

Yeah, you're going to be on stage.

[John Moran]

You probably have to get some lunch.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

To get something to eat before you actually get on stage. Break a leg today.

[John Moran]

Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me on here.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Representative]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

Great. The first time, actually live on Perpetual Traffic. You're actually the most popular guests on the show.

[John Moran]

That's fun.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

You have the highest ranked shows.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Representative]

So there you go.

[John Moran]

So the more John Moran, the better.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

All right, well, wherever you listen to podcasts, obviously, leave us rating and or review. We'll read that out on the air, of course. And it allows us to get to a wider audience and teach people how to do this stuff the right way, through metrics that matter and growth that scales ultimately. So on behalf of John Moran, thank you once again for coming on Perpetual Traffic.

[ActiveCampaign Representative]

Until next show.

[Perpetual Traffic Host]

See ya. You've been listening to Perpetual Traffic.