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If you're spending six figures a month on ads and you still can't tell exactly which dollar produced which sale, well, this episode is for you. You're listening to Perpetual Traffic. Hey, before we get into today's show, as you might have seen in your downloads on your podcast app, wherever you listen to us, that we have taken a little bit of a break, a little hiatus, a three to four week hiatus here for Perpetual Traffic. The first break we've ever done since starting this show 10 years ago. And truth be told, I actually had a medical procedure that was done. It was also a bit of a time for us to transition away from our previous co host, Lauren Petrullo, and really sort of take stock of what we've been doing here at Perpetual Traffic and listen to the listener understand exactly where all this digital marketing stuff is going. And after nearly 800 episodes and anywhere between 15 to 20 million downloads, we've actually kind of lost track because every time you change provider, that history gets erased. The last time we were checking, it was actually about 15 million downloads. They've been doing this for 10 years, and that's an awful long time to be doing the same kind of content. And although we never have a scarcity of things to talk about, because the beauty of this space is that everything's always changing. And as a result of that, it's a continuous flow of new and interesting things to discuss. So after doing two shows a week for probably about four years, it was time we took a break and made some changes. And as you've seen so far, Lauren is no longer the co host here at Perpetual Traffic. We're going to change the format. She was the, I think, fourth co host, if I'm not mistaken, if you count sort of Keith Krantz and Molly Pittman as sort of co hosts. It was the three of us started this about 10 years ago thanks to Ryan Dice, and started it with a partnership with Digital Marketer, then went to Amanda Powell, who was a great co host for years. She went off to do her own thing. Next up was Qasem Aslam. Still buddies with him and did a great job there. He had a Google agency, I had a Facebook agency at that point in time. And then we went along to Lauren and I think we've had a really good run with her, but it was time for us to make some changes and transition the show. As the show matures, as I mature, as the content matures, we realize that we're doing a little bit of overlap with some of the other type of content that we do at tier 11. And we realized that we really did need a change of format for the show. So as you'll be seeing in the coming weeks, the visual format of the show is going to be changing a bit. The content is still going to be top quality. The things that are actually happening in the here and now, more along the lines of businesses at a higher level from the VP of marketing, the CMO level. This is really marketing for executives. It's really what this show is more about because that's what I've become through the years. Less of a tactician, less of somebody who's actually doing the day to day advertising, but seeing sort of the big picture with all the different changes that are going on right now. And there are a lot of changes. It's not just algorithm changes on the platforms like we talk about every single week here on the show, but also AI. And AI is something that's going to be a huge topic of conversation here in the coming months and weeks. So as a result of that, we're changing the format. We're going to be doing a little bit more of myself, solo, going through individual case studies, individual calls that I have with people like you, VPs of marketing, CEOs, CMOs, what's on their mind, how we can potentially solve the problems that they have and they come to us for at tier 11, but then not necessarily to sell you the listener, but to educate you and sort this stuff out on your own. And if you so happen to want our help, then we're always going to be here for you. So alongside those shows are going to be shows with folks within the tier 11 community, specifically our growth strategists. What we've realized is that we don't really sell services. What we sell is what we refer to as a growth diagnostic. It's a solution to a problem. And I've always said this, many times, marketing is just a means to grow a business. And that's what this show is about. Yes, it's about traffic, yes, it's about the perpetual nature of marketing, but really that's what this show is about. It's about business growth and how you can do that with all the platforms changing constantly, as well as the entire environment, especially now with artificial intelligence, how are you going to plan for the future? How are you going to achieve your goals? And as a business owner, as a director of marketing, as a VP of marketing, as somebody who's doing this stuff day in and day out, and that's what this show is all about. And like I said, we'll have some guests. We'll be doing weekly and monthly guests depending on what the relevance is and how relevant we feel it is in the digital marketing landscape. But overall the show might be a little bit higher level than we have gone in the past where we're staying in the weeds and getting very detail oriented and digging into the day to day. The Nitty Gritty is the other show that we do every single week. Myself and John Moran, our Chief Strategist at Tier 11, those are our Friday ad labs and we do those every Friday on all the tier 11 socials at 2:30 Eastern unless he and I are both in surgery for two weeks, which happened a few weeks ago. So anyway, so tactical stuff is on Fridays. Higher level digital marketing, higher level strategy with some tactics. Not going to kid you. I'm still a tactical guy and I can't start talking about something that we do within tier 11 or how we're doing something without getting a little bit into the tactics. But we're going to keep it more high level for you and I believe that that is where the direction for digital marketing right now and that's where you, you really want most of the help because that's what we hear when we talk to people like yourself when they book calls with our sales team and those are the problems that we're going to try and solve here on the show. So without further ado, let's get into the refreshed Perpetual Traffic starting with this week's show. Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic podcast. This is your host, Ralph burns, founder and CEO of Tier11. Today we're going to be talking through that problem as well as the solutions that we proposed for this business. Give you a little bit of a background as to what this business is. It's a nine year old premium home wellness brand. The name shall remain nameless at this point in time. About $13 million in revenue actually. Headquartered in Canada, they have markets in US and Canada. They've got about a 12 to 14 person team. They do do a lot of their own marketing. They don't have a performance team. Internally co founder personally handles all the creative direction and the filming. So there is a lot being done by the founders. Customer is a high average order value, high consideration B to C purchase. The average order value is anywhere between 10 and $20,000. So these are very premium pieces of equipment used outdoors. Like I said, it's the home wellness industry. Can't say specifically exactly what it is you might be able to sort of piece this together here. Obviously a very high consideration purchase. They do have a B2B channel selling to hospitality as well as two spa accounts as well. But we're really going to be focusing in on today's show is about their business to consumer market or B2C market. And they are really struggling to scale. So a couple of different problems that they've had. First off, this is probably something that you're experiencing right now, rising ncac, which is cost to acquire a new customer. If you're not familiar with that term, we've done many, many, many shows here on marketing performance indicators. You can grab a copy of the marketing performance indicator Checklist over at perpetualtraffic.com MPI or tier11.com MPI you can follow along with this here. But NCAC was the real problem cost to acquire a new customer for this type of business. This is a high consideration purchase. Like I said, this is an eight figure purchase. So most of their customers are new customers. Like some of the case studies that we've done here on this show, when you have a high consideration purchase, something that's over, we usually say an average order value of over $200 is sort of on the higher end as far as E commerce is concerned. Anything from a thousand to multiple thousands. And we've talked on the show many times about those high AOV types of clients that we work with here at tier 11. That needs a lot of consideration, that needs a lot of convincing in the newsfeed and, and in the advertising before they actually click and go to the page, which is one of the most important things in today's digital marketing landscape. So like I said, many times there's a direct relationship or direct correlation between price of your product and number of touches, number of impressions, number of ads, number of creatives that you need to put in front of your ideal customer in order for them to ultimately consider to buy your product and ultimately purchase. So an example of this that we've talked about here multiple times is we have a lot of clients that are in the beauty space that are under a hundred dollars for the average order value. You might need only 10 or maybe 20 impressions or 10 or 20 top of funnel or middle of funnel ads in order to ultimately make the sale. But with a $4,000 hammock or a $25,000 outdoor kitchen, you might need dozens if not 20, 30, 40 touches before they even consider clicking to your website. In a lot of cases or even doing a Google search for your name or your product name. So that's why it's so important now to have great amounts of creative particular especially if you're selling over that 100, 200 range. You're trying to sell people using social media especially and trying to get out of that Google rat race. That's what we see with a lot of clients that come to us is that they're spending a tremendous amount of money on Google. And you'll see that in this example here, which we're going to be talking about as well as another case study that we'll be talking about in a future show is that 70, 80% sometimes of their spend for their overall media spend is on Google. And in that market we're talking about bidding for high consideration keywords. I always use the personal injury law space which is an area where there's a tremendous amount of competition. Doesn't matter what you're bidding on. Let's say you're bidding on a keyword like high end plunge pools or high end outdoor hammocks. We've used the hammock example many times here on perpetual traffic. Those keywords are going to cost you 20, 30, 40 a click, which is really expensive. So plus you're competing against everybody else that's in that space and you're really commoditizing your brand by just using Google. So that's why we do a lot of this in our discovery calls and a lot of this in our strategy sessions with clients is that we try and get them to shift away from that very bottom of funnel demand capture platforms like Google and shift them over to more attention grabbing and demand creation platforms like Meta and now Programmatic with our Programmatic division. So if you can combine the two together, you can really shift the majority of your budget over to these top of funnel, middle of funnel channels. Like I said, YouTube is another one of those. TikTok to a lesser degree. But Google is largely relegated to the brand name keywords and most of our successful clients here, brand name meaning they're googling your name, they're googling the name of your product and those are brand searches which should not cost you 20, 30, $40 to click. They should cost you in the single dollar range. If not maybe the 10 to $20 range depending on what your market is. So same challenge here with these guys. So they have NCAC costs. Like I said, you can get NCAC and all the marketing performance indicators over at tiereleven.com forward/mpi. Their NCAC in the United States was about $2800 $2800 to purchase a new customer. And in the Canadian market it was $1,700. Almost a twofold difference in the US market versus the Canadian market. One of the reasons is, is because of their mix was largely on Google, which is going to cost you more in the US markets typically versus Canada. Obviously it depends on your individual market. So same brand paying nearly double to acquire in one market versus the other, which is one of the problems that they definitely had. They also had a problem with attribution. So a meaningful a large share of their revenue is closed by phone. So this might be your business. If you're selling 10 to $20,000 pieces of equipment in this particular case in the health and well, or if you're selling $30,000 kitchens, you probably need a salesperson to make that sale. That's not usually the book of schedule calls. A lot of these types of businesses are E commerce. Yes, but they're also lead generation at the same time. So the combination of those two things gets confusing from a digital marketing perspective because as soon as you go offline and the salesperson is actually on a zoom call and then enters the sale into your CRM, you need a way to be able to link that back to the platform and give the platform and this case they're largely using Google. Our recommendation is to shift most of that budget over Meta. That be able to link that data through an offline conversion is extremely important. They were not doing this, so that's one of the problems that they had. So they really didn't know which platform was pulling for them. They're doing some paid social traffic obviously like I said on meta, but the majority of their spend really is on Google. And this is a problem that we see oftentimes with these types of businesses. Google's a great way to start. Google is an absolutely fabulous way of using high value keywords, high intent based keywords for your niche to prove that you actually have a product that is meaningful. However, as a long term growth strategy, it's faulty. So and that's the reason why we've shifted. And even John Moran, who used to be known as a Google guy, is now our chief strategist here at tier 11. The majority of our spend now is really is 80, 20 meta top of funnel. Like I said, programmatic as well. Then Google is that remaining 10 to 20% in most cases. So like I said, most of the closes, most of the sales actually happen by phone or through a manually created draft order is what they call it, which falls outside of the ad attribution platform. So in many cases there's no way to have Meta determine the sale if the sale is done manually in an offline way, unless you do offline conversions, which is one of the recommendations that we make here. Sometimes that is just a zapier integration from the CRM back into the database. But even if you're not optimizing for the sale, let's say you're actually optimizing your advertising for booking a scheduled call or book a scheduled call. We have numerous clients that are in the healthcare space, two in particular that I think of right off the bat. They sell thousand dollar plus programs and treatment for a variety of different conditions. One's the refractory depression niche, another one is in sort of the physical therapy niche, and another one is actually in the spa space. So in each one of those cases, sometimes the actual sale is manually entered by a salesperson or maybe by a consultant. So that information is really important to have because you want to be able to pipe that back into the platforms, but you oftentimes don't want to optimize for it. And that's sort of the question that the growth strategists here at tier 11 figure out in a very short order, as well as our tech team to be able to optimize the advertising so we can actually make good decisions on which platforms are working together in order to create the sale. So in this case they were making six figure monthly ad spend decisions without seeing where any of the money was actually really working in their ads. Another issue is that they have misdirected traffic. So paid social traffic was landing on their homepage in many cases and not specific pages or not pages that were specific to the advertising and just sort of a generalized information page. So even when people would click click, they would typically click and just gather more information. The vast majority of folks though, remember when you're running on programmatic, let's say native advertising, we've used the example for the very high end dog product niche. We can't say their name either, but very, very high end, they're selling a $1200 pet accessory. So the majority of the spend in that case is on ads that have no click whatsoever. So a lot of people will just scroll and watch the video and never actually click. They'll hover over the videos that this creative diversification strategy that we deploy and we've talked about here many times on the show, oftentimes you don't get a click. But when they do click, they have dedicated pages that are specific to that ad. So when you're sending most of your traffic to a generic homepage, it's a good place to start. But it's also another potential choke point for you because you really do want your ads to match the experience that they have once they actually do click. I will say this, however, a lot of brands get caught up on that after the click, when in fact only 1 to 2% or maybe 3%, let's say 5% of visitors actually click. So think about it that way. If you have 100% of your traffic, 100 people see your ad, 95, stop watch, never click. Five actually do click. You're only serving the five that do click. Now, those people ostensibly have higher intent on your product. That could very well be the case. However, what are you going to do about the 95%? That's where most of the market actually exists. And that market is what we call is in the zone of indifference. They really haven't made a decision to. They're not really maybe interested in this particular case, this premium home wellness system brand. They're not really in the market for it. So that's how you actually gather their attention is through creative diversification in the news feed to interrupt them, get their attention and then continue to show them different ways in which they might actually consider then maybe taking the next step, which is to click and actually check you out or do a Google search, or if you sell on Amazon, head on over to Amazon and maybe even buy your product at that point in time. Like I said, a bit of misdirected traffic here. So also the next problem that they had is they have what we refer to as a creative bottleneck. This is sort of a quality problem, not a supply problem. They actually have a fair amount of creative and they've got actually a backlog of really strong footage. But this is very typical in a lot of businesses that are dedicated to their brand, which they should be. First and foremost is if you're too brand centric and you're too focused on your brand, you might miss of the best opportunities to market that brand because you're stuck in this endless loop of yes, I want to sell more of my stuff, but I want everything to look perfect. Sometimes the best brands that perform on Meta, for example, or the best performance brands are the ones that use what we refer to as lo fi or more raw video. And this runs counter to a lot of brands that want to have a very appeal, a beautiful appeal and a beautiful impression to would be clients. So in this case, the founder was getting involved in some of the editing of some of the videos and that was definitely a choke point. And the team was really weary of outside script writers who might not know the market, thinking that, you know, an agency might lean on AI to create the brand voice. So they were very squeamish about this sort of thing, but it was hampering their growth. At a certain point you really do have to sort of let go of some of that. And there is a balance between the two. And we have plenty of brands that we work with here at your 11 that are brand first for sure, like very important to them. The founder is very involved, which is great, we love that. However, you also have to look at what's going to convert, what's going to be best for the business, how are you going to achieve your goals. And oftentimes it's not with beautiful super bowl style ads, they're often just shot with an iPhone. Very granular, very grainy, very lo fi. And we'll leave some links in the show notes or examples of that as well. And last but not least, one of the big problems was trust. They had a prior agency left them burned very, you know, this, this sort of came out in the call itself. They were shuffled around by this team. This is probably you like you start with an agency and they put all stars on it first and then all of a sudden the next thing you know you're dealing with like a second or third or fourth tierum, you know, base level person who maybe is new to media buying or new to creative. And so they were shuffled around that way or you're shipped. Nothing wrong with offshore. Oftentimes there's a negative connotation with that. So they had this issue with a previous agency that they did work with. A lot of turnover, really slow execution and low confidence in just sort of outside help. So coming to us was sort of a big step for them. So there's definitely that issue that you're probably facing if you're considering figuring out a better way to market your company, whether it's internally or whether it's through an agency. This is definitely an issue that we face quite a bit. Like I said, the biggest problem here is NCAC escalation. They're up at 2,800 doll, which you would figure if you know you've got a 10 to 15, maybe even $20,000 purchase. It's actually not a bad NCAC number. But that number has continued to rise and it probably has a lot to do with the Fact that they're over reliant on the Google Ad platform, sort of the demand capture platforms as opposed to demand creation platforms like Top of Funnel with Meta Programmatic as well as on YouTube. So the stakes are pretty high with this business. So they're spending 115, $120,000 a month for a national campaign and running it largely on instinct without really any solid data. They're relying on in platform metrics, CPA as well as roas, specifically on Meta as well as on Google and not really knowing. A lot of those platforms are double counting. Every platform wants to take credit for the last click. Every. Every platform wants to take credit for the sale as much as possible. What they need and the what we immediately would diagnose here is first off, you've got a gap in attributes and that needs to be filled as soon as possible. So fortunately they're running on Shopify, which is a really easy integration with Tier 11 data suite or Wicked Reports. You know, even if you're using any sort of outside attribution platform like Triple Whale or North Beam or I wouldn't say Google Analytics. Don't even bother with Google Analytics. It's very good at seeing how people travel within your website, but horrible on traffic because there's just too much direct, unattributed, unknown that's on Google Analytics. So don't even consider those. I mean any platform is better than no platform. So the reason I mentioned those other ones is because we've used both of those. We're actually investors in North Beam, so I feel it's a really good platform. But for businesses this size, the 7 to 100 million range, the best solution that we've found is Wicked Reports. First off, just doing a major upgrade on their interface, which is tremendous. Scott, the CEO has been on the show here plenty of times. But also we add in our own Edge Tag server onto that. We call that the Tier 11 data suite and then we layer in Edge Tag technology on top of that. So the data that we get inside the interface of the tier 11 data suite is near 100% match. When there is a click that none of that data that you see inside the Tier 11 data suite is modeled. Whereas with Triple well, and with North Beam, vast majority of those clicks that you see are actually modeled clicks, which is helpful, don't get me wrong, it's better than nothing. However, if you can get actual data, that's what Tier 11 data suite does in concert with Wicked Reports, who's our partner on that. So that's the first thing that we'll do is we'll install that. So you'll now be able to see exactly where the click is coming from on all platforms. Tier 1 data suite and Wicked Reports do not track view through conversion. However that is going to change within Wicked Reports I am told within the next six months. So there is going to be additional features I think that are really going to differentiate us even more. So we can do a lot without that view conversion. But when you actually do have the click capturing it nearly 100% of the time then with an actual click, not a modeled click like the platforms do, it really is enables you to be able to make very well educated decisions on media, spend ads, ad sets less so with audiences to a certain degree, campaigns, all of that sort of thing. So one of the other parts to this is like I said, there's phone sales and draft orders. Those are all invisible in the ad platform. So the ad platform itself is optimizing for a book scheduled call in some cases or an opt in in other cases. You'd want to figure out in the continuum of events from the actual click to the website to the application to the next best step prior to the actual sale of the product usually is a booked call that is attended. So a booked scheduled attended call oftentimes in a scenario like this with an E Commerce brand high consideration, we're talking, you know, tens of thousands of dollars here potentially as far as the average order value, usually that's the event that we try and optimize for. Obviously our growth strategist would dive deep into that as well as our tech folks inside tier 11 and determine exactly which event we want to optimize for. However, having said that, we still want to import the data for the actual sale from those phone orders. And I believe these guys run HubSpot. I'd have to go back and check my notes. But any CRM can be imported. The data from that CRM can be imported back into the platforms. It might not be the event that you're optimizing your ads for, but that information is very helpful for the platform to be able to optimize and find more people like those people. You want buyers. You don't want people that just click and fill out forms and never buy. You want the algorithm to target within the audience that it's targeting with your creative and your ads using create a diversification. You want the algorithm to know which people are the ones that look like people that are the ones that have bought from you before. So you want to Add in that data. You want to pipe that in. We usually do that either with a Zapier integration or a direct integration. Some cases it's a download, physical download that we then upload into the platforms themselves. So at least meta. And then if we're running ads on Programmatic, the same sort of thing happens there, same thing happens over on Google. So that was what we would do with the attribution gap immediately. The second thing we would do is we would look at all the individual pages that they're sending traffic to and analyze exactly which page and which ad are the ones that are getting the most either clicks, views, impressions, and also potential sales through the platform itself. So we were shown a number of different landing pages. Most of the traffic was actually going to the homepage, and most of the ad creative did not match what was being said on the homepage. And in many cases, the homepage, as we were analyzing this is you had to do multiple scrolls to actually get to the application box, which sometimes is a good thing, sometimes it's not. In most cases, you want this to be above the fold. Now, the argument could also be made that someone who clicks on your ad and then checks you out scrolls down to three thumb scrolls. I'm doing this on a mobile phone here. Or a click and a scroll on a desktop. That individual is more interested in potentially buying or more interested in your product. That argument could be made. So this is something that we would definitely need to test. We would need to test the application at the top of the page, the middle of the page, bottom of the page, and also send traffic specifically, especially on Programmatic and on all the native platforms, as well as anything that we would do for connected tv. If we actually did do that here, we would send it to a dedicated landing page, a dedicated sales page specific to those platforms. So the last thing we would do here after we do those first two things are probably we would do this immediately upon onboarding, is have a real deep dive, look into all of their creatives, all of their video specifically. And we'll leave links in the show notes to a couple of clients that we've worked with in the past. So you can get a better idea of how do you actually sell a $4,000 hammock? How do you sell a $25,000 outdoor kitchen? I can't name specifically what this brand is, but this is a premium home wellness system. It's an outdoor system, very similar to those two other products in the same space. So the creative that I'm going to put over on perpetualtraffic.com, definitely check that out. You'll see exactly what we're talking about here. And both really good examples of true creative diversification where we're using founders ads explaining the difference between their brand and why they started their brand, the story behind why they started it, what their mission is, all of that. Those are sort of founders story videos as well as lifestyle like this could be your life. Look at how your life could be if you lived in this outdoor kitchen. See how much fun you'd be having with all of your friends. A nice wide angle shot will show you links in the show notes of exactly what I'm talking about. Those are very good top of funnel awareness style ads or creative that engage people, get them interested in the brand so that once they sort of stop the scroll and watch the video even with the sound off, the algorithms will then be able to serve more ads similar to that with different types of angles to it. What's different about your brand versus the competition? We refer to those as us versus them type of ads. Maybe it's a product demo ad. We have a company that sells premium umbrellas for the beach. How you actually set this thing up. So product demo and then people actually enjoying their day on the beach as a result of this specific product. Customer testimonials, how people love your product. Like you could do a montage of your best customers or email your customer list and give them an incentive to give you a customer testimonial with a link that's very easily shareable. All of that sort of stuff. Very good. Top of funnel, middle of funnel. We even use AI ads in some cases. We absolutely do use AI in all of our advertising. It's not typically the most important type of ad, but for one of our clients who sells water bottles, an animated water bottle, talking water bottle was one of their best, highest performing or attention grabbing, highest spend ads. Another type of ad is of features and benefit. You could probably think of this right off the top of your head, like what are the features of your product and the benefits. You can do a video about that with a talking head or you can do that as an image head. Face to camera ads. Obviously doing this sort of thing. If you're watching us over on YouTube, this is perfect for this type of environment. Face to camera people talking about the benefit. Either it's a creator that's a paid creator that's doing a video on it. You'll see some of the examples that I'm going to leave in the show notes here. But the point is this is that all of these types of ads are different types of creative that we refer to as creative diversification, none of which they're doing right now. And when we looked at their YouTube channel, we looked at their Facebook ads, we saw a tremendous amount of content over on their YouTube channel. And then when I checked their meta ads inside their meta ads library, none of that was being used. So not even in its raw form. So they have the kids capability of being able to do it. They have a lot of sort of raw footage that we would then from a strategy standpoint, our growth strategist and our creative strategist would work together in order to create ways in which to take a lot of that raw video and post, produce it with B roll, with text overlays, even adding in creators as part of the content. Sort of in the lower right hand corner you'll see some of those ads over@perpetual traffic.com really important. So in most cases for most brands that come to us, we find that up to 30 creatives month is sort of the bare minimum right now in order to really be able to capture awareness top of funnel as well as start to convince middle of funnel. So you're capturing the awareness with a lot of these types of ads and then you're getting the consideration in sort of middle of funnel. And oftentimes John Moran talks about this many times on this show. We'll even split out our ad sets into top of funnel, middle of funnel, even bottom of funnel. Bottom of funnel ads are usually something that is a call to action. Hey, get this today. I actually purchased a product on Instagram the other day. It was one of these types of ads. It was actually a whitelisting ad. It was done through an affiliate for the products that I purchased. And on his site he was offering a 40% discount. And that was very bottom funnel. After I consumed or watched at least a dozen or so videos, this is just like a skincare product that I purchased. But anyway I purchased, probably watched 10 or 15 of these videos. So falling into the same sort of sequence here, under $100 purchase, I ended up buying $119. The thing, I think it was only like a $40 purchase, but I ended up getting like a three pack. So I totally felt this whole thing. They did creative diversification extremely well and so far very happy with the product. The point is this is that very bottom of funnel typically is where most brands live. And when we look at ad accounts and when we're looking at this ad account for this premium home wellness systems company. Most of their ads, I would say 90% of their ads were very bottom of funnel and represented a great opportunity for creative diversification and less reliance over on Google. And so that would be the last portion of our recommendations here is to slowly shift budget. I'll leave a link in the show notes for a case study that we did with Scott from Wicked Reports where we shifted budget on Amazon as well as on Google. Nearly 90% of their ad spend was shifted from $60,000 $50,000 a month in ad spend down to less than $5,000 per month on both of those platforms. All of that spend was then pushed over to top of funnel channels like native advertising, connected TV and of course Meta. And this is exactly what we would do here, wouldn't do it all at once. We did that over four to five months period, sort of slowly because a lot of those high value keywords that you're probably relying on in your marketing are paying the bills. You don't want to cut it completely. You want it to be sort of a slow shift and you need an agency that knows what they're doing to be able to do that for you. So last but not least volume of creative the biggest challenge I think we're going to have here is founder led marketing. Oftentimes they get in their own way and yes there is and I'm guilty of this as well as a founder. So in their desire to maintain a very high level of professionalism on their brand, they oftentimes sacrifice the performance side of the marketing. And these guys in this business is a performance marketing company. They sell in a very competitive space, very high end purchase and oftentimes it's the less pretty ads, it's in the affiliate world, the getta the better. Which means the more ghetto your ads are, oftentimes those are the most effective ads. That's something that we would have to work on with these guys, but they definitely have the raw materials in order to do it. Really super great product, really excited to work with them. Premium home wellness systems space 10 to $20,000, getting an NCAC of $2,800 in the U.S. i would say within six months we could have that cost to acquire a customer. If we follow the playbook that we talk about here and hopefully we'll do another case study here on the show to explain exactly what those shifts were and how we did it and what the results were. So I hope you enjoyed this week's show. Make sure that you subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts on whatever platform that you love most. Leave us a comment, leave us a rating and a review. We'd love to hear those. We'll read those out on air here as well. And of course, all the links and all the references that I talked about are available over on the show notes@perpetualtraffic.com and of course, if you need our help for any of this, you can head on over to tier11.com forward/apply or just check us out at tier11.com happy to help you scale and grow through metrics that matter and growth that scales. So until next show. See ya. You've been listening to Perpetual Traffic.
Episode: They Were Spending $115K a Month Without Knowing What Worked
Host: Ralph Burns (CEO, Tier 11)
Date: July 7, 2026
This episode dives deep into the challenges faced by a premium home wellness brand spending over six figures a month on advertising—without clear understanding of what channels or strategies were actually driving sales. Ralph Burns breaks down an anonymized case study, highlighting common pain points, diagnostic steps, and actionable solutions agencies like Tier 11 provide—including optimizing attribution, shifting media spend, creative diversification, and tackling trust and internal bottlenecks.
For deeper resources, case studies, and creative examples referenced in the episode, visit perpetualtraffic.com.