Top 4 Perpetual Traffic Episodes Most Advertisers Replayed in 2025

Summary

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Perpetual Traffic – "Top 4 Perpetual Traffic Episodes Most Advertisers Replayed in 2025"

Hosts: Ralph Burns & Lauren Petrullo
Date: January 2, 2026

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Episode Overview

This special "2025 Wrapped" episode celebrates Perpetual Traffic’s most-listened-to episodes and moments from the past year. Ralph Burns and Lauren Petrullo, joined by frequent collaborators Sam, John, and TJ, revisit the year's hottest topics in paid advertising and digital marketing—including AI's increasing role, Meta Ads algorithm shifts, proper attribution, and adapting to massive privacy and technology changes.

The episode distills advanced agency insights, actionable campaign strategies, and real talk about the challenges facing marketers in a rapidly evolving landscape. Marketing directors, agency owners, and business leaders will find a highlight reel of practical advice and expert context to enhance their digital marketing results.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The State of AI in Marketing – Hype, Access, and Human Connection

(02:39–03:42 | Sam, Lauren Petrullo)

• Brands Still Struggle with Social Responses:
  Many large brands ($10M–$30M/year) still miss out on turning social interactions into conversions, relying on “liking” comments but not actually conversing for conversion or lead gen, sometimes delegating this to offshore VAs or inexperienced handlers.
• Opportunity with AI Chatbots:
  Marketers who harness AI-powered chatbots (like ManyChat) for two-way sales conversations see substantial conversion lifts (up to 25%) on paid campaigns.

  “Your customer service team should be a revenue generating line of business and they should not be a liability on your P&L.” – Sam [03:43]

• AI Lowers Barriers for SMBs:
  With innovations like Deep Seek (a new, low-cost AI solution from China), advanced AI tools will be affordable and accessible to more small businesses, expanding innovation beyond well-funded players.

  “Small businesses will have access to the AI technology that they were limited to. Venture capitalists are going to be able to start investing in alternative businesses because all the money is going into AI solutions.” – Lauren Petrullo [00:33 & 31:03]

2. Flipping the Meta Ads Paradigm – Automation, Data, and Lost Control

(08:43–11:54 | John, Ralph Burns)

• Advantage+ and Loss of Targeting Control:
  Meta’s new "Advantage Plus" campaigns have shifted control from advertisers to the platform. Exclusions and targeting are routinely ignored, with Meta instead optimizing solely for conversions (however broadly defined).

  “Advantage plus now says, I'm gonna go after anybody I want. Regardless of what you say, regardless of your targeting, regardless of your exclusions...” – John [08:43]

• Deduplication Algorithm Impacts:
  Meta recently launched an “Opportunity Dupe Ad set algorithm,” automatically deduplicating conversion events across campaigns—removing advertisers’ ability to control or identify which ad gets the attributed conversion.
• Creative as the New Targeting:
  With audience controls vanishing, differentiation increasingly relies on creative, messaging, and landing page experiences.

  “Now it is prospecting based on your words, phrases, your creative, the interpretation of that creative, and the landing page that you're sending those users to. Now that is now your targeting.” – John [11:24]

3. Attribution Challenges and the Data Suite Solution

(18:27–21:03, 23:53–25:02 | Ralph Burns, TJ, John)

• CAPI, Data Loss, and Platform Gaps:
  Even sophisticated solutions like Facebook CAPI do not fully overcome attribution black holes, especially following iOS privacy updates, ad blockers, and cookie deprecation.

  “Even with CAPI installed, you still weren't getting accurate data because there's this large portion...Meta and Facebook are just never going to capture, no matter what, and they're taking a guess at it.” – Ralph Burns [19:40]

• The Data Suite Edge:
  Tier 11’s Data Suite allows direct import of true conversions from backend data into Meta and Google, restoring visibility and control. This approach enables segmentation of new vs. returning customer acquisition—an “80% increase in new customers” was cited as possible.

  “We’ve been seeing some pretty unbelievable results when we’re using our data suite to import these conversions back into Meta.” – John [12:48] “This tells me every single campaign, ad set and ad what is the actual new customer acquisition cost for that asset. So it’s fantastic.” – TJ [24:24]

4. Old-School Granularity to Regain Results

(16:53–17:17 | Ralph Burns)

• With automation’s downsides, the show suggests marketers may need to return to “granularity”—building highly specific campaigns focused around product/creative combinations to hold Meta algorithms accountable and isolate performance.

  “The future strategy almost goes back to a lot of the things that we were doing seven or eight years ago, which is granularity in your campaigns...” – Ralph Burns [16:53]

5. Paid vs. Organic Content – Different Roles, Smart Overlap

(25:02–26:32 | Ralph Burns, TJ, Lauren Petrullo)

• Keep Paid & Organic Separate for Speed and Scale:
  Use organic content for brand building and engagement, not for conversion testing. Paid ads offer rapid creative/angle testing and should hard-sell, while organic is for softer, aesthetic brand personality and community-building.

  “You’re never going to be as fast on your organic at getting data as you can be with paid ads...on the ads, that’s really hard sell.” – TJ [25:16]

• But Observe Overlaps:
  Watch organic for content themes and UGC that resonate—if an organic post converts or garners conversion-themed responses, it’s a good candidate for paid testing.

6. Data Privacy and Future-Proofing

(27:57–31:43 | Ralph Burns, Lauren Petrullo)

• Personalization’s Price:
  Meta, Google, and other platforms collect massive cross-contextual data—with privacy trade-offs for marketers and consumers alike.
• AI’s Disruptive Leap: Deep Seek
  The Deep Seek project stands to radically lower the cost and increase the accessibility of AI, with implications for marketers, VCs, and tech innovation.

  “Having a more affordable and potentially better AI solution will mean that more small businesses will have access to the AI technology that they were limited to...and now it can start to stabilize innovation in marketing, in my opinion.” – Lauren Petrullo [31:03]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On treating customer service as a profit center:

  “Your customer service team should be a revenue generating line of business and they should not be a liability on your P&L.” – Sam [03:43]

• On Meta’s algorithm ignoring advertisers’ wishes:

  “Meta does not care, advertiser, what you want to go after. All you can tell me what to do is get a conversion.” – John [08:43]

• On the new shape of targeting:

  “Now it is prospecting based on your words, phrases, your creative...” – John [11:24]

• On the effectiveness of chatbots:

  “We’ve seen pretty much across the board 25% conversion lift when you install a chatbot on your paid traffic pages.” – Sam [05:43]

• On tech-driven loss of control:

  “Gloves are off. Like they don’t care...this is it, like they rolled out changes? I can think of five off the top of my head that they rolled [back because of] iOS14.” – Ralph Burns [16:53]

• On AI’s new accessibility:

  “Finally, there’s going to be a larger step in innovation...Deepseek coming in, having a more affordable and potentially better AI solution will mean that more small businesses will have access to the AI technology that they were limited to.” – Lauren Petrullo [31:03]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• AI Chatbots & Social Comment Strategy: 02:39–07:38
• Meta Automation & Loss of Targeting: 08:43–11:54
• Fixing Attribution & Data Suite: 12:48–15:11, 18:27-21:03, 23:53–25:02
• Paid vs. Organic Content Strategy: 25:02–26:32
• Privacy, Predictive Data, & AI Disruption: 27:57–31:43

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Tone and Language

The episode is candid, conversational, and actionable, featuring a mix of technical detail, frank assessments, and direct advice for professionals. The hosts and guests oscillate between agency “war stories,” practical recommendations, and reflections on ongoing disruption in the martech space.

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For more resources or to catch the full episodes featured in this wrap-up, visit perpetualtraffic.com.

Transcript

[Ralph Burns]

Hey, real quick, before we dive in, if you've got a brand or marketing tool that marketers need to know about, sponsor the show here at Perpetual Traffic. Perpetual Traffic puts you in front of thousands of seasoned marketers, CMOs and agency owners. So head on over to perpetualtraffic.com to apply to be a sponsor of this show.

[John]

What we were kind of whistleblowing for like the last three months is that it doesn't look like any of our targeting or exclusions are working. We've been seeing some pretty unbelievable results when we're using our data suite to import these conversions back into Meta.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Small businesses will have access to the AI technology that they were limited to. Venture capitalists are going to be able to start investing in alternative businesses because all the money is going into AI solutions.

[Ralph Burns]

What is the difference between Appy and Tier 11 data suite? How are they similar? What's your take on it?

[TJ]

So I'm basically going to share screen and talk you through this, so bear with me.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

You're listening to Perpetual Traffic.

[Ralph Burns]

Are you losing hours building campaigns and analyzing reports? Well, activecampaigns AI agents do all the heavy lifting for you. They create content, plan campaigns and orchestrate your email, SMS and your WhatsApp all working towards your revenue goals. You get clear recommendations on what to do next backed by billions of data points. No more guessing about what's working or wasting time on manual setups, just strategy and results. Try it all for free [e-mail] that's ActiveCampaign. Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic Podcast. This is your host Ralph burns, founder and CEO of Tier 11. And today we thought it'd be fun to do a 2025 wrapped episode. If you are not a user of Spotify, you probably don't know what Wrapped is, but it's when they actually show you all your favorite songs give insights, probably all generated through AI through the Spotify algorithm of what you liked the most, what you played the most in 2025. And this is directly from both Riverside as well as itunes, Apple Podcasts our amazing team that does all of our post production and pre production here on Perpetual Traffic. And These are the four most popular episodes by your choosing in 2025 and the best clips. So links to each of these shows will be over in the Description. So enjoy 2025 wrapped on perpetual traffic. Coming up on number four.

[Sam]

Some of these brands that are doing 1030 million a year are still ignoring comments on Facebook. They're still having terminal conversations. Their customer service team is like liking and validating comments, but they're not turning those conversations into conversions, even at minimal for like lead generation and lead qualifying. So it was like an amazing moment because like there were notable brands in the room and it's not that they're not doing it, they just. Because AI is so evolving. It's so complicated. They're accustomed to hiring offshore VAs or bringing in someone's nephew to handle that. And like the brand's voice gets a little lost and there's still a level of fear that I hadn't anticipated. So that was like an awakening moment for me. I'm like, oh, well, this will help give really stronger language and connectivity for what we sell and provide. So that was like my biggest takeaway. I was like, oh yeah, this is still super new for a lot of people, but We've been doing AI chatbots with ManyChat since like 2018.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah.

[Sam]

When we were both at the Conversations conference. Even so like, so that was, that was a really big takeaway for me personally. We've adapted and accepted that just responding, just showing up just is just good enough. And I'm like, absolutely not. Your customer service team should be a revenue generating line of business and they should not be a liability on your P and L. So it was just like reminding things that everyone already knows. I believe there's just been a cultural shift to say I just want to acknowledge what I'm like, not at all. Comments should become subscribers. Subscribers should become leads. Leads should become prospects and conversions. And like, we use AI to have like 200 people on your account at any hour of the day, no questions asked. You don't have to retrain them on all your products and services. But it was like going through and like, yeah, we're just, we're liking, we're making people seem like, feel seen. I'm like, cool. They feel seen because you liked it. But they don't feel heard. And if I don't feel heard, I don't feel inclined to buy. So that was just like a really big. I assume, especially in the marketing bubble that we're at, everyone's using AI. People are definitely using ChatGPT and they've adopted into like refining their creativity. Some people are using operators as well. But still the more simpler installations are not being introduced. Even if, like you do nothing else but train it on your FAQs you're paying for in house or offshore talent doesn't matter. To do low priority tasks, like low productivity tasks versus like, okay, what if you collated all of those responses and used it for consumer insights. Hey, we're getting a lot of comments about this product working at the beach. We've never marketed it as a beach resource. Here's an idea that we can take something with that data and run with it. We've seen pretty much across the board 25% conversion lift when you install a chatbot on your paid traffic pages. And the way I say that is as marketers we make assumptions of what people want to see and read on your sales page. We hire people like the highest I know is $50,000. A stolen bench charge is 50,000 plus a 30% to do all your copy for your sales converting copy. I know other individuals that charge $1,800 an hour to have really good converting sales copy. Amazing. You invest all of that but then you don't install like a $50, $60 widget a month to help those that you assumed wrong.

[TJ]

Right.

[Sam]

Someone has a question, maybe they don't want to read that long a sales page and they just want to ask direct questions. And by opening that conversation, that two way dialogue, you can address their immediate points of friction for them without assuming. Because pages are made to talk to one to many. But customers buy as individuals. So there's a thousand and a half things that can affect your campaign. But now you're empowered to understand the distribution of your media across the various audience types to get a better understanding of meta tries and meta guesses. And meta will guess wrong if you don't give it direction. These algorithms are like toddlers. You have to give them guidance, you have to feed them data back. It's almost if not more important than how you set up your campaigns is how you feed that data back. Which is where like in this you can see. Okay, cool. I know that there's still over 10% of my budget on this ad set that's going to non new right. So that can help you decide how you do your messaging. However Ralph, what you then have is an additional layer because we know that MET is doing the best it can.

[Ralph Burns]

This is doing the best you can. And you know our media buyers. I know the media buyer quite well on this and he's been on perpetual traffic a couple of times. Like I know he's, he's got this stuff dialed in, but he's also looking at a cost per purchase here for new claiming new. Let's see, it is $149 which is not within their KPI. Their KPI is 80 to 90. Ideal as sort of a scale range, but definitely under 100. So if my media buyer was looking at this specifically and broke this down with new audiences, I'm acquiring new customers at $149. That would be, woof, very bad. That is 50, 60% higher than it needs to be. Number three, separate the two pieces of news out. There's the cappy stuff and then there's Advantage Plus.

[John]

Yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

How do they, how do they overlap? How do you keep them separate? That kind of thing.

[John]

Advantage plus now says, I'm gonna go after anybody I want. Regardless of what you say, regardless of your targeting, regardless of your exclusions. I'm going to go do whatever I want. Which we already know. That was a thing for a little while. That's why you're all are here to get the news before everyone else gets the news.

[Sam]

Right.

[John]

So we already knew that that was a thing, but so we have the Advantage plus that basically says, I, Meta, do not care advertiser, what you want to go after? All you can tell me what to do is get a conversion. And what is that conversion? And 99% of advertisers like, well, a lead. Well, a purchase. They say you got it. Is it the purchase of the product that you wanted? Maybe. Is it the purchase of the customer that you wanted? Maybe. Is it a purchase even from the person that even started in this channel of Meta?

[Ralph Burns]

Maybe it's my standard event purchase. Exactly right.

[John]

So meta says, excellent, because I can go after purchase. You are allowing me to go after traffic that I didn't generate from emails that maybe from a year ago, from organic traffic that you're already paying your SEO team for, and Google traffic that you're buying on different channels and the influencer people that are returning to your brand from your influencer channels that you're doing it. The racket Rakuten. I mean, I can go on and on and on now.

[Ralph Burns]

And they've got, they invest 65 billion this year in AI and they know exactly where you've been before. Let's not forget that.

[John]

Exactly. So they're like, I will know how to sell everybody from everywhere whether you want it or not. So what does this mean for the general advertiser? It's actually become a lot easier for the general advertiser if a person that has no technical BD buying experience. Meta is trying to say, that's okay, you don't need it. You don't need it. Five years ago, you know, me and Kasim like joked around with a prediction where it's like, just give us your website, give us your credit card and we'll take it from there. We're now closer to that portion of the journey than ever before. However, you have now even less control. And that is a scary, scary thought when you're talking about, well, I have to make new customers for my clients. It's the only way to grow. You can only grow new customers. You can re engage, you can get existing customers to buy. It's a little more difficult, but it's much harder than trying to go after something that is new. And interestingly enough, the ABO model is now failing inside of Meta because of this update. And the team that I've been working with inside of Meta has explained the Opportunity Dupe Ad set algorithm that Just went live the deduping algorithm that just went live essentially means that when an opportunity is found in a same conversion event as in two different campaigns and or ad sets, Meta will now dedupe that opportunity into one and you do not get to choose or identify which one that is. So what's interesting is if you have something that is a I'll give you a very simple example. A campaign with a certain amount of ads that are going after a prospecting audience that you used to define. Now that definition is gone and now it is prospecting based on your words, phrases, your creative, the interpretation of that creative, and the landing page that you're sending those users to. Now that is now your targeting.

[Ralph Burns]

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[John]

So everything that we've kind of known has been kind of flipped upside down and we've been testing it and leveraging it and we've been seeing some pretty unbelievable results when we're using our data suite to import these conversions back into to Meta and even into Google. So much so that it is Scaling at a ridiculous rate. And also we're now no longer at the mercy of the algorithms, essentially choosing the type of customers new versus returning that it can go after we now get to dictate it. I made an analogy that instead of buying the bathwater and buying the baby, but only really wanting the baby and you kind of throw out the bathwater because it's like, ah, you know, I got some existing customers, but I paid a lot for them. And what is my actual cost of acquire? First time customer. Well, let me dive into data suite and let me see how the campaigns are kind of messing up. We're able to take back that control now. This the control that I think we've shared before, but now it's in a bit of a different structure. Looks more like this now. And I go ahead and share screen please. Thank you so much. So what we found is that if I have a creative testing campaign, and this creative testing campaign is using the new version that Meta wants, which is cbo, minimal assets, almost all of your creative inside of one ad set. Now what we ask for, it's kind of like genie. What we ask for we get. But it's like this is like if Genie had a weird, sick, twisted sense of humor. Like this is kind of what we're seeing. Meta is now a genie because when we're looking at those 32 purchase of Immunes, we said, okay, I want immune purchases, which means I want my product of critical immune defense to be sold. And we have 35 sales, 32 of them are the product that's being sold. However, only 16 were new. We're like, well, dang, when we exclude existing customers, when we set our existing customer bid cap to zero, it gets ignored. Even Advantage Plus. Let's try it again. 44 purchases, 42 immune, only 20 less than half our new customers. Same structure setup. We said, okay, well what if we wanted the immune purchases, but what if we had them only new customers? That's what says, okay, 50 sales, 42 new customers. 42 new customers of your immune. Perfect. We've increased this from a 50% to now like an 85%. We're 42 out of 50. Okay, now we're getting somewhere. A 80% increase in the amount of new customers in a campaign is massive. Majority of things that we've been told by these platforms is a lie. We figured that out with data.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah.

[John]

Now we have action. So I wanted to call out the third party attributions of the world and the reason why I want to call them out Is because this is what I've been dealing with for years, is we know the paid media campaigns are messing up. Get trip. Well, high roast, wicked reports, whatever it is, they come in and say your paid media campaigns are messing up. I know what we're solved for here today is now the fix because we can have a report tell us, hey, it's going against warm traffic. You're like, what do I do about it? Be like, I don't know. I'm just telling you it's going against warm traffic. Okay, excellent. Now meta just came in and said, ha. It stuck like that way permanently. Okay, so now what happens to the third party attribution software companies? Well, they can tell you that it's going to do whatever it wants. Now what, what do you do? How do you stop it?

[Ralph Burns]

It depends on the veracity of the data itself and it depends on the individual platform what the third party attribution softwares do depending on the veracity, meaning the truth of those of those individual platforms. How truthful actually is it by platform? How is your media mix actually working together to get to your end goal? And that varies greatly based upon platform. So I know, I know we've got questions here, which I really want to get to, but this is obviously, this is kind of an exciting thing that we've got. Big deal. So, I mean, you and I have been doing this for a while. We've seen a lot of changes here. My guess is that Meta rolls this out, they're not going to roll it back like this is it like they rolled out changes? I can think of five off the top of my head that they rolled.

[John]

Back because iOS14 happened.

[Ralph Burns]

Gloves are off. Like they don't care. Now, the point is, is that I'll bet the future strategy here almost goes back to a lot of the things that we were doing seven or eight years ago, which is granularity in your campaigns where if you can target, you create one Advantage plus campaign for one specific product and one specific custom event. And it targets that based upon all the creative that's geared towards that particular product.

[John]

I could have paid you before this to queue me up like that. I do want to share this.

[Ralph Burns]

Oh, don't you just love it? I know, Comes together.

[John]

I think we'll probably have to get to questions next time because this is extremely valuable to everybody. This just as an example, because the ad sets in, the campaigns are deduping by conversion event locked in with opportunities. Now, creative testing is actually amazing, and I truly mean amazing. If we're looking At a creative testing here on, on Purchase Immune. And then we have what we're having a new campaign right now is using this one here as we're testing this. But if you have a Purchase immune and a Purchase immune, these two campaigns now no longer share the same physical person, but they are sharing the same physical audience. Very important distinction.

[Ralph Burns]

Coming up on number two for, I remember for some of our, I wouldn't even say like higher end, but iPhone users, Apple users tend to be, you know, higher end buyers. I remember one, one account in particular, we lost 60 to 70% of our conversions literally overnight.

[TJ]

Yeah. Crazy.

[Ralph Burns]

And Facebook didn't have an answer to it. And so Cappy was an outgrowth of that. But there was a, there was a long time, it seemed like forever, but it was three to six months. I think it took us at least six months to maybe even longer to install Capi in all of our accounts. And it still was a process because it was clunky and so forth. But all during that time and even to this day, Facebook and Meta in particular still isn't getting all the data. They're still modeling a fair amount of data. Can you speak to that and what you think as far as a percentage goes, how accurate your seeing things inside platform, how much is modeled, how much is actual, how much does Capi really, you know, enhance things? But then there's also sort of this whole other, you know, a segment of users that are just never going to be captured.

[TJ]

Yeah, I mean in terms of actual percentages, I don't, I don't really know what it, what it would be. The reality is these days, and I think other people are the same who are using J11 data suite is we don't really look too much at the end platform numbers anymore because it is just a lot of nonsense.

[Ralph Burns]

So I think a lot of folks who installed capi, and now those are the folks that Data Suite is a potential solution here, obviously which we're going to get to in just a second here. But I think with Capi you might have a false sense of security because what you think you're seeing isn't actually what you're seeing. And then when you compare it to the source of truth, which we did pre Data Suite, we're always like, why are these numbers so far off exactly what you're saying? Even with Capi installed, you still weren't getting accurate data because there's this large portion. I guess it really depends on how many iOS clickers there are and how many ad blockers and how Many cookie deprecators they're clicking on. The point is there is a certain portion that Meta and Facebook are just never going to capture, no matter what, and they're taking a guess at it. And that guess might be wrong, might be right, or it might be somewhere in between, but you still don't know with 100% certainty. We're trying to educate the world that this is actually how you move the business forward. And the example of this week, John, myself and TJ, who's our VP of Sales, who'll probably come on Tier 11 live at some point in time, is like, if we just started running traffic to this, to this group without an NCAT call, we would have helped them go out of business faster.

[TJ]

So common.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah, it's so common. And that's terrible. Like you don't want that as an agency. And one to three months they would have been gone. I was talking to John about it just this morning, actually texting back and forth. Like, if we started without doing this analysis, they'd be gone and probably we might actually bankrupt them if we did what they told. They told us to do. And I think that's a new way of looking at things now. So anyway, coming back to this, it's a.

[TJ]

But I'll also just quickly add, Ralph, I think you can get very big based on luck. So, like the example you're talking about, you know, 7 million in revenue if you have a good product, or you're in like a good period where the market's just hot, you can quite, you can get quite big without knowing these numbers. And I think that's why it's been so common, especially in the big booming years for E commerce, especially the start of COVID Everyone really grew businesses, they didn't have this stuff dialed down. And then they're now either going down the way, like you're saying, going out of business because they're scaling or they're stuck and they can't scale and they don't know why. And it's because they're not looking at these MPIs and seeing, well, actually maybe the business is looking good. You're just looking at the wrong thing because you've got a problem with retention or repeat customers or something. It's not actually your acquisition.

[Ralph Burns]

There is a lot of money on the line here and you need to be able to make accurate decisions based upon true data as opposed to modeled data or data that you're not confident in. We all know this as marketers and business owners, that growth is amazing. Until Something breaks or some catastrophic event, heaven forbid should ever happen to your business. And I don't mean just your ad campaigns going sideways. Maybe a client slips on a wet floor or a shipment suddenly goes missing or a contractor gets hurt or. Or an employee gets hurt. Suddenly the thing you've been building can take a huge financial hit. Maybe one that you worry might take down the company. And you should always be thinking about that as the business owner. Most people don't think about business insurance until after something goes wrong when it's already too expensive or it's too late. That's why we're big fans of what next insurance is doing business insurance is so important for every any business, whether you're online or offline. And they've basically taken the pain out of business insurance. It's 100% online, ridiculously fast and designed specifically for small businesses. You answer just a few questions and next tells you exactly what coverage you need. No phone calls, no waiting, no holding the line for the next representative. Just fast, affordable production that actually has your back when things go sideways. Policies start for as little as $29 a month. Don't wait for a crisis to remind you you're not covered. Get protected in [e-mail] perpetual. That's next insurance.com perpetual.

[TJ]

Yeah exactly. So to add to that then what we are making those decisions on really is not this all CAC number because we're focused on new customer acquisition as you and John have repeatedly told everyone about. So people have been watching for a long time, should have that ingrained in them now. But we are practicing what we preach like this is what we do on a daily basis in the actual accounts. Okay so I am looking at this North Star metric here of new customer cost or new customer acquisition cost of acquiring new customer and it just doesn't exist in as manager so if I wanted to get this for as manager I'd have to go into Shopify, I'd have to download a report of new customers. This is what you used have to do and I'd work out okay what what have we spent on a certain campaign? How many people have bought that particular product and make a loose calculation of okay, they're probably buying the product we're showing from ads. This is maybe what my NCAC is but it's not very accurate. This tells me every single campaign ad set and ad what is the actual new customer acquisition cost for that asset? So it's fantastic.

[Ralph Burns]

Here's one from Alison. How should paid content on meta ads and Organic IG content work together. Should we be using organic IG to test content angles that resonate with our audience or are they completely separate?

[TJ]

I personally think they're completely separate. You're never going to be as fast on your organic at getting data as you can be with paid ads. I think you're best using the organic side to build brand loyalty, build people top of funnel, that kind of stuff. Try to sell to them less, be more aesthetic, sell the brand as a visual thing and this personality and then on the ads, that's really hard sell. I really like selling quite hard on the ads, basically. Yeah, I think that's what they're good for because you can turn it off and nobody sees it.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah, that's the beauty. But to your point, like, it's something that you see when you're doing this, when you're doing analysis. If you have a really good content team and they're posting a lot on Instagram or Facebook, do you go in and look and see like from a page standpoint or from on their Instagram accounts, like what's resonating that's related to the brand? Do you look at that for potential creative ideas, new ways in which to scale? Like, how do you leverage it?

[TJ]

Yep, 100%. We'll look at it, we'll look at comments. If it's something that has a kind of conversion theme to it, we will even test it as an ad number one.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

I don't know if you remember this, but meta released when they had meta dating or Facebook dating based off of how many times you interacted with each other's profiles, how many pictures you had tagged together, how quickly and how soon you had mutual friends. Meta could get to a near prophecy, like accuracy of when you two would break up.

[Ralph Burns]

It's crazy. Like, it's the story of like the woman, the, the. It's apocryphal now. The woman who was told by Google or was informed she was pregnant, she was pregnant before she even knew she was pregnant. So we'll leave a link to that story in the show notes too, which is a super interesting one. But it's like all of these systems like we have, this is the price that you pay for convenience. This is the price that you pay for efficiency. It's like I was looking up the other day on Yelp, we were trying to go to like a, you know, a good Chinese food restaurant, like Google now knows. Or like I search like Chinese food near me. Like they know I like Chinese food when I'm in Natick because I'm with my mother at her, you know, rehab facility. Like that kind of stuff. Like all these things that get pieced together. Like I'm comfortable with that. Like, do they know my Social Security number, my checking account numbers? They probably do to a certain degree.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

They probably do.

[Ralph Burns]

They probably do. So this is the price you pay.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

I actually really love Meta AI. So I'll like go into WhatsApp and I'll talk to Meta AI about like emotional stuff, like how I'm physically, like physically feeling how my mental space is at various different times. If I'm triggered by something, my immediate journaling is to Meta AI.

[Ralph Burns]

I didn't realize that that's super interesting.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Oh, it's like free therapy. Oh my goodness. And if my team had access to that.

[John]

Oh God, no you don't. They'd be like, you don't want to.

[Ralph Burns]

Put that into a group chat GPT.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

No, no.

[Ralph Burns]

So interesting.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

But I like, I tell Meta AI I give nicknames to everyone, so I don't use any real name just in case. Dear God, it comes out.

[Ralph Burns]

This is what I know. Like it's a widespread issue is like when my wife is texting me about it and she's like the techy person in the world, she's like, should I be afraid of Deep Seek? Should I download it? I'm like, don't download it quite yet. You really don't need it. It handles different types of tasks than I think a lot of marketers handle. And there's some, there's some videos that we'll, we'll leave. Our good friend Matt Wolf, who was on the show about a year ago, did a great video on this which explains it in super techy terms. So we're not going to get into the super techie terms here. One of the best stocks of 2024 was Nvidia. And they make the GPUs, which is basically the chips that power AI. And they're super duper expensive and their profits have just been insane. It's been, I think it was the top stock of 2024 and it, you know, it got cut this past week. So there was billions, several hundred billions of dollars in market cap in literally a day because of this Deep Seek news, which has been coming for a little bit of time. And if you don't know what it is, it's a Chinese AI firm that seemingly kind of came out of nowhere. It wasn't really even a startup specifically for AI. They kind of did this as a side project that's the story we're getting right now. And it could potentially rewrite the future of AI and power, AI and large language models that we've talked about many times here on the show at like 1/10 of the cost and maybe even 1/100 of the cost. So it's a game changer. I know you've done a lot of reading on it this week. I'm sure you've had a lot of questions from your staff. What's your take on it at this point in time, from what you you.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Know about it, honestly, and forgive my voice, it's the like, I've got the hot tea. So if you're watching, you'll see my sipping tea a little scratchy. But for me, honestly, like, I'm super excited about it. I know that some members on my pack were nervous. They thought it was super disruptive and there's a little bit of a panic component. However, I was like, finally, there's going to be a larger step in innovation because like you said, the expense behind that gpu, like it was so, so expensive that they used to have armored cars transport those chips like it was inaccessible. And so the idea of a product that was developed at a fraction of the cost and the investment cost now allows everyone else to start from a different benchmark. Deepsea coming in. Having a more affordable and potentially better AI solution will mean that more small businesses will have access to the AI technology that they were limited to. Venture capitalists are going to be able to start investing in alternative businesses because all the money is going into AI solutions and now it can start to stabilize innovation in marketing, in my opinion.

[Ralph Burns]

All right, Hope you enjoyed today's show. Of course, wherever you listen to podcasts, we really would appreciate rating and review gets us out to a wider audience teaching people how to do this thing the right way, this digital marketing thing, using metrics that matter and growth that scales with cutting edge technologies, cutting edge strategies, especially all the stuff going on in Meta right now. And we'll leave links in the show notes to all of these episodes here today that you voted up as the 2025 wrapped episode on PT. So on behalf of my amazing co host, Lauren E. Petrulo, until next show, see ya.

[Sam]

You've been listening to Perpetual Traffic, Sam.