Why Your Organic Traffic Isn’t “Organic” (Brand Lift Breakdown + Feeder 2.0)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Perpetual Traffic

Episode: Why Your Organic Traffic Isn’t “Organic” (Brand Lift Breakdown + Feeder 2.0)
Hosts: Ralph Burns & John
Release Date: January 6, 2026

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Main Theme

This episode tackles the myth of "organic" traffic in digital marketing by explaining why most organic website visits—especially those converting into sales—are actually influenced by paid advertising and multi-channel brand-building efforts. The hosts also deliver a breakdown of their advanced “Feeder 2.0” strategy for scaling product sales efficiently on Meta and Google, with actionable, data-driven tactics marketers can apply immediately.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Organic Traffic Isn’t Really “Organic”

• Big Idea: The majority of organic conversions are driven by users searching for your brand name after exposure to paid ads, not by unsolicited discovery.
• Data Breakdown:
  • John uses a real example: a client seeing $225,000 in organic sales in 90 days, compared to $1.9M overall, with 22,000 purchases via organic.
  • Yet, nearly all high-converting “organic” traffic comes from brand name searches, NOT from broad, non-brand keywords.
• Quote:

  “2% of your [organic] traffic ... is actually non-brand. The rest searched your brand name after seeing you somewhere else.”
  — John (09:22)

• Implication:
  • Paid social and other channels feed your brand demand; “organic” is the return route, not the original source.

2. Brand Lift Metrics & Google Search Console

• How to Measure True Brand Impact:
  • Don’t just monitor sales or clicks, but brand-specific impressions in Google Search Console.
  • A surge in brand-name searches reflects successful upper-funnel efforts (ads, media, etc.).
• Key Analogy:

  “The brand lift is how many people are Googling your name—that will tell you a brand lift. ... It matters that they search.”
  — John (12:33)

3. Impression Share Myth in Google Ads

• Misconception: Doubling your search impression share = doubling business.
• Reality: Impression share is not linear—expanding budgets or bids often dilutes your share as the audience pool grows.
• John’s Analogy:

  “If your eligible audience triples, your impression share can stay flat even as you triple spending.”
  — John (18:18)

• Practical Takeaway:
  • Don’t obsess over impression share. Focus on valuable search term overlap and audience quality.

4. Creative Diversification & Feeder 2.0 Strategy

• Concept:
  • Use “feeder” campaigns on platforms like Meta to inject new audiences and product interests into your algorithmic “room” for better attribution and scaling.
• Room Analogy:
  • The campaign is a room; each creative brings in a distinct audience; feeder campaigns bring targeted people (e.g., those interested in new products) into the room, shifting what the algorithm optimizes for (23:41).
• Case Study:
  • Increasing feeder campaign spend by 400% led to 118% more new customers at a lower-than-average cost, proving scalability (26:29–29:53).
  • Staggering or switching feeder products (e.g., immunity, joint, digestive supplements) lets you control which lines to scale.

5. Hook Rate as the Prime Optimization Metric

• Definition:
  • Percentage of users who linger >3 seconds on a video ad; top hook rates drive most of Meta’s spend allocation.
• John’s Rule:

  “The best hook rate, even if it sucks, is still better than the best click-through rate of a static [image ad] so far.”
  — John (42:32)

• Tactic:
  • Test video creative with boosted posts to gauge hook rate cheaply before rolling into large-scale conversion campaigns (36:56–39:16).

6. Advancing Product Bundles With Feeder Campaigns & Attribution

• Strategy:
  • Running separate feeder and main campaigns for single products and bundles can incrementally and efficiently scale sales.
  • Product bundle sales (e.g., a “three pack” of supplements) raised order value and subscription rates.
  • Feeder 2.0 allowed precise tracking of which campaign drove new customer growth and AOV.
• Ralph’s Note:

  “Now you can see the impact almost the day after you launch the campaign. ... It sells products on command.” — Ralph (30:00)

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Notable Quotes & Moments (With Timestamps)

• “It looks like organic is costing us nothing and brings us 22,000 purchases ... Why am I paying so much for ads?”
  — John (08:06)
  (Setting up the “organic isn’t really organic” myth)

• “When people start to look at channel versus channel, the assumptions could be deadly.”
  — John (05:41)

• “We’re no longer channel vs. channel. People are everywhere ... everything blends together.”
  — John (09:25)
  (Addressing the reality of multi-platform consumer journeys)

• “A search for your name is that much closer to actually buying...”
  — Ralph (10:15)

• “Impression share is not linear; it’s a breadth and depth factor.”
  — John (14:01)

• “We have our levers now. It’s basically just a full correlation—it sells products on command.”
  — John (29:53)

• “Hook rate dictates spend. Pause your best hooked ad for a less hooked ad? That’s why this doesn’t work anymore.”
  — John (35:49)

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Important Segments & Timestamps

• Intro & Problem Setup: 00:18–04:20
• Why “Organic” Traffic Isn’t Really Organic: 05:41–13:30
• Brand Lift Explained, Measuring Impact: 12:09–13:06
• Impression Share Myth and How Google Really Works: 14:01–21:36
• Feeder 2.0 Scenario, Leverage & Case Studies: 22:30–34:38
• Hook Rate, Video vs. Static, and Cheap Testing Tactics: 34:41–40:51
• Bundling Products & Feeder Levers for Scale: 31:44–34:34
• Meta’s Preferences: 2/3 Video and Creative Diversification: 40:51–42:32

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Actionable Takeaways

• Audit your “organic” sales—check what % are brand name searches; attribute them back to upper funnel efforts.
• Use Google Search Console’s brand impressions as your primary “brand lift” metric.
• Don’t blindly chase impression share in Google Ads; expand keywords or budget judiciously for quality—not just volume.
• Deploy feeder campaigns to introduce new buyers or push specific products, and watch attribution and sales move in near real time.
• Use boosted posts to cheaply test new video hooks; prioritize video creative with high hook rate for scaling.
• Bundle products and measure cross-selling impact via feeder/main campaign structures to maximize order value and LTV.

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Overall Tone & Style

The conversation is lively, practical, and refreshingly blunt, heavy on real-world examples and agency-tested tactics. John brings deep data granularity and the occasional playful analogy; Ralph steers, summarizes, and keeps the audience focused on business implications.

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This episode is a must-listen for marketers and business owners seeking to understand attribution, the real nature of organic traffic, strategic budget allocation, and how to use Meta and Google’s AI-driven platforms for predictable, scalable growth in 2026 and beyond.

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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 perpetual traffic.com to apply to be a sponsor of this show.

[John]

How do I sell other products with Andromeda? When ad spend is dictating and creative is dictating what people are seeing, how.

[Ralph Burns]

Much should I spend on SEO versus paid?

[John]

The amount of money that we made inside of organic search is $225,000. That's 1.9 million. That's a sizable amount, John. It looks like the Organic Traffic is making just as many sales as my very expensive paid search. Why am I paying so much for ads? Please make this clear. How do we test hook rates in Andromeda without screwing up half million dollars worth of campaigns?

[Ralph Burns]

You're listening to Perpetual Traffic. 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 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 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.

[John]

That's next.

[Ralph Burns]

Nextinsurance.com forward/petpetual. Hello, and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic podcast. This is your host, Ralph burns, founder and CEO of Tier 11. And today is a rebroadcast of one of the most insightful ad labs we've done in quite Some time now that we have tested now counting over $50 million on some of these strategies that we've talked so much about here on Perpetual Traffic. And we talk about every Friday, except around the holidays, every Single Friday at 2:30pm Eastern. Myself and John break down our individual experiences with our test accounts and then some actual tier 11 clients that we are using these strategies on in real time. And this one today is an outgrowth of a conversation we had with a current client and how the creative diversification strategy that we've talked about here so many times is so important in getting conversions over on Google Organic. Google Organic people don't really think about this all that much. They see an ad or multiple ads over on Meta, the first thing they're going to do is they're going to Google your name. And we get into why that is a great thing. Not the high value keyword like barbershop near me or Best CRM. You don't want those terms. Those are the terms where there's still shopping. You want them to Google your name and maybe there's a branded ad there, maybe there's some organic search results there for your name. If you're doing your SEO correctly, we break down exactly why that matters and why it's such a critical component of the creative diversification strategy. And also on the Google Ads side, we dispel the myth of impression share as well as we're going to give you some updates on the Feeder strategy, which I know you're hanging on the edge of your seat for because we've talked about it so many times here on today's show. So without further ado, let's get into today's show with John and yours truly. Take it away, guys.

[John]

Yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

All right, before we get into today's show, I know you have an update on Feeder Feeder 2.0.

[John]

Yeah, meta, feeder.

[Ralph Burns]

That'S right. We got meta, we got Google, we got all kinds of feeders going on. Just so people listening here, like our media buyers and our growth strategists have a call with you twice a week for an hour and they bring up whatever problem, whatever question they have, and you help guide through it. Then you like, you might go after the fact and like help out with specific clients using a lot of things that we talk about here on this call. But you brought up something on a call from a week or so ago which I was watching, which I was like, it finally all made sense to me around Google Search Console. And we have a client that was asking about this or was Talking about, like, where is the SEO, the line from SEO to paid, and how much should I spend on SEO versus paid? And you had like an extremely great answer for it, which I sort of kind of knew, but I had forgotten. And all of a sudden it was like, wow, this is what makes so much sense.

[John]

And.

[Ralph Burns]

And before I keep explaining it any further, maybe you could just talk about what it actually is.

[John]

So people, they, they're still like Google Analytics, UA days where it's like, you know, the channel, the last click. And that's how it did. So how's my organic doing compared to my paid doing? Right. Compared to my YouTube doing all that stuff. So when people start to look at channel versus channel, the assumptions could be deadly. And so we have a company that ranks. Let me just see. Sometimes we fall in and out. So I'm not sure you type in bikini. So that right there is a company that we market for work with. I'll, you know, have an equity stake and yada, yada, yada. And this number one position does not pay that much. About number one for bikini pays about 12k per month. And that's about it. And that's when you show up as number one for the keyword bikini. And that's, you know, a little bit higher. Maybe 20k a month in summertime, but nothing like first position organic of the word bikini. You're like, this is millions of dollars. It's really not. It's not.

[Ralph Burns]

I just opened it. A new incognito window. Same, same results right at the top.

[John]

Yep, it's. It's kind of cool. And, well, you know what's funny is I'll do this. I'm gonna pull up. Actually, I don't have permission to do. I will see if I will. You're just gonna have to trust me. But if you've been watching us for longer than a day, you know that we do everything by example. And that's just something I'll get and see if I can, if I can confirm that. But here's what's interesting. You're like, okay, we're showing up really well for that keyword and organic traffic. I have an SEO team and they feed me and they say, hey, this is typically what ends up happening. Your SEO team says, hey, last, you know, let's do like last 90 days. Because SEO works slowly. And they say, okay, in SEO, in the last 90 days, it looks like the amount of money that we made inside of organic search is $225,000. That's, you know, 1.9 million. That's a, that's a sizable amount. And actually that's just the key event, the purchases here. There's, if we look at the paid or the organic search, there's 23,000 out of 177. That's a sizable amount of purchases. Now this is last click as GA4 is. So you have last click direct which is like, you know, 47,000 out of 177. So you see there is a loss there. So when we're looking at all of these channel versus channels, we say okay, paid social, we got X, you know, paid search, we got X. But it looks like organic is costing us nothing and brings us 22,000 purchases. I'm paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for paid search. That's bringing me 25,000 purchases. John, it looks like the organic traffic is making just as many sales as my very expensive paid search. Why am I paying so much for ads? What's going on? I hate life. Please make this clear.

[Ralph Burns]

Why should I do paid advertising? Just making all my money from SEO, which you're doing nothing to affect.

[John]

Yeah, I'm just throwing the show people. But that 22,000 you say yes, it's organic, but what are the most common search terms in organic? And SEO company is going to hate me right now. But the most common search term, inorganic unfortunately is your brand name. So when we start to take a look at this, just as an example, this is a company that you can see the name up there if you're watching live, but people that are watching live can confirm that the name up there is also the name over there that's the same name. This is the last three months. This is also the last three months. So if we look at the organic search, bringing in 22,000 purchases out of 177,000 purchases. That's a great channel. Now what are the majority of users clicking on from down? All the way from the 77,000 clicks, all the way down to 600 clicks. Well, you got brand, brand, brand, brand, brand, brand, brand, brand. Hey, we have two grand. Awesome. So you have 77,000 plus five. You got this what like 82, 83, 84, 85, 86. So you got about 90,000 clicks and then you got 1200. Okay, so you got 90,000 brand clicks and 12,000 or 1200 non brands. So you got a ratio of about.

[Ralph Burns]

2% less than 2%.

[John]

So 2% of your traffic I don't believe is purchasing as good as your paid. But since the page is going after majority non brand. Well Wait a minute, we're spending on non brand making non brand and then the people that come back to us by googling the brand name, how much of that 22,000 is actually not coming from paid hard thing. Especially when you're looking at massive scale of 50% year over year and organic seems to be scaling with it. And what's in the organic the brand name. So when you're looking at how's meta doing check organic. How's people doing check organic. It's, it's. We're no longer channel versus channel. People have a cell phone, an iPad, a laptop and they have a Facebook, an Instagram, a TikTok and they have a YouTube. They are everywhere. We're all so connected that everything blends together. And one of the reasons why organic is not truly organic, it's just the channel they use to get back to you. But what they they se they searched you.

[Ralph Burns]

So the caveat to this is that a search with your name is that much closer to actually buying than somebody who is searching for bikini. Think about the mindset I look for. I brand name, bikini company name. I have found out about bikini company somewhere else. I didn't wake up in the morning and say oh bikini company name that I don't know about. I learned about it. I'm in the market for bikinis. I probably learned about it on a meta platform, maybe a YouTube video or some other social form. And I am then googling your brand name that brand name of that bikini company. And because I'm interested in buying it, if I Google bikini I'm still shopping.

[John]

Around now far less could turn into a Google branded search later on for sure.

[Ralph Burns]

Absolutely.

[John]

If that works well Google would not make 97% of their annual revenue off of organic. Right. It's paid and they, they rigged the game. That's why they say wait, we'll sell you traffic or we'll sell you conversions. You want traffic, that's SEO and max clicks and and manual cpc. You want conversions. That's conversion based bidding. So you could do all of our organic campaigns over here showing up for bikini. All we're doing is warming up traffic so that I and all my competitors can bid on it when they're ready to buy. Right. That's how stupid this guy. So watch this too. This is actually really fun. I have a difference of measurement for brand lift. So we're looking at the last 90 days compared to the previous 90 days. My organic search has gone up 117%. Right? It's 117% increase in revenue coming from organic search in the last 90 days compared to the previous 90 days. Go into Google Search Console and compare the same 90 days to the previous 90 days. And what is our brand lift metric? Well, I want to know that. I don't care about the clicks. Just erase this out of your mind for a moment. What I care about in brand lift is the impressions over the last few months compared to the impressions of the previous months went from 180,000 to a 305. Do they click on brand or did they click on non brand at that point? I don't care. All I know is that people who are looking for me went a lot higher. Went for basically we gained 125,000 users on top of the 180. So it's not 100% increase. But when you take into consideration that there is 100% increase because this last 90 days we went through Black Friday, December, Monday. It's still not organic though.

[Ralph Burns]

It's not organic.

[John]

So the brand lift is how many people are googling your name that will tell you a brand lift. So doing a holdout test, are you doing a TV commercial, doing direct mail, doing whatever. Isolate the location that you're doing your marketing and do more people search your name regardless of where they clicked, brand or organic doesn't matter where they click. It matters that they search. That's their brand lift. So when you're looking at impressions doubling and organic suddenly got better by double. It didn't just people didn't wait. I got to grow six feet and buy tall products now I wonder if this company is a thing that doesn't happen. It has to start somewhere else. And that's, that's what is tied to spend which is why NCAC and BUR are a thing.

[Ralph Burns]

That's why Google Search Console is so instructive. So when this client I said I'll guarantee if you look at Google Search Console you're going to see 95% of your, all of your searches coming in for your brand name. Sure enough we went in there right after the call and that was the case. Where are they coming from? They're coming from our meta ads. They're coming from you know, maybe some of the socials, prospecting channels, people who are actually searching for like they've got a really, really good product.

[John]

Yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

Highly regionalized, you know, it's, it's based on, well it's also seasonal to a certain degree. The point is this is that top of funnel creative diversification Meta Andromeda is The solution there, the, the other question that I had for you on these types of clients is okay, they're also doing some high value keywords like the name, the, the thing that their company does near me. And their statement is also that, well, we're only getting 20% of our impression share. What if we double it to 40%? Isn't that a better lever than going after this meta stuff?

[John]

Your answer would be impression share is not linear, it's a breadth and depth factor. So when you're talking about impression share, the impression share is the total availability of the variables you're going after. So if I go after the, the keyword, you know, size 12, red shoe, 2 inch heel, very, very, very specific.

[Ralph Burns]

You look great in that by the way.

[John]

Right. I know I am only 5 10, so it makes me 6 foot it.

[Ralph Burns]

Wash we can get here.

[John]

So when you're looking at like that specific of a search term, you can get 10 clicks and have 100 search impression share. Now take off the word, a 2 inch heel. Now you're just looking at red shoe. Well, your search pressure just went from 10 impressions to now a million. So by changing your keyword, you widen the scope of what you can show up by impressions. And simply due to the fact that I changed the keyword, I can cut in half or double my search impression share. Because search impression share is the eligibility of me showing up for the variables of that keyword. So changing match types. Yes. Or increasing your bid, which means increasing your budget, which means your bid can go up, which means there's a wider audience. So increasing budget and increasing bid can sometimes reduce your search impression share because now you're eligible for a larger audience. Yes, but to you personally, you went from 200 people that you can market to to 400 people. But your total search impression share of a million people may have gone to 10 million people. So as you widen your audience, your search impression share goes down even though you're making market penetration in the area that you wanted to. But it is absolutely not linear. It's actually if you can double your budget, sometimes your search impression goes from 20 to 24%. It's not that much. So interesting. That's where I would say a search impression share is. Literally, am I showing up for all variables on the first page? Yeah, yeah. But what you really want to look at is what are the valuable search terms and search keywords that are overlapping commonly and how am I looking at those specifically? Because I don't want to have 100 search impression share on dog grooming near me. If nail clipping near me was what I was searching for. Yeah, because I don't want to, I don't want to match for that variant 100 of the time. So. Good. I don't want 100 search impression share on the close match you came up with. And that's why it's not really a linear metric. Yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

So it's, it's, it's a, it's an easy rationalization. Well, if I just double it, then I double my business. It's not, it's not linear.

[John]

No, it's never linear. I actually have never actually seen it be linear. And people assume it is. No, never. You know what's funny is I'm just going to do this for fun. I'm just going to share screen on an account and we're just going to grab an account. Okay, let's.

[Ralph Burns]

Because I've seen you get 90% impression share on some Google Ads. I know we've done an ad lab in here where you've gotten like super, super, super high. I believe it was like that RV customer that we had. Like, you're getting a really, really high share of impressions for specific keywords.

[John]

Yeah. And so like I just do like March, April, May, June, July compared to previous period. Like. Yeah, but you, you can. But sometimes it's like, do I want a specific market penetration on a specific group?

[Ralph Burns]

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[John]

So like this campaign here went up 78% in ad spend. It went from basically 100 grand to 190,000. Let me just turn up all the segmentation because you also need to see the quality imports and all the other crap. But this one here, if I just look at my impression column and say I don't even know if I use Search impression. Oh, that's desktop. I don't even know if I really, I don't use search impression share, actually. It's not a metric I, I track, which is kind of fun, how much.

[Ralph Burns]

You actually do it.

[John]

I'm like, I really don't. Because it's just, it's. Yeah. So I went, you are the best.

[Ralph Burns]

You are, by the way. You are the best Google guy on the planet. I know you become a meta guy, but you're still the best Google guy on the planet.

[John]

So there.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah.

[John]

All right, ready? Cost Search Impression share. I'm going to increase my estimate 78%. Congratulations. You lost 35% search impression share.

[Ralph Burns]

Damn it.

[John]

All right. I went up 80%. You only lost seven. Damn it. You know why? I did this on purpose and I purposely utilized a time period where this would, quote, unquote, not work. Why? Well, I chose an outdoor kitchen company during the time of our peak season. March, June, July. Now I compare that to our off season of September and October and November. December, January, February. So these two time periods are my busy season versus my non busy season. Well, what happens to the busy season of users? The user pool goes from small to much larger. My ad spend went from small to kind of bigger. So it used to be I used to do this. Actually. I'll, I'll, I'll do this in a little. I'll pull up paint. This would be a lot easier. So let's do this. If your search impression share is now based on simply just eligibility. So if you have a. This is who I'm going after, and this is who I could go after. Okay. This means that you have a 10%, you know, search is. Okay, so I'll make this a little bit clear. You have a 10% search is now let's just say that this all of a sudden just starts to grow really, really big right here and now I am this big in here. Well, I still have a 10% search, is why. Well, the availability that I can show up what I'm eligible for grew twice as much. I tripled my budget. See the size of the small circle, the big circle, that's three times as much spend. We see the available audience. Yeah. The small circle, the big circle also tripled. So your search impression share stayed flat upon you tripling your budget because there was more demand and your supply increased at the same rate.

[Ralph Burns]

Okay, got it. So Google is just, Google figures all this stuff out.

[John]

Yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

Like, if it was that easy, like everybody would just be crushing it on Google Ads because they're like, oh, I've got 10 impression share. I'm just going to double my budget and Now I got 20% magically. It's not quite that easy. It's not like, you know, you're going to the ATM and you're putting in your card and you're saying give me 100 bucks. It's going to give you 100 bucks. Every single time you say give me 200 bucks. As long as you have enough money in the account. It's not like that.

[John]

You want to have more brain damage? Watch how, watch how stupid this thing actually gets too. Now if we can take this one small step further and give you a really, really massive amount of brain damage. There is two groups of people and these group of people over here say, should I shave my dog? All right, this one is dog groomers near me. All right. And now this is my, my key word I'm going after is dog grooming. So services. I'm just going to use a bad one. Now a high CPC bid is going to get these people why more competitive but also smaller audience. A low CPC bid is going to go over here because there's not a lot of people bidding but there's everyone asking Google and chat GPT random questions. No one bidding on solo cpc. So by taking my ad spend like hey you know what if I start to switch over to manual CPC and I bid less for these keywords, I seem like I, I, I get more searches. Yes. Of lower quality than no one bid on and it goes to left. So you're technically you can keep your ad spend the same. Drop your CPC and your SE impression share can explode because you're actually getting the larger amount of random searches and everyone else is taking your buyers.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah.

[John]

So it's all about relativity.

[Ralph Burns]

So in that case. So that's the reason why in the analysis when you looked at that you're like, yeah, the Google Ads are fine.

[John]

Like I was looking at a search refresher day.

[Ralph Burns]

You're like, you're like that's fine. What you really need to do is you need to do creative diversification over on Meta Andromeda.

[John]

Yeah. By region feeder. Yeah, exactly. By reader. You need to understand what, how much money you're spending and how much you're actually being able to attribute in a location to know can I scale that location and what's the seasonality of that location year over year so we can plan pre quarters. Exactly. Right.

[Ralph Burns]

Makes a whole lot of sense.

[John]

Yeah. Cool.

[Ralph Burns]

We have to keep repeating this over and over again. By the way, because people still don't get this. So if you feel like you're repeating yourself, don't worry about it. Because they didn't hear the, they didn't hear the first 19 times you said it.

[John]

I've been doing this for about 10 years and how many times you heard me say the word NCAC and roas. Oh my God. All right, so quick update. This is fantastic, fantastic stuff. And updated. We have two little overlapping updates between Hook rate and feeder. It's, it's coming together. It's amazing. So we did a couple things. Hook, rate, feeder. First thing we're going to talk about.

[Ralph Burns]

Is only like last Friday, by the way. So this is like an update of an update.

[John]

Yeah. And this is actually, if we look at this is just going to be the last seven day update, actually, which is kind of cool color.

[Ralph Burns]

So just tell people what you're doing here. Just if they missed last week's show.

[John]

Just exactly right.

[Ralph Burns]

Review. Yeah.

[John]

So we developed feeder strategy. Now, feeder strategy for Google, people have seen before. It's a way to use standard shopping and Performance Max to have the two compete with and talk with each other in order for us to steer a more powerful larger campaign that can vary off the rails called performance Max. Because it's a black box and you have no control. Feeder strategy allows you to use external campaigns in order to drive more people to the tag slash pixel in order to manipulate the larger amount of spend into a specific direction. So think of it like you have a room full of people and there's 50 people in that room and you're talking about glass jars, okay? And so I say, hey, 50 people. I have glass jars. And these glass jars are amazing. And the 50 people are like, wow, we love your glass jars. And I'm just talking to this here and I'm like, you know what I really want to talk about? You know my, my other glass jar called lemonade. I don't know if people are interested in lemonade, but people like glass jars and water. So how the hell do I take these 50 people that are just interested in this and be like, have you seen this? How do I sell other products with Andromeda when Aspen is dictating and creative is dictating what people are seeing on.

[Ralph Burns]

Your computer, will you show's over.

[John]

If you see this slip out of my hand, green goes black. You'll know that I just messed everything up. But so we basically say, okay, this is what Meta wants to spend on. We said, well, what if we start an external campaign and we start bringing people in this way. So now I have someone out in, in the show right now as I'm speaking to my 50 people, bringing in people that are like, hey John, these people are interested in lemonade. Like, oh, okay, great. Maybe about 10% of my speech is going to be about lemonade because 10% of the people that just joined want lemonade. And so now I'm using feeder, which is the dude out in the hall grabbing people that are lemonade and saying, you got to hear the speech. That's exactly how this works in a humanistic variable. So meta is the pixel, which is the room. Us advertisers using creative fill the room with people are interested in whatever creative they're clicking on. You bring in new diversified creative, grow the room, which is ad spend. And those people are. Now we have two products that we're selling and we can grow them by pulling these levers on feeders. Right? So the cool part about this is we said, well, let's test this a few different ways. So we did do two separate individual tests and I wanted to share. Share showcase you these tests because this is actually like pretty definitive. So first thing, this is our joint campaign. In the last seven days, what we said is we want to add in ad spend into our joint product. So we raised it up 413%. Went from $1,300 in. Oops, sorry, one second. See things getting overlapped.

[Ralph Burns]

Sorry everyone, real quick.

[John]

I am stuck in my chair, in my head. There we go.

[Ralph Burns]

I had to change out your headphones last week.

[John]

I know. I have this gigantic cord that just gets wrapped around things. Okay, so we said we're going to increase our ad spend by, by 413%. We went from 1300 dollars to 7000. So let's just put that on the calculator real quick. We're saying, okay, we added 5,704. Perfect. We're going to set that off to the side. Now I have another column over here that I'm going to add. And the column that I did have before that ended up going away is called joint new customers. So the joint new customers is right here. And I said if I add in ad spend to the feeder, my main campaign that has joint products in there and also has better attribution than this one. This feeder runs on 7 day click the all products runs on 7 day click. One day view, one day engage view. Why? Because this one has higher ad spend. Has the ads. So if I bring anybody into the room, this campaign's Going to start talking to them. That's how that works. And so if it starts talking to them, I want them to know that they're right. So I allow the attribution to go there. I'm just leveraging the way the algorithm works. So he said, okay, the main campaign here has had 1% change in spend. This one increased by 400%. So we look over to the side and we see we have 118% more new customers. Where are they coming from? Well, it looks like my feeder campaign brought in 15 and then my main campaign brought in another 13.

[Ralph Burns]

Perfect.

[John]

Exactly what I want. I don't care where they land. I just want them both to equal 118% more. Okay, so let's pause there and just validate. Let's just verify. So in the same time period, let's go last seven days here, which is not including the previous period. And then we're going to compare that to the past previous period. Last seven days. Remember, we added $5,700 to joint. So we move that off to the side. And let's go down to our joint products. We don't sell a lot of products here, as you can tell, and we're only marketing on meta, which is why it's controlled. There's my joint, and my joint went from 35 up to 59. Okay, so let's throw that now on the calculator. So if we have 59 down to 35. 59 minus 35, whoops. We have 24 incremental for 5704. So let's divide the 5704 divided by 24, they come in at $237. So $237 for a new customer. Well, if I go to my media tracker, which tells me what I am spending on per customer right now, that 235 is below the average of 315. Excellent. So now I'm bringing in more new customers at a cheaper cost than my main immunity product. And we're doing this with feeder. Now let's go over to the. This is my joint right here. My. My joint product. And let's go to like the last, you know, let's go to the last 30 days. Okay, so because I also want sales, but also want subscribers. Sure. Last 30 days of my joint product. And we launched the or, we scaled up the joint campaign on the 10th or like right before the 10th because we cranked it up right then thereafter. But around the 10th, the joint here. So we have this kind of move up here. We got the plateau. Plateau, Plateau, Plateau. Here comes the 10th. There's my new subscribers. Went from basically 395 up. Excellent. So we see a nice little blip up there. Okay, so let's say we did this and that was in the joint. Now let's do this. What about our digestive? We ran a Digestive feeder before, and we ran it for a specific time between November 16 and December 6. We've tried this before, but we thought it failed because we're looking at this incorrectly. So in our digestive feeder between November 16 and December 6, where we paused this, we have to look at our digestive here. Well, that is November 18th, right there. We started the. The joint. No, we started the digestive feeder on November 16th. November 16th is right there. Here. And then we ended it on the 6th, which is here. So what's nice about this is we were running at a plateau. Started here, ended here. So we have plateau horizontal line, kind of a plateau with a little blip up at the end. Okay. So not only have we seen this inside of Meta, inside the feeder. Exactly as we want. Inside the top line. Measuring my new customers in Shopify and inside of our tracker with all of our new subscribers. I don't know any other way to.

[Ralph Burns]

Showcase that this works in December 7th onwards. Like, no more feeders paid. Paid cert. I mean, sorry, no more feeder paid ads. You stop them entirely on the Digestive.

[John]

Because we switched over to joint to say, can we. Can we see the Digestive stop? And can we see the joint pick up? And that's exactly what we saw. It went on plateau rising, pause at plateau. The other one went for plateau turn on rising at. I mean, it's basically. We have our levers now.

[Ralph Burns]

It's basically just a full correlation.

[John]

It's a plug and play.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah.

[John]

It sells products on command.

[Ralph Burns]

It literally. It almost changes like the day after you launch the campaign. I mean, that's. That's incredible.

[John]

It's interesting how there is a little bit of time lag. We noticed. And it's not a day, though. Well, it's. This is the 16th. When we started, we got like one.

[Ralph Burns]

Oh, okay. Right, right, right. Yeah, Here. A couple of days down, then all of a sudden, boom.

[John]

Yep. Just kick. Here's. Here's the issue is this line is actually fighting a push and pull. So the blue is our new subscribers and the reds, all of our cancellations. So this may kind of waffle a little bit if we brought some new ones. And then it got smoked here. So that's the reason why there's a little bit of a dip. But then we were able to attribute much more new than returning which just kept this thing looking like the SP 500 on a Mac review. It just goes up.

[Ralph Burns]

Well, I mean even like after you stopped spend it's still, it's still on an upward kind of sort of trajectory. I mean that 339 to 351, I mean it's not. I don't know if that's clinically relevant but. Or statistically significant I guess is the question.

[John]

Right? Is this thing kind of moves sideways and all of a sudden it's like hey, why is it moving up over here? Like this is kind of weird all of a sudden it started again in this time period here. We actually backed that now to our third feeder test and this thing is going to be really, really cool. We actually have something called a CPL cpl. We've actually started to market the CPL inside of here and the CPL is our three pack. So hey, do you like our immunity product? Now you can get Immunity Joint and Digestive all at the same time. Once we started pushing those, we noticed that this plateau started to increase again because those products are in our campaign. So our third and final test is going to be we have our immune product and that is fantastic. We tried joint, we can scale joint, we tried Digestive, we can do Digestive. We then tried all three and all of a sudden all three works. So now we're going to have a main campaign that primarily sells immune and then we're going to have a feeder of our three pack.

[Ralph Burns]

Hey, real quick. If you're looking to get your brand in front of growth minded marketers, CMOs, directors of marketing and agency owners, or we're opening up our sponsorship spots for Q1 and Q2 of next year, get in front of a quarter of a million marketers every single month at Perpetual Traffic. All you have to do is head on over to perpetual traffic.com for the details or check out the link in the show notes to apply.

[John]

So you like this product? Have you seen or tried the other three? Like now we're going to see. Can we just scale everything at once with two campaigns? That's the next. If we can do all products scale at the same time, that's going to be gold.

[Ralph Burns]

Well plus your average order value is going to increase too because they're buying three all at once.

[John]

Exactly. NCAC target increase and the LTV will also increase.

[Ralph Burns]

Absolutely.

[John]

Yes, yes, yes.

[Ralph Burns]

I didn't realize, I didn't realize. You had a three pack on that one.

[John]

Yeah. That's pretty cool.

[Ralph Burns]

Like each one of the. What is it? It's Immune.

[John]

It's digestive immune and a joint.

[Ralph Burns]

Joint. Okay, so those are the three and the Immune is the one that's like the flagship.

[John]

Exactly right.

[Ralph Burns]

And it's the other ones that you're trying to get, you know, get some momentum going to obviously get new customers. Not just on Immune, but the business goal here, like we mentioned last week's show, is to get subscribers on all of the products, therefore making you as a business that much more attractive and valuable from a valuation standpoint for a potential takeover at some point in time. And buy out where you're going to be buying brand new plaid shirts all the time.

[John]

Exactly.

[Ralph Burns]

Getting new headphones.

[John]

So I know I got new ones, but that's. That's right. Like this three pack here. Like this. This solves for a lot of issues. Like, I'm only selling X and meta, like for the people that are like, wow, my meta campaigns seem to sell a lot of X product. How do I get it to sell anything else? This is the answer. And it's going to evolve and continually change, adapt and modify. We have like three more tests we're going to run. But I mean, I don't see anybody else being able to even understand yet. Control and leverage Andromeda as fast as we can. Like, this shit is. This is fantastic.

[Ralph Burns]

This is so cool. Because I love the three pack, right? Because the AOV is just killer. Because now I don't know if you figured out like what your new NCAC is on that three pack.

[John]

Like. Yeah. Or what it needs to be.

[Ralph Burns]

I would imagine it's higher than 210, 250 and around that range. Right.

[John]

It's unknown at this point because we didn't really understand which campaigns were using the 3PL. Like, it was kind of like our leftover. We only had six ads kind of thing running. So they're always just kind of of a bunch part of catchalls everywhere. But all of a sudden, as soon as we saw spend starting to increase on it, then we see everything starting to increase. We're like, holy crap, what if we have a letter lever for product A, product B, product C, and all of the above. Like, you can't ask for anything more. It's literally like, what do you want to sell? Well, sell more three packs. We crank it up. Like it's. It's pretty, pretty simplistic.

[Ralph Burns]

And that's on recharge too. Are the three Packs on a recharge. Yes, sir, they are.

[John]

Okay. Yep. Yeah, that are showcased individually, but they are on a recharge. Yeah, got it. So check this out. This is something I thought was really unique. When we look at the hook rate. Remember when we talked about the importance of hook rate?

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah.

[John]

Well, in the previous strategy that we ran the previous hook. Right.

[Ralph Burns]

Just if you weren't on last week, hook rate is you stick around for longer than 3 seconds to read the ad. Oftentimes it comes with a click and all these other sorts of things. So anyway.

[John]

Exactly. Right. It basically is the amount of impressions divided by the people that saw more than three seconds of that video. That's how much hook rate is. So 37 hook rates means 1 out of 3 people stop and watch it longer than 3 seconds. Now remember what I was saying? Like hook rate deems everything, everything is now spending on hook rate.

[Ralph Burns]

Right.

[John]

Meta wants 2/3 of your video or 2/3 of your creator be in video format. You have your reels, your stats and your videos and your videos and your reels should be like 16 by 9 format. I forgot what it was. Or 9 by 16, I forget where. 9 by 16. 9 by 16. So you got their videos and you got your reels 9 x 16. Then you have your statics. But you want a hi fi lo fi. But still you have to have 2/3 video. We understand 2/3 video now because after examining all the metrics that deemed to control spend the most hook rate was the highest indicator of success. So when you see this descending again, you can see half my spend on product. On product A. Typically it's like, oh no, this one's spending half the spend.

[Ralph Burns]

Pause it.

[John]

Well, that one is getting 43 hook rate compared to literally everything else. So pause your best hooked ad for a less hooked ad. And that's why this doesn't work anymore. It's because we pause what works spend. It dictates all hook rate dictates spend. Cool. So now that we know that we're leveraging it. But check this out. We knew that our joint had a good video in there. It worked. Sorry. We worked well with the previous feeder. We tried it with this feeder. It failed miserably. And that's when we, that's when we said, okay, hook rate. So this last feeder that we're running, this is the best hook rate. We made a concerted effort and this hook rate is the best. And it's also beating the NCAC in this all product campaign we're spending half mil on. Because this Hook rate sucks. So yes, hook rate is going to be something important. So how do we get better hook rates? How do we test hook rates in Andromeda without screwing up half million dollars worth of campaigns? Last week I said we're going to be testing something. I think you actually came to the idea before I could present it, which is what about boosted posts? That was, that was yours at. Yeah. So the boosted post. So I said we're going to test that. And we did. So we had a whole bunch of boosted posts, but only one had video in it. Look at that hook rate. Wow. We, we purposely for everyone that says AI videos are dub. I don't like AI videos. Well, we paid like $7 for this video and it was an AI video and so.

[Ralph Burns]

Oh, like there it is. It's one of the ten types of ads. AI Right there, John.

[John]

Exactly right. I remember when we found out that people really want to know stories about animals. Well, comfort starts from the inside. My 2 year old is peppier. She feels better. So we basically just started to have this little animated dancing thing with a puppy and we're just talking about all of our sophistication. So we're like, like, let's just test it out. It actually is working pretty well. I think people do like the animated puppy because we're going after dog owners and people really want to know why. Exactly. Like yeah, right. My two year old is pepier. Like, what is this? Like, so they. That we. That's how we hooked them. They want to know the story. 78 hook rate, 2% cost per view. Now will this actually average out into anything great when we start to focus on conversions? Who knows? But what we just said, boosted post. And if you're just alive on Wednesday, like this video, 8 out of 10 said yes, that's good enough for us to now throw it into the main campaign and say, let's see how this works. Let's see if this is something that is going to work well.

[Ralph Burns]

My only criticism of that is that you're getting video watchers as opposed to potentially converters. It'd be interesting to see if you put that in a conversion campaign because that's like video view through play. Right. So are you just getting people to watch the video? But then they're not never going to buy, even though you've got an insanely high hook rate.

[John]

That's. We're going to find out.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah, I guess we'll find out.

[John]

Yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah.

[John]

Because that's.

[Ralph Burns]

It's cool because you have tried that. So Long ago I had this great idea. I'm like, if we could get, just get people to watch videos. And we had hook. Like this is before hook. Right. We were doing it manually.

[John]

You probably just hook them.

[Ralph Burns]

We could just hook them, then we can sell them. But what we found is that all the people that were watching videos because we put on a video view campaign back then, which is video viewers but not converters.

[John]

Exactly right. And that's, that's kind of what we're seeing is like we may find out that if the video viewers are over 70, that may average out to a hook rate of 30. Like we don't know what that will, that will grade to when we take it from pixel of just happy people to like, these are our buyers. That's what we're going to find out. Which is exactly a test. Now, the hook rate being 80%. So far so good. How this equates. If we can identify a, a consistent static drop in percentile points when I switch from view to viewers to converters. And we know that there's a basis like it usually drops 30. Now we have a, we have a benchmark target for our hook rate on boosted posts. And it's only costing us five bucks to figure this out, which is great.

[Ralph Burns]

Which is cool, you know, but at least you're finding out like that's a, that's a video that you want to test. You want to put into a conversion campaign because it, it passed the sniff test on the video.

[John]

It cost us five bucks to get five reviews on it.

[Ralph Burns]

Five bucks. Which is about what you, what you spent to create it.

[John]

Apparently we do, we do animated videos and testing all for 10 bucks.

[Ralph Burns]

All their 10 bucks. That's pretty sick. I did notice, like you said this, you sort of dropped this along the way is that you want a certain percentage, especially with creat diversification. You want a lot of video. You want 60% ish. But last week, last Friday, wasn't really that long ago, you actually had a couple of posts or a couple of ads which were not video but were getting really insane hook rates because they were clicking to read more. So they had very high click through all.

[John]

Yep.

[Ralph Burns]

Yes. Click through all.

[John]

Yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

So have you changed your tune on that saying like you should? Because those seem to be very hooky and we're obviously working. And I believe they were in the feeder, the feeder campaign, if I'm not mistaken.

[John]

What's interesting about this whole thing and what also really sucks is that I also mentioned on the call last week and we Kind of also saw it in real life again yesterday, which is met as Andromeda wants this. They really want this here. Yeah. The reason why I said we want Two Thirds video is. Comes directly from. I can't draw on that. It's right here. It comes directly from meta. Yeah. So they say you want to have a video, a static and a real. Well, that's two videos that a static or 66% videos.

[Ralph Burns]

We're extrapolating here, but yeah, exactly. Probably about right.

[John]

Yep. And so when they. Because they wanted us to have the. The video formats in four different formats, kind of hi fi, lo fi treatment of a video static reel. So I was like, well, why are they asking for more video engagement than statics? Like, they made a concerted effort to build an entire page in the presentation about this and how they should be addressing. So it's like, well, okay, I understand this now. Why? Well, if video is a bigger factor to the algorithm of intent, then you want to have it stack the deck to what could be more intentful. So we said, well, if we're looking at just a campaign like our dog's joint NC or whatever it may be, and we sort descending by amount spent and we look at our hook right here, you can see that this is a video and then a static and then a video and a video, a static and a video and a static and then a static, static, static, static. So we had more statics than video. And then what ended up happening was it says thanks for your 34 ads where most of them are statics. But hey, you found a good video and it has a good hook rate. So you know what? Everything else from here on down is basically just going to kind of be ignored. Like, oh. So yes, if we take 10, and I have a better example, this I just can't show paste it because it's a company I didn't have permission to share. They did nine statics in one video and 90% of our spend is on the video because it has 33% hook rates. So if you have a good hook rate on a video, it kind of just screws up your statics. They're now just like, nice, nice to have remarketing reminders. But it's not driving conversions or growth or new customers or brand building or anything else. It's basically just like you like that video. Seen this picture, seen that picture, seen a picture. So we found out that yes, it makes Sense to have 66% of your creative inside of Metabeat video, because if one of those works, that's what's going to suck up. Even you can have 20% click the race be beat by 10 view rates, air hook rates. It's very strange. So that's what's weird is like the best hook rate, even if it sucks, is still better than the best click through rate of a static is what we're seeing so far.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah, definitely. And Meta is just telling us that. And you're seeing it obviously in the data and the data doesn't lie. Speaking of not lying, we know Thomas from Austria never lies, but he's been waiting very, very patiently here. We should probably get over to questions. That was awesome, by the way.

[John]

It's cool stuff, right?

[Ralph Burns]

This is pretty cool because we're going to. We're not. We're not going to be on Friday and probably the Friday after that because that's Boxing Day. I'm taking Boxing Day off.

[John]

There you go. We packed a good thing. We got a feeder. I mean we just told you how to like just scale your company for free. So we got a day off. Okay. We're going to. Yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

For the amount we get paid for this, you know. Absolutely.

[John]

Make sure take myself to get a dollar menu from McDonald's. That's what I'm banned from a day off. That's what.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah. You know, sell more content. Creative diversification packages which by the way, we only have one left.

[John]

All right.

[Ralph Burns]

Hope you enjoyed this week's show and some of the insights there. We're going to continue to follow up on. Obviously the feeder strategy is an evolving strategy that we're using right now, especially in the E commerce space. We're testing it there right now, but very eager to see some results on the services space which we're testing as well. And of course for any of this stuff, if you don't want to do it yourself, you want us to do it. You want to get 30 plus creatives every single month. You want to get professional media buying that knows exactly how to deploy these strategies that we talk about with John every single week and obviously on the show as well. Head on over to tier11.com apply, fill out the form and we'd be happy to talk to you about how we can help you scale and grow your business in 2026 and beyond. Of course, where you listen to podcasts, we'd love a rating and or review lets us get out to a broader audience, teach people how to do this stuff the right way with metrics that matter and growth that scales. Cutting edge technologies like we're talking about here today with Meta, Andromeda. No one else is talking about this and no one else has tested as much money on this up to about $40 million, $50 million. And John have to do the the accounting on that. And we're testing it on our own accounts before we tested on tier 11 clients. And now we have figured out exactly how to get this really working to scale in 2026. Which is the reason why we feel that Meta is the best ad platform on the planet in 2026 and beyond. So of course leave a rating and review if you find this stuff helpful. Wherever you listen podcasts and until next show, see ya. You've been listening to Perpetual Traffic.