Your CAC Is Lying to You — Here's the Number That Isn't

Summary

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Perpetual Traffic Podcast

Episode: Your CAC Is Lying to You — Here's the Number That Isn't
Hosts: Lauren Petrullo (Mongoose Media), Roland Frasier (Tier 11), Kenny
Date: March 17, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Perpetual Traffic delivers a candid, in-depth discussion about the reliability of Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) as a marketing metric. The hosts challenge the overreliance on in-platform reporting, especially from platforms like Meta (formerly Facebook), and debate what metrics marketers should trust as their "source of truth." Listeners are guided through the tangled web of attribution, cross-platform reconciliation, audience definitions, and the practical realities (and vulnerabilities) of reporting new vs. returning customers.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Problem with CAC and Attribution “Truth”

• CAC is the centerpiece for many marketing teams, but the episode questions its true reliability.
• Marketers often feel “blind” about which source of customer data to trust: ad platform dashboards, CRM, Shopify, or external data tools.
• Lauren: Describes the struggle: “I haven't spent a full week deep diving and full reconciliation of... if Meta is telling me that I have 80 new customers and 34 returning customers...going in a per order basis in Shopify or a CRM to match the validity of it.” (06:17)

2. The Practical Limits of Perfect Data

• Lauren admits that, while she performs fact-checks, she is forced to pick a “source of truth” due to time and resource constraints—not because it's scientifically perfect.
• She emphasizes assigning definitions to new, returning, and engaged customers inside platforms, but recognizes most ad accounts fail to set these essential audience definitions.
• Quote: “There is a point of no return...I have to assign a source of truth and accept that...because I am not a data scientist.” (07:05)

3. The Fault Lines in Platform Reporting

• Meta’s audience exclusions and definitions: Even with proper exclusions, ads are still shown to customers you explicitly try to omit—a known limitation in many ad platforms.
  • “You can say exclude customers and you know that you're still getting existing customers.” (08:55)
• There are advanced settings (ad account vs. advertising settings) which control the strictness of audience exclusions (important for legal age/country restrictions). Many marketers conflate targeting with audience definition, leading to misleading reports.

4. How to Assign and Use Audience Definitions in Meta

• Lauren gives a step-by-step on setting up audience definitions for more reliable in-platform segmentation:
  1. Go to “advertising settings” in Meta Ads Manager.
  2. Define “engaged customers” by uploading subscriber lists—“flag on the moon, these suckers are mine.” (14:13)
  3. Use campaign breakdowns (Sales > Demographics > Audience) to see where budget/conversions go (new, engaged, existing).
  4. Assign high-value/low-value audiences, and even upload “disqualified leads” (leads who haven’t purchased in 360 days).
• Roland: “If a client did want to know, okay, well, how many new customers did I get this week? You can point to that section within Meta.” (15:27)

5. Confidence in the Numbers: Never 100%

• Both agree that in-app reporting (Meta, Shopify, Google Analytics) has limitations—Lauren estimates her confidence at 70-80% for Meta, well short of Roland’s desired 99%.
• Lauren’s perspective: “At some point, I have to choose something that I can rely on so that I can continue to drive the numbers that matter.” (16:21)
• The resources needed for iron-clad tracking often outweigh the marginal gains for most agencies/brands.

6. What to Do If You Want Higher Certainty

• The Tier 11 “Data Suite” and tools like Wicked Reports can get closer to a true 99% match, but these require significant investment and cross-platform integrations.
• For most, the practical path is:
  • Set up correct audience definitions, exclusions, and event tracking in Meta.
  • Cross-validate with Google Analytics (GA4) and a Looker Studio dashboard if possible.
  • Use Shopify/CRM as a backend source of truth when privacy and access allow.
  • Lauren: “The real source of truth-ish could be if you go into the CRM...but that's a lot of sensitive data.” (28:09)

7. The Human Element and Trust

• At the end of the day, marketers need to accept a certain margin of error, relying on best practices rather than pursuing absolute certainty.
• Lauren’s vulnerability in admitting she doesn’t triple-audit every number serves as an important reminder of the realities of agency life.
• Roland: “I just want to be able to go into a dashboard and say this is how many we got, this is how many returning, this is how many new. And with a very high degree of confidence, I know that data is accurate. That's all.” (22:43)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Lauren on the “source of truth” struggle:
  “There is a point of no return or no rabbit hole digging where I accept that I have to assign a source of truth and accept that as the source of truth because I am not a data scientist.” (06:13)
• On Meta exclusions not being airtight:
  “You can say exclude customers and you know that you're still getting existing customers... It's a known truth in targeting.” (08:55)
• On data reconciliation limits:
  “I have to at some point choose something that I can rely on so that I can continue to drive the numbers that matter.” (16:21)
• Lauren’s definition hierarchy:
  “When I do, when I go outside of that I'm in campaigns, I click on breakdown and I can go to demographics and then I choose audience and then I can see it breaks down on only sales campaigns.” (14:19)
• Data confidence gap:
  Roland: “What's a high degree of confidence for you?”
  Lauren: “I feel confident to 80%, 70 to 80%... But the other piece to it is like... I just, I don't have the time and energy and focus or I haven't put resources to it to check it.” (16:21)
• On the impossible ideal:
  Roland: “I just want to be able to go into a dashboard and say this is how many we got, this is how many returning, this is how many new. And with a very high degree of confidence, I know that data is accurate. That's all.” (22:43)

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Key Segment Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment Description | |-----------|--------------------| | 01:06 | The reliability of CAC and customer reporting comes into question | | 06:13 | Lauren on resource limitations & selecting a practical “source of truth” | | 08:55 | Meta audience exclusions – why reporting isn’t perfect | | 14:13 | Step-by-step: How Lauren sets up audience definitions in Meta | | 15:27 | Using Meta’s campaign breakdowns to report on new vs. returning customers | | 16:21 | Confidence levels in data — 70-80% vs. 99% | | 24:46 | Importance of explicitly defining the purchase event in audience settings | | 28:09 | The real “source of truth” is the CRM—and the privacy/trust implications |

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Actionable Takeaways

• Audit and Assign: If you aren’t manually defining “customer,” “engaged,” and “lead” audiences in your ad platform settings, do so now for more reliable reporting.
• Validate, But Accept Imperfection: Use Google Analytics, Looker Studio, and your CRM or Shopify data to cross-check numbers—while understanding there will always be a margin of error.
• Set Realistic Expectations: Understand that reaching data perfection requires immense resources. Accept directionally correct data and use it to drive decisions, rather than getting lost in the reconciliation rabbit hole.

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Tone & Style

The episode is lively, a little irreverent, and deeply honest about the daily pratfalls and compromises of digital marketing. The hosts blend tactical advice (step-by-step guides) with practical hard truths (“I have to assume the data”), all in their banter-heavy style.

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For Further Resources

• PerpetualTraffic.com – For episode downloads and tools mentioned.
• Look up “Audience Definitions” in Meta Ads Manager help.
• Consult the Tier 11 Data Suite or Wicked Reports for advanced attribution needs.

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End of Summary

Transcript

[Kenny]

Hey, before we get into today's show, my marketing manager finally convinced me to run a wild experiment in this episode because he wanted to prove what the conversion engine can do for your brand. So we are giving away three of our $10,000 deep dive audits for free in this audit. And this isn't one of those audits that you get from some AI generated bot. This actually takes us two plus weeks, seven or eight of our team members and it is incredibly in depth. It will give you insights into your media buying, your creative, your actual business metrics and find out exactly where the gaps are and where your growth is stalled and what we can do about it or what you can do about it when you get the audit. Now here's the catch. We only have three spots so head on over to tier11.com audit right now. Fill out the form and let's see how we can scale your business in the coming year.

[Roland]

How do you actually know that your numbers aren't lying to you? How many new customers are we actually

[Kenny]

acquiring and how much we are paying

[Roland]

to acquire those customers?

[Kenny]

And oftentimes we have found that CAC

[Roland]

number Customer Acquisition Cost I haven't spent

[Lauren Evatrulo]

a full week deep diving in full reconciliation of okay, if Meta is telling me that I have 85 new customers and 34 returning customers yesterday and going in a per order basis in Shopify or a per order basis inside of a CRM to match the validity of it. So I don't have a preponderance of proof. Implicitly you're listening to Perpetual Traffic.

[Roland]

Hey, real quick.

[Kenny]

If you're looking to get your brand in front of growth minded marketers, CMOs, directors of marketing and agency owners, we're opening up our sponsorship spots for Q1 and Q2. 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 perpetualtraffic.com for the details or check out the link in the show Notes to apply hello and welcome

[Lauren Evatrulo]

to the Pink Perpetual Traffic Podcast. I am your host, the Barbie Lauren Evatrulo, alongside my fluffy pink microphone, Ken.

[Kenny]

This is Ken co host Ken co

[Lauren Evatrulo]

host Ken, wasn't there a term in the Barbie movie where you were like,

[Roland]

I haven't seen it.

[Kenny]

Jen hasn't even seen it.

[Roland]

Can you believe that? I can't believe I haven't seen that movie yet. But you haven't seen a lot of movies that I really like.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

Yeah, but I watch good movies.

[Roland]

Yeah, you haven't watched Landman yet.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

I Watched the trailer yesterday. I'm watching Shrinking season three and that's occupying my TV time at the moment.

[Roland]

I've lost interest.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

Look, I've had a hundred books to read in 20, 26. I want you right now.

[Roland]

Well, as you can guess, here we are live in Orlando. It's the only place in the world I would be using a pink microphone.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

That's not true. He loves it. He's going to buy one himself.

[Roland]

Yeah, you've got like the cooler microphone over there. It looks like the raspberry sherbet microphone sort of ice cream cone.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

It's like a glinda magical wand.

[Roland]

That's right.

[Kenny]

Just don't hit anybody with it.

[Roland]

We are going to be talking some interesting stuff here today in Orlando. It's about 43 degrees inside the place that we're at, which is actually colder than Boston.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

I am so cold in this room.

[Kenny]

It's so cold.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

I went to Paul earlier in this office and I was like, I'm sorry. I'm like, I'm freezing. I'm coming up with the worst creative ideas I've ever had. Yeah, I was like, I'm distracted with my

[Roland]

teeth chattering. Yeah. I was actually out on the front deck. There's a front deck that overlooks what street is Church Street. Church street is very, very cool. I spent like half my day working out there. I think it's orange actually outside it's, you know, it's 70 degrees of a lot warmer than it is back in Boston.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

That's cold for Orlando.

[Kenny]

Yeah.

[Roland]

71. You might have to put on what, a windbreaker?

[Lauren Evatrulo]

I'm wearing pants. Like, I'm wearing long pants.

[Roland]

Yeah, it's. It's tough for you guys here.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

This is short weather.

[Roland]

I know, I know. Probably like overdressed.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

No. You're appropriately dressed for AC In Orlando.

[Kenny]

Actually, I, I should have brought my

[Roland]

winter coat for in here.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

Like, do you see my fingers are turning blue?

[Kenny]

I think it's like I actually started

[Roland]

to get numb earlier today. So anyway, we're going to be talking about some interesting things today that you and I don't know if we necessarily agree.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

I feel like this episode's coming for my credibility.

[Roland]

So I. We've discussed this many times here on the show and the numbers that you get inside your platforms and your outside platform. I'm just going to say that right now, whether it's a third party tool that you may or may not use. We use the Tier 11 data suite. But if you don't have Tier 11 data suite, how do you actually know that your numbers aren't lying to you? And the big number. And this is obviously, this is a very important number for both of our businesses and for all of our clients and for anybody who's doing this digital marketing stuff. So if you're a vp, a marketing director of marketing, are you going to do that with your microphone the entire time?

[Kenny]

This is the stuff that probably you're

[Roland]

holding your team and or your agency, which is how many new customers are we actually acquiring and how much we are paying to acquire those customers.

[Kenny]

And oftentimes we have found that that

[Roland]

CAC number customer acquisition cost.

[Kenny]

I know that would get Lauren starting

[Roland]

grin because it's late the day here. Why are we recording late the day every day? Because we're all like punchy like the last couple of episodes, four or five.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

Well, today was like back to back to back to back to back to back. Tomorrow morning though.

[Roland]

Tomorrow morning. That's good. That's true. We're going to be doing that tomorrow anyway. So your CAC figure is trying to

[Kenny]

giggle or your NCAC figures.

[Roland]

Where do you find the source of truth and how do you know whether

[Kenny]

or not all these brilliant laurentrulo marketing

[Roland]

ideas from your creative team and everyone else?

[Lauren Evatrulo]

For me it's like, no, what you're

[Roland]

doing is actually making a difference in the business.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

Okay,

[Kenny]

I just want to know, I

[Lauren Evatrulo]

just want anyone that's listening to understand where this like these fighting words are coming from is because I have a level of how do I explain I don't know the amount of time that I spend in fact checking these sources that we're investing in or the tools that we're relying on is not the level of a data scientist. It's not the level of someone whose full time job is. Let me make sure that in the audience definitions inside of Meta that the new customer percentages within triple whale that the Shopify numbers within Shopify are matching those things. Like I, there's a turning point that I have where I'm acknowledging and this is where you know, like I, I'm being hypervolent. I haven't spent a full week deep diving and full reconciliation of okay, if Meta is telling me that I have 80 new customers and 34 returning customers yesterday and going in a per order basis in Shopify or a per order basis inside of a CRM to match the validity of it. So I don't have a preponderance of proof to say I trust the numbers implicitly. But it's when I have to divide My resources and attention. There is a, there's a point of no return or no rabbit hole digging where I accept that I have to assign a source of truth and accept that as the source of truth because I am not a data scientist. That's saying I know with absolute certainty that my audience definitions of new, engaged and existing customers is correct. While it's relatively new, you know, like a year and some change, it's still something I don't see. In 90 plus percent of ad accounts that I look at, people aren't doing audience definitions. And even if you're listening to this and you're hearing this and you're like, oh, you do audience definitions. Unless you're in advertising settings. No you don't. Because most people will think the numbers that I look at for new versus existing engaged audiences are based off of targeting. This has nothing to do with targeting. It's audience definition where you can do like customer lists, app activity, offline customer conversions, website lead form, like your limited restriction, like it's five options and you can engage in. It's like a 30 second process that most people don't do anyways because I set those up. I admit I haven't done the line by line check my data to confirm if meta's lying to me or not. I know in the audience targeting, when I exclude an audience, meta still goes after customers. This is something we've known. It's a known truth in targeting. You can say exclude customers and you know that you're still getting existing customers. Say you're perfect. Small world, you're only running one campaign on only one channel. It's the source of 90% of your business. And you see, you're like, why am I still going to it? You know the sentiment. And like the business owner has to take a level of ownership on the numbers too. Right. So they're saying like this is just, you know, I told you, don't resell to my existing customers. Like I'm excluding them from meta and meta's like so.

[Roland]

Sure you are.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

But then I can. I know. So we know. That's like a known thing.

[Roland]

So audio, you put in audience exclusions in an audience. It looks like I can talk.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

Yeah, whatever.

[Roland]

And they basically say, yeah, that's great, that's great data for us to probably like that and those people as well.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

There's some new things where then like now you can tell meta, like I'm asking you to be more strict. But again there's like advertising settings, there's ad account settings, there's advertising settings or you can do an agency we work with clients that are age sensitive products. Not I'm not saying oh, we have a preference for 65 plus audiences or a preference for the market of 35 to 45. I have products that are legally age restricted and the only way you can protect it to the highest degree that you can within meta, at least the to the degree that I understand it is you have to go into the ad account settings and then you have to say what is the age limit? Same as like you can say the country limit. Like if you cannot provide your services in France, for example, because France has some of the most marketing laws in all of Europe. I like actively avoid advertising in France. So I'll go into the ad account settings and and like say what are the countries we can do that is different than targeting.

[Roland]

Yes. So audience definitions explain that. I'm not actually looking for. I'm just curious because understanding new versus returning customers is the essence of because clients hire us to if it was all about returns, then yes, increasing lifetime value by getting them to buy over and over again. Product or it's a consumable product. I got that. We can do that. I look at that as that's the job of email plus retargeting, which is a whole secondary topic. But. But we're really talking about if you don't have exact numbers.

[Kenny]

Hey, one of the reasons why you're probably listening to this show is because you're trying to figure out how to finally scale and grow your business. And if you've been a longtime listener here, you understand that a lot of the things that we talk about are because we've tested them and done these exact strategies, including creative diversification, all the Andromeda changes, all the stuff we talk about, all with Google, with social, with email, website conversion, CRO, all of that stuff. If you're listening to this show, you're probably wanting some kind of deeper level of understanding of what does this all mean to you. Well, we want to prove that to you by giving away three of our $10,000 deep dive audits. In that audit, we'll look at your creative, your media buying, your campaign structure, your website, your actual business metrics, including all the NPIs that we talk about on this show all the time to discover where the gaps are and why your growth has stalled. Now, this isn't one of those AI audits that's automated. This takes our team about two weeks to put together and it's so comprehensive, it blows away customers like this. So here's the catch. We only have three spots to give away here. So head on over to tier11.com forward/audit to claim your spot. Right now fill out the form and let's see how we can scale and grow your business in the coming year.

[Roland]

Where is the best place? You know, at least you're not just sending out messaging, spending money on Campaign Target. The same people who have already bought prior hottie. What do you look at inside the platform? And then secondarily what do you look at inside? Maybe the CRM or the back end of E commerce business efforts.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

We'll go to Shopify. Okay, so in the front end I'm just going to speak to Mana specifically. So you go into advertising settings. It's got the like megaphone. So if you go to the hamburger menu and you're inside business ads Manager, the advertising menu, then you have like where events, tools and campaigns are. You click on advertising settings. So again the microphone, if it's I think ad account, there's ad account settings, there's business settings and then there's advertising settings. So there's three. It's one with the microphone and then you go into, there's like four boxes at least last time I looked at it. And you have like value rules, your engaged customers, your existing customers and then like one other piece like it's, it's where all that stuff lives in the definition setup. So if you go into engaged customers then you can create list and then you can upload your full subscriber list. You can add an additional optional which I like doing is you can upload so you upload your full, full subscriber list like meta. I've already claimed them, right flag on the moon, these suckers are mine.

[Roland]

Is that a do not sell to these people or. I've already claimed them.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

I've already claimed them. So when I do, when I go outside of that I'm in campaigns, I click on breakdown and I can go to demographics and then I choose audience and then I can see it breaks down on only sales campaigns. Sorry. I know. That's why I use complete registration for leads. But on your sales based campaigns you can see engage new new and existing customers. So it tells me where my budget is being distributed, where my conversions are being distributed.

[Roland]

What's your confidence level in that?

[Lauren Evatrulo]

Well, prior to this recording. Oops.

[Kenny]

Yeah, but again you learn stuff in this show too.

[Roland]

Anyway, I'm making you aware of something that I don't. Look, the reason why I'm asking this is because I feel somewhat spoiled that it's like, readily available at my fingertips. I don't have to go through 10 different clicks to find it on Meta. But I do think that one of the biggest questions that we always get is, all right, well, what's my new customer and how much am I paying to acquire those new customers? And if you have something at least directionally in app, because we always say don't trust the metrics that are in app. But you're talking about a deeper level of reporting for new versus returning. And if a client did want to know, okay, well, how many new customers did I get this week? You can point to that section within Meta. We're just talking about clicks or less and four clicks or less and then produce a report that would show with a moderate degree of confidence, a high degree of confidence that that data is that great. Because I know this is something that Meta has been really trying to improve on.

[Kenny]

So much so that it seems like

[Roland]

we get an email every other week from our partner manager on this very topic. So. And I just sort of set it aside because we look in other places, which I won't mention at this point. So but like, how does somebody differentiate that in four or five clicks? And if you've just explained, but your confidence level is 100%, meaning I never, never be 100%. Okay.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

I feel confident to 80%, 70 to 80%. Like, honestly. And it's. But the other piece to it is like, yes, it said, like we should do. You're not wrong. I just, I don't have the time and energy and focus or I haven't put resources to it to check it. Hey, Meta, to what degree are you saying what you're saying is true? Because that's just not been the business I'm in. It's like focusing on like, okay, with the data that I have. Let's make some assumptions. And I am. And like, I admit, like, it's a vulnerable piece because I haven't explored it. And that's why I'm like, oh, this is so uncomfortable. But, like, I have to at some point choose something that I can rely on so that I can continue to drive the numbers that matter. And you said, well, how. What do you compare it to? Is at the same time as the bank account? Like, what is the account growing? Is the client confident that we're investing more money in our paid ads initiatives because they see what's growing? You said earlier that for you, marketing really comes down to acquiring new customers? I. If you're watching YouTube and looking at our beautiful pink mites. Take a little issue with that because that's for me it's the role of a CMO to an extent. But when I think of marketing and advertising in general, you're buying attention and earning trust. And then when you're looking at the systematic, your marketing efforts are to lead to new customers. But I think it's too much emphasis on the ad alone because it's not taking into consideration the offer, the upsell pieces. It's not taking into mindfulness of what's happening with the your position in tam, what's going around in the global marketplace around you. Like last week was a bad week. There's a lot of things that were happening and we saw less activity. Super Bowl Sunday is always a lower day for sales unless you're in specific categories. And I know that to be true with like without an iota of a doubt because and when I worked at Disney, Disneyland, California, I don't know if it's still true. Disneyland California, their lowest attendance day is Super Bowl Sunday. So if you want to ride rides at California, you go Super Bowl Sunday because people are socializing on something else so they're not buying. And so in that parks and resorts capacity is like, oh shoot, how do I get someone's attention away from the TV? So anyways, all that, okay, that's 70, 80 confidence that I have. I've defined my definitions. I know that meta knows everything about us. Anyways, I'm just saying here's my flag, here's my existing customer. So I upload engaged audiences, I do my full subscriber list and then I do two additional options. I do my high quality leads and my disqualified leads. If you're a shopify store or if you're an E commerce thing, if you have a list of leads that you have grown from lead magnets or have done quizzes or they've signed up for something and they have not made a single purchase in 360 days, to me that's a disqualified lead. By lead I'm saying subscriber. If they have signed up for your ecosystem and then within a 365 day period did not make a purchase, that's a disqualified lead. And I can upload that full list into Meta and say here are my disqualified leads. Now I don't know what they do with that. It's still a definition. I can see engaged audiences idea what

[Roland]

they do with it.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

Sure.

[Roland]

Well, I'm going to try and target those people and match them with their own user id.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

And so I mean they're still listed as engaged because if I'm loading my whole list, I'm saying here's my engaged audiences. And then I do the high quality leads where it's like hey, if this is a subscriber and I've got proof of life. So I use proof of life and like this works for lead gen 2 where if they've click on an email or replied to an email, I have insight. I use high level as a trigger that statuses them as 1A active. It's shown proof of life. If I've got something that shows proof of life, I've got that list. And then I can say here's all of my subscribers that are not customers, all my subscribers that are high quality subscribers because they've shown me proof of life activity inside of my ecosystem and we can manually do it like we're legion. So we talk to them. So anyways, I defined those. Forget the options of like more enhanced because I'm like meta. I'm giving you more data. I'm, I am trusting. I get it. Like I've not seen documentation that does it. But I have to assume that it was built with intention. So I'm going to assume positive intent on that piece. You can be the pessimistic Boston person,

[Roland]

completely skeptical and pessimistic.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

Disney, the most magical place in the world.

[Roland]

I don't feel any magic when I'm here. Just feel sweaty when I go outside.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

My presence doesn't make you feel magical?

[Roland]

Well, you know, we really haven't even

[Kenny]

like talked about that.

[Roland]

Here we are like together finally. We're not, we're not arguing by the way. We're just looking at this.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

But it feels good.

[Roland]

But I definitely think that all you're, you're talking, that's great.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

But you can do it for awesomers too. There's an existing you upload customers. High value customers, low value customers.

[Roland]

What I'm trying to get to three ways you'd grow a business. Wait.

[Kenny]

My marketing manager finally convinced me to run a wild experiment in this episode. Because we want to prove what the conversion engine can do for your brand. We are giving away three of our ten thousand dollar deep dive audits for free.

[Roland]

We're going to look at your creative,

[Kenny]

your media, buying your actual business metrics to find exactly where your growth is stalled. This is two weeks of our best work. But we only have three spots. So go to tier11.com audit right now. Fill out the form and let's see how we can scale your business.

[Roland]

You get new customers, you get them to buy more, you get them to buy more often. There's no other way. Leads are a precursor, all of that. And preferably you're bringing in new customers all the time. And if you're bringing in new customers all the time and you're not losing the old ones, the business will grow exponentially. And I'm trying, what I'm trying to get to is, is there a way for us and anyone who's listening, who doesn't have tier 11 data suite or Wicked Report. So it sounds like a pitch, but I'm just like trying to understand what, where do you go to to make sure that you know what you're doing is actually making an impact on business? And I'm not trying to pick on Mongoose Media, I'm just trying to figure out like, how do you do it? And then you get like this back end.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

But you are picking up, you're picking up me because I haven't spent the time. You've invested millions of dollars into tier 11 data suite. I know that I have not invested that same level of resource into fact

[Roland]

checking meta, but I don't want to fact check it. I just want to be able to go into a dashboard and say this is how many we got, this is how many returning, this is how many new. And. And that's it. And with a very high degree of confidence, I know that data is accurate. That's all I will.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

What's a high degree of confidence for you?

[Roland]

It's like 99%.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

Okay, but see, again, like the amount of resources required to get that is something that's going to pull away from what I know is my zero. One day I would love to hire, engage someone that's doing it, but at the same time there's full companies that spend their whole time doing this and that's not the business I'm in. There's a tipping point for me where the amount of resources that I need to go to personally vet the tools that I'm using are doing what the tools are saying. Like I'm not in a tool auditing space. I can have preferences and I can say that this is where I'm doing it. But I have to at one point assume I have to assume the data.

[Roland]

Okay, let me ask you. This is if you're pulling reports and a customer asks you this question or a client asks like how many new customers, how many easy. What do you go?

[Lauren Evatrulo]

Okay, so one. I mean again, I'll go into Meta. I go into the sales campaigns.

[Roland]

Go into meta first.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

Well, yeah, because that's going to be. Assuming that's running out. Running, though. Yeah, assuming that we're running. I mean. Well, yeah, you're mostly running out. We're running out.

[Roland]

And now your clients, like, what's the mix? Is it mostly meta? Is it percent meta? Paid advertising?

[Lauren Evatrulo]

I mean, I don't think we have any clients that are not running ads on meta. Hola.

[Roland]

So meta first. Yeah.

[Kenny]

Why would you have to think.

[Roland]

I think I know what the answer is, so.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

Well, yeah, because it's. So that's the space that I know the best too.

[Roland]

Like, yes, you're very meta heavy. Very.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

That platform for sure. For sure. But.

[Roland]

So that would be the first place you would go.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

Yeah.

[Kenny]

Because that's to think you're like sitting here.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

I was like, I. Because I don't live in absolutes and I don't want to say absolutely everyone. So I'm like going through this.

[Roland]

I'm like, well, maybe there's some email clients in there, right?

[Lauren Evatrulo]

No, we have email clients. Yeah. But like it's still. They're all running ads on meta. Okay. So all I get so nervous of saying in absolutes, I believe. Listen, though, I can't think of anyone. And if you're not running ads on meta, there's small campaigns you should place.

[Roland]

You go meta.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

That's the place I know the best. So I go into meta assuming that they have their audience definitions and if they not, I'm like, who am I yelling at? Definitions. Tell advertising settings. You go into that. You have to define your audience definitions. You don't have them automatically. You tell meta. There's like. So let's do the customer version. You go into audience settings and then if you have a purchase pixel on your website, you have to define. I know, it's so stupid. I have to tell meta. Anyone that accesses the purchase pixel is a customer of mine. The purchase meta pixel. I have to tell meta the purchase meta pixel is a customer. If I don't. It's not defined. So I'm saying because people may be like, oh, I've seen people put the purchase pixel on cart page. Oh my God. Sorry. I'm getting aggressive. Like what?

[Roland]

In person podcast.

[Kenny]

Because you're angry.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

I'm angry.

[Roland]

Can feel it.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

You're a beauty woman.

[Roland]

It's not just a microphone.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

This is getting hated anyways. The audience definitions and the advertising settings, the one, the megaphone, existing customers. You have to define the website visitors and you get to 180 days because that's all you get with meta of purchase. Pixel are my customers. If you don't define it, you will never get to access the level of information I'm trying to tell you right now. It takes 10 seconds. Want to be as slow as my mother who I love her and is 81 years old and can't go around technology. It will take her two minutes if you don't. If you go into your typing settings now. Yeah, I was like if you open, you have your computer here.

[Roland]

However, we're just trying to explain this sort of from a high level. So first thing you go to advertising

[Lauren Evatrulo]

settings you already have with the purchase pixel and then you've uploaded your full customer list. Basic just download, upload, full customer list, do match so to say like name field, email field, whatever. Then I go into the campaigns manager. I go to breakdown. I hit a demographics and then audience segments and then all my sales campaigns break down and tell me like you click, you open campaign manager one click, you click breakdown. Two clicks. You choose audience segments under demographic. That's not a click, that's a. You scroll down and move over. That's three. That's three clicks to tell me of my sales campaign. How many are. How many of my conversions came from existing customers because I defined them. I gave them my full customer list so they know how many came from my engaged audiences because I just defined them. I uploaded my subscriber list and I did all website visitors any pixel and then I can see new. So new is anyone that isn't otherwise it says unknown. And if you go into your. If you have a sales campaign so you're running a purchase campaign, it's like one of the six you can do Elite traffic. It's a sales campaign. Like the objective is sales.

[Roland]

Got it.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

And then you can see that breakdown and it'll tell you how much of your budget is being spent on new engage audience as an existing customers. That's where I start. Then I can take it into like we use Looker Studio. We can use GA4. That's going to bring inside of it. We'll have all that information inside of a dashboard. Looker Studio is a free tool like all that type of stuff. And then we can use BigQuery and like pull this information and I can check our dashboards from what I have aligned in ads and what I have aligned in GA4.

[Roland]

Is Looker Studio tied into the back end either CRM?

[Lauren Evatrulo]

Yes.

[Roland]

So your source of truth should match up well.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

So in this I'm saying GA4 because using Google Analytics as an additional point of reference, assuming that there's utms and stuff like again this is like a lot of assumptions of best practices in play. But I'm going to look inside Meta Ads Manager then I'm going to check our dashboard to see like if someone's like okay well let's see where that matches. Then you can check inside the dashboards with Google Analytics and and then the real source of truth ish could be if you go into the CRM. Now not all clients are giving us full customer list view. Like we have access to Shopify but if you give me your customer list, I'm not saying I'm doing this but I know it's possible for me to download that full list and then upload it to another client. So that's a lot of sensitive data. That's where I'm like this is the hard piece.

[Roland]

So we demand like that but like it's a partnership not yeah non disclosure agreement. That's sure part of the engagement.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

So yeah, I just, I've found bad players and I've fired bad players. I'm not saying that they've done stuff like this but like when it comes up and then like those kind of decisions like I, I don't want anyone to ever feel that their customers aren't anyone but theirs. And I worked with but you're sharing

[Roland]

with your disagreements and your clients are like you have to have the relationship where we are trying to move your business forward and the place where you collect the money is in your CRM.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

I want to know, yeah we have access to it but like are we like if you want to go into a deeper degree and this is again not what I'm doing like but you can go and look at all of yesterday's orders. I can look at all of GA4 transactions of what's coming from where I can look in meta, what's the distribution and then I can go count order by order by order and we have clients that are doing thousand plus orders a day. So again I admit I haven't done this.

[Roland]

You're not doing it for to that level.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

Well that's where I'm like I think there's level of confidence.

[Roland]

Is there a spot?

[Kenny]

Hey, stay tuned for part two of this episode by subscribing to the channel

[Roland]

so you don't miss the gold nuggets for the metrics that matter and grow your business.

[Kenny]

I'll see you on the next video.

[Lauren Evatrulo]

You've been listening to Perpetual Traffic.