AppLovin’s Rise, Google Ads Setup, and Amazon Reality Check

[00:00:00] Richard Gaffin: maybe even dare I say hot takes about App 11. let's let's jump into that. What are we what are we thinking there?

[00:00:06] Tony Chopp: We're very excited, number one, like, because I've never seen a media channel come out of kind of nowhere

[00:00:16] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:00:17] Tony Chopp: and have this much scale potential.

[00:00:21] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:00:22] Tony Chopp: So that's like excitement.

[00:00:24] Piece number one. Excitement piece number two is we have, we're, we're on our, we're on our way to producing. Um, we're hoping to get like 10 total incrementality studies out of the channel.

[00:00:37] We have two so far. Both of them are really, really strong.

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[00:01:23] Richard Gaffin: All right. Welcome folks to the D two C hotline. This is your direct connection to Hot Takes, cold Truths, and real e-comm advice from the best in the business. I'm your host, Richard, the Professor Gaffin. Call or text eight six six DTC 2 2 6 3 to get your burning e-comm questions answered. That's 8 6 6 3 8 2. 2, 2, 6, 3. Just leave us a voicemail, shoot us a text, ask whatever is on your mind. D two C wise, our operators are standing by, or rather, in this case, operator, Mr. Tony Chop is here with us today. Luke will probably be joining us a little bit later to to answer some questions, but we'll we'll get to him when he gets here.

[00:01:58] But for the time being, we have Mr. Tony Chop, the chopper himself, who's our VP of Paid Media here at Common Thread Collective. Tony, what's going on, man?

[00:02:06] Tony Chopp: Doing good. Richard, Luke, Luke, the weatherman is on location in a hurricane. Pretty sure.

[00:02:12] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, exactly. Doing some do some dangers onsite reporting for us. We'll we'll hear back from him when he gets here, but I noticed, I noticed no Hawaiian today.

[00:02:20] Tony Chopp: Oh, shoot.

[00:02:20] Richard Gaffin: huh?

[00:02:22] Tony Chopp: Yeah, I, you know, you know, actually, here's the problem. I, I only have like two, maybe three Hawaiian shirts and I gotta, I gotta, I really gotta raise my game up for this D two C hotline.

[00:02:32] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:02:33] Tony Chopp: I've been wearing the same thing over and over again, so thank you for the prompt, Richard. I'll go shopping.

[00:02:38] Richard Gaffin: There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just put it on my card. That's totally fine. The,

[00:02:41] Tony Chopp: Okay.

[00:02:42] Richard Gaffin: that this is the only Hawaiian shirt I have, and I've been wearing it every single week, so I actually just put an order in for some more. So we'll look forward to seeing those later, but, all right.

[00:02:50] For the time being, look, fall is here. It's getting a little chilly. Maybe not the right. Temperature for Hawaiian right now, although next week we'll be back into it. But we got some questions here this week and a couple of sort of text message questions that I'm gonna read off. We'll have Tony get into 'em and then when Luke joins us from the hurricane, we'll we'll kind of see what his take is on some of these as well. So, let's start with a question that we had from. A brand that's, I would say like mid seven figure range. They're like fairly well established, good base of organic revenue but they really don't do anything on Google search or paid search rather beyond maybe like a little bit of branded defense or whatever. So his question was, how do I start with Google ads? In other words, like what's the sequence you should set things up in? a brand that's of this size, what are the first steps that you take to get a successful Google ad strategy in place?

[00:03:42] Tony Chopp: Okay, so this is gonna sound maybe obvious, but the very first step, regardless of the platform is signal.

[00:03:52] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:52] Tony Chopp: So the very first step is pixel.

[00:03:57] There's a couple different ways to go about that with, with Google ads and if you're on, let's just assume that you're on Shopify. The, the right way to, to do it now is to launch the pixel via the sales sales channel on Shopify. And that's gonna set you up with the, the deepest level of integration

[00:04:17] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:20] Tony Chopp: caveat when. You set up the Shopify Google Sales Channel and the Pixel that way the, the pixel in the Google Ads account is gonna be set up with a bunch of events and conversions around page views and add to carts, and there's gonna be a lot of signal in there. Let's, let's put it this way, the Shopify.

[00:04:44] Google ads integration is like tons and tons and tons of signal. May maybe too much potentially. So the, the thing that, that you wanna focus on is to make sure that your Google Ads conversion tag is wired up correctly and that you have one primary conversion. So this is a, a nuance and a difference between, from Google Ads to some of the other media platforms.

[00:05:11] You can have multiple. Primary conversions. So step number one, get your tag set up correctly. Step 1.5, make sure that it's just one primary conversion, so you're avoiding double counting or repeat counting. Okay, so let's assume that you have all that dialed in and now you're ready to go build some stuff in Google Ads.

[00:05:38] The most important ad product. For e-commerce advertisers, the most important ad inventory for e-commerce advertisers in the Google Ads ecosystem is shopping ads. So little picture ads on the search results page, the those, those are feed driven ads. So. You thought I was gonna go into the Google Ads account, but I'm not.

[00:06:05] The next place you have to go is into Google Merchant Center. So if you're familiar with if you're a meta advertiser it's the, the ancillary or corollary is the commerce manager. So in the Google Ads ecosystem, it's called merchant center. You gotta make sure your data feed, your product feed is going into Google Merchant Center.

[00:06:26] If you're using Shopify and you're using that Shopify sales channel app, this is gonna help you make that connection as well. But you wanna make sure that you have all your products in there and that your products are approved in Google Merchant Center. And if you want to go the extra, extra mile,

[00:06:46] a lot of times what you have as a, a default setting. For your, your product titles are whatever's on the PDP, the, the tricky part or the nuance, or the cool part, I guess with Google Ads is the, the product title is the, the targeting. So whatever keywords are in there is what your product ads will show up for.

[00:07:13] So let's just, let's just give you a scenario. So let's say you sell sunglasses. And your product title is Your brand name plus some cheeky product name. Okay. Brand name plus, you know, I don't know, super, super fun, awesome shades, right?

[00:07:32] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Yeah. Sure.

[00:07:33] Tony Chopp: You might, it, it would be worthwhile to spend some time adding some keywords into your product titles in Google Merchant Center.

[00:07:41] So. Keep your brand name in there, but add in color, shape, size anything that somebody might be searching for where your product would be a good fit for them. Okay, so we talked about signal. First of all we talked about feed second of all, and those are the, the two precursors to actually running the most important ad product in Google ads for e-commerce advertisers, which is shopping ads.

[00:08:07] So now, now that you have all of this set up, you're gonna be in the account, you're faced with a question now how do I access this inventory? Google Shopping ads. So you have. A couple choices. The two primary ones are standard shopping or Performance Max. The difference between the two standard shopping is a really specific inventory type where you're just buying those little picture ads.

[00:08:35] Performance Max campaigns have access to all of the inventory across all of Google surfaces. So shopping, search, YouTube, demand, gen, discovery display, Gmail, et cetera, et cetera. If you're just starting out, I, there's not really a right or wrong way to do this, but if you're just starting out and you wanna dip your toe in the water, the shopping, the standard shopping ads are more simple.

[00:09:04] It's more of a simple setup. There's less that can go wrong, there's less, opportunity for confusion is my, are my ads showing on YouTube or display or search or et cetera, et cetera. So, given, given what you've described to me in this business that's new to the space, get the pixel set up correctly, get the feed set up correctly, run some standard Google shopping ads.

[00:09:30] Go get your feet wet that way.

[00:09:31] Richard Gaffin: keeping it simple, huh?

[00:09:33] Tony Chopp: Yeah.

[00:09:33] Richard Gaffin: In terms of like, the steps, so I mean, I guess in this particular case, they're already kind of doing branded search, let's say. That wasn't an. In place. Where is that on the priority list?

[00:09:47] Tony Chopp: Yeah, well we used to talk about this Google Ads order of Operations, which was basically just a sequencing and, and actually brand was the, the first one, first one in that, in that step the, the thing about brand advertising is it. It's kind of like the least exciting thing that you can do on Google Ads.

[00:10:06] I would say. General rule of thumb is

[00:10:13] your Google Ads account is healthy if no more than 10% of your total investment is on the brand piece. So let's just make up some numbers. Let's say this brand is spending. $5,000 a month on Google Ads. Well, if you came to CTC, we would want to be chasing towards how do we invest 30, 40, $50,000 a month into non non-brand activities.

[00:10:43] And the primary place that we would want to go do that is in the Google shopping space.

[00:10:49] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Okay, well I think that that kind of, that answers that one in terms of at

[00:10:53] Tony Chopp: Okay.

[00:10:53] Richard Gaffin: the initial, oh no, go ahead.

[00:10:55] Tony Chopp: Okay, so, so that's all like the standard status quo sort of stuff. The absolute most exciting place on the Google Ads platform is the YouTube inventory accessed through the Demand Gen product.

[00:11:09] Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

[00:11:09] Tony Chopp: We've been on this journey for the last, better part of the last year or so around exploring the incrementality of YouTube specifically, and we're.

[00:11:20] We're getting like pretty wide variation of, in certain cases it's, it's performing really, really well and in other cases not so well. So once you have your brand set up in a way that's like. Tight and simple and straightforward, and, and you feel like you, you have good representation there and you're doing some defense against competitors and you've explored Google Shopping, you've kind of pushed into that.

[00:11:46] The next place to go is into this, into, into YouTube, through the demand gen product. And that, that's, that's the place where I think there's a lot of blue ocean for exploration for brands to really, really find their audience and introduce themselves to, to brand new customers.

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[00:12:51] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. yeah. Exciting stuff and probably worth its own, its own question at some point to dig into that a little bit more. But, roll onto our next one here. This is from a brand, actually it's similar, which is this is a brand supplement brand launching on Amazon. And this particular business owner, they were trying to figure out what sort of like the best. Best practices, I guess, for bringing that product into Amazon. Now in this particular conversation, Taylor was in it as well, and he was saying the supplement space is incredibly difficult to break into on Amazon just because it's so commoditized and people are winning on price there. But cur we're, I was curious about, anyway, for you and, and maybe also Luke, if he joins us, is a sense of like some, some basic best practices for thinking about expanding into Amazon.

[00:13:40] Tony Chopp: Yeah. Yeah. I think the thing that's like the most unique about the Amazon ecosystem is the, the fact that the velocity of product sales, like how much you're selling is a, a ranking factor,

[00:13:56] Richard Gaffin: Hm.

[00:13:57] Tony Chopp: factor to how well you show up in in, in the search results or organically. So I think that. The case can be made that what you should do is not necessarily run your entire product portfolio.

[00:14:17] And you know, maybe it's a supplement brand that only has a couple SKUs. What you should do is focus on the velocity of how many units you're selling. And if it's me like to Taylor's point, it's, it's really, really competitive and you're gonna be up against a bunch of other advertisers that are adver, that are pushing velocity at well under break even because everybody in the supplement space understands their LTV math.

[00:14:50] If you're gonna, if you're gonna try to win on Amazon, I think you have to get real about what the. Investment is going, what investment is gonna be required to get to a sales velocity That's actually going to help you cut through the noise in any particular category.

[00:15:08] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:15:08] Tony Chopp: So I think there's a couple tools that are unique to the Amazon space that are, that are pretty useful.

[00:15:14] Like he, helium 10 is the, is the most popular one. So if you haven't, if you haven't checked that out yet, that, that's where, that's where a lot of product research starts and you can understand like what are, what are the top selling ASINs, they don't call 'em skews. They call 'em ASINs on Amazon for any particular category.

[00:15:32] And what is the sales velocity of those of those products? And you can work your way backwards from, all right, well, if I got a. Get into this space where I, there's other competitors that are selling, you know, a thousand, 5,000 units a week, something like that. Like what, what sort of advertising budget do I think I would need to put put into this to, to to compete effectively?

[00:15:57] Richard Gaffin: Right.

[00:15:59] Tony Chopp: It's gonna be, it's gonna be a tight squeeze, especially after Amazon takes their cut.

[00:16:03] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, so I guess coming away from that conversation, there was a little bit of like, well, it seems like Amazon is basically. A losing prospect for brands at least like that were in her position, which is like slightly smaller brands. But what's the scenario in which it's like, it's the right move, I guess,

[00:16:20] Tony Chopp: Well, it's, it's just like, it's just like anything else in, in business and in life in general. It's like, decide, decide and commit. Right? So now what you need to do is, is understand the, the like researching the category and the products that are already popular on in that category and their sales philosophy.

[00:16:38] Is going to give you an analytical understanding of what you're deciding and committing to. And then you have to ask yourself the question, do I have, do I have enough resources to actually fight this fight? The answer might be no. You know, if you're, if you're like totally bootstrapped and you don't have a meaningful amount of investment that you can deploy into creating awareness through advertising and accelerating your, your velocity on Amazon you, you might not be setting yourself up to win.

[00:17:05] However if you know, I, for, if your brand is producing a certain amount of cashflow already from some other place, potentially, if I, I guess maybe I don't, it would be helpful to understand is this like a brand new brand that's just starting out from zero or,

[00:17:23] Richard Gaffin: say, I would say they're probably mid to late six figures, something

[00:17:26] Tony Chopp: okay, so, so you have some free cash flow, so, so. I, I would offer that you think about this over the course of how do we make Amazon work in in a 12 month window as opposed to how, you know, how do we think about testing Amazon for the next week or so?

[00:17:44] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:45] Tony Chopp: if you look at it and that, and that sort of with the end in mind, so like by in 12 months from now, we wanna be moving 5,000 units a week, or whatever it is.

[00:17:54] So, stair step your way to that. The first three, potentially six months, you're gonna be well under break even on your advertising investment. How much, how much cash is that gonna require to, to get over the hump into this point where you have a little bit of a flywheel happening on Amazon where you're getting some organic traffic.

[00:18:16] You're getting, everything you're doing is not like bullying your way into the auction through, through paid media, which is effectively what you're gonna be doing during the first period that you're going through, which is pulling your way into the auction through paid media, which you can a hundred percent do.

[00:18:34] There's just a cost associated with it.

[00:18:36] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, I think that's a, a useful piece of advice or thing to pull from that is like that idea of like, thinking about the commitment in terms of a year as opposed to in terms of a week, I think is a great idea of, of just thinking through, like, we're going to be in this and we're not gonna see, we're aiming to see the results that we want to see in this like, really wide window of time, which gives us some leeway to kind of build up to that as opposed to it needs to, like, we need to win now for us to understand, or for us to believe that this is a good channel for us.

[00:19:04] Tony Chopp: Yeah, I mean, like if, like, listen, if I just had like a random like money printing factory like that, that was, it was as easy as that. Like wouldn't everybody do it?

[00:19:13] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, yeah,

[00:19:14] Tony Chopp: So like, it's just not, it's not the way it works. And, and I think this is, I think this is generally true of like channel expansion,

[00:19:21] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:22] Tony Chopp: Here, here's where we see it work really well.

[00:19:24] Here's what it looks like. You go, you start a brand. You go into meta, you get meta dialed in. Meta becomes your growth engine. You have the, you have the operational architecture around running the meta channel, which includes creative input some media buying, et cetera, et cetera. Forecasting, planning, all that stuff.

[00:19:45] You go, all right, cool. Now I can shift my energy over into another channel. And it's not, it's not this idea of like, Hey, does such and such channel work? It's rather we're going to become an Amazon advertiser. This is what it's gonna take to do that. And just being real with yourself and with your team, and with your, with your financing partners and with your board and with everybody else around like.

[00:20:12] Decide, commit, understand what's what's really gonna be involved, and then go become an adver Amazon.

[00:20:19] Richard Gaffin: I like that. It's kind of like, our, our HR guy Dane here at CTC, who just launched his own show, by the way. So check it out. Dane would like to say to us, like, when you wanna become somebody. It's about a matter of like taking on the identity before you actually do the action. Like let's say you wanted to be a musician, you say to yourself, I am a musician.

[00:20:35] And then you go out and you do the work and there's a little bit, it feels like that sort of metaphor or parallels this a little bit. Like commit to being an Amazon advertiser before you actually go out and do the Amazon advertising. Like take that on first. Say we're gonna do this for 12 months, this is going to be who we are. And then from there you have a much better chance of success.

[00:20:57] Tony Chopp: Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah. I mean, you asked me, we were, we were talking earlier, Richard, and you're like, well, you wanna talk about app loving? All right, cool. I'm gonna parlay into App loving because we have a eight or 10 accounts that we're starting this month on, on App Loving, and we're. We've decided we're going to become Apple Love advertisers for these eight to 10 brands.

[00:21:23] Now, in the starting point is we're looking across all these brands and we're doing incrementality test design, and we're basically saying, Hey, it's gonna cost whatever, 10, 15, 20, $30,000. Just to learn how incremental the channel is so that we can then go back and think about target setting and bigger investments and all, all the other pieces, like we're, we're putting this, putting our chips in the middle here, knowing that this investment, this 10 or 20 or $30,000 investment isn't necessarily going to create the biggest return, but it's the initial step on the journey of fulfilling.

[00:22:03] Of we are now an app Loving Advertiser. This is a channel that is part of our ME media stack.

[00:22:10] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm. Well speaking of APP 11, I mean. Look, we could pivot to that right now, which is, know that you had some observations, maybe even dare I say hot takes about App 11. let's let's jump into that. What are we what are we thinking there?

[00:22:26] Tony Chopp: We're very excited, number one, like, because I've never seen a media channel come out of kind of nowhere

[00:22:36] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:22:36] Tony Chopp: and have this much scale potential.

[00:22:41] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:42] Tony Chopp: So that's like excitement. Piece number one. Excitement piece number two is we have, we're, we're on our, we're on our way to producing. We're hoping to get like 10 total incrementality studies out of the channel.

[00:22:55] We have two so far. Both of them are really, really strong. The two that we have. Little side note sometimes with new, new channel exploration, it can be. It's difficult to get signal into the incrementality test and the, the way that that manifests is we end up without a statistically significant result.

[00:23:17] So effectively, we run the media and our data science team says, eh, it could have just been chance, like the signal isn't strong enough. Both of these apple oven tests that we've done so far. Not only is the result really strong, but the signal is really strong too, which is, which is a good indication that we're, into an environment where we're, we're creating meaningful, incremental results as a result of deploying media. So, so those two things are, are exciting. And so we're in the process of, we have a cohort of projects that we're deploying a series of incrementality tests this month to sort of round out our portfolio understanding of the platform.

[00:24:00] A couple of things. These, these aren't really hot takes, I don't think, but just like. Kind of like Tony's curiosities about like, why, why is this working? So like, obviously the inventory, so app love and inventory is on mobile games, so people are spending time, a lot of time, there's a lot of impressions available.

[00:24:19] So like that's a piece of the puzzle. But there's, there's two things that have stood out to me so far in this exploration that I think are interesting. Number one, the videos are that, that show up are not skippable.

[00:24:32] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:33] Tony Chopp: Not skippable, 32nd Nons skippable videos. So you're in the middle of playing Candy Crush or whatever, whatever the heck you're doing, and you're sort of locked in.

[00:24:40] And what what's happening is you're waiting for your game to come back, right? So you're like Candy Crush. Candy Crush, candy Crush. And then this ad shows up and you're ah, but. You're waiting to go make your next Candy Crush move. So my, my intuition, my spidey sense is telling me like, we're getting attention.

[00:24:58] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:24:58] Tony Chopp: We're getting attention, which is the hard, one of the hardest things to get. And just the way the ad product sits in the experience of the user is getting attention by, by design.

[00:25:12] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, that makes sense.

[00:25:13] Tony Chopp: The other thing that's really, really fascinating, and I, I'm like a, I'm a signal guy and, and I think like the signal is more has has more to do with our success than we would care to admit or failure.

[00:25:28] Their, their pixel is fascinating. It's super, super deep. So, it has like, they're throwing thousands of events. They're throwing, I, I actually don't know exactly what the number is, but I'm gonna guess that they're, they're picking up three, four, maybe five x the raw volume of events that the megapixel is grabbing.

[00:25:53] So like add credit card information. So like basically everything that you do on a site, like every interaction point, every, every form that you fill out, every click that you make, they have an event tied to it. So my Spidey sense is telling me we got a couple things that are happening here. We have a huge amount of inventory.

[00:26:14] We have an ad product that is sitting in this experience that. Compels attention,

[00:26:23] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:24] Tony Chopp: sort of de sort of demands it in some way. That's kind of interesting. Kind. Kind of similar to TV advertising, you know, like you, I want the show to come back and, and if I were to draw a corollary to TV advertising, I don't know if this is a fact or not, but I think that there's probably, some, I'm sure there is in fact something about where your ad sits in like the, the, was it the first commercial or last commercial or whatever else? Anyway, so it's like TV advertising, but it's only one commercial. So you got the whole chunk of the attention and there is it's clear that this technology company has invested a bunch of energy and resources into the pixel and just basically picking, picking up as much signal as humanly possible.

[00:27:07] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Well it seems like yeah, the factors combined make for like a really, really compelling product. For sure. I mean, I think like, like having, I mean, I'm, I'm definitely not a mobile gamer per se, but having played a few of them, is something about, you actually only get one, like an interruptive ad, like a TV ad, but you, there's an, you know, you're only gonna see 30 seconds of one, which means that there's no reason to put your phone down and go do something else

[00:27:31] Tony Chopp: Exactly.

[00:27:32] Richard Gaffin: And then you're also kind of like locked in.

[00:27:34] Tony Chopp: Exactly.

[00:27:35] Richard Gaffin: play your next round. So there's a little bit of an element of like. What if a slot machine showed an ad in the middle of it and then the ad went away? But you're compelling attention from somebody who's like locked in and then because the a's not that long, ultimately they don't really have any reason to put it away or to look away.

[00:27:49] So you're, you're really getting people to, getting eyeballs in a way that it feels like other types of ads

[00:27:55] Tony Chopp: Richard, I don't know why I've never thought of this before, but we should go build an ad product into slot machines.

[00:28:02] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. There. There you go. I'm sure that there's a lot of regulation that says you can't do that. That would be, that would be my guess. But I mean, that I, that's essentially what app Loving has

[00:28:12] Tony Chopp: It's, it's exactly what it's,

[00:28:14] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, exactly.

[00:28:15] Tony Chopp: And, and there's also, there's also this idea of like, the idea of content portability in general. So like, we live in DDC advertising meta is the 800 pound gorilla. And there as such, like all the creative. Pipelining is designed for you know, nine by sixteens sort of vertical video, potentially square.

[00:28:38] So that's the same ad format that we're, we're able to use on, on app loving. So, so all of the, the e the easiest way to say it is like you're, your best performing ads that are working on meta are very likely to be your best performing ads on Apple and. One more piece of this puzzle. I, I've played a few mobile games over my, over my days, and I think the, the ads are kind, crappy.

[00:29:03] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, they're bad.

[00:29:04] Tony Chopp: So I think what Apple Oven has done actually is introduce really, really sophisticated D two C advertising advertisers and thereby advertising production. So really great ads into an ecosystem that is not typically used to seeing really great ads. So I think we have like. At least right now the benefit of a little bit of arbitrage over the, the types of like really, really kick-ass ads we're making for these like really awesome D two C brands that we work with are showing up in this space where that ad really stands out.

[00:29:42] It really looks great. Yeah.

[00:29:43] Richard Gaffin: that's cool. Any initial, like. I mean, I know we've only won two complete tests so far or whatever, but any initial senses of like what the incrementality factor for app loving is right now in terms of percentage?

[00:29:56] Tony Chopp: Two x.

[00:29:57] Richard Gaffin: Two x Damn.

[00:29:58] Tony Chopp: Yeah. Yeah. And so when, when a little bit of just making sure everybody understands what we mean by this. So when we talk about the incrementality factor, basically all that is, is the platform tells us one thing, platform says raw 1.0 or 1.5. So what we're measuring is two x that. So the platform's telling us 1.5, we're measuring business impact is at at a three.

[00:30:22] So two x is. Is what we've seen in the small, small sample size and really strong signal. So really clear Stat sig. And. More business impact than what the pixel is, is reporting, which, which kind of makes sense because they built the platform to use seven day click only attribution. There's no other way you can set it up.

[00:30:45] So we know this from meta when we run tight seven day click only attribution, that that it's, it's positively incremental. It means that the business impact is more than what Meta is telling us. So we're seeing. A similar thing on app Loving, which I think relates back to they have tight what we, what I would call tight attribution.

[00:31:05] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Right. So x. Pretty strong. I mean, just in, in the kind of the scheme of things. Would say like the the second highest or whatever is like what, 1 50, 1 70 as opposed to 201

[00:31:19] Tony Chopp: for meta seven day click is 1 1 20.

[00:31:22] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:31:23] Tony Chopp: And we, we see it. We see it float pretty close around that. In all the incrementality tests that we've done, we've seen one 60 or 180 a couple times. So, yeah, so this, these are, these are pretty high now. We've gotten crazy readings from YouTube.

[00:31:37] We've seen like five and six x. So the, the app 11 one doesn't, it's not the highest. It's not like the highest incrementality that we've ever measured. But you know, if we come out of this. This group cohort study, and we end up with something that's one 50 or one 60 or one 70, somewhere in there.

[00:31:59] It's gonna, it's gonna make for a pretty strong case around why you'd want to go adopt the identity of an app of an advertiser.

[00:32:09] Richard Gaffin: There you go. I like it. All right. Well that'll be we can make that Tony's hot take for the week is that you should go adopt the identity of an app loving advertiser right now. Run, don't walk. Well, looks, we're sitting at about 30 minutes here. Looks like Luke probably got lost in the storm, sadly.

[00:32:24] So we'll hopefully see him next week as well. But I think we'll, we'll leave it at that unless you have another hot take that you'd like to bring to us, Tony.

[00:32:31] Tony Chopp: Oh boy. Put me on the spot.

[00:32:35] Richard Gaffin: You don't have

[00:32:35] Tony Chopp: I don't know. It's, it's not that hot. I mean, my whole, my whole world right now is revolved. The big part of my world right now is like. We have committed, CTC has committed to being an app loving advertiser.

[00:32:47] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:32:47] Tony Chopp: And it's just funny to me like how many the, the obstacles that present themselves in in pursuit of that identity.

[00:32:57] You could never. Figure all of them out. Like, so for example, like today we had, we had one advertiser that we're, we're working towards this process with, and you know, they're like, oh, I don't have a corporate card. I can't set up the account. I was like, all right, get out my CTC card. We'll sort out the,

[00:33:13] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:33:14] Tony Chopp: sort out the billing stuff later, right?

[00:33:16] Like, it's just, it, it's the identity first and then just like,

[00:33:23] Richard Gaffin: That's right. your way towards it.

[00:33:25] Tony Chopp: it's not really a hot take, but it's the truth.

[00:33:28] Richard Gaffin: There we go. Hey, the truth works too. All right, well I think that's that's gonna do it for us. And hey, if you wanna talk to us about maybe getting in on app love here via the CTC method, common thread co.com, hit that hire us button. Let us know that you'd like to talk.

[00:33:41] We would love to talk to you about this. Tony would love to whip about his company card to help you get on it. So, oh, and I'll also provide my one non eCom hot take of the day. I should probably save this for next month, but Thanksgiving, Turkey, pretty good.

[00:33:53] Tony Chopp: I,

[00:33:53] Richard Gaffin: good. I like

[00:33:54] Tony Chopp: it, it's delicious. Sorry, I have one more, one more hot take. So, for the record, I, we are not an app loving shill. We don't get anything from app loving. So I've seen some squabbling on LinkedIn around. Hey, what, what are y'all? What are y'all getting on this? I don't give a shit. Okay. My, my job is to find effective ways to, to deploy media dollars.

[00:34:15] That's it. At the end of the day, if we can do that on behalf of our clients, then everybody wins. So, I don't, I don't have any, nobody, nobody pays me anything except for Taylor.

[00:34:27] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, there you go. And I can tell you from experience that Tony's passion is the deployment of media dollars in an efficient way.

[00:34:34] Tony Chopp: That's it.

[00:34:34] Richard Gaffin: If, if he wasn't, he wouldn't take a dime to say anything otherwise. So, alright, well I think that's gonna wrap it up for us. Next week we'll dredge Luke up from wherever he is and he'll we'll bring him back in here.

[00:34:45] And next week, I believe too, we're gonna have a couple more Hawaiian shirts because I wear the same one every single. So, alright, until next time folks that'll do it for us. Remember, if you want your questions answered on the pod, leave us a voicemail. Send us a text, 8 6 6 DTC 2 2 6 3 and we might read your question on a subsequent episode.

[00:35:02] Alright, for Tony Chop, I'm Richard Gaffin. Take care everybody.

[00:35:08]