Why Your Ads Aren't Working

[00:00:00] Joy: And if you think about an exhaustive framework of everything that you can do as a business to grow your brand is basically landing pages, offers, creatives, customer journey, and marketing moments.

[00:00:10] That's it. Those are the five things. There's nothing really outside of them. And if you think about it, they're actually not linear. Like I was trying to put that in a mathematical formula so that I can understand the impact of each, and it is actually, it's landing pages plus offers plus creative to the power of customer journey, which all is to the power of a moment.

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[00:00:57] Richrd: Hey folks, welcome to the Ecommerce Playbook podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffin, Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective, and I'm joined today by Mr. Joy Sharma, who heads up our global accelerator program as well as he's our sort of cohort leader for our six-figure brand group.

[00:01:14] Joy, what's going on, man? You're coming to us from from Tbilisi, Georgia. Is that right?

[00:01:19] Joy: Good. Yeah.

[00:01:20] it's good. It's cold.

[00:01:22] We're getting through it.

[00:01:24] Richrd: Yeah. So we had a dispute beforehand. Producer Corey believed that those things going up the hill behind you were called gondolas. I said cable car. So, I will say sound off in the comments. What do you, what do you call the thing that goes up and down, up and down the hill?

[00:01:38] But all right, that's not what we're here to talk about, though, no matter how interesting it might be. What we wanna talk about today is obviously Joy's primary focus and, and where you spend almost all of your time is with six and seven-figure brands, brands that are kind of in the emerging phase, growing to the point where they can kind of flip over and get to that eight-figure range.

[00:01:55] And so I think kind of the thing that we, we wanted to talk about today is, is essentially the fo- the one thing that you need to focus on to grow from the six, seven-figure range to the eight-figure range. And so in short, that's customer journey. But Joy, I think what we're gonna have you do is kind of unfold for us what exactly that means for brands in this space.

[00:02:13] So when you talk about customer journey, what-- how, how does our approach differ from the way people usually talk about customer journey?

[00:02:21] Joy: I think customer journey to me is basically how you're structuring a, a particular cohort of people to buy. It doesn't apply to everyone, it applies to that specific cohort of this is the first thing I want them to buy. These are the particular upsells I will have for this person. This is how I'm going to nurture that particular cohort of people, and then this is basically what I'm going to continue to sell them.

[00:02:41] What I'm going to bid is gonna be relative to what my backend value is. I will have it differently. So if I-I have a bundle, I will have different unon-uneconomics. I will probably not have as much LTV, so I'll bid accordingly and so on and so forth. So basically, those are the overall general things of what constitutes customer journey.

[00:02:59] The reason we say this is looking through so, so much, so many different businesses across PE7, even we are doing PE6 calls, and what we're starting to realize is like the most valuable thing for people is this. And if you think about an exhaustive framework of everything that you can do as a business to grow your brand is basically landing pages, offers, creatives, customer journey, and marketing moments.

[00:03:22] That's it. Those are the five things. There's nothing really outside of them. And if you think about it, they're actually not linear. Like I was trying to put that in a mathematical formula so that I can understand the impact of each, and it is actually, it's landing pages plus offers plus creative to the power of customer journey, which all is to the power of a moment.

[00:03:40] And the reason for that goes further because if you think about if I want to go and scale from a seven-figure to a eight-figure business and I want to do it the fastest, it's basically we are in an auction where people who pay the most wins the most, and the people who can pay the most are the people who can extract the most value. And Taylor had this idea, and I think you, you remember the story from Taylor. She's "It's the law of mompiracy." The cheapest person to sell in the world is your mom. She loves

[00:04:02] you. She'll buy anything from you, and the cost is zero. And the last person in China is the hardest person to sell because you need to go and fly there, explain him the product, and like it's just tens and thousands of dollar.

[00:04:12] So if I want to be the most aggressive person on the auction, what I need is I want the cheapest cohort of everyone. That means I want the most cohort of people I can go and target, and the way you do that is basically from customer journey. So you build customer journeys that are specific to every cohort of people. Cohort of people can basically mean people who are buying for a particular moment, particular instance, like a job to be done. It could be anything. But basically, having marketing funnels that are specific to different sets of people is basically how you win. Now, a lot of brands don't even have a funnel for evergreen, is actually the point.

[00:04:45] So that, that's the starting point, and then you expand into it, and that is the idea we were playing with. So people don't have that nailed in. It is the most interesting dilemma because we are-- If you notice, we are having conversations internally about how much you should spend on creative as a seven-figure brand. A lot of people go like-- We, we were talking about the title is like this is where P like seven-figure business go to die

[00:05:06] because every single business goes and dies in the creative production cycle because there's-- Like people can debate this as much as they want, but the answer to solving for creative is just more volume.

[00:05:17] Richrd: Mhm.

[00:05:17] Joy: And if it is more volume, then you need to be able to afford the production, and people just can't afford the production. And the reason for that is because most ads don't work. So if you do the math, and I think we have-- I have a Twitter video. We have a bunch of videos about this, which is take how many ads you

[00:05:32] launch, take how much you spent on them, and then find the ad spend per ad. The people who actually are in the rut where they can't grow their business actually come to us. They're just like, "I can't make more ads because I spend $20 on every piece of ad." So what that, that means is like if doing your math, I should spend $5 on creative production. And they're like, "The answer cannot be volume." But the reality is it is. It just indicates something that your ads don't work. And the reality is it is not a creative problem. That's what we're running into, and it's like the funniest thing ever, which is it has nothing to do with creative, but that's the thing that sucks and your business would not grow because you don't have it. And it actually also comes from the same thing, which is you don't have a customer journey for your evergreen customers, which predominantly might be close to offers, and that's why you don't win. Now, you don't have offers that-- If you have a winning offer, your hit rate on ads will be higher, is actually the core point.

[00:06:24] So if I have a offer that works and people want to buy my product on that offer, my hit rate might be like 7%,

[00:06:30] versus right now I might have 2%. So that actually necessarily doesn't mean your creatives are bad. They're just talking about something that people are not directly like naturally enticed into, and that's the one thing you actually need

[00:06:41] Richrd: Okay. So, well, sorry, I just, I wanna clarify then. So you're-- what you're talking about is obviously the, the way to win is volume of creative, and so there's obviously if you can bring the cost of creative down, then that would be effective for that. But really the, the first step, y- I mean, it is in some ways sort of like a creative quality problem almost, because what you're trying to do is find an offer that works, and if the offer works, the increase in conversion rate or the, the hit rate really percentage will allow you to produce less volume of creative and still win?

[00:07:14] Joy: Now you will need to produce the same. Your spend per ad will just go up. So if my hit rate is 2%, then my spend per ad will be $20. If it goes to 6%, now it's three times, it will be $150. Now I can make production work. I, I still have the same cost, I can just make it work because I extract more value out of it.

[00:07:31] So my hypothesis on this is the people who can extract the most value from a seven-figure-- from a customer acquisition as a seven-figure brand win the most. The reason P7 versus P8, and this is an interesting distinction, which is people don't talk about it. Because the people who talk online are P8 brands, and they don't talk about this, which is like you need to nail in these basic things of you need to extract the most value out of your customer. Because they've already done that, and they might have done it intentionally, unintentionally, but that's not the thing they need to focus on anymore. And that is something that gets skipped because they don't talk about it, so there's not enough information about it, and people miss that aspect. They will launch a brand, and they will run to the things that everyone talks about, which all of them will probably be eight-figure brands. So they miss this part, which is you need to actually nail in your customer journey. Now, customer journey to me is actually offer as part of it, creatives are part of it, landing pages as part of it. Because if you look back at the journey of most of our PE calls we can take a random example from it, which is like there was a oil company, right? And how I would sell for them in an evergreen period will be very different from how I sell it during a marketing moment. So what we were doing was, if you're a marketing moment, you should sell gifts, and you should sell bundles, and you should bid very differently on that, and then the job there is very different.

[00:08:39] Like in that particular instance, for that particular marketing moment, my job is to go and increase the AOV up, not have a different CAC target. I will spend bunch more money, but I will take all the value today. Like my value capture is happening all of it today. Then my funnel and my customer journey for basically people that are coming in as a evergreen is very different for that instance, basically because I'm going to acquire them from a sample pack or stuff like that. But what people do is they will just enter in a market, and they will see what people do, and then they will be like, "Okay, I, I like that thing, so let's go and copy it." And because people do that, for that particular brand also, like if they ran bundles as an evergreen front-end offer, they will just not win.

[00:09:17] It will have nothing

[00:09:18] to do with- Creative, it will-- and but this is what is going to happen. They're going to take that bundle, they're going to make ads for it, and then their creatives are gonna spend $20, and they're gonna be, "Okay, creative didn't work. I'm-- I have a creative problem," which they didn't. And then they will come to us and be like, "How do I win?" And the answer by doing the math would be make more ads. I can't afford making more ads, even if that's the right answer. So that's basically the problem, which like when you look so closely, it's like this is like common in strategy and consulting, which like you just look at one thing and you're like, "Yeah, the solve to this is X or Y."

[00:09:47] Which is like the solve to creative is always more volume. That's y- we can't debate on it. But people can't afford it. Y- you're giving them advice, which is like, "Make more ads," but I can't afford it. That's the second set of problem that you need to solve for. That is the problem I actually, I think customer journey solves for, which is you need to go and make a customer journey to your cohorts of people, which are like who are the people who are going to go and buy from you? People for, for oil company would be people who use it in all the different ways. Some people will use it for food, some people will use it as a gathering, and some people will use it like in all these different cohorts of people, and you probably would need to make a customer journey that's specific to them.

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[00:10:47] Richrd: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that's something that's important to highlight. Well, one-- Actually, one thing I wanna say, too, just for those who don't know, when we say PE7 and PE8, those are kind of our internal shorthands for seven-figure brands, eight-figure brands, and then we also have PE6, which is six-figure brands.

[00:11:00] So when we talk about the difference between PE7 and PE8, what we mean is a brand in the seven-figure range has problems that are not solved by the things that you're reading on X or whatever, right? Because by and large, the brands that are posting there are eight-figure brands who have the fundamental thing that you don't have solved, they have that solved.

[00:11:19] And so, again, this, this gets into our discussion about customer journey. One thing that, um, I think it's worth teasing out is part of what you're saying is that there isn't-- And, and this is, this kind of seems obvious in retrospect. I th- I think a lot of people approach it as if there's one customer journey, right?

[00:11:34] The customer comes in here, they buy the thing, and then we upsell something, and then they leave. But what you're saying, like in the case of this olive oil company, is there's obviously a- an evergreen cohort, and then there's moment cohorts. But really, too, then there's also audience cohorts I don't know, somebody who wants a gift or whatever to give out at a party or whatever, or somebody who just uses it for cooking.

[00:11:55] Those are two separate cohorts that need to be tested against with their own customer journeys. And so it's about volume. Obviously, creative volume is important, but also volume of offers tested basically is, is crucial as well. And then also I think too, part of what you're saying is thinking critically about how y- what your own business needs as opposed to just copying what you see, I mean, largely huge brands doing.

[00:12:20] "Oh, we need a quiz funnel," or something like that. So talk a little bit more about what's the thought process? What, what's the work that you can do with your own business to start developing an offer that makes sense for your specific situation?

[00:12:34] Joy: So this, this, this is actually good. So the way you measure this, because the way you start playing any game is like, what is good? And the definition of good is we, we have a screenshot, we can pull it up and we can show them, but we have that in Statlas. So the value of Statlas is we have some consolidation of basically every type of business in the e-commerce industry. So when you put it on that graph, that graph is a log relationship between AOV and conversion rate. And I would say your job as a brand is to figure out a landing page offer and a creative combination. That's why it's like those things are together in a sum to the power of the customer journey and all of that to the power of the moment. The reason for that is you need to figure out that combination that wins in that particular basically graph, and then every time you can find something that's above that line, you won. Like the definition doesn't need to be I won, like th- I want to be the absolute best. You don't. You just need to be above average. Because what that means is when you're above average, you will go into an auction. We all know auction is how much you pay for it versus how much is expected action rate is there. If you have a better than average expected action rate and you're paying better than average CPAs, you're going to win that auction. I would go out on a limb and say every single seven-figure business just has one problem, which is this. Like this is it. There's no other problem. There's n- you don't have a creative problem. You don't have any other problem. You just have a foundational problem, which is you don't have your customer journeys nailed in, which means the consolidation of creative offer or, or the permutation combination of offers, landing pages and creative is not there, and you start with offers.

[00:13:59] So how you, how you win is basically you measure against it, you test it. How you test everything is actually important. So me and Taylor had this video, I think back in December, which was we were talking about this idea that seven-figure businesses, because they don't have as much influence as eight-figure businesses, should have four marketing moments in a w- in a w- month. We were like, we had the four peak theory, and then everyone should follow that. But as a seven-figure brand, you should have four peaks within the month. What that means is you should have like probably two prominent peaks, okay? Which is Easter, Prime, whatever. Like whatever you want to talk about publicly through the website, you should talk about it. But then you should have two other peaks that are basically unlisted. They're probably in the announcement bar, but they're not prominent. They're not on the hero banner. They're not on the hero image. We are not talking about it to every single person. We're not sending those emails out to everyone. But that's where you test all these things, which are like we wrote up this idea of like there's, there's baseball all opens and you sell stuff to kids, which are like for baseball moms. Make unlisted landing page. Talk about a customer journey that's specific to that. And that's actually how you should test all of these things. Because my point is, you can find-- If you went out in a random day and you said baseball moms, you probably will not work But if you said that during a time period where it matters, you will win. And that's why I believe the way you should test this is you should test-- You should convert everything that you have into buckets. You have a moments customer journey, and then you have evergreen customer journey. You should test your moments during the peak big moments that you have. Try to have two of them in a month, and then you should test them. The way you should test them is you should-- If you don't have something winning, which is use that graph and see if it above that or not during that time of the year or that time of the basically a month. If you don't have anything that's above that graph, then you need to keep testing and you need to have redundancies.

[00:15:40] If this doesn't work, I will go to the other thing and I'll win. If you do have something that wins, you should still split test. And the way you should split test is don't have something on the homepage with a official split test of okay, send 50% of traffic here, 50% of traffic there. It's not good because you will lose because it's a very valuable moment to me, and if the split test didn't work, it didn't work. I would want to stack spend. So I will actually take a new campaign, launch it to a new landing page, talking about the same marketing moment, which is my main moment, like Easter day, and have a different offer, which is can I have an Easter bundle? Which is what if I took the same bundle I used to give 20% discount on and now I give 5% discount on and special Easter packaging on it?

[00:16:18] There are like so many things like we live in an infinitely creative universe, so you can come up with as many ideas you want. The good thing is we can actually probably tell you which are the good ones because we can just look at all the other businesses that are in the same niche. We can tell you, "Hey, this is what's working."

[00:16:30] But the point is that might work. That might actually give us a conversion rate even if the margin is the same. That might give us a conversion that's so much better that you will have bigger moments during those prominent moments.

[00:16:40] And then for the baseball moms and like I think you can have cardio week and you can have Earth Day and you can have all these other small things.

[00:16:48] You should test evergreen there. That is actually my main point, which is like because they're unlisted, you should test evergreen offers and you should test everything that's evergreen there. It might not be the main cohort that you have of people, like people who care about Earth might not-- Like some set of those people will still be your evergreen customers, but they will not all be.

[00:17:04] But you will not lose money on it. When you can attach something to a marketing moment, you will just not lose money

[00:17:10] on testing. And that is actually the beautiful part, which is your job between seven to eight is go test those moments. Use those lear- those moments as a learning container to test what works for evergreen across landing pages, offers, and creatives, and then just make them for evergreen.

[00:17:24] Just remove Earth Day from it and the rest everything still works.

[00:17:27] And that's your winning evergreen thing.

[00:17:29] And then you basically graduate into evergreen. Instead of testing on evergreen, losing money and seeing if it works or not.

[00:17:35] Richrd: Yeah, yeah. So I-- well, I think it's, it's important to call out again, like you'd s- you'd mentioned that formula at the beginning, which is landing page plus content plus offer to the power of customer journey, to the power of moments, and that final layer, which is, of course, like the final exponential is the moment, is really important because kind of what you're framing for us here is that all of your testing, all of your customer journey builds, all of your offers, all have to fit within a marketing moment because that's when people have a time that they want to buy, that's when they're going to buy, and it's just it's just sort of an immutable law of the world.

[00:18:06] So, um, yeah, I guess, talk a little bit more then about what the process looks like for ideating those offers. If you can bring up an example. So you'd mentioned before, for instance, with the olive oil brand, I think this is interesting, like the idea that selling the bundle evergreen or in one of these moments where you're testing your evergreen, that doesn't make sense.

[00:18:26] For a specific marketing moment that might be around gifting or whatever, then the bundle makes perfect sense. What are some other examples that you can dig up from whatever industry for what it would look like to, to test these different types of offers?

[00:18:39] Joy: I think to, to hurt people's brain, because people love binary,

[00:18:43] the way you should treat this is you should have it separately at all times. The way you should do it for a major moment is very different from the unlisted moment, and every month you're supposed to have both. You are supposed to have two major moments and two unlisted moments. Let's start with the major moment. The way you win in a major moment is you go and find which brand actually has that as the biggest moment. So if you remember, we talked about this, I think, for Bond Primitive few years ago, which is they have a d- they-- Black Friday is not their biggest moment. They have a different time period.

[00:19:10] I don't want to say what it is, but it's a major moment that's actually bigger for them because CPMs are cheaper and they get the same conversion rate, they get the same peop- amount of people buying. It's as big of a culture moment as Black Friday for them or actually bigger. That is what you should do.

[00:19:22] You should find the industry for which that moment. Let's say Prime Day is coming up. There will be someone somewhere for who Prime Day will be bigger than Black Friday to a certain degree, or it might be the closest. Then you should learn from them why it is. This is like a very, a really prominent example that can be applied to basically every business should be if you're in health, you probably have Christmas or leading up to Christmas the worst.

[00:19:47] Your Black Friday is gonna be terrible, your Christmas is gonna be decent, and after Christmas you're gonna pick up. And then you go and look at who has the best Christmas. The people who have the best Christmas are people who give gifts. It's like personalized jewelry, they have their time of their life.

[00:20:00] That, that's the best thing they ever have. And then they... i'm pretty sure there are more other businesses, but if you-- You need to go and learn from them, which is like, why does personalized jewelry have it? Because during that time period, I'm actually gifting. So yes, um, shoes might have a great time and every other industry might have a great time, but- Your personalized route is going to have the best time, then that means can I have something personalized about my product?

[00:20:22] Which if you're in health, can I have it personalized in terms of can I, can it be like specific plan for you or stuff like that? Which might be far-fetched and you might not be able to do it, then take it a little bit closer. Okay, people are giving it as gift. That means if I can build a really nice gift set, and if you notice like people do this, like you can charge $20 extra, can I have a really good wooden plate so you can put your vitamins on top and I can make it into a Christmas framing.

[00:20:45] So it looks really good under the tree, you will win. And that's what you're doing. So for m- major marketing moments, you're just learning who has the best. Like I think we had Army week. There, there's so many good examples of promotional periods. You just learn from whoever has the best and you copy and you try to make a marketing moment for that.

[00:21:02] Richrd: Yeah. So, well, I was gonna say too so you mentioned before obviously it's important not to copy the things that you see on X, but I think that there's probably some value to the biggest-- Yeah, yeah, exactly. Or the marketing moment or the, the time of the year when, when buying behavior is up, because that's gonna be the same for w- any brand, whether it's large or small.

[00:21:20] Um,

[00:21:21] Joy: you don't copy the offer. That's the point. Like you will not go and copy it exactly and you will not copy the offer. Also, this is again, like the reason it's not binary is like you do it very different for the unlisted one. For the unlisted one, you actually don't do that. For the unlisted one, you go and I don't know how to tell you this, which is like you probably need to have our insight on this.

[00:21:38] Like the way I do this is... That's a nice dog. The way I do this is I will look through Statlas and I will just know I have industry context of, okay, what works best in this industry, and then I have Statlas context of, okay, these are the best brands that are killing it and crushing it and during this time period. That's how we make unlisted. Unlisted actually is special to us in a way, which is like I know for Evergreen, you should build this customer journey. You should start with a quiz. You should drop them on a particular kind of subscription. You should-- This is how you should increase AOV on the first end versus the second end.

[00:22:06] Or if you remember, we were actually talking about this so much, which is like your first end AOV should drive it down probably to a particular number. I know that particular number because I have the industry, like I have the average of the industry. Your job is if you can have industrial context of, okay, everyone's AOV is 50-ish dollars. I know everyone is bidding about 50-ish dollars. They have one extra ask. That's what the average is. Can I figure out a way in which I can pay 55? That's all I'm playing with. Then it's okay, how do I pay 55? Can I make people buy faster, which is the conversion versus AOV conversation we come back to, or can I extend the LTV out? Can I have free gifts be added on to it? Is like how do I change the customer journey to go and beat that particular number? So to win on the unlisted moments, you need to have the industrial context of what I'm trying to beat. Again, all the games are what I'm trying to beat, and you need to start with the North Star, and the, the North Star for those two is very different.

[00:22:57] But the overarching is that, is that graph.

[00:23:00] Once you have above log conversion versus AOV, you have won in that customer journey,

[00:23:06] is how I would say it. Awesome.

[00:23:07] Richrd: A-a-and to be clear then too, just, just obviously we'll have the graph up, but i-it's a graph measuring conversion rate versus AOV, and essentially what you're saying is you wanna be above the, the average curve, yeah?

[00:23:18] Joy: Yeah.

[00:23:19] Richrd: Right. Um, so actually may-might be interesting to talk a little bit about 'cause you had some notes on where people land on that graph, like just on average how, how people are doing on kind of how that on that curve.

[00:23:32] So you'd mentioned that let me see if I can find it here. You can see from the, the graph that like eight-figure-- how the way in which eight-figure brands haven't figured out that seven-figure brands don't. Like maybe speak to that a little bit.

[00:23:44] Joy: That, that graph doesn't take into account the context of eight-figure versus seven-figure, and that's interesting. If you do that, you will notice that eight-figure brands are actually above the average and seven-figure are below the average.

[00:23:52] What that means is they just haven't figured it out, and that's how you can be like, "Okay, I don't need to spend more time on it because I'm above industry average, and there are other things in my business that are below industry average I need to go and fix for it." But people don't do this exercise of "Is my offer, is the way I'm acquiring customers above average in efficiency or below average?" And that's basically how we know what to go and fix for. It is also like that's actually the one thing I can go and say, which is solving for customer journey, if I only did that, if that was my entire job, I can probably still grow a business from seven to eight figure by just doing one, that one thing. Um, the difference also is eight-figure brands don't do this intentionally because over time they might have either got it on their first try or they have just taken so many tries. They didn't do it systematically, or there are some really good operators who might have done it, but that's why people don't talk about it, because they have done it.

[00:24:38] You just need to do this once, and then you win. But for seven-figure brands, you need to do this intentionally, and then once you go above that average log, then you have everything working for you. It's like people are like, "Yeah, my business clicked." The way you can measure that click is you actually tested stuff that went above it.

[00:24:54] There's just-- People just don't know how to measure, and that's why they can't define click. This is what click is. Once you have an offer that converts above average, you have enough marketing moments in a month that convert above average, and you have creative that's pumping out at a cost you can afford, that's what clicking means, and that's how you grow from seven to eight really fast.

[00:25:08] And that's why if there's one thing that affects it the most is customer journey and how you define it for different

[00:25:14] Richrd: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's, that's really interesting. And it's, and it's also a really good observation too, that when you're-- let's say you find yourself doom scrolling on X, looking through all these brands who are winning in these certain ways, it's a good... a good reminder, I think, too, that a lot of the time it's just that they lucked into it in terms of maybe they had a great product, and of course, that takes effort or whatever.

[00:25:32] But really, it's like a lot of the times they just sort of like figured it out kind of on accident, and now they're at a place where they're winning and have to make all these other tactical choices. But the fundamental thing is figured out, but you have the opportunity to actually do it intentionally in a way that they maybe didn't.

[00:25:48] Joy: I think this is also like recent. I see a lot of people talk about creatives for Grunt. Grunt, Grunts have so many good ads. This is why the AdWords people will post their thoughts about why that ad works. I'm like, yeah, and 90% of the work is done by their subscription funnel that they have where it's basically dirt cheap to buy.

[00:26:03] I think it's $30 to buy, and they're paying $100 to acquire a customer. The, the 90% of the work of making that ad work is basically because of that offer. And then you make stuff, and you will... If the same-- And this is actually interesting, which is if you hired the same creative agency that did the work for Grunts, they will not have the same hit rate on your seven-figure business as Grunts because Grunts figured it out. They made a back end where the CAC is actually so good that they can out-compete their competition in a way that they can have-- they will just have a higher hit rate on their ads. And you, because you need a three extra Rs to just break even because your offer is not that good and you need to extract all the value on that ad on the same instant, you will just not win.

[00:26:43] Your ads need to be extraordinary, and Grunts just need to have good ads.

[00:26:47] And that's where the cost difference comes from.

[00:26:49] Richrd: So let's-- I wanna talk real quick then about, like, when you're- Ideating these offers. Is it just a matter of you come up with as many as possible, obviously within the bounds of these specific marketing moments? Or what's, what is the math, or is there some way to calculate a little bit more intentionally what set of offers you should be trying?

[00:27:09] Joy: I think... So this, this is m- this is my personal take on this, which is

[00:27:13] you should not be testing them evergreen. If you're gonna wrap them in a moment, that-- you should actually just be doing that. You should never be testing anything evergreen. You should also never be using any software that splits traffic. If you have done those two things, there, there, there's a reason I- why I say that, which is you will never lose money if you do it in a moment, or that's ideally what's go- going to happen. Also, if you don't split test traffic, you're just launching a new campaign. That means I'm just spending additional incremental money on top, and I will also not lose there.

[00:27:42] And then the answer is if my downside is actually zero, then the answer is yes, you should test as much as you can. Some directional advice is specific to the industry you're in, but I can give you the answer, but the answer is not going to be specific- like applicable to the people. Because the answer is like you go into Statlas and you have the context of what we have as a context by working on multiple brands. Like the answer is go into Statlas, open the industry report in it, and you can just start looking at the brands and see what they do, and then find the biggest competitors and like... But that, that's not applicable.

[00:28:11] So the, the thing for them is like your downside should be zero, and then you should be testing at least for a month, two prominent moments and two small moments, and that's it.

[00:28:21] Richrd: Yeah. Okay. So one, one other thing I wanna touch on, because you mentioned it in your notes and I think it's interesting, is like in some ways the conversation we've been having is sort of about C-CVR. It's kind of about conversion rate. But one thing that you pointed out, and you've pointed out on one of our cohort calls with our six-figure brands before, is that this is not-- has nothing to do with CRO.

[00:28:38] So talk to us a little bit about what, why CRO is sort of useless when thinking about

[00:28:44] Joy: CRO is useless because CRO, according to me, is changing how the website looks

[00:28:49] like, what the colors of the buttons are, where the, the stars are of reviews, and what color those are. Like, those are according to me CRO changes. It, it makes the flow of buying easier and faster. It's like you, you want to make it faster, but if-- The way you make something faster and easier to buy is people should really want it. You can't force people. You can't add butter to the side and get things fast if they just don't want it to begin with, right?

[00:29:16] That's the whole point, which is 80% of CRO comes from offer, headline. A really good example of this was, like, if you sold dog food and then you started saying "Dog food for German Shepherds," and you ran ads to a landing page that said "Dog food for German Shepherds," and you showed a German Shepherd in the ad, it will boost your conversion rate more than any change you could make on a landing page that said "Dog food" for,

[00:29:36] Richrd: Yeah.

[00:29:37] Joy: That is my point, which is like 80% of that is that, and then the other 20% doesn't really matter for seven-figure businesses because they haven't done that exercise for all the pages. You should probably have CRO once you have figured out "This is the thing I want to make it better." You should not spend money for conversion rate optimization on something you don't even know I want to keep.

[00:29:55] I don't know if I want to keep that offer because I don't win on it right now.

[00:29:58] That's why I said y- it's probably not the ideal for a seven-figure business. It's, it, it might be good at $30 million, to be fair. That's where you have figured out, you know. You probably found the best ads you were ever gonna have.

[00:30:08] You've probably found the best offer you were ever gonna have, and that's why you've reached that point.

[00:30:12] But until that point, I don't think CRO is that valuable because you don't even know if you're going to be able to run with it for the next six months.

[00:30:18] Richrd: Yeah. And I think too, like if, if, if somebody doesn't want what you're selling,

[00:30:22] Joy: Yeah, you-

[00:30:23] Richrd: why, would changing the color of a button or making it more UX friendly or whatever... I think like one, one thing, at least anecdotally from my shopping experience, I've found that if I want something enough, I'll figure out how to buy it off of your site.

[00:30:33] You know what I mean? And like obviously it would make it better if, if it was easier or whatever. But at a certain point, that is like you're saying, an eight-figure problem to solve. It's like how can-- now that I have an offer that works all the time, how do I figure out how to make that a little bit more frictionless to pick up some incremental value?

[00:30:48] Um, but anyway, I thought... Yeah, go ahead.

[00:30:51] Joy: this happens on Black Friday, right? Like when, when you don't have your Black Friday offer on your website, people email you and saying, "Your ads are running.

[00:30:57] Give me that offer." That's the value of a really good offer. So that's how you should know it. People want it. Y-you can have a shitty website.

[00:31:04] You can have it m- you can make sure it doesn't even work, the buttons are not clickable, and they will still buy the Black Friday offer.

[00:31:10] Richrd: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, they'll figure it out. So that's what you have to solve first, is make something that people wanna buy, which I mean is like maybe a way that you can kind of summarize all of this. But, um, all right.

[00:31:20] Joy: I think the summary of this is test everything in moments. Do not test them in evergreen, and then make sure you have customer journey. And every customer journey consists of three parts: content, landing pages, and offers. And then you should see if you won by looking at that graph. That's it.

[00:31:35] Richrd: Love it. All right. Well, I think that's gonna wrap it up for us. Night has fallen over the Caucasus Mountains there behind you, Joy, so, we'll let you go. But, um, if you're interested in getting this kind of analysis, getting the specific sort of context that we have around your industry getting that look at your brand, if you're a seven-figure brand we have a seven-figure service tier.

[00:31:52] Check it out at comettherco.com. Hit the Hire Us button, let us know. If you're a six-figure brand, Joy is our weekly cohort leader for those six-figure brands. Come hit the Hire Us button. You'll have a conversation with me, and we'll figure out whether or not it's a fit. But all right, I think that's gonna do it for us.

[00:32:05] Until next time, we'll see y'all. Take care.