The Future of Marketing in a One-Click World with Caden Thompson

In this episode, Nathan and Caden discuss various topics related to Google Ads and agency land. Caden shares his background in marketing and how he got into the digital marketing industry. They dive into the concept of Google's Performance Max and its purpose in reducing the barrier of entry for small businesses. They also discuss the challenges and limitations of using Performance Max and how it can be used in conjunction with other channels. The conversation then shifts to the importance of specialization versus broadening focus in agencies, and the difficulties of upskilling large performance marketing teams. They also touch on the concept of removing conversion tracking from Google ad accounts and the potential benefits and challenges of this approach. The episode concludes with a discussion on the future of marketing in a one-click world and the value of media buyers in driving better financial outcomes for businesses. They provide advice on how to vet agencies and what to look for in terms of red flags and reporting.

Caden's Socials

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@cprogrowth
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cadenthompson/

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background
06:33 The Pros and Cons of Performance Max
09:23 Omnichannel Approach and Adding Facebook Ads
11:08 Specialization vs. Broadening Focus in Agencies
18:29 Removing Conversion Tracking from Google Ad Accounts
24:45 Testing and Results of Conversion Tracking Removal
31:05 The Future of Marketing in a One-Click World
33:16 Vetting Agencies and Red Flags
43:07 Conclusion and Where to Find Caden

Takeaways

• Performance Max was introduced by Google to reduce the barrier of entry for small businesses in Google Ads
• Performance Max can be effective for new customer acquisition, but its use case diminishes as more businesses adopt it
• Caden recommends using Performance Max as a complementary tool rather than a main strategy
• Caden has expanded into Facebook ads to have an omni-channel approach and better understand user psychology
• The balance between specialisation and broadening focus is important for agencies
• Removing conversion tracking from Google ad accounts and focusing on overall incrementality is the best strategy
• Vetting agencies should involve in evaluating their impact on profit and looking for red flags in conversion tracking, audience sources, and auto-applied recommendations
• Business owners should not solely rely on agencies and should have a basic understanding of digital marketing
• In a one-click world, agencies should focus on driving better financial outcomes rather than relying on attribution
• Large businesses should vet their agencies based on profit improvement, conversion tracking, reporting, and decision-making based on financial metrics

Transcript

0:02

Welcome back to the Blues Brothers podcast. We missed last week's episode because I was away with the flu and this week I barely made it into the office this morning. So I'll try to keep my voice to a minimum and luckily I've chosen the best guest to talk throughout this podcast. We're going to go through Google ads. We're going to talk about agency land. We'll talk about where agencies are moving, how to vet agencies. There's so many different directions that we can go with this conversation, but I think we'll keep it free flowing. We're joined with Kaden. So Kayden has worked at Sol 8. He's also started his own agency. I've done a lot of content together on the Sol 8 channel as well on his channel. He's come on our channel. I think we collab on content every two weeks now. So thanks for finally coming on the podcast. Yeah, thanks for having me. Glad to be here. Awesome. For those that haven't watched any of our content that we've put out across all of these different channels, it'd good to get an intro from yourself so that people have some context about where the conversation will go and then what your experiences across what's called digital marketing. Yeah, so it's kind of funny when I tell people this, but I actually started marketing when I was about 12 years old. And funny story, my grandfather actually got me into it in the first place, where I do like trade shows. So it was like very like old school marketing, like just going to trade events and like pretty much trying to like promote the products. And so my grandfather loved his job. And he just pretty much would go to these shows every like couple months, bring me along. I'd help him pretty much move stuff, talk to people, learn about which companies are pushing what. He had a bunch of brands underneath him that he was advertising for in the agricultural niche. That was the starting point of my whole marketing experience, I guess you can say. Pretty much got me to the point where I wanted to do marketing in a more modern way because I came along the old school way of doing it, which still works. But the more online side of things has been one of those things to where I was like, hey, I want the freedom because you can do fully remote and it's also in a new and growing sector. so for me, I just saw that as a huge opportunity for me to lean more into that side of things. so pretty much, yeah, I went to college, went through marketing, started at a very small agency, which was my first job, local digital marketing company. and then decided, I want to get more involved, meet more people that are passionate about it. I went to the other agency that Nathan just mentioned, was Solutions 8. I started there as an account manager, guess a client manager, moved into actually pretty fast because I was just consuming knowledge every day. was obsessed moving into just being a lead strategist after going through all the barriers It was one of those things to where it'd be consuming John's content on Solutions A, any content on YouTube, LinkedIn, going as far as I can just in terms of just focus on what are these new strategies, what's the general best practice, and then going into marketing psychology. This was probably a year of just 12 -hour days back to back to back. I was obsessed with it. Finally, once I proved my whole baseline with all that, yeah, I just pretty much solidified myself instead of Google Ads at Solutions 8. Then now, obviously, I my own agency that I've been doing on the site for a while now and just leaning more into that too, and also adding Facebook to the mix, which has been fun. A bit of a long intro, but yeah, my general story. I think that was good. I think where we should probably start is why do you think Google introduced performance max and then how are you finding Google in 2024? Yeah, so Performance Max, believe Google's original thought behind it was to reduce the barrier of entry inside of Google Ads for small business owners. I think that it was one of those things to where it was that as the initial trigger. And then I think it's just been kind of snowballing in a way where Google is looking at ROAS and seeing that as like what our in -app says as the health of your business. because they're not going to go in and they don't know every company's P &Ls, it's just impossible for them to do that. They're just going after large datasets of this works that doesn't work. I think that philosophy channels all throughout Google as just purely ROAS focus. Obviously, with that being in mind, remarketing is a big issue if you lean too heavily into that because obviously that's going to hurt your P I think Performance Max originally was working really well because the adoption rate of it was not really high. That audience that was ready to buy that new market in the pool of people that Google knows was not necessarily being consumed by all these other people leaning into Performance Max. We actually had this internal talk at Solutions 8 early on where we were saying, well, it was working really well, new customer acquisition. early on and then now as time developed, the use case of it has dropped off more and more. As more people are adopting it and more people are just looking at ROAS and NNN numbers, it's becoming more popular, but it's hurting businesses on the back end. Not in every case, but I'm in a lot of scenarios. We've shifted our approach both at my agency and Solutions 8 where we look at Performance Max as either the little step brother of Facebook, meaning just very little spend goes into it and it just uses it to essentially help bring in those people that need that extra push from your marketing. Or we use it sort of as like a way to pair, you know, another top of funnel like YouTube, for example, that's not as affected by performance max, to then feed into performance max and then get those conversions. So I would say from a general use case, I maybe use it 5 % of the time. depending on the account scenario, maybe it just kind of depends on a case by case. So it's more of just a different tool to use at this point, not necessarily the main strategy that we implement like many other agencies do. Yeah, interesting. I would probably sit in the middle of being an agency that just runs P max and all robots looks good. And then where you guys are probably sitting, which is you're really leaning against it. I've had some accounts recently that with heavy brand exclusions and with dedicated brand campaigns, we've actually found that we can drive incremental ROI through scaling performance max. The issue is, I don't know how far we can scale And so like, that's ultimately the question is, where is the ceiling on being able to scale a performance max before it just goes into its old habits and starts heavily retargeting bottom of funnel and middle of funnel in comparison to scaling a true cold acquisition channel like shopping dedicated out. And so that's where I'm like, if it's a small account, if they're spending four to five K a month, we could probably get them to 10 to 15 K a month pretty quick through performance max, and it's actually going to drive top line. But once we get to that 15 K markets funny, because it's like, are we going to then transition back to standard shopping? There's this weird full circle, which is you start a new account, you can't go performance max, there's no data, you have to go standard shopping, then you transition into a performance max. And then you almost revert back to a standard shopping at a certain scale, because performance max only take you so far. Yeah, no, think, I think, yeah, it's, mean, at the end of the day, it's very like account specific, right? Like low AOV accounts, it's very hard to run standard shopping profitably because your ceiling is just way lower because CPC is obviously that audience is gonna eat it up. And also, you know, how competitive you are in the market. I mean, there's so many factors that kind of play into that. So yeah, I think we both, we both view it the same way where it's just, it's a tool to use to scale an account. But long -term wise, it's a very flimsy, like it starts to kind of break apart once you hit a certain ad spend because it reaches past that new consumable audience. And yeah, I think that it all just depends too on like your other channels as well, right? Like Facebook could be spending, you know, 90 % of the budget, performance max 10 % of the budget. And then you see that relationship of like, we scale up Facebook, we scale up performance max, and you maintain that incrementality to scale based on just performance max. returning those users. Completely agree. It's a very powerful tool. I just see it used in a lot of incorrect ways, especially when it comes down to just large companies leaning so heavy into it. When it's like you realize there's so much shopping that you can just lean into right away and help get that CPA or NCAC down. I think that's something that I see a lot of times when we take in accounts. But yeah, definitely don't want to be on the bandwagon of demonizing it either. So definitely has its use cases. Yeah, for sure. I have an interesting question for you, which is, obviously, solutions eight was a Google Photos Agency. And so your initial upscaling came through Google. What recently has made you pivot into getting into Facebook ads? Yeah, so I think the biggest thing has been Omnichannel, just having the ability to know what's going on. Because one of the biggest issues that we were facing, and I was facing too at my own agency, was we'd have a percentage of the budget, right? And so that would be anywhere from like 50%, 30%, 10%, 20%. And so we were controlling that portion of the funnel. And so if something were to change on Facebook, out of what we were trying to do, then it would just essentially blow up our whole system or affect us in a negative way or affect the client in a negative way to where it affects their P &Ls and that messes up our ability to have accurate incremental testing done. I think that was probably the number one issue. Then in addition to just my curiosity, has always been around Facebook for years now and so running it for a year has been. a big learning curve, but it's been really nice having the skills already from Google, because a lot of the algorithm skills translate over to Facebook, and Facebook's more, at least in my opinion, a creative strategy standpoint, more of like the psychology behind the user versus an actual like account structure standpoint. I think that obviously account structure is very important, but I think that if you were to compare Google and Facebook together, Google's heavily, heavily, heavily about like algorithm, like interactions between different campaign types. Whereas Facebook's more about the user and how that creative is performing and how that translates to the funnel. How do you mentally balance the fight between specialization and then broadening out your focus? Because something I think a lot about, and I actually made a post on it the other day, which is the best agencies in the world are the agencies that do one specific thing, and they do it incredibly well. because they can focus all their SOPs, all their attention, all their upscaling on that one thing. And obviously, that was a core value proposition of Solutions 8 for a while is we only do Google Ads. Almost no one exists at the scale that we're at just doing Google Ads. And so by function, we are the best because all of our training, all of our people, it's all we talk about, it's all we do, it's all we consume. But you're probably missing out on the fact that by having Meta as well, you then get that additional context to actually drive better financial outcomes for businesses. So how are you in your head battling this because you can argue your way all the way to hey, we service the entire globe. And so like, where do you stop in that thought process? Yeah, so I would say the biggest thing kind of comes down to just omni -channel. I think that's kind of the main skill that I see being valuable is the relationship between how all channels function, right? And that's just general marketing principles, like you said, like incremental testing, like how that affects different parts of the funnel and being keen to figuring that out, meaning that you can notice patterns lot more quickly, I think has been the skill that I've been focusing more and more on. Just because when it comes to... know, SOPs in Google, SOPs in Facebook, like, yes, you can get that extra like 10% or that 5 % lift on like changing your strategy or even, you know, more than that. But if we compare like the best of the best pair with the best of the best, the difference in impact gets smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller because you already have the baseline figured out. And so I saw the value being that, like, how many channels are like, this is like huge. so many people aren't focused on this and looking at just the pure value prop of like affecting your PNLs versus just our little bubble over here being a lot better. And the way that I maintain that has been mainly based off of being in the industry, knowing who to trust and who to not trust. And I think that's probably the biggest thing. to then speed up your way of consuming information and then vetting it yourself. Because you've already vetted the person. So you know, like, okay, does this person know what they're doing or they just another YouTube or Instagram guru that's just saying, yeah, well, five extra ROAS, check it out. And then you take them on and it's performance max. Sweet, we're at a 20X, but we're losing X amount of money. There's a plethora of agencies and gurus that are looking at just ROAS I see it as just one of those things to where it's like there's so much improvement just focusing on OmniChannel. And those people that are doing that, like me and Nathan, we can have those conversations about incrementality. And then I just use that to base off who I follow on social platforms. And then if I have my focus on OmniChannel, I then know what's test for, so I have my internal knowledge. But then I look at what other people are doing and say, OK, that's an idea for a test. Let me see if it works and then vet it myself and then go through that process. So I would say from an informational standpoint, it's gotten a lot easier just having multiple people to go off of that you trust. I think that's probably the biggest benefit that I've had that's allowed me to manage the information. But if we're talking like going into SEO and all that, my brain is just going to explode. think that you have to cap yourself out at a certain point, whether it's niche to the type of industry you're in or in the amount of services you have. It's a fine balance there. Yeah, for sure. I was gonna say that I have this theory, I don't know if it's actually true. I'm not gonna sit here and say that I know everything about agency land and how agencies operate at every, every level of scale. But let me know your thoughts, which is that I think we're in this bubble of and the only content I consume anywhere. is never talking about robots. It's always in alignment with driving better financial outcomes. So you're looking at actual business level metrics and then translating that into the ad accounts. Because anything else, I hide it from my feed and I don't look at it. And so to me, it looks like, the whole industry is doing this. But then we get five to six accounts a week, sorry, come through that I look at and I order and I look at what this agency is doing. And I go, Oh, I'm wrong. 90 % of people aren't doing this stuff. They're still looking at a platform. They're still running old campaign types. They have no context about the wider business. This is crazy. Why is that happening? I think it's because and this is where my theory starts and we start to derange into into my own thoughts, which is that it's really, really hard for large agencies, or agencies that been around for a while to technically upskill an entire large performance marketing team. to new standards. And so it's easier to just keep acquiring clients and then just keep the existing training program, keep the existing SPS don't update them. It's too much friction, it's too hard, people don't like change. And therefore they get stuck in these old ways. And it allows new agencies to just pop up with updated information, roll out a new team with the updated information, go deliver a much better service and then maybe that agency over time turns into the same one and then goes and dies. And there's just this consistent churn of agencies coming through because people can't effectively upscale a large team quick enough on the new stuff that's coming into the fold. Yeah, no, I totally agree. think it kind of goes back into that balance like we were just discussing where it's like how many services do you want to provide? And then how many people do you want to serve? Right? Like the more services you have, the less people you can serve for it to be even enough to say, hey, like, I know what I'm talking about. You're broadening yourself too wide. But then there's the other angle of like, I can have more services for a specific niche. because you know that niche. I think from a training perspective when it comes to agencies, think one of the biggest things that I found success in is localizing that source of truth and then teaching everyone off the same software. I think that's been a really, really big benefit. That's why I mainly focused on e-commerce, specifically Shopify, because we know everything that's going on and we're not playing in a bunch of different CRMs. and trying to figure out what's happening with this. And then like I'm having to teach my employees like, this CRM, you have to do this, this, this as well as myself. And you kind of get into that wide, you you're casting too wide of a net. So I think it's a really important balance to have, you know, kind of both of those at the right levels in order to then be the most successful. Because then you run into that scenario we just talking about where you just get so broad and you have so much offerings, you have a massive team, but then it's like who's niching down and growing actual knowledge base to then sync together and then teach everyone. Then you have to also rely on everyone to hold all that knowledge. I think that a lot of agencies are just too broad, I think is what it comes down to. Yeah, for sure. this a bit of content that you've been putting out and you actually messaged me the other day about it, which is you're saying success removing conversion tracking from Google ad accounts. I don't want to run that as a test. I'm going to let you run it as a test and see what happens. But how are those tests going so far? And can you provide any context to that as well for the audience? Yeah, so the first thing I'll say is this idea came from John Moran. So he's lead strategist. I've known him for years now. The dude is just always working on Google. He's nuts. And I think the most interesting thing about this test is that it kind of goes, it goes against the grain of those people, meaning those 90 % of agency owners that are looking at in -app numbers because it completely blows that out of the water and says, we're not even going to track in-app numbers on ROAS. Yes, you can still see in the all column, but we're not even going look at that. We're just going to look at overall incrementality, what that's driving the overall business, and if that continues to do so or not. To summarize the test, it's essentially removing conversion tracking from the account. Swapping to manual CPC, so not enhanced. And then using an arbitrary conversion action, so like YouTube engagements that's been in the account but hasn't had any conversions come through. So then in Google's eyes, they view it as we don't know if we're making you money or not, so we can't upcharge you in the actual bidding war that they have. And so the very aggressive test is doing that per campaign and just optimizing for a fake conversion that you're not even really, that you can't even really and then seeing how CPCs and positioning stays the same and how that translates to your overall sales. I think John actually did a post on this recently where he's been testing, think for 72 days now and it's been growing continuously. He's had no issue with scale. I think that this specific strategy and the use case of it is very much geared towards those people that are hitting a wall. in their scale and whenever they scale their CPCs increase, but their overall sales don't. We actually had this conversation, I was talking to John, think it was literally like a day ago, where we've got it to the conclusion of conversion -based data is just the pool that Google knows and it's just having people bid against it however much it possibly can. If you're showing positive signs of like you're making money off it, meaning like you're increasing spend, then it's going to try to push the CPCs further and further. We've seen that correlation again and again. And so I think actually Ginny Marvin commented on one of the posts that John had about this. And they pretty much admit it to price fixing, which, I mean, we kind of all knew it, but just seeing it in writing, it's kind of like, okay, like, here it is. And so with that extreme test, I think that it doesn't always work. It's one of those scenarios where, you have to make sure, especially if you're running shopping, that you have a really, really strong negative keyword list because when you're on ROAS -based bidding, it's already doing negatives for you in a sense, where it's pulling away from people that aren't interacting and not converting. And so what we see in accounts that fail with it are you don't have a very flushed out negative keyword list. And so then it just starts going after everything in terms of the keywords. And so then you have to go through and make sure you negative that all to make sure that you're not going after just junk clicks per se. So you have to be very careful with how you use it in a shopping set of things. With a search set of things, exact match obviously has been the way to go just because you don't have to worry as much about going after keywords that you don't and then expanding out into phrase match after that once you have or you feel confident enough to do so and then scaling from there. And then it's more so just an inventory issue with offering versus a here's what Google knows to actual sale. And you might find that when you're on manual versus conversion based, which I would say majority of the cases is, is that your lag time increases further and further because the users are not as engaged in Google's eyes, which then leads into obviously longer buying cycles. So it's been pretty eye opening. I would say for the most part, I'm very thankful that, you John had this idea and we just kind of like went off with it because it's just, it's very, it opens us up back to the days where you can say, yeah, let's scale this campaign. Like I want to scale. I feel like the mindset is more now like, how can we save money over here? How can we save money over here? Whereas this mindset is going back to the original, like, okay, let's grow the account. Let's scale. Like let's increase it and let's not hit a And Facebook can do that, but it's the point where Google was having trouble doing that. And I believe it's for that use case of just Google price fixing CPCs and increasing that more and more. it's been, like I said, it's been pretty eyeopening. It's very interesting to see how other people view it. And it kind of, I actually got into a conversation with a guy that was talking about ROAS and like, what do you even look at? And it's like, well, I look at P &L incrementality. It's like, those are just buzzwords. And it's These have been talked about before either of us are born. This is how people used to do it. Nothing's changed. It's just we've gotten this ability to see what's going on and now we're just going back to what originally works and how all these large brands were built. That's really what it comes down to. I just think it's cool seeing it being played out further and further in this scenario with that strategy. Yeah, it's funny to dismiss profit as a buzzword. That's, that's pretty funny. People people were getting angry over that post. And I understand some people's pushback, which is that we've, we've, this is why I'm not going to run the test yet until I see more data on it. But we've taken on quite a few accounts, maybe like four to five. It's not often that we'll take an account on like this, but where their conversion tracking is completely messed Either it was never set up in the first place. And for whatever reason, they've been spending four to five K a month for six months with no conversion tracking, which is just mind blowing. Or it was triggering on every page visit. And so they just had like an a million row as and what we've done immediately came in, fix the tracking day one, and almost within two weeks, back end revenue doubles. And so that shows me that okay, The lack of conversion tracking had the campaign confused, didn't know where to go. And then we put the conversion tracking on a provider direction and then the campaign knew who to serve to and started improving. And so it's just that small set of data that I have on the tests that I've run that make me very scared to then just pull that, pull the signal off. But it's interesting. think it comes down to, I guess, three things you would say, budget and that relationship, I guess, was one and a half things. The budget relationship to the actual audience that Google knows can convert because you could be in a scenario where you have essentially a blue ocean of people that Google has in data and it's not being targeted inside of the algorithm. And like most of my accounts are still on conversion -based spending because we haven't hit that wall yet. But it's those accounts that you're spending 500 ,000, 600 ,000, over a million a month, you're hitting that wall and you need to push past that. Now, obviously, I've tested this in smaller accounts as well too, but a lot of that comes down to knowing your targeting with the conversion data in the first place. So if you know this keyword works and gets you sales, then target that keyword more. So there's a little test that you can do to pull out certain keywords and then just push that more. But I think that's very situational. And using data that Google already has makes sense in majority of cases. It's just a matter of if you go away from that, you need to be very careful of your keywords because everything can just blow up. And that can cause obviously big issues and things that look worse. So I definitely think that's a big, big issue with But from, yeah, like I was saying, from a scaling perspective, it opens you up to so many things. I actually thought of another strategy, and I haven't tested this yet. This still kind in the theory of things right now, but it's kind of pairing both together where you have, you know, that main data set of people, right? So you have those people that can convert that Google knows, and you're still optimizing for those people till diminishing returns hit. And then you add on a manual campaign for those exact same keywords. to then see if that number one keeps you out of solid CPC and drives more sales, as well as seeing if that increases the volume of known in Google's eyes people that can convert. Because what we've seen with conversion based campaigns is they can essentially go after cold traffic that's typing in cold terms. Even if you try to exclude all the brand terms as much as possible, they still technically type in cold terms. we've actually seen some instances where we'll actually run RLSADSA, which is essentially just a remarketing DSA campaign to then scoop up those users. And we use that on a conversion -based strategy to then say, okay, these are repeat users. It pulls it away more so from the actual main campaign that's conversion -based bidding. And then that can stay as colder per se. But yeah, still kind of in the works on having a top of funnel, I guess you can say. Pure manual strategy, but I'm paired with that conversion base That's something that I'm I'm thinking of right now and I think that when it comes to search I think that's something that I'll for sure do shopping. I'm still kind of trying to figure that out So once I had that flushed out I'll let you know but I think it'll be an interesting test to see how You can kind of employ both strategies together and see if that's you know, a lot lower risk as Yeah, for sure. Have you done much testing with splitting conversion actions by new customers versus existing customers and pulling them into Google as two different conversion actions? Yeah, so we've tested that back in the back when we were running Performance Max. So we did it with the setting, we did it with customer lists, and we pretty much came to the conclusion that it might move the needle in the direction slightly, and then it'll cap out and then drop back into where it was at previously. And so what I mean by that is that Google doesn't match users well at all. I mean, even Facebook doesn't. Facebook does it way better than Google, but Google is awful at it. And so I see a lot of accounts that will focus on new customer acquisition. And I actually did a test. It was with a supplement brand. So they were getting repeat purchasers again and again. And instead of adding a new customer column only, I just maxed out the click window or click attribution window. And then instead of having the setting be every user, I just swapped it to one. and saw what would happen from that. It made a lift and then eventually those people from the 90 days came back and it got into a longer cycle. It was hitting people that were on average 90 days being outside of that window. I did do that test as well and it worked out early on, but 30 days, so within the window of those 90, it ended up not panning out. It was initial trigger and then it fell back. Obviously, excluding, know, Klaviyo lists is SOP for us. So we don't even trust Google's all conversion audience. We just try to keep it as much as possible. The actual user data on it and then putting that into both Facebook and Google because that's going to give you the most accurate data. But like I said, it's the unknown amount of people instead of Google that are people that would convert that are warm or cold kind of mixed together. It's so high that If you get into the point of hyper-targeting certain audiences, you just exclude the majority of traffic on Google. Yeah, yeah, interesting. I want to pivot a little bit to asking a question that I was going to ask at the start, which is, and I did a video on this. This was my first video on solutions. Do you think we're moving to a one click world? And if so, where's the value with media buyer? Yeah, I think this kind of speaks to the angle of successful companies is P &Ls. At this point, I don't need to see the second or third or fourth or fifth click. I mean, I want to, but I don't need to see it because there's correlations that you can draw to then figure out the information. I think that. People don't want to believe that we're moving to a one -click, but I believe that's how things are going. Just look at Europe right now. It's completely different field versus the United States, so much more privacy laws. My thought process is just if agencies are going to continue to focus on attribution and use that as their baseline, it's just going to get worse and worse and worse. That makes it better for us because obviously we're going to get more clients. I feel bad for the businesses that are kind of in that unknown space of like, who do I go with? Why do I go with them? Like, what's the, how do I measure? And then they have to then find the right person to give them the right information to then make the right decision. So it's, I would say as a small business owner, feel the most bad for them because it's, you can't hide behind attribution anymore as an agency. it's going to become more more apparent that it's not the way to do it. It wasn't the way to do it before, but now it's really not the way to do it. It's just getting worse and worse. I view that as the correlation of things. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. If you were to give advice to let's call it a large business owner. So small to medium, actually, let's let's do they're doing at least at least two to 3 million. And your revenue. What should they do to vet their current agency? If they and this is the fantastic thing about watching a podcast like this, and then they can just move to their second monitor and open up their Google ad account, open up their matter ad account. and then they can start looking for specific red flags. What would you advise that they immediately start looking for throughout those accounts? Yeah, well, I would say, this, I'm gonna take one step back, because I think this kind of outlines everything, is if you hire an agency and you're paying the max amount, right, over the period of time that you both talked about, right, because normally, like, you can't just hop in day one and all of everything's different. But whatever that date range is, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, whatever that is, if you hire an agency, and you don't see an improvement of your overall profit, right? Like I'll just make it simple numbers. You pay an agency, let's say $1 ,000 a month and you don't see $1 ,000 growth. Why is that agency there? I mean, I feel like it's that simple, right? Like there's no excuse either just losing money off of you versus what they're doing before. So why not just do what they're doing before? So I see that as the first point to measure black and white. Are we making more money or not? The second point going off of specifics would be number one, I would say two areas to check would be if you go into conversions, look for multiple primary conversions in there. Double counting to inflate ROAS. I see that all the time where you'll see a campaign that's targeting the count level conversions in the settings, and then you go into the actual conversions and you see five listed as primary and it's like, purchase add to cart, a GA4 purchase conversion, and then like a page view conversion. And then you look at it and like, they're reporting like we're out of 10X, but like, we're getting worse results on our PNLs, what's going on? It's like, well, they're just quadruple tracking. So I would say that's probably the first thing to look at from just a pure in -app side of things. The next thing I would look at if you're an e -commerce store is going into audiences and then looking for audience sources. and then seeing if the e -com prod ID is firing. I see this issue so often too, where they're running a performance max campaign or dynamic remarketing campaign and they don't have the product IDs firing to then give the algorithm the right information to decide if this user needs to see this product or this product. I would say just from a baseline perspective, that's what I would look at. Then obviously going from we can go for forever and ever, but auto-apply recommendations are off. Well, at least, yeah, I wouldn't say all of them, but I would say 99 .999 percent of them. There's always that one weird scenario of it. But I would say those are probably the first areas universally that you can look and know, okay, are any of these areas off? This is a red flag. Then obviously baseline to if your company is making more money or not from the agency from when you hired them. in that range of time that they talked to and said, we'll make the improvement on day 60 or 90 or give us 90 days or 60 days or whatever it is. I probably add one thing to that, which is in reporting, which is also what are they reporting on? Pretty obvious because we've been talking about the whole, the whole podcast, but are they giving you row as in platform? And does that encapsulate brand search? Does that encapsulate retargeting existing customers on Facebook? Or are they indexing towards metrics that are actually going to drive more profit to the bottom line? Are they looking at, cac? Are they looking at E R or acquisition Mer? are they making changes based on that is more so the important point there as well. Because I know it, I know for sure guaranteed that there's probably five or six agency owners watching this video right now. And then they're going to go, okay, they're the red flags. Let's make sure we start reporting on we are. cool, it's in the report, but it doesn't mean like if you're not actually applying that into the changes in decision making that you're doing, it means nothing. And so there's also that extra degree of almost intuition that you have to have as an ecommerce operator to be able to go, okay, they're reporting on it, but also how are they using it? Can I start asking them questions? Okay, cool, it did this, but what are you doing off the back of that? Why did it improve? How does this correlate into your decision making? Because I thought if I just said reports, it would be a little bit biased because I know that anyone can throw anything into a report. Yeah, no, makes sense. think it just I feel like everything just comes back down. Are you making more money or not? Like, that's really it. Like at the end of the day, like we're going, you know, often like, you know, all these different types of terminology. And it's like, it's it's true, all that information is correct. But are you making more money from the agency or not? And then if you aren't, then fire him. Like, it's just simple as that as bad as it sounds, like, that's just that's just how it goes. And so I think, yeah, if you're an agency, business owner, whoever it is watching this, you should definitely be looking at P &Ls, because I know owners that don't look at P &Ls, and I also know agencies that don't look at P &Ls. So I think that's the number one thing. And I actually really appreciate the content you put out, because it's more from the financial side of things on a P&L standpoint. that is then good to then teach everyone and they understand like there's stuff that you've said that I have no idea. was like, really? That's interesting. I didn't know that was like a relationship there. So I think having you as a source of information from a financial side of things has been really beneficial for me because that also helps me, you know, be in a scenario where I just want to make sure that I'm reporting on the right things and we're optimizing for the right things, not the wrong things. And that's just going down the rabbit hole of, you know, marketing as a whole. Yeah, I appreciate it. The only piece of info that I'll add there before we wrap this one up and I'll pass to you is when you're looking at financial outcomes and agencies driving for you, I would recommend to not do it too quickly on too short time horizons. And so we obviously vet this heavily throughout our sales process with anyone that we bring on board. But don't expect agencies to be a cure for your business. And I say this from personal experience because I'm actually going to reference out to a case study here. I hope they're not watching this and they don't know that I'm talking about them. But there's a specific brand that we previously worked with and they went and bought the business. The business is only customer acquisition channel was Facebook. Their business was doing 300 K a month in revenue in the US, but the owners are in Australia and they bought this US company. spending $100 ,000 a month on meta. Now, these people that bought the company have never run a meta ad in their life. They've never opened an ad account and they know nothing about e -commerce. So right out of the gates, a very risky purchase to be making. Day two of owning the company, the meta ad account got banned. Sales went to zero. They made a new ad account with their agency that was working with the previous owners. And they never could get revenue back up above really 60 to 70 K a month because all the data that had accumulated within that pixel with that account was out the window. And they had to start from scratch. And to this day, they've gone through agency to agency to agency every like 30 to 60 days going, can you fix it? Can you fix it? Can you fix it? And the issue is, is that no one can really fix anything in that short of a time horizon. without really having their hands on the account for a long period of time. Unless you're going to some really terrible agencies that are missing some core pieces of information. And so when we got our eyes across this account, I was very candid and upfront and said, look, this is this is a crazy situation. I don't know if we can fix this. We can give it a shot. This hasn't been tested. This hasn't been tested. I can see in the old band ad account, which we can still say into that they were doing this. So we could try these things. But I have absolutely no guarantee that this is going to work. Because the core difference between now and then was that ad account had all $5 million worth of data in it accumulated within the pixel and within the optimization. This ad account has nothing. And so we'll do our best, but we can't guarantee anything. So I would just recommend don't try to use agencies as a bandaid. If your business is struggling to stay afloat, it likely means that you probably need to turn more of your attention towards acquisition, you probably need to get a better understanding of Facebook ads, and then work with an agency over the long term to upskill you even further. So ensure that anyone that you partner with is also that education piece where they're constantly upskilling you so that you can better understand your business, because it absolutely blows my mind that e commerce operators run a company that the entire company is reliant on Facebook ads or Google ads the entire company. And they don't know a single thing about Facebook or Google ads. And it's like, like you need to be at least a base level junior performance marketer within an agency. If you're going to run that kind of company, you need to just you need to know your way around the cap, you need to know how to check change history, you need to know what a bidding strategy is like. And if you're watching this podcast, you probably do so well done. It's good that you're consuming content. Yeah, no, think you summed it up perfectly where it's just, yeah, like you even told the client, like, this is what we're gonna do, this is what we're gonna face issues to go from there. And then that's really all you can hold an agency to is what they tell you, right? Like, we told you we can do XYZ, here's our goal, here's our roadmap, and then go from there. I think that's a really important thing. So yeah, I totally agree with that. Looking at it from a very individualized perspective on Yeah, where can people find it? Yeah, so I do have a YouTube channel. You can just look up, you know, see pro growth. I think that'll, yeah, that'll be linked or some will probably comment somewhere and then LinkedIn as well. So those have been kind of the main spaces that I'm that I'm in right now. Perfect. I'll make sure to link your LinkedIn and YouTube below. Thanks for coming on Caden really appreciate it. I'm sure we'll be doing a lot more content in the future as well. Oh, 100%. Thanks again, Nathan. Appreciate it,