Tanner Larsson 0:07
Hey, everybody, welcome back to the optimized eCommerce podcast. I’m Tanner Larsson, your host for this episode, although it is usually me, sometimes it does change. Today we’re going to be talking about something pretty cool. Everybody’s always asking us, what about ads, what’s working with ads. And guess what? I don’t teach ads, because that’s not what we do build your skills and optimization company. So today, I brought on a very special guest, Ralph Burns from tier 11, who is kind of the Yin to our Yang’s when it comes to optimization and ads. We didn’t lead to the optimization. And I’ve never seen anybody do a better job at running ads to eCommerce companies, the way that we approach optimization. And that’s what Ralph does. So wanted to bring Ralph on to kind of school you on what’s working and what’s not working in the world of eCommerce right now. So Ralph, thanks for joining us.
Ralph Burns 0:57
Thanks for having me, buddy. Long time no talk.
Tanner Larsson 1:00
Yeah, so he’s like, my favorite person in the world who I never talked to. And then this was actually going to be a faster, longer detailed podcast, but we ran out of time. So we’re gonna do a real short one today, that’s going to be real good. And then we’re gonna do a real long one later, where we actually don’t eat up all of our allotted time. Catching up.
Ralph Burns 1:17
Sounds like a plan.
Tanner Larsson 1:18
Yeah. So Ralph, first off, why don’t you give like the Reader’s Digest version of your background, and kind of why you’re so magic at what you do?
Ralph Burns 1:28
Well, I mean, I started off as an affiliate, because I got fired twice from the corporate world, I figured the only way for me to actually make money is to work on my own and not have a boss aside from my wife. So I started off as affiliate like I said, and then that sort of turned into running ads for people that I know, because they’re like, well, you’re selling all that, you know, si E and colon cleanse stuff. Why don’t you start selling my stuff. So that’s why and when we turned into an agency, a full-service agency, and, you know, we’re doing a lot of different things, SEO, Google ads, you know, Yahoo, Bing, ads back when those actually existed. And then when Facebook started putting ads in the newsfeed, we had tested them out, you know, back in 2010, 2009, as an affiliate, when they finally got targeting and ads in the newsfeed in 2013, we pivoted the whole agency to just Facebook and Instagram ads. So that’s what we’ve been doing for the last seven or eight years. And, you know, I have a team of over 50 people right now, all Virtual Media buyers, creative folks, customer success, people, and things have just been on fire, especially the last six to nine months, we’ve been in demand, which is very good. And we’re, we’re continuing to get to expand and seemingly, a lot of people need our service because a lot of people are going to want to advertise online for direct response, which is exactly what we do. So
Tanner Larsson 2:54
Absolutely, now, you know, obviously, at the time This podcast is recorded, where several are actually way months into COVID, more than several things are going on. But you know, COVID, as bad as it is, has been kind of a blessing for most eCommerce stores. And it’s caused a massive ups uptick and usability people using store shopping online, people who never shopped online are now shopping online. Numbers are big. But that’s also changed how marketing’s working, how the ad structure is working? How what’s you know, ad spins being used? how, you know, just everything? So why don’t you kind of talk a little bit about what you’re seeing? Since, you know, no, I guess, March to now and what’s changing what’s working? Let’s just go through that.
Ralph Burns 3:35
Yeah, I mean, I think in March, everybody freaked out. And we had a stable of customers that I would say probably a third completely freaked a third didn’t really know what was going to happen. There was a third that said, this is the best thing ever. Yeah. And, you know, just because their products and services lent themselves two products that were ones that were in demand during a recovery. And, you know, from COVID, and from an economic recovery standpoint. So that did help. But we did lose a fair amount of people who were sort of bricks and mortar way back then. But we noticed that the demand all of a sudden turn towards businesses that said, Well, maybe my bricks and mortar and maybe my physical locations aren’t really pulling it from a, from a revenue perspective, I need to double down on my direct response advertising online on my Shopify store, which I really haven’t done a whole lot with. And so that’s been the biggest area of growth for us. So taking brands that have really good offers that are proven, you know, these are larger companies, not ones that are probably in the fortune 500, but ones that most of the listeners of this show will probably know. But they had never really done a whole lot online and turn their focus towards that. A lot of whom were eCommerce. And that’s been a big trend. So we’ve had some remarkable results with customers who had great products had great offers in the offline world, and it was just a matter of transitioning that pivoting that to a message on Facebook and Instagram ads, which is primarily what we do, we do other social media advertising platforms as well. But if you have a really good offer something that’s proven, it’s just a matter of tweaking your messaging to approach cold traffic. And that’s what we kind of talk about all the time. Tier 11 is how do we crack the code on cold traffic, which is a lot of C’s there. Or K’s, if you know, you spell like I do depends on how you spell, it depends on how you spell it. But that really is it. So for businesses that are successful making that transition to online, and we just use Facebook and Instagram, because there’s 4 billion monthly active users, it’s like why there’s not a better platform. As far as interruption marketing goes, those obviously there’s Google, there’s search, there’s display all that we really double down on these platforms, because it’s the best way to scale and grow businesses, which we’ve done, businesses that have been big in the online world, but that want to get bigger, but more importantly, ones that are in the offline world that want to convert to the online world. That’s where we’ve really seen a lot of traction, the last six to nine months.
Tanner Larsson 6:12
Cool. Yeah, now that we’ve kind of seen the same thing on our site, and, you know, ecom stores, specifically, obviously, they’re all they’re all booming, whether regardless, in our case, it didn’t matter what the product was. Because people were at home, or they were still consuming the same. They just had more or less options to consume from so they turned to the online space. But back to like, specifically the ecom world and running ads. And you know, how has the advertising strategy or game kind of changed? Because I know obviously, now everybody’s advertising more, there’s probably less ad inventory available, we’ll get to the election later. We’ll talk about just, you know, the rest of it, but like, what should people be doing right now? How should they be shifting to kind of take advantage of what’s happening specifically on Facebook and Instagram?
Ralph Burns 6:58
Yeah, I do think that the political side of this whole thing is worth mentioning is we’re talking about Facebook, it’s true. It’s it’s an 800 pound gorilla right now, that’s kind of messing up a lot of the stuff on the platform, we just got off a call an hour or so ago with Facebook, they actually admitted that the political ads are affecting the algorithm, whatever that really means. But you know, there is a site and I can give the link here for your show notes, there is a site where you can go to you can actually see who the biggest advertisers are. And the first three, four or 500 of them are all political. It’s crazy. So in that demand is going to pretty much dry up with some some exceptions November 3, so the landscape is going to change in time for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And we’re actually preparing for that right now. So I think we’re cautiously optimistic that the craziness that we’ve seen in the algorithm like we’re just on Facebook, one of my media buyers said, Yeah, I have like $100 a day spend on a cold traffic audience with all the exclusions, meaning my fans, people have visited my website, my custom audiences, my buyers, my leads, and I run these ads for a week and I have a frequency of five to cold traffic. I’m like, What the hell is going on? And Facebook didn’t really have an answer for us. So I just think right now, what’s working is what’s not working, is there is so much competition out there. And if you’re having a tough time, you know, here in October of 2020, into November, the early part of it just stay the course. Because a lot of those advertisers, all that inventory is going to now be available to you cpms are going to decrease I think, once again, just in time for Cyber Monday, Black Friday. So but yeah, we’ve seen increased cpms we’ve seen increased competition, we’ve seen weird things like high frequency we’ve seen very challenging to get a handle on CPAs cost per acquisition row as a return on ad spend. And but we’ve weathered the storm. But yeah, the end is in sight. And I think, you know, there’s certain things that just don’t change the tenor is like if you have a great offer, you know, that takes care of a lot of bills, you’re still going to do well, the advertisers and have great offers are still doing what like they don’t care about the political ads, people are out there buying the ones that maybe they haven’t tweaked their offer in two or three years and they yearn for the days back of, you know, 2017 and 2016. When Facebook was so much easier, it’s like we’ll get with the program. It’s not three years ago, you have to change up your front end offer. And then obviously then hire you guys, you know, Bill, gross scale for the e-commerce side to increase your average order value, your lifetime value, all that stuff, but it does start with an irresistible offer still on Facebook, and the ones that are doing really well. Right now are the ones that have that and all we do is we just throw gasoline on the fire so to speak, you know With our with our systems that we put into place and help them grow their business.
Tanner Larsson 10:04
I’m glad you’re actually talked about kind of what’s happening with the political landscape because we are we’re gonna I was gonna ask you about that. But I’m glad you hit it now. Because in our membership groups in our programs, that’s one of the things. We’re mostly an optimization thing. But it’s there’s a mastermind element to it as well. So people are always talking about their ads and things like that. And that’s what the common thing is like, Hey, are you seeing this, it’s always some weird anomaly, or, hey, my ads are doing this. And it’s never good. But it’s all just focused around this craziness that we’re seeing right now.
Ralph Burns 10:33
It’s inexplicable from Facebook’s perspective, they I forget the term they use they, you know, when something is going wrong with the algorithm, they don’t know exactly what it is. And they’re not really telling the people that we talked to, but it is like you just look at the data. Like I said, I’ll show you that link of the top advertisers like when these guys all go away. I mean, they’re spending dumb money, most of these advertisers, like, you know, we talked to the Republican National Committee, we’ve talked to the Democratic National Committee about like us running ads for them. Most of those media buyers don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Like the guy for Trump, Brad Parscale is actually he does know what he’s doing. But the point is that not many people do. So a lot of it is dumb money. So you think about all that inventory that’s being sucked up by these political ads, and there’s literally no targeting in the US. So like just anybody over the age of 18. Now, maybe male, female, depending on what demographic are regionally like, where they’re kind of going, based upon electoral votes. But by and large, this is not very smart money that’s out there. And it’s taking up all your inventory, and you’re competing with people who want to outbid you. And don’t care if there’s a result, don’t really care if there’s a result, like, how do you measure you can’t measure conversions on a political ad? You know, at the end of the day, it’s all about November 3. Rice, or maybe the days after that, with all the right imbalance. The point is, is it’s a challenging time right now. And I think there is, you know, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. And then buyer intent really does come back in November, big time you guys see it, I’m sure with all your your customers build gross scale, and what you see with with all your products, it’s like, you might be paying more, but you also have higher buyer intent, November and into December, and we’ve seen that every single year. And those are the biggest spend months for us. So yeah, so there is some optimism, I think, but political ads are definitely a challenge, you know, for whatever the advertiser is, especially performance based advertisers, those are the ones I think that are the most frustrated with it right now. Totally, you know, understandable.
Tanner Larsson 12:35
Yep, absolutely. So you know, we also mentioned things slowing down for political November 3, and then obviously, just in time for us to hit the q4 rush and everything. And obviously, q4 for ecom is huge. And we believe that this q4, specifically Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and then the Christmas rush is going to be the biggest we’ve ever seen, simply because not necessary because of COVID. But because of what COVID has done, and making people more comfortable shopping online who didn’t used to. So we’re obviously dialing in all of our ducks, getting all of everything in a row to really get the stores prepped for Black Friday, Cyber Monday to start and then the Christmas rush. Now we’ve done several podcasts on that. But what I’d like to hear is kind of what are you guys doing at Tier 11? To get your clients prepped for Black Friday? What does it look like from an advertising standpoint to gear up for Black Friday, Cyber Monday?
Ralph Burns 13:35
Well, we were far more organized, I think, on the way ever have been, and which is great. You know, 90 days out, we now have a you know, a project manager who has been spearheading our entire creative team and our media buying team to get as many of our creative assets for Black Friday, Cyber Monday in now. So they’re ready and loaded to go. Like we’ve got a lot of customers and we manage a lot of ad spend. And that ad spend balloons in November. So getting creative in is really, really important. So that’s one of the things we’ve been ahead of this year. And we’ve prepped our customers specifically for that, and made them a bit paranoid because I mean, hey, you know, when you have a last minute rush for creative and for ad copy and all those things, so like, you know, there’s other customers that we have to or we are an agency so we’ve ramped up we’ve invested heavily in our creative team this year, more so than any other year. Because creative is vitally important for messaging hooks, ad copy all that now it’s not necessarily campaign management per se in the latest tip and the latest trends really it’s about like your messaging and and creating an environment where you have lots of different ways to approach different audiences, different avatars, and doing deep dive research and then coming up with creative messaging. And we’ve seen that as a big needle mover for a lot of our customers, the ones that, you know, like I said before, maybe we’re offline are now coming online. It’s about testing the right message, and what is it specifically, that gets buyers to buy and then once you have a winning message, think to yourself, alright, this is gonna die out. This is gonna last maybe a month or so. So I need the next messaging. So we are constantly testing. You know, we use dynamic creative a lot now, which just sort of gives us some initial signals. And then we have sort of our main state campaigns where we pump those creatives and those ads back into sort of our main campaigns to keep everything fresh. And I think that’s the biggest thing that we’ve seen as a real shift for our ecom customers is just constantly having lots of creative ideas, and testing in and folding in things and because everything seems to be, you probably hear this with, you know, your mastermind, is it seems to me that creative and messaging has a shorter time span a lifespan rather now than it ever has been. It’s like it used to be this and that every single month that like it gets shorter and shorter and shorter, which is the reason why we’ve over invested on our creative team side, so that we’re prepared for that. Because you know, what you have right now is if you have an offer that works and ad that works, it’s not going to work forever, chances are in a month or so it’s probably not going to work. So you should prep now, for that eventuality, which is kind of what we’re trying to do and prepping our customers for, for the big months of November and December.
Tanner Larsson 16:35
Totally. Now that’s actually a perfect segway real quick, I know we’re keeping this episode short. But to take all that creative and actually apply it effectively to ad campaigns, you guys have a basically a secret weapon in the system and the process that you use, why don’t you talk real briefly about that, and then we’ll deep dive in that in our next episode.
Ralph Burns 16:54
Yeah, it’s called the e-commerce amplifier, we sort of came up with it as a group about four years ago. And since then, we now have the ad amplifier for non e-commerce businesses. But you know, for the e-commerce ad amplifier, there’s basically five stages, there’s five levels of traffic, level one is cold, level two is lightly engaged, like they’ve clicked through to an ad or maybe watched a percentage of your video. Level Three is perfect for e-commerce, you fire the view content event inside Facebook. And then level four is add to cart firing the add to cart event. And then five is obviously its purchase. So level five is not where it ends, or not. level four isn’t where it is like level five, you still want to be able to sell people, upsell them, cross sell them refill whatever it happens to be. So five levels of traffic. And what we’ve been able to figure out through hundreds of millions of dollars in ad spend is each level sort of has a consistently, sort of template type of message level one is unique to the individual brand, because that’s people who don’t know you, okay, people have no idea or what you offer. But then level two, once they’ve engaged with you, we tend to get a little bit more product pitchy because they now have a familiarity with your product or service, in this case, a product for e-commerce. And then level three, if they’ve actually viewed a particular product, they fire the view content event, we pretty much know that all we need to do is put that product in front of you again, or something that’s similar to it using dynamic product ads, which are just the greatest invention Facebook for e-commerce ever invented, I think. And then last but not least, you know, like 80 90% 70%, depending on your desktop or mobile, people are abandoning cart, so only one in 10 people once they actually add a product to cart actually complete the purchase. So put a plan in place there, hey, you know, did you forget this, you know, ready to check out. So we have sort of different ways to approach all these four levels of traffic. And then last but not least, the fifth one is once they purchase. Now we go back with a very small ad spend, but a very high return on adspend. To remind them to buy again, or buy a product that’s similar. And then the whole circuit, the whole sort of framework just continues in a virtuous loop. And so all of our e-commerce customers, it’s almost like the first thing we do in onboarding is set up the eCommerce amplifier because the framework that really works.
And yeah, happy to talk about it more on on episodes.
Tanner Larsson 19:25
Now guys, I know a lot of you have been listening. You’ve also obviously heard us talk about how what revenue optimization is is how we optimize the entire buyers journey on the store. So we take over from the when the click happens. That’s when we start optimizing so they click they land on the store, boom all the way through to the purchase Rouse team and what their framework does is back steps that it goes from priek before the click happens all the way up from the just to the awareness of your offer or whatever it is to cold audience so they’re the first half of the buyers journey before before they even get to the store, and we’re the second half, and it just fits so, so well together. Um, definitely Ralph, we’re definitely gonna have you back do a complete deep dive episode just on on your framework and how it how it kind of dovetails into ecom brands success. But for now I know you got to run, what is the best way people can get ahold of you?
Ralph Burns 20:18
Yeah, that could just head over to tier eleven.com. There’s a big pink button on the top, maybe by the airing of this, we’ll have our website redo up. But there’s the work with us page work with us hyphenated if you’re interested in hiring us as an agency. And then we also have a program for agencies to help them get to the next level, teach them what we know. And that’s over at Tier eleven.com Ford slash 100. And that’s an agency only training. So yeah, but we’re a full service agency. It’s what we do. We’re not an info company, you know, trying to be an agency. We’re an agency that does a little bit of info stuff and the info stuff is pretty good, just like you do. That’s why we love each other so much agree. And we work well
Tanner Larsson 20:58
and I can I can I can vouch for what Ralph and his team does. We send clients his way he sends clients our way. We’re very happy with the results on both sides of it. But guys, we will have Ralph back for another episode very, very soon, we’ll do a deep dive on their whole entire framework. For now though, if you’re listening on iTunes, make sure you click subscribe if you’re on Stitcher or whatever, click subscribe. And then also head over to YouTube because this is a video podcast. Sometimes we share some really, really cool stuff on the screen that you’re going to want to see. So make sure you’re subscribed over there and to get all the notes and show notes and links and all that jazz go to build gross scale comm forward slash podcast. And with that, guys we’ll see in the next episode. Thanks, Ralph.
