The 4 Growth Levers Every DTC Brand Needs To Audit

What are the fastest growing and biggest brands in DTC currently? They were so over leveraged into one persona that they were running towards a cliff. Welcome back to another episode of DTC Diaries. I'm joined by someone who's not Lucas. Someone not Lucas. Not Lucas is reliable substitute. Yeah, good to have Sam, COO, Chief Product Officer as well. He's moving into on for this episode. And yeah, really excited to go into. Obviously we had a bit of a break for a couple of weeks. First episode, back last week, recapping Q1. And in this episode, we're going to go into a piece of work, our culmination of a piece of work that's been going on for probably about four, five, six months within the agency group. And I guess how I'd summarize it is like our attempt to codify our belief in how to, how you deliver like best in class growth for DTC runs right? Extremes simplification. Yeah. So really excited to dive into that. I'm going to take you through what we have trademarked as the growth compass in this episode. Quick question. How many tabs do you have open right now to manage your business expenses? There's your bank, your expense tracker, your add account, spreadsheet, maybe even an AI companion to help you make sense of the chaos. If that sounds familiar, in card has the solution. In card is the financial platform built for how modern businesses actually operate. Multicurrency accounts, corporate cards and a fully connected banking experience all in one place. It replaces chaos with one connected system. And I mean, actually connected, Shopify, Zero, Meta, all in one view, all in one dashboard. You earn cash back on the things that you're actually spending money on. Think SaaS, travel, ad spend, the exact costs that eat into your margin every month. And brands like azia beauty and alo Paris are already using it to scale smarter. So check out in card through the link in the description below and back to the episode. And I guess it's built on just what you said, like this belief and our fundamental belief internally that like many brands overcomplicate growth. I think I can be said about a lot of business and maybe even a lot of life. It's always like complexity. Everything tends towards complexity. Steve Jobs says simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication. Yeah. And he's absolutely right. But the book actually inspired a lot of this. You told me to read it about Steve Jobs' biography. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Three months ago. It's great, it's amazing. It's a chunky one though. It's like 600 pages isn't it? Loose guy as well. Loose kind of great product though. Yeah, and I think we talk a lot internally. We've talked a lot about this podcast about doing less better, focusing on less bigger bets, bigger initiatives. And ensuring that you've got like a breach of those initiatives, you've got a process that's repeatable and scalable before you bring in something new. So I think product launches, I like to use the mental model and product launches of like, you're almost launching another business in a business when you're running two products, two acquisition products. So yeah, we get faced with this complexity across a really high volume of brands. So the piece of work here is our attempt to firstly simplify and codify our belief in our approach. But also to move the concept of like a paid media manager or a paid search manager and or a growth strategist, away from just execution in the ad account, which we know is tending towards a point of like automation through AI tools and towards high leverage, strategic decision making across prioritized levers that drive the outcomes we try to deliver for our clients, right? Super important in the world of AI as well. Has that stripped a lot of that execution and lower leverage work. We need to shift shift responsibilities up the chain, make decision making higher leverage. That's the real journey that we've gone on over the last six months. And it's interesting that evolution of the media buyer, almost media planner in like, say 1990 to then media buyer to paid social manager to now what we've got as a growth strategist. So what we're going to go through today is really like the system that supports that because I really believe that to get great outcomes, it's a simple formula that's people time system and when we've got the person, we need to give them the system and that's for us as an agency, the journey that we've had to go on. 100% and I think because we're trying to create repeatable outcomes for many clients, we've had to create a framework for this that's broadly applicable. So it's a framework that starts through like constraint diagnostic. Those construct constraint lives across one of four pillars and I we do think it's broadly applicable to every type of run. Amazon, DeityC only, Omni Channel, Retail, etc. The outcome is like getting alignment across everybody within the business and our team around what are the key growth levers that we have available to us based on a starting position to create the outcome we're looking for and how does everybody in that room contribute to delivering on that? So I think it's applicable to like brands and terminal teams as well. You don't have to be a big agency to work through this. You don't need to like align everyone in the team even if you're a small team of four people need to be thinking through the lens of what we're going to go through today and it all stems back to being able to understand like the biggest constraint that you've got in a business. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, the growth compass. What is it? Give us an overview of what I think is your brain. Larger your brain child. So it's like a full circle moment of releasing it to the wild. Yeah, we're putting it out there. So what is a compass? Well, a compass points you towards a destination, right? The destination for all the brands that we work with is their financial outcome. So we need a framework that helps us get towards a financial outcome and that's coming in the form of a compass. When you look at a compass, it's got North, South, East, West and put our own screen here, which will show our version of the compass. Yes. Yes. So different directions that you can take a compass right and you've got to really like boil down what are the pillars? What are the fundamentals? What doesn't change for any brand? When we landed on four key pillars, that's offer conversion, distribution and creative. Offer is how we monetize attention. So it's the product that is the monetization vehicle that you've got on site that people can buy of course. Conversion is how you create action. Distribution is how you serve messaging and actually reach people. And what I mean by that is basically what you are doing in an ad account. It's delivering which you pull to actually reach people. Usually that's going to come in the form of spend leverage. And then creative is obviously how we create attention, how we how we serve messaging to people through the form of a creative and actually get people to stop on screen, right? So those are the four pillars and what's really what's really important about the growth compass is you've got four pillars that don't ever change but you've got things that make up pillars that may change. And there's always going to be changes in such a fast-moving industry like D to C, right? An example of that could be meta coming out and updating their product and all of a sudden this becomes the most important factor. You could say account simplification now versus three years ago. Not necessarily. Exactly. Even the emergence of new channels like up loving. Yeah. fit into the pillars. And that was another important thing for us as well. It's because it's like we've got to keep on top of so many moving parts but it's understanding where that can slot into, where that can slot into and it's always for us as a growth agency going to go into one of those pillars. So we've got four pillars but we've got two of the pillars that slightly different to the other two. And that's because we've got foundational pillars and then we've got mechanical pillars. So foundational pillars are going to set the ceiling. So it's going to determine how much headroom of we actually got here and the foundational pillars. So might of guest will be offer and conversion. If you're selling a really niche product like half supplements. That's why I like came into my head. Your tam isn't that big. Therefore your ceiling isn't great. Same with conversion. If you've got a website that looks like it was built in 2001, like your ceiling is not going to be very high because people that will convert on a website that's built in 2001 is not many people. So those are foundational. The determining better the ceiling. And then we've got an influential. You can still influence them. Got 100%. That's the key thing that I'd like you want to expand your ceiling. Like one big growth lever for brands is always going to be MPD. Therefore you've increased the ceiling every time you launch a new product. Then we've got mechanical pillars and mechanical pillars, determining how fast you'll reach that ceiling. So you've got you've got a product you've got somewhere to sell the product. You've merchandise it right. Distribution. Outspend. If we launch a brand and we spend five K a day versus 500 pounds a day, the speed in which you will reach that ceiling is a lot different. Yeah, so that's how distribution works. And then creative, you could say the same from a volume perspective. If you have one ad running all year round versus 5,000 ads, who's gonna reach the ceiling quicker, right? So that is a top level overview of the growth compass. We need to go a level deeper now, because we've got just a quick point on that. So what we're trying to build is a scoring and a rating mechanism across each of those pillars. So each of them contributes the same territorial value. So we're rating it of 100. We're giving a rating across 25 per pillar, using the system we're going to go through now and benchmarking in data that we have available without within our business. And quite a lot of that data is read, quite a lot of data in e-commerce is readily available through other platforms as well. So if you haven't got the same level of context as you can apply the similar thought process. And then setting a roadmap between where at this score today, based on the gaps between today and say three months time, how do we go from a 50 to a 75 out of 100? And how do we reset and go again? But as you say, each of these macro pillars is made up of five subfactors, right? Five subfactors, yeah. And now what we score against, so each subfacto we score out of five and to get a five out of five, that needs to be what we define as gold standard. So an example of a subfactor for offer is going to be in economics. So a five out of five could be something like 80 plus percent gross margin. If you've got 40 percent, then you're probably going to fall in a one, but then we need to look at other parts of the offer. So offer architecture, that's another subfactor. Offer architecture means how do we architect the product on a on a landing page or product page? Have we got upsells present on the page? Is it a bundle? Is it a bundle that increases AOV? It allows you to acquire higher carc and positions off like an angle in an ad. Yeah. And it's very tailored to a specific persona, for example. There's always going to be AOV lifting mechanisms present as well. So we define our gold standard as you've either a bundle or you've got a single product page with AOV lifting mechanisms in place. And that's present across page in cart and post purchase. And it's highly personalized as well. We go a little bit deeper onto that later. I'm not going to go through every single subfactor, but because we've got five there, we're able to get 25. And then we do that across every pillar. And it's going to be really easy to understand where the constraint is based on the score. So we've made it objective, which is key. We're not going to give away this whole process because if you want to reach out, book a call, we'll build it for you. We'll give you our rating. But we will put a cheat sheet of each of the subfactors in the description just so you can follow along with the conversation that we're having here because I want to ensure that everybody can take away from this episode, something that they're able to just reflect on within their own business. But yeah, sorry, Cohen. Yeah. So what people need to know up to now is like a constraint is always going to lie within a pillar. We've got to break the pillar down into its different parts. It was funny, actually. We met a brand owner the other week. And there was rattling off different problems in the business. And because we've gone through this process, we could immediately back it into one of the pillars. And just telling him like, this is what I was like. If you don't change, if you just do this for the next 12 months, your dreams will come true in terms of targets. And that was creative. They were making 100 assets a month for a brand that's doing an astronomical amount of revenue. Now, I'm literally like, you just need to 10x that. And it's going to change the business. And that's what-- I think that's the complexity. It's like bringing distilling complexity. As a business gets bigger, it gets more complex into a process that creates focus on the highest leverage point to spend time that creates asymmetrical returns. I think the point-- one point on the two foundational pillars is I think those are the two areas, offer and conversion, where you often find step changes in outcome. 100%. Whereas the mechanical pillars, which will come onto a more incremental improvement over time. 100%. But yeah, carry on, sorry. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So let me give a couple more examples of subfactors. So this really crystallizes for people. Distribution pillar, account architecture. How is the account actually structured? Another example, audience strategy. And then I'll give two more for creative persona coverage. Brands don't think about this enough. How much persona have you got present in your ad account versus how many personas can buy the products? Yeah. We're going to probably go maybe on the next episode. Going to go through a skill that allows us to actually view that through AI. We just did a pitch today to a client who produced an RFP for us and gave us two personas, or their view of what their personas were. And we did research. And we found four personas that firstly, they didn't know exist. And then we mapped it to the market and noticed that none of the competitors were advertising to any of those personas. So those are building blocks of growth to each one of them. Gap analysis. Yeah, we did a good talk on that in New York, didn't we? And yeah, we affirmed that not a lot of people are thinking about that. So that's another key thing that we ordered. Another example, volume. Volume is really, really, really important for brands, especially when backing that into persona. Because have you personas, like you said, that each persona has probably got its own little time. And your volume should reflect that as well. Because if you're 80% of the volume is going to a persona that is 20% already maximized. That's not much headroom there. It's diminishing over time. Exactly. It's diminishing returns. In conventional assets, taking less-- is having a decrease in contribution to the total ability to spend in that account. I think that's what the job of a creative strategist is connecting this-- we know, based on our metrics, what volume we think we need to back into this spend target. How do we connect to that volume expectation on requirement to a strategy that is prioritized and intentional across personas and all the other building locks? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. One important thing to mention, actually, is that you need to start with offer. It always starts from offer. Because that really, like, it paints the pictures to-- let me give an example. So a brand that we recently ran this process through, we started with offer. And part of this process was getting out all of the data-- all margin data across the full product portfolio, across different categories-- LTV data as well. And then when you get onto the distribution pillar, you can see what percentage of spend is going towards those skews that high margin, high LTV, versus not. Yeah. And you're forming this hypothesis in your mind as you work through the pillars. And you know, by the time that you get to creative or distribution, what is the biggest foundational lever that you can be pulling? And then make sure you've got the building blocks there. And then it's getting into that rhythm of business incremental increases over time. So yeah, the sequence is really important. I found-- Takes a lot of things. Yeah. So there's subfactors. Subfactors back into pillars. We define the gold standard for each subfactor. And then that's where the odd frame work comes in. Because we need to create, like you said, it's that a repeatable way to understand where we are versus where we're trying to get to. And there's so many variables there. There's a lot of things that we can be doing. You need something that can guide you through that process. And we've spent a lot of time creating a process that is heavily AI enabled. Because doing this two years ago wouldn't have been possible. But it would. But it would take, and you'd like two weeks. Whereas now we've got tools like that Shopify assistant. What's it called now? Can't remember the name. Basically the AI agent that leads and Shopify. Yeah. Just people aren't using that by the way. That's really good. I've got so much better in the last few months when they've already called as well. I would say that the only caveat is you need to be careful because it hallucinates loads. Just like prompting it the right way. Validating the data is really important. But yeah, it's so valuable. Yeah, 100%. So we've got processes that couldn't use that. We're going through the process right now. We're housing a lot of our client data as well, which can be retrieved. There's tools like triple well and moe that exist. So there's really no excuses for mass data extraction. And for me, that's where AI leverage lies in a lot of businesses right now. It's the ability to serve you insights at scale. So doing what you do across site, we've talked a lot about qualitative data insights in that way, like review mining. Yeah. Persona building, scraping reddit. But it's makes more sense. It's almost more common to do it on a raw data from a raw data perspective. E-combrans are data businesses as well. It's very literally just a data business. But because you collect so much in every point in the customer journey. And it changes every day. You've got the quickest feedback loop. Yeah. 100%. So it's probably quite dubbing and juicing for a lot of media bias. It's just like instantly seeing that. Yeah. So yeah, so we've got the gold standard audit framework. And this looks what this looks like, almost like probing questions that allow The Girl's Drone. just to really figure out, right, this is what the data is suggesting. Let me reason through that. Again, this is where AI comes in high leverage versus low leverage. High leverage is reasoning through the data, applying your years of intuition, knowing how to fix that problem. So the audit is diagnosing and then asking you probing questions that allow you to get to the answer really quickly. Give me some examples of probing questions. So one probing question could be, what is the repeat rate on a certain skewer? What is the first to second order? What is the most commonly purchased items together, for example, so that could be offer? And that was a big finding for a brand that we've just onboarded that implemented this and the business within 30 days is like up 30% month on month, just from this one off a nugget. And what that basically was was the most commonly purchased items together weren't being intentionally done on site essentially. So there was no AOV lifting mechanisms with this product that people were obviously pairing together most commonly. So there was that and the spend allocation to this high margin, high LTV skew, wasn't really present in account. It was present, but it wasn't getting the majority of spend and it had so much LTV. So shift sounds stupidly simple, doesn't it? This is often where the answer is like shifting spend to that skewer, pairing that skew with the AOV drivers that were proving to already be paired together, but done in an intentionally way. The Holy Trinity that one, because we paired it together and then we turned the bundle into a persona driven landing page around a pain point that we've found through the creative research process. And it got to effect to have all come in together. So that's an example of a probing question. It's you're extracting the data, you're reasoning through it and then you're putting something down on paper. And what you're going to have at the end of this is loads of opportunities. Like there's just going to be so many opportunities that you find from this day to going through this exercise. So how we trim that down is through ice. So impact and confidence in ease. And we're going to have like, let's say 10 opportunities per pillar. And we boil that down to the three most important opportunities that we can say to the client only focus on these. And then we translate that into an end to end strategy where it's each pillar, the diagnostic, the way in which we will improve that. And a non-negotiable area like where is the number one constraint? Like after this meeting, the binding constraint, after this meeting, let's just fix this one, everything else is noise. And that's what the ice process allows us to allows us to understand. And it's amazing how often if you ask, even if you ask yourself, I'm watching like ask yourself, do you know your biggest constraint in the business on growth right now? For us, it's the rate at which we can acquire really good creative strategists as an example, because our demand outstrips our supply of high quality labor, therefore that's our constraint in the business. Free comrades, it's like, is it, it's a lot of the time it's probably going to be creative for many, for many, for some it won't be. But he's going to level deeper than that, I think, than just saying creative. It's like, is it volume, is it hit rate? Is it episode and adversity, etc? That's why the subfactors are so important. Yeah. And that's why I was saying at the start, like we can recycle through subfactors, we just got to be quick to understand how important an industry changes at a given point in time. I would suspect maybe a bold claim that the need for volume, I think matter will be creating a solution that means that advertisers don't produce as much volume. Like they must know how much volume is required to find success on that platform and how much cost is associated with that. They must be doing something about that. It either goes that way or it goes further towards the fact that you can make the perfect out for everybody and the diversity continues to increase because your long tail of ads becomes more impactful over time, it closes the becomes more of a normal distribution rather than like a. Yeah. I can see reverse. I can see it at some point in the future where you almost give it a persona and you give it one asset and it just creates multiple forms of that. It feels like what they're doing right now with their enhancements is probably getting to that point and just like training the machine. Yeah. So we've gone through the audit process there. We'll do that for every single pillar, every single subfactor. We've got a score, we've got the opportunities and what helps goes specifically on the distribution and creative pillars. Cloud skills, we're going to go deeper on this in the next episode. But the Cloud skills really do that lower leverage portion of extracting insights. An example varies add identities. So add identities are a key part of the distribution pillar. We want to make sure that there's diversity not on an asset level but on an identity level. And what AI does for us right now is basically creates identity buckets. So we'll see in front of us immediately what percentage of ads are going to brand founder, creator, or third party page. That's something that we're going to go deeper on in a little moment because what we want to do is go through some of the tactics that we've seen when working through the growth compass. What are the most common biggest levers we're seeing right now that a lot of brands aren't doing. We'll touch on those in a moment. But the audit process we've coined as the command center. It's like an end to end operating system where every member of our client services team can jump in and work through this audit. For our clients, this is something that can access. We can see it all in front of them. I think that's everything on the process side. Have I missed anything there? I don't think so. It's just then distilling all of that information into that prioritization framework and then allocating resource against those constraints, starting with the binding on first. I think it's definitely worth is going through. So that's an overview of the process. Like I said, we'll drop a little cheat sheet down below. If you want us to run the process for you, please do get in touch. Quick question. There's your bank, your expense tracker, your account, spreadsheet, maybe even an AI companion to help you make sense of the chaos. Multi-currency accounts, corporate cards and a fully connected banking experience all in one place. And I mean actually connected. Shopify, zero, meta, all in one view, all in one dashboard. I guess again, thinking about what can people watching take and implement for within their business. And we've got the notes starting with offer, but I think we should start with creative first, just because it's we've talked about a lot in the past. And I guess what from your perspective, what are the key creative tactics that people are missing? Yeah, I think from my side, one, and I'm going to do a masterclass on this because we've built a really strong detailed process on how to create one of these for your brand dimension in the last episode, but like a creative forecast that connects a spend expectation into an asset plan. Time and time again, it's like brands getting caught short, not not scaling volume enough alongside spend. And therefore not having enough ads to hit their spend target. And realizing that too late and then needing like 60 days to fix that problem or getting into a route where they're just not able to grow, spend. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's part of like that. That is obviously a sub factor that we look at when we go through the audit exercise, something that will really help you plot that out is actually understanding what you want to spend over the next 12 months. Like the compass is pointing towards that destination, which is a financial outcome. So understanding what you need to spend is going to allow you to figure out right. And if you can back back into a marketing calendar as well, that's really important. Like if you're doing this in August and you've got Black Friday coming in for your asset volume needs to increase. Have you factored that into your resourcing plans? You're going to need designers, you're going to need editors, you're going to need a really good creative urgency. Yeah. And it's not as easy as this quite a few different data points that need to go into creating like a robust forecast. It's not just like a linear. How much does an average spend take? You have to treat your asset, like your assets in an account like a portfolio. The portion of that portfolio every month is new and incremental. A portion of it for tees completely. Portion of it is on the decline on the way to fatigue. So I think there's a whole, I think that's a whole episode itself for whole 2030 minute masterclass, which we'll put together in the next couple of weeks on how to do that with rigor and get to a really clear plan. Yeah, we've created it. a really, really nice quad skill for that as well. - Yeah, yeah. - What's another one that we're seeing most common? - Definitely, definitely put the persona side, so gap analysis, but going one step deeper. So there's gonna be so many different ways to get in front of a persona. Some one, so you're gonna have obviously, I know Lucas is just in an episode on this, you're gonna have micro-personas as well. So it's not just like you four big personas, but you go really deep on your matter as well. And again, we've got this quad skill that does gap analysis on that. So it's looking at the buckets, how much percentage of span fits into each bucket? - You're creating the buckets with qualitative research. So you get in the market data and the customer data to build the personas, then you're comparing, you're comparing that to the live-add inventory and spotting the gaps in between the two, right? - Yeah, exactly. Another part, so one part of the offer pillar is actually looking at post-purchase data as well. So what a customer's saying, once they've actually ordered a product, and you're able to back that into your creative gap analysis as well, because it might be a hidden persona there. So again, this is why it's important to start with that offer pillar. - Yep. - Yeah, time and time, again, type time and time, we see an obvious gap in persona, but it's understanding like how different creative types will resonate with that persona as well. So it's not just the gap analysis, but it's the vehicle gap analysis and how that backs into a persona as well. - Yep. I recently saw behind the scenes of one of the fastest growing and biggest runs in DTC, currently, and they were so overleveraged into one persona that they were running towards a cliff. - Yeah. - And it was like, it's like, their frequency was just going on, just going like this. And it's like, it wasn't gonna be a, it wasn't a constraint today, but it was very quickly going to become a constraint, 'cause they were just approaching it. They were making hundreds of assets per day, and they were just, but they were making them all within one demo. And I think that's an example of just where that gap analysis would be so valuable. - Yeah, yeah, that's it. This is, it's like the offer is determining the ceiling, but creative is the mechanism that allows you to reach the ceiling, and there's gonna be so many personas there that you can tie into that. So persona wouldn't class as diversity, because you've got two forms of diversity, persona, but then obviously vehicle as well. Things need to look visually, yeah, format and vehicle. Things need to look visually diverse in an account, and that's another, so I'd say those three subfactors are always the ones that we see time and time again. And one subfactor that people don't often think about is like concentration of spending life span of asset. - Yeah, yeah. - That's gonna be typically determined by the persona. I think it's often for those brands, if you've not looked at that, it can be one of the biggest risks in the business. - 100%. - If you've got like 80% of your spend, it all adds fatigue eventually. - Yeah, yeah. - And it's like, they tend to have a, we look at like half span, so what, half life, so like what's the average time that it takes more than 50% of our ad inventory to fatigue, and then use that as a guide. But every ad for teagues, and you'll sometimes look in an account and 78% of spend will be through two top spenders. - Yeah. - And again, you just run into it towards a cliff. Like your performance is gonna fall off a cliff eventually. It's just a matter of when that happens. - Yeah. - Yeah, really short life span. More good performing ads, longer life span, more headroom, less resource, less immediate resourcing required. So yeah, that's part of the Claude's Guild that people might get. That goes into concentration of life span as well. Yeah, would you add any more to Crayv? - No, I think we'll touch on more in detail in the Masterclass on creative, creative, forecasting, translating that into strategy. I think distribution, let's go to distribution next. - Yeah. Yeah, so biggest one, not a lot of brands are thinking about ad identities. Like we've already said, if you have a founder that is willing to go on camera, pair that asset with the founders Instagram, if it's, if it's, if it looks good, just to clarify in distribution, we're talking about how we're allocating capital to get in front of people, basically. - How on where? - How on where. And we're going to focus a lot of this conversation on Facebook, but you could apply, then we're increasingly thinking about how would, how do we apply this to TikTok shop? How do we apply this to Google? How do we apply this to other channels? But it's how do we allocate capital in the pursuit of incremental new customers in the best possible way based on what we know best practice to look like? - Yeah, exactly. - Exactly. Yeah, I think that add identities or third party identities that are volume of different identities that we're delivering spend through. - Yeah, that one's really important, and that fits into audience strategy. So audience strategy is one of the subfactors, along with audience strategy is obviously some of your basics, like are you, who you excluding, who you're targeting, etc., but the biggest one, that is the often the biggest opportunity is ad identities. If you've already got a top performing ad and you pair it with a different identity, that's going to go to a new bucket of people. It might be a smaller bucket, but you're still going to be able to squeeze some juice. - I think I'm just so what I was going to say. I think we went through, oh, we went through it on last episode, we went through some quick wins on our inventory, and I think that's an example of something that's been relatively new in terms of what would be new into this process. I think that's really become a massive lever, and like 30 plus percent of our spend through partnership ads, I think he's like half of the cost now. It's like you need to get there, maybe more, maybe 50, maybe above 50, which is sort of like walking up spend across accounts and seeing it just massively outperform. - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, that's a quick point. You mentioned the exclusions, that's what I was going to say. There's also a lot of this process where it's, you know, you say like the concept of like basics. It's really important to rehash the basics frequently. Again, I mentioned the last episode that I'd say more than 60 percent of the audits I do, which I do quite a lot of them still haven't got exclusions that are properly, or they haven't got like an email list that's sinking regularly into engagement excluded up and existing customers. And it's therefore not trading the algorithm, it's also not removing retargeting spend, it doesn't give you audits and definitions properly, essentially. - Yeah. - So I think, yes. - Well, that's where we've really gone down to basics with the distribution pillar. It's like we've got account structure, signals and tracking as well. Like is your EMQ score high for the purchase conversion event? Have you got the copy connected locally because the majority of businesses will work with the Ron Shopify mix a lot easier, but we literally audit signals and tracking as well. Every time a brand on joins us on what is now. - Even when you're looking at that, it's like how many of your conversions happen within a seven day click window is another way to look at that. We've had clients come on where more than 70 percent of their customers take more than 77 days to purchase. - Yep. - And it's very hard at high A/V sometimes to decrease that. - Yeah. And therefore the signal in that account can be a lot weaker. Is that how do we engineer another signal to support that? - Yeah, exactly. One part of signals is actually looking at that on an environment level. So how many signals are flowing through each campaign if that's very fragmented. The answer often lies within account architecture and really simplifying down there. What was I going to say then? - Yeah, optimization, I wanted to touch on that as well because something that we started looking a lot more recently is how often ads are getting turned off. And I believe now that ads should no longer be turned off at the rate that there were six, 12 months ago. And that's because each ad serves a purpose. Its purpose may not just be now to be served. It may be served in 30 days time. And that's because I really believe that everything is feeding into each other. So you might have one big spender. And if that's the first touch point, your second worst spender might be sweeping up a lot of that low hanging fruit. But that's only possible if the first touch point was the high spending ad. I think this is where you often see that rotation of ads where you might promote an ad into a scaling environment. It's not going to get spend within the first two months, but then suddenly it does. But if you turn that off, you're basically missing opportunity and that feeds into concentration and lifespan as well because you're making these quick decisions. - Yeah. - You're really sacrificing future performance. - That's treating the ASE as like an entity rather than looking at it on an ad set level. And I think Meta is getting certainly in the last 12 months, but even the last six, it's got way better. It's sequential ad delivery based on the way you are in the customer journey. - Yeah. - So like. - Sequence learning isn't at the product of the product. - Yeah. - And if you can see the impact of that, of like how people will flow down a campaign, how you, even when I use a platform, you flow, you can see yourself flowing through a funnel and I'd assume that's all, like that function or that release becoming more impactful. - Yeah. - So you got a lot and again, AI scrapes not just ad account data, but the chain history. And it combines chain history to performance over time and plots that out on a chart, which is really cool to see because you will always see a high volume of changes, ads getting turned off and a correlation with performance going down. one brand that we audited recently, there was like, I think it was like 600 changes in one day and for that following week, the cat was just through the roof and it was mainly turning ads off. So crazy. That's what GM, that's what GMV Marx is in TikTok shop is as well. Every single time you turn, you change anything on GMV Marx, it was ruined you before. So like budget, ROI target, any buttons, it's just like the more, it's literally like less is more, get it on the set it on our ROI target and focus on the inputs. That makes sense though. This is why Mediavine intuition is just like a thing. That's why you just can't automate Mediavine yet. You can do it maybe 50%. It's why I talk, yeah, people are asked often in like a sales process with those who would be like, so how are you like defining a winner? I'm like, well, we define it through like a decision matrix on how we define a winner based on a AOV spend levels, account averages. But if you're in and you send something and it rips, you know in like two hours, if it's going to perform, if you've got the context of the account. 100%. Because you can just see something like over index on like CPF, under index on CPF and still hit the same CPA target and you just know that asset is going to take loads of spending. But that's so many examples of that I think. Yeah. So yeah, that's a big one for distribution. Those three that we've mentioned there. I think optimization, which we touch to go on again, I'm a really bullish on stripping out one day view for accounts right now. Ever since they changed mid-march attribution update, I think just using engage through seven day click, pushing engage through all one day click, pushing day, engage through if the accounts write for that. I always see this as well. It's just just make spend more incremental. Yeah, exactly. It's like if you are optimizing around people that are viewing an ad and not clicking through onto that ad, but still purchasing, where do you think meta is going to optimize around? It's like it's people that aren't purchasing on the platform, they're going somewhere else. Is a view incremental? No. Is the answer to that also prioritizes lower funnel assets. It becomes cyclical. It's like a negative spiral of decreasing incremental at your retirement, especially if you've got a high repeat rate, which most subscription brands do. You always see a correlation between spend towards one day view and conversions towards one day view and when you've defined audience segments, how much is spent is going to the hangage segment as well. That's another thing people don't do enough, just like really break down the ad account, break down by attribution window. Audience demos obviously and audience segments and you can piece them together. Yeah. 100%. I think it's another one to add into that, which is probably a more recent piece, is CPMR as well, which we talked about a lot. The impacts of just reviewing that on an asset, campaign and ad level, but conversion tactics. Yeah. Conversion biggest, so one sub factor here that I'd say, so it's the first one I'd say is often the missing piece for a lot of brands we work with is AdTeland in page congruence. Does the ad to LP match the messaging, the visual style? Yeah. If you're again, this is why the conversion is determining how the size of the ceiling, because you need to make sure that that is highly consistent. Persona best LP's come in here. So if you've defined your macro person as I don't think you need to do it on a micro level, just because you can't control spend to that degree. No, definitely. You'd be thinking about it on a macro level. I think about it on a macro level, persona and sometimes a demographic level. When I'm looking at age, definitely. You don't need to go as niche as you do on creative now. Maybe you will do in the future. I would hypothesize that probably if it becomes easier to create them, because they are quite expensive, but I 100% agree. I think it's so easy to do as well, so low effort, high impact. The complexity is whether you need to, some brands speak into one yesterday where they've just been trying everything with this product. Looked it and I was like, there's a massive educational gap. It needs a step-j, it needs a step-age. You get a bit more complexity when you start thinking about pre-sell landers, but you can often generate signals that that's the right step. So you've been, your admet tricks are great, and your conversion rates just not flowing through your conversion rate. You've been trying a lot of volume. And your product has complexity. This product is a supplement that has, it's like a really premium end of the market that combines loads of others into a better version. It's perfect for a seven, nine reasons why I aged it. Just walk someone through. Why should they pay three times more than they would pay with these other brands for this product? Yeah, something that's working really well for a brand we own is third party identities and the LP being a listicle-advatorial style. Yeah. So opening it up with basically a, like, positioning from like a doctor usually works really well. It needs to be an authoritative figure. If you've got a doctor that helps. It's all like GL, but you go and mention that in the last episode, yeah, just gotta be careful with some of the agencies that you can go with most. Yeah. And then going into a listicle. That's a perfect example of R2LP congruence. The answer isn't always in landing pages either, just the basics. How are you sending to a product page if you're advertising a specific product? Yeah. So like, why is my conversion rate so a lot? Because he's sending so a lot of it as well. Yeah, yeah. 83% of someone's traffic was to a collection page. They were sending it to certain seller products. And then it's not always a new page either. It's like, have we got testimonials above the, have we got enough social proof above the fall that speaks to the objections that this persona has? Yeah. Have we got, is the text size and the trust signals aligned with the age? So older need more legacy signals like payments. More people, I think younger is like vertical video. Yeah. By now, pay later, like these are the things that influence that demo a little bit. And also like carousel imagery and whether that's like aligned with the persona. One thing people don't do enough is change the imagery based on demo. Like if you've got an old demo and a younger demo, just use Gemini to nano banana to swap the person out to an older person. I remember Dylan and from the RO agency that now owns he maps mentioned, showed me a test result of just bumping pixel size by two for older people, just improve conversion rate. It's just so simple. So I get it's just looking at things from a lens of like first principles, first principles and outside the stepping out of like being too close to a problem. Yeah. It's been like, right. These people probably find it harder to use this website. Maybe we should just make it easier. Just say, I love stuff like that. So simple. Yeah. What you mentioned there that falls into the landing page experience sublighter. So we're looking at that as well. And you basically define the gold standard there. Trust signals pad to the person that we're trying to sell to. I think it's like each, I almost think of this as like a hygiene standard. Yeah. Like every category has a best in class hygiene standard for paid, for like a page. So for a clothing brand, that's obviously things like sizing. Have you got like a description of the how big the model is? Have you got two models where in different sizes with the size of the product on each model in the description? Things like that that just make it so much easier to buy. So I'm afraid for when you don't see that in your own purchase, something it's like, I love this t-shirt, but I don't have a clue what size it is. Yeah. And then it's got measurements. It's like 13.6 inch growing. I'm like, what does that mean? So like stuff like that for fashion is and returns, because it returns a higher really important way of supplements. It's like benefits, social proof, the journey that someone's going to go on. Yeah. Before I know. Third-party testing or experts, it's differs by brand type. It's really quite simple. If you just sit down and pull like 10 brands into a mirror board and just look at what's good about them all, you'll build like a common thread across them that then becomes like a pattern you can apply to every business. That's something I should mention actually. So for each of the gold standard, we're building out a massive reference bank. So at any point you could look at the economics and look at all these different categories of bands and it's like, oh, this is best in class. This is how I compare to it because it's categoric specific. You touch on cart and check out there, which is another sub factor. That's the basics. Making sure the ship is there, trust signals are there, you buy now, pay later, use of upsells in the checkout, super basic things. But eight times out of ten I always find one thing missing. I like the one where you put the most commonly used shipping provider in the market as the actual name shipping provider. That's a good one. That's a good type. It's so simple. So rather than just being express shipping, you put like extra royal mail, express shipping. And even if you put like stuff like brackets recommended, just like that's sort of stuff to increase, uptake in page shipping and increase contribution margin per order. - 100% and have a massive impact on your P&L. - But another one people don't do as well is, so with some apps or you can custom deva is like create logic based on what the dispatch time is in your checkout. So if you do, if you dispatch orders before 3PM, make sure that if it's before 3PM using logic rules, you're saying that in your checkout. - Yeah. - And if it goes out of 3PM, you're telling them you're having just removing it also and it's gonna ship the next day. - Yeah, I always say that as well. - Also see all brands that offer full, most brands, lots of brands offer complimentary free shipping as standard. But if you just add a page shipping option that's faster, so many people just self selects the page shipping option 'cause they want it quicker. And you do have to, you can still offer the free shipping because it's there. But some people just 10% of people just impatient. - Yeah, yeah. - I think the same with adding like a hero bundle of products to a website because you'll just get this like small cohort of people who buy everything 'cause they have brand, just like catering for them. - Yeah. - Yeah, yeah. - Moving on to like within that checkout, it's also post purchase upsells, which I think is like a whole rabbit hole in itself. You can never really stop optimizing that to be honest. - No, that's just first principles and personalization. So as you work through an offer pillar, it's gonna tell you like most common purchase items together. There's gonna be like five different upsell paths you can do that you can do there. If you've got high-sku catalog as well, it's really worth spending the time looking at every possible journey that someone can go on based on the skew that they're purchasing. It's a t-shirt, how often are people buying X-CAP versus Y-CAP? Why don't we pair it with X-CAP for this t-shirt, but for the hoodie, it might be a pair of socks. People don't create the, - Yeah, that's sort of different flows. - It's also like the other, the quick win there if you're not doing it already is just selling more of the same product. - Yeah, yeah. - Oh, and I've seen, I know this one's working really well for some supplement brands right now is when people buy a monthly subscription, upselling 90 days on the post purchase and rolling it all in and offering a discount on the three months. - That's a good one. - Up front and pulling all the LTV into one order. - Yeah, yeah. - She's seeing IMA offering that on the front and now, but it works really well if you just post purchase, test it first. - Yeah, yeah, another brand did that as well, come in there now. That works really well for supplement brands. You're gonna have products that probably, you can't sell to or for like a, say, exact same hoodie, for example. - You're off there. - It's good. - Go on, sorry. - I think that, I think those three are the biggest ones for conversion as well. The other thing that we're looking at is the ROK ability as well, often under looks, but have you got the ability to move quickly when it comes to website adjustments can you produce landing pages, can you change checker, etc. So it's capability and education. - It's like doing it in the right way as well. I think I'm just a massive advocate of big swing CRO. - Yeah. - We wanna be trying to find 20, 30% changes in the not too long form and, rebuild in full above the fold sections in a test rather than small tweaks. - I think the biggest one is like the destination. - Yeah. - Just the RP destination. - Start there before you start making like button changes. - Perfect. So offer back to the foundation. This is like the number one, I think. - Foundational. - 100%. - So this makes everything else easy. - Yeah. - If it's great. - I would say, so we touched on it already. Unit economics and LTV data. So grounding your choice of acquisition skews in that data is so important. And we see this a lot for brands that have high skew counts. They're often not thinking enough about. And this will change based on seasonality as well. Like if you're selling blinds, then there's gonna be a different cell through in blackout versus none. - Yeah. - Depending on the season that you're in. And there might be a big margin difference between the two. And you wanna make sure that you're at least testing if that's something that can be made work. And you can, so this second part of this is why is market positioning. You're gonna have products that are more sophisticated in the market, sorry, there's more market sophistication, more awareness around it. - Green powder. - Yeah, yeah, that's a good example. You're gonna have products in your catalog that are like, like go up and down from a market position in standpoint, combine unit economics, retention and market positioning together. And you've crafted using your own existing inventory really good offer that's grounded in data. And then the other two parts of that, how you architect that, so can you value stack? Free gifts is such an easy one. Like if you're selling socks when you're a clothing brand, chucking some free socks, do a bundle. So value stacking, AOE lifting mechanisms like we've already mentioned, and then retention as well. So just like we said with post purchase upsell journeys, doing the exact same, but through retention as well. If they don't buy it on the post purchase page on the thank you page, can we sell them at for any email instead? That is part of offer. It's how much value you can extract within the first month. - Makes sense. I think that offer architecture, I'm a big proponent right now, I was selling, of creating the offer around the marketing angle in persona. - Yep. - Going work through this with a couple of brands and removing, it's always tempting to just discount, discount, discount, it's like going more down the value of perceived value, how do we increase perceived value above the like pain threshold to make them transact on the item. And I think a lot of that can be done better when you're angling a solution to a problem rather than just selling a product. So selling a complete solution to a problem. - Yeah. - Yeah. You mentioned one earlier, a brand that's selling something for the household that solves like a very functional problem of overheating in summer. It's like angling it towards that rather than just selling the objects itself. It's just, it's a much more emotional transaction. I think when you do that, rather than just like buying bed sheets, as the example, as an example. - Product names as well. Like product imagery and product names can be changed on a landing page level. It all comes back down to personalization in a world of AI, there's just no excuses to why we can't get really personalized, not just with creative, but LP experience as well. But yeah, I think those are the main ones for offer. Yeah. - Perfect. - Yeah. - I think we've run through a lot there. - What juice? - I think like we said at the start, this is just the evolution of how we deliver best in class outcomes for the clients that we work with and the standard that we deliver across our growth service. Obviously we talk a lot on this podcast about creative, but creative is one part of this. I think when you get all of these things running in the right direction with the right prioritization, with the right understanding of constraints, with the resource and the people to support working through those, you can create massive growth very quickly. I actually don't think I still think it's as easy as it's ever been to accelerate growth DC runs. - 100% people just get really complicated. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. Any problem. - I think one final point is, if you're a brand owner, there needs to be someone in the business that obsesses around one of those pillars. Can be the same person, the different people, but if you don't have someone that's thinking about how to optimize offer, knows where to look, subfactors, understanding data and how that translates to strategy. I think that's really important. Assign someone to each one of those pillars. - Yeah, 100%. - 100% oh yeah, thank you for running through that. So I'm pretty sure. - Yeah, it's been a pleasure. - Everybody who's still watching, who sat with us through that journey, hopefully found something tactical to implement. And like I said, we'll put some resources in the description as always. Please like and subscribe. Many people watching who aren't subscribed. I think like over 50% of the people watching. So it would be great to get to get that if possible, but we'll catch you on the next episode. - Thank you. (upbeat music)