0:00 – 0:27 – G&G eCommerce Podcast Theme
This is the Growth & Greatness eCommerce Podcast, powered by Right Hook Digital, with your hosts Scott Seward & Raymond Johnston. If you’re an eCommerce brand founder, entrepreneur, or marketer looking to accelerate profitable growth for your business, then listen in ‘cause this is the podcast for you.

0:27 – 1:06 – Episode Introduction
Scott (0:27 – 1:06) – Alright, guys. It has finally happened. Apple has rolled out the iOS14.5 ATT prompt. Now, there are gonna be massive changes in the eCommerce industry moving forward from a paid advertising perspective. We’re really gonna see changes in strategy, customer journey, how we approach data. And today in Episode 6, we’re gonna dive deep into this discussion with someone we’ve got a ton of respect for in the industry, and that is Tyler Garner from Standout Social. So tune in, this is gonna be a great chat, it goes in a few different directions, and it’s really gonna help you get your head around what you’re gonna have to change from a mindset perspective and a strategic approach over the next 12 months.

1:06 – 8:27 – Introduction of guest Tyler Garner
Scott (1:06 – 1:19) – Alright, we are back and I’m very excited. We have a very highly-respected Facebook and eCommerce marketer with us today and, Ray, good to be back. Would you like to do an introduction for us?

Ray (1:19 – 1:48) – Yeah, I’d love to. Man, I think it’s really been crazy the last few months. It’s a different world since the last time we did this. iOS14, dogecoin to the moon, you know, we don’t have to go into all that! We have a really awesome Facebook advertiser with us, Tyler, he has made a name for himself across the Facebook sphere. In addition, he has his own agency as well. And so, one thing we’re really gonna be talking about today is just strategies, how we can adapt those strategies in light of what’s happening. So Tyler, welcome to the show!

Tyler (1:48 – 1:52) – Thanks, guys! Thanks for having me. Good to be spending a bit of time with you!

Scott (1:52 – 2:07) – Absolutely! Man, kick us off! I’m just curious. How did you get into this space? Give us a bit of a background into where Tyler Garner came from and how he got into the eCommerce, Facebook advertising world.

Tyler (2:07 – 4:49) – Yeah, it’s kind of a funny story actually ‘cause growing up, I was not someone that was ever advanced in technology or, even interested in it. Honestly, the most I did on a computer was play games as a kid. So I wish I could have one of these stories where you hear people say, ‘Oh, I started an eBay store when I was 8 years old and made millions,’ but that wasn’t me. I was just a kid, you know, I worked in sales fresh out of school, and just went through a couple of different jobs. I got into a sales role with a company called NetRegistry, which is just a large domain provider, they sell domains and provide other services. It just so happened that one of the services they offered was social media marketing. Now, at the time, that didn’t really interest me, I didn’t know anything about it. Excuse me, I’m losing my voice here. And, so anyway, we sat down one time with who was supposed to be the marketing specialist at the time, again, that would help us sell these services to other businesses. He was an eCommerce director or anything like that and he started talking about this thing called a Facebook Pixel that you can then retarget people and how Facebook could filter by their ages, their genders. Having spent 3 or 4 years in sales at this point, knowing that I was typically calling people up and having to get to know these people before I could even sell them anything, being able to expedite that process with someone like Facebook got me interested. So you know, at that point, I always knew that I wanted to go into business, but I didn’t know what I wanted. So I thought, is this way for me to be able to launch something that was gonna be successful in the future, was to then learn marketing, and then this whole Facebook Pixel and Facebook marketing. You know, it was obviously still quite new then, I think this was like 2015 or something so still relatively early. You know, late for some, early for others. So anyway, I was doing some research, for the next 6 – 12 months I spent just researching, I went home. I read blog post after every shift and blah blah blah! Fast forward, a guy worked with me knew how to build websites, I was learning Facebook marketing so, you know what, we can go ahead and do this by ourselves. Anyway, that ended up fizzling out within the first 3 – 6 months like any good early partnerships do, they don’t usually work out. I went out on my own, at that point, and you know, for the last 4, 5 years now, however long it’s been, we’ve been focusing specifically in Facebook marketing, probably for the last 3.5, 4 years, just through natural progression, we’ve gone through the natural eCommerce route and I think through my sales background and I think just through, I guess, you would call it a natural strength or natural ability, I’ve been able to, you know, really work out some pretty unique and creative ways to make Facebook work well for the eCommerce space. Yeah, that’s where we focus now.

Ray (4:49 – 5:08) – Yeah, I was actually gonna ask you about that. Normally, I find that people, that they come from a sales background, whether it’s door-to-door or some other form of it, that they adapt this native genius that is so hard for other people to replicate. I’d love for you to dive into that, just for a few moments. What have you adapted from your sales background to how you do marketing and advertising now?

Tyler (5:08 – 6:51) – I think a lot, that’s a really good question, actually. No one’s ever asked me that before. I think, if I was to put my finger on it, it’s just, I think in sales, you learn a lot about how to control a conversation. You have to think what are they thinking right now and what do I need to say next to actually get them across the line. I think by being able to utilize that skillset, and I was really lucky. The first sales job I had was, all leads were inbound, all leads were warm, and so I had this really good experience in sales. It just so happened that this company, they gave us top-of-the-line sales training and it wasn’t so much, there was a mix of product-specific but also sales-specific, so things like hard skills, soft skills, how to communicate, when you’re saying certain things, you’re evoking this type of emotion and this is why you wanna do it. We went really deep into the psychology of it, and you know, I’ve always been, I guess, a naturally good storyteller so it worked really well within my skillset to, you know, further develop those sales skills, but I would honestly attribute a lot of that natural knack for sales from the early stage selling or the early training that I had. But then, yeah, being able to utilize what I learned then, and continue to develop, obviously, the sales skill and looking at different marketing books, being able to create that hybrid approach and really think about the customer journey is probably a different stage ‘cause a lot of people come from marketing, they’ve learned the AIDA principles, they’ve learned all the technical know-how, but they’ve actually never had to practically implement it. I think, by practically implementing sales psychology on such a regular basis, you know, before ever getting into marketing has been something that, really, I guess, it would be in a way an unfair advantage almost when it comes to running digital marketing well because writing copy and creating ads, it’s all selling.

Ray (6:51 – 7:10) – I thought that, for a long time, that anyone that comes from a sales background, especially when they’ve done the grind, just sell, sell, sell, or call center or door-knocking. If you can do that, you will crush advertising. Are there any principles that you learned back then that are still relevant to how you do it now?

Tyler (7:10 – 7:45) – It’s hard to be able to say for certain. Again, it’s a really good question, but it’s hard to say for certain, only because everything I’ve learned has shaped my character to who I am now so a lot of what we do as far as a process is probably inspired from what I once learned, but it’s hard to be able to say for certain that, because of that, here’s the direct moment of what I learned that I can attribute to what I’m doing today. I just say it was all character building, which has allowed me to, you know, kind of follow the principles and processes that I do now within the marketing space.

Scott (7:45 – 8:25) – I think it really highlights the difference between the good media buyers and Facebook advertisers and the really, really good ones. I find, you really have your technical media buyers and then you got the ones that have got the balance between understanding technical, the data, the analysis, but also understanding the persuasion, the copy, and the creative. The biggest lever, right? It’s creative and messaging. So when you can come to the table and bring those persuasion tactics to the table that you’ve obviously learned on the sales side, I think, it doesn’t surprise me that you’re so strong and doing so well, really, when you’ve got that skill set combined.

Tyler (8:25 – 8:27) – Yeah, yeah, I definitely agree.

8:29 – 14:33 – A view of the digital marketing landscape post-ATT policy rollout
Scott (8:29 – 9:21) – Alright, you started your agency back in 2015. A little bit of the same time as when I really launched my brand and launched the agency through there as well, so we know that time period, you went back to the Facebook Pixel right? It’s been a gravy train for Facebook advertising. You couldn’t have started a business on this platform throughout a better time. Things have changed massively, in the last, let’s say, 6 months. It’s been, going back, discussed mid-last year, in terms of Apple rolling out their ATT changes and, you know, giving users the option to opt-in to being tracked with data. That’s now being rolled out in the last couple of months and it certainly changed the landscape. So what do we know right now and what don’t we know? What do you see from the performance-side and the impact of what we’ve seen from the rollout in the last couple of weeks?

Tyler (9:21 – 14:33) – Yeah, it’s been a really wild period, especially the last couple of weeks. But even, I’d say anywhere from February onwards has been pretty crazy. The best source of truth that we really have right now is just going off the official documentation, just cause this is such a technical change. It’s hard to go off any hunches that can’t be supported by proper documentation to say, you know, this is what we can now do and this is what we can’t do. I’ve been relying a lot on Facebook documentation and, obviously, communicating with our rep when we can just to understand what’s going on. Speaking to Dee, as well, other people across the marketing community. Crowdsourcing opinions and crowdsourcing what they’re doing and what they’re thinking, what they’re seeing in order to just, I guess, gather a kind of generalized approach, generalized opinion. What I’m seeing right now is, performance is up and down. Some days, we have a really profitable day. For our own brand, we probably had the most profitable day, especially by margins, that we’ve had in at least 4 – 6 weeks, but that was then followed up by a day where it was quite disgusting in performance. You know, it’s one of those things where it’s up, it’s down, it’s all over the place at the moment. We’re trying to build that consistency. One thing I used to heavily rely on, and we’re definitely gonna have to find a solution for this, I rely heavily on automated rules. I’m a huge advocate for it. I think that the, and a lot of my messaging in the past has always been, most of the reasons people can’t scale past that $500 – $1000 dollars a day, I think, is because they didn’t have automated rules to control that spend. I personally couldn’t sleep easy at night spending $5,000 – $10,000 dollars a day of my own money or even clients without having automated rules in there to somehow safeguard the spending because, when you’re spending that kind of money, money can go into the wrong places and if you don’t have rules that are set up, you know, you’re gonna be in a dangerous situation. But that’s probably one of the biggest shifts right now and something that I’m definitely trying to find a solution for. Not just that but, also, now with the attribution window’s changing and how reporting is, some days we’ll see accurate tracking, we’ll be off by maybe 10% – 20%, which in the grand scheme of things isn’t too bad, but then we’ll have other days where we’re missing 50% of our data. And so, when you don’t have data on a platform that has been purely built on having access to Day 1 data, it makes things a lot harder to make decisions when it comes to breaking down demographics and your placements and your ages. I’m not having any of that information anymore just as we’re starting to get so good and so powerful. It’s definitely made a massive change. Right now, some of the steps that I’m taking to make these changes, to make things better, or well, get a better read of what’s working, and the way I explain it to people, although it’s concerning, it’s also quite exciting at the exact same time because there’s a lot of innovation that will come from this. There’s a lot of learnings, there’s a lot of testing, and a lot of ways you can get ahead as long as you got the right skillset behind you and working with the right people who have the skillset behind them. There’s a lot of opportunity here to, you know, make money when others, or be greedy when others are fearful because, right now, a lot of people are either gonna pull back budgets or, overtime, will start to pull back budgets because they don’t know what the next step is. For me, right now, it’s all about testing everything that we once knew. So when I first got into this, we were running things like PPE campaigns. I remember, one of my first tests I ever ran was running my own dropshipping store and I was running a $10 PPE campaign getting $2 dollar sales, like on a free shipping offer when I was first into this industry. At the time, I was like, that’s not profitable enough, I’m not happy with this. The glory days of a $2 CPA, these days it sounds greedy, and running on PPE of all things. So, you know, testing PPE again, testing traffic, testing other conversion events like initiate checkouts, etc. All of these events now are something that I’m wanting to test both within our own brand and also across clients. I guess, for me, I’m using our, you know, my own brand as a test dummy a lot of the times just to kind of save the spend from clients. Yeah, at the moment, with tracking being as bad as it is across the board, but obviously only getting worse, there’s more people updating and opting-out, it’s hard to be able to say with statistical relevance that because we’ve started optimizing traffic and initiate checkouts and other events that there is a lift or that there is a measurable lift. However, I can say with absolute certainty that since I’ve been running that, I have seen more profitability, day 1, in our store across the board since we started running traffic and initiate checkout campaigns. So there’s definitely something to explore there and then also, just optimizing for different events or retargeting for different events so, you know, things like instant experiences, things like page engagers. Even things like, now, if we can’t track people who visited our website that have opted-out, well, we can still track them based on clicking the call-to-action button. So that now is gonna become something I’m setting up across the board for our retargeting just to give us more vision and more retargeting capabilities across the board, but yeah, it’s a whole new world out there at the moment. It’s quite exciting, but you gotta move fast and you gotta be able to, you know, scrap things when they’re not going right.

14:34 – 19:05 – What qualitative checks can be used to help make decisions post-ATT policy rollout?
Ray (14:34 – 14:55) – Hey Tyler, you mentioned about the lack of data you get sometimes from day-to-day. That’s really hard when you’re used to getting a certain level of data that you’re not getting anymore. Now that you can’t always make decisions on the black-and-white, what I see in the ad accounts, for example, what other context or maybe qualitative checks are you pulling in to help you make some of these decisions?

Tyler (14:55 – 17:24) – I think it helps when you work with brands who really know their ideal customer. Obviously, we still have the ability to look at historic data so that definitely helps. So anytime that we work with a new account now, and this is relevant because we’ve had 2 new ones come onboard, and we don’t have the relevant Day 1 data now, meaning any new tests, we just don’t have those answers unless we split by age groups, which is something we’re doing. Looking at historic data definitely helps. Looking at the lifetime spend, what they’ve spent this year, from January to April, has really helped us understand where their market currently lies. Beyond that, though, 1 thing that we’re doing is going back to the old school split-testing days where you might do your 18 – 30 or your 30 – 45. I’m not even worrying now. Like before, I used to worry, split it up to the point where you can kinda set filters on your age groups. So the 18 – 25 used to be its own category and cohort, then you would have the 26 – 34 and you’d worry about that, or the 25 – 34. Not worrying about that anymore. It’s kind of different, I’m splitting now because we won’t be able to measure those results in the breakdown data anyway. What we now need to measure it from is where the, I guess, where the demographic, psychographic age groups that we’re splitting by. So 18 – 30 year olds, to me, all act, think, and behave a certain way. They’re interested in certain things. From 30 to maybe 45, maybe 50, they share similarities. They, you know, most likely have children. They have mortgages, they have debt, they have this, they have that. With splitting by those behavioral demographics as well, and then from 50 to 55+, they tend to fall into similar age groups as well. Maybe not so much, but 65+ also would most likely deserve, depending on the brand, deserve their own category as well, just to see what message, what creative, what copy really resonates with them. And a lot of the time, I guess the best way to describe it, I like to describe it, is people got really fat and greedy, like marketers really got fat and greedy. They just said, as long as it’s profitable, we know what age groups work, just go broad and just let it rip. Now, it’s gonna force people to be far more proactive with what does work and what doesn’t work. I personally believe that, by splitting with these age groups, we’re gonna find better marketers, we’re gonna find better data, and yes, it’s gonna be hard with the opt-ins and the opt-outs, but it’s gonna force us as marketers to work harder, to make our clients money, which as a client, they should be happy about that but also it just means that it is harder work, so it might take more money to test and to get those answers. There will be good things that come from this. I choose to be an optimist in a time when, you know, things can be quite scary.

Scott (17:24 – 18:26) – It’s such an interesting thing, right, because I used to do, very much, the things the same way, if we’re going back 3, 4, 5 years. Hyper-segmentation, almost single-interest groups, broken down by demo, age, and as you’re saying, crafting your messaging and your visual creatives to those demographics. The challenge I found, as soon as Facebook started pushing towards the Power of Five, right, and everyone started going super broad, even if I went back and tried to break those down, as soon as it started segmenting more, the CPMs would offset any conversion increase. That was always the challenge ‘cause it ended up just being more profitable a lot of the time, going broad with, pretty much, blanket messaging and marketing across those various demographics. It’ll be interesting just to see how that works going forward because, I agree with you, I think it’s gonna go back to really having to sniper in on finding those pockets of profitable audiences and demographics, and trying to drill down on those. It’s not gonna be, you’re not gonna have the data to be able to go broad like we used to.

Tyler (18:26 – 18:27) – Totally agree.

Ray (18:28 – 19:05) – Yeah, that was one of the hard things. I remember like you, Scott. I was working with a brand 5 years ago. We’re spending $250K a week and the thing that worked the best, using Facebook Ads Manager, audience split-testing, I forgot what it’s called, audience, they split out the age for you automatically, right? You can do male-female, 18-25 or whatever. I remember that was working the best, but the problem with that is that they would also die within 3 – 4 days because you would exhaust that if you do that hyper-interest as well. I think it’ll be interesting, especially maybe dynamic creative’s gonna have a play here as well to where we can keep those fresher, longer, using dynamic creatives or something like a dynamic DPA even, for example, to keep it fresh.

19:05 – 22:29 – How can a brand’s success be measured if some of the data’s not coming through?
Ray (19:05 – 19:21) – But Tyler, follow-up question for how you’re doing things is, testing with some of those micros, I’m really obsessed with just knowing and understanding how your mind works because I’ve been following you in different Facebook groups. I think that you take things in a very systemic and logical way. You don’t just randomly do crap.

Tyler (19:22 – 19:23) – Totally.

Ray (19:23 – 19:35) – When you’re do this, I’d love to kind of hear your mind. What are some of your pre-assumptions when you do it, and then in addition to that, how do you measure the success, for example, if you’re getting some of that data that’s not coming through?

Tyler (19:35 – 22:29) – That’s a really good question. So how we’re measuring the success now is with whatever data we can find on Facebook that is going to be relevant. For example, I like to look at the overall performance, that overall bar you get at the bottom of the Ads Manager, something I look at heavily. I use that as my source of truth, say in the last 7 days, if we know that the account has, on average, a 1.8% outbound CTR, what I wanna run with the test is either see a breakeven on that. So 1.8, especially now ‘cause we don’t have that off-Facebook data that’s gonna be 100% accurate. I wanna see that either equal or above that, if I’m gonna consider that to be a winner. Things like, even, you know, you’ve got your video view watch times or something you can look at as well to really indicate success. But then, it’s always gonna be different stages of the funnel and understanding how far along the funnel did they go, but then also reverse-engineering that and saying why did or did this not work? Why would the CTR be higher, but why would they not go through an end of purchase, ‘cause sometimes CTR can be a vanity metric where it helps you indicate that the creative hits the spot, but why isn’t the messaging working? What is it about this one creative or this one piece of copy that has worked as far as your overall CTR, but why has this affected our conversion rate? What aren’t we showing them that we have shown them in the past? Using the information between a winner versus a new test that has winning metrics but doesn’t have winning performance, again, it’s a bit harder now without having all of the tracking data behind it, but being able to say this worked and understanding why, and then this lost and understanding why, or this is working in some components but not in others. I think the biggest thing for me is, and this is something now with my media buyer, I’m constantly drilling into is, always ask why. Good or bad, always ask why. This worked, why? This didn’t work, why? Why did this work and why didn’t this not, and compare those two against one another. What components did this possess? What components didn’t this one possess? What made this one get a higher CTR? Is it too clickbait-y? Is it just that it attracts a different audience or age group? Now that we’re splitting down age groups, it goes a bit deeper in saying, why did this resonate more with an 18 – 30 versus the 30 – 45? Now, we’re really starting to learn, on a deep marketing level, what makes our customers tick and what do they want to see at different age groups? What messaging makes more sense because, again, your 18 – 30 are not the same people at 31 – 45 or 35 – 50. They are going to need a different creative or messaging so, for me, it’s all about interpreting what data we can have and making decisions against it. But, rather than making decisions, testing against that hypothesis that we didn’t have because all of it is gonna be, I see, the best brands are gonna come out on top by the ones who test the most, but also learn and ask questions about the data that they do receive. I think that’s probably one of the main strengths I have is I constantly test against my own hypotheses and my own ideas based on the data, rather than just saying, well, this works, let’s just run with it. If this works, let’s test against it. Let’s see if we can beat that.

22:31 26:56 – Assessing Facebook performance versus other channels through MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio)
Scott (22:31 – 22:58) – You have brands that are working multi-channel, right? I assume a lot of them are. How are you now viewing, how you’re assessing the performance of Facebook against those other channels? And what sort of discussions have you had to have around that ‘cause there’s probably been a little bit of a mindset shift if we’re unsure of what Facebook’s reporting or, as you said, it’s been really good some days, down the others, but how are you sort of having that discussion around viewing that against various other channels?

Tyler (22:58 – 25:56) – Yeah, that’s a really good question. So MER is something, obviously, you guys, I’ve heard both, I think all of you guys mentioned it at one point or another, that’s something now that I’ve been having discussions with all clients now across the board, saying MER’s the only way, that’s our only source of truth at this point. Back in the day, everyone was trying to attribute success with 1 platform. It caused, especially if they worked with other agencies across other platforms, it caused a lot of cannibalization because everyone wanted to claim attributable revenue. Look at my email servers, look at my Facebook, look at my Google, and it can’t work like that, especially not now, but it shouldn’t have ever been like that. It’s an ecosystem. They all support one another, whether you can measure it or not. The way that I’ve seen, even things I’ve had measurable results in the past where we had a 30% correlation or 30% lift, with every dollar we spent or every dollar we made on Facebook. No, it was something along the lines of every dollar we spent or made on Facebook for this 1 brand, there was a 30% lift in Amazon revenue as well, especially in America where Amazon is so strong, there is always going to be a massive spillover that you’ll never be able to have a direct correlation. So the way I look at this, and again I don’t have any perfect mathematical models at this point in time, but what I used to look at is, if we’re spending $1,000 today on Facebook and let’s say we’re making $5,000 in the account overall, but then we wanna lift our Facebook budget by 50%, meaning we’re now spending $1,500 a day, how close to a 15% lift do we have on the store? If we’re making $5,000, which is a 5:1 MER versus Facebook spend, we’re gonna go up to $1,500, and we wanna see 100% correlation, I wanna see $7,500 dollars a day in spend or in revenue on that overall store. That would tell us there’s a 100% correlation there because the 50% lift in Facebook equal to 50% lift in sales. It’s not always gonna be the case. It might be an 80% lift, it might be a 50% lift, then we know we’ve got some correlation of numbers to work with that’s a true representation. Facebook won’t show it, Google won’t show it, Snapchat or any email or anything else won’t show it, but we’ll see a direct correlation there. I think, as long as agencies can work in tandem with their clients as far as, or clients need to work in tandem with their agencies, not trying to pinpoint on them, and this is the hard conversation ‘cause, now, from a client aspect, I can understand that they’re definitely gonna look at it and go, well, you’re just trying to take a bigger piece of the pie by saying look at how we’re doing. It’s not even that. It’s that we need a source of truth as marketers to say we can continue to spend because it is working rather than saying, you know, the worst conversation to have with a client who finds it, well, no, we want you to go off Facebook, we can’t do that anymore. It doesn’t, there’s no way that we can do that anymore in one go. We need to say, let’s move the goal post. If you’ve got KPIs you wanna see from us, we need to have that conversation and say, okay, what do you need to see to be comfortable that Facebook is attributing to this success, one way or another, and not just what’s on Ads Manager? Otherwise, it’ll burn the relationship from agency to client, but also it’ll burn results.

Scott (25:56 – 26:55) – It should never have been that way. I was just saying, and I feel like this is something that we saw over the years. Business decisions should have always been made at that level anyway, and I think they were. A lot of people look at the ad account and just determine that’s where I’m gonna make the decision. To me, it was always, look at the channel for optimization. How can I improve what’s happening within that channel, but you should be looking at it from an overall perspective in terms of making business decisions. I think this has forced that to happen much more where I think, prior to that, I think there was not enough of that going on. We, I remember us having situations where, you know, we’ll have a 6 or 7x MER and Facebook would be saying it’s 2x but that was the only channel running and the client will go, we have to switch Facebook off ‘cause it’s not working! Well, it is, there’s a lot of people probably falling out of the conversion window or whatnot. I think, in that regard, it’s helping force some better business decisions when it comes to marketing spend.

Tyler (26:55 – 26:56) – Exactly, I agree.

26:58 – 31:09 – Measuring performance with MER while also making channel-specific decisions on optimization
Ray (26:58 – 27:57) – That’s exactly right and, for example, just to kind of give a story. We have a brand, for example, it was a similar story where they, we were spending 5K, performance in the actual ad account, it wasn’t there, but their total MER which is total gross sales divided to total advertising spend, was actually very healthy. The test we had, thankfully, that they said yes was, listen, let’s ignore what the Facebook ROAS says. Let’s continue to scale and they started spending 10, 15K a day, still overall healthy on MER, but the ad account ROAS kept going down. So the question is, the more you scale, the less attribution you get. We’re not gonna go into the reasons why you don’t get that attribution, but yeah, I think that’s the hardest part. The conversations we have with brands is, okay, how do I make this decision on ad account, specific, across Facebook, Google, Snapchat, Pinterest, email, but still macro enough so I know that I can keep scaling? I think that’s probably the hardest challenge a lot of brands have. I was gonna ask you, Tyler, how do you kinda navigate that particular question?

Tyler (27:58 – 28:01) – Which particular question?

Ray (28:01 – 28:11) – Yeah, the question where, having macro enough, where you’re looking at the MER, but making specific channel decisions on optimization within that silo?

Tyler (28:11 – 31:09) – Yeah, again, this is where, I guess, you have to, what I mentioned earlier was, we have to look at how much we’re spending and how much they’re making overall, and then running a test of, cool, mathematically push up the budgets now, 20%, 30%, 50% and understand what that reflection looks like. Not over 1 day, but say over 3, 5, 7 days to deal with any day-to-day volatility, but being able to directly correlate back to, great, we’ve spent 30% overall for the week, what does the sales look like overall from the store and are we up 30%? How far off are we? Understanding the correlation there and the lift, it’s the only way moving forward because you can’t solely rely on Snapchat. You can’t solely rely on Facebook. You can’t solely rely on YouTube. It has to work as an ecosystem. For the success of the brand long-term, it has to work as an ecosystem. The moment you wanna try and point the finger and say, it’s all because of them and you shut off a channel and then it turns to shit, then the blame goes to the other channel for saying, well, you’re not doing your job properly. It’s not that, it’s the fact that, again, it’s the lack of attribution, but you can never pinpoint because the customer’s psychology, the customer’s journey is always different. Someone sees an organic post on Instagram, then goes to YouTube to look it up for reviews, sees the review, goes to an affiliate link. All of a sudden, you’ve got Instagram that wants attribution if it’s same-day, you got YouTube that wants attribution, but then it’s an affiliate sale if you’ve got that kind of system set up. In what universe will you ever have something that’s totally, you know, congruent and says it is because of this 1 definitive moment. It’s different for every person and everyone uses different channels differently. I don’t even have Snapchat anymore. I, for example, if I wanna make a buying decision, I might see an ad, but I’m gonna go to Google and look it up, check reviews, do all that, but if that’s my personality type, other people are far more snap decision-type purchasers, this looks sick, I wanna buy it, quick-buy! We have a different decision-making process. Some people might be single and go, I’m just gonna buy this thing because I don’t have anyone to weight it up, but I find again & again that 30 – 45 or even 54 group, I find that they have partners, they’re married, they take longer to sell too, and a lot of the time, they are the worst-performing age group for a lot of campaigns because they seem to either have a partner, they have kids, they have responsibilities. A hard industry that I’ve seen in the past as well, different age groups and it differs, but in the childcare space, I’ve seen it’s been quite hard, at times, to sell things to mums because they’re selfless. They wanna spend on their family, they wanna spend on their kids, they wanna spend on their husbands and their partners, anyone but themselves, especially when they have kids or young kids. I found that the ones with younger children are harder to sell to than older children because money’s tight. It’s all new to them, they’re a lot tighter with their money, and so all these decisions and how attribution plays a role in that comes back to the psychographics of the user as well. It’s hard, again, the only way that we can measure accurately is going to be MER because every one person’s different, they interact with platforms differently, and they use platforms differently.

31:11 – 35:11 – What are some solutions or innovations that Facebook has tested,  implemented, or proposed in the face of the iOS14.5 ATT policy?
Ray (31:11 – 31:16) – So where do you see Facebook adapting and making changes going forward?

Tyler (31:16 – 34:35) – I personally believe, without question, they’re going to make changes on-platform. I see them coming for Amazon, they always have been for quite a while with, obviously, Facebook Marketplace, but now with the rollout of Facebook Shops, I see them coming for Amazon. It’s also gonna impact Shopify. Personally, I think it’s gonna be great for Facebook, longer term, what’s happened because it’s gonna mean, they’re gonna accumulate data on a far greater level because it’s gonna be all on-platform, transactional data, etc. Then they’re gonna have the checkout facilities and payment process fees of Shopify except a lot more, a lot more extensive, like 5% from what I’ve heard which is a bit savage, but that’s Facebook. And then they’re gonna be able to compete with Amazon in the same way. They’re gonna offer the ability for one-click checkouts. I’ve realized now, if you guys were to go on your desktop, there’s now a little window for Facebook Pay, I don’t know if you guys have it, but I’ve seen it. Now, somehow, they’ve got my PayPal on there. I don’t know where it came from, I must’ve done it when I was younger. I thought, this is so cool, I never made a purchase on Facebook in my life, but they’ve somehow got my PayPal built in. And so they’re definitely working on ways to, you know, build in this eCommerce platform that’s on-platform that never moves. It changes, it brings, all based on this new iOS14.5 where on-platform data is fair game. Facebook can report that back and I can be wrong in saying that so loosely, but as far as everything I know, it’s all on-platform data so it’s fine and Facebook can share that with us as advertisers, opted-in or opted-out, meaning hey, wanna sell a widget directly on Facebook. It’s gonna be a very smooth and coherent process. We’re gonna see all of it. We’re gonna see it initiate checkout, we’re gonna see where they dropped off, and what we can do to make it easier and it’s all on platform so it should be faster and easier to navigate. I remember hearing from you guys as well. You have been running some alpha test on the Facebook Shops platform as well so I don’t know how much you can or can’t share on that, but what I do know is that they are clearly pushing. They are going to people and seeking guidance to be able to get this platform up to speed. And that way, us as advertisers, I see it making a huge shift. One thing I’ve made a post about, or I guess a prediction about, is the process is gonna look different instead of going to ad or landing page or product page to checkout page all off Facebook. I see it going from ad to instant experience, instant experience to shop, shop to cart, cart to checkout, all on Facebook. It’s gonna give us far more vision, it’s gonna make the process smoother and easier on Facebook. I see the potential downfall, someone I know made a good comment on this, it could make the experience harder for us as advertisers if we know how they are with their compliance and policies and shutting things down for no reason. I mean, my brand’s in the supplement and health space. I’m having a hard time even getting my shop active! I’ve only got 4 of about 15 SKUs active right now because we just can’t get it done. We’re getting denied for things that shouldn’t be getting denied for. And so there’s going to be a lot of issues there as well, as this rolls out. That’s gonna be something we’re gonna work past, but again it’s all new. There’s a lot of changes happening, but I see the more data we can accumulate as marketers, the more data we can keep on the platform and control the experience, I see working better. About a year, about 12 – 18 months ago now, I was running some tests early on using the Shopify permalink, links that you can use…

Ray (34:35 – 34:39) – Someone might drag to check out, right, or add a link in there? Yeah, nice.

Tyler (34:39 – 35:11) – Yeah, so what we were doing, we were running ads to instant experiences, instant experiences direct to checkout with these Shopify permalinks so we still had the call-to-action buttons built in around, obviously, through Facebook, but those URLs went to a product page, weren’t even to a pre-load cart, went direct to checkout with that actual product in its cart. For anyone who might be listening on how to find this, you can just type in Shopify permalink checkout and it should come out through a Google search. It’s not the easiest thing to do, but doing it is extremely effective.

35:11 – 42:47 – A sneak peek of Instant Experiences on Facebook
Ray (35:11 – 35:20) – Tyler, when you did that, real quick, when you did that, were you just trying to recreate the product page experience to load the in-app experience? How did you change that?

Tyler (35:21 – 37:02) – Yeah. So for me, we don’t do any dev work for clients. It’s a lot of work, a lot of hard work, and it can become expensive when you’re just working on, say, agency retainers. Instead of that, what I decided to do was, this is what I actually did, look, your product page could do a bit of work, but we don’t have time to get it developed or to do it for you. We’re going to set up an instant experience and run the test that way. So, there were a couple of ways that I tested this. I’ve tested long-form sales page, much like advertorials, see how that go. Hit-and-miss, depending on the industry, and also, as anyone would know that’s run advertorials, it’s very story and copy-dependent as well. Yeah, I’ve tested running standard product page look and feels, that has worked quite well, but then also made tweaks and adjustments to make it more of an instructional landing page the way I would like it to see. So, you know, starting with maybe an end of product page flow which has image and a hero banner, with maybe, like, a free shipping icon above or whatever. And then going down with a call-to-action, trying to keep it all above the fold, but then getting into the product intricacies and the USPs after the fact and social proof and, you know, screenshots of positive reviews and things like that as well further down the page. Again, that’s turning a standard product page into more of a sales-driven page, which I personally prefer. And again, I’ve seen some really good results across the board with it. It’s just something that we haven’t had to explore anytime soon, but definitely something we’re going to start re-exploring ‘cause it gives us that on-party data, or third-party data, and on-platform data. So now, once they open up a canvas ad, or an instant experience now, we’re gonna have the ability to retarget based on the fact that they’ve opened it. But then we also have the ability to retarget whether they have or have not clicked out, and that’s one thing I really like.

Ray (37:02 – 37:14) – I was gonna ask about that. Have you tried, almost like, kinda silo the in-app experience funnel and just kinda do a split-test, compare and contrast? Like, in conversion rate for example, between in-app versus sending people off-app?

Tyler (37:14 – 38:34) – It’s been a while since I’ve done it since so I can’t give you anything statistically right now, but when I did run it, the last time I did run it was for a skincare brand. We were stuck at around 1.8 – 2x return when we were running it to our product landing page. I remember the initial test we were running this, we were seeing like an average of a 4 – 5x ROAS the moment we launched this and I was blown away. But then, interestingly I found, because it’s an instant experience, much like how Facebook has priorities based on how people interact with images, videos, or carousels, some campaigns will get all the spends, carousels versus images or videos. I found that instant experiences were very, very inconsistent with performance, almost as though there were certain people who did engage with instant experience ads and some who didn’t. It became one of those things were, performance was so shaky, it was hard to really pinpoint if it wasn’t just because it was a unique gimmick or something new that people weren’t exposed to before that we had some early success, much like whenever you do a product launch. There’s always a lot of success and then it kind of tapers off to more of a baseline. It worked then, it worked really, really well, and even if we could sustain the same performance that we were getting currently, but now have more in-party data to be able to retarget people with, I’d choose instant experiences every day of the week to get a lot more flexibility.

Ray (38:35 – 39:34) – We’re testing that right now and we’re seeing the exact same thing where the ad spend we’ll feed randomly to one ad or one ad group, ad set. But one thing we’re trying right now, I wanted to get your thoughts on this, is we’re trying linking instant experiences together, almost like if someone abandons that, they have a different instant experience like an offer or trying to interlink it. I agree with you. I think the funnel of Facebook, I think every social platform now, everything’s gonna be in-platform. Checkout, a shop, and as a marketer and an advertiser, you’re just gonna have to, like,  have these separate shops, almost like one on Shopify, one on Amazon, one on Facebook, and that’s just how you’re gonna have to operate your business, and have one central hub where you manage it all. I’d love to kind of get your thoughts on, for example, on running full funnel inside the app for example. I know you mentioned retargeting, which I’m really happy you mentioned that. What are some of the pros and cons, ‘cause there are pros and cons to it. Obviously, people on Instagram may not have instant experience, especially if you’re like an Instagram Story. Can you kind of talk through that?

Tyler (39:34 – 42:46) – Yeah, I mean, it’s one of those things where, I’m trying to think of the best way to put this. It’s a real tricky one. I think that, my big push at the moment, and my big belief is, work within the confinements that we have. If we know that we have, first-party data’s fair game, I wanna try and do as much as humanly possible to create as much first-party data as possible, whether that’s instant experiences, whether that’s lead form ads, or whether that’s engagement campaigns, or running… You can start creating listicles inside instant experiences where you know that that’s your very top-of-funnel and you might have, you know, top gifts for Black Friday this year or whatever, come Christmas. That becomes a top of funnel aspect to start building audiences, usually it’s pretty cheap as well, where then you give them the ability to link out to Facebook or like you said, you can link in to a product page which just so happens to be an instant experience. There’s a lot of different ways that I see this working moving forward. You can even be so clever as to, you know, you can have videos set up as, keep it on Facebook but link them from instant experiences to that video and there’s a lot of ways you can get creative with it. I think all of these, us as marketers, we need to be smart enough to know the tools that we have at our disposal and think to ourselves, how can we create this on Facebook? Instant experiences give us websites. We also have collection ads, which are basically listicles in a way because they’re so rigid and so structured. Here are all the collection pages. I see collection ads, essentially, changing from, going from, you know, rather than from a Facebook collection, it’s gonna be a collection on Facebook. Directly from Facebook, it goes to Facebook Shop with that individual product or, again, to be so clever, try and recreate the standard collection page which will usually link you out, build it inside of Facebook yourself as an instant experience to look like a collection, then to go to an instant experience which happens to be a product collection, product page, sales page, and you’re just rebuilding the entire experience. It’s a lot of work, but again, in times of change, we all need to pivot what we’re doing. One thing I’m really looking forward to and excited about is going to be using leave forms more, mentioned before, that’s something I’m really excited to try out because that’s gonna give us first-party data. It gives us the ability to sync that directly with Klaviyo. We’re then gonna be able to email them sooner or follow up with them. Even if those who convert as a lead ad aren’t gonna be as likely to buy, chances are and from what we know, there’s still gonna be people we can then retarget ‘cause they’ve completed an action on Facebook, first-party data we can retarget them based on that. We’re also gonna be able to follow up with them with email, and for those who opted-in, we can then sync back that data, first-party data, into Facebook for smart retargeting. They visited a collection page or whatever else it might be, we can then feed that into dynamic audiences as well. You know, my real ethos, I guess you might say, is right now, it’s just going down the route of keep things on-platform as much as possible to keep as much vision as we can on the buyer’s journey and making statistically relevant decisions. The only way we can make statistically relevant decisions is seeing that data and knowing exactly what is or what is not working.

42:47 – 47:58 – A refocus on the consumer journey and experience with brand
Ray (42:47 – 42:51) – You mentioned lead forms. Do you have a preference, email address or phone number? What would you go for, or both?

Tyler (42:51 – 43:23) – That’s a really good question. I personally have not played around with SMS enough. I know it’s a massive platform. It’s just not something I’ve played around enough with. I’ve got a million and 1 different ideas of how to use SMS effectively. I, personally, at this point, in order for, as cheap leads as possible, I just go name and email. However, if I wanted to get SMS, what I’d rather do is run a reach campaign or brand awareness campaign, saying hey, get a 20% off deal. Text DEAL to 88544.

Ray (43:23 – 43:24) – That’s a good idea.

Tyler (43:24 – 43:51) – You know what I mean? That might just be in the retargeting aspect to acquire as many people as possible on SMS. Because then you don’t need them to do anything other than get off Facebook, send a text, and off they go. But that also then involves effort of leaving Facebook to do that, but that’s gonna give you data you can control as well. Everyone’s talking about the open rates of SMS and obviously the effective rates of SMS. The big thing is, we’re in compliance with SMS ‘cause you can get in a lot of trouble with that too so proceed with caution.

Scott (43:54 – 45:36) – Man, this is so exciting to me as to where this is all going. The one thing I hear, just listening to you guys go back and forth on this is, it’s really coming back to focusing on the customer journey and what that looks like. You know, I think, over the last 2, 3, 4, years, it’s very much just went direct response, make profit, scale as hard as possible, and now it’s forcing everyone to rethink their funnels. How can we, as you said, you know, can we put listicles in instant experiences? Can we actually generate some awareness and push them down the funnel, get their details, nurture the relationship as opposed to just going hardcore direct response, trying to get that sale. It’s gonna be such an interesting shift. I think the other interesting part is where Facebook, coming back to what you suggested, there’s gonna be pivots, right? What’s Facebook gonna have to pivot with their, I guess, their product, their technicals? Going back to January, we had a call with our Facebook rep and it was the 1st time ever that they’d ask us for our opinion on Facebook product. You know, at the time, I was like, I think having Groups, opening the advertising to Groups and building, they pushed Groups so hard and community building, and there was always the discussion around advertising within Groups, but they never really followed through with that. I think it’s these products that, you know, lean so hard on Power of Five because that was what the platform was being built around. It’s been flipped on its head, but I think there are so many opportunities. Even coming back to their digital currency, right? They’re relaunching Libra, these type of things. Next 12 months are exciting, I think for the platform. A lot of people see it as the sky is falling, but I think there’s some exciting stuff on the horizon.

Tyler (45:36 – 46:46) – I think you can choose to be pessimist or an optimist in this situation. Being a pessimist is only gonna cause more problems for you. There’s no point sitting around and crying and thinking, what are we gonna do now? Pull spend, that’s it, Facebook’s done for us! That’s one way, but that’s not the approach I’d ever take and not something I’d advise anybody. Take what we know, understand what we do know, what we don’t know. Test against what we don’t know. Take that learning and kinda continue to improve on it. Yeah, like you said, Scott, the big difference is gonna come back to improving your overall customer experience, speaking to them like a human, not just buy my widget now, it’s on sale, 50% off blah blah blah. Although there will still be a play, I don’t see that being something that’s gonna work long-term just based on how much this platform’s gonna change. It’s about building that relationship and giving your customers more reasons to, you know, resonate with your brand, giving them more content, giving them more ways to, keeping things on the platform, but enhance that overall experience. Groups, you mentioned, getting them on SMS, getting them on email lists, building more than just trying to turn $1 dollar into $2. Day 1 is definitely gonna be a longer-term play now and it forces people to think about that longer-term play.

Ray (46:48 – 47:56) – I love to tell this story of 1 of our brands where when they first started, they didn’t focus on data first or the user experience. Tyler, you mentioned, not just focused on getting my dollar today, but later down the road. I’ll never forget this brand. When they first started, they started heavily focusing on email and SMS. I know we talked about it few moments ago. I’ll never forget, 10 months later, they were really grinding on it. It got to the point where they’ll send an email and SMS, they’d make 10 – 15 grand a piece. For them, that was everything. I love that you said that because, me and Scott talk about this a lot, it’s all about the LTV game. With your background, especially when it comes to sales, getting to know their personas, getting to know them, if you can really speak to them on a human level, most of the time, that money’s gonna roll back. Some people will buy immediately, some people will buy 6 months from now, but even the people who will buy right away, they’re gonna buy again. I love that because I think, it’s gonna make the people who are really good at it, they’re gonna rise at the top, whereas the dropshippers that are just surviving off of 50% sitewide, and that was their top-of-funnel acquisition, I think they’re probably gonna go by the wayside ‘cause they don’t have a good user experience or any focus to the customer.

Tyler (47:56 – 47:58) – Yeah, totally agree.

48:00 – 52:41 – 3 key strategic points to focus on in the next 12 months
Scott (48:00 – 48:46) – We’re just about out for time. It’s been a really, really interesting discussion and it’s gonna be, just, a really exciting and interesting industry to watch over the next 12 months. I think, just to wrap things up, for everyone who’s at home, who’s got a brand, who’s either working with an agency or running ads themselves, let’s tie it up with, like, 3 to 5 points that you think people should be focusing on strategically over the next 12 months. Where should they be putting their attention based on the shifts that we’re seeing now? Obviously, there’s things that we don’t know and what that’s gonna look like in 6 months, but I think focusing on in-app is probably, we’re in agreement. We’re sort of seeing where the focus needs to go. What would you tell people to focus on here?

Tyler (48:46 – 51:03) – I think people, now, are gonna be forced to be less fat and greedy and to focus more on their, really getting to know their customer. Relearn who their customer is. Understand, you know, speak to them. I’m, personally, one thing I’m gonna start doing now that I’ve been wanting to do is those who’ve had really good success with our products, being in the health and supplements space, seeing that they had a direct result, getting on calls with them, ask what they like about it, ask how it’s helped them, ask what they were doing before, and really just get to know them on a human level. I think, taking what’s purely an online business and trying to make it, how’s it gonna be a more day-to-day standard brick and mortar type business where you do more than just, we don’t talk to people because we’re a faceless business, or we don’t engage with our customers ‘cause we’re just spending and making money, that’s what we do for an online business. Finding a way to be more humanly engaged with your customers, but understand on a deeper level, understand that there might be different things going on in the lives of your customers from 50 to 60 versus the 18 to 30. How do you serve them better? It comes from a place of service and trying to keep them longer-term as opposed to just trying to sell them something now. I personally believe that, the way I see it is, the better you can understand your customer, the better you’re gonna sell to them. I find that the biggest mistake people make is they make assumptions about their customers. The moment you make assumptions is the moment you start losing the game because you need to… People will buy when they feel understood, and if you can’t articulate and understand their problem better than they know it themselves, you’re gonna be able to solve the problem better than they could’ve said and that’s gonna help you drive more customers. Whether that’s attributable, day 1, to Facebook or not, having the better data on Facebook or better data of your customers, you’ll communicate better and even if your KPIs don’t change, day 1, on Facebook, you will see a better lift in the LTV because they’re gonna be a more valuable customer to you long-term because you’ve articulated and understood them better than your competitors out there might know. For me, the big thing’s going to be just relearning your customer, relearning what they do wanna see as far as ads, and relearning what they wanna read as far as messaging and building a closer relationship with them; things like groups and things like SMS, things like emails, not just hitting them hard with buy now, buy now, but more so, here’s what’s going on with us as a business and letting people buy into and understand what’s going on with your business as well, I think, is gonna be a big thing.

Scott (51:03 – 51:39) – Could not agree more, could not agree more! We’ve said it a lot lately, you know, across all our best-performing brands that we’ve ever worked with. The ones that have the best returns in the accounts are always the ones that have the best relationships with their clients and have amazing customer relationships. I think it is easy to look at your Facebook Ads Manager dashboard and see numbers and forget that there’s people on the other side of that. It’s a really, I think it’s a really critical thing, and a really good point to sum it all up. Tyler, thank you so much for jumping on, man! We really appreciate your time. For anyone who’s interested in connecting with you, where can they get you?

Tyler (51:39 – 52:21) – Awesome! First of all, thanks for having me on! Really appreciate it. Love getting on and sharing as much as I know about this type of industry, especially these days. People who wanna connect, the best place to find me is on Facebook, Tyler Garner is where to find me. I actually own the bitly to my name as well, which is kind of cool. bit.ly/TylerGarner, you’ll find my personal page. Other than that, I’m vibing a bit on Twitter, really liking Twitter so could do with few more followers so if anyone wants to catch up on Twitter, I tweet some stuff on there. Still new to the platform, but I’m really enjoying it. Best place to find me is gonna be on my personal profile and then on Twitter as well. Nothing really happens on Instagram to me, that’s more of the whatever platform, but yeah, that’ll be the best places!

Scott (52:23 – 52:38) – Amazing! I’m definitely coming to hunt you on Twitter, that’s my little crypto-world, that’s where I hide in the crypto-sphere. So it’s good to connect with some marketers on there. Alright, thank you very much, man! Really appreciate it and look forward to the next 12 months and all the best!

Tyler (52:38 – 52:41) – Thanks, guys! Thanks for having me on!

52:41 – 53:38 – Episode outro
Scott (52:41 – 53:38) – Thanks again for tuning to this episode of the Growth & Greatness eCommerce Podcast. We hope you got a ton of value out of this episode and if you did, we’d love for you to leave us a review on your platform of choice and help us reach as many people as we can. Now, if you’re a brand founder, an eCommerce entrepreneur, or an in-house marketing manager looking to accelerate your growth this year, reach out to us at Right Hook Digital. We’re a performance branding agency and we specialize in partnering with eCommerce brands to help them hit their growth goals with maximum ROI. Now, if this sounds like a solution that you need, check us out at righthookdigital.com and schedule a call with our client partnerships team. They’d love to have a chat with you and see how we can help you grow in 2021.