The 4 Growth Levers Every DTC Brand Needs To Audit

0:00One of the fastest growing and biggest brands in DTC currently. they were so over leveraged into one persona that they were running towards a cliff

0:13welcome back to another episode of dtc diaries i'm i'm joined by someone who's not lucas someone not lucas not lucas is reliable substitute i'm um yeah good to have sam coo chief product officer as well as he's moving into yeah um 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 or a culmination of a piece of work that's been going on for probably about 4, 5, 6 months within the agency group and I guess how I'd summarise it is like our attempt to codify our belief in how you deliver best-in-class growth for DC brands, right?

1:07Extreme 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 ad account, some spreadsheet, maybe even an AI companion to help you make sense of the chaos. If that sounds familiar, InCard has the solution. InCard is the financial platform built for how modern businesses actually operate. Multi-currency accounts, corporate cards and a fully connected banking experience all in one place.

1:42It replaces chaos with one connected system. And I mean actually connected. Shopify, Xero, 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 Asio Beauty and Aloe Paris are already using it to scale smarter. So check out Incard 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 many brands overcomplicate growth.

2:21I think that can be said about a lot of business and maybe even a lot of life. Just everything, yeah. It's like complexity. Everything tends towards complexity. Yeah. Steve Jobs says simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication. Yeah. And he's absolutely right. The book actually inspired a lot of this. You told me to read it about... Steve Jobs' biography? Yeah, yeah, yeah. About three months ago. It's the best biography I've ever read. It is great. It's amazing. It's so good. It's a chunky one though. It's like 600 pages, isn't it? Yeah. Loose guy as well. Yeah. Loose cannon. Great product though.

2:53Yeah. And I think we talk a lot internally. we've talked a lot on this podcast about like doing less better focusing on less bigger bets bigger initiatives and ensuring that you've got like for each 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 on product launches of like you're almost launching another business at a business when you're running two products two acquisition products um 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 and our approach, but also to move the concept of like a paid media manager or a paid search manager 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 as that strips a lot of that execution and lower leverage work we need to shift shift responsibilities up the chain make decision making higher leverage and 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 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 uh yeah 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.

5:00So it's a framework that starts through like constraint diagnostic. That constraint lives across one of four pillars. And we do think it's broadly applicable to every type of brand, Amazon, DTC only, Omnichannel, retail, etc. and it's the outcome is like getting alignment across everybody within the business and on 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 internal teams as well you don't have to be a big agency to 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 a give us an overview of what i think is your brain largely your brain child so yeah yeah so it's like full circle moment of releasing it to the wild yeah we're putting it out there um so the what is it what is a compass well a compass points you towards a destination right and 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 ours on screen here which will show our version of the compass yes yes so different directions that you can take a compass right and we've got to really like boil down what are the pillars what are the 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 the lever in 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 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 d2c 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 exactly even the emergence of new channels like app loving or something that would fit into yeah 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.

8:34So we've got four pillars, but we've got two of the pillars that are 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 have we actually got here and the foundational pillars, some might have guessed, will be offer and conversion. If you're selling a really niche product like horse supplements. I don't know why that 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, your ceiling is not going to be very high because people that will convert on a website that's built in 2001, there's not many people.

9:23So those are foundational. They're determining the ceiling. and then we've got you can still influence them oh 100 % yeah that's the key thing there it's 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 right so those are foundational then we've got mechanical pillars and mechanical pillars determine 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 merchandised it right distribution ad spend if we launch a brand and we spend 5k 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 going to 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 gone 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 total value so we're rating out of 100 um we're giving a rating across 25 per pillar using the system we're going to go through now and benchmarking and data that we have available within our business and quite a lot of data in e-commerce is readily available through other platforms as well.

11:00So if you haven't got the same level of context as us, you can apply a similar thought process. And then setting a roadmap between we're 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 sub-factors, right? Five sub-factors, yeah. And they're what we score against. So each sub-factor 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 sub-factor for offer is going to be unit economics.

11:46so a five out of five could be something like 80 plus percent gross margin yeah if you've got 40 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 sub-factor 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 a higher car can positions off like an angle in an ad that'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 got 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'll go a little bit deeper onto that later.

12:38I'm not going to go through every single sub-factor 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 yeah we'll give you our rating but we will put a cheat sheet of each of the sub factors in the description just so you can follow along with the the conversation that we're having here because we want to ensure that everybody can sort of take away from this episode something that that they're able to just reflect on within their own business um but yeah sorry yeah yeah so what people need to know up to now is like a constraint is always going to lie within a pillar but we've got to break the pillar down into its different parts it was funny actually we were we met a brand owner the other week and he was like 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 tell him like this is why i was like if you don't change if you just do this for the next 12 months your your dreams will come true in terms of targets and it's that was creative like they were making like 100 assets a month for a brand that's doing an astronomical amount of revenue i'm literally like you just need to 10x that and it's going to change the business um and but that's what that i think that's the complexity it's like bringing distilling complexity as a business gets bigger it gets more complex into a into a process that creates focus on the highest leverage point to spend time that creates asymmetrical returns i think the point at one point on the two like foundational pillars is i think those are the two areas offer and conversion where you often find step changes in outcome whereas the mechanical pillars which will come on to a more incremental incremental improvement over time 100 % but yeah carry on sorry yeah yeah yeah definitely so let me give a couple more examples of sub factors just 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 product yeah we're gonna probably gonna go maybe on the next episode gonna go through a skill that allows us to actually view that yeah um through ai i 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 they'd 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 each one of them gap analysis yeah yeah we we did a good talk on that in in new york didn't we um and yeah that reaffirmed that not a lot of people are thinking about that so that's another key thing that we that we ordered another example volume volume volume is really really really important for brands especially when backing that into persona because I view personas on like a like you said there each persona is probably going to on little tam 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, it's like that's not much headroom there it's diminishing over time each incremental asset is taking less is having a decreasing contribution to the total ability to spend in that account yeah um 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 or on requirement to a strategy that is prioritized and intentional across personas and all the other building blocks yeah yeah for sure one 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.

17:44So yeah, the sequence is really important, I've found. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So they're subfactors, subfactors back into pillars. We define the gold standard for each subfactor and then that's where the audit framework comes in. Because we need to create, like you said at the start, a repeatable way to understand where we are versus where we're trying to get to. And there's so many variables there. like there's a lot of things that we 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 or it would but it would have taken you like two weeks whereas now we've got tools like that Shopify assistant what's it called now I can't remember the name now basically the AI agent that lives in Shopify people are using that by the way that's really good.

18:39It's got so much better in the last few months when the implant had clawed 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 can use that. We're going through the process right now of warehousing a lot of our client data as well, which can be retrieved. There's tools like Triple Whale and Mobi 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.

19:11It's the ability to serve you insights at scale. So doing what you do across, like we've talked a lot about qualitative data insights in that way, like review mining, persona building, scraping Reddit, but it makes more sense. It's almost more common to do it from a raw data perspective. E-com brands are data businesses as well. It's literally just a data business. because you collect so much of it in every point of the customer journey. And it changes every day. You've got the quickest feedback loop ever. Yeah, 100%. That's why it's probably quite dopamine-inducing for a lot of media buyers. It's just like instantly seeing it.

19:49Yeah.

19:53So, yeah. So we've got the gold standard audit framework. And what this looks like, almost like probing questions that allow the growth strategist 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 giving asking you probing questions that allow you to get to the answer really quickly give you some examples of probing questions probing questions so one probing question could be what is the what is the what is the repeat rate on a certain skew or what is the first to second order what is the most common commonly purchased items together for example yeah 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 percent month on month yeah just from this one offer nugget and what that basically was was the 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 well 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 um this is often where the answer's like um shifting spend to that skew and pairing that skew with the AOV drivers that were um proving to already be paired together but done in an intentional 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 found through the creative research process and it trifecta of all coming together.

21:47Yeah. 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 data and going through this exercise. So how we trim that down is through ice. So impact, confidence and 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.

22:26And 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, where is the number one constraint? The binding constraint. 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 most 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 um for econ brands it's like is it it's a lot of time it's probably going to be creative for many for many it won't for some it won't be um but it's going a level deeper than that i think than just saying creative it's like is it volume is it hit rate is it persona diversity etc that's why the sub factors are so so important yeah and that's why i was saying at the start like we can we can recycle through sub factors we've just got to be quick to understand like how important an industry changes at a given point in time um i would i would suspect maybe a bold claim that the need for volume i think meta 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 their platform and how much how much cost is associated with that there must be doing something about that it either goes that way or it goes further towards the fact that you can make the perfect ad for everybody and the diversity continues to increase because your long tail of ads becomes more impactful over time it like closes the becomes more of like a normal distribution like 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 like you almost give it a persona and you give it like 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 um yeah let me so that we've gone through the audit process there we'll do that for every single every single pillar every single sub factor we've got a score we've got the opportunities and what helps us specifically on the distribution and creative pillars are Claude Skills.

25:08We're going to go deeper on this in the next episode. But the Claude Skills really do that lower leverage portion of extracting insights. An example there is ad identities. So ad 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 and 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 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 um but the audit process we've coined as the command center it's like a end-to-end operating system where every member of our client services team can jump in and work through this audit um for our clients this is something that can access we can see it all in front of them um i think that's everything on the process side have i missed anything there i don't think so i think um yeah it's just then distilling all of that information into that prioritization framework and then allocating resource against those constraints starting with the binding one first yeah i think it's definitely worth us going through so that's an overview of the process like i said we'll drop a little cheat sheet down below and if you want us to run the process for you please do get in touch quick question how many tabs do you have open right now to manage your business expenses there's your bank your expense tracker your ad account sub spreadsheet maybe even an AI companion to help you make sense of the chaos.

26:59If that sounds familiar, InCard has the solution. InCard 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, Xero, Meta, all in one view, all in one dashboard. You earn cash back on the things that you're actually spending money on think sass travel ad spend the exact costs that eat into your margin every month and brands like asio beauty and aloe paris are already using it to scale smarter so check out in cards through the link in the description below and back to the episode i guess again thinking about what can people watching take and implement for 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 like the key creative tactics that people are missing yeah I think I think from my side one and I'm going to do a master class on this because we've we've built a really strong detailed process on on how to create one of these for your brand I mentioned 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 um and realizing that too late and then needing like 60 days to fix that problem or getting into a rut where they're just not able to grow spend yeah yeah exactly exactly it's part of like that that So that is obviously a sub-factor that we look at when we go through the audit exercise.

28:51Something 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 that 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 Q4, 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.

29:18You're going to need a really good creative agency. Yeah. And it's not as easy as, there's 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 assets in an account like a portfolio. A portion of that portfolio every month is new and incremental. A portion of it fatigues completely. portion of it is on the decline on the way to fatigue so I think there's a whole episode in itself, a whole 20-30 minute masterclass which we'll put together in the next couple of weeks and how to do that with rigor and get to a really clear plan we've created a really nice Claude skill for that as well what's another one that we're seeing most common?

30:07definitely the persona side so gap analysis but going one step deeper so there's going to be so many different ways to get in front of a persona some one so you're going to have obviously i know lucas has just done an episode on this you've got my micro personas as well so it's not just like your four big personas but you go really deep on your micros as well and again we've got this claude skill that does gap analysis on that so it's looking at the buckets how much percentage of spend fits into each bucket you're creating the buckets with qualitative research so you're getting the market data and the customer data to build the personas then you're pairing you're comparing that to the live ad inventory and spotting the gaps and between the two right yeah exactly um another so one part of the offer pillar is actually looking at post-purchase data as well so what customers saying once they've actually ordered a product and you're able to back that into um your creative gap analysis as well because it might be a hidden persona there yeah so again this is why it's important to start with that offer pillar yeah um yeah time and time again time and time we see we see an obvious gap in persona but it's 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 yeah i recently saw behind the scenes of one of the fastest growing and biggest brands in dc currently and they were so over leveraged into one persona that they were running towards a cliff.

31:40And it was like, it was a map. It's like their frequency was just going on, just going like this. And it's like, it wasn't going to be a, it wasn't a constraint today, but it was very, it's very quickly going to become this constraint because it's, 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 going to be so many personas there that you can you can tie into that so persona I wouldn't class as diversity because you've got two forms of diversity persona but then obviously vehicle as well um things need to look visually yeah format vehicle things need to look visually diverse in an ad account and that's another so i'd say those three sub factors are always the ones that we see time and time again and one that one sub factor that people don't often think about is like concentration of spend and lifespan of asset yeah that's going to be typically determined by the persona i think it's often for those brands if you've not looked at that it's one of the it can be one of the biggest risks in the business 100 % if you've got like 80 % of your spend all ads 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 fatigues and you'll sometimes look in an account and 70-80 % of spend will be through two top spenders yeah and and again you're just running towards a cliff like your performance is going to fall off a cliff eventually.

33:26It's just a matter of when that happens. Yeah, really short lifespan. More good performing ads, longer lifespan, more headroom, less immediate resourcing required. So yeah, that's part of the core skill that people might get. That goes into concentration of lifespan as well. Yeah, would you add any more to creative?

33:50No, I think we'll touch on more in detail in the masterclass on creative. um creative forecasting and 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 identities like we've already said if you have a founder that is willing to get on camera pair that asset with the founders instagram if it's if it's if it looks good just to clarify on distribution we're talking about how we're allocating capital to get in front of people basically how and where how and where and we're going to focus a lot of this conversation on facebook but you could apply and 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 didn't add identities or 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 sub factors along with audience strategy is obviously some of your basics like are you who are you excluding who you're targeting etc but the biggest one that is the often the biggest opportunity is ad identities and 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 um i just thought i was going to say i think we went we went through on last episode we went through like some quick wins on ad inventory and i think there's 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 spend through partnership ads I think is like par for the course now, it's like you need to get there maybe more, maybe 50 maybe above 50, we're sort of like walking up spend across accounts and seeing it just massively outperform yeah that's a quick win you mentioned the exclusions, that's what I was going to say there's also a lot of this process where you say like the concept of like basic it's really important to rehash the basics frequently again I mentioned in the last episode that I'd say more than 60 % of the audits I do which I do quite a lot of them still haven't got exclusions set up properly or they haven't got like an email list that's syncing regularly into engaged and excluded and existing customers and it's therefore not training the algorithm it's also not removing retargeting spend and it doesn't give you auditions definitions properly etc yeah i think yeah that's what the that's where we've we've really gone down to basics with the distribution pillar it's like we've got account structure signals and tracking as well yeah it's like is your emq score high for the purchase conversion event have you got the capi connected luckily because the majority of businesses will work with their own shopify makes it a lot easier but we literally audit signals and tracking as well every time a brand on joins joins us on with us now even when you're looking at that is 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 % of their customers take more than 70 to seven days to purchase yeah and it's very hard at high aov sometimes to decrease that yeah um and therefore the signal in that account can be a lot weaker it's like how do we engineer another signal to support that yeah exactly one part of one part of signals is actually looking at that on a 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 um what was i going to say then um 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 it's 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 why you often see that rotation of ads where you might promote an ad into a scaling environment it's not going to get spent within the first two months but then suddenly it does but if you turn that off you're basically missing opportunity and that's feeds into concentration and lifespan as well because if you're making these quick decisions you're really sacrificing future performance.

39:03You're treating the ASC as like an entity rather than looking at it on an ad set level and I think Meta's getting certainly in the last 12 months but even the last six has got way better at sequential ad delivery based on the way you are in the customer journey. Sequence learning isn't it the product? You can see the impact of that how people will flow down a campaign how you were even when i use the platform you float you can see yourself flowing through a funnel and i'd assume that's all like that that that function or that release becoming more more impactful yeah so i see that a lot and again ai scrapes not just ad account data but the change history and it combines change 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.

39:59One brand that we audited recently, there was like, I think it was like 600 changes in one day and for that following week, the cack was just through the roof and it was mainly turning ads off. So crazy. That's what GMV Max's TikTok shop is as well. Every single time you turn, you change anything on GMV Max, it just ruins your performance. so like budget ROI target any buttons it's just like the more it's literally like less is more get it on set it on an ROI target and focus on the inputs yeah yeah that makes sense though this is why like media buying intuition is just like a thing yeah that's why you just can't automate media buying yet you can do it maybe 50 % but that's why I talk yeah people will ask often in like a sales process with us it'll be like so how are you like how are you like defining a winner and I'm like well we define it through like we create like a decision matrix on how we define a winner based on an AOV spend levels account averages but if you're in and you send something and it rips and you can 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 CPM under index on CPM and still hit the same CPM target and you just know that asset's going to take loads of spend.

41:24There's so many examples of that I think. So yeah that's a big one for distribution those three that we've mentioned there. I think optimization which we touched on again I'm really bullish on stripping out one day view for accounts right now. Ever since they changed mid-March attribution update I think just using engaged through seven day click plus engaged through or one day click plus engaged through if the account's right for that. I always see this as well. It's just, just makes 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?

42:06It'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, so it becomes cyclical. It's like a negative spiral of decreasing incrementality over time, 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 uh when you've defined audience segments how much is spend is going to that engage 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 another one to add into that actually which is probably a more recent piece is CPMR as well which we talk about a lot and the impact of just reviewing that on an asset campaign and ad level but yeah 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 ad to landing page congruence does the ad to lp match the messaging the visual style yeah like if you're again this is why this is why the conversion is is determining how how the size of the ceiling because you need to make sure that that is highly consistent um persona based lps come in here so if you've defined your macro personas.

43:42I don't think you need to do it on a micro level just because you can't control spend to that degree. You should definitely 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 age. 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 it's so low low effort high impact yeah the complexity is whether you need to some brands speaking to one yesterday where they've just been trying everything with this product and i just looked at it and i was like there's there's just there's a massive educational gap like it needs a step change needs a step page it's like um yeah pre-sale lander you get a bit more complexity when you start thinking about pre-sale landers but you can often generate signals that that's the right step.

44:43Say you've been your ad metrics are great and your conversion rate's just you're just not flowing through to conversion rate and you've been trying a lot of volume and your product has complexity like this product is a supplement that has it's like a really premium end of the market that kind of combines loads of others into a better version it's like it's perfect for like a seven nine reasons why page that just walk someone through like 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 listicle advertorial style yeah so opening it up with basically a like so positioning from like a doctor usually works really well it needs to be an authoritative figure if you've got a doctor that helps yeah solid glp guy we mentioned that in the last episode but yeah just gotta be careful with some identities but you can go you can go with most yeah and then going into a listicle that's a perfect example of add to lp congruence the answer isn't always in landing pages either just the basics are you sending to a product page if you're advertising a specific product yeah it's like why is my conversion rate so a lot is because you're sending so the other day as well yeah yeah 83 percent of someone's traffic was to a collection page they were sending selling products yeah and and then it's not always new pages 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 um people more people i think um younger is like vertical video yeah um buy buy now pay later like these these are the things that influence that that demo a little bit yeah and they 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 it's like if you've got an old demo and a younger demo just use Gemini to Nano Banana 2 to swap the person out to an older person I think I remember Dylan from Sierra Agency that now owns Heatmaps showed me a test result of like just bumping pixel size by two for older people just to improve conversion rate it's just so simple it's like again it's just looking at things from a lens of like first principles first principles and like outside the like stepping out of like being too close to a problem yeah just being like right these people probably find it harder to use this website maybe we should just make it easier it's like just just like i love stuff like that it's so simple yeah what you mentioned there though that falls into the landing page experience sub factor so we're looking at that as well and you basically define the gold standard there trust signals paired 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 for page 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 wearing different sizes with the 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 painful when you don't see that and you're trying to purchase something.

48:19It's like, I love this t-shirt, but I don't have a clue what size it is. Yeah, yeah. And then it's got measurements. It's like 13.6 inch groin. I'm like, what does that mean? Give over. So like stuff like that for fashion is, and returns because the returns are higher, really important. Whereas supplements, it's like benefits, social proof, the journey that someone's going to go on. Yeah, before and after. Third party testing or experts. and it differs by brand type, but 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.

49:00You'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 basically, we're building out a massive reference bank. So at any point you could look at 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 category specific. You touched on cart and checkout there, which is another sub-factor. That's the basics. Making sure that shipping's there, trust signals are there, you buy now, pay later, use of upsells in the checkout, super basic things.

49:38But eight times out of 10, 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 named shipping provider. Yeah, that's a good one. That's a good tactic. So simple. So rather than just being express shipping, you put like Royal Mail express shipping. Yeah. And even if you put like stuff like brackets recommended, just like that sort of stuff can increase uptake in paid shipping and increase contribution margin per order. 100%. And have a massive impact on your P &L. Another one people don't do as well is you can, so with some apps or you can custom dev it, is create logic based on what the dispatch time is in your checkout.

50:19So if you dispatch orders before 3 p.m., make sure that if it's before 3 p.m., using logic rules, you're saying that in your checkout. And if it goes out of 3 p.m., you're telling them you're either just removing it or saying it's going to ship the next day. I always see that as well. I also see all brands that offer full... Lots of brands offer complimentary free shipping as standard, but if you just add a paid shipping option that's faster oh yeah so many people will just self-select the paid shipping option because they want it quicker and you don't have to you can still offer the free shipping because it's there but some people just 10 of people just impatient yeah yeah um 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 because they love the brand it's like catering for them yeah um 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 going to tell you like most common purchase items together there's going to be like five different upsell paths you can do that you can do there if you've got a high skew 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 if 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 different flows also like the other the quick win there if you're not doing it already is just selling more of the same product or 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 3 months up front and pulling all the LTV into one order you're seeing IMA offering that on the front end now but it works really well if you just post purchase test it first yeah yeah another brand did that as well can't remember the name now that works really well for supplement brands you're going to have products that probably you can't sell to all for like an exact same hoodie for example an offer go on sorry I think those three are the biggest ones for conversion as well the other thing that we're looking at is CRO capability as well often underlooked but have you got the ability to move quickly when it comes to website adjustments can you produce landing pages can you change checkout etc so it's capability and education doing it in the right way as well I'm just a massive advocate of big swing CRO it's like we want to be trying to find 20-30 % changes in page performance like rebuilding full above the fold sections in a test rather than small tweaks I think the biggest one is like the destination LP destination start there before you start making like button changes

53:24perfect so offer back to the foundation this is like the number one I think foundational this makes everything else easy if it's great yeah um i would say so we touched on it already um 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 um blinds then there's going to be a different sell 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 want to make sure that you're at least testing if that's something that can be made work and you can so the second part of this as well is market positioning you're going to 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 um you're going to have products in your catalog that are like that go up and down from a market positioning standpoint combine unit economics retention and market positioning together and you've crafted using your own existing inventory a really good offer that's grounded in data and then the other two parts of that are how you architect that so can you value stack free gifts is such an easy one like if you're selling socks and you're a clothing brand chuck in some free socks do a bundle um so value stacking um aov 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 it through an 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 of selling of creating the offer around the marketing angle and persona go and work through this with a couple of brands and remove it it's always tempting to just discount discount discount it's like going more down the value route of perceived value how do we increase perceived value above their their their like pain threshold to make them transact on 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 um yeah we mentioned one earlier um a brand that's selling something for the household that solves like a very functional problem of overheating in summer.

56:26It's like angling it towards that rather than just selling the object itself. It's just, it's a much more emotional transaction, I think, when you do that, rather than just like buying bedsheets. Yeah. 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 and 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 um but yeah i think those are the main ones for for offer um yeah perfect yeah i think we've run through a lot there what juice i think um like we said at the start i think this is just uh this is 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 um i think when you get all of these things rolling 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 um i actually don't think i still think it's as easy as it's ever been to to accelerate growth for dc runs 100 % people just make it really complicated yeah yeah yeah um any go on 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 from the different people but if you don't have someone that's thinking about how to optimize offer knows where to look sub factors understanding data and how that translates to strategy.

58:15I think that's really important. Assign someone to each one of those pillars. Yeah, 100%. 100%. Well, yeah, thank you for running through that. I appreciate it. 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'd be great to get to get that if possible but we'll catch you on the next episode thank you