The ultimate guide to performance marketing | Timothy Davis (Shopify)

25:25Yeah, you gotta make sure you have that flywheel. And the flywheel is just people internally or some company agency that can make video ads for you. Correct, yep. Cool. I guess is there any advice there of just how to do that or what ads work well or anything there for someone else to do that? So yeah, the thing with YouTube is, I always say start with emotion. If you can have an emotional connection with the user, is gonna be way more impactful and way more powerful than anything else. And to take that further, when I say emotion, that I'm talking about comedy, I'm talking about, you know, happiness, it's not necessarily just, oh, we need an emotional connection with the brand.

26:09It is just making sure the user feels something after seeing your ad. Because then there are more times not going to remember it, which then they will take a favorable action after the fact. That is super interesting. One last question about platforms. Are there any other platforms you see working for people that are emerging maybe that people aren't thinking about Reddit or Snap or X or anything along those lines? When you say emerging channels, my brain kind of goes to connected TV, podcast, VR advertising, audio, voice search and even AI stuff right now. I can tell you podcast are doing really well for the people that I know are able to measure it correctly, right?

26:57Connected TV is also doing really well. You can take the, if you again, you're doing YouTube right now, being able to take that creative and repurpose it. But the VR stuff and the AI stuff, that is stuff that is, I would say, very emerging right now. Because to be completely transparent, I haven't experimented with those things yet. I kind of like letting other people be the guinea pig and learning from them. And then if someone comes to me and they're like, hey, we have budget for this. Let's go ahead and test it. Great. Let's go. Let's see what we can learn. Awesome. Podcast ads, I'm glad you suggested that.

27:38I'm a huge fan. Thank you. They're working really well for a lot of our sponsors. And I'm very biased. So you don't need to pay attention to me. But I also think there's a lot of opportunity there. OK, let's talk about when to start investing in performance marketing, flash paid growth. So say you're like a startup. Do you have any advice for when it's time to start signs of life test or even? And then also just when is the time to scale to go like, OK, let's go big on this. If you are a startup, typically whenever I consulted with them, it was, what are the goals? Where are we trying to achieve and win?

28:18Because if you're looking for something quick, paid needs to start even me, paid you to start it yesterday. Because SEO takes time. SEO, depending on the market you're getting into, if it's emerging, people may not even know your product exists. There was a product I was working on years ago that if you were traveling to a hotel and say, it was a romantic getaway with you and your partner, and you wanted the hotel suite or that room done up with like flower petals and champagne and stuff like that, they would do it for you. Well, they were working with someone before that was like, oh, we should totally be in paid search.

28:59And if you look at the keywords that they were doing, it was like booking hotel rooms. It's like, no, that's complete disconnect. They're like, yeah, but we're trying to build awareness. You don't want to build awareness through search. You build awareness through display, media base, type media. When we transitioned all of their money over at the time, and this will age me before meta was a thing, when we transitioned everything over to GTN, that's when the company started really reaping the rewards because we were building the awareness around the product. So it depends on how, what is the demand of your product and market.

29:38If you're doing something that is similar to another product and market, you could do competitor. I call it co -tail riding. Say you have, say Lenny, you and I create a product that is similar to Monday .com. We can go out there and just start bidding on Monday .com and say, see why Lenny and Tim are better than Monday .com and start getting some people in interested and maybe kick in the tires, starting free trials. But they also have other keywords that they can go after in market. But if you're going after something new like hotel room, flowers, and I forget what keywords you were bidding on for that because it was years ago, people weren't thinking of that.

30:22It wasn't something they were searching for. So it just really depends on when do you expect results? Because SEO can take time and be what is the demand in the market for your product. Some people use paid ads to drive early growth to bring customers to help them figure out what to build pre -product market fit growth. Is that something you recommend? Is that something you advise against? Is that strategy that you've seen work? Yeah, product market fit is a huge thing. We've run into some of this at Shopify and we definitely ran into this at IBM. So for the longest time, IBM is, we're a global company, we should be everywhere.

31:05But when we started looking at the data, it was, should we be everywhere? For example, Africa. We were in the whole continent. We weren't just in, say, South Africa or Egypt or something like that. And the more we dug into it, the more we realized the biggest issue wasn't necessarily that users weren't interested in our product and weren't able to, and weren't purchasing it. It was because we didn't have a product market fit, mainly from an operations standpoint. In Africa, there are multitudes of different types of currency. There's the frunk, there's the ran, there's the shell, and we were just, hey, USD, thank you.

31:44So of course they weren't converting, unless they were going out of their way to make a way to convert that. So when we took a step back and we said, okay, where do we want to start? It was South Africa, that's really where we were trying to get quote unquote stronghold in. So we had to make sure we had the brand available. Once we did that, we were, we started doing tremendously better, because then we had a product market fit. They had demand for our product and now we were able to serve them, meet them where they were. So essentially you're saying probably not smart to run a bunch of ads if it's not working.

32:25If you don't have something people actually want yet in that product, in that market. Right, okay. Or able to convert. It because conversion is going to end up being really low. No one actually cares about what you're doing. All you're going to do is really annoy the users because say in the future they are, hey, I'm still interested, but I don't want to use that product because I already tried. It's like, no, no, you can totally use it now. I already tried. It's, I had a bad experience with them. And some users will hold that, you know, you accountable to that one bad experience and I'm just never giving you my business.

32:56Interesting. So is that, is that generally your advice if you're startup, you're not feeling like you actually have product market fit yet? Should you even experiment with and do signs of life tests or should you hold off until it's like, okay, it's actually working. Let's go. From an operation standpoint, I always want to make sure those things are tied off. Yeah, it doesn't make sense to, again, if you have a, if you have a major budget and you're trying to get awareness into a market, great. Yeah, you can go after a market, but just know that it may, it's probably not going to convert very well.

33:28Got it. So I wouldn't recommend it. Okay, great. Awesome. Very, very clear answer. Let's talk about the mistakes that you see companies make when they're investing in performance marketing. So we got introduced through KC winners, illustrious former podcast guests, two time podcast guests and asked them about you. And he told me that when you take over for an agency at a company that you work with, you crush their performance within a month. I'm curious to what you see and find they are doing wrong that allows you to be such a hero when you come in and take over. I think agencies have playbooks.

34:05Now I've worked at agencies. I did consulting for a long period of time. It was never an approach I took. I looked at each account and each company as its own thing. But I think a lot of agencies just come in and they go, oh, this is like A, B and C company. And this is what we're doing. Copy, paste, done, move on. And they're also not willing to get deep, deep, deep into the weeds of stuff. I may get a little too far into data than some other people. For example, like I have Ops cadence that, you know, myself and my team follow. So within that Ops cadence, we have things like finance, performance, structure, keywords, ad copy, quality score, targeting, etc., and then within each of those, we have specifics.

34:56For example, the keyword subsection is keyword granularity, brand versus non -brand, search query reports, negative, so on, so forth. I feel like agencies don't necessarily get into all of those things every single month, where some of those were doing weekly, some of those were doing bi -weekly, and some of those were doing monthly. But they touch the things that they think they need to touch. They turn on automated bidding. They're doing their search query reports, and then they just kind of move on with their day, because they have 50 other clients they have to get to. Well, what about looking at your conversions?

35:36Where are we converting? Have we tested different landing pages? What is a better user experience that we can be getting users right now? It's a five -step process. Can get it to a three, partnering with PMMs to say, hey, here's something that I think could help improve our lead to conversion. Just stuff like that that they're too busy with too many other things to focus really, really deep into those. And typically whenever I manage the agency in the past and I consulted, I made sure that you weren't stretched then enough that you couldn't do those things, because I'm a firm believer in hiring smart people and then getting out of their way, but each week having one -on -ones with them, just spot checking things, just saying, hey, I looked at this.

36:28This doesn't look right. What's going on there? Oh, yeah, I do that on this day. Okay, great. Just making sure you're covered. Because sometimes people won't scream, Uncle, when they should be screaming, Uncle, because I think it's a sign of weakness. But let me know when you're overwhelmed. Maybe I have a solution for you. Maybe there's a way I can coach you to be better at something, or we just need to hire more resources because the client portfolio you have is five. And when we took them on, they were all at 100K, but now they're all spending two million plus. We need to offload some of that from you, because you're doing such a good job that you've scaled them up.

37:04Let's give you three clients, instead of five and hire someone to take those two. So it sounds like you basically, they just don't have the time to care and spend on all the things that they need to be doing. And when you've held companies, you actually go deep and you don't have a lot of, you have the time to do it well. I guess when someone's trying to find an agency or someone like you, I know you don't do this much anymore, any advice for just like how to know if they're gonna be great? Is it just like agencies in general, probably not a good choice? Is it hiring hire someone in -house? I guess what advice do you have for people that are like, oh man, I wanna avoid this.

37:43Agencies are a good place to get things started, even when I was consulting, I would honestly, I'm a big believer in forward thinking, backwards planning. So if I'm taking this contract on with this new client, it's what's the end goal for you? If your end goal is to have this at, you know, a performant $100 million spend, there's no way one person can do that. So let's create mild zones along the way of making sure we're checking in and saying, when is the right time to hire, whether that's a data scientist, whether that's a creative person in -house or replacing me whole time? There's no reason that you should be holding a company back if anything, you should be helping them get to that milestone.

38:32And I think that's why I've been able to do so well for myself because I show that, hey, I have the best interest for you and your company, as opposed to how much money can I squeeze from you by holding on to you as a client? I would say agency consultant is a good way to start because if you as a business owner, you shouldn't have to log in, I've logged into Google in like three weeks to look at stuff because I'm doing payroll, I'm doing HR stuff and I'm meeting with clients and I'm doing sales. Start there, get it to a good place, create that milestone of, hey, when we're spending 50K a month, I need to hire somebody full time to take this over and just have that conversation with your agency and your consultant.

39:18I think more times than not, you will have a positive reaction to that, but if you don't, I would say that's a major red flag and probably someone you should be partnering with. Awesome, okay, so your advice is to get started on paid growth, find an agency or like a small shop consultant type person to get you started, have a conversation and when we reach a certain scale, we're gonna hire someone internally to run this for us and then potentially they'll keep working with you, potentially they'll start things on the run. Or is that, or is it, is the assumption they'll start working with you? They'll become the owner of this thing or is it like we may transition you out?

39:51That's a really good point actually. So there have been times where clients like, hey, we've reached our milestone, I wanna bring someone in, that person comes in and say they're an expert in social media. Like, hey, I still want you to execute on Google and Bing because that is just not my daily wick. I'll take over the social stuff, but we do need to talk about your fee, maybe it doesn't need to go down. Completely acceptable. Let's have that discussion, make sure we are both aligned to what that should be. But yeah, there have been times where they're like, hey, we've reached our milestone, we gotta bring someone on, but that person that they bring on is like, actually, I see expansion in this direction, but I can't do this.

40:31Are you willing to stay on help me with this? Great, if not, I'll just have to find someone else who can. I wanna talk about the team that used build over time, but later, but specifically for this first person that you hire, what sort of person is this person? Is it like a data person? Is it a person that's just done specific forance marketing on channel? Or what do you look for ideally? I'm a big believer in that there was a book written by Nate Silver called The Signal and the Noise, are you familiar with it? No. So Nate Silver is the guy who created it. Five, three, seven, yeah. And in the book, he basically, I'm using the word art.

41:19I'm using the word art. Detailed the art of like probability, statistics, and applying them to like real world circumstances. It included case studies with baseball, which of course I loved, elections, climate change, poker, stuff like that. And the, I like that book, it's kind of dense, but the thing I liked the most about it was the title, and just changing the title ever so slightly to signal not noise. So typically whenever I hire people, I want to hire smart people and kind of get out of their way, but the biggest thing I want to focus on is, what is your thought process when it comes to data?

42:04Because I can teach anyone how to do Google ads. I can teach anyone how to do meta ads. That is not the hard part. It is the data part, that is the hard part. Because there is so much noise going on in those accounts, they give you everything, which is great. It's great that they give you all this information, but you can have someone that's, oh, but look at the reach, look at the frequency, look at the CPMs, look at the CPC, look at the conversion rate, look at the cost per lead, look at the cost per mql, look at this, hold on. That's a lot of noise you just said. So let's, what is the signal and what is the noise?

42:41And let's make sure we're focusing on the right signal versus the right noise, and that has to be a data person because there's a lot of data in these platforms. This episode is brought to you by Epo. Epo is a next generation AB testing and feature management platform, built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp and DraftKings rely on Epo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features. An Epo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does.

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43:59Check out Epo at getepo .com slash Lenny and 10X your experiment velocity. That's getepo .com slash Lenny. Everyone I talk to that's worked with you is just like Timothy is incredible at working with tons of data and finding the things that matter. Someone told me that it actually comes from your love of baseball that you just go crazy with stats and spreadsheets of baseball, games and players and things like that. Is there something there that you could share that is interesting? Yeah, so I played baseball my whole life, but when you blow out your arm and you're as fast as a seater, it's not very conducive for you to continue chasing that dream.

44:43But the one thing I always liked was the stats. Even as a kid when I would watch baseball games on TV, it's like, what's the sky batting? How often is he getting on base? How many RBI is like, oh, this guy, it's terrible average but he has a lot of RBI. So that means if there's a runner on base, he may not get a hit but he's going to get that guy in. So you want to make sure you put him in the right spot in the batting order, so on and so forth. I could talk about that for hours. But again, that could be another thing where there's a lot of data available, which one should you focus on? And ultimately, what is the optimization you're going to make to the lineup or to the where you place fielders on the field to ensure that we're doing the right thing and becoming as efficient and effective as possible?

45:33As far as dealing with all that data, that is just, I would say a skill I've learned over time. Early in my career, whenever someone was like, oh, we have this new project, who wants to work on it? I'll do it. I was always just eager, like a sponge. I just wanted to get in as much stuff as possible. I did SEO for a portion of my career. I did email marketing. I did affiliates. And then eventually, I remember the first time I saw paid because again, I was doing like SEO where it's like, yeah, we're going to do this and we think it's going to work. But we won't know for about six months. Someone showed me the paid platform and was like, wait, you know this is the key word you're betting on.

46:17This is how many times the ad was shown. How many people clicked on it? How many? Wow, this is amazing. I need to get more into this. And that's just kind of where it started. And when I usually hire people and we go through the interview process, I make sure that there can be data focused. Really, it's just ensuring that we're focusing on that signal and not the noise. And one of the interview questions I usually ask is, like I throw a bunch of data points at them and then say, out of all that, what would you do to optimize the account? And more times than not, they're just overwhelmed. But the people that I like are like, well, what was the purpose of the campaign?

47:02Purpose of the campaign is to drive conversions. Okay, well, I would focus here. You like focus on how many clicks we're getting and how many conversions are we targeting the right people? Because who cares about how many impressions you're getting, who cares about the reach, who cares about the frequency? If the goal of the campaign is to get conversions, that's what we should be doing. If it was awareness, it's how many people saw it. If it was consideration, how many people were reading into the funnel and are considering us as from a white paper download or demo as the product solution that they're looking for.

47:34That's a great segue to the next question I wanted to ask you, which is just metrics that you love to focus on pay attention to when you're helping people with pin ads. Like a lot of people think about CAC. A lot of people think about returning an ad spend, LTB to CAC. I know it really depends on the goals, as you said. But I guess is there anything that you find is like, just forget these metrics. These are kind of the bucket that you focus on most. Yeah, so for those metrics, I would say I really hope you have a great finance partner. Shout out to Courtney and Nick, that fantastic finance partners I have at Shopify, well, Nick's not there anymore.

48:16Sad cry emoji, but Courtney, we're able to collaborate on those things, understand this is the investment we're putting in, this is the expected return, this is the CAC that we can basically put a guard rail on, you have to be with them. So hopefully you have a really strong financial partner, you can use for those. But as far as the stuff that I focus on, there are things that whenever we're looking at accounts, we'll kind of hyper focus on. For example, Google will give you information about what is going on with your ad copy and how to ultimately show as often as possible. What I'm showing here is a visual of brand versus non -brand when it comes to expected click -through rate, landing page experience and ad relevance.

49:08The reason I like building reports like this is because it will kind of show you where your hole in the ship is. If you look on the left side, expected click -through rate, 75 % above average, landing page experience, 84 % above average, then you get down to ad relevance. Lot more colors than there are green, only 35 % above average. So for your brand ad copy, the clear direction you have from the data that's available to you is jump into the account and make it more relevant. That will improve your ad strength and once you improve your ad strength, that will improve your quality score. And more times, I think it's 12 % increase in the number of impressions you can get if you increase from a below average to an above average for the data that's available here.

50:06And then on the non -brand side, clear expected click -through rate, you really need to be working on. And that data is also available here that you can kind of see, I put in red, the one for brand, your quality score being at a nine, but your average CPC is $8. That is very interesting because it should be the lower your CPC is, I mean, the higher your CPC is, the lower your CPC should be. So that is an investigation that's like, hey, here's a signal, let's go do a deep dive. So there's further reports that you could look at. Looking at the ad strength again, average, excellent, good or poor.

50:49You can see clearly on the non -brand side, doing really well. They're doing really well here. Most of their ads, 46 of their ads are excellent and a bulk of their spend is going there. But if we look on the brand side, you have one ad, one ad that you could go in and just click pause on, that is a poor. And look at that CPC, $7. So just turning that ad off by itself, not only will, I'm a firm believer in that there's an account level quality score, not just necessarily a keyword or an ad quality score. So just turning this one off and removing it from the account, this one ad could dramatically improve your performance.

51:41And then Google actually tells you what you need to do to increase those strength things. So this report is ultimately powered by this one. So for your ad strength improvements, they'll tell you, try adding a few more unique headlines or unpainting some of the ads as, try including more keywords in your descriptions or your headlines. So they're actually giving you this information, but more times than not, I just feel like people are just missing this and just not taking action on it. So definitely some stuff available within the account that will help you focus on that signal versus the noise that you could be just getting from the clicks, the impressions and all those things that are available to you.

52:24That was amazing for folks not watching and YouTube, you pulled up actual reports from I think ImaginePass clients, is that what the data was from? Okay, so actual reports from pass clients of how you evaluate, and this is Google ads, basically, Google ads data. Incredible, okay. And so within those reports, you had poor, excellent. How do you determine when something is going great? Is that something you set, like if it's above this threshold, is that a benchmark you have or is that Google telling you? This was poor, this. Yeah, so that's Google telling you. Okay. There's sometimes where you will work really, really hard to take that poor to an average, that average to an excellent.

53:06And there's just not a whole lot you can do sometimes. It kinda is what it is, but I would argue more times than not, people are not doing those things to improve their ad string. So just if you have the change history available in every account in Meta and Google, if people are doing the test to try and improve and get better, great, you have the right people working, but if not, that's a clear indication that there's definitely room for improvement. Something that someone asked on Twitter is for benchmarks around any of the stuff. Like how do you know when your CPC is good? I guess you just look at, do you look at like Google telling you, it's excellent for a sport?

53:50How do you know if your conversion rate is good? How do you know if your CAC is good? Yeah, every industry and every company is gonna be different. Healthcare, lawyers, those are some of the highest cost and average CPCs I've seen. If I was to compare that industry, say to a B2B industry, it would not be very good at all. Honestly, what I would tell the user to do, every single platform has partners available. More times and not, they're kind of like sales people. I actually really like the partners that we have at Shopify because that do feel that they are partners. Shout out to friends at Cisco at Google and Sammy and Alana and Meta and Nick and Sam and Brian at LinkedIn.

54:39In case they all hear this, but I think they're really great partners and they will give you that information. They will actually say, if you give me the five people you consider to be your top competitors, I will tell you if you are above or below a certain threshold. Now they can't tell you CAC because they would have to have transparency into like conversions, but click -through rate, conversion rate, cost per click, things like that, they will give you that information because they will anonymize it. So you won't know who is who, like if you say, my competitor is Monday .com, they won't say Monday .com has a click -through rate of 5%.

55:18They won't tell you that, but they will tell you of the competitors you gave us. And we added three more in just to say, hey, we found some people and also to where, if you only give them two, you can be like, oh, it's one or the other. They'll give you that information because they want you to succeed because if you succeed, you spend more money on their platform. So if you find out your average CPC is really high, take the actions that are in the account that tell you what you can do to lower it. But if you find out that you have a lower CPC, you're like, oh, great, I thought that was worse.

55:49And then you can communicate that internally to your team and say, hey, our average CPC is amazing high. But in reality, we got with our partners and we are on par with the industry. Got it. So the advice is, don't seek generic benchmarks for any of these metrics. You can talk to your rep at Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, et cetera, and they'll give you essentially the number of years. Great summary, yes. Amazing. Okay, back going back to the report, you just showed, is that a report you developed custom that gives you, like, here's the most important stuff to pay attention to, or is it basically an export from Google ad manager?

56:25And so these are all exports. So this is just the visualization of the data that's available. So this all data is available in every account. This is the data available in the account. This is data available in the account. Now I'm saying that there are more reports that we get into, like, impression, share, and frequency. This is something I tend to look at that not a lot of other people do. It's not about showing as often as possible because that's what impression share tells you. And that's kind of like ego marketing. I want to be number one. I want to be there all the time. It's about showing to the right person as often as possible.

57:06Instead of thinking about being on top of the page, you should think about serving the right user, which can be measured with our click share. And then Google will put us on top of the page, which we can see through our top impression share. That's what this whole visualization is here for, where I feel like a lot of people don't do this type of visualization. And this can be done by leveraging all the user data available in Google, such as demographics, locations, if any audiences, in market audiences, testing different bid strategies and more. So the data is readily available, but it's just making the visualization a little bit more digestible.

57:48And the reason that I actually have two here to show is because this is an example of when I was working on an account back in 2023, where we started making some changes. And you can see that clearly our impression share, I would say was baseline. It didn't really change too much, but look at our click share going up. Because now again, we're talking more to the right people, not necessarily just everyone, generic people, versus this campaign that was, this was the test, and this was the control. And you can clearly see that we were talking with a lot of people, but no one cared about what we were talking about.

58:28So this was an easy test to call and just say this one's performing a lot better. And then, you know, verifying the other metrics still look good conversion rate, number of conversions, stuff like that. This one was the clear winner, so we went in this direction. This is super cool. I love that you're showing this. And again, plug for YouTube to actually see the charts you're talking about. I see one of our slides on this deck. I'm curious what's there. Yeah, so this one, I'm hoping you have show notes that we can give a shout out to somebody. So yep, there's a website called PPC Hero. What I usually tell people is terrible name, great content.

59:03The actual website used to be a little bit more cartoonish with like superheroes on it, but now it's, you know, they've refined it. But the writer there, his name's Jacob Brown. This is what he calls the true competition metric. And again, this is why I highly recommend we give people the link to the article because this does get a little dense. So what he does is that he creates four new metrics with the auction insights that are available. And two of those metrics are position above rate when we show an amount of times they show and we don't added together. And it will show how often a competitor ranks above you in all auctions you are available for.

59:50Using this type of lens is an effective way to identify genuine threats. Not that just this data can be used again, comprehensive insights like determining your position and impression share. But by creating a baseline that you can see how this data changes over time through different bid strategies, keyword and copy optimizations and more. This is a very, very powerful one because I do know a lot of people are always concerned about what are my competitors doing, how are they doing it, why are they doing it and with all the smart bidding currently available, you know, back in, back in my day, you know, we were, it was all manual bid.

1:00:29So you could change the bid ever so slightly and then be like, oh, now my competitor is showing above me and this is even before Google gave us auction insights data. This is now available to us in the platform. Tell using this report will actually identify a true threat as opposed to making an assumption based on personalization that maybe you're seeing when you Google a keyword or using a tool like Sem Rush that ultimately is saying, oh, this person's appearing above you. Well, let's run this report and see if it's a genuine threat as opposed to just maybe ego marketing going on. Super cool.

1:01:10And this comes from PPC Hero is what you're saying. Cool. Well, definitely like to that. There are other tools or workflows that you find really helpful in analyzing this endless amount of data. Please audience, if you are using AI in this way, let me know because a lot of the stuff I do is can be a little manual and can be a little time consuming. If they found ways to automate through AI that does that where I can provide the information that isn't sensitive, that they will make it a lot cleaner and a lot more digestible, let me know. But a lot of the things I have templates that you can load the data into and it will just automatically give you the result from it.

1:02:00But yeah, it's right right now it is a little manual but if there's a way to automate this through AI please use or contact me on LinkedIn and let me know. Sounds like a startup opportunity right there. Yeah. Sweet. Okay, let's move in a slightly different direction. Attribution. What a sexy, exciting topic. So attribution, basically it's how do you assign credit to a channel and to a campaign so that you know where growth is coming from, it's working. What's the state of attribution today? What do you find is helpful? How do people do attribution well in today's world? Yeah, I'm a big believer and proponent and multi -touch.

1:02:41I fall into the camp a more time decay. Historically the research I've done, users tend to forget very quickly where they first challenge your brand. Yes, you should get credit because this is the first time they saw your brand or the first time they interacted with it. For sure, let's give you some credit for that but definitely not the reason that they ultimately converted. Linear spine as well but you know, overall I do think, you know, attribution by itself is biased. It does not answer the question of whether the person clicking on or seeing an ad would have converted anyways. Even in the absence of that ad.

1:03:24This is why numerous companies like Netflix and eBay have done studies to get an understanding of the incrementality of paid advertising campaigns whether that's conducting GOX or conversion lift test and important slices of the marketing channel. I know eBay was very popular when they did that experiment. I think it was like 2012 but and I'll have a link for you for that as well where they ultimately decided to cut almost all of their brand spend because they found that users were already going to find them through organic anyway. So they were just kind of throwing money out the window and it was really hard for competitors to get their ads at the top of the page because their quality scores were so low.

1:04:07Okay, so multi -touch is the way you like to think about it. Basically give credits to all of the channels that you detected the user saw your ad on and less credit if it was further back in time. Right. And then in terms of tooling, is there tools you love? Is it stuff you build in house? Generally how do people go about doing this sort of stuff? Yeah, I don't know if I want to say I have been fortunate or not but most of the companies I've worked with like the big companies of the world, the Pinterest, the Shopify's, the IBM's of the world tend to build things in house. So from a third party tool, unfortunately I don't have a whole lot of go -to's for that.

1:04:48So again, either that's a, I've been fortunate or I've been sheltered. And then are there tools that you see people use or is it just like really nothing amazing out there? Yeah, none that I've seen that's like, oh wow, that's amazing. I will always say make sure you're trying to leverage the in platform tools because the biggest thing with performance marketing is the signal you're sending the platform because if you are telling the platform, oh, I want to get more of the users that are doing this action, it's going to do a really good job of giving you that. But if that action doesn't equal business results, you're not helping yourself at the end of the day.

1:05:33You're giving it again, a lot of noise instead of the right signal. So try and leverage the in platform tools or if there is a tool you're using, make sure it does allow third party integration through the Google Meta TikToks of the world. Then let's talk about incrementality. You mentioned this idea of how do you know if the money you spent led to incremental growth that wouldn't have happened if you didn't run that ad. Is there any advice there anything you've seen about just like how to think about incrementality correctly and not just give yourself all this credit for stuff that would have happened anyway?

1:06:08Yeah, I mean, there are many ways to judge the effectiveness of growth overall. Like some of the stuff we talked about before, brand metrics, awareness, recall things along those lines. There also, I know some companies look at like, leading indicators, like visits and clicks or tribute which of the efforts are linked to or perceived drivers of actions like leads, conversions of prospect, prospect to scale. But really the results should be coming from either that geo, X or geo experiment or conversion lift. The results of those experiments should ultimately fuel the plans for what we call IAF, incrementality adjusted factor and will allow you to be more precise and how efficient each channel is.

1:07:02Ideally by region, sometimes you just have a holistic of like this is how meta is, this is how YouTube is. But if you don't have it by region, don't fret, it's fine, just have it by platform. And kind of like what does that look in practice? When you're running a conversion lift test, you intentionally do not show your ad to some users when you win an auction and instead Google shows the next bitters ad. This is your control group and adds up to some opportunity cost that is estimated in terms of impression share percentage as well as spend holdback. Spend holdback is like how much money you will not spend because of this test.

1:07:41And all of the platforms are willing to partner with you on this because Facebook knows this, LinkedIn knows this, all of them know that they are very visually based creative assets that are not getting as much credit as they deserve. So if you go to any of them, you say you don't have a dedicated rep, you can call. And if you ask for this more times than not, they are willing to partner with you. And saying that if you're not spending enough, they probably will not help you with this because there are certain spend thresholds you do need to meet. But I would say at least start there. And also if you're not spending more than, I would say 50 K a month in the platform doing this is going to be a lot more work than you're going to get result from.

1:08:34You're just not going to have enough signal there. So basically don't worry about running Cram mentality tests when you're just, when you're starting out. Got it. And so basically to understand actual and mentality, every platform has a way for you to actually test it on the platform and the team there can help you run it. Yep. Awesome. OK, let's go back to talking about team structure and how to kind of build your own formats marketing team. So we talked about the first person that you hire and the advice there was someone that's very, understands how to find signal in noise. So there's that one person and your advice there was maybe around like 50 K.

1:09:10Was that like an actual threshold they usually recommend or is that just like an example? Every business is slightly different. I mean, if they're well funded, 50 K may not, the threshold may be higher. But yeah, everyone's different. 50 K maybe, like if somebody said, if you were just say, hey, give me a number, I would say 50 K to start having those conversations. Because if you're at 50 K, say for the month of June, great. It's going to take us three months to hire someone anyway. So at least start the conversations now. Awesome. OK. What do like the first three to five hires look like generally that you recommend for scaling internally for its marketing?

1:09:48So the first thing, like we said, someone data driven that can get into the platforms, the next is going to be creative. Because I need those two now working hand in hand, making sure the creative is matching the tone and also the performance that we're trying to achieve as a business. And then third would be a dedicated data scientist, a fully dedicated person. Because they can help you with things like the incrementality testing. They can help create reports that will ultimately make everyone's lives better. They will be able to build analyses that you will not, as a generalist, will not be able to do yourself.

1:10:34There's a saying of like, I'm not a data scientist, but I like to tell you one online. Because what they do, they ultimately make us look really good. Because we're ultimately the ones reporting on the performance of it. But they were the ones that helped build that environment and build all those things for us to succeed. In terms of the creative person, is that like a graphic designer, is it like a marketing person, what's like the actual skill set there? It would be more graphic design slash branding. The reason for that is because if you have a good marketing mix, you're gonna have, if we keep it to a three -step funnel of awareness consideration purchase, you're going to need to build some brand equity in a specific direction.

1:11:22You're going to need to make sure you're communicating value, which now you're not being as creative, you are being more directional. And then ultimately the purchase is like, hey, click here, convert now. So you do want to give them the ability to still be creative. Hey, I hired you because you have a good creative eye and you're good at what you do. But now we need to focus on getting that person to convert. So give them a little free reign to be creative, but then you also need them to be able to execute against that creative. You need to get those uses to convert. And they're also writing the copy, I imagine, for like the Google ads.

1:11:59I usually say that should be collaborative. The performance marketer should be able to write most of the ads. But I can't tell you how many times in my career where I've written an ad, and I'm like, this is the greatest ad ever written known to man. People will write stories about this ad. It is amazing. And it flops. Because I'm not the target audience more times than not. So I think it should be collaborative and no idea should be left on the cutting room floor because perfect example, I was working with ADT, the security company. We wrote the most perfect ad when Google ads only allowed a headline and two descriptions of 35 and 35.

1:12:44We got every single value prop in there, somehow it was amazing. And the ad that it was going against was $0, set up fee, $0, $0, insolfe. That ad won. It was like, that is, no, how did that, it barely uses any of the characters. And it almost tells you, I mean, tells you almost nothing, but it won. Had more conversions, a higher click -through rate. So we took that and we applied that with the value props and it did better. So it should never be like, unless the ideas don't buy our product, which hopefully someone is not writing that on copy, it shouldn't be left on the cutting room floor. Always tested, always be willing to learn what works, what doesn't.

1:13:34For this first hire, what's the title of this person usually in your experience? Lately, it's been growth marketing, specialist growth marketing manager, because they're going to wear multiple hats. You know, like at any startup that you're at, you're going to be asked one day to, hey, I want you to do performance ads. And then tomorrow, it's like, hey, I need you to help me build out this spreadsheet for a spec sheet that you have no idea what you're doing. So you're always going to wear multiple hats, so just having a general title like that to start out with. And then if that person matures into a role, you can make them more of a specialist.

1:14:13Or if they start showing signs of like, hey, I really like doing the social stuff. And we've scaled enough, okay, let me hire a paid search person. So yeah, I always start with a general. And then as the team grows, we get more misspecialties. So like growth marketing person. It's kind of like the broad brella. And then are these people sitting in Google ad manager and meta ads and just like running ads manually? I'm a firm believer at shop if I would call a GSD getting shit done. I'm a firm believer in getting shit done. You should be in the account, like I mentioned earlier, with that Ops cadence, we have stuff we need to be doing weekly, biweekly, monthly.

1:14:53The bigger the company gets the 10, you wind up in more and more meetings, talking about the things you want to do and how you're going to do it and stuff like that. But keeping those people kind of sheltered away from that and focused on those things, are going to drive the best results for you. You possibly can get. And that means hands on keyboards in the ads manager tweaking things, setting up a calendar. I'm a firm believer in setting up a calendar. We did this test. We started this test on this day. That means this test will end on a month from now. Put a notification. So you have a cool down period and you report out to the org what you did, how you did it, why you did it.

1:15:31And then the results from it. And then all right, what we learned from this is this. And we will be applying that to our next test. And this is how. So yeah, hands on keyboards, doing all of those things. So again, hiring those smart people and just getting out of their way. I love that. In terms of how this team grows, you mentioned when we were chatting that you wait for someone to cry uncle to hire more and to add to the team to kind of avoid bloat. Talk about that. You know, unfortunately, we've seen a lot in the news lately with a lot of tech companies. And we've seen a lot of these companies.

1:16:07Letting go of some really talented people. And that is I feel like just created bloated organizations. We every month. My current manager, Dean created this calculator that we look at that says, how much time are you spending in meetings? If you have any PTO coming up with that in there, optimizations reporting stuff like that to basically add up to. How many days are in the quarter? Because you know, every quarter, well, not every quarter, but most quarters you'll have like vacation or you'll have. Say what we call a Shopify burst, where it's we meet in real in real life to, you know, get you done in real life as opposed to remotely, you know, put all that in there and then what is the number equate to?

1:16:53Oh, we're in the red right now for these, you know, two to five people. How many quarters hasn't been that way? Okay, it's only this quarter. This quarter we have a Sunday coming up or we have a burst coming up or. We have a lot of travel because we're meeting with partners so on so forth. So maybe this is an isolated thing. Let's go ahead and wait till next quarter. All right, next quarter, it's red again. All right, now maybe we need to start having the conversation of. What this new hire will take over what they will be responsible for. And how much work they'll be taking on and doing to replace some of this red.

1:17:30That is going on and if it equates to a full head, great. We can move forward. We've made our business case. But sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes we're just red. And we need to do a better job of making sure hey, we need to step out of these meetings. These meetings are sucking out our time and we don't need to be a part of it. Or this launch, we don't need to be a part of. We just need to be consulted on it. We don't need to be in every single meeting every single time or every single communication. So just making sure we're looking at the right things before we decide to hire someone and making sure that we have stuff for them to do.

1:18:05And red means they have more work. Yeah, more days and there are in the in the quarter. And so they basically estimate here's how much how many days I need to do the things I've committed to for the quarter. And then it's like how many actual days do you have this quarter? Yep. That is super cool. And so step one is, okay, if you're in the red, let's cut some stuff. And then if they're still in the red and you've got stuff, then, okay, we need to start hiring. Yep, that is very cool. Is that just a, is that a shop if I think or is that something you do at your team? I've done stuff like that at other companies before, but kind of bringing it forward again.

1:18:42I don't want to take the credit for it. Dean was kind of the one that brought it back up and was like, oh, yeah, I used to do this. I don't know why would I stop doing it. So it's definitely something I've used at other companies for sure. That is super cool. You mentioned this ops cadence. Is that something you can describe just like what this cadence looks like of how you run? Yeah. So I love me a spreadsheet. So it's just a spreadsheet. And visually, I'll do my best to describe it. Let's say column A has those buckets. I was talking about like a finance, performance, structure, keyword, so on and so forth.

1:19:14And then within those buckets, or let's call those, everyone loves rocks and pebbles right now. Right. So that's your big rock, your big rock is keywords. Then within that, you have pebbles, keyword granularity, brand versus non -brand search query reports, negatives, so on, so forth. And then within that, we say, how often we're doing it? Are we doing it weekly by weekly monthly? And then that allows us to, if anyone in the organization is like, hey, how often are you guys updating on copy? Easy answer. How often are you guys doing search query reports? Easy answer. And it allows us to make sure we hold ourselves accountable to those things, because a lot of times we have a lot we're doing.

1:19:57We're working in Google. We're working in meta. We're working in YouTube. You could easily forget, oh, I didn't do that. Ah, I got to make sure I do that again. So it holds you, it's a way to hold yourself accountable, but it's also a way for me as a manager to go in and kind of spot check that and make sure. That they're doing the things that they that need to be done in the account. The core of this essentially, there's a spreadsheet that everyone aligns on of here is how when and how often we do certain activity to operate this performance marketing machine that you built. Yep. Awesome. And it's both internally so that everyone knows.

1:20:33And then also when people ask, what are you going to do this? So okay, here, here's the date. Yeah. Yeah. So like if a cross functional team or partner wants to know, easy answer. We got it for you right here. Here's a whole lot of cadence. So it was a team, something else folks told me about you is that you're very hardcore about training new people that you hire. What does that mean? People mean by that. Yeah, there's a book called, I think it's the first 90 days and in it, it actually has a graph that shows when the person starts having impact and how many days it's been. And more times than not, it takes about, you know, we've all heard it 90 days for someone to have impact.

1:21:14I want to try and make that, you know, 45 days if not 30. Most of the time it has to do with learning the culture, learning the people, understanding. Yes, you've done paid before at this other job, but this is how we do it here. That's where the ups cadence really comes in handy. It's like, here's how often we do it here. I understand maybe you did it monthly there, but we do it here by weekly. I understand you used to do it by weekly. We do it weekly. And this is how. And also giving them responsibility early on for something. For example, cat on my team was higher than eightish months ago. She was thrown into the fire very quickly.

1:22:03She was like, hey, we have this campaign coming up called additions. Here's everything we did last additions. This is the results. These are your responsibilities. These are the expectations. Go go for think conquer as you come along. There may be something that doesn't make sense. I'm here by all means, ask questions. But what I've noticed is twofold one, when you're clear in what is expected of them, like you are expected to do this when. And you already know how to do it. Great. Or. And or also in like one on one. I'll just open up the account and say, hey, this is how I do it. Let me show you the way I'm doing it and how quick it is for me.

1:22:48And you can learn even though we're remote. I'm showing you as if you're sitting right over my shoulder or were face to face. This is how I do it. So if you're doing something different, maybe, you know, one plus one is two, three minus one is two. And that's fine. We both got to the same answer. But if you're doing like nine times five minus two times 12 divided by 15. No, we can simplify this. So making sure that they're efficient and effective with their time, they're focusing on that signal versus that noise. And giving them responsibility early on to really take ownership of something. You can see that people are a lot more quicker to pick up things and start getting that flywheel going of, hey, I want to have impact as soon as possible versus.

1:23:38Oh, hey, go read this handbook week one week two. Let me introduce you to the team week three. It's like slower rolling that we can speed this up guys. We can get people up to speed and making impact a lot sooner. And also don't expect them to be perfect. You can't expect people to be perfect right out the out the gate. I can't remember every little thing I need to tell you. So, and there may be things I can learn from you. I can't tell you how many times I'm still learning from people, you know, around me. It's like, oh, that's great. I didn't even think of that or I haven't tried that. I should totally do that.

1:24:18So just know that they're not going to be perfect out of the gate, but giving them clear direction and expectations will get them where they need to be. I could see why your team is so effective and so successful. This all makes a lot of sense. You mind if I do a rapid fire set of questions that people asked on Twitter about very specific stuff. Yeah, by all means. Okay, ATT. There was like a huge change to the way cookies and attribution and tracking worked online. And it felt like paid ads kind of like, oh shit, it's not going to work anymore. It's over Facebook is dead. Clearly, that hasn't happened at this point.

1:24:55Just what is the impact that ATG has had on paid ads and from its marketing? We were just talking about this the other day because we have full transparency. We have people fully dedicated to mobile on the team. And I had reached out to Sasha who's on the team said, hey, what are we doing with ATT? What are we doing scan? All those things because has any of our tactics really changed because of say low opt -in rates. And kind of the direct question, I mean to direct the answer I got from her was as long as we can use scan to provide attribution and measurement for iOS. We're fine. It's like, okay, that's very straightforward.

1:25:45I appreciate it. So as long as you're doing those things, you should be okay. Amazing. That's great. So basically the show goes on things change, but people find ways to work around it. Okay, creatives. How impactful are creative in the performance of ads generally? Like is that like only people are way under estimating the power of a creative or is it like, okay, it's like a bridge impact way up way underestimating the power of creative. The best example I can give. Do you remember dollar shave club? Absolutely. They're video. All right, there you go. Do you remember it? That's that was creative.

1:26:25Now the person buying it may have done a really good job of just targeting males. But I would argue, you know, girlfriends at the time probably would have been aware of it as well. I think creative does it's really good creative should be doing a really good job of telling a story. And if it does that again going back to what we talked about the very beginning, if you get that emotion with users, whether that's, you know, pulling at the heartstrings or comedy. It's going to have a lasting impact. Okay, Chuck on Twitter asked when someone steals your traffic saying Google search results and buying up keywords around your company is it what she do?

1:27:05Any advice? Yeah, so that actually goes back to the visual that we show and I'll pull it back up as I'm talking through it. The biggest thing is just know that anyone can do that. You can do it too. Like if you are ultimately concerned about it, but a lot of times competitors could be doing it on accident. And what I mean by accident is within Google, if you're bidding on keywords, Google will do what's called a close variant. If you were to do say e -commerce solution. I bet you Shopify shows up as a close variant at some point or square or anyone like that. So they could just be mismanaging their account first and foremost, don't give them that much credit that they're doing this maliciously or even doing it within 10.

1:27:55But if you do 10 if you do pull this and again, it will be in the show notes. If you do pull this report and you do notice that there is a clear threat that's going on here. First things first, let's make sure that they're not doing anything agree just like saying Lenny and Tim are better than Monday .com you cannot be if the brand is trademarked within Google they cannot use your name within the ad copy. Google more times and not will disallow it, but they could misspell it like I can't tell you how many times I've seen Shopify spelled with two eyes because Google isn't catching it, but we can always put in a claim to say, hey Google please remove this.

1:28:39But if we do run this, you can kind of see that the orange line here and for those that are just listening orange line is rather consistent over time. There is a two week period where it dips, but it does come back up. There's another line that at the beginning of this visual green is actually above orange. And if you look at the green one over time, it almost disappears. So the reason I would say make sure you're looking at this report and it's not just ego marketing. It could be an error. The issue could be the green one specifically could have been getting a close variant. They identified it, they removed it.

1:29:20Oh wait, a couple of weeks later, we didn't fully remove it. Now let's remove it completely and now they're almost gone completely. So make sure you're looking at the data and reacting to consistent competitor conquesting versus something that could just be an accident or users not knowing what they're doing. Amazing. And this is a PPC hero again, right? PPC or a comma, whatever. Yes. Okay, we'll share it. We'll share it. Yeah, we'll link it to it in the show notes. Okay, last question, AI, you mentioned AI, you're looking for AI tools to help you with your workflows and analyze data. I guess is there anything you've seen AI impact in the work of paid growth and performance marketing.

1:30:00Or is it like in the future might other than obviously the algorithms behind on the platforms. I remember having this conversation a couple of months ago.

1:30:13AI was like couldn't get away from it, right? It was everywhere. And what we were doing was leadership on know and all of our, you know, quarterly planning. What are we doing about AI? How are we using AI? What are we doing? That's different. What we did was I went as always I go to the partners and I say, Hey, what are we doing about this? And from Cisco a Google actually he made a really good point. You guys have been using AI for years now. Smart bidding is AI. All of the recommendations within Google ads is AI and copy recommendations is AI. And that's always been in the platform. So we've always used those things.

1:30:59So it was kind of like let's reset the conversation of, Hey, this has been here. We have been using it. This is how we've been using it and moving forward. These are some of the things we think will start doing. I do think it's having a huge impact from a content standpoint and a creative standpoint. Now if those two kind of converge together, you kind of have a perfect storm, right? But it's not overly, it is something that I keep a relative close eye on. But like I said earlier, hopefully some of your users can share more information with me. But it's not something that I would say is overly impactful yet.

1:31:40But I could see how it could be used maliciously. If you can do like API connections and things along those lines for sure. And wait, what do you mean by that? Again, Google will disallow certain things, but it takes time sometimes. Like if the turn is copyrighted in Google for ad copy, it will disallow immediately. But say they need to do a check. You'll see a lot of times under review or pending in the account. But you'll also see impressions potentially attached to that. It's because Google's like, oh, we'll serve a little bit of it. And then if it's malicious, we'll pull it back. I could see a way that somebody could automate AI to where it's like always updating it to where it's like, oh, let's just get a little drip here, a little drip here, a little drip here.

1:32:26And that little drip equates to a lot. But that's something AI can help with a human doing that would just take forever and be a total waste of time. Yeah, just run tons of ads. Just keep trying, trying, trying stuff, get you to flip through the cracks. You mentioned creative and actually came back to question. I forgot to ask. So you start with this going back to the team that you hired to run this sort of stuff. You hire this one person growth market or specialist type of person. The next hire is a creative. What's the sign that it's time to hire the creative person? Is there anything there of just like, is it just like we have budget and this is working?

1:32:56Or is there anything else of like, okay, this is a good time. Yeah, if you're using a creative agency and they're doing it and they're getting you everything you want and you're happy with it, then you may not make sense to hire a creative. But more times not what I've noticed from creative creative independence tend to do better than like an agency. The biggest difference I see is that matching the right tone, matching the right creative look and feel that you're going for is a accomplished way better in house. And also coming up with new ideas that you can test quickly and iterate on versus we only have so many hours with the agency this month or we all only have so much budget we can spend with them.

1:33:42Where if you have that person in house fully dedicated to the product itself, you'll never run into those caps. It feels like if anywhere that scenario AI is going to empower that initial hire to do more creative on their own, you would think. Yeah, and that's not always the best way to go. I mean, I've seen some ads in there where it's like, oh, yeah, they're being scrappy. I see what they're doing. But to your point, maybe that's where AI kind of bridges the gap because I can't tell you how many times in the past. It's like guys, we got to be able to do retargeting, but we have no creative to do.

1:34:17Google has the dynamic ad builder and they've had it for I feel like years now. And that was just like give us a couple of images and we will make a display ad for you. That should perform because we're testing many different iterations of it. Meta is probably going to come along with something as well that it's like, you know, give us a picture of your product and we'll put different backgrounds on it and test what works and what doesn't. Things along those lines. That's makes so much sense. Timothy, we've covered so much ground. This is everything I was hoping it would be before we get to our very exciting lightning round.

1:34:54Is there anything else that you think would be important valuable for listeners when they're trying to do this stuff on their own. Any other nuggets left that we haven't already come. Yeah, I said it at one point, but I'll reiterate it. I'm always forward thinking backwards planning. Just as you're going through it, like where do you want to be? And ultimately, how do you think you're going to get there? Because if say your goal is to be on all platforms, I'm going to be on Pinterest, I'm going to be on X. I want to be on, you know, everything. Okay. What is the forward thing? That's where you want to be.

1:35:32Now let's backwards plan. What can we do right now? We can do search because that's only content and that's keywords. We can do that. All right. Now we need creative. Well, where do we start? And then make iterations long way. It's just always forward think backwards plan. And that's for anything. What are other examples of forward thinking? Because like it in a sense, everyone will be like, I want to be on every platform. I guess like, what are the things that people think about when they're like the forward thinking? He's like, oh, we want to go. We want to win Google a goal search. Is that an example of forward thinking?

1:36:04What else should people think in there? Yeah, exactly. What are those goals you want to hit? One of the things that we look at is what, you know, emerging channels to perform. And so what is it going to take for us to consider this channel of performance in channel? That is an always on where we're adopting it as BAU. So that's going to take. You know, 1000 conversions a month at this much spend with this much lift associated with it. So, okay, we know what that looks like. So we're going to backwards plan. And where we're going to start, we're going to start with this one ad creative. Okay, that works.

1:36:49And we're going to go to this next because which in each platform they all have multiple types of ad units you can use. Say in LinkedIn, there's feed, there's conversation, there's video, there's carousel. So what are the milestones along the way that you're going to do to ultimately get it from. You know, testing emerging channel to perform them. So that would be an example of something more micro than macro. Got it. Well, with that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? Oh, yeah. First question. What are two or three books that you recommended most to other people daily stoic by far on a book I read every day quick, you know, excerpt of what you can do from a stoic philosophy standpoint, great bite choice is another good one and deep work favorite recent movie or TV show they really enjoyed.

1:37:48Xman 97 thoroughly enjoyed that, but that may be a lot of nostalgia. I actually never watched RRR when it first came out highly recommend that that was a lot more enjoyable than I was anticipating. The playlist, which is about Spotify. Welcome to Rex. Yeah, and billion dollar code also on Netflix about Google Earth. Very interesting. Yeah, RRR that movie is intense and very long also is like man, I've been at three and a half hours. I just I've to split it up into different days to finish it, but it was incredible though in 10. Okay, favorite recent product you've recently discovered that you really love.

1:38:31I drink too much caffeine and I've been trying to cut it out and I kind of circled back to this product. I use to use called magic mind. It's a little shot every single day. Taste really good and it does help with focus I find if it's a placebo great. I don't care if it's but it's helping me. That's amazing. I'm also a huge fan of magic mind and friends with the guy that started it so funny that you love it. I drink it often. I am on the subscription plan and I think he's a Shopify to sell to sell it. It does. It all connects. It's amazing. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to share with friends or family by useful worker in life?

1:39:14Happiness is dedicated by expectations or dictated by expectations. That can't be more true more times than not. And it's similar. That's why I said there's two and this one's similar to it. You won't see it for what it is until you stop looking through the lens of what you want it to be. Amazing. It reminds me of an equation. A colleague of mine once shared a book of like emotional equations or life equations and it was happiness is reality minus expectations. Yep. Love that. Okay. Next question. Who's had the most influence on you in your career? Well, we mentioned them before. So I got to bring them back up KC winters for sure.

1:40:00He was. He was we were at a wedding. He showed me the original version of Google Analytics for those of you that don't know it's called urgent. And when he showed that to me, it was wait, you know all of this information about users coming to the site. I knew I wouldn't do marketing, but at that moment, I knew I was going to do digital marketing and you know what? I was just thinking, well, watch him grow in his career. He's watching me grow my career. We still balance each. Each questions off of each other. We cannot not have a phone call under an hour. So definitely the most impactful. Is there something about KC winters that people may not know?

1:40:39He's a two time podcast guest huge friend of the show. KC is really good at tennis. Like insanely good at tennis. You want to know how good this is how good he was in high school. He played. I think it was our I'm pretty sure was our senior year. He hadn't played in a year. Maybe a year plus. He was still ranked top 10 in the state of Louisiana for tennis players. Hasn't played in a year and still considered one of the top 10 players. And saying did not know that I actually actually played tennis in high school. And so that's amazing. I didn't know this. Thanks for sharing that. Timothy, this was incredible.

1:41:25I think this is going to help a lot of people figure out first marketing, run more paid growth ads, figure out who to bring in to help them do this. Thank you so much for sharing and for being here. Of course. Appreciate the time. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's Podcast dot com. See you in the next episode.