Transcript for:
Lecture on Performance Marketing

is Performance Marketing just something every company should be doing hot take PID is for everyone if you look at the way each platform is doing Google you have to scroll pretty far down to get to organic listing meta it's almost a pay for play now when you take over for an agency at a company you crush their performance within a month I'm curious to what you find they are doing wrong instead of thinking about being on top of the page 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 any other tips for people just to experiment with the platform each platform is different the user behavior is different make sure you're not too hard on yourself if it doesn't work it's okay to fail because we're either winning or we're learning today my guest is Timothy Davis Timothy has led Performance Marketing for all of Shopify for the past 2 and a half years and as a consultant has helped companies like Pinterest LinkedIn redin and Eventbrite Kickstart and scale the performance marketing team in our conversation we get incredibly tactical on all things Performance Marketing and pay growth when to start investing how to run Signs of Life test on each platform what platforms to investigate and what platforms to bet big on what types of companies are best suited to invest big on paid growth whether you should invest pre-product Market fit or not what agencies often get wrong and what to look for in your investment when you're just getting started plus what your first three hires should look like tips for which platforms are most interesting right now a Peak at Timothy's actual reports that he runs to judge performance if you're watching this on YouTube and so much more this episode is for anyone who's trying to figure out how to Kickstart or improve the Performance Marketing investment and I guarantee you'll get something out of this that'll make your life better if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube it's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously with that I bring you Timothy Davis [Music] Timothy thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast yeah thanks for having me a long time coming yeah I'm really excited we're finally doing this I actually posted on Twitter for people to suggest questions for this topic and there's just so much interest in what we're going to be talking about which essentially we're going to be diving deep into all things PID growth all things Performance Marketing uh by the way I have a cold for people if in case you wonder why I sound a little weird but The Show Must Go On I want to start with just setting a little context for folks that aren't super familiar with Performance Marketing paid growth when we talk about Performance Marketing paid growth first of all are those two terms interchangeable to you and second of all what falls under the umbrella of Performance Marketing paid growth paid uh can be a lot of things it can be online it can be offline it can also even be Affiliates typically when I talk about Performance Marketing it's about online only but you could argue it's like offline could be performant Affiliates could be performant stuff like that uh they can be interchangeable but I would recommend if you are talking about it to kind of specify which one you're talking about because when you do say paid because I'm in the industry I would just oh they do Google Search and they do meta and they do things like that but if you do offline and you just say paid m m we may be uh talking about things but missing each other on two two ships passing in the night so I I think historically uh people when they have said paid growth have been fully focused on just online online okay but I would argue in the last couple of years you could definitely roll offline into that conversation as well okay so Performance Marketing when someone hears that term it's essentially marketing that you can measure the performance up correct yes nail on the head this episode is brought to you by build better. a back in 2020 when AI was just a toy build better bet that it could cut down on a product teams's operational BS fast forward to today 23 thousand product teams use purpose-built AI in build better every day first build better uses custom models to turn unstructured data like product and sales calls support tickets internal Communications and surveys into structured insights it's like having a dedicated data science team second build better runs those structured insights into workflows like weekly reports about customer issues context aware prds and user research documents with citations it even turns standups into action items that automatically get assigned and shared into your tools plus with Unlimited seat pricing on all plans buil better ensures everyone at your company has access to this knowledge truly no data silos in a world of AI demos over promising and underd delivering seey build better has a 93% subscription retention get a personalized demo and use code Lenny for $100 credit if you sign up now at build better. a/ Lenny I'm excited to chat with Christina Gilbert the founder of one schema one of our longtime podcast sponsors hi Christina yes thank you for having me on Lenny what is the latest with one schema I know you now work with some of my favorite companies like ramp vantis scale and Watershed I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import csvs from especially tricky systems like erps yes so we just launched one scheme of file feeds which allows you to build an integration with any system in 15 minutes as long as you can export a CSV to an SFTP folder we see our customers all the time getting stuck with hacks and workarounds and the product teams that we work with don't have to turn down prospects because their systems are too hard to integrate with we allow our customers to offer thousands of Integrations without involving their engineering team at all I can tell you that if my team had to build Integrations like this how nice would it be to be able to take this off my road map and instead use something like one schema and not just to build it but also to maintain it forever absolutely Lenny we heard so many horor stories of multi-day outages from even just a handful of bad records we are laser focused on integration reliability to help teams end all of those distractions that come up with Integrations we have a built-in validation layer that stops any bad data from entering your system and one schema will notify your team immediately of any data that looks incorrect I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kinds of pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust Christina thank you for joining us and if you want to learn more head on over to on schema. that's on schema. is Performance Marketing just something every company should be doing or is there certain business models where it's like no you're probably going to grow through other channels mostly like SEO or sales or word amount hot take uh I would say paid is for everyone uh if you look at the way each platform is doing Google introducing AI plus with paid taking up like the first four spots you have to scroll pretty far down to get to an organic listing meta it's almost a pay for play now you have to do promoted posts for people to even see your content I would say it does depend on the industry you're in if you're say leaning heavily into influencer marketing that is still a paid component you may not be doing meta ad you may not be doing paid search but that is a paid component but I would say at Baseline everyone should be doing paid search uh the way I usually explain it to people is paid search is user driven you have to type in a relevant keyword for your ad to show anything else is more disruptive media uh you're on meta and you're looking at pictures of babies and cats and then all of a sudden you see an ad for Shopify you're watching a YouTube video maybe a YouTube podcast and then in between you get advertisements maybe for Shopify maybe for Pinterest maybe for Eventbrite so all of that being disruptive media Will May make a whole lot of sense for where you are as a business but I would say paid search being user-driven having to type in a relevant keyword for your ad to show should pretty much be for just about everybody everyone should do it super interesting there's also the most companies growth through one growth engine primarily say word of mouth or SEO or sales or paid so for some companies paid will be most of how they grow like say I always think of booking.com in Credit Karma and just like most of their growth came from Paid growth online paid growth for some companies it's just like a layer like a small 10 20% of their growth what are signs that you have the potential for paid Performance Marketing to be most of your growth like say 70 80% I always say where where are your users uh you will have some data that will allow you to understand that say right now you're doing really well on Tik Tok some would argue that's an emerging Channel right now great uh if that's doing really well for you maybe you take because that content could be used on something similar like Snap see how that does for you you could also lean into your Google analytics or whatever Analytics tool you are using and see if you're already getting users from that platform if you're currently managing that if you don't have a profile on there and obviously you don't have a presence it would be really hard for users to find you and get there but always look at the data that's available to you within your analytics platforms and say users are already finding us here how can we turn that knob up to 11 and you can do that with paid because if they're already finding you through that channel what would happen if you were to just turn it up to 11 is there an example of a company you worked with that's known that is an example that where you're like oh I see everyone's looking finding them on say Google let's go turn into 11 yeah so there was a company I worked with a couple years ago called hair story uh and Ipsy I know very funny guy with no hair working on a company called hair story but uh they were doing really well from a Google shopping standpoint but when I started Consulting with them we looked at the analytics and we actually saw that they were getting a lot of people from meta and uh Tik Tok at the time and Tik Tok was very very new uh and they didn't really know what to do with it so said we'll do a small test we can start on meta with just some you know uh customer testimonials let's see how that does we'll get interest in build a funnel get retargeting and hopefully get conversions Tik Tok was so new at the time that it was like we don't know what's going to work let's just try with what would is currently available then once we started doing it we started noticing hey this doesn't make a whole lot of sense from a creative standpoint we were kind of missing the mark of what we were using on meow was working was not working on Tik talk so you can't always just take what is currently working one platform and apply it to another because it is a different user experience it is a different mindset that the user has when they're on there so that was an example of where we were able to take those instances look at their uh data and say they're already finding us here how can we turn this up a little bit and I don't remember the numbers exactly but it was pretty exponential okay so the the core advice here so far is look for where people are coming to you from today and then that gives you a sign of where you should start to think about running paid ads Performance Marketing on those platforms yeah and also uh there's a saying that um my current director likes to use which is Signs of Life you can always do a very very small test you can just put a little money into a platform see if there's a sign of life if there is then you can you can pull back and say okay we have signs of life now let's build a campaign around that there's no reason to say all right we have a science of life let's now turn it up all the way do we have the right creative do we have the right campaign do we have the right messaging for the users on this platform then let's take uh that approach as opposed to just hey Signs of Life great Go Run 100 miles an hour make sure you're doing the right thing when you get into those platforms let's follow that thread a lot of people run little experiments on say Tik Tok and snap and Twitter and things like LinkedIn and they often don't see a lot of results and it's always like hey did we do it wrong or is it the platforms not working I know it's like a very difficult question to give like here's how you do a sign of Life test correctly but what are some things that you think either people do often wrong when they're trying to experiment with a platform or they you just think they should do when they're trying to look for signs of Life the number one thing I tell people all the time is use your own data start with your own data so take the existing customer base you have load that up into the platform to build lookalikes from there you can do and I'll use meta as the example you can do a 1% all the way up to a 10% so 1% match 2% 3% so on so forth what I tend to do is build ad sets uh one at 1% because we know that one's going to be highly correlated to what we're looking for then a two to four and then a five to S and then an eight plus more times than not the eight eight plus does not work but there have been times where it has so it's hey let's do it let's try it but if you also have a very limited budget because some people don't have the luxury of having an unlimited budget like we do in uh some of these other companies I've worked at uh just start with the 1% see what that sign of life is because you already know that this is so tied to your existing customer base if that sign of life is giving you a positive uh signal now you have the information you need to build the campaign you need to be successful what are these percentages referring to you may have mentioned it but when you say 1% 2% 3% yeah yeah so that that is how closely tied they are to that user's behavior on the platform so they're 1% tied to what they're doing they're visiting similar Pages or they have similar behavior on the platform so they're more than likely going to be tied to what that user they're not going to be that user exactly but they're going to be very correlated to them where 10% is pretty wide base that you're going to hit I see so the smaller the percentage the closer they are the closer will look like they are y there you go how do you know if it's the creative that is failing versus it's just like never going to work because there's something that tells you that's what's not working it's a million-- dollar question to be honest with you uh because the uh the you could look at some of the metrics that currently exist in the platform click through rate basically just tells you are the users in engaged because start with the target you're getting the Impressions they there is the Target right that should be your first thing yes the target is correct users that we want to see are seeing our ads but they're not engaging with it that would kind of be the first thing but the the part that I think you're really trying to ask is creative versus the content because sometimes depending on the ad unit you could have like a story creative that is literally the creative kind of has to stand on its own not necessarily the content that's in it but something like an infeed creative has a headline a primary a description and a creative that's where honestly the only way you're going to get an answer to that outside of the data that's available to you like clickthrough rate reach frequency and all those things to kind of pull in more metrics is a focus group to understand hey when you saw this image with this content you know what was your result from it now you can build a test within the platform to do a control versus a test where say you take the creative with the same Primary in the same description versus a creative that's just your logo with the headline and the description and see what the results are but more times and not you're not getting the understanding from the user of why doesn't that creative resonate with you and they'll give you suggestions in the focus group why does that work better for you than not um so that's a really really hard hard question to answer without having those dialogue with the user to understand that yeah that makes a lot of sense how long do you recommend these test run for the signs of Life test and I like this term by the way I haven't heard this before ideally in a perfect world you're going to hear the word statistical relevance um mathematicians will will tell you exactly what that number is and I'm not going to pretend like a mathematician but a lot of times it's uh budget constraint so that there could be a VP Finance anyone like could just come to you and just say hey you have $25,000 for this test you only have 5,000 uh you know just get that information get that data you can then also build an OP siize off of that hey guys we worked with our meta Partners we worked with our Google Partners uh we put ,000 behind this test we know that our impression share was this our reach was this if we were to put $10,000 into it this is the expected return we can get from it based on the histo based on the click-through rate the conversion rate that we got from the test that we ran got it so basically you have a limited number of dollars to spend that'll tell you how long you could run one of these for yeah any other tips for someone that's trying to experiment with the platform early on for the Science Life test so one is uh try a lookalike that is like the most targeted version of the look like so 1% you said and then kind of incrementally grow and see that incrementally increase that percentage as as as you spend more any other tips I guess for people just to experiment with the platform make sure you're not too hard on yourself if it doesn't work a lot of times companies I've either consulted with or worked at there was always pressure or there was always a need to succeed at whatever experiment we put into Market I believe in creating an environment where it's okay to fail because we're either winning or we're learning and more times than not if we put something new into a platform that we know nothing about we're learning the bells and whistles we're learning the functionality of it just know there's going to be things you're not going to understand because each platform is unique each platform is different the user behavior is different so give yourself some Grace understand that this may not work and as long as you're learning from it you're going to be okay I love that in terms of which platforms people should explore obviously there's Google there's Facebook Instagram what's kind of like what are the platforms people should seriously consider at this point Google for sure and when we say Google let's make sure everyone understands what Google entails Google is YouTube Google is Google search gdn Google Display Network there's a lot of things in Google that you can do I always say if you have the creative available you should should really really be looking at doing video because video is one of those things that I am very bullish on it is doing really well um when you measure it the right way and as long as you can get that creative and get it consistently just because you have one piece creative if it's doing well you do need to have that creative refresh kind of that flywheel going make sure you're doing Google search again user driven YouTube and meta and meta contains both Facebook and Instagram and then based on the data available to you if you do see users on Tik Tok definitely go after those but if you're just kind of starting out and you're just want to get your feet wet into something I would say start with Google search then get into meta uh and if you have video available definitely get into YouTube awesome okay so Google search YouTube Facebook Instagram Tik Tok What about LinkedIn do you see things happening there for say Tob companies yeah uh LinkedIn um is very expensive in comparison so just know if you're going into LinkedIn it's going to look almost three times more expensive than other channels the targeting that's available on LinkedIn knowing job titles Industries actually targeting people at certain companies is very powerful the example I always tend to use is that uh I worked at a company called soft layer soft layer was acquired by IBM because they were trying to build out their Cloud portfolio couldn't do it so they're like hey let's do the next best thing and buy this company but when we were just soft layer we were trying to get uh Coca-Cola as one of our clients and uh you know those Coke free Styles where you can pick whatever drink you want and put the flavor in it no these are great um maybe maybe it's a sell thing but uh basically you go up to a Coke freestyle and say I want Dr Pepper and I want cherry flavor in it uh or you want to Coke Zero with cherry and vanilla in it you can do that uh it's kind of the freestyle you get to pick the reason they wanted uh it to be cloud-based is because there's a ton of drinks in there so you need to be able to efficiently and effectively say this store needs more Sprite or this store needs more Sprite Zero uh because you have your whole portfolio in this one machine so they want to be able to update things more readily uh and it was between us AWS and Microsoft and met with the sales team and said you know what do we need need to do to win this because it was a big ticket item for us and uh what we found out was they had two concerns about us it was recent recency and private uh security so what we did was we found out where the decision makers were so a in LinkedIn we took the anyone who works at Coca-Cola we want you to see ads about security and Rec recency outside of that we also Geo fenced it because you would think Coca-Cola Atlanta that's where the decision maker sits but they were actually in La so in La we geofence them and we knew that they worked at Coca-Cola the next time the salesperson got on the call with the team to say hey just wanted to check in he was like Hey Hey I get it security is fine recency is fine we hear you um that was great to hear because it was something we were able to do on LinkedIn and we did it in other platforms as well but we knew we were able to get not only to that decision maker but everyone around that decision maker to say hey these these guys may be the ones we need to go with okay so just to mirror back what you're saying you're saying you ran ads on LinkedIn uh targeting the execs at Coca-Cola trying to influence them to overcome these barriers they had to buying to working with guys uh amazing I've seen people do that on Google search but I've never heard of it makes so much sense to do on LinkedIn and it worked and did they know that you did this or they're just like oh I just kind of changed my mind uh no I one of them was like we get it we're seeing it everywhere we actually tried because at the time we didn't have an offline team we actually tried to buy the Billboards around the office as well but I didn't know enough at the time from an offline perspective of like the right people to talk to how wow how long it would take to do it so uh we were trying to pour it on hard that's incredible like I could see why LinkedIn is more expensive that's incredible Le powerful and uh is the advice then that LinkedIn makes more sense for like higher LTB higher ACB type of products yeah exactly uh I would not recommend getting into LinkedIn and my LinkedIn reps May kill me for those I would not recommend getting into LinkedIn until you've uh tested Google and meta first now you could be an Enterprise level company and it does make sense to start with LinkedIn for sure uh but depending on your audience I would say more times than not it would be a Google meta discussion before going to LinkedIn okay so just generally start with Google and meta is there one or the other usually is it like I guess yeah do you which one would you start with if you had to pick one yeah always Google search I'm always going to say start with Google search uh but it it's also creative dependent if you don't have the right creative for Facebook it's going to be really hard to convert because users are just going to either be turned off by what you're kind of putting out there and then also depending on where your user base is if they're not on Facebook it's kind of a mood point but if they're browsing around on gdn or YouTube it makes more sense to go there and then you said this insight about video is performing super well right now and you're recommending people use video and the key there is you need to be able to make videos video ads yeah you got to 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 just how how to do that or how what ads work well or anything there for someone else to that so yeah the the thing with YouTube is uh I always say start with emotion if you can have an emotional connection with the user is going to be way more impactful and way more powerful than uh anything else and to to take that further when I say emotion that I'm talking about comedy I'm talking about you know um H happiness it's not necessarily just oh we need an emotional connection with the brand it is just making sure the user feels something after seeing your ad uh because then they'll they're more 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 I don't know anything along those lines when you say emerging channels my brain kind of goes to Connected TV podcast VR advertising uh audio voice search and even AI stuff right now I can tell you podcasts are doing really well for the people that I know are able to measure it correctly right um connected TV is also doing really well you can take the if again you're doing YouTube right now being able to take that creative and repurpose it but the the VR stuff and the AI stuff that is stuff that is I would say very emerging right now because uh to to be completely transparent I haven't experimented with those things yet uh I kind of like letting other people be the guinea pig and learning from them and then uh if hey 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 uh podcast ads I'm glad you uh suggested that I'm a huge fan thank you uh they're working really well for a lot of our sponsors and uh I'm very biased so you don't need to pay attention to me but uh I also think there's a lot of opportunity there okay let's talk about when to start investing in Performance Marketing paid growth so say you're like a startup do you have any advice for when it's time to start signs a life test or even and then also just when is it time to scale to go like okay let's go big on this if you are a startup um typically whenever I consulted with them it was what are the goals what are we trying to achieve and when because if you're looking for something quick paid needs to started immediately P started yesterday because SEO takes time SEO depending on on the market you're getting into if it's emerging people may not even know your product exists uh there was a product I was working on years ago uh 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 uh Suite or B um room done up with like flower petals and champagne and stuff like that uh they would do it for you well they were working with someone before that was like oh we totally being paid search and if you look at the keywords that they were doing it was like booking hotel rooms it's like no that's that's complete disconnect they're like yeah but we're trying to build awareness you don't 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 gdn that's when the company started really reaping the rewards because we were building the awareness around the product so it depends on how you know what is the demand of the prod of your product and Market if you're doing something that is similar to another uh product and Market you could do competitor um uh I call it cail writing uh 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 you know Lenny and Tim are better than monday.com and start getting some people in interested maybe kicking the tires starting free trials but they also have other keywords that they can go after in Market uh but if you're going after something new like hotel room you know flowers and I forget what keywords we were bidding on for that because it was years ago people weren't thinking of that it wasn't something they were searching for so it just really depends on a 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 kind of 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 um we've run into some of this at Shopify and we definitely ran into this at um IBM so for the longest time you know IBM is we're a global company we should be everywhere uh but 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 on purchasing it it was because we didn't have a product Market fit mainly from an operation standpoint in Africa there are multitudes of different types of uh currency there's the Fran there's the ran there's the shill and we we were just hey USD thank you so of course they weren't converting unless they were going out of their way to make a way to uh 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 uh so we had to make sure we had the Rand available once we did that we were uh we started doing tremendously better because we had a product Market fit they 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 if you don't have something people actually want yet in that product in that market right or able to convert 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 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 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 interesting so is that is that is that generally your advice if your startup you're not feeling like you actually have product Market fit yet should you even experiment with and do science a life test or should you hold off until it's like okay it's actually working let's go from an operation standpoint I I always want to make sure those things are tied off yeah it 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 uh but just know that it may it's probably not going to convert very well got 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 uh we got introduced through Casey wyers illustrious former podcast guest two time podcast guest and asked him about you and he told me that when you take over for an agency at a company that you've 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 uh now I've worked at agencies I 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 andc 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 um I may get a little too far into Data uh than uh some other people for example like I have Ops Cadence that you know myself and my team follow So within that OBS Cadence we have things like Finance performance structure keywords ad copy quality score targeting etc etc and then with within each of those we have specifics for example the keyword subsection is keyword granularity brand versus non-brand search query reports negatives 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 your conversions where are we converting have we tested different landing pages what is a better user experience that we could be getting users right now it's a five-step process can get it to a three partnering with like pmm to say hey here's something that I think could help improve our you know lead to conversion uh just stuff like that that they're you know too busy with too many other things to focus really really deep into those and typically whenever I managed an agency in the past and I consulted I made sure that you didn't you weren't stretched than 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 you know spot checking things just saying hey I looked at this this 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 want scream Uncle when they should be screaming Uncle because they 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 2 million plus we to offload some of that from you because you're doing such a good job that you've scaled them up let'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 helped 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 going to be great is it just like agencies in general probably not a good choice is it h hire someone in house I guess what what advice do you have for people that are like oh man I don't I want to avoid this agencies 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 uh performing anund million spend there's no way one person can do that so let's creates mild Stones along the way of uh making sure we're checking in and saying when is the right time to hire uh whether that's a data scientist whether that's a creative person in house or replacing me fulltime there's no reason that you should be holding a company back if anything you should be helping them get to that Milestone and 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 uh as opposed to how much money how much more money can I squeeze from you by holding on to you as a client I would say agency consultant um is a good way to start because if you as a business owner you shouldn't have to log in oh I haven't 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 uh I 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 buy 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 going to hire someone internally to run this for us and then potentially they'll keep working with you potentially they'll start things in their room or or is that or is it is 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 that's a really good point actually so uh there have been times where uh clients like hey we've reached Milestone I want to bring someone in that person comes in and say they're an expert in uh social media like hey I still want you to execute on Google and bang because that is just not my baileywick I'll take over the social stuff but we do need to talk about your fee maybe it does need to go down completely acceptable let's have that discussion make sure we're both aligned to what that should be uh but yeah that there have been times where they're like hey we've reached our Milestone we got to bring someone on but that person that they bring on like actually I see expansion in this direction but I can't do this are you willing to stay on help me with this great if not I'll just have to find someone else who can I want to talk about the team that youed 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 Performance Marketing on Channel or what do you look for ideally I'm a big believer in uh there was a a book written by uh Nate silver called the signal and the noise are you familiar with it no um so are uh so Nate silver is the guy who created yeah yeah um and in the book he basically uh I'm me use the word art let use the word art detailed the art of like probability statistics um and applied them to like real world um circumstances it included case studies of with baseball which of course I loved um 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 big biggest thing I want to focus on is what is your thought process when it comes to data because I can teach anyone how to do Google ads I can teach anyone how to do meta ads that 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 could 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 the hold on that's a lot of noise you just said so let's what is the signal and what is the noise and 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 manag M platform built by Al Lums of Airbnb and snowflake for modern growth teams companies like twitch Muro 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 when I was at rbnb one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform where I could set up experim ments easily troubleshoot issues and analyze performance all on my own EPO does all that and more with Advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance and out of the box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolong analytic Cycles EPO also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team sparking new ideas for the AB testing flywheel EPO Powers experimentation across every use case including product growth machine learning ization and email marketing check out EPO at geo.com Lenny and 10x your experiment velocity that's get.com Lenny everyone I talked to that's worked with you is just like Tim Timothy is incredible at working with tons of data and finding the things that matter uh 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's something there that you could show that is interesting yeah I so I played baseball my whole life uh but when you um blow out your arm and you're as fast as a sea otter it's it's not very conducive for you to continue facing uh you know chasing that dream but the one thing I always liked was the stats even as a kid when I would watch like baseball games uh on TV it's like what's this guy batting how often is he getting on base uh you know how many RBI 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 um so you want to make sure you put them in the right spot in the batting order so on so forth I could talk about that for hours but uh again that that could be another thing where there's a lot of data available what which one should you focus on and uh ultimately where what is the optimization you're going to make to the lineup or to the uh where you place fielders on the field to ensure that we're we're doing the right thing and becoming as efficient and effective as possible as far as dealing with all that data that is just I would say a skill I've learned over time uh early in my career uh whenever someone uh you know was like oh we have this new project uh who wants to work on I'll do it I was always just eager you know like a sponge I just I wanted to get in as much stuff as possible I did SEO for a portion of my career I email marketing I did Affiliates and then eventually I remember the first time I saw it paid because again I was doing like SEO where I was like yeah we're going to do this and we think it's going to work but uh we won't know for about you know six months someone showed me a paid platform is like wait you know this is the keyword you're bidding on this is how many times the ad was shown how many people clicked on it how many wow this is amazing I need to I need to get more into this and that is kind of where it started and uh when I usually hire people and we go through the interview process I make sure that they 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 I throw a bunch of you know data points at them and then say out of all that uh what would you do to optimize the account and more times than not that they're just like overwhelmed uh but the people that I like or like well what was the purpose of the camp what's the purpose of the campaign uh the purpose of the campaign is to drive conversions okay well I would focus here 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 getting into the funnel and are considering us as from a white paper download or a demo as the product solution that they're looking for that'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 PID ads like a lot of people think about CAC a lot of people think about return on at spend LTV to CAC I know it really depends on the goals as you said and but I guess is there anything that you find is like this forget these metrics these are kind of the bucket that you focus on most yeah so so for those metrics I would say I really hope you have a a great re uh Finance partner shout out to Courtney and Nick uh that that fantastic Finance Partners I have at Shopify well Nick's not there anymore sad cry Emoji but uh Courtney you know 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 uh basically put a guard rail on you have to be within so hope 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 we're looking at accounts uh we'll we'll kind of hyperfocus 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 uh what I'm showing here is a visual of brand versus non-brand when it comes to expected clickthrough rate landing page experience and AD relevance the reason I like building reports like this is because it will kind of show you where your whole 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 uh 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 uh that will improve your ad strength and once you improve your ad strength uh that will impr improve your quality score and more times and I think it's 12 a 12% increase in the number of impr Impressions you can get if you increase from uh a below average to an above average for the data that's available here and then on the the non-brand side clear expected click-through rate uh you really need to be working on and that data is also available here that you can kind of see I put in red uh 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 it's like hey here's a signal let's go do a deep dive so there's further reports uh that you could look at uh looking at the ad strength again average excellent good or poor you can see clearly on the uh 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 uh 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 add off by itself not only will Pro I'm a firm believer in that there's a an account level uh 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 and 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 uh they'll tell you try adding a few more unique headlines or unpinning some of the adet 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 um so definitely some stuff available uh 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 that was amazing for folks not watching on YouTube you pulled that uh actual reports from I think I imagine past clients is that what the uh the data was from okay so actual reports from past clients of how you evaluate and this is Google ads basically Google ads data incredible okay and so within the those reports you had poor excellent how how do you determine when something is going great is that something you set like if it's above the threshold is that a benchmark you have or is that Google telling you this is poor this yeah so that's Google telling you there's some times where you will work really really hard uh to take that poor to an average that average to uh an excellent and there there's just not a whole lot you can do uh sometimes it kind of is what it is but I would argue more times than not people are not doing those things to improve their ad strength uh so Ju Just if you have the change history available in every account in meta in 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 that's a clear indication that there's definitely room for improvement something that someone asked on Twitter is is for benchmarks around any of the stuff like how do you know when your CPC is good I guess you just look at you look at like Google telling you it's excellent vers sport how 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 going to 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 than not there're kind of like sales people I actually really like the partners uh that we have at Shopify uh because I do feel that they are Partners shout out to FR Francisco at Google and uh Sammy and Alana at uh meta and Nick and Sam and Brian at LinkedIn in case they all hear this but you know I think they're really great partners and they will give you that information they will actually say if you give me your 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 CA because they would have to have transparency into like conversions uh but click through rate conversion rate cost per click things like that they will give you that information because they they 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 clickthrough rate of 5% they won't tell you that but they will tell you of the competitors you gave us and we added three more in just to you know 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 that they'll give you that information because they want you to succeed because if you succeed you spend more money on their platform uh 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 and then you can communicate that internally to your team and say hey our average cpcs may seem high but in reality we got our partners and we are uh you know 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 Etc and it'll give you essentially the great summary yes yes amazing okay back going back to the report you just showed is that 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 and so these are all e exports so this is just the visualization of the data that's available so this all data is available in every account this is data available in the account this is data available in the account now in saying that there are more reports that we get into like impression Shar 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 instead 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 you know demographics locations Affinity 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 and 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 uh where we started making some changes and you can see that clearly our impression share you know I would say was Baseline you know 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 to a lot of people but no one cared about what we were talking about so this was an easy test to call and just say this one's performing a lot better and then you know verifying the other metric 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 more slide on this deck I'm curious what's there yeah so this one I'm hoping you have show notes uh that we can uh give a shout out to somebody um yep uh there's uh a website called PPC hero um what I usually tell people is terrible name great content the 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 uh the writer there his name is Jacob Brown this is what he calls the true competition metric and again this is why I highly recommend we give people the uh link to the article because this does get a little dense so what he does 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 and 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 using this type of lens is an effective way to identify genuine threats not that just this data can be used to gain 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 ad 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 so 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 uh this is now available to us in the platform tells 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 tool like sem Rush that ultimately is uh saying oh this 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 and this comes from PPC hero is this what you're saying cool we'll definitely link to that there are any other tools or workflows that you find really helpful in analyzing this endless amount of data please audience if you if if if you are using AI in this way let me know uh because a lot of the stuff I do is can be a little manual and can be a little timec consuming if they found ways to automate through AI uh that does that where I can provide the information that isn't you know sensitive uh that they will you know 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 uh the result from it but yeah it's it right right now it is a little manual but if there's a way to automate this through AI please users uh 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 what a sexy uh exciting topic so attribution basically it's how do you assign credit to a channel and to a campaign uh so that you where growth is coming from it's working what's the state of attribution today what do you find is is helpful how do people do attribution well in today's world yeah I'm a big believer and proponent in multi-touch I fall into the Campa more time Decay historically the research I've done users tend to forget very quickly where they first found 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 uh for sure let's give you some credit for that but uh definitely not the reason that they ultimately converted um linear is fine as well but I 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 ab absence of that ad this 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 uh conversion lift test and important slices of uh the marketing channel I know eBay was very popular when they did that uh experiment I think it was like 2012 and I'll have a link for you for that as well uh where they ultimately decided to cut almost all of their brands Ben 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 our quality scores were so low okay 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 add-on and less credit if it was further back in time right yep and then in terms of tooling is there tools you love is is it stuff you build in house generally how to 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 uh but most of the companies I've worked with like the the the big companies of the world the Pinterest the Shopify the ibms of the world tend to build things inhouse so from a a thirdparty tool unfortunately I don't have a whole lot of uh go-tos for that so again either that's a I've been fortunate or I've been sheltered and then are 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 uh I will always say make sure you're trying to Leverage The in platform tools uh 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 you're giving it again a lot of noise instead of the right signal so uh try and Leverage The in platform tools or if there is a tool you're using make sure it does you know uh allow third party integration through the Google meta Tik toks 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 run that ad is there any advice there anything you've seen about about just like how to think about incrementality correctly and not just give yourself all this credit for stuff that would have happened anyway yeah I mean there are many ways to judge the effectiveness of uh growth overall like some of the stuff we talked about before brand metrics awareness recall things along those lines there're also I know some companies look at like leading indicator like visits and clicks or tribute which of the efforts are linked to or perceived uh drivers of actions like leads conversions to prospect prospect to scale but you know really the the the results should be coming from either that Geo X or Geo experiment or conversion lift uh the results of those experiments should ultimately fuel the plans for your uh what we call if increment mentality adjusted factor and will allow you to be more precise and how efficient each channel is ideally by region sometimes you just have a holistic of like this is how meta is this is how YouTube is but if you 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 uh 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 bidder's ad this is your control group and adds up to some opportunity cost that is estimated in terms of impression share per uh percentage as well as spend hold back spend hold back is like how much money you will not spend because of this test and all of the platforms are uh willing to partner with you on this because you know Facebook knows this Linkin 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 if 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 uh and saying that if you're not spending enough they probably will not uh help you with this because there are certain spend thresholds you do need to meet but uh I would say at least start there uh and also if you're not spending more than would say 50k a month in the platform doing this is going to be a lot more work uh than you're going to get result from you you're just not going to have enough signal there so basically don't don't worry about running incrementality tests when you're just when you're when you're starting out got it and okay and so basically to understand actual incrementality 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 okay let's go back to talking about team structure and how to kind of build your own Performance 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 you your advice there was maybe around like 50k was that like an actual threshold they usually recommenders that just like an example uh every business is slightly different I mean if they're uh well funded 50k may not uh the the threshold may be higher but uh yeah everyone's different 50k may be like if somebody said if you were just say hey give me a number I would say 50k to to start having those conversations because if you're at 50k 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 okay what are like the first three to five hires look like generally that you recommend for scaling internally Performance Marketing so the first thing uh like we said someone data driven that can get into the platforms the next is is uh going to be creative uh because I need those two now working hand inand uh making sure the creative is matching the tone and also the performance that we're trying to achieve as a business uh 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 Liv better they will be able to build analyses that you will not as a generalist will not be able to do yourself you know that there's a saying of like I uh I'm not a data scientist but I like to play One online because that 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 the 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 uh graphic design slash branding uh the reason for that is because there you're if you have a good marketing mix you're going to 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 you're going to need to uh 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 users to convert and they're also writing the copy I imagine for like the Google ads or I usually say that should be collaborative um the performance marketer should be able to write most of the ads but I can't tell you how 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 uh 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 you know the security company we wrote the most perfect ad when Google ads only allowed a headline and two descriptions of 35 and 35 we got every single value prop in there somehow it was amazing and the ad that it was going against was dollar sign zero setup Fe dollar sign zero install fee that add one it's like that is no how did that how it barely uses any of the characters and it almost tells I mean tells you almost nothing but it it won um had more conversions a higher clickthrough raid so we took that and we applied that with the value props and it did better so it should never be like unless the idea is don't buy our product which hopefully someone is not writing that ad copy it shouldn't be left on The Cutting Room floor always test it always be willing to learn what what works what doesn't for this first hire what's the what's like the title of this person usually in your experience lately it's been uh growth marketing specialist growth marketing manager uh because they're going to wear multiple hats you know like at any startup that you're at you you're 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 or 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 uh and then as the team grows we get more in the Specialties so like growth marketing person it's kind of like the broad umbrella 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 Shopify would call it GSD getting done I'm a firm believer in getting done uh you should be in the account like I mentioned earlier with that Ops Cadence we have stuff we need to be doing weekly bi-weekly monthly the 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 uh 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 and then the results from it and then all right what we learned from this uh 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 un 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 um letting go of some really talented people and that is I feel like just created bloated organizations we every uh month uh my current manager Dean created this uh calculator that we look at that says how much time are you spend spending in meetings uh if you have any PTO coming up put that in there optimizations reporting stuff like that to basically add up to how many days are in the quarter uh 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 uh we meet in real in real life to you know get sh done in real life as opposed to remotely you know put all that in there and then what does the number equate to oh we're in the red right now for these you know two to five people how many quarters has it been that way okay it's only this quarter this quarter we have a summit coming up or we have a burst coming up or we have a lot of travel because uh 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 uh what they will be responsible for and and uh how much work they'll be taking on and doing to replace uh some of this red uh that is going on and if it equates to a full head great we can move forward we've made our business case uh but sometimes it doesn't sometimes we're just read and uh 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 uh this launch we don't need to be a part of we just need to be consulted on it we don't need 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 and uh red means uh they have more work yeah more days than 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 cut stuff then okay we need to start hiring yep that is very cool is that just a is that a Shopify thing or is that something you you do on your team I've done stuff like that at other companies before but uh kind of bringing it Forward again I don't want to take the credit for it Dean was kind of the one that brought it back up it was like oh yeah I used to do this I don't know why would I stopped 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 I love me a spreadsheet so it's just a spreadsheet and uh visually uh 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 so forth and then within those buckets or let's call those everyone loves rocks and Pebbles right now right so that that's your big rock your big rock is keywords then within that you have Pebbles uh 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 bi-weekly monthly and then that allows us to if anyone in the organization's like hey how often are you guys updating ad copy easy answer how often are you guys uh doing search qu reports easy answer and it allows us to make sure we hold ourselves accountable to those things because a lot of times we we have a lot we're doing we'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 gotta make sure I do that again so it hold 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 that that need to be done in the account the core of this is essentially there's a spreadsheet that everyone aligns on of hears how when and how often we certain activity to operate this Performance Marketing machine that you've built yep awesome and it's it's both internally so that everyone knows and then also when people ask okay when are you going to do this 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 our whole Ops Cadence in terms of the team something else uh folks told me about you is that you're very hardcore about training new people that you hire uh what does that mean people mean by that yeah there's a book called uh I think it's the first 90 days and in it it actually has uh 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 I want to try and make that you know 45 days if not 30 most of the time it has to do with uh um 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 Ops 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 and you're saying 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 uh cat on my team was hired 8ish months ago she was thrown into the fire very quickly she was like Hey we're uh we have this campaign coming up called additions here's everything we did last uh additions this is the results these are your responsibilities these are the expectations go go forth and Conquer uh as you come along there 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 uh also in like one-on ones 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 and you can learn even though we're remote I'm showing you as if you're sitting right over my shoulder or we're fa to face this is how I do it so if you're doing something different maybe you know 1+ 1 is 2 3us 1 is two and that's fine we both got to the same answer but if you're doing like 9 * 5 - 2 * 12 / 15 nope 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 fly wheel going of hey I want to have impact as soon as possible versus oh hey go read this handbook week one week two let me introduce you to the team week three it's like Slow 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 out the gate I can't remember every little thing I need to tell you so and there may be things I I can learn from you uh I can't tell you how many times I I'm still learning from people you know around me it's like oh that's great I I didn't even think of that or I haven't tried that I should totally do that so 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 PID ads kind of like oh it's not going to work anymore it's over Facebook is dead uh clearly that hasn't happened at this point just what is the impact that uh ATP has had on pit ads and Performance Marketing we were just talking about this the other day because uh we have uh full transparency we have people fully dedicated to Mobile on the team and I had reached out to uh Sasha who's on the team and said hey um what are we doing with ATT what are we doing scan um 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 the direct 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 I appreciate it um 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 uh creatives how pack are creative in the performance of ads generally like is that like holy people are way under uh estimating the power of a creative or is it like okay it's like a ringe impact way way underestimating the power of creative um the the best example I can give uh do you remember Dollar Shave Club absolutely their video all right there you go do you remember it that's that creative now the person buying it may have done a really good job of just targeting males uh but I would argue you know girlfriends at the time probably would have been aware of it as well uh I think creative does it's if 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 at 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 uh Chuck on Twitter ask when someone steals your traffic say in Google search results and buying up keywords around your companies what should you do any advice yeah so that actually goes back to the uh visual that we uh showed and I'll pull it back up as I'm talking through it the biggest thing is uh 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 uh Google will do what's called a close variant if you were to do say Ecommerce 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 but if you do T if you do pull this uh 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 egregious like saying Lenny and Tim are 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 than not will uh 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 but if we do run this you can kind of see that the orange uh line here and for those that are just listening uh orange line is rather consistent over time there is a two-e period where it dips but it does come back up there's another line that uh at the beginning of this uh 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 oh wait 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 PPC hero again right PPC hero.com or whatever yes okay cool we'll share we'll share it yeah we'll link it to it in the show notes okay uh last question AI you mentioned AI you're looking for AI tools to help you with your workflows and analy data I guess is there anything you've seen AI impact in the work of paid growth and Performance Marketing or is it like in the future might other than obviously the algorithms behind on the platforms I remember having this conversation couple of months ago um AI was like couldn't get away from it right it was everywhere uh and what we were doing was leadership on to know in 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 to as always I go to the partners uh and I say hey what are we doing about this and Francisco a Google actually he he made a really good point you guys have been using AI for years now um smart bidding is AI all of the recommendations within Google ads is AI ad copy recommendations is Ai and that that's always been in the platform so we've always used those things so 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 we'll 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 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 but I could see how it could be used maliciously uh if you can do like API connections and things along those lines for sure oh wait what do you mean by that again uh Google will uh disallow certain things but it takes time uh sometimes like if the term is copyrighted in Google for ad copy it will disallow it immediately but say they need to do a check you you'll see a lot of times under revie or pending in the account uh but you'll also see Impressions uh potentially attached to that uh 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 where it's like oh let's just get a little drip here a little drip here a little drip here and that little drip equates to a lot but that's something AI could help with a human doing that would just take forever and be a total waste of time got it just run tons of ads just keep trying try try trying stuff flip through the flip through the cracks you mentioned creative it actually came back to a question I forgot to ask so you start with this going back to the team that you hire to run this sort of stuff you hire this one person growth marketer specialist type of person the next hire is a creative what's a sign that it's time to hire the creative person is there anything there of just like like is it just like we have budget and this is working or is there anything else of like okay this is a good good time yeah if you're using a creative agency and they're do and they're getting you everything you want and you're happy with it then yeah it may not make sense to hire a creative but more times not what I've noticed from creative creative um Independence tend to do better than like an agency the biggest difference I see is that matching the right tone matching the right uh creative look and feel that you're going for is accomplish way better inhouse 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 only have so much budget we can spend with them where if you have that person inhouse fully dedicated to the product itself you'll never run into those caps it feels like if anywhere that's scen area AI is going to empower that initial hire to do more creative on their own you would think yeah yeah and that's not always the best way to go uh I mean I've seen some ads in there where it's like oh yeah they're being Scrappy I 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 uh in the past it's like guys we got to be able to do retargeting but we have no creative to do uh Google has the um uh 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 uh 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 is 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 cover yeah the I said it at one point but I'll reiterate it I 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 be on Pinterest I want to be on X I want to be on you know everything okay what is the what forward thing that's where you want to be now 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 where do we start and then make iterations along the way it's just always forward think backwards plan and that's for anything what are other examples of Forward Thinking cuz like is like it in in a sense everyone will be like I want to be on every platform I guess like what are there things that people think about when they're like the Ford thing is like oh we want to go we want to win Google Google search is that is that an example of for thinking what else what else should people thinking yeah exactly what are those what are those goals you want to hit uh one of the things that uh we look at is what you know emerging channels to performing it so what is it going to take for us to consider this channel a perform in channel that isn't always on and we're we're adopting it as ba so that's going to take you know a thous conversions a month at this much spend with this much uh lift associated with it so okay we know what that looks like so we're going to backwards plan where we're going to start we're going to start with this one ad creative okay that works and 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 it's what are the Milestones along the way that you're going to do to ultimately get it from um you know testing emerging channel to perform it in 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 question what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people uh daily stoic by far uh a book I read every day quick you know excerp of what you can do from a stoic philosophy standpoint great by choice uh is another uh good one and uh deep work favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed uh X-Men 97 thoroughly enjoyed that but that made me a lot of nostalgia I actually never watched rrr when it first came out uh highly recommend that that was a lot more enjoyable than I was anticipating uh the playlist uh which is about Spotify uh welcome to rexam yeah and billion dollar code also on Netflix about uh Google uh Earth very interesting yeah rrr that movie is intense and uh very long also it's like man like three and a half hours I just split it up into different days to finish it but it was it's incredible so in 10 okay favorite recent product you recently discovered that you really love I drink too much caffeine and I've been trying to cut it out and I kind of circled back to uh this product uh I used to use called Magic mind it's a little shot every single day tastes really good uh and it does help with Focus I find um if it's a placebo great I don't care it's but it's helping me that's amazing also a huge fan of magic mind I'm friends with the guy that started it so funny that you love it I I drink it often I I'm on the subscription plan and I think he uses Shopify to sell uh to sell it he does yep it all connects amazing do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to share with friends or family find useful worker in life happiness is dedicated by expectations or dictated by expectations um 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 a of an equation uh a colleague of mine once shared he wrote a book of like emotional equations or life equations and it was happiness is uh reality minus expectations yep love that okay next question who's had the most influence on you in your career well we mentioned him before so I gotta bring him back up Casey Winters for sure um he was he was we we were at a wedding he showed me the original version of Google analytics for those of you that don't know was 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 wanted to do marketing but at that moment I knew I was going to do digital marketing and and you know W watch him grow in his career he's watching me grow in my career we still bounce 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 Casey Winters that people may not know he's a two-time podcast guest huge friend of the show Casey is really good at tennis like ins insanely good at tennis you want to know how good this is how good he was in high school he played it I think it was our I'm pretty sure it was our senior year he hadn't played in a year 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 insane did not know that actually actually played tennis uh in high school and so uh that's amazing I did not know this thanks for sharing that Timothy this was incredible I think this going to help a lot of people figure out PR 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 podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny podcast.com see you in the next episode