The REAL Reason You Can't Scale Your Google Ads w/ Caden Thompson

Increasing cold is where companies I think are failing today because they've been trained and brainwashed, including myself, on roas as this like almighty metric. And then they've been trained and brainwashed on in app metrics which more and more today are becoming less reliable. You could have a high MER and a bad ncac.

Yeah.

And you could kill it on ncac. And you drove way more new customers and MER goes down and the client flips and it's like did you guys do anything on email this month? No, we did not do. Okay, well that's where your drops coming from.

Our biggest barrier to scale is always efficiency on you know, cost to acquiring a customer. And so that's sort of our main goal is like we care about cash flow but we don't really have as much control over cash flow as like we do to like generate more new business. And so that's why we focus heavily on, you know, the metric of ncac. Let's figure out the metrics that are going to impact your bank account and then let's work back from there. And so that's the number one thing that you should be looking at is how much are you paying for a new customer.

Okay, I've got Caden, who I've had the privilege of talking to several times now, who I think I found out about you with John, John Moran stuff.

Solutions 8 John Moran. Yeah, all the, all the feeder strategy and all that fun stuff that's been kind of going around. So.

And yeah you, you obviously guys are into some like extra level wizard stuff so I was always interested in listening to you. Some of it I'm like I' going to test that and I'll see what kind of failures they come up with from my observations. And then other stuff has been great. So you guys are definitely, you know, some people that I love like staying in tune with on like what's going on just because you're doing like some real crazy out of the box stuff. But you think high level. You guys are thinking like how a business owner should look at it from like a P and L standpoint and looking at more than just in app metrics and looking beyond in app and going into what really matters is like this is all what you're doing with advertising is customer, new customer acquisition.

Right.

Obviously there's some repeat lap stuff in there too. But the goal is to acquire new customers and people forget about that sometimes. I don't know why. And so you know, the reality is some of the most important metrics like in cac Just don't even get discussed. And you guys do discuss a lot of that. So that's why I'm glad that you know, I've been able to interact with you guys. You, not necessarily John, but you on some stuff especially like in the school communities and things like that. But Kaden is doing some cool stuff with like feeder strategy. If you don't know what feeder strategy is, you'll. You'll find out through this video. I also have a YouTube video I did on the feeder strategy on the channel, so you can go check that out. And then also I, I just had a conversation with Kaden not too long ago in regards to what they're doing with some like third party tools and passing back only first cl, like attribution stuff. So like some real wizard stuff is going on in Kaden's brain. And so I was like, dude, let's just talk about this on, on the YouTube channel. And, and this is not planned. We don't have like some script for this. I was like, well, just, just hop on and let's start talking and so we'll see what. This could be one of the worst videos to ever be released on YouTube or there should be some valuable insights hopefully for some of you guys because this is probably going to be some nerdy conversations with Google Ads. So Kaden, man, I appreciate you being on.

Yeah, thanks for having me on and yeah, nerdy conversations for sure. So I think you summed it up in a really good way though, where at the end of the day every business wants more new customers. At least I haven't met one that doesn't, you know. And so what tends to be sort of that disconnect that happens in the ad platform is you get a really good result, but then you realize that it's a lot of repeat traffic or not new customers. And so then you're invested in your repeat customers. And so that's typically the bottleneck that happens in a lot of accounts that we work with. And so we were trying to think, well, why is it that we're giving the algorithm all this information but it's not really growing the business and what's going on the back end, that's sort of, you know, how we sort of move more into like the CMO, I guess you can say, level of looking at P. Ls where it's just like, how is the pipeline looking? What does the overall revenue look like when we increase ad spend? Why is that not growing as much as we see in the platform? And it just comes down to that, you know, simple issue of, you know, warm traffic versus cold traffic and then the complicated issue of attribution. But I think to kind of keep it simple, it's think of it as you have someone that, you know, let's say on average you have a repeat purchase cycle of like, you know, someone comes back twice, right? They buy one product and they come back again. Your brand traffic typically will be a lot of repeat customers coming back to buy that second product, at least when it gets attributed inside of Google. But what tends to happen is that people think that, oh, it's just the brand campaign, but they don't realize that that can seep into all the other campaigns. So you can have warm traffic that goes into your what you think is top of funnel, what you think is your middle of funnel and then you start to optimize towards warm signals or warm audiences and then it bottlenecks the overall growth of business because you're not feeding that top of funnel. And so that was kind of, you know, what we were thinking about. We're like, well, how do we kind of get around this problem? How do we push it more into cold? And John has been a huge, huge help in the space when it comes to understanding how to find the cold and warm audiences. And it's one of those things to where we've been using a tactic that's been pushing more into controlling what data we feed to Google. So think of it as instead of feeding Google like your standard, this is a purchase. We say first click new customer purchase. That's what we feed into the algorithm to then better push it in the direction of new customers. Because you're only rewarding it when it gets a first click new customer. And the key point there, which we could probably go on forever about, is the first click aspect of it, right? We don't want to go last click, want to go first click top of funnel as much as possible and try to use that to then grow the business. And we've been getting really good results with that both on Meta and Google. So that's been kind of fun to.

So let me, I'm going to bring you back to just, just in case because there's going to be many people who are watching this. Like I have no idea that you know Google in app stuff I shouldn't be relying on as or they might not know this is an issue. So based off of like what you have found is Google, especially today with their AI and like smart bidding is prone to really try to rabbit hole on Warm traffic. Now when you say warm traffic, is it always repeat buyers?

Yes, that's a really good point. It's not always repeat buyers. So it could be just bottom of funnel or middle of funnel. Right. So if you view like a full funnel, like you have your top of funnel, middle and bottom of funnel, you could have your top of funnel being from another source or another campaign and then your middle funnel looks the best. Your bottom of funnel looks the best. It's still new customers but it's not the first interaction that they're scaling with. So it's warmed up traffic per se, but it's still new. So if you scale the middle of funnel too much, it's going to not be as efficient as if you scale the top of funnel to feed the rest of the funnel. That's kind of the general idea around it though. But yes, it could be for, for new customers technically just different parts of the funnel.

And that's why when you, when you look at if you like use any sort of third party attribution tool such as a wicked reports, you know you're going to look at it will tell you percent of new visits and it's actually way lower than what you anticipate. You would be like how is this like non branded search campaign? 50%. You know, not only 50 is new and 50 is return and it's not. And that's, it's because like Google knows, hey this person's been on the website, they've looked at three pages, they spent five minutes and then they know if they're searching again for some of the. And that's why I mean again as we evolve into the future of intent based, more intent based targeting versus just keyword specific. And I actually I have a video coming out on like how Google Ad, how to run Google Ads in 2025. I talk about that evolution where it's no longer specific words, exact matches, it's more the meaning right behind it all especially as we get into like AI mode and things like that. But Google knows then like they're searching again and it's yes it is a non brand term but they've actually been to you before. Whether that was through organic, whether that was through word of mouth, whether that was through a Facebook ad, they've been on your site and, and so it is prone at times to like just try to wait for some of that warmer traffic because they know based off of the patterns that hey X amount come back during this time frame. And so we know these searches will be taking place so it does this pattern recognition I think in order to pick up or scoop up some of that warmed up traffic. But obviously it's still generating a lot of cold traffic at the same time. But I feel like most people truly think when they look at the, the campaigns that all of that is like, oh, these people have never been to us before. When the reality is actually I, and I'm saying half, I actually don't know what this proper number would be, but I've just seen in a lot of third party tools about 50% it seems like it's hitting some warm traffic. And, and so but the reality is like, hey, cool, you got a thousand clicks from that campaign, but just know like you know half of that they've already interacted with you in some form. Now me as a business owner, I actually really don't care, right. Like if, if they were searching a non brand term even though they've been on my site before, right, that means I didn't sell them yet. So I'm happy to get back in front of them. I'm fine for the machine learning to be doing that. I want their purchase. They they haven't purchased. It gets finicky or weird when you're in a repeat purchase model. So supplements or something like that. And then Google really starts rabbit holing basically repeat buyers quite often. Now sometimes the same argument could be applied though, right? If they were searching a non brand term even though they're a repeat customer, were they, were they just. Did they forget my brand or were they truly looking for another company? And somehow I popped back up with an ad and then they came back and purchased from me. So I think, hey, an ad played a role in saving a customer or at least getting them come back based off of the customer journey they just took there. So I don't. Is that, is that kind of what you guys are seeing? And some of the findings, I know you've done way more testing than anything I've done in regards to this.

Yeah, so exactly. Cover the point of like the algorithm itself will go after the easiest person to convert. Like as much as possible. You have to fight it to try to push it away from the easiest person to convert. That tends to be middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. So an example was like, for example, like a supplement brand that I was working with, they were selling protein powder. The shopping campaign was getting cold terms that were saying protein powder, but they were actually repeat customers that were coming back and typing in protein powder and then converting again. And so what tends to happen Is that even if you have all the cold signals ever, and let's say you're only pushing towards new customers in the settings, whatever the case is, it doesn't know enough about new versus repeat customers. So it will tell you after the fact that I already got the conversion, oh, it's a repeat customer. And so the philosophy that I have with going and trying to scale in businesses is let's go as cold as possible because we know that it's going to have a percentage of warm regardless. And that's going to just be the byproduct of the algorithm not being able to match a person perfectly. And so when we push in that direction, our biggest barrier to scale is always efficiency on cost to acquire a new customer. And so that's sort of our main goal is like we care about cash flow, but we don't really have as much control over cash flow as we do to generate more new business. Because cash flow could be a sale, it could be an email. There's so many other things that kind of come into play that will affect your overall efficiency from a profitability standpoint. And so that's why we focus heavily on the metric of NCAC to then say, okay, when we scale at this efficiency, is it too cold, is it too warm? And we kind of find the sweet spot. And that's how we can kind of build the rest of like the middle funnel like you're talking about, where you know, if we have people that are typing in cold terms but they haven't converted yet, then that will cycle in and scoop up those people. So we like to sort of organize audiences instead of organizing it via like the settings inside of like audience manager and trying to figure that out. It's more about the actual end result action. Right. So we might have a top of funnel that's geared more towards first click, like I was saying, new customers and then a middle of funnel that might just be geared towards new customers and not just first click. And we kind of use that to sort of build out the funnel now versus like layering on a bunch of audiences.

So what do you mean by top of funnel first click?

Yeah, so we use third party attribution software not to, I guess attribution software is not the best, I would say more so like server side tracking is a better way to say it. So think of it as for those that don't know, it's essentially a way to capture more data and have more control over the conversion action that's fed into your account is sort of the way that I would like to think about it. And so first click is one of those filters that you can apply to the conversion action or the event in your Facebook or Google Ad account. And so first click is essentially filtering to say, okay, we're only going to import in a conversion. That was the first click that this person had as well as if they're new customer. Those are the two filters. Right. So it's the first interaction that the algorithm can see or the server side tracking can see that's attributed to that campaign. So it's trying to optimize towards the first click on the top of Funnel versus like the second click on like the middle of Funnel and the third click, let's say on the bottom of.

Funnel because Google, so Google does a terrible job. I know they give you some of these metrics and you can go in and you know, have your developer tag specialist implement some stuff to give it more of like new and return customer data. And obviously if you give it like customer, it's going to know if it's a previous customer, if it's matched in with that customer match list. But Google does a really bad job with knowing who's new versus returning. You can see it in the data. Even people who are like, I am only targeting new visitor or new customers only in my PMAX settings. And I'm like, it doesn't really know. Yeah, it's not like Google just does. It doesn't do a great job. And, and so what you're doing is using tools. Are you allowed to mention these tools?

Like Blot out is one of the tools that we use for it and it's one of those things to where we use all these tools to help push it in that direction. But we've used other tools to figure out why this was the problem in the first place. And so there's tactics that still you can use that don't require the tool that will allow things to get more cold traffic per se and be able to grow the business.

So you use blot out and then blot outs, allowing you to on the back end only send first time cold. This person's absolutely on the first perspective.

Yeah.

From a first click perspective, this is the first time they've ever been to your website from all the data that it has and that Google like again, Google, if you click an ad and then like, you know, come back maybe 30 days later, you could have cleared your cookies, you could be on a different device. Like there's a lot of breaking points there. Right. Even though I think Google probably still does a pretty good job of tracking some people, but with, with something like a blot out, it's able to understand whether you've actually been to that website or not because they're buying from other data sources. So there's, there's even. And I'm not going to go too crazy there because I'll probably butcher it because even I've, I've had asked Kaden about it and then like all these companies blot out. If you're listening, you guys all, if I go to your. I'm an. I'm in the industry, okay. I talk to guys like Kaden who. And I get everyone. Like, once you're into this stuff, it's like very. You're almost in developer land. But then like the way companies explain it is so like they use marketing, marketing language and nerd talk. And it's like how I literally went how to go. I've like deciphered it by using chat GPT to break it down into like get one sentence. How would you explain this? Or give me the elevator pitch of what this company actually does. And then, oh, okay, that makes sense now. But it's like, stop using all these crazy terms like edge tag and like, what does that mean? I, I don't even know what you do yet. I don't care what edge tag is, okay? I'm not buying a car. I'm, I'm trying to figure out what the heck you actually do. But you're using blot out to then send only people who convert who were first click visitors and that wipes out all of the warm or lapsed or repeat customers from that. And now Google's AI only has that to learn from in regards to the data that you're pushing and feeding back to it.

Exactly. Yeah. So I don't know if I could share my screen. Is that possible?

Yeah, yeah, you can.

Let me see if I can do that real quick. So this was kind of an example of the difference we found for an account, one of John's accounts that just completely blew it out of the water for me.

I still don't believe these numbers. I feel like John photoshopped this, but he's a trustworthy guy, so I think.

It'S his largest account, I'm pretty sure. But yeah, we talk about this stuff all the time and like show proof and evidence of it too. But this is essentially the comparison of, you know, original, all the original conversion actions. Like Google shopping app purchase. If you have a Shopify store and you Automatically connect it. And then the comparison to for example the blot out server side tracking, it's like 10x with the total.

This is beyond. Is this, is this only new customer data that's being pushed back to.

So it's both. So we have three different actions. So there's like for example, blot out server side, new customers and then blah, server side. And then this is blottout, I think server return customer. So we don't have the first click in this one because it's an older Screenshot.

Well, there's 12,000 conversions basically total on the server.

6,000.

Server is everything. Sorry, server.

Both.

Okay. And that's obviously 10x from then what Google. The Google Purchase app was at 654.

Yeah. Which is like your standard integration with Shopify and it.

All right, but okay, so listen, this is a super extreme example. I still don't, I still don't believe it. What's the average?

I would say about 30 to 40%.

Really? That high?

It really depends on your business model. So this is a company that's been around for a while and this is a company that gets a lot of repeat purchasers and people that are outside of Google's window per se because they've been around for years. And so the service side tracking goes back as far as I've seen up to like five years. So this opens up the attribution window like tremendously. So that's also why these numbers are a little bit wider. But I typically see about a 30 to 40% shift unless it's like your buying window. So like if I click on an ad and then I convert a day later, that's a very short buying window. If I click on an ad and I buy in like 10 days, 20 days, 30 days, that's a longer buying window. And so typically on like shorter buying windows the difference is a lot less. Whereas on longer buying windows it becomes way, way more impactful on that side of things as well as if you have a lot of repeat customers or a lot of warm traffic versus not.

And again, the reason the Google Shopping app purchase is not able to get all that attribution is due to the fact that it loses the attribution during most customer journeys. Or at least 30% of them.

Yeah, typically. And by the way too, these are imports. So we know that these are all like legitimate. They've touched Google Ads because they have a Google tag attached to the conversion action. That's, that's why it's able to show in here.

Interesting oh yeah. So, and again, the reason this is all so important is like if you're just starting out, like you'll hear me say, I just use the Google Ad, like just get going.

Right?

Like you're not. This super nerd stuff that Cadence is going into is for companies who are like plateauing. And this is the plateau is a tough spot for a lot of businesses and it can happen at various stages. But. And it's hard as a media buyer today too. Working within Google Ads specifically, I don't really roll in the meta world too much, so I won't speak there. But within Google it's tough when you do hit these plateaus because it's like, all right, we're like bidding on everything possible. We've got like all of the shopping ads if you're E commerce, you know, like, we've got our, you know, really good exposure on what's selling the best for us. And you know, we've got all these good campaign structures built out, but anytime we try to spend more, we just lose efficiency. Right. And there's many reasons for that which I've break down in some, some of my other trainings on this YouTube channel. So it's not a one thing. It's not just oh, this is the why it that's happening. That's, it's a lot of different variables that are involved. When you get diminishing returns, I mean you're going to get diminishing returns and a lot of things when you're trying to reach to really high impressions of, of the auctions that you're in. So there's some of that that's involved, but part of it is also at least like from what Kaden is talking about, and this is what I always find interesting is like sometimes within standard in app metrics and within standard in app setups, just using the native Google Ads tag, for example, it's really hard to just reach a cold audience. And because Google wants to try to like rabbit hole, especially if you're using smart bidding of some sort like T roas tcpa, it does want to just kind of like rabbit hole itself into warmed up audiences. And it doesn't want to reach cold because cold can't necessarily. It doesn't know how, it doesn't have data on it, so it doesn't know how to convert from it. And the engine is built to give you the winning number that you set inside the campaign setting to make you feel, wow, this is working. Thanks Google. And give Google more money. And so scaling companies Today, back years ago with Google is great. Like you, you had a lot more control and these manual setups and everything else. I actually believed a lot of the metrics too. I mean we would run. I gave an example when we were talking Kaden where I launched a brand new company. A brand new brand. This wasn't my business, this was a client. We spun off another brand. There was no other traffic other than Google Ads when we launched it. We didn't know our current customers had no idea about it because we went with this like cheaper offer to test it. Right. So the only traffic coming to it was Google Ads and Google Ads tag and we had a great setup, always underreported by 20% of the actual revenue we were generating. So I, you know, as we know, Meta likes to kind of overinflate an app. And Google in my opinion back at least then was under reporting in most cases because it's losing some of that attribution which it, you know, sounds like things like blot out really help with.

Yeah.

But blot out hopefully maybe will send us a affiliate check after this video. So but for mentioning their name so many times. But the going cold is tough then, right? Because a lot of people freak out when there is no attribution back to that cold. And this is where you have to really go into looking at back in metrics, which I talk about a lot. It's like get out of the stupid Google Ads interface and look at what's actually coming into your business on the back end. Right. And then how many new customers did you actually acquire? Did it go up or down? Because it's like, oh, we had a great month and it's like, yeah, but you didn't actually grow new customers. So you had a great lapsed customer repeat buy come back, but you didn't. You're not going to grow. You can't grow that way. Right. Or you can maybe for a little while until you burn out, you know, your current customer base. So you have to look at these numbers. And NCAC is like looking at just new customer acquisition. It's like your cpa but just for new customer acquisition across everything too. Kind of the overall holistic metric. Right. But mers. MER has it. MERS can be great. But MER doesn't tell the full story of new customer acquisition. MER is just like an efficiency ratio across.

Yeah, everything.

Yeah, right. But you could have high. You could have a high MER and a bad NCAC because. Yeah, right, because your repeat came back and you could kill it on ncac. And you drove way more new customers. And MER goes down and the client flips and it's like, did you guys do anything on email this month? No, we did not do. Okay, well that's where your drops coming from. So it's, you have to look at all of these numbers and they, they all tell a story. But when you're buying media on Google Ads or meta, yes, you're going to have some warm stuff there. And I think it's great to that middle of the funnel stuff. I'm happy that I can get back in front of someone who did not purchase from me. But they've been on my website before. I'm happy, I'm happy for that. Okay. Because I want them to come buy from me. And so yes, that's considered remarketing a little bit. Who cares? I got their purchase at the end of the day, so they gave me their money. I'm a happy guy as long as the math works out. But, but when it goes into that, that increasing cold is where companies I think are failing today because they've been trained and brainwashed, including myself, on roas as this like almighty metric. And then they've been trained and brainwashed on in app metrics which more and more today are becoming less reliable. And you really have to step back outside of that interface and be looking at true business metrics and true business insights to really help pave the way for your advertising strategies and so few things. What's working for you right now on the cold side? So you talk about feeder strategy and I'll give a quick definition of feeder strategy for anyone who's like, what the heck is feeder strategy? They keep saying it. Feeder strategy is like, I'll use a very easy example. You have a shopping campaign. Okay. Or sorry, let's say we'll use performance max. You have a performance max campaign. You've kind of plateaued it what you do, you launch a, you launch a shopping campaign. You bid more aggressively on that and in to a stupid level sometimes like.

A 40% T. Roas.

Yeah, I don't, I haven't gone that crazy. So I'm a little more conservative. But I know John and Kaden go, go nuts on some of that. But you're just like, you're buying all the traffic basically that Google wouldn't show your ads for previously because it doesn't think these people would convert even though they might and because it's ignoring them. Right. And so you're going aggressive then on this acquisition of traffic for good stuff. It's still good stuff. And then that feeds more data because you're getting more visitors to the site and that actually ends up feeding back to the performance max campaign because pmax is prone to obviously remarket through all the other channels. It's a backfill of a bunch of those other channels, including you're going to have some shopping exposure on there still as well. Is that an okay definition real quick on feeder strategy?

Yeah, I mean pretty much you have a more restricted biz strategy with like a super less restrictive bid strategy and the less helps feed the one that's already kind of maxed out which is typically conversion based. Or the feeder might find an entirely different audience and then it becomes two different audience pools. But that's typically the general is that it feeds the other campaign.

Okay, yeah. And then what? So feeder strategy is one thing that you guys have been doing mainly on shopping. I know you've done some stuff on search really well. I'll have some questions there too. But like anything else, like what, what other nerd stuff do you guys have going on for acquiring what you would call true cold audiences?

Yeah. So I think an important point too on the first click import on the conversion action side of things is you can have one conversion based campaign that's let's say like a shopping campaign that earns like 20 clicks but the first click still happened on that campaign. So it's gonna get credit. Right. So there could be and this kind of, you know, nerdy talk again, but there could be miniature funnels that are scattered across your accounts on different campaigns that don't necessarily overlap as much with other campaigns. So you might find when you're imported in just the first click, the first click can happen on that shopping or search campaign and then that search campaign can bring them back again and again. And it'll still take the attribution of okay, I was the cause of this and I was the middle and I was the bottom of funnel. So that can still happen inside of that one campaign. But typically we see it go from that campaign maybe cycle like two or three clicks and then it goes into another campaign. But yeah, that's typically the use case that we sit work in. So there's a lot of miniature funnels, all that fun confusing stuff with attribution.

And so is feeder strategy like predominantly right now, at least on Google Ads like your guys go to play for trying to capture more true cold traffic.

Yeah. So the, so the feeder strategy came actually outside of sort of an issue that we kept running into and John came up with it. We've kind of perfected it in the sense that we only use it on accounts that have sort of hit that wall of saying, okay, you've used conversion based bidding, you now are trying to scale conversion based bidding, your CPCs are skyrocketing and you're not seeing that actual number of cost per acquisition get better. And so the reason that we found because of that was that it's sort of trapping itself inside of an audience of conversion based people. And so with a fear strategy, this is with or without the blot out tool. Just want to clarify that this was like, without it, essentially we were like, okay, can we grow this audience? Can we feed this audience somewhere else? And typically it's like, well, we can use YouTube, we can use more technical top of funnel, but YouTube attribution is horrible. And we're like, well, there's so many other people that are searching these terms and we're not able to, you know, buy them at a profitable amount. So let's just see if we can run like a manual campaign or a max clicks campaign and see if we can show up for those terms that we know are converting really well and see if that can get us past that plateau of like, we can't scale past this amount. We're stuck here. And so then from that point that was like, well, okay, we can just, we'll name it the feeder strategy. Because when we turned it on, the plateau then increased and we said, okay, we can. Now we're seeing new audiences come in, it's getting more consistent in terms of conversions in app numbers are looking better. We looked to the back end, more new customers were coming in. And so we're like, okay, there's a correlation here. And so that's sort of the step one process of you need to make sure you're maxed out on conversion based bidding and then you roll into the feeder strategy because that opens it up more.

Okay, so few things from my tests, one, I've had some success with it, right? And I did a YouTube video on an E commerce case study where it did blow up. Now there's been a few weird cases on some of ours where, and I'm just asking if you've had this happen in the beginning, feeder strategy worked really well. Both of these that didn't do as well are E commerce companies. So the ones that have, I wouldn't call them failures that it's just finicky to like figure out. Now one of them that I did the video on killed it. Still killing it. A couple others that we've tested it on killed it out of the gate died off and they were like how did this die off? And now it's like trying to figure out well what, what, what's happening here? Because we're running the same playbook and it seemed to be like just ROAS tanked. And yes, we're still using a ROAS in the account metrics but obviously we have back in access to their sales nuke it like sales even took a dip and it's like what blew up in this thing. So the. When you've seen this goes sideways or not work or works at first but then dies off, what are you guys seeing?

Yeah, so in terms of the feeder, it typically I've. So I've never seen it drop off. Like just everything just drops off. I've only seen it plateau again. But I like a different range. So I'd be curious to see like yeah, what's going on there. If we can talk maybe after and discuss that Because I'm really curious about that. But typically what we see is either. So there's sort of two scenarios. Mainly when you implement the feeder CPCs on the manual or max clicks campaign can be way higher than that of the conversion based campaign. And then if for example you run max clicks, it'll be really high and it'll start to drop lower and lower and lower and lower until it finds that healthy medium and you kind of have to watch it to see if that quality of click is good or bad and then decide if you want to roll it over.

Why does it start high and decrease? But people ask that all the time.

Yeah. So typically if you run max clicks it's going to try to find the clicks first and then optimize to get more clicks. Right. So when it finds the clicks it's going super aggressive. I just need to get volume on this. When I get the volume now I can sift through and say okay, what's a cheaper click? That will be sort of, you know, the same level of like interaction per se.

And that's usually about a week to two training period depending on the.

The account and the buying cycle. Yeah, typically. And how. Learning phase.

That should be. Use that term, learning phase.

But yeah. And so when that sort of. Because that's why we switch back and forth between max clicks and manual. It just kind of depends on what the account looks like. It typically is an issue of CPCs get high after we scale it, client freaks out and then we have to revert it Back. But if we get past that period and we say, okay, clicks are fine, backend numbers are good, we get into that level of okay, we can scale this and we just push it further. We might see like different audiences in each campaign. And so then we have to kind of teeter, totter it to figure out what the ratio is. And that will fluctuate constantly because demand on search is going to be all over the place. And so we typically get to the point where we scale it up, we max out on the demand capture side of it, and then we just, we plateau again. And then that gets into the whole idea of like now we need to go into like YouTube or Facebook or you know, something else to sort of push it further beyond its current scale.

Pushing further top of funnel audiences, basically. Right, right, correct. Yeah. How so? The structures that we've been testing so far are a lot of like the feeders, predominantly all products. Like we're just blasting, in most of those cases, we're just giving it everything, just go let it rip low t row as and then, you know, seeing what happens from there. How far have you taken it? Like have you split off certain categories or brands and now you're running like feeder strategies at specific levels?

Yeah, this is a very, this is an open up Pandora's box. So there's, there's so many variants to it when it comes to that. The general framework is that you find the product that you're the most profitable on, that's sort of the hero product that's the winner. And you have that be sort of like the beginning of the feeder strategy. Right. You put that on like the aggressive bidding for that new awesome products, already tested the market. It's great. You see how far you can push that. And then you have your performance max campaign or you know, another campaign that's just a lot or a lot higher of a bid cap on that. Right. So you have one that's like a 40% troas, one that's like 100% trois kind of thing. Just to kind of, you know, get the idea out there. You can performance max or standard shopping, that's just a variant. Typically we do performance max for standard shopping. And then what happens is the good products, we push it as far as we can and then we hit a plateau and then we diversify and say, okay, let's add in more products and then it sort of expands out again. So it depends on your business on like how many products you have. But it's typically a question of it starts, you know, Specific goes broad and then it starts to get more specific and then we hit a plateau again. It goes broad. So it's kind of like if you want, if you're optimizing towards getting more results, you, you diversify it out more. If you hit a wall, you then combine them back in together. So it's a, it's a constant in and out from what we've seen over like months and or years in some accounts.

All right, do that we'll go to. Because you said you worked with like a, a supplement company, so I'll use them as an example. Let's say, hey, Kaden, I'm a supplement E commerce business. Not too big. We spend, you know, 10, 20k a month. And right now for the most part, we have a performance max campaign. And we have several different asset groups broken out by product type. So we sell protein powder, we sell creatine, we sell multivitamins. I'm just throwing out obviously very generic stuff. Okay. Those are three separate asset groups. We want to test the feeder strategy. You're saying, okay, start with a standard shot. Let's say they're hitting a 300% ROAS, okay. And like that's what we, that's what we need right now. And obviously you would dive further into like back in metrics. Okay. But I want to roll with this conversation in regards to the masses. Okay. And how, how it's, it's being applied. So you're saying, okay, do you have a hero product or products? And like actually we do. It's, you know, muscle milk protein chocolate. Then, all right, cool. You're just saying, go build a standard shopping campaign. Put your muscle milk protein chocolate variation skew one skew in that shopping campaign and put a 40% T row as on it.

And that is, I look at, for example, so there's multiple things here. So number one, yes, the summary of it, yes, there's a lot of if this, then that. So yes, I would try to add more products in there if, for example, the volume is not that high. So you have to be very aware of like what the conversion volume in the actual account is first to then also use that as like a reference to what kind of budget you want to throw at it.

Smaller accounts with less volume and by small, let's say 15k or under and spend. Not always because obviously volume could be relative to what you're converting on. So if you're selling, selling $1 products or something crazy, I don't know, I don't know of anyone doing that. But like, and you have thousands of conversions from that for a low aov, I guess you would have a lot of volume in that case.

But test kits probably in that space.

Okay, yeah, that's a. Yeah, so, but, but let's say 15k whatever per month or under. You're saying like in those cases, don't probably start with one SKU, give it more SKUs to feed.

Pareto's rule is kind of the general frameworks like 80, 20, what's driving 80% of the sales. You want to put that in?

Okay, and now Kaden, how do I know if this is working?

Well, that's, that's like I said, the philosophy that I have is, you know, looking at P. Ls, right. So what is your goal? New customers? What impact did this change have towards your goal? Right. So that's the number one thing. So if, and to kind of put this, I'll put this to the extreme, right. So if I'm a business and I want to grow and my goal is to get more new customers, I want to try to figure out what the cause of the new customer growth is in the first place. I have accounts right now that are totally fine with like a 0.01 ROAS, like hardly like 10% ROAS and are scaling totally fine in terms of the new customer acquisition side of it. And whenever we scale Google or scale Facebook, we see the correlation happen on the back end, which is what the be all end all results kind of thing is where how much money am I paying to get a new customer? And then what's the correlation there? Right. And so I'm using benchmarks to then triangulate that. So the goal that I have for all the clients that I have consult, all that kind of stuff is let's figure out the metrics that are going to impact your bank account and then let's work back from there. Right. So like cost, acquiring a customer, obviously profitability is in the equation, but I'm more so responsible for how much you're paying for new customer. Not if you launch like you said, that email campaign that's going to make your global roas go up. Right. And so that's the, the number one thing that you should be looking at is how much are you paying for a new customer.

So before you would test this, you would say a, either you have clarity on true backend sales. So let's say you're work for an agency or a freelancer, you have to have backend sales access to your client or you're using A tool like Wicked Reports or something to be able to at least track the customer journey or the click journey through. Through this as well, somewhat.

I'm more so. I'm more so a proponent of just looking at top line. The attribution game is like, I don't really look at it as much. I look at like sort of like what the platform says and then the end results. The attribution game is. Tries to play in the middle. I use that sometimes, but I've been moving a little bit more and more away from that.

Even if you were to look at the feeders being okay, feeder is going to have a more first. If you're looking at like first click attribution, it should have first click attribution to it. If you're looking at like a Wicked Reports.

Right, yes, but that would be like a middle of the story. Not like the actual result of it too though. So because attribution is still not perfect, it might be like 80% accurate, 90% accurate, 99% accurate. But yes, correct. Yeah, I would look at that as a clue between the two.

Okay, so, and I'll summarize this at the end for someone who's like starting out, wants to test it. Because here's the thing people listen to I said this on someone else podcasts. I. I respect John and you at a very high level. So everything I said, I'm not speaking ill, but people in the industry, like, nerd out, like super nerds, love your guys's nerdy conversations. And then, but. But John is like on 10 Red Bulls when he talks. And, and then, you know, yeah, there you go. And then, and then he's got like all these awesome ideas, but sometimes they're just ideas. They're like, he's. He's just in the midst of. It'd be like, I found the cure for cancer. When you actually just got a glimmer of like hope from your testings. And then it's like he goes, some people take that as like the drug and then they all die. So. Because like, actually, no, that test had, you know, there. It worked once in a weird way. But technically, if you try universally doing this, it's going to kill accounts. But I see a lot of people when I'm talking to them and if they know of John and like, yeah, I'm doing the feeder strategy and I'm like, you guys spend 2k a month. You don't need to be running some complex crazy stuff. Just start running that, get some volume, figure out what you are. The Reason your account isn't working at 2k a month is not because you're not utilizing the nerdiest of nerd tactics by John Moran, okay? It's because you guys don't even have a foundation yet. And so don't be doing that. You're actually hurting yourselves. Like this type of stuff is for companies who are a little more mature within their advertising programs and they're trying to continue to work on, on, on growth stages where they're finding this plateau. And so I will summarize this in a way for someone who like wants to test this in like a conservative manner with that said, when it doesn't work a have you had that happen? Because I have like flat out doesn't work. Why is that? What do you think it's typically an.

Issue on the demand channels or a competitor that has a better message than them. So like in every single scenario that I've had with the feeder strategy, it's either it works, it plateaus, or the demand side of it, there's a competitor that is taking up or the demand is just not there per se. Because at the end of the day search and shopping are demand channels and people are flocking to those channels based on how they heard about the product or the industry or whatever the case is. They have a problem they're looking to solve. And does your message resonate with the majority of people typing in that specific keyword or not? That's typically the biggest differentiator of it. So I haven't seen it completely like just tank an account. I've never seen it happen, but I have seen it hit a plateau and I have seen it not work in terms of not being able to push as much as you want it to push.

I've seen so this is an interesting one and this is going to lead me into search and then we can wrap up here in like 10 minutes because I, I think we booked an hour and we're already almost there. So sorry.

Works.

But I've seen I have one where and this. I always hate when this happens because then I go in like my tinfoil hat land and start thinking of conspiracy theories in regards to like Google robbing me. But I have one where so because what I'm trying to do in this case is actually. So I started feeder strategy and this is a high SKU client I started with all products and I've done that most in most cases my feeder campaign shopping I just give it everything.

So conversion based.

I start there. What's that?

So the conversion Based campaign. You gave everything.

Yeah, yeah. So I. These are accounts that were predominantly on performance max. Then I'm introducing a new standard shopping that's super aggressive on bids. Right. And I usually will start lower budget there and then start slowly ramping that up. By the way, I don't go as crazy in cases and some of them I have like I've done the 50t ROAS but a lot of times let's say it's an account that's on 500 ROAS. I may start a feeder at 250300 just and. And so I'm almost like funneling now just shopping traffic into shopping away from pmax basically turning PMAX into a remarketing only campaign at that point. But I've, I've had some success just doing that strategy alone. Right. But then I'm like all right, what if I started taking like you guys were talking about individual skus that I really, I want to push further because I'm. I look at as much as I can in regards to like impressions share on that stuff and it's like okay. Or I have a competitor that's. Now every time I'm searching an incognito or whatever they're like beating me. And so it's like okay, I want to push heavy on that. I've had a. I have this case where I've done that with a product category. So I'm trying to do a feeder strategy now at a product category level. Okay. So this product category and it's got like we'll call it a couple hundred SKUs. I have a performance mask campaign already set up for that product category because I'm uniquely managing that. And it's got, it had its own unique roas goals too. And it's different. It'd be like selling keyboards and water bottles so I don't have to worry about audiences crossing over. Okay. I then took the individual SKU level feeder strategy because I really want. And I did see every time I'm incogni. Incognito searching now I'm like taking up more of the ad spots. Right. However, it's like Google just robbed me, did the math. I'm getting a 50 roas and that's it. Like sales actually haven't increased on it. It's like it increased my click traffic from that feeder strategy. But it's just a bunch of non converting traffic that I'm now getting. Have you, have you ran into that even though yes, I'm increased cold traffic. It's like I just Increased a bunch of low intent cold traffic. Even though if you look at the search terms it's okay. And then after you answer we'll go into the search side of some tests I've done and then I'll go into my conspiracy theory on all of it.

Yeah, so I always look at feeder blended every time. Right. So I'll never look at like the manual or the lower T roas campaign as like its own entity. I'll always blend it with the performance max or the you know, higher T roas shop and campaign. What I typically see though in those scenarios is that that's what I see as the plateau where it's like either there's a blockage of education from someone that's typing in this term that's not like showing convergent signals to then the actual end result. It could be just the lag time from like, instead of it being seven days from like being you know, solution unaware to like solution aware kind of thing. And it might jump to like you know, 30 days or 40 days. But let's be real, we don't want to wait like 30 or 40 days to have just money churning. And so what I like to do is I'll do that and I view that as a plateau fail where like it doesn't necessarily grow based on the current demand and so then you're just kind of stuck at the current rate you're at and you have to use other demand channels to then grow the business. But I always try to look at them blend blended.

Yeah, I agree with that. And I, and I was actually, I was looking at it from SKU level then product category level data as an aggregate in the account and all I saw was a diminishing return on that. Okay, then there's this feeder strategy for search campaigns and there's a few ways of going about it that I've, you know, John has done the, this is when the whole thing feeder strategy really came out. That video he did where it's like Google's like price fixing and cause a lot of noise there. But he suggested hey remove, give it a fake conversion and like, like YouTube engagement or something and let it go on that. Right?

Yeah.

Now I didn't quite buy into that and it seems like you guys have change the way you're going about search campaign feeder strategies now. However I have, I, I have tested it and all I found was it does kind of give you some good traffic in the beginning and then CPC start decreasing but then it just like suffocates out because it's like you have it on a conversion that it can't actually get and over time it never will get it. And so then it just dies. And that's what I have found. And then it turns into like one of Those, you have $100 budget on it and it gives, it spends like $2 a day because it's like, it's like this machine that's just like broken, limping around. Here's a click or two. Yeah, that's like what it turns into.

Yeah, so, so a couple things with that. So the first thing was the idea that that generated from was like three years ago and it was actually a speech that was done on, I think it was traffic and conversions where we showed evidence of an account that didn't have a conversion action in it but was still getting more efficient on getting people to convert even though we weren't sending in any data. And the reason for that was because, you know, long story short, the client had a separate vendor that was holding the website hostage. And so we essentially couldn't add the conversion action to the website. And so we looked at backend numbers and looked at Google, we scaled up Google backend numbers, got better and more efficient even though no conversion action was happening. So then it kind of led to the tinfoil hat conversation of like, well if it's getting more efficient at getting leads and the terms are staying the same but it's just improving on efficiency, then Google probably knows the type of user behavior because they're trying to optimize towards people interacting with the website, meaning that they're getting a good experience on the platform. So like that was kind of like the thought process and like sort of like evidence of it where it's like we can see like this is causing it. And so that's what led into the feeder strategy going more towards the like fake conversion side of things to get outside of that CPC cap or that high CPC bid that we were looking at previously. It's shifted to more of a manual and click based feeder versus just a conversion based. So we don't use the conversion based side of it. It's totally different bid strategy because the concept is you're trying to feed it more information of users that it's just unaware of from a conversion standpoint.

Right now let's say you have a search campaign, 200 ROAS is the bid strategy, you're running on it and then you've plateaued it, hey, I can't really grow this without I lose. You know, it decreases in efficiency CPCs go up, CPA goes up, ROAS goes down. Right, you're now then creating a new search campaign. Not to the existing, it's a new search campaign and the goal there is to actually feed traffic to feed into the conversion based campaign. And what's the setup like that?

Yeah. So two things. So Troas like you said is at 200% and you're at a plateau. So typically that's a restriction on the bid strategy. Right. So you're not able to learn the algorithm, isn't able to learn past it saying oh, I can get a 200% to ROAS. So the first thing I'll do because I'll try to drop that trois down to see if I can learn within one campaign still to keep the efficiency all together and have as much learning as possible. When we get to the point where let's say that we're on maximize conversion value and we're super aggressive on conversion based and we're not seeing that efficiency happen, I control things more so off budget versus the bid strategy. So I'll push the budget on a super aggressive bid strategy and as long as we're at a 2% or a 200% troas or 200% roas goal, I'm fine with that, but I won't scale past that. So then I'll go into saying, okay, let's do the feeder strategy. Then we'll say, okay, we need to get past the 200% or we need to scale up on volume on this side of the equation if there's a conversion based campaign. So I'll say, okay, we can't scale up by just increasing the budget. We're on a super aggressive bid strategy so we don't have any learning issues. But whenever I push the button to scale on that original campaign, CPC spike up and efficiency just goes out the window. So say okay, that's the problem. The solution then is feeder strategy which I'll probably do a exact match on the winning keywords. So we have super, super high control over the targeting and then I go on manual CPC or max clicks based on, you know, the client and sort of what we're looking for. I'm more of a fan of manual CPC because I can control it and see it right away. But max clicks is also viable if you just want to get more volume and you want to see it over a longer period of time.

And the goal, the idea there is like a conversion based campaign. So even if you're on aggressive maximize conversion value bid strategy, Google is going to potentially ignore some of the searches because it doesn't feel like you could get conversions from it. And now going to a click based feeder on those top keywords you are able to show in those auctions now because you're, it's no longer a conversion base. You're literally just buying traffic at that point. You're, I mean the whole, the bid strategy itself is literally paying per a click, not necessarily for a conversion. Few things on that I haven't, I haven't tested that as much and my tests there have been harder to determine whether or not I'm having that much success with it. I've even done the fake conversion thing too which has been fun to get cheap because it starts off expensive, it gets super cheap and then it's like still killer search like terms like if I could ask a genie, give me this traffic that for search terms it's like cool, this is exactly what I bid on. But then it's like well I increased that but I still didn't get any additional sales on the back end. Then I've done, I'm do, I've tested manual CPC max click strategy as well in many cases on those it's lead generation companies I'm trying to pump up for not necessarily E commerce. Now here's my conspiracy. When it doesn't work and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Google, it's a rigged game. Okay, I, I totally believe that. It would be stupid not to believe that I would rig the game myself. Okay, if I was Google. I mean it's so craz, like it's the best business in the world. You know all the advertisers, you literally know all their goals and now everyone's telling you how much they're willing to pay for a conversion. It's like yeah, oh my gosh, perfect. This is like what an incredible system to own all of the moving parts. And you know, people just pay, they don't even like think it's like here, I don't even know what I'm buying, right? Like they're hiding half of that stuff now. So the whole thing's bananas. But what it's the world we live. You gotta play the game. It's, I mean the game makes money. Just continue to figure out how to make money within it. And then hopefully yeah, Google I, I, that's why I always talk. People are like aren't you freaked out about chat, GBT and AI? No, because now Google has to go back to innovation. They've been Optimizing as a company for like the last five years. Innovator. Now they need to go back to innovating. And I'm happy, happy to see some true competition in the space. Like let's be honest, if people move to LLMs for searching, which we are, and especially in informational type searches, but if people even move to commercial intent searches for like buying products and stuff, do you not think these LLMs are going to have advertising involved? Like no. No one on the street that's not a nerd is paying $20 right now to chat GPT. Okay, that's not the monetization model. So eventually ads always get into it. And as people who make a living helping companies acquire customers through marketing channels will have a place there. So I'm actually optimistic about it all. But with that said, I think that Google knows all the advertisers and they know all of their conversions. Right? And it's no long like how the ad auction works is probably really hard to explain Explained today when you're now talking about like CPA and T. RO as bidding. It made sense when it's manual. But when I read the definitions today I'm like, I'm not entirely sure how this works but they make it sound like it does. But they know that Caden's willing to pay fifty dollars for a cpa, Austin's willing to pay a hundred dollars a CPA and these three other advertisers are willing to pay X amount of dollars. And we're all bidding on the same stuff. Stuff especially if you, if you're in like you know, personal injury lawyer, like generic stuff like where it's like literally this is what people want. Or like pest control companies near me like okay, all the pest control companies advertising are probably going to go on that term. Google knows what you're willing to pay for it. What they don't want is one advertiser dominating why they would rather have money from 10 advertisers. Right. And so they're trying to make everyone happy and not just one greedy company gets everything because that would kill the system. And I think they know because on a per day basis there's only X percent of people searching for pest control company near me who are actually ready to pick up the phone or fill a form out. Okay, that's just data. Not 100 of people. That's the, that is so high intent, right?

Get more high intent than that can't.

Get more high intent. And that's not 100% conversion rate of people literally willing to make that next step. It's only a certain percent now. It's going to be pretty high, but it's only a certain percent. I think they divvy up the conversions. I think there's like, obviously you can still optimize and get around like growing that, but I think they divvy up those conversions and the cases where I feel like I can't move the needle any further is because truly I'm getting scrap traffic. Even though the search term looks good, it's as low intent for a high intent term as you're going to get. So, yes, I got pest control company near me. I, I exploded more of those clicks, but ultimately I got zero more conversions from it. And, oh, well, Austin, maybe you're going to get those 30 days from now or 10 days from now.

We can't wait that long.

Yeah, on some of that, I haven't seen that.

That.

And I'm like, am I actually buying just absolute crap? Is this like, Is this like even what they searched or what is happening here? Because if, if you go back, I've been in this game for over 10 years. If you go back to the manual days, I could, I mean, I could just print money on. With alpha beta structure.

Right.

You just like camp on those exact terms that make money. And even trying to do that with like in a target impression share bid strategy on some of that stuff, unless it's brand terms, it ultimately doesn't sometimes lead to more. It just, you just get the diminishing return. And part of me is like, all right, are they truly just divvying up conversions to the smart bidding advertisers who are telling them how much they're willing to buy a conversion for, and then everything else goes to this, like, scrap traffic and then that's what all the clickbaits people get. What do you think on that?

Yeah, I mean, the biggest thing, the biggest correlation that we've seen and I mean, it's just common sense. I feel like at this point too, where it's like the higher the CPC is for that exact same search term, the higher the intent is. Right. So we're bidding on intent more so than we're bidding on search terms now. And that's kind of been one of those things to where, you know, it's probably changed over the last two, three years on how they've kind of shifted away from like keywords to more intent. And that's been sort of the reason too, why sometimes on the feeder I'll use manual because they don't want lower cost CPCs. So that's why there's kind of a choice to be made there. So completely agree though in that standpoint of like Google wants diversity in this space and it's all based, I mean literally it's a business, they're going for profitability. Like they're, you know, oh, this person will pay $90 for this click. Okay, cool, maybe I'll pay $90 for it if I get a 50% conversion rate, you know. So it just kind of depends on the risk tolerance you have as well too on how much you want to test that. But the feeder has been a lot safer for us to kind of go through and see, okay, is that happening in this specific pool or audience pool or not? Meaning that we can bid and control the bids more and not have Google inflate the cpc. But sometimes there's a scenario where like our bids on the manual campaign will be super high, like double what the maximized conversions bids are and we're getting a better cpa. So it's super unique towards like which audience pool is actually driving or what type of results are going to be driven from that. But I think the concept of how the algorithm's laid out is, is that, yeah, that's perfect. I think.

Okay, so rigged.

A rigged game it is. And you have to play the rig as much as possible.

That's still makes money. I know people can, we can all complain, it's easy to do. But I'm like, you know, I got, I have business owners that will like yell about Google. I'm like, what are you, okay, what are you going to do about it? Like you either can make money still within it, it just might not be as much as you were making five years ago, but like make some money and the cheese is moving, Keep moving, figure out other, other things, work on your business. It I have. Google has allowed a lot of lazy business owners. I think they rode this bowl wave and then, and then like if you got on Google early, you could just print money. Dude, do you remember when shopping ads were free?

Yeah.

Talk about printing money like crazy. And, and so some of these businesses that started early and were able to capture a lot of Google Ads traffic early on and like optimize accounts based off of that. They were, they're just lazy. They like, that's all they knew. And now it's like things are changing for some of them or it's harder or they're seeing diminishing results, returns from it and they're just, they just want to Yell at Google and it's like, yeah, Google's fleecing you, they're fleecing everyone, but you can still make money within it. So maximize that. But what are you doing to work on your business? What are you doing to expand other channels? Nothing. Most of them are doing nothing. And that's like the problem. Right? So, man, I, I wish we could actually like, nerd out more on I. There's so many other questions I have in regards to, regards to like, you know, like, I believe top of funnel traffic predominantly should dollar should be pushed into meta. And this is coming from a guy who's not really a meta guy, but I think top of funnel just is very finicky on Google. Way harder to make work in my opinion, based off of what I see on the meta side of things. So there's that holistic approach there and then. Yeah, so there's a lot more. Maybe we can chat another time and do one of these to wrap it though, if you're. If I'm an E commerce business today and let's say I'm spending 20, 30, 40,000, predominantly a lot of PMAX and I'm like, man, I want to test feeder strategy, but this sounds beyond me and I'm a little scared to do it. Caden, what's, what would you tell that guy without, you know, breaking his account?

Well, first thing I would say is, number one, try playing with the budget on performance max and see if it even impacts your business. Because what we find in a lot of cases is people spend too much on performance max or bottom of funnel and we just trim the budget in half and we see nothing change on their backlink volume, like zero. So I do that first just to see if pmax is even driving more new customers at like a good efficient rate or just cycling the repeat. But if you're trying to, if you want to do feeder and you're like, yes, it's not working, we need to, you know, use another strategy. Then I would just take the 8020 rule, you know, predator's rule, where whatever's driving the majority of sales, 80% of sales, put that in a separate campaign, go more aggressive on that and look at your back end numbers. That's the key to all of this, is looking at the back end numbers. What is your end cap? How much am I paying on marketing across everywhere divided by the amount of new customers and that'll give you the end result and you just benchmark that with the changes. So pretty straightforward on like the feeder, Like I said, standard shopping, lower T roas than what you're running on PMAX. 80% of the. The winners, I guess, are the winners that drive 80 of your sales.

Okay.

Just let it run and see what happens.

And you still would suggest a very like a 40. T Roz, or are you okay going conservative? Like, I've. I've gone. Like I said, if. Let's say my goal is a 300% or. Sorry, I think in my example, I said 500% ROAS. I went to like a 300.

Yeah. So I typically will control based on budget, not as much roas. So if the account doesn't have that much history and you're seeing that. Okay, I don't want to. It just depends on your risk tolerance. So, like, you can say, okay, we can push a 40% troas on there on a super low budget. So that's a lower risk. You know, it's lower risk, but you're super aggressive. Or you can say, well, I just want to see what happens if I cut the troas in half and put it on here at like a higher budget. And it might spend. It might not. You can watch that. And then you might have to get to the point where you have to trim down that troas.

You have no accounts that you run troas on. You only just opt to max conversion.

Value on top of funnel. I try to mainly just go for super aggressive bidding because it's all I just control based on budget. That's my biggest thing. So, like, I, like, in every single one of my accounts, you'll never see a T row as at like, you know, 500% and like a hundred dollars a day, let's say, is the budget. And then you see the spend at like 300 over the last seven days. That you'll never see that in any accounts.

No, I agree. Well, yeah, that suffocates it out over time, too.

So, yeah, I will use it, though, to play with the algorithm sometimes.

Okay. That opens up a whole other conversation. So maybe that's the next one. Kaden. Appreciate it. Where can people find you? Obviously, I'll have you linked in the description below.

Yeah, so we got a YouTube channel as well, too, where we showcase all this stuff as well. So if you don't, you know, believe what I say, then we have proof. You can just see us showing results firsthand. But like Austin was saying as well, we were testing stuff and so we pushed up the live and it's like, hey, we've seen this work in five accounts kind of thing. And so we try to try to do as best as we can to try to keep it as honest as possible in terms of, like, don't go do this right away, but if you want to do it, here you go. And yeah, so YouTube CPRO growth, we're there. And then on LinkedIn as well, you could find me as well, too.

Cool. And again, you can find all of his information in the description below. So, dude, had fun. I want to do this again. Appreciate you being on, man.

Yeah, thanks for having me. And excited to talk again.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks.