Andrew Maff 00:03
It's how we look at it for our own agency. It's how I look at it for really any of my businesses. It's extremely high level. How much did I spend? What did I get in return? Overall?
Narrator 00:14
Welcome to the E comm Show podcast. I am your host. Andrew Maff, owner and founder of BlueTusker, from groundbreaking industry updates to success stories and strategies. Get to know the ins and outs of the e Commerce industry from top leaders in the space. Let's get into it!
Andrew Maff 00:33
Hello and welcome to another episode of the E comm Show as usual. I am your host, Andrew Maff, and today I'm flying solo because I wanted to talk to you about ecommerce SEO. It has been an extreme hot topic here at BlueTusker, and it's something that I really wanted to talk about, because I think there's a common misconception.
Andrew Maff 00:28
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the E comm show as usual. I am your host, Andrew Maff, and today I'm going to be talking to you about the a word, yeah. Attribution I'm in, if you're watching this, I'm in my beautiful new office, and I'm enjoying a glass of bourbon. So we're going to see, we're going to see how this episode is going to go.
Andrew Maff 00:47
So the reason I wanted to do this with bourbon is because discussing attribution stresses me out just as much as it probably stresses everyone else out. And there's so much to say about it, and so little to say about it, and it is a constant conversation. It has been the bane of my existence for years and years and years, ever since the iOS change in I believe that got pushed through in 2020.
Andrew Maff 01:19
It's, uh, it, you know, it's been fun. I have a theory. Now my theory is based on where I think things will be in the future. I think that digital advertising is becoming more and more like what I referred to as traditional advertising, your radio, your TV spots, your billboards, sponsorships, etc.
Andrew Maff 01:46
When you think back to Mad Men days, great show, by the way, you never saw a clip where, like, the owner of the business came in and was just like, what was the ROI on that billboard that we did? Because it's not physically possible. There's no way you're figuring that out. Even billboards, when they do, like, oh, visit this specific page and it's like, got, you know, it's got a specific code to it, and so they know it came from that billboard. It's still not perfect, because it's not attributing the people that were like, I just want to know who want to know who you are first and started that process there.
Andrew Maff 02:28
It gets even more convoluted when you start to now factor in, especially with E commerce. I think that attribution for like traditional B to B, or if you're just doing like a traditional D to C approach, and you only have one website to send people to, and that's it. It's a little bit different, but with E commerce and with overall brand and the ability for consumers to purchase wherever the hell they want, it makes it that much more difficult, because we all know Amazon's not sharing their data. The Walmarts of the world, if you're in pet space, Chewy, or Wayfair, like all of those companies, hide their data, and so they're not allowing you to integrate really much of anything, and so you can't track that. So you know, you've got platforms out there. I won't name them, because we do work with them, because there are benefits to having more data for you to work with. However, these attribution platforms are nothing more than glorified UTM trackers. And if someone wants to fight me over it, let's have, let's go. It's, it's a fancy UTM tracker. It's really all it is. It's not perfect. It definitely doesn't track as well as it says it should. How you look at attribution is also a completely different question. Some people like to look at first click. Other like to look at last. Some like to do more data driven stuff. So like, it's all over the place, and it really kind of depends on how you want to look at it. So we have different theories on it. I have my own theory. I am going to give you the theory of what I would do if I was just focusing on my own e commerce business.
Andrew Maff 04:13
Brands that we work with sometimes feel differently. And so that's where it becomes more of a question of, how do you choose to look at things?
Andrew Maff 04:24
For example, branded campaigns. So everyone's got a different name for them. Some people call them defensive campaigns, bidding on your own brand name.
Andrew Maff 04:36
I'll guarantee you, there are definitely listeners that probably just completely shivered when they heard that, because they hate them that much. I know a lot of companies we work with right now that are all very much not big fans. Why should I have to pay for my own brand name when they were searching for me and they were probably going to come to my website anyway?
Andrew Maff 04:59
Well, A, you have ease of use. You're up at the top. They found you right away, and you didn't risk them going somewhere else. B, you are jacking up the CPCs on the competition that's already bidding on your name, so you're kind of slowing the competition down a little bit. And then C, if you don't, someone else probably will, especially if you're doing really good advertising. And if those companies have any type of even somewhat tolerable copy behind them, they can always write something a little cheeky that will actually get them to click, and then you very well may lose a customer. So yes, in a certain theory, you are paying to reacquire a customer that you may or may not have already gotten. However, there are so many ways to keep those costs extremely low. If we're talking about a Google Ads approach, there's ways to keep the cost per click down, whether it's through like just Max clicks or a target impression share or something like that. There's actually software out there that we use for brands that have, like, serious branding, usually they're spending like, well over 10k a month on just earning their brand name, where it's like kind of an AI element that it will actually you have two different campaigns. You have your traditional branding campaign, but then you also have a second one that's AI driven. And what it does is it will turn off your other one and turn on the AI one as needed based on the user. And so it's, it's wild, like it's, we've used it on as many brands as we can that are hitting those numbers, and it's just cool to look at, because basically you're talking like CPAs, like, cut down by like, a 10th of what they normally are spending, and really what it's doing, at least the way that I understand it is, it's killing your current campaign for a split second and triggering the AI one only in scenarios where it knows that for that user, you're going to win that bid at just a penny. So it's only bidding a penny, whereas, obviously CPCs for your own brand name can get up there, especially when you're spending that kind of money.
Andrew Maff 07:12
By the way, if I start to ramble, I start to talk about one thing and then get into another subject, you can thank Elijah Craig tonight.
Andrew Maff 07:19
Thanks, Elijah, this is fun. I feel like I should do these more often and just turn it a little bit into a venting session. We had a call today with the client that just the conversation of attribution was it's like pulling hair, pulling teeth and hair, all of it, pulling everything out.
Andrew Maff 07:39
So here's the thing that my theory and how I like to look at this. So it's how we look at it for our own agency. It's how I look at it for really, any of my own businesses. It's extremely high level. How much did I spend? What did I get in return, overall? So if you're an Amazon seller and you're hopefully doing things correctly. That means that you're looking at a tacos, right? And if you're not an Amazon seller, that effectively means your total advertising cost of sale, by the way. Fun fact, someone's going to call bullshit on this, and I don't care, because I still stand by it. I'm like, 99% sure that I came up with that, and I want all of the credit for it.
Andrew Maff 08:22
Thank you.
Andrew Maff 08:25
Years ago, with an old client who bought me a t shirt that says, like, it's TACOS time, and there was tacos on it because he thought that the term I came up with was hilarious. And I still have that shirt. I don't know why I said that.
Andrew Maff 08:39
So you're thinking of TACOS, total advertising cost sale. Basically, what you're looking at is what how much money did I spend, and then how much revenue did I earn across the entire account. And the reason that you look at that from an Amazon perspective is that the more money that you spend on Amazon, the more traffic you're getting to your listings, the more, especially if it's performing well, then the more sell through, and the higher conversion rate you have. And then obviously, as long as your product doesn't suck, the better reviews you get. So the more and more money that you spend on advertising, the more you're driving to that listing, which is a ranking factor, and so your organic ranking starts to improve. So it's a very, clear correlation. On Amazon, they make it pretty obvious, where you'll see BSRs get way, way better as you're driving more and more qualified traffic to that listing, and they're converting than if you killed your ads. And I've seen it time and time again. Of brands are like, what if I just turned off my ads? What do you think would happen? Honestly, you would probably you'd lose whatever revenue you're getting from those ads. That's pretty self explanatory. And then it would take a little bit. It's not going to happen overnight, but in like a month, you're gonna tank. And they're like, I don't really know. I think it'll run ball. And sure enough, I think it's like, it's, I usually have, like, an over, under of like three, two to three weeks before they reach back out. They say, like, okay, let's turn it back on.
Andrew Maff 10:00
And it's usually the under. A couple times it's been the over, but by like days.
Andrew Maff 10:05
So you look at this number because you know the clear correlation of your organic traffic that you're getting from your paid advertising and the overall improvement. So that's why you look at how much money did I spent versus how much money did I get overall.
Andrew Maff 10:20
From a D to C perspective. That is exactly how I think most brands should do it. I don't think it's any different. It's kind of a like a rising tides lift all boats sort of thing, right? Someone told me that, I guess metaphor. I guess it's not really a metaphor for that line, someone said that to me, like earlier this year, and I've heard it before, but for some reason, it's stuck, and I keep using it. Oh, I'm beating it like a dead horse right now. So rising tides lifts all those boats.
Andrew Maff 10:52
The difference is, from a DTC perspective, every platform has its own purpose, right? Google is very middle of funnel. Unless you're doing YouTube ads, or you're struggling with display, maybe you're doing some interesting top of funnel stuff, where you're driving traffic to certain landing pages and like different, different approach. But it's pretty middle funnel for the most part. Meta is a little bit of both. I see it as primarily a top of funnel platform for, you know, starting to build up brand awareness, generate new customers that didn't know you existed, but also you still have pretty strong retargeting efforts. So any social media platform really. So Tiktok is the same way.You know, Pinterest can be that way.
Andrew Maff 11:36
So those are they both have a different purpose, right? So you'll often find your Google Ads could be doing really well, and your Meta ads not doing as great when you look at it on a per platform level. But then again, I've seen brands do this dozens of times, where they go, let's just kill our Meta ads, and then the next thing you know, their Google Ads starts to tank. There is elements of things that you have to factor in.
Andrew Maff 12:05
But let me give you an example. Actually, when I do presentations, I always like to give this example of this one time. It was kind of a grandiose example, but it was during Q4 like, seven or eight years ago. I was watching my wife shop, and yeah, she was sitting on the couch next to me. I'm just like watching, like, what are you doing?
Andrew Maff 12:23
And she gets hit with one of those, like, stereotypical Instagram ads that still are out there today, where it's just like heavy pastels. And so she clicks on it, and this ad takes her straight to the product page, right? She gets a product page. She gets hit with, hit with a pop up. She fills out the pop up because it's like it was like a standard 10% off your first order or whatever. And then she fills that thing out. Now she knows it's in her email. She stays on the product page, checks it out. This product page didn't have a ton of reviews on it, and my wife says to me, almost verbatim, this is their website. They can control these reviews. I don't know that I believe them all, because the reviews were like, all five stars. And I told her, I was like, Yeah, you're 100% right? I go, they don't necessarily control them. I go, but they can. They do have the ability to, like, delete the bad ones.
Andrew Maff 13:13
So she's like, Yeah, I don't. I don't know if I trust it, but she's the product looks really cool. I don't remember what she bought, but so she left the site and she went to Amazon. So she searches the brand name on Amazon, goes to the product page, gets to the exact same product, goes through all the product images, scrolls past the bullet points, which duh, kind of looks at the a plus content pretty quick, and then goes down to those reviews, and she pretty much sorts by all the negative stuff, like, what's the worst stuff that's going to happen to me right now? And was it addressed was another question she had.
Narrator 13:45
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Andrew Maff 14:16
So this company was doing good. They had, they still, you know, they have one star reviews. Everyone's got them. It is what it is and but they were pretty responsive to pretty much all of them. And so in a couple of the one star reviews were like, you know, those dumb consumers where it's like, it's just, yeah, read the instructions. You'll figure it out. But so she saw that, she'll go, okay, cool. And then, for whatever reason, instead of going back to the website, I'm sorry, she chose not to purchase on Amazon because she remembered she got that 10% off, pop up. So she left Amazon, searched the brand name on Google and clicked on the Google ad, branded Google ad.
Andrew Maff 15:00
Went to back to the product page she wanted, left the browser completely, went to her email, grabbed the coupon code, went back to the website, and completed the purchase.
Andrew Maff 15:12
This was all within an hour. So as a marketer, I should have divorced her. I don't know how who attributes that right? Like, who gets the credit? Right? If you're doing attribution and you're doing first click, Instagram's getting that credit. But if you're doing a data driven like, every it's kind of weighted, then your emails got to get some, the pop ups got to get some. Amazon should get some. But that's not possible to share that data, so it's a complete crapshoot, right? Like you can't figure out. There were so many certain steps, I think that. And by the way, this was before 2020 I think that 2020 was so much of a game changer for the consumers in the e Commerce Industry than anyone ever talks about. I think if someone could figure out a way to build a graph on this of like, how much more due diligence the average consumer does and now knows how to do correctly after covid, I think that they became so much better at figuring out, like, what's fake, what's real? Where can I get a coupon? Where can I do this? Where can I look up more on this company? What are they active on Tiktok? Are they active on Facebook? Are they active on LinkedIn? Depending what they're selling, like, there's a bunch of different options. And so I think that that made attribution even worse, because now it's like, All right, I've been introduced to this product, and now I'm going to shop where I'm most comfortable. It could be Amazon.
Andrew Maff 16:45
Years ago, when I was a partner the at the agency I was at before this, we did this test with like, probably about like, half a dozen brands where we had their Meta ads. At the time, was Facebook ads, ran their meta ads and their Amazon ads, and left them completely flat for a month. We didn't touch them so like, we're gonna stick to your ad spend, we're going to leave your ad spend. We're not gonna fluctuate at all. Then in month two, what we did is we left Amazon ads exactly the same. We did normal optimizations. We didn't do any type of overall campaign restructuring or anything. We left them flat, so we had as much of a baseline as possible. But then in month two, we increased the Meta ad spend by 10%.
Andrew Maff 17:29
In almost every case, I if it was, if it was half, it was six brands, five of them, we saw this happen where there was like a three to 4% I'm sorry, there was like a six to 7% like supplemental increase of revenue on the D to C site, but then there was like a three to 4% increase on Amazon. We saw this across the board, and then by the time we put things back to where they were, that revenue increase went away. We did everything from factoring in seasonality, and like when we did it across this data set. It was very interesting. And basically what we learned was what we had expected, and what we were kind of looking to prove out, is that a lot of people will learn about a brand and a product in a in a social media setting or something like that, and they may go to the website, but then if they're more comfortable, they're going to go to Amazon, which this is why I ended up hopping on the Buy with prime train for so long because, like, it makes a lot of sense, I can keep the data they're going to shop from Amazon anyway. So it kind of reduced that barrier to entry, and it made things a little bit easier. But because the consumer is doing that type of stuff, you can't attribute it. So we've had countless scenarios where brands, if your website is trash and it just is not converting well, and you're one of those brands that doesn't want to do anything about it, and you're just like, oh, the ads aren't working. I'm like, yeah, really, because the place that we're sending them is garbage and you don't want to change it. So when you're able to prove that stuff, and then they go, oh, let's kill the Meta ads, they're clearly not working, and then the next thing they know is like, whoa, wait. What happened to Amazon? You killed your Meta ads that was driving a lot of your brand awareness. It you one way to prove it a little bit is by looking at the increases in branded search on Amazon as your D to C advertising spend increases. So if you're spending more on Facebook or Tiktok or whatever, you can almost always see branded search on Amazon starts to go up, and that's just from people hopping over. So you have to look at everything holistically. So we get back to what my theory was. In my scenario, what I like to do is look at your advertising holistically. How much did you spend across all of your advertising channels? Meta, Tiktok, Facebook, Meta, Facebook, shut up, Google, Microsoft, like Pinterest, all of them, right? Like every element and Amazon, by the way, everything, inclusive of your Amazon ads if you do Amazon ads include those two like all of them across the board, and aggregate them, how much money did you spend in advertising?
Andrew Maff 20:06
Then how much revenue did you bring in across the board? And a lot of people end up, they go, oh, you know, Amazon's revenue is always way higher, but the profitability is not always there. And then my DTC site, the revenue is not where I want it to be, but the profitability is better. I'd love to pour more gas on it. Great. Then you have to invest in your website and improve your website, because you're not competing with your competitors all the time. Sometimes you're competing with yourself on Amazon, and sometimes that's okay, if you have certain things in place to drive traffic from Amazon back to your website and to and to actually, like, start to earn that customer back. But when you look at your advertising spend across the board like that, and then look at your revenue across the board, it starts to paint that picture of how much more awareness are you building of your product line, where you've started to educate more people and you're increasing so a lot of brands have a very specific focus on a TACOS that they want to hit on their Amazon account, you can come up with that same number for your entire business, or just your DTC business if you still feel that you need to look at sales channels individually.
Andrew Maff 21:13
Then you have to sit down, and I highly recommend always have someone with a marketing mind have this conversation with you of the use of those platforms. The return that you're going to see on Google is almost always better, at least in most scenarios. Not always every brand is different, but those are people that most of the time are actively looking to purchase something. So the argument of, oh, I don't want to run a branded ad because I've already educated them and they're already planning on paying, purchasing with me. Well, when you're running ads on Google, these people are actively looking for something that they've already been educated on. They know a product like yours exists, and they're actively looking for it.
Andrew Maff 21:57
So in a weird theory, you could have been the one that educated them before, or could have avoided competitors. But hence the game. Right? Then you have to think of the Meta side. Okay, I've got to educate people. I have to teach people about our product, of why we're different, or, you know, why they need this product. So there's a lot of of, how much do you want to be spending on top of funnel, versus middle of funnel versus bottom of funnel. And then that's where you start to think about that, because that's how you start to factor in what your return targets are to hit that, let's say TACOS target, right?
Andrew Maff 22:32
Then, I mean, then you get crazy granular, then you get deep, deep, where it's like, you start having conversations about, do we want to have return targets, like a ROAS target for specific product lines. Sometimes you may have a certain product line that your is dragging your ROAS down, but it's a great barrier to entry. And so then that actually means that if someone buys this, they almost always buy this, and then this. So now we're factoring an LTV, so things get a little bit messier, but attribution overall, I just, I hate, I hate the conversation. It drives me crazy, because it's not perfect. It's never going to be perfect. And then the issue always becomes how you choose to look at it. If you look at it from a really high level, and start there, and then break it down by the purpose of each channel, you would actually be shocked to come up with some pretty sound decisions to pour gas on platforms that, according to the platform, is not getting a great the best return for you, but you can actually start to see that it's really lifting up all of your other platforms. So you have to look at everything holistically. I like to look at it everything up top, a very high level, all of my advertising spend to my revenue. And that's usually the conversations I have with other CEOs, because that's the only answer they want, right? How much did I make off all my ads? This is how much you made. Cool, great. What are we doing to make it better? We're thinking about doing this. Love it. Awesome. Carry on, right?
Andrew Maff 24:02
You get deeper with other marketers. That's where you start to go. Okay, this is the return we're hitting. We want to hit a better return, or we want to scale up, right? Scaling up, I personally believe, and I always get the craziest looks when I tell brands this, I actually believe that a hitting a target ROAS is kind of easy. Like, hitting a specific returns, not that hard. It's scaling up that return that's difficult if you want to hit is really, like, I want to be at a 4x and I don't care what I'm paying, right? Like, great, cool. Kill all your top of funnel stuff. Just focus on middle of funnel and bottom of funnel. There you go. So, like, that's the areas where it's pretty simple. It's scaling it up that it becomes hard, and that means you have to focus on more top of funnel stuff. And certain brands, certain product lines, require more education, which means you need more top of funnel stuff. Well, if you've got to educate the consumer for a certain amount of time before they're willing to actually convert, you have to factor in that that return is not going to be what you want it to be. So you have to look at everything much more holistically, as opposed to just single channels. So that's, that's, that's my theory on attribution. I'll get off my high horse for a little bit.
Andrew Maff 25:12
Here's my suggestion, in your best months, where you were the most profitable, I would highly recommend every brand, look at what was your overall ad spend at that time and in the months where you weren't profitable at all, or maybe you it was your lowest profitability. Look at what your overall ad spend was at that given time.
Andrew Maff 25:33
Then look at it by channel, and try to understand what the purpose of those ads were, whether they were to educate, or whether they were to convert, that's where it becomes very interesting. Then, by the way, I won't even get into this too much longer, because I hate making these longer than it already is
Andrew Maff 25:52
But Meta can Meta and Tiktok, all those can sometimes be great for email generation. And so now you're not even looking at a return, you're looking at a CPA. But then you got to factor in, how good is your email marketing, and sometimes that's your that's your best tool. So there's a lot of different things to think about. This becomes a 5000 deeper questions, but overall, that is my opinion on attribution. I still do believe that the attribution platforms out there are very useful. They can help paint a certain picture, but they are not perfect. They are glorified UTM trackers with fancy reporting cool. You can make that in Looker, but they do have some capabilities where it's like, yeah, you know, that's kind of interesting, and it was a little bit easier to do it through your platform than build out custom stuff. That is my thoughts. And thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Andrew Maff 26:45
As usual. I appreciate you all joining me. Please make sure you do the typical thing, rate, review, subscribe, all that fun stuff on whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to the ecomm show.com to check out all of our previous episodes. And if you liked this vibe where I said bucket and I'm going have a bourbon and we're just gonna we're going to we're going to vent for a little bit, hit me up and let me know, and maybe I'll do more of them, or I won't, or tell me if you hated it, and then I'll stop doing that too. Thank you all for joining us, and I'll see you next time, cheers!
Narrator 27:17
Thank you for tuning in to the E comm Show. Head over to Ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTuskr YouTube channel. The Ecomm show is brought to you by BlueTusker, a full service digital marketing company specifically for E commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth, go to bluetuskr.com now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the E comm show!