Article

Optimization Beyond Ads

Analytics Data Testing

by Sam Tomlinson

January 22, 2024

A recurring theme in many of my conversations and meetings over the past few weeks has been creative testing – whether that’s new ad structures on Meta, ad copy testing on Google, different creative formats on TikTok, whatever. 

For many of these brands, the issue is almost irrelevant:

Need To Get More Leads? New creative time

Poor Lead Quality? Ad copy testing, baby! 

Meta Ad Account Performance Hitting a Wall? Load up 25 new creatives!

Poor/Declining Conversion Rate? Let’s try video

Shrinking Contribution Margin? I bet carousels fix this. 

Over-Reliance on Discounts? Have we tried UGC? Let’s test. 

Poor Email Performance? Neil Patel said to use emojis in the post-header. Give it a shot. 

SQLs Not Signing? Have we tried new search ad copy again? 

It’s gotten to the point where creative testing is an obsession. The need to test creative has overshadowed the reason why we test it in the first place (namely, to improve the incremental profitability of our ad accounts).

Before anyone jumps to conclusions, I’m not claiming creative testing is bad. Rather, I’m saying that somewhere along the way, creative testing went from one of many tools marketers had to improve advertising profitability to the one-size-smashes-all hammer on which far too many of us rely. Creative testing has a place in every marketer’s process + toolbox – and that place isn’t the entire toolbox. 

So, for this week’s issue, I want to talk about four oft-forgotten other tools in the optimization toolbox.  

1. Offer

Offer testing is something that so few brands do – or have even thought about doing – that it makes me want to pull my hair out. 

The best marketing in the world can not save a bad product or a poor offer. We’ve found that the offer is 30% to 50% of the purchase driver in most industries; the ad creative is 5% to 10%. The remaining 40% to 65% is the moment, the experience, the lander & the perceptions of the brand itself. Creative testing without offer testing is the proverbial tail wagging the dog. 

This is doubly true in verticals/industries with a high degree of commodity perception among the target audience – home services, food delivery, office supplies, electronics, professional services (legal, marketing, accounting, etc.), SaaS, you get the idea. 

As a clear example, I audited a brand in the home services space. They had a long-term agency partner. The CEO called after observing a significant decline in marketing performance over the last year, while his competitors were posting strong (20%+) growth.

Unlike most audits, the accounts were not in objectively bad shape – structure was acceptable, there was some evidence of proactive management, offer-specific creatives for promotions were added + removed on-schedule, and they were even running a few experiments. Nothing earth-shatteringly good, but nothing horrific, either. But, despite that, performance was tanking. Not declining. Tanking.

This was the ad account version of the 2023 Philadelphia Eagles. 

I figured I had missed something, so I redoubled my efforts. I dug in further. Still nothing in the account to justify this level of bad. 

Then I started searching, just as a potential customer would. And I found the issue in minutes: competitors were dominating this brand’s offers:

This is straight-up offer annihilation. 

If you’re a potential customer, you’re going with the competitor every day of the week and twice on Sundays. You’re not even contacting the audit brand, because the competitor looks so much better + more compelling. It doesn’t matter how pretty the audit brand’s ad is, or how witty their ad copy is in this context. They’re going to lose the vast majority of the time. 

The sales team didn’t catch it because they were never getting the call. The agency didn’t catch it because they weren’t looking for it – they were so focused on the account that they didn’t bother to step back and look at the bigger picture. But the impact was massive, regardless: the audit brand was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars promoting offers that were dead in the water. All of the creative + structural optimization in the world was not going to overcome these chasms in perceived value. 

This client’s industry is commoditized + discount-heavy, which is why each of these offers focuses on savings, but I’ve observed the same trends in spaces that do not rely on discounts – this can include feature domination (a competitor offers staggeringly more in terms of features/functionality at a comparable price point), benefit domination (concierge service), even perceptual domination (for the same price, you can work with a proven brand vs. those risky upstarts). 

The common denominator in all of them: no-one in marketing (in-house or agency) bothered to pay attention to how their offer was positioned in the marketplace, and even if they did, they didn’t have the ability to pivot to an answer in a timely manner. 

Here’s the simple reality: every minute that your ad is in-market and promoting a dominated offer is a minute that you’re losing money. Successfully managing ad accounts is all about diagnosing the actual issue + getting to the right answer as quickly as possible. You never, ever want to be in a position where you can’t get to an answer and are forced to plow spend into a dominated offer. That’s a recipe for disaster. 

This is why we develop Beaters. 

This is my (affectionate) term for counters to your competition’s in-market offers. These should be evergreen + they should either (a) supersede a dominant offer and/or (b) change the angle of attack to one where your brand can effectively dominate the competition. 

In the above example, one beater was a “Get A 2nd Opinion Before You Sign // We’ll Beat Their Offer No Matter What.” It doesn’t matter what discount our competitor is running – 25% off, buy one, get one, free install, whatever – that beater is going to resonate with an information-deficient and price-sensitive homeowner audience. If we see that our competition is rolling a promo that dominates ours, we can get into this.

It’s pre-approved. The messaging and landers are on the website. We have the creative to support it loaded up in the ad account. We know we can pivot everything to that messaging and immediately re-establish our proverbial footing. 

As an aside: the “beater” doesn’t have to be a discount, either – you could pivot completely away from savings + focus on premium messaging (“You Get What You Pay For – One, Fair Price All Year Long”) or reviews (5,000+ 5* Ratings For A Reason). 

The easiest way to design those beaters is to document all of your competition’s core offers, alongside a clear-eyed comparison between your brand + each individual competitor/alternative (and no, “we’re just better!” isn’t a clear-eyed comparison). From those two data points, you should be able to identify 2-3 different angles of attack. Those are your beaters. 

Here’s How To Employ This In Your Ad Account: 

• Schedule time every 1-2 weeks to review your competition’s ads + the search landscape. Click on your competitor’s ads. Document everything in a shared Google Sheet. Each time you run across an offer/message that you don’t have a good answer for, flag it and develop options for a response. 
• Create all of the assets you need to support your “beater” offers before you need them – have them pre-approved, create images/messaging points, search ads, etc. Have it all ready to go. 
• Pivot to “Beaters” when you observe that a competitor has deployed a superior offer, pivot all of your ads to the appropriate “beater”. 
• Use surveys to understand shifting audience preferences, fears, challenges + hesitations. I’ll never understand why brands are happy to deploy $100k a month to support an offer, but aren’t willing to spend $1,000 on a 750 person online survey to validate it beforehand. If you’re that averse to spending money, conduct a focus group with 20-30 current customers to ask if that would be compelling to them. 
• Craft offers that attack those customer pain points / preferences. If my main hesitation is buying the wrong product, 10% off isn’t changing that. An expert virtual consultation on orders over $100, on the other hand, just might. 

The offer is the most critical and powerful component of your marketing strategy. It will (quite literally) make-or-break your ad account’s performance. If there’s one thing you spend time on, make it this.

2. Unit Economics

There are exactly three ways to make money in any business: 

• Find more new customers
• Sell more to current customers
• Increase the margins on what you sell

99% of marketers ignore the third one. That’s a mistake that costs brands millions (probably billions) every year. Please don’t make it. 

And before you tell me that you can’t control your COGS or processing fees or wholesale costs or whatever, allow me to ask a simple question: 

When did we collectively decide that 10% off was the going rate for the privilege of sending potential customers emails until the end of time? Who did that math? What analysis validated it? (if you’re curious, the earliest example of 10% off for an email I can find is 2012, and it was far from scientific). 

For many brands, that 10% off represents 20% to 35% of their total contribution dollars on a transaction. That’s a staggering chunk of the total margin on a sale given away by a random pop-up, the incrementality and impact of which the brand has likely never tested. 

Even if you do like your “WELCOME10” discount code (and are still living under the delusion that it is net/net incremental), when was the last time you pulled a discount codes report in GA4 to see if only your new customers were using it? When’s the last time you ran an analysis to see if other discount codes (FRIENDSANDFAMILY20, anyone?) are being used by a staggering number of people who are neither friends nor family? 

In most cases, the answer is “never” – and that’s a huge problem. Sure, it’s not technically marketing’s problem, but the core, fundamental objective of every marketing team is to produce a measurable return on invested capital. Marketing is a profit center, not a cost center. Treat it like such. 

And yes, that means understanding how every dollar flows through your (or your client’s) organization. It means leaving no discount code stone unturned. It means critically assessing where every dollar goes, finding the points of leverage where you can have an impact through targeted marketing communications activities, then communicating that to senior-level stakeholders. 

It isn’t easy. But it’s what the marketers that succeed tomorrow will do brilliantly well.  

And sometimes – like with that discount thing above – you’ll run into skeptics. They won’t believe you. But they’ll believe in math. Let’s walk through an example: 

Brand X:

$100,000/month in Meta Spend

$100 AOV

70% of Meta Transactions are 1st Time Customers

$40 Cost of Delivery (COGS + Processing Costs + Shipping Costs) 

3.3 ROAS // $30 CPA on Meta Spend

15% Off Discount Code (“WELCOME15”)

So, for that $100,000, the brand gets ~3,330 transactions per month, about 2,330 of which are new-to-brand customers (pretty standard for Meta post-iOS14.5/15). From a big-picture perspective, this is already above-average Meta performance (the platform average is a ROAS of ~1.7). 

Assuming the “WELCOME15” code ONLY is applied to new customers (it isn’t, because it is auto-applied by Honey + Capital One Shopping, among others, but that’s another thing), using this code costs the brand $34,950 per month. In reality (and what you learn from those GA4 reports), that code costs the brand upwards of $90,000 per month, because it is auto-applied to existing customers, along with direct/organic/referral traffic, not to mention email + SMS traffic. Yeah, you read that right. Subscribe once, get 10% off forever. Somebody made an oops. 

This brand would need to improve their Meta Ads efficiency by ~30% on the $100k ad budget to simply overcome the contribution dollars lost to this one discount code. I don’t like the odds of finding a piece of creative that does that, especially for a brand that’s already tested hundreds of different creatives. 

This is a classic example – but far from the only one – of brands tripping over dollars to pick up dimes. 

In order for this brand – or any brand in a similar position – to succeed, they need to optimize beyond ad creative, with the assumption that their creative performance will revert to the mean over time. That means digging in to the business economics and finding the places where optimization can have a real, material, bottom-line impact. 

Here’s Where I’d Start:

• Deactivate every generic code you have + move to dynamic codes. I guarantee you the cost of a dynamic code platform is less than what you’re losing to Honey, Capital One Shopping + Affiliate sites. 
• Create GA4 events for every discount code (here is the documentation on how to do it). Check it religiously. 
• Test your discounts (or better yet, test REMOVING them entirely)
• Experiment with other offers – free shipping, free gift with purchase, we’ll plant a tree on orders over $100, whatever. 

Repeat this with other components of your offers + service/product. 

Spending 12% of your AOV on packaging? Can we save here? Getting crushed by fulfillment costs? Recommend alternatives + price-shop. Appointments no-showing to calls with the sales team, resulting in massive time-wastes? Implement a deposit to schedule a consult, or automate the process for lower-tier prospects. Inundated on returns? Actively work with Customer Support to understand *why* people are returning the product, then build functionality to address it. 

As a concrete example, both Victoria’s Secret + Patagonia did this with sizing. The #1 cause of returns was incorrect fit. Their PDPs now mention (“SIZE” about 25 times, along with providing detailed charts, videos showing how to measure yourself, etc.). Both brands pioneered multi-modal (text, video, infographic, interactive) ways to make at-home sizing easier. Amazon co-opted the concept for furniture using the Amazon app, and now Ikea, Lowes + Home Depot all provide variants of an AR sizer for appliances/furniture/rugs as well. 

This isn’t just an eCommerce/DTC thing, either. 

A B2B client (a MLS provider) of ours was being inundated by complaints from clients following a system migration – realtors LOVE to pick up the phone and call. The client was being forced to bring in additional customer support just to handle basic requests. We queried their support database, identified the 20 most common issues, and made short (<2 minute) videos on how to do each one, then added them as tooltips on the page. Calls dropped 40%. That likely saved the client millions of dollars in support costs. 

That’s real optimization. In the meeting a month after we launched this initiative, the CFO of the company was *giddy* – I’ve never seen someone in finance look that happy outside of a hostile takeover. It was quite the thing to behold. 

3. Moments

When you ask most marketers for their marketing calendar, the standard response is something along the lines of, “You mean our social calendar? It’s [wherever].” 

But a social calendar isn’t the same as a marketing calendar. Perhaps the better way to ask this question: what are the narrative/brand moments around which we plan to grow this business? 

These moments are the lattice onto which the strategy + the tactics can be mapped to create predictable, scalable, profitable growth. 

The truth is that most brands – including many we work with – don’t know (at least not before we start working together). Some have a few (Black Friday / Cyber Monday, 4th of July, a Spring-related thing (Spring Cleaning, Homebuying Season, Easter, Memorial Day). Virtually none have a well-thought-out, logical, moment-driven marketing calendar that can be leveraged to drive outsized performance in the ad account, email account, etc. 

While those moments are often holidays, they need not be. They could also be:  

• New product releases
• New service/location announcements
• Key gifting moments (graduation)
• Partnerships & events
• Brand Moments
• Seasonal Triggers (spring cleaning / get ready for winter)
• Post Holiday Triggers (works incredibly well in Senior Living)
• Back to School
• Minor holidays
• Cultural moments

You get the idea. 

Regardless of which one(s) you choose, the idea is simple: the overarching brand + story is a major driver of demand. By intentionally creating those moments throughout the year, we create triggers that drive people to interact with our brand outside of the ordinary (and competition-laden) major moments (like BFCM or Back to School). 

This is not a novel concept – brands like Apple and Honda have been doing this for decades (why do you think new iPhones drop every September, or next-model-year cars are introduced in August?). Hell, the real estate industry *created* a collective moment for homebuying in March/April by hammering on about school years for a decade-plus. 

You can do the same thing. 

Most brands already have 1-3 major moments (whether or not they call them that is another story, but you can pretty easily look at your GA4, CRM, whatever) and find the periods when sales/leads peak. 

The magic is in creating more of those – 3, 4, 5, 6 moments. Depending on the brand, you might have 6 total moments, 4 of which appeal to your primary target audience and 2 that appeal to your secondary/tertiary target audience. 

This need not be a major thing – if you’re already dropping new products, time those drops for an otherwise “down” period. If you’re planning on expanding locations, do so during a period when not much else is happening. 

If that’s not an option, find other moments that have resonance with your brand and target audience, whether they are cultural (Juneteenth, Veteran’s Day, International Women’s Day) or merely symbolic (National Ice Cream Day). Build campaigns around them. 

The same can be true for seasonal triggers or post-holiday triggers – if you’re a Senior Living community, the optimal time to reach out to Adult Children is late January through March. Those are the times when they’ve just seen Mom & Dad (Winter Holidays), have relatively little going on (kids are back in school, Spring sports haven’t started), and they have both the mental bandwidth and acute impulse to address the situation. 

If you’re a home services brand, February/March/April is the perfect time to push windows, HVAC + landscaping – who doesn’t want their house to look like the jewel of the neighborhood come springtime? Who wants to find out that their A/C unit is donezo in the middle of a May heatwave? 

Finding these moments is as easy as doing your research + empathizing with your target audience. Understand what matters to them, figure out what you have to offer them for those moments, then promote the ever-loving-daylights out of it. 

The benefits of this are massive: 

• Increase Relevance & Mindshare – if you’re not top-of-mind, people tend to pay no mind. Creating moments keeps your brand / organization relevant, which in turn drives preference. 
• Favorable Economics – the more you can diversify your revenue streams (instead of relying on 1-2 moments, you have 4-5), the lower your overall risk profile + the more favorable your cash position. There’s nothing worse than having to borrow money to staff up or stock up for a “big moment”, immediately after you’ve been bleeding cash for 2-3 months. Less risk + more consistent revenue = win/win. 
• New Customer Attraction – not everyone wants to be a BFCM or back to school shopper. Not everyone wants to buy a house in the middle of April. By creating alternate moments, you create corresponding opportunities to appeal to your target audience in unexpected ways. 
• Open New Fronts – Along with appealing to your audience in unexpected ways, moment-driven campaigns can compete on non-financial terms. I don’t have to run a discount for a women-owned brand during International Women’s Day; rather, I can focus on storytelling + creating genuine, lasting connections with the segment of a client’s audience that genuinely believes in supporting businesses like ours. 
• Outsized Ad Account Performance – there’s a reason eCommerce ad accounts look better in November/December than they do in February. It isn’t because everyone magically forgot how to run Meta ads; it’s because the Q4 ads tie into a broader moment. The same is true for minor moments – the more you can inject brand, story, purpose + pre-existing triggers into your ad account, the better your overall performance will be.

But, as valuable as these moments are, they don’t happen by accident. They are created when smart, strategic marketers are willing to do the hard work of understanding what resonates with their audience, then design intentional moments that connect the brand to the audience via that moment. 

Invest the time to make more – and more magical – moments for your audience, and watch your overall marketing performance soar. 

4. Landers

If the first three of these were predominantly strategic, this one is fantastically tactical. I love landing page testing. I believe in it so strongly I wrote an entire issue about it a few months ago (check it out here). 

I also don’t understand why brands – on average – spend 3-4x more time testing ads than they do testing the pages + landers where those ads send people. This makes no sense, considering the primary role of the ad is to earn the user’s direct attention (via the click); the role of the landing page is to earn their commitment (via a sale, a lead form, a demo request, etc.). 

The latter is far, far more important – and far, far more difficult – than the former. 

The greatest ad in the world will not be effective if it is driving users to a page that isn’t relevant, informative, impactful and compelling. The greatest landing page in the world won’t do a damn thing if no-one arrives on it. Ads + Landing pages need each other like chocolate needs peanut butter or Taylor Swift needs Travis Kelce. 

Yet most brands simply don’t prioritize landing page (or even web page) testing. 

This is confounding, especially when you consider that – unlike creative testing – LP/web page testing provides incremental value to every other marketing channel (Paid Search, Organic Search, etc.). Increasing a PDP conversion rate from 2% to 3% doesn’t just help your Google or Meta account; it also boosts email, organic, referral and affiliate performance, too. A rising tide lifts all boats. A great landing page makes your entire business better. 

So, what goes into that? What is a remarkable landing page? 

From a big-picture standpoint, a great lander or web page is a natural part of the journey, seamlessly connecting the in-platform ad experience (your offer/angle and creative) to your brand in a way that meets the user where s/he is and guides them to where you’d like them to be. The less the ad destination feels like a generic experience or a cold, unfeeling sales pitch, the more likely it is to convert AND the more likely it is to convert the right kind of customers for your brand.

This is no different than a high-end sales call or brilliant in-store sales experience: upon arrival, there’s a warm greeting and introduction, rapport-building, empathetic questioning to reveal pain points/challenges/issues, a sincere effort to present tailored solutions. If all that is done well, a transaction (lead form, sale, whatever) is the natural result.

This level of care, diligence, thoughtfulness and attention is expected during in-store experiences. It’s expected in pitch meetings. It’s even expected on Zooms/Calls. So why do brands think it’s a-OK to create miserable, generic, wholly-undifferentiated experiences on their website/landers? 

To keep this (relatively) short, I think Lander testing should mimic the creative testing strategy described above: start conceptual, and move into the tactical/granular. 

That means starting with big-picture landing page concepts/types: 

• Offer-focused – Product/Category Specific Lander – this is the primary lander type I see, and for good reason: the content of the lander is specifically tailored to the creative in the ad account, which creates a simple, seamless experience. This benefit is also the greatest downside: the lander is limited to the product, service or offer that it has been designed to promote – which can cap AOV for ecommerce brands or result in a increased competition for B2B/B2C lead gen (i.e. the customer isn’t aware that Bob the Contractor also does Landscaping, or X Assisted Living Community also offers Memory Care, or Z SaaS company also offers SMS + email sending), so s/he doesn’t contact them for that.)

• Quiz / Assessment – I love a good quiz. There’s no better way to trigger the Ikea Effect than giving your potential customer the ability to customize their product bundle, all while gaining insanely-valuable zero-party data that you can leverage in future interactions/communications. It just works. 

• Listicles – there’s a reason advertorials are insanely popular in traditional media: they provide a side-door into the prospect’s mind that builds credibility and avoids the typical “defensive” response to being marketed to / sold, while providing ample opportunity for storytelling and objection-diffusion. You can achieve the same result with a listicle that feels like a third-party article, but is really just a delightful lander. Here’s an example from Earthling that I think is fantastic. 

• Influencer-Specific Page – there’s no denying that influencer marketing can be effective, especially if there’s an audience overlap. Continuing with one of the themes of this article, I think continuity is critical – so why not feature the influencer throughout the experience? I came across this example from Molekule, but I’m sure there are others. 

• Article/Write-Up – similar to the listicle above, any chance you have to highlight your product on a third-party or publisher website (I’ve seen these everywhere from the Business Journal or Trade Publication to Conferences (“Sponsored Sessions”) to actual businesses that focus on this. It’s basically the weird love-child of PR & Advertising – and if it’s done well (and tastefully), it can work wonders. Here’s an example from “SweetKick”, produced by Premium Purveyor.  

• Shadow Brand Lander (“Homepage-Style Lander”) – an under-utilized variant of the “offer-focused lander”, these are pages that look like a home page, but are actually landers tailored to the audience/angle targeted by ads. Each one has all of the components you’d look for in a lander – compelling headlines, clear + targeted benefits, social proof, scarcity, objections + responses and clear next steps, all weaved into a seamless story. Here’s a great example from Caraway Pans. 

Once you’ve found a core concept that works, follow the same process as you would with creative testing: create variants of the winning concept that have different structures, flow, components, etc. Once you’ve found a good structure/flow, move on to  copy, CTA, color, orientation tests. If your client is in B2B, don’t neglect things like form testing – not just the type of form, but number of fields, staged vs. unstaged, progression graphics, etc. 

The even-better news about investing in high-quality landing pages is that they tend to have longer shelf lives than ad creative – so your investment in them will (likely) pay larger dividends. 

Each of these four things (and especially the top-3) are widely considered to be outside the realm of traditional marketing optimization – but are disproportionately impactful to the overall performance of your marketing program. 

More automation means that lever-pulling in ad accounts will only go so far. The Law of the Best Ad is still true. So, if you want to help your clients (internal, external, whatever) get the most out of their marketing investments, start thinking – and testing – the bigger picture. 

You’ll be surprised what you find. 

Until next time,

Sam

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