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

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/be9eb4f637977778

Is performance marketing just something every company should be doing? Hot take. If you look at the way each platform is doing Google, you have to scroll pretty far down to get to our organic listing. Neta, it's almost a pay for play now. When you take over for an agency at a company, you crush their performance within a month. I'm curious to what you find they
Are doing wrong. Instead of thinking about being on top of the page, and that's kind of like ego marketing, I want to be number one, I want to be there all the time. It's about showing to the right person as often as possible. Any other tips for people just to experiment with the platform? Each platform is different. The user behavior is different. Make sure you're not too hard on yourself if it doesn't work. It's okay to fail because


Today, my guest is Timothy Davis. Timothy has led performance marketing for all of Shopify for the past two and a half years.
and as a consultant has helped companies like Pinterest, LinkedIn,
Redfin and Eventbrite kickstart and scale the performance marketing teams.
In our conversation, we get incredibly tactical on all things performance marketing and paid growth.
When to start investing.
How to run signs of life test on each platform.
What platforms to investigate and what platforms to bid big on.
What types of companies are best suited to invest big on paid growth?
Whether you should invest pre product market fit or not.
What agencies often get wrong, and what to look for in your investment when you're just getting started.
Plus what your first three hires should look like, tips for which platforms are most interesting right now, a peek at Timothy's actual reports that he runs to judge performance if you're watching this on YouTube, and so much more.
This episode is for anyone who's trying to figure out how to kickstart or improve their performance marketing investment, and I guarantee you'll get something out of this that'll make your life better.
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.
It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously.
With that, I bring you Timothy Davis.

Timothy, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
Yeah, thanks for having me. Long time coming.
Yeah, I'm really excited we're finally doing this. I actually post it on Twitter for people to suggest questions for this topic and there's just so much interest.
in what we're gonna be talking about, which essentially we're gonna be diving deep into
All things paid growth, all things performance, marketing.
Uh, by the way, I have a cold for people if in case you wonder why I sound a little weird, but the sh show must go on.
I wanna start with just setting a little context for folks that aren't super familiar with
Performance marketing, pay growth.
When we talk about performance marketing slash paid growth, first of all, are those two terms interchangeable to you?
And second of all.
What falls under the umbrella of
Performance marketing slash paid growth
Paid uh can be
a lot of things. It can be online, it can be offline, it can also even be affiliates.
Typically when I talk about performance marketing
It's about online only.
But you could argue it's like
offline could be performant, affiliates could be performant, stuff like that. Uh they can be interchangeable, but I would recommend if you are talking about it to kind of specify which one you're talking about because
When you do say paid.
Because I'm in the industry I was just oh, they do Google search and they do Meta and they do things like that. But if you do offline
And you just say paid.
Ma we may be uh talking about things but missing each other on two
Two ships passing in the night. So I I think historically, uh people when they have said paid growth have been fulfocus on just online. But I would argue in the last couple of years you could definitely roll
uh offline into that conversation as well.
Okay, so performance marketing, when someone hears that term, it's essentially marketing that you can measure the performance up.
Correct. Yes. Nail on the head.
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Hi Christina.
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Is performance marketing just something every company should be doing, or is there certain business models where it's like, no, you're probably gonna grow
Through other channels mostly like SEO.
Or sales.
Or.
Hot take. Uh I would say pay it is for everyone. Uh I if you look at the way each platform is doing, Google
Introducing
AI plus with paid taking up like the first four spots.
You have to scroll pretty far down to get to an organic listing.
Meta
It's almost a pay for play now. You have to do promoted posts for people to even see your content.
I would say it does depend on the industry you're in. If you're say leaning heavily into influencer marketing.
That is still a paid
component. You may not be doing
meta ads you may not d be doing paid search, but that is a paid component.
But I would say at
Baseline.
Everyone should be doing paid search.
Uh the way I usually explain it to people is
Paid search is user driven.
You have to type in
A relevant keyword.
For your ad to show.
Anything else is more disruptive media?
Uh you're on meta?
And you're looking at pictures of babies and cats, and then all of a sudden you see an ad for Shopify.
You're watching a YouTube video, maybe a YouTube podcast.
And then in between you get advertisements.
Maybe for Shopify, maybe for Pinterest, maybe for Eventbrite.
So
All of that being disruptive media.
Well
may not make a whole lot of sense for where you are as a business.
But I would say paid surge being
user driven having to type in a relevant keyword for your ad to show should pretty much be for just about everybody.
Everyone should do it.
Super interesting.
There's also the
Most companies grow through one
Growth engine.
Primarily, say word of mouth or SEO or sales.
Or paid.
So for some companies paid will be most of how they grow.
Like say I always think of booking dot com and credit karma and
Just like most of their growth came from
paid growth, online paid growth.
For some companies it's just like a layer, like a small ten, twenty percent of their growth.
What are signs that
You have the potential for paid slash performance marketing to be most of your growth, like say seventy, eighty percent.
I always say where where are your users? Uh you will have some data that will allow you to understand that.
Say right now you're doing really well on TikTok.
Some would argue that's an emerging channel right now.
Great.
Uh if that's doing really well for you, maybe you take because that content could be used on something similar like Snap.
See how that does for you.
You could also lean into your Google Analytics or whatever analytics tool you are using and see if you're already getting
users from that platform.
If you're currently managing that, if you're don't have a profile on there.
And obviously you don't have a presence.
it would be really hard for users to find new and get there.
But always look at the data that's available to you within your analytics platforms and say
Users are already finding us here.
How can we turn that knob up to eleven?
And you can do that with paid because if they're already finding you
Through that channel.
What would happen if you were to just
Turn it up to eleven.
Mm-hmm.
Is there an example of a company you worked with that's known that
As an example that where you're like, Oh, I see everyone's looking, finding them on say Google.
Let's go.
Turn it to eleven.
Yeah, so there was a company I worked with uh a couple of years ago called Hairstory uh in Ipsy. I know, very funny guy with no hair working on a company called Hairstory.
But uh they were doing really well from a Google shopping standpoint.
But when I started
consulting with them, we looked at the analytics and we actually saw that they were getting a lot of people
from Mena.
and uh TikTok at the time. And TikTok was very, very new.
Uh and they didn't really know what to do with it.
So said we'll do a small test.
We can start on meta with just some
You know.
Uh customer testimonials.
Let's see how that does.
We'll get interest in, build a funnel, get retargeting.
And hopeful get conversions.
TikTok was so new at the time.
Then it was like
We don't know what's gonna work.
Let's just try with what would is currently available.
Then once we started doing it, we started noticing, hey
This doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
From a creative standpoint, we were kind of missing the mark of
What we were using on Meta was working, was not working on TikTok.
So you can't always just
take what is currently working on one platform and apply it to another.
'Cause it is a different user experience. It is a different mindset that the user has when they're on there.
So that was an example of where we were able to take
Those
instances look at their
uh data and say they're already finding us here. How can we turn this up a little bit?
And I don't remember the numbers exactly, but it was pretty exponential.
Okay, so the core advice here so far is
Look for where people are coming.
to you from today.
And then that gives you a sign of where you should start to think about running paid ads, performance marketing.
On those platforms.
Yeah. And also uh there's a saying that um
my current director likes to use, which is signs of life.
You can always do a very, very small
Test.
You can just put a little money into a platform
See if there's a sign of life.
If there is.
Then you can s you can pull back and say, Okay, we have signs of life.
Now let's build a campaign around that. There's no reason to say all right, we have a science life.
Let's now turn it up all the way.
Do we have the right creative? Do we have the right campaign? Do we have the right messaging for the users on this platform?
Then let's take
uh that approach as opposed to just
Hey, signs of light, great, go, run a hundred uh miles an hour.
Make sure you're doing the right thing when you get into those platforms.
Let's follow that thread.
A lot of people run little experiments on, say, TikTok and Snap and Twitter and things on LinkedIn.
And they often don't see a lot of results and it's always like, Hey, did we do it wrong or is it the platform's not working? I know it's like a very difficult question.
to give like here's how you do a sign of life test correctly, but
What are some things that you think
Either people do often wrong when they're trying to experiment with the platform or they you just think they should do when they're trying to
Look for signs of life.
The number one thing I tell people all the time.
is use your own data. Start with your own data.
So take the existing customer base you have.
load that up into the platform to build lookalikes.
From there, you can do, and I'll use Meta as the example, you can do a one percent
all the way up to a ten percent. So one percent match, two percent, three percent, so on so forth.
What I tend to do is build
And sets.
Uh one at one percent because we know that one's going to be
highly correlated to what we're looking for.
Then a two to four.
And then a five to seven, and then
An eight plus.
More times than not, the eight a plus does not work.
But there have been times where it has, so it's
Hey, let's do it. Let's try it.
But if you also have a very limited budget because
Some people don't have the luxury of having an un unlimited budget like we do and
uh some of these other companies I've worked at.
Uh just start with the one percent.
See what that sign of life is.
Because you already know that this is so
tied to your existing customer base.
If that sign of life is giving you a positive
Uh signal.
Now you have the information you need to build the campaign you need to be successful.
What are these percentages referring to? You may have mentioned it, but w when you say one percent, two percent, three percent. Yeah, yeah. So that that that is how closely tied they are to that user's behavior on the platform. So they're one percent.
Tied to what they're doing. They're visiting similar pages or they have similar behavior on the platform. So they're more than likely going to be.
tied to what that user they're not gonna be that user exactly.
But they're gonna be very correlated to them, where ten percent is
pretty wide base that you're gonna hit.
I see, so the smaller the percentage, the closer they are, the closer the it will look like they are.
Yep. There you go.
How do you know if it's the creative that is failing versus it's just like never gonna work is there's something that tells you
That's what's not working.
It's a million dollar question, to be honest with you. Uh because the uh the
You could look at some of the metrics that currently exist in the platform. Click through rate.
basically just tells you are the users engaged.
Because start with the target.
You're getting the impressions are there.
Is the target right?
That should be your first thing. Yes, the target is correct. Users that we want to see are seeing our ads, but they're not engaging with it.
That would kind of be the first thing.
But uh
The part that I think you're
really trying to ask is
Creative versus the content.
Because sometimes, depending on the ad unit
you could have like a story creative that is literally the creative kind of has to stand on its own.
Not necessarily the content that's in it.
But something like an in feed.
Creative has a headline, a primary
A description.
And a creative.
That's where
Honestly, the only way you're gonna get an answer to that outside of the data that's available to you, like click through rate, reach frequency, and all those things to kind of pull in more metrics.
As a focus group to understand.
Hey, when you saw this image.
With this content.
You know, what was your results from it?
Now you can build
a test within the platform to do a control versus a test where
Say you take the creative
With the same primary and the same description.
versus a creative that's just your logo.
with the headline and the description and see what the results are.
But more times than not, you're not getting the understanding from the user of well, why doesn't that?
creative resonate with you.
And they'll give you suggestions in the focus group.
Why does that
work better for you than not.
Um
So that's a really, really hard
question to answer without having those
dialogue with the user to understand that.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. How long do you recommend these tests run for these signs of life tests? And I like this term, by the way, I've heard this before.
Ideally, in a perfect world, you're gonna hear the word statistical relevance.
Um, mathematicians will will tell you exactly what that number is, and I'm not gonna pretend like a mathematician, but a lot of times it's uh budget constrained.
So
There there could be
A VP, finance, anyone like that could just come to you and just say, Hey
You have twenty five thousand dollars for this test.
You only have five thousand.
Uh
You know, just get that information, get that data. You can then also build an opsize off of that.
Hey guys, we worked with our meta partners, we worked with our Google partners.
Uh we put
A thousand dollars behind this test.
We know that our impression share was this, our reach was this. If we were to put
ten thousand dollars into it. This is the expected return we can get from it, uh based on the historic
Based on the click through rate, the conversion rate that we got from the test that we ran.
Got it. So basically you have a lim limited number of dollars to spend.
That'll tell you how long you could run one of these for.
Yeah.
Any other tips for someone that's trying to
experiment with a platform early on.
So one is
Uh
Try a look alike that is v like the most targeted.
version of the look like so one percent you said
And then kind of incrementally grown. See that
incrementally increase that percentage as as as you spend more.
Any other tips, I guess, for people just to experiment with the platform?
Make sure you're not too hard on yourself if it doesn't work.
A lot of times companies I've either consulted with
Or work that.
There was always
Pressure.
Or there was always
A need to succeed at whatever experiment we put into market.
I believe in creating an environment where it's okay to fail because we're either winning or we're learning.
And more times than not, if we put something new into a platform that we know nothing about.
We're learning
The bells and whistles, we're learning the functionality of it.
Just know there's gonna be things you're not gonna understand because each platform is unique, each platform is different.
The user behavior is different.
So give yourself some grace.
Understand that
This May
Not work.
And as long as you're learning from it.
You're gonna be okay.
I love that.
In terms of which platforms people should explore.
Obviously there's Google, there's Facebook.
Instagram. What's kind of like what are the platforms people should seriously consider at this point?
Google for sure. And when we say Google, let's make sure everyone understands what G Google entails. Google is YouTube.
Google's Google search.
GDN Google Display Network.
There's a lot of things in Google that you can do.
I always say if you have the creative available.
You should really, really be looking at doing
Danielle?
Because video is one of those things that I'm very bullish on.
It is doing really well.
Um when you measure it.
The right way.
And as long as you can get that creative and get it consistently, just because you have one piece of creative.
If it's doing well, you do need to have that creative refresh, kind of that flywheel going.
Make sure you're doing
Google search again, user driven.
You two.
And meta, and meta contains both Facebook.
And Instagram.
And then based on
the data available to you if you do see users on TikTok, definitely go after those.
But if you're just kind of starting out
And you're
Just want to get your feet wet into something, I would say start with Google search.
Then get into meta.
Uh and if you have video available, definitely get into YouTube.
Awesome. Okay. So Google search
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok.
What about
LinkedIn.
Do you see things happening there for say B to B?
Companies.
Yeah, uh l LinkedIn um is very expensive in comparison. So just know if you're going into LinkedIn, it's going to
Look.
Almost three times more expensive.
Than other channels.
the targeting that's available on LinkedIn.
knowing job titles industries actually targeting people at certain companies.
is very powerful.
The example I always tend to use.
is that uh I worked at a company called SoftLair. SoftLair was acquired by IBM because
They were trying to build out their cloud portfolio, couldn't do it.
They're like, hey, let's do the next best thing and
by this company. But when we were just soft layer, we were trying to get
uh Coca-Cola.
as one of our clients. And uh you know those Coke free styles where you can pick whatever drink you want and put the flavor in it.
No.
Oh man, these are great. Um maybe it maybe it's a cell thing, but uh basically you go up to a Coke free style and say I want
Doctor Pepper.
And I want cherry flavor in it.
Uh or you want to coke.
Zero with
cherry and vanilla in it. You can do that. Uh it's kind of the freestyle you get to pick.
The reason they wanted
uh it to be cloud based is because
There's a ton of drinks in there.
So you need to be able to
Efficiently and effectively say this store
needs more sprite or this store needs more sprite zero.
Because you have your whole portfolio.
In this one machine.
So they want to be able to update.
things more readily.
Uh, and it was between us, AWS, and Microsoft.
And
Met with the sales team and said
Yeah, what what do we need need to do to win this'cause it was a big ticket item for us.
And uh what we found out was they had two concerns about us. It was recent recency and private um security.
So what we did was we found out where the decision makers were.
So A in LinkedIn we took
The anyone who works at Coca Cola, we want you to see ads about
Security and recent recency.
Outside of that
We also geofenced it because you would think Coca Cola
Atlanta. That's where the decision maker sits, but they were actually in LA.
So
In LA, we geofence them.
And we knew that they worked at Coca-Cola.
The next time the salesperson got on the call.
with the team to say, Hey just wanted to check in. He was like hey hey, I get it.
Security's fine, recency is fine.
We hear you. Um that was
great to hear because it was something we were able to do on LinkedIn and we did it in other platforms as well.
But we knew we were able to get not only to that decision maker, but everyone around that decision maker.
to say, hey, these these guys may be the ones we need to go with.
Okay, so just to mirror back what you're saying, you're saying you ran ads on LinkedIn.
Uh targeting
The exact Coca-Cola trying to
influence them to
overcome these barriers they had to buying to working with you guys.
Uh amazing.
I didn't.
I've seen people do that on Google search, but uh I've never heard of that makes so much sense to do on LinkedIn.
And it worked. And did they know that you did this or they're just like, Oh, I just kind of changed my mind.
Uh no I w one of them was like
We get it. We're seeing it everywhere.
We actually tried because at the time we didn't have an offline team. We actually tried to buy the billboards around the office as well, but I didn't know enough at the time from an offline perspective of like the right people to talk to, how how long it would take to do it. So
Oh we we were trying to port on hard. That's incredible. Like I could see why LinkedIn is more expensive. That's incredible.
Powerful.
And
Uh is the advice then that LinkedIn makes more sense for like higher L T B
Higher C V type of products.
Yeah, exactly. Uh I would not recommend getting into LinkedIn and my LinkedIn reps may kill me for those. I would not recommend getting into LinkedIn until you've uh tested Google and MetaFirst.
Now you could be
an enterprise level company and it does make sense to start with LinkedIn for sure.
Uh but
Depending on your audience, I would say more times than not, it would be a Google meta discussion before going to LinkedIn. Okay, so just generally
Start with Google and Meta.
Is there one or the other usually is it like I guess yeah. Do you s which one would you start with if you had to pick one?
Yeah. Always Google search. I'm always gonna say start with Google search, uh, but it it's also creative dependent. If you don't have the right creative for Facebook.
it's gonna be really hard to convert because users are just gonna either be turned off by what you're kind of putting out there. And then also depending on where your user base is, if they're not on Facebook, it it
It's kind of a mood point.
But if there are
Browsing around
On GDN or YouTube, it makes more sense to go there.
And then you said
This insight about video is performing super well right now and you're recommending people use video.
And the key there is you need to be able to make videos.
Video ads.
Yeah, you gotta make sure you have that flywheel. And the flywheel is just people internally or some company agency that can make video ads for you.
Correct, yep.
Cool. I guess is there any advice there of just how how to do that or how what ads work well or anything there?
For someone else. So yeah, the the thing with YouTube is uh I always say start with emotion.
If you can have an emotional connection.
With the user.
is gonna be way more impactful and way more powerful.
than uh anything else and
Two
Two
Take that further. When I say emotion.
That I'm talking about
Comedy.
I'm talking about
Yeah.
Um
H s happiness.
It's not necessarily just
Oh, we need an emotional connection with the brand. It is
Just making sure the user feels something after seeing your ad.
Uh, because then they'll they're more the more times not going to remember it, which then
they will take a favorable action after the fact.
That is super interesting.
One last question about platforms. Are there any
Other platforms you see.
Working for people that are emerging, maybe.
That people aren't thinking about Reddit or Snap or X or I don't know, anything along those lines.
Wh when when you say emerging channels, my brain kind of goes to connected TV
Podcast.
VR advertising, uh
Audio voice search and even AI stuff right now.
I can tell you podcasts are doing really well for the people
that I know are able to measure it correctly. Right. Um, connected TV is also doing really well. You can take the
If you again you're doing YouTube right now, being able to
Take that creative and repurpose it.
But the the VR stuff and the AI stuff.
That is stuff that is
I would say
very emerging right now.
Because
Uh
To to be completely transparent, I haven't experimented with those things yet. Uh, I kind of like letting other people be the guinea pig and learning from them.
And then uh if a hey, someone comes to me and they're like, Hey, we have budget for this, let's go ahead and test it. Great.
But let's go. Let's see what we can learn.
Awesome.
uh podcast ads. I'm glad you uh suggested that. I'm a huge fan. Thank you.
Uh
They're working really well for a lot of our sponsors and uh
I'm very biased, so you don't need to pay attention to me.
But uh
I also think there's a lot of opportunity there.
Okay. Let's talk about when
to start investing in
Performance marketing.
Flash paid growth.
So say you're like a startup. Mm-hmm.
Do you have any advice for when it's time to start?
signs of life test or even and then also just when is the time to scale.
To go like okay, let's go big on this.
If you are a startup
Um
Typically whenever I consulted with them.
It was
What are the goals?
What are we trying to achieve and when?
Because if you're looking for something quick.
Page needs to start immediately Paige has started yesterday.
Because SEO takes time.
SEO depending on the market you're getting into, if it's emerging
People may not even know your product exists.
Uh there was a product I was working on.
Years ago.
uh that if you were traveling to a hotel and say it was a romantic getaway with you and your partner and you wanted the hotel
Uh sweet or bet um
room done up with like flower petals and champagne and stuff like that.
uh they would do it for you. Well
They were working with someone before that was like, Oh, we should totally be in paid search. And if you look at the keywords that they were doing, it was like booking hotel rooms. It's like, no, that's that's a complete disconnect.
They're like, Yeah, but we're trying to build awareness.
You don't wanna build awareness through search.
You build awareness through display media base type.
Media.
When we
transitioned all of their money over at the time
Mm.
This will age me before m metto was a thing.
When we transitioned everything over to GDN.
That's when the company started really reaping the rewards.
Because we were building the awareness b around the product.
So it depends on how, you know, what is the demand of the product of your product and market. If you're doing something
That is similar to another
Uh product and market you
Could do competitor.
Um
Uh I call it co tail writing. Uh say you have say
Lenny, you and I create a product that is similar to Monday dot com.
We can go out there and just start bidding on Monday.com and say
See why
You know, Lenny and Tim are better than Monday dot com.
And start getting some people in interested, maybe kicking the tire, starting free trials.
But they also have
other keywords that they can go after.
in market.
Uh, but if you're going after something new like
Hotel room.
You know, flowers and
I forget what keywords we were bidding on for that, because it was years ago. People weren't thinking of that. That wasn't something they were searching for. So it just really depends on.
A
When do you expect results?
Because SEO can take time.
And B, what is the demand in the market for your product?
Some people use
Paid ads to drive early growth to
bring customers to help them figure out what to build, kind of pre product market fit.
growth, is that something you recommend? Is that something you advise against? Is that
Strategy that you've seen work.
Yeah, product market fit is a huge thing. Um
We've run into some of this at uh Shopify.
And we definitely ran into this at um IBM.
So for the longest time, you know, IBM is we're a global company, we should be everywhere.
Uh, but when we started looking at the data, it was
Should we be everywhere?
For example
Africa.
We were in the whole continent.
We weren't just in, say, South Africa or Egypt or something like that. And the more we dug into it, the more we realized the biggest
Issue wasn't necessarily that users
weren't interested in our product and weren't able to and weren't purchasing it.
It was because we didn't have a product market fit.
mainly from an operation standpoint.
In Africa there are
multitudes of different types of uh currency. There's the Franc, there's the RAN, there's the Shill.
And we
We were just hey USD, thank you. So of course they weren't converting.
Unless they were going out of their way to make a way.
to uh convert that.
So
When we
took a step back and we said, okay, where do we want to start?
It was South Africa. That's really where we were trying to get
quote unquote stronghold in.
Uh, so we had to make sure we had the RAND available.
Once we did that, we were uh we started doing
tremendously better because then we had a product market fit they
They had demand.
for our product and now we were able to serve them.
Meet them where they were.
So essentially you're saying.
Probably not smart to run a bunch of
Adds if
It's not working. If you don't have something people actually want yet in that product in that market.
Right.
Or
Able to convert.
It because conversion is gonna end up being really low. No one actually cares about what you're doing.
All you're gonna do is really annoy the users'cause say in the future they are
Hey, I'm I'm still interested, but I don't want to use that product'cause I already tried.
It's like, no, no, you can totally use it now.
I already tried. It's it's it I had a bad experience with them and
Some users will hold that.
You know, you accountable to that. One bad experience and I'm just never giving you my business.
Interesting. So is that is that generally your advice if you're

You're not feeling like you actually have product market fit yet.
Should you even experiment with and do signs of life tests or should you hold off until it's like, okay, it's actually working. Let's go.
From an operation standpoint, I alwa I always want to make sure those things are tied off.
Yeah, it it doesn't make sense to
Yeah, again, if you have a if you have a major budget and you're trying to get awareness into a market.
Great.
Yeah, you can go after a market.
Uh, but just know that it may it's probably not gonna convert very well.
Got it. So I wouldn't recommend it.
Okay, great. Awesome. Very very clear answer.
Let's talk about
The mistakes that you see
companies make when they're investing in performance marketing.
So uh we got introduced through Casey Winners, illustrious former podcast guest, two time podcast guest.
And
I asked him about you and he told me that
When you take over for an agency.
at a company that you work with.
You crush their performance within a month.
I'm curious what you
see and find they are doing wrong that allows you to be such a hero when you come in and take over.
I think agencies have playbooks.
Uh now I've worked at agencies. I I did consulting for a long period of time.
It was never a approach I took.
I looked at each account and each company.
As it's
Own thing.
But I think a lot of agencies just come in and they go, Oh, this is like A B and C company and this is what we're doing.
Copy paste done.
Move on.
And they're also not willing to get
Deep, deep, deep into the weeds of stuff. Um
I may get a little too far into data uh than uh some other people.
For example, like I have uh opscadence that
you know, myself and my team follow. So
Within that obscadance, we have things like finance, performance, structure.
Keywords, ad copy, quality score.
targeting, et cetera, et cetera. And then with it
Within each of those we have specifics.
For example, the keyword subsection is keyword granularity, brand versus non-brand.
Search query reports, negatives, so on so forth.
I feel like
Agencies
Don't necessarily
Get into all of those things every single month.
Where some of those were doing
Weekly some of those we're doing
bi weekly and some of those we're doing monthly.
But
They touch the things that they think they need to touch. They turn on automated bidding.
They're doing their search query reports, and then they just kind of move on up with their day because they have 50 other clients they have to get to.
Well, what about looking at your your conversions? Where are we converting? Have we tested different landing pages?
what is a better user experience that we can be getting users right now. It's a five step process can get it to a three.
partnering with like
PMMs to say
Hey.
Here's something that I think could help improve our
you know, lead to conversion.
Uh just stuff like that that they're
You know.
too busy with too many other things to focus really, really deep into those. And
Typically whenever
I managed an agency in the past and I consulted. I made sure that
you didn't you weren't stretched then enough that you couldn't do those things.
Because
I'm a firm believer
In hiring smart people and then getting out of their way.
But
Each week having one on ones with them.
Just
You know.
spot checking things, just saying, Hey, I looked at this. This doesn't
Look.
Right, what's going on there. Oh yeah, I do that on this day. Okay, great, just making sure you're covered.
Because
Sometimes people won't scream uncle when they should be screaming uncle'cause they think it's a sign of weakness.
But
Let me know when you're overwhelmed. Maybe I have a
solution for you. Maybe there's a way I can coach you to be better at something. Or we just need to hire more resources because
The client portfolio you have is five.
And when we took them on, they were all at a hundred K, but now they're all spending two million plus.
We need to offload some of that from you because
You're doing such a good job.
That
You've scaled them up. Let's give you three clients instead of five and hire someone to take those two.
So it sounds like you basically they just don't have the time to
Care and spend.
On
All the things that they need to be doing.
And
When you've held companies you actually go deep and you don't have a lot of
Y you have the time to do it well.
I guess when someone's trying to find an agency.
Or someone like you, I know you don't do this much anymore.
Any advice for just like how to know if they're gonna
Be great.
Is it just like agencies in general probably not a good choice? Is it
H hire someone in house.
I guess what what advice do you have for people that are like, Oh man, I don't I wanna avoid this.
Agencies are a good place to get things started. Even when I was consulting
I would honestly
I'm a big believer in
Forward thinking, backwards planning.
So
If I'm taking this contract on
With this.
new client. It's w what's the end goal for you?
If your end goal is to have this at
you know, uh performing at hundred million dollar spend. There's no way one person can do that.
So let's create mild zones along the way.
of uh making sure we're checking in and saying when is the right time to hire
Uh whether that's a data scientist, whether that's a creative person in house.
Or replacing me all time.
There's no reason that you should be holding a company back.
If anything, you should be helping them get to that milestone.
And
I think that's why I have been able to do so well for myself because
I show that.
Hey, I have the best interest for you.
And your company.
uh as opposed to how much money how much more money can I squeeze from you by holding on to you as a client.
I would say agency consultant.
Um is a good way to start because if you as a business owner
You shouldn't
have to log in oh I haven't logged into Google in like three weeks to look at stuff because
I'm doing payroll. I'm doing
HR stuff and I'm meeting with clients and I'm doing sales.
Start there.
Get it to a good place, create that milestone of hey, when we're spending
50 K a month, I need to hire somebody full time to take this over and just have that conversation with your agency and your consultant.
Uh, I think more times than not you will
Have a positive reaction to that.
But if you don't, I would say that's a major red flag and probably someone you should be partnering with.
Awesome. Okay. So your advice is
To get started on paid growth.
Buying an agency or like a small shop consultant.
type person to get you started, have a conversation. And when we reach a certain scale
We're gonna hire someone internally to run this for us and then
Potentially they'll keep working with you, potentially they'll start things on their own. Or or is that or is it is the is the assumption they'll start working with you, they'll become the owner of this thing, or is it like we may
Transition you out?
That's a really good point, actually. So uh there have been times where uh clients like, hey, we've reached our milestone, I want to bring someone in.
That person comes in and say they're an expert in uh social media.
Like hey, I still want you to execute on Google and Bing because that is just not my daily wick.
I'll take over the social stuff, but we do need to talk about your fee. Maybe it does need to go down. Completely acceptable.
Let's have that discussion, make sure we're both aligned to what that should be.
Uh, but yeah, that there have been times where they're like, Hey, we've reached our milestone, we gotta bring someone on.
But that person that they bring on's like, actually I see expansion in this direction.
But I can't do this. Are you willing to stay on and help me with this?
Great. If not, I'll just have to find someone else who can.
I wanna talk about the team that used build over time, but
Later, but specifically for this first person that you hire.
What sort of person
Is this person is it like a data person? Is it a person that's just done specific performance marketing on channel?
Or what do you look for ideally?
I'm a big believer in uh that there was a a book written by uh Nate Silver called The Signal.
And the noise, are you familiar with it? No.
Um, so uh are you uh so Nate Silver is the guy who created five through seven.
Yeah.
Um and
In the book.
it he basically uh
I'm gonna use the word art.
Use the word art.
detailed the art of like probability
statistics, um
Uh and applying them to like real world.
um circumstances.
It included case studies of with baseball, which of course I love.
Um elections, climate change, poker, stuff like that.
And
The
I like that book. It's kind of dense, but the thing I liked the most about it was the title.
And just changing the title ever so slightly to signal not noise.
So
Typically whenever I
Higher
people. I wanna hire smart people and kind of get out of their way.
But the biggest thing I want to focus on is
What is
Your thoughts when it comes to data.
Because I can teach anyone.
How to do Google Ads. I can teach anyone how to do meta ads. That that is not the hard part. It is the data part that is the hard part.
Because there is so much noise.
going on in those accounts.
They give you everything, which is great.
It's great that they give you all this information.
But
You can have someone that's, oh, but look at the reach, look at the frequency, look at the CPMs, look at the CPC, look at the conversion rate, look at the cost per lead, look at the cost per MQL, look at this.
Hold on.
That's a lot of noise, you just said. So let's what is the signal and what is the noise? And let's make sure we're focusing on the right signal versus the right noise. And that has to be a data person.
Because there's a lot of data.
In these platforms.
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Everyone I talk to that's worked with you is just like Tim Timothy is incredible. It
Working with tons of data and finding the things that matter.
Uh
Someone told me that it actually comes from your love of baseball that you just go crazy with stats and spread sheets of
baseball games and players and things like that. Is there something there that you could show that is interesting?
Yeah, I so I played baseball my whole life. Um but when you um
Blow out your arm.
And you're as fast as a sea otter. It's
It's not very
conduce for you to continue facing uh, you know, chasing that dream. But the one thing I always liked was the stats. Even as a kid, when I would watch like baseball games.
uh on T V it's like what's this guy batting?
How often is he getting on base?
uh, you know, how many RBIs like, oh this guy's terrible average, but he has a lot of RBIs. So that means if there's a runner on base, he may not
get a hit, but he's gonna get that guy in.
Um, so you want to make sure you put'em in the right spot in the batting order, so on and so forth. I could talk about that for hours. But
Uh again, that that could be another thing where there's a lot of data available. What which one should you focus on? And uh ultimately where what is the optimization you're gonna make to
the lineup or
To the
Uh where you place.
fielders on the field.
To ensure that
We're we're doing the right thing and becoming as efficient and effective as possible.
As far as dealing with all that data.
That is just
I would say a skill I've learned over time.
Early in my career, uh whenever someone
Uh
You know, it was like, Oh, we have this new project, uh, who wants to work on it? I'll do it.
I I was always just eager, you know, like a sponge and just I wanted to get in as much stuff as possible.
I did SEO for a portion of my career. I did email marketing. I did affiliates.
And then eventually
I remember the first time I saw paid because again I was doing like SEO where it was like, Yeah, we're gonna do this and we think it's gonna work.

But uh we won't know for about
Yeah, six months.
Someone showed me a paid platform. I was like, wait.
You know this is the keyword you're betting on.
This is how many times the ad was shown, how many people clicked on it.
How many?
Wow.
This is amazing. I need to I need to get more into this. And that's just kind of where it started.
And
Uh when I usually hire people
And
We go through the interview process. I make sure that they can be data focused.
Really, it's just ensuring that we're focusing on that signal.
And not the noise.
And
One of the interview questions I usually ask is like I I throw a bunch of
You know, data points at them.
And then say out of all that, uh w what would you do to optimize the account?
And more times than not, that they're just like overwhelmed.
Uh, but the people that I like or like well w what was the purpose of the
Camp what's the purpose of the campaign?
Uh the purpose of the campaign is to drive conversions.
Okay, well I would focus here. Like focus on how many clicks we're getting and how many conversions.
Are we targeting the right people?
Because
Who cares about how many impressions you're getting? Who cares about the reach? Who cares about the frequency?
If the goal of the campaign is to get the conversions, that's what we should be doing. If it was awareness, it's how many people saw it.
If it was a consideration, how many people were getting into the funnel.
And are considering
us is from a white paper download or a demo.
as the product solution that they're looking for.
That's uh great segue to the next question I wanted to ask you, which is just
Metrics that you
love to focus on, pay attention to when you're
Helping people with
Prades.
Like a lot of people think about CAC.
Lot of people think about return on at spend.
L T B to CAC. I know it really depends on the goals, as you said, and
But I guess is there anything that you find is like the forget these metrics.
These are kind of the bucket that you focus on mo most.
Yeah, so so for those metrics, I would say I really hope you have uh
A great rev uh finance partner.
Shout out to Courtney and Nick, uh the the fantastic finance partners I have at Shopify. Well, Nick's not there anymore.
Sad cry emoji, but uh Courtney
You know, we're we're able to collaborate on those things, understand
This is the investment we're putting in. This is the expected return. This is the CAC that we can uh
uh basically put a guardrail on you have to be within
So
Hope.
Hopefully you have a really strong financial partner you can use for those.
But as far as the stuff that I focus on, there are things that whenever
We're we're looking at accounts.
uh we'll we'll kind of hyper focus on
For example, Google will give you information.
about what is going on with your
add copy and how to ultimately show as often as possible.
Uh, what I'm showing here is a visual of
Brand versus non brand.
When it comes to expected click through aid.
Landing page experience and add relevance.
The reason I like
building reports like this is because it will kind of show you where your hole in the ship is.
If you look on the left side.
Expected click through rate.
Seventy five percent above average.
Landing page experience eighty four percent above average.
Then you get down to add relevance.
A lot more uh colors than there are green, only thirty five percent above average.
So for your brand add copy.
the clear direction you have.
from the data that's available to you is jump into the account.
And make it more relevant.
Uh that will improve your ad strength.
And once you improve your ad strength.
uh that will improve prove your quality score and more times than I think it's
Twelve per
a twelve percent increase in the number of impressions you can get.
If you increase
from a a below average
to an above average.
for the data that's available here.
And then on the
The non brand side, clear expected click through rate.
Uh you really need to be working on.
And that data is also available here.
That you can kind of see I put in red.
Uh the the one for brand, your quality score being at a nine.
But your average CPC is eight dollars.
That is very interesting because it should be
The lower your CPC is.
I mean the higher your C P C is, the lower your C P C should be.
So that is an investigation that's like, hey, here's a signal.
Let's go do a deep dive.
So
There's further reports uh that you could look at.
Uh looking at the ad strength again, average, excellent, good or poor.
You can see clearly on the uh non brand side.
Doing really well.
They're doing really well here.
Most of their ads, 46 of their ads are excellent.
And a bulk of their spend.
is going there.
Uh, but if we look on the brand side
You have one ad, one
add that you could go in and just
Click pause on.
That is a poor.
And look at that C P C.
Seven dollars.
So just turning that ad off by itself.
Not only will
Pra yeah I'm a firm believer in that there's a
An account level
qu uh quality score, not just necessarily a keyword or an ad quality score. So just turning this one off and removing it from the account, this one ad could dramatically improve your performance.
And then
Google actually tells you
What you need to do to increase those strength things. So this report is ultimately powered by this one.
So
For your ad strength improvements, uh, they'll tell you try adding a few more unique headlines or unpinning some of the ad sets.
Try including more keywords in your descriptions or your headlines.
So they're actually giving you this information, but more times than not, I just feel like
People are just missing this and just not taking action on it.
Um, so definitely some stuff available uh within the account that will help you focus on that signal.
versus the noise that you could be just getting from the clicks, the impressions and
All those things that are available to you.
That was amazing. For folks not watching on YouTube, you pulled up uh
Actual reports from I think Imagine Past Clients. Is that what the uh
The data was from okay, so actual reports for past clients.
Of how you evaluate and this is Google
Ads, basically.
Uh lads data.
Incredible. Okay. And
So within the r those reports you had
Poor excellent. How how do you determine when something is going great? Is that something you set like if it's above the threshold?
Is that a benchmark you have, or is that Google telling you this is poor this
Yeah. So that's Google telling you. Okay. Um
There are some times where you will work really, really hard uh to take that uh poor to an average, that average to uh an excellent.
And there there's just not a whole lot you can do, uh sometimes. It it kinda is what it is.
But I would argue more times than not, people are not doing those things to improve.
Their add string.
Uh so j just
Yeah.
You have the
Change
history available in every account in Meta and Google.
If people are doing the test to try and improve
And get better.
Right.
You have the right people working.
But if not, that that's a clearation that there's definitely room for improvement.
Something that someone asked on Twitter is
is for benchmarks around any of the stuff. Like how do you know when your C P C is good?
I guess you just look at you look at like Google telling you it's excellent for sport. How do you know if your
Conversion rate is good.
CAC is good. Yeah, every industry and every company is gonna be different.
Healthcare
Lawyers, those are some of the
highest
cost and average CPCs I've seen.
If I was to compare that industry, say to a B to B industry.
It would
not be very good at all.
Honestly what I would tell the user to do.
Every single platform has partners available.
More times than not, they're kinda like salespeople. I actually really like the partners.
uh that we have at Shopify uh because I do feel that they are partners.
Shout out to Fran Francisco at Google and uh Sammy and Alana.
And uh meta.
And Nick and Sam.
And Brian at LinkedIn.
Case they all hear this, but you know, I think they're really great partners, and they will give you that information, they will actually say.
If you give me
Your
The five people you consider to be your top competitors.
I will tell you
If you are above or below
certain threshold. Now they can't tell you CAC because they would have to have transparency into like conversions.
Uh but click through eight.
Conversion rate.
cost per click, things like that. They won't give you that information'cause
They they they will anonymized it, so you won't know.
Who is who?
Like if you say
My competitorsmonday.com.
They won't say Monday.com has a click through rate of five percent.
They they won't tell you that, but they will tell you
of the competitors you gave us and we added three more in just uh
You know.
Say hey, we found some people and also
Where if you only give them two, you can be like, Oh, it's one or the other. That they'll give you that information because they want you to succeed. Because if you succeed,
You spend more money on their platform.
Uh so if you find out your average CPC is really high.
Take the actions that are in the account that tell you what you can do to lower it.
But if you find out that you have a lower CPC, you're like, Oh, great, I thought that was
Worse. And then
You can communicate that internally to your team and say
Hey, our average C P C is may seem high.
But in reality, we got with our partners and we are uh
You know.
on par with the industry.
Got it. So the advice is don't seek
generic benchmarks for any of these metrics.
You can talk to your rep at
Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, et cetera, and it'll give you essentially the number of the summary. Yes. Yes.
Amazing.
Okay, back going back to the report you just showed, is that is that a report you developed custom that
gives you like here's the most important stuff to pay attention to or is it basically an export
From Google Ad Manager and
So these are all ac exports. So that this is just the visualization of the data that's available. So this all data is available in every account.
This is data available in the account. This is data available in the account.
Now in saying that
There are more reports that we get into like impression share and frequency.
This is something I tend to look at that not a lot of other people do.
It's not
About showing as often as possible.
Because that's what impression share tells you.
And that's kind of like ego marketing. I want to be number one. I want to be there all the time.
It's about showing
to the right person as often as possible.
Instead of thinking about being on top of the page
You should think about serving the right user, which can be measured with our click share.
And then Google will put us on top of the page.
Which we can see through our
Top impression share.
That's what this whole visualization is here for, where I feel like a lot of people don't do this type of visualization.
And this can be done by leveraging all the user data available in Google, such as
you know, demographics locations, affinity audiences, in market audiences.
Testing different bid strategies and more.
So
The data is readily available.
But it's just making the visualization
A little bit more digestible.
And the reason that I actually have two here to show is because this is an example.
of when I was working on an account back in twenty twenty three.
Uh where we started making some changes and you can see that
Clearly our impression share.
You know, I would say was baseline.
You know, it didn't really change too much, but look at our click share going up.
Because now again we're talking
More to the right people.
Not necessarily just everyone generic people.
versus this campaign.
That was this was the
Test and this was the control.
And you can clearly see that
We were talking to a lot of people, but no one cared about what we were talking about.
So this was an easy test to call and just say this one's performing a lot better.
And then you know, verifying the other metrics still look good, conversion rate, number of conversions, stuff like that.
This one was the clear winner, so we went in this direction.
This is super cool. I love that you're showing this and again the plug for YouTube to actually see the charts you're talking about.
I see one more slide on this deck. I'm curious what's there.
Yeah, so this one, I'm hoping you have show notes uh that we can uh give a shout out to somebody. Um
Yep. Uh there's uh a website called PPC Hero. Um what I usually tell people is terrible name, great content.
De
actual website used to be a little bit more cartoonish with like superheroes on it, but now it's a you know, they've refined it. But uh the writer there, his name's Jacob Brown.
This is what he calls the true competition metric.
And again, this is why I highly recommend we give people the uh link to the article because this does get a little dense.
So
What he does is that he creates four new metrics.
with the auction insights that are available.
And two of those metrics are position above rate.
when we show an amount of times they show and we don't.
Added together.
And it will show how often a competitor
rings above you.
in all auctions you are available for.
Using this type of lens is an effective way to identify genuine threats.
Not that just this data can be used to gain comprehensive insights like determining your position and impression share.
But by creating a baseline that you can see how this data changes over time through different bid strategies.
Keyword and copy optimizations and more.
This is a very, very powerful one because I do know a lot of people are always concerned about
What are my competitors doing? How are they doing it? Why are they doing it? And with all the smart bidding currently available.
You know, back in
Back in my day, you know.
We were it was all manual bid.
So you could change the bid ever so slightly.
And then be like, oh now my competitor is showing above me. And this is even before Google gave us auction insights data.
Uh this is now available to us in the platform.
Tell
Using this report will actually identify a true threat.
As opposed to
making an assumption based on
personalization that maybe you're seeing when you Google a keyword.
Or using a tool
Like Sem Rush that ultimately is
Uh saying oh this
This person's appearing above you.
Well, let's run this report and see if it's a genuine threat.
as opposed to just maybe ego marketing going on.
Super cool. And this comes from PPC Hero is is what you're thinking?
Cool. We'll definitely link to that.
There are any other tools
Or workflows that you find really helpful in analyzing
This endless amount of data.
Please, audience, if you if if you are using AI in this way.
Let me know uh because
A lot of the stuff I do is
can be a little manual and can be a little time consuming.
If they've found ways to automate
Through AI.
Uh that does that where I can
Provide the information that isn't
You know, sensitive.
Uh that they will
You know
make it a lot cleaner and a lot more digestible, let me know.
But a lot of the things I have templates that you can load the data into and it will just automatically give you
Uh the result from it.
But yeah, it's it right right now it is.
a little manual, but if there's a way to automate this through AI, please users, uh contact me on LinkedIn and let me know.
Sounds like a start up opportunity right there.
Yeah.
Sweet. Okay. Let's move in a slightly different direction. Attribution.
What a what a sexy uh
Exciting topic.
So attribution basically it's how do you assign credit to a channel and to a campaign.
Uh so that you know where growth is coming from it's working.
What's the state of attribution today? What do you find is
Is helpful. How do people do attribution?
Well, in today's world.
Yeah, I'm a big
believer and proponent in multi-touch.
I fall into the camp of more time decay. Historically the
research I've done
Users tend to forget very quickly where they first found your brand.
Yes, you should get credit because this is the first time they saw your brand or the first time they interacted with it.
Uh for sure. Let's give you some credit for that.
But uh definitely not the reason that they ultimately converted.
Um, linear's fine as well, but I
You know.
Overall, I do think
You know, attribution by itself is biased.
It does not answer the question of whether the person clicking on or seeing an ad.
Would have converted anyways.
Even in the upset.
Absence of that ad.
This is why numerous companies like Netflix and eBay have done studies to get an understanding of the incrementality of paid advertising campaigns.
Whether that's conducting GOX or
Uh conversion lift test.
and important slices of uh the marketing channel. I know eBay was very popular.
when they did that uh experiment. I think it was like twenty twelve. I and I'll have a link for you for that as well.
Uh where they
ultimately decided to cut almost all of their brand spend because they found that users were already going to find them.
through organic anyway. So they were just kind of
Throwing money out the window.
And it was really hard for competitors to get their ads at the top of the page because our quality scores were so low.
Okay, so multi touch is the way you like to think about it. Basically give credits to
All of the channels that
You detected the user saw your add on.
And less credit if it was
Further back in time.
Right.
Yep.
And then in terms of tooling, is there tools you love? Is is it stuff you build in house generally? How do how do people go about doing this sort of stuff?
Yeah, I don't know if I wanna say I have been fortunate.
Or not, uh but most of the companies with like the the
the big companies of the world, the Pinterest, the
Shopify's the IBMs of the world tend to build things in house.
So from uh
A third party tool, unfortunately. I don't have a whole lot of uh go to's for that.
So again, either that's a
I've been fortunate or I've been sheltered.
And then
Are are there tools that you s see people use, or is it just like really nothing amazing out there?
Yeah, not none that I've seen that's like, oh wow, that's amazing. Uh I will always say make sure you're trying to leverage the in platform tools.
Uh because
The biggest thing with
Performance marketing is the signal you're sending the platform.
Because if you are telling the platform, Oh, I want to get more
of the users that are doing this action.
It's gonna do a really good job of giving you that.
But if that action doesn't equal business results
You you're you're not helping yourself at the end of the day. You're you're giving it up again a lot of noise instead of the right signal.
So
Uh try and leverage the in platform tools or if there is a tool you're using, make sure it does
You know
uh uh allow
third party integration through
The Google meta TikToks of the world.
Then let's talk about incrementality. You mentioned this idea of
How do you know if
The
Money you spent.
led to incremental growth that wouldn't have happened if you didn't run
Run that ad.
Is there any advice there, anything you've seen about just like how to think about incrementality correctly and not just give yourself all this credit for stuff that would have happened anyway?
Yeah, I mean th there are many ways to judge the effectiveness.
Of uh
Growth overall, like some of the stuff we talked about before, brand metrics, awareness, recall, things along those lines.
There also I know some companies look at like leading indicators like visits and clicks.
or tribute which of the efforts are linked to or perceived uh drivers of actions like leads, conversions to prospect, prospect to scale.
But you know, really the the the results should be coming from either that geo
X or geo experiment or conversion lift.
uh the results of those experiments should ultimately fuel the plans for your uh what we call
IAF incrementality adjusted factor.
And will allow you to be more precise.
And how efficient each channel is.
Ideally by region, sometimes you just have a holistic of like this is how Meta is, this is how YouTube is. But if you
If you don't have it by region, don't fret. That's fine. Just have it by platform.
And kind of like what does that look in practice?
Uh when you're running a conversion lift test, you intentionally do not show your ad to some users.
When you win an auction
And instead Google shows the next bidders ad.
This is your control group and adds up to some opportunity cost that is
estimated in terms of impression share per f uh percentage as well as spend holdback.
spend holdback is like how much money
You will not spend.
Because of this test.
And all of the platforms are
uh willing to partner with you on this because
You know.
Facebook knows this, LinkedIn knows this, all of them know that they are very visually based.
creative assets.
that are not getting as much credit as they deserve.
So if you go to any of them, you if say you don't have a dedicated rep, you can call and if you ask for this more times than not, they are willing to partner with you.
Uh, in saying that if you're not spending enough.
They probably will not.
uh help you with this because there are certain spend thresholds you do need to meet.
But uh I would say at least start there.
Uh and also if you're not spending
more than I would say fifty K a month in the platform.
doing this is going to be a lot more work.
uh then you're gonna get result from you you're just not gonna have enough signal there.
So basically don't don't worry about running incrementality tests when you're just
When you're when you're starting out.
Got it.
to understand actual incrementality.
Every platform has a way for you to actually test it.
on the platform and the team there.
Can help you run it.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Okay.
Let's go back to talking about team structure and how to kind of build your own
Performance marketing team. So we talked about the first person that you hire and the advice there was someone that's very understands how to find signaling noise.
So there's that one person
And you
Your advice there was maybe around like fifty K.
Was that like an actual threshold they usually recommend or is that just like a an example?
Uh every business is slightly different. I mean if there are
Uh well funded, fifty K may not.
uh the the threshold may be higher.
But uh yeah, everyone's different. Fifty K may be like if somebody said if you were to just say, Hey, give me a number, I would say fifty K.
to to start having those conversations because if you're at fifty K
Say for the month of June.
Great.
It's gonna take us three months to hire someone anyway. So at least start the conversations now.
Awesome. Okay.
What do like the first three to five hires look like generally that you recommend?
For
scaling internally.
Performance marketing.
So the first thing
Uh, like we said, someone data driven that can get into the platforms.
The next is uh going to be creative.
Uh, because I need those two now working hand in hand.
Uh, making sure they're creative.
is matching the tone.
And also the performance that we're trying to achieve as a business.
Uh, and then third would be a dedicated data scientist, a fully dedicated person, because they can help you with things like
The
Incrementality testing.
They can help.
create reports that will ultimately make everyone's lives better.
They will be able to build
analyses that
you will not as a generalist will not be able to do yourself.
You know, that there's a saying of like I
Uh
I'm not a data scientist, but I like to play one online.
Because that what they do they ultimately
Make
Us look really good.
Because we're ultimately the ones reporting on the performance of it, but they were the ones that helped build that environment and build all those things for us to succeed.
In the terms of the creative person, is that like a
graphic designer, is it like a marketing person? What's like the actual
Skill set there.
It would be more
Uh graphic design slash branding. Uh the reason for that is because there
You're if you have a good marketing mix, you're gonna have
If we keep it to a three step funnel of awareness consideration purchase.
you're going to need to build some brand equity.
In a specific direction.
You're going to need to
Uh make sure you're communicating value.
Which now you're not being as
creative, you are being more directional.
And then ultimately the purchase is like, hey, click here, convert now.
So you do want to give them the ability to still be creative. Hey, I hired you because you have a good creative eye and you're good at what you do.
But now we need to focus on getting that person to convert.
So you give them a little free reign to do be creative, but then you also need them to be able to execute against that creative if you need to get those users to convert.
And they're also writing the copy.
I imagine for like the Google ads.
I usually say that should be collaborative. Um
The
performance marketer should be able to write most of the ads.
But I can't tell you how mo how many times in my career where I've written an ad and I'm like, this is the greatest ad ever written known to man.
people will write stories about this ad. It is amazing.
And it flops.
Because I'm not the target audience more times than not.
Uh so
I think it should be collaborative and no idea should be left on the cutting room floor because
Perfect example.
I was working with AD T.
You know, the security company.
We wrote
the most perfect ad when Google ads only allowed a headline and two descriptions of thirty five and thirty five.
We got every single value prop.
in there.
Somehow it was amazing.
And the ad that it was going against was
Dollar sign zero setup fee. Dollar sign zero.
In Sulfy.
That add one.
It's like
That is no. How did that how it it barely uses any of the characters.
And it almost tells you I mean
Tells you almost nothing, but it it won.
Um had more conversions, a higher click through rate.
So we took that and we applied that with the value props and
It did better. So
Should never be like
Unless the idea is don't buy our product.
Which hopefully someone is not writing that odd copy.
It shouldn't be left on the cutting room floor. Always test it.
Always be willing to learn what what works, what doesn't.
For this first hire, what's the r what's like the title of this person usually in your experience?
Lately it's been uh growth marketing specialist, growth marketing manager.
Uh, because they're gonna wear multiple hats.
You know, like at any start up that you're at, you you're you're gonna be asked one day to
Hey, I want you to do performance ads. And then tomorrow it's like, hey, I need you to help me.
build out this spreadsheet
a spec sheet that you you have no idea what you're doing. So you're always gonna wear multiple hats. So just having a general
title like that to start out with. And then if that per person matures into a role.
you can make them more of a specialist, or if they start showing signs of like
I
Really like doing the social stuff.
And we've scaled enough, okay, let me hire a paid search person.
So yeah, I always start with a general
Uh and then as the team grows, we get more into specialties. So like growth marketing.
It's kinda like the broadbrella.
And then are these people sitting in Google Ad Manager and
meta ads and just like running ads manually.
I'm a firm believer at Shopify would call it GSD getting shit done.
I'm a firm believer in getting shit done. Uh you should be in the account, like I mentioned earlier with that ops cadence.
We have stuff we need to be doing weekly.
Biweekly, monthly.
The bigger the company gets, the ten
you wind up in more and more meetings talking about the things you wanna do and how you're gonna do it and stuff like that.
Uh but keeping those people kind of sheltered.
away from that and focused on those things.
are gonna drive the best.
Results for you.
You possibly can get.
And that means hands on keyboards.
In the ads manager tweaking things.
Setting up a calendar. I'm a firm believer in setting up a calendar.
We did this test. We started this test on this day.
That means this test will end on a month from now, put a notification. So you have a cool down period and you report out to the org what you did, how you did it, why you did it.
And then the results from it.
And then all right, what we learned from this.
uh is this and we will be applying that to our next test and this is how.
So yeah, hands on keyboards doing all of those things. So
Again.
Hiring those smart people and just getting out of their way.
I love that.
In terms of
How this
Team grows. You mentioned s when we were chatting that you wait for someone to
Cry on Conglone.
to hire more and to add to the team.
To kind of avoid bloat.
Talk about that.
You know, unfortunately we've seen a lot in the news lately with a lot of tech companies.
Um letting go.
of some really talented people.
And that is I feel like just created
loaded organizations.
We every uh month, uh my current manager, Dean, created this uh calculator.
that we look at that says how much time are you spending in meetings, uh if you have any PTO coming up, put that in there.
optimizations, reporting, stuff like that to basically add up to how many days are in the quarter.
Uh,'cause you know, every quarter well, not every quarter, but most quarters you'll have like vacation or you'll have
Say what we call Shopify burst.
where it's uh we meet in real in real life to
you know, get shit done in real life as opposed to remotely.
You know, put all that in there and then what does the number equate to? Oh, we're in the red.
right now for these, you know, two to five people.
How many quarters has it been that way? Okay, it's only this quarter.
This quarter we have a summit coming up, or we have a burst coming up, or we have a lot of travel because uh we're meeting with partners.
So on and so forth. So
Maybe this is an isolated thing. Let's go ahead and wait till next quarter. All right, next quarter, it's red again.
All right, now maybe we need to start having the conversation of
What this new hire will take over.
uh what they will be responsible for.
and uh how much work they'll be taking on and doing.
to replace uh some of this red.
Uh that is going on. And if it
equates to a full head, great, we can move forward. We've made our business case.
Uh but sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes we're just read.
And uh we need to do a better job of making sure, hey, we need to step out of these meetings.
These meetings are sucking out.
our time and we don't need to be a part of it.
Yeah.
uh this launch we don't need to be a part of. We just need to be consultant on it. We don't need to be in every single meeting every single time or every single communication. So just making sure we're looking at the right things before we
decide to hire someone and making sure that we have stuff for them to do.
And uh red means uh they've more
work. Yeah, more days than there are in the m in the quarter. And so they basically estimate here's how much I how many days I need to do the things I've committed to for the quarter. And then it's like how many actual days do you have this quarter?
Yep.
That is super cool.
And
So step one is okay, if you're in the red, let's cut some stuff.
And then if
They're still in the red.
And you've cut stuff, then okay, we need to start hiring.
Yep. That is very cool. Is that just a is that a Shopify thing or is that something you
You do on your team. I've done stuff like that at other companies before, but uh
Kind of bringing it forward again. I don't want to take the credit for it. Dean was kind of the one that brought it back up. It was like, Oh yeah, I used to do this. I don't know why we I stopped doing it.
So it's definitely something I've used at other companies for sure.
That is super cool.
You mentioned this ops cadence. Is that something you can describe just like what this cadence looks like of how you
Run. Yeah. So I I love me a spreadsheet. So it's just a spreadsheet.
And uh visually, uh, I'll do my best to describe it. Let's say column A.
has those buckets I was talking about, like a finance, performance, structure, keyword, so on and so forth.
And then within those buckets
Or let's call those
Everyone loves
rocks and pebbles right now, right? So that that's your big rock. Your big rock is keywords. Then within that you have pebbles.
Uh keyword granularity, brand versus non brand, search query reports, negatives, so on and so forth.
And then within that, we say how often we're doing it. Are we doing it weekly, biweekly, monthly?
And then that allows us to if anyone in the organization's like
Hey, how often are you guys updating Ad Copy?
Easy answer. How often are you guys uh doing search query reports?
Easy answer.
And it allows us to make sure we hold ourselves accountable to those things because
A lot of times we we have a lot we're doing. We're working in Google, we're working in Meta, we're working in YouTube.
You could easily forget, oh, I didn't do that.
Ah, I gotta make sure I do that again. So it holds your it it's a way to hold yourself accountable, but it's also a way for me as
a manager to go in and kind of
spot check that and make sure that they're doing the things that that that need to be done in the account.
The core of this essentially there's a spreadsheet that
Everyone aligns on of here's how when and how often we do certain activity.
to operate this.
Performance marketing machine that you built.
Yep.
Awesome. And it's it's both internally so that everyone knows and then also
When people ask, Okay, when are you gonna do this? Okay, here, here's the date. Yeah.
Yeah, so like if a cross functional team or partner wants to know.
Easy answer. We got it for you right here. Here's our whole op cadence.
In terms of the team
Something else uh folks told me about you is that you're very hardcore about training new people that you hire.
Uh what does that mean?
People mean by that.
Yeah, there's a book called Uh
I think it's the first ninety days.
And in it it actually has uh a graph that shows
when the person starts having an impact and how many days it's been.
And more times than not, it takes about, you know
We've all heard it, ninety days for someone to have impact.
I want to
Try and make that
You know, forty five days, if not thirty.
Most of the time.
It has to do with um learning the culture, learning the people, understanding
Yes, you've done paid before at this other job, but this is how we do it here.
That's where the ops cadence.
really comes in handy.
Like
Here's how often we do it here.
I understand maybe you did it monthly there, but we do it here biweekly.
And you're saying you used to do it bi weekly. We do it weekly.
And this is how.
And also
giving them responsibility early on for something.
For example, uh Cat on my team was hired eight ish months ago.
She was thrown into the fire very quickly. She was like, Hey, we're uh we have this campaign coming up called Additions.
Here's everything we did last.
Uh additions.
This is the results, these are your responsibilities, these are the expectations.
Yeah.
Go forth and conquer.
Uh as you come along, there there may be something that doesn't make sense.
I'm here.
By all means ask questions.
But
What I've noticed is twofold. One
When you're clear
in what is expected of them. Like you are expected to do this.
When
And
You already know how to do it.
Great.
Yeah.
And or
Uh also in like one on ones, I'll just open up the account and say
Hey, this is how I do it.
Let me show you the way I'm doing it and how quick it is for me.
And you can learn even though we're remote.
I'm showing you as if you're sitting right over my shoulder or we're face to face. This is how I do it. So
If you're doing something different, maybe
You know, one plus one is two, three minus one is two, and that's fine.
We we both got to the same answer, but if you're doing like
Nine times five minus two times twelve divided by fifteen. No.
We can simplify this.
So
Making sure that they're
Efficient and effective with their time.
They're focusing on that signal versus that noise.
And
giving them responsibility early on to really
Take ownership of something.
You can see that people are
A lot more quicker to pick up things.
And start.
getting that flywheel going of hey, I want to have impact as soon as possible.
Versus
Oh hey, go read this handbook, week one.
Week two.
Let me introduce you to the team.
Week three. It's like
slow rolling that we can speed this up, guys. We can get people up to speed and make an impact a lot sooner.
And also
Don't expect them to be perfect.
You can't expect people to be perfect right out the out out the gate.
I can't remember every little thing I need to tell you.
So
And
There may be things I I can learn from you.
Uh I can't tell you how many times I I'm still learning from people, you know, around me. It's like oh

That's great.
I I didn't even think of that, or I haven't tried that. I should totally do that.
So just know that they're not gonna be perfect out of the gate, but
Giving them
Clear direction.
And expectations will get'em where they need to be.
I could see why your team is so effective and uh so successful.
This all makes a lot of sense.
You mind if I do a rapid fire set of questions that people asked on Twitter about very specific stuff?
Yeah.
By all means. Okay.
A T T.
There was like a huge change to the way cookies and attribution and tracking worked online.
And it felt like paid ads kind of like, Oh shit, that's not gonna work anymore. It's over, Facebook is dead.
Uh clearly that hasn't happened.
At this point, just what is the impact that
Uh
A T his hat on.
Pit ads and
Format marketing.
We were just talking about this.

The other day.
because uh we have uh full transparency. We have people fully dedicated to mobile on the team.
And I had reached out to uh Sasha.
Who's on the team said
Hey fr um
What are we doing with ATT? What are we doing scan?
Um, all those things.
Because
Has any of our tactics really changed because of
Say low opt in rates.
And
Kind of the direct question, I mean the direct answer I got from her was as long as we can use scan to provide attribution and measurement for IOS.
We're fine.
Sorry.
Okay, that's very straightforward.
I appreciate it. Um, so as long as you're doing those things, you should be okay.
Amazing. That's great. So basically the show goes on.
Things change, but
People find ways to work around it.
Okay, uh creatives.
How impact more creative than the performance of
Ads generally. Like, is that like holy shit, people are way under
Uh estimating the power of a creative? Or is it like okay, it's like a fringe.
Impact.
Way uh way underestimating the power of creative. Um
The
The best example I can give, uh, do you remember Dollar Shave Club?
Absolutely. The video?
All right, there you go.
Do you remember it?
That's that was creative.
Now the person buying it
um may have done a really good job of just targeting males.
Ah, but I would argue
Yeah.
Girlfriends at the time.
probably would have been a aware of it as well.
Uh
I think creative does.
It's if really good creative should be doing a really good job of telling a story.
And if it does that
Again, going back to what we talked about at the very beginning, if you get that emotion with users, whether that's
You know
Pulling at the hard strings or comedy.
It's gonna have a lasting impact.
Okay, uh Chuck on Twitter asked when someone steals your traffic
Say in Google search results.
And buying up keywords around your company is it what should you do?
Any advice?
Yeah, so that actually goes back to the uh visual that we uh showed and I'll pull it back up as I'm talking through it.
The biggest thing is
Uh just know that
Anyone can do that.
You can do it too. Like if you are ultimately concerned about it.
But
Алатам
Competitors.
Could be doing it on accident.
And what I mean by accident is within Google, if you're bidding on keywords, uh Google will do what's called a close variant.
If you were to do, say, e commerce solution.
I bet you Shopify shows up as a close variant at some point, or Square or anyone like that.
So they could just be mismanaging their account first and foremost. Don't give them that much credit that they're doing this maliciously or even doing it with intent.
But if you do ten if you do pull this
Uh and again it will be in the show notes.
If you do pull this report and you do notice that
There is a clear thread.
That's going on here.
First things first, let's make sure that they're not doing anything egregious like saying
Lenny and Tim are m are better than Monday dot com. You cannot be s if the
brand is trademarked within Google. They cannot use your name within the ad copy.
Google more times than not will
Uh disallow it.
But
they could misspell it. Like I can't tell you how many times I've seen Shopify spelled with two eyes because
Google isn't catching it, but we can always put in a claim to say, Hey, Google, please remove this.
But if we do run this, you can kind of see
That the orange
uh line here and for those that are just listening
Uh, orange line is rather consistent over time. There is a two week period where it dips, but it does come back up.
There's another line that uh at the beginning of this uh visual
Green is actually above orange.
And if you look at the green one over time, it almost disappears.
So the reason I would say make sure you're looking at this report.
And it's not just ego marketing. It could be an error.
The issue could be the green one specifically.
Could have been getting a close variant.
They identified it, they removed it.
Oh wait, a couple of weeks later we didn't fully remove it.
Now let's remove it completely and now they're almost gone completely.
So
Make sure you're looking at the data and reacting to consistent
Competitor.
Conquesting versus something that could just be
An accident or
Users not knowing what they're doing.
Amazing. And this is PPC Hero again, right? PPC Hero dot com or whatever it is. Yes. Okay, cool. We'll share it. We'll share it.
Yeah, we'll link it to it in the show notes. Okay. Uh last question, AI. You mentioned AI.
You're looking for AI tools to help you?
With your workflows and analyze data.
You've seen uh AI impact in the work of
paid growth and performance marketing.
Or is it like
In the future it might, other than obviously the algorithms behind on the platforms.
I remember having this conversation
Couple of months ago. Um
A I was like
Couldn't get away from it, right? It was everywhere.
Uh and
What we were doing was leadership on no
And all of our
you know, quarterly planning, what are we doing about AI? How are we using AI? What are we doing that's different.
What we did was I went to as always, I go to the partners uh and I say, Hey, what are we doing about this? And Francisco and Google.
Actually
He he made a really good point.
You guys have been using AI for
Years now.
Um
Smart bidding is AI.
All of the recommendations within Google Ads is AI.
Add copy recommendations is AI. And that that's always been in the platform. So we've always
Use those things. So it was kind of like
Let's reset the conversation of
Hey, this has been here.
We have been using it. This is how we've been using it.
And moving forward, these are some of the things we think we'll
start doing.
I do think it's having a huge impact from a content standpoint.
And a creative standpoint.
Now if those two
kind of converge together, you kind of have a perfect storm, right?
But it's not
Overly
It it is something that I keep a relative close eye on, but like I said earlier, hopefully some of your users can
Share more information with me.
But it's not something that I would say is overly impactful yet.
But I could see how it could be used maliciously.
Uh if you can do like API connections and things along those lines, for sure.
Oh wait, what do you mean by that?
Again, uh Google will uh disallow certain things.
But it takes time.
Uh sometimes.
Like if the term is copyrighted in Google for Ad copy, it will disallow it immediately.
But say they need to do a check.
You'll you'll see a lot of times under review.
weren't pending in the account.
Uh, but you'll also see impressions.
uh potentially attached to that.
Uh it's because Google's like, Oh, we'll serve a little bit of it.
And then if it's malicious, we'll pull it back.
I could see a way that somebody could automate
AI to where it's like always updating it to where it's like, oh, let's just get a little drip here, a little drip here, a little drip here.
And that little drip equates to a lot.
But that's something AI could help with a human doing that would just take forever and be a total waste of time. Yeah, just run tons of ads, just keep trying, join, drain, join stuff. Yeah, yeah. Flip through the slip through the cracks.
You mentioned creative. It actually came back to a question I forgot to ask.
So you start with this going back to the team that you hired to run the sort of stuff.
You hire this one person growth marketer specialist type of person.
The next hire is a creative.
What's a sign that it's time to hire the creative person? Is there anything there of just like is it just like we have budget?
And this is working? Or is there anything else of like okay this is good?
Good time.
Yeah, if you're using a creative agency and they're doing and they're getting you everything you want and you're happy with it.
then yeah, it may it may not make sense to hire a creative. But I more times than not what I've noticed from
Creative.
Creative.
Um, independents tend to do better than like an agency.
The biggest difference I see is that matching the right tone.
matching the right
uh creative look and feel that you're going for
Is accomplished way better in house.
And also
Coming up with new ideas that you can test quickly.
and iterate on.
Versus
We only have so many hours with the agency this month, or we all only have so much budget we can spend with them.
Or if you have that person in house fully dedicated to
The product itself.
You'll never run into those caps.
It feels like if anywhere that scenario AI is gonna
Empower.
That initial hire to do more creative on their own.
I think.
Yeah. And

That's not always the best way to go. Uh I mean, I've seen some ads in there where it's like, Oh yeah, they're being scrappy.
I I see what they're doing, but to your point, maybe that's where AI kind of bridges the gap.
Because I can't tell you how many times
Uh in the past.
It's like guys, we gotta be able to do retargeting, but we have no creative to do.
Uh Google has the um
uh dynamic ad builder.
And they've had it for
I feel like years now.
And that was just like give us a couple of images and we will make a display ad for you.
uh that should perform.
'Cause we're testing many
different iterations of it.
Meta's probably gonna come along with something as well that it's like
You know, give us a picture of your product and we'll
put different backgrounds on it and test what works and what doesn't.
Things along those lines.
That makes so much sense.
Timothy
We've covered so much ground. This is everything I was hoping it would be.
Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you think
Would be
Important or valuable for listeners when they're trying to
Do this stuff on their own, any other nuggets.
left that we haven't already covered.
Yeah, the i I I said it at one point, but I'll reiterate it.
I I'm always forward thinking, backwards planning.
Just
As you're going through it, like
Where do you want to be?
And ultimately, how do you think you're gonna get there?
Because if
Say your goal.
is to be on all platforms. I want to be on Pinterest. I wanna be on X. I wanna be on
You know, everything.
Okay.
What is the
What
Forward thing. That's where you want to be.
Now let's backwards plan. What can we do right now? We can do search because that's only content and that's keywords. We can do that.
All right, now we need creative.
Well w where do we start?
And then make iterations along the way. It's just
Always
Forward thing.
Backwards plan.
And that's
For anything.
What are other examples of forward thinking?'Cause like
Is
Like in in s in a sense, everyone will be like, I wanna be on every platform. I guess like
What are there things that people think about when they're like the forward thinking? It's like, oh, we want to go we want to win Google Google search. Is that is that an example of forward thinking? What else what else should people be thinking about? Yeah, exactly. What are those goals you want to hit? Uh one of the things that uh we look at is what, you know.
Emerging channels to perform it.
So
What is it gonna take for us to consider this channel a performing channel that is an always on
Yeah.
We're we're adopting it as BAU.
So that's gonna take
You know, a thousand conversions a month at this much spend.
With this much uh lift associated with it.
So okay, we know what that looks like.
So we're gonna backwards plan where we're gonna start. We're gonna start with this one ad creative.
Okay, that works. Then we're gonna go to this next because which in each platform they all s have multiple
Types of add units you can use.
Say in LinkedIn there's
Feed
There's conversation.
There's video, there's carousel.
So it's
What are the milestones along the way that you're gonna do to ultimately get it from
Um
You know, testing a merging channel to perform them.
So that would be an example of
Something more micro than macro.
Got it.
Well, with that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
First question.
What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?
Uh Daily Stoic by Far. Uh book I read every day, quick
You know.
Excerpt of what you can do from a stoic philosophy standpoint.
Great by choice.
Uh as another
Uh good one.
And uh deep work.
Favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoyed?
Uh X Men ninety seven.
thoroughly enjoyed that, but that may be a lot of nostalgia.
I actually never watched RRR when it first came out.
Uh highly recommend that. That was a lot more
enjoyable than I was anticipating.
Uh the playlist, uh, which is about Spotify.
Oh, welcome to Rexham.
Yeah, yeah, and bu billion dollar code.
Also on Netflix about uh Google uh Earth.
Very interesting.
Yeah, R R R that movie is intense.
And uh very long also. It's like man, I I've been three and a half hours. I just have to split it up into different days to finish it, but it was
It's incredible.
No intent.
Okay, favorite recent product you've recently discovered that you really love?
I drink too much caffeine and I've been trying to cut it out.
And I kind of circled back to
Uh this product uh I used to use called Magic Mind.
It's a little shot every single day.
Taste really good.
Uh, and it does help with focus, I find. Um if it's a placebo, great. I don't care, it's but it's helping me.
That's amazing. I'm also a huge fan of Magic Mine. I'm friends with the guy that started it.
So funny that you love it. I
I drink it often.
I uh on the subscription plan.
And I think he uses Shopify to sell uh to sell it. He does. Yep. It all connects. Amazing.
Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to, share with friends or family?
Fine useful worker in life.
Happiness is dedicated by expectations or dictated by expectations. Um
That can't be more true more times than not.
And it's similar. That's why I said there's two. And this one's similar to it.
You won't see
It for what it is.
Until you stop looking through the lens.
Of what you want it to be.
Amazing.
Reminds me of a of an equation uh a colleague of mine once.
Shared. He wrote a book of like uh emotional equations or life equations. It was
Happiness is uh
Reality minus expectations.
Yep.
Love that.

Okay, next question. Who's had the most
influence on you in your career.
Well, we mentioned him before, so I gotta bring him back up. Casey Winters for sure. Um he was
He was we we were at a wedding, he showed me
The original version of Google Analytics, for those of you that don't know, is called Urchent.
And when he showed that to me, it was
Wait.
You know all of this.
information
About users coming to the site.
I knew I wanted to do marketing.
But
At that moment I knew I was gonna do digital marketing.
And
You know.
What.
Watch him grow in his career, he's watching me grow in my career. We still bounce each
Each questions off of each other.
We cannot
not have a phone call under an hour. So definitely the most impactful.
Is there something about Casey Winters?
that people may not know. He's a two time podcast guest, huge
For another show.
Casey is really good at tennis.
Like
Insanely good at tennis.
You wanna know how good
This is how good he was.
In high school
He played
Yeah, I think it was our I'm pretty sure it was our senior year.
He hadn't played a year.
A year maybe a year plus.
He was still ranked top ten.
In the state of Louisiana.
For tennis players.
Hasn't played in a year.
And still considered one of the top ten players.
And saying.
Did not know that. Actually I actually played tennis.
Uh in high school and so uh
That's amazing. I did not know this.
Thanks for sharing that.
Timothy, this was incredible. Uh, I think this gonna help a lot of people.
Figure out for its marketing, run more paid growth ads.
Figure out who to bring in to help them do this.
Thank you so much for
sharing and for being here.
Course. Appreciate the time.
Hi everyone.
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