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Omnichannel strategies for a post-IDFA world

WHAT’S ON THE TABLE?

The dust has more-than-settled over the bombshell that has been Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework.

With Google announcing their Privacy Sandbox for Android, the march toward a more privacy-focused internet is not slowing down. For marketers, adapting to & thriving in this post-identifier world is more critical than ever.

Join us in this webinar hosted by RocketShip HQ and Ruckus, in which our panelists share strategies that have worked for them across the web and app ecosystems, along with their best tips and pointers to prepare for a post-identifier future.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

  1. How performance has changed since ATT: Real time data from our panelists to help you make informed decisions.
  2. Differences in impact for web vs. app: How to optimize performance for each.
  3. Coping with measurement losses: web vs. app: Tried and tested backup plans for those measurement losses.
  4. Impact on creative strategy: Creatives that are performing better.
  5. The way forward: web, app and web + app: The next best steps.

WATCH THE FULL VIDEO

PANELISTS INCLUDE

Grace Ouma-CabezasHead of Growth, Poppy Seed Health – Grace is a Growth Marketing Executive and Consultant with more than 15 years of experience at high-growth digital brands & startups. She focuses on delivering customers and audiences through performance-driven, brand-enhancing marketing. Featured in Digiday, AdWeek, The Muse and more, Grace’s impact in digital marketing is widely celebrated

Evan Woods, General Manager, DT.Co – Evan is a growth marketer, advisor, and investor with over 12 years of experience driving success for a wide range of businesses, from Fortune 500 brands to start-ups. He currently is the General Manager at DT.Co, a growth studio focused on helping high-growth, DTC start-ups scale. Prior to DT.Co, Evan led growth & retention teams at Haus & Ollie, and he has also held Marketing and Sales leadership roles at Aaptiv, Jet.com, HelloFresh and Twitter.

Shamanth Rao, Founder & CEO, Rocketship HQ – Shamanth is the founder and CEO of the boutique growth marketing firm RocketShip HQ and host of the podcast Mobile User Acquisition Show.In the past, he’s led growth leading to 3 acquisitions(Bash Gaming, by GSN Games; PuzzleSocial, by Zynga; FreshPlanet, by GameLoft).

Matej Lancaric, User Acquisition & Marketing consultant – Matej is a true mobile marketing enthusiast who has been in the gaming industry for almost a decade. He develops multi-channel acquisition strategies and marketing campaigns that are designed to drive the overall growth for his partners. Matej partners with talented developers across the globe with multi-channel user acquisition strategies, soft launch and global launch planning and general marketing and business advising.

Moderator: Anish Shah is the CEO & Founder of executive search agency Ruckus. Anish has worked in-house in Growth roles at Snapfish and Getable. He started Bring Ruckus as a Growth consultancy 11 years ago working with 40+ clients, then re-focused his firm on executive recruiting for Growth leaders.


READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT

Kayci Baldwin (00:00):
Let’s get started. Welcome. Welcome. Thank you for joining us. We have Ruckus and Rocketship HQ coming together to present a conversation on Omnichannel Strategies for a Post-IDFA World. We have some really incredible panelists here to share their knowledge and wisdom. And we are really excited to learn from them too. Just a reminder, this webinar is going to be recorded and we will send a playback to everyone who has registered for this event. So feel free as well to submit questions in the Q and A. If we get through all of the questions that have already been submitted for the panelists, we will come back to questions that are submitted from the audience live. So feel free to ask anything that you are hoping to get answered, and I will pass the mic to Anish who is going to be moderating today’s conversation.

Anish Shah (00:56):
And of course I was muted. So quick introductions. So my background was actually both in house and consulting in Growth for, for about a decade and then started an executive recruiting firm, Ruckus. I’m in New York right now, and we have about a team of 16.

Grace Ouma-Cabezas (01:18):
Awesome. Thank you. You’re that unmute and reminded me to unmute.

Anish Shah (01:23):
Nice.

Grace Ouma-Cabezas (01:24):
That was a nice reminder. That would definitely have been me. I’m Grace, I’m very excited to be here. I’m currently Head of Growth at Poppy Seed Health. Just a little bit about that. We’re an app based telehealth solution that provides 24 7 text access to doulas, midwives and nurses for pregnant people. Prior to that, I’ve been around in growth marketing for a long time, over 15 years now kind of straddling between DTC and digital media, mostly at startups. So I’ve got to do a lot of fun stuff over the years, right before I was at Papa seed house. So I’ve got the skim also at flu 52 Birchbox glam squad, which was another app based business. And I kind of grew up working at the, not when it was the OG wedding website. So excited to be here.

Evan Woods (02:15):
Hey everyone. My name’s Evan Woods, I’m currently general manager at DTco. We are a growth studio who we focus on D TOC businesses, you know, ranging large and small. We have about 15 clients right now prior to that, you know, spent most of my time within growth and retention marketing at various DDC startups, including hell fresh Ali pets house. And a couple of others started my career more on the publisher side at Twitter and LinkedIn doing more marketing operation stuff and very excited for this conversation.

Shamanth Rao (02:53):
Hi everyone. My name is Shamanth Rao and I’m the founder of the boutique growth marketing firm, Rocketship HQ. We work with mobile apps, had them grow a portfolio split between games and consumer subscription apps managed multiple millions in spent in the past. I’ve worked primarily with games was fortunate enough to be a part of three acquisitions around the podcast, mobile UA show. And I’ve had some of you on this show as well.

Matej Lancaric (03:26):
Hey guys. My name is Matej, I’m in the, in gaming industry for like nine years already. Right now working as a UA consultant slash freelancer with the multiple gaming companies around the world. And I have my own creative team of 12 motion designers and I’m happy to be here. It’s it’s amazing. Thanks.

Anish Shah (03:50):
Cool. And so as hopefully everyone who registered kind of realized what we’re gonna be talking about today are kind of the changes that have happened over the last year, about a year ago, Apple kind of deprecated some of the, the attribution capabilities that, that marketers previously had. And that has turned and thrown a lot of marketers kind of for a bit of a swirl. And so what we’re gonna talk about is what have people done over the last year? What have they learned? What are some of the tests that we run? What are the experiments, how do we sort of all collectively move forward? And a lot of you have registered have put, put your questions in the RSVP. And so we’ve unearthed some of the more interesting questions, but before we get into those you know, I know everyone has a certain level of you know, how deeply they’re dealing with kind of like attribution on a day to day basis and how the changes have affected them. So it’s pretty helpful for, for ch to be here. Who’s obviously running a, a really popular mobile acquisition agency has to deal with the day to day to sort of explain what was capable previously, what happened and sort of what what is capable now.

Shamanth Rao (05:03):
Yeah. right. You know, at a high level, what changed about a year ago almost to the day actually is that before 2020, the, there was a unique identifier. Think of it as a phone number called the IDFA ID for advertisers. So if you were Facebook, if you were Google, you could see shaman’s IDFA, which is basically shaman’s phone number and say, shaman made a $2 purchases purchase in this word game. He bought this DDC brand. So Facebook and Google and any advertiser would know exactly what shaman bought, because they would know shaman’s phone number and that phone number, if you will, was observable by all these platforms without shaman’s consent about a year ago, what Apple did this say? You’re not, none of the platforms are going to access this phone number if you will, without shaman’s consent. Right. And that is a huge deal because a not many users are going to are giving consent. And now Facebook doesn’t know that I have actually made all these other purchases. So Facebook cannot target me nearly as well as they did a year and a half ago. What that means is just as advertisers and marketers via having, you know, the performance is just far, far worse than what it used to be, just because we cannot target purchasers or high value users in the way that we used to,

Anish Shah (06:41):
Which is a great segue way into the first question. How has your performance changed since the policy changes? So, you know, some of you with agency businesses probably get to see across a wide variety of of clients and customers who you can see, you know, is there sort of an average a median or is it all over the board in terms of how and why the changes have happened? What the, what the metrics are in terms of what is dropped and by what percentage and like, what are there certain things that, that have made certain companies drop more than others, like is at scale is the types of products they sell? You know, anything else?

Matej Lancaric (07:28):
Yeah, I would like to start because I have a very positive view on the whole IDF change. And since that happened well, all the campaigns I’m running at the moment for iOS on iOS, for the gaming companies, almost all of them is actually way better than before.

Anish Shah (07:45):
Wow.

Matej Lancaric (07:46):
Because first of all, like a lot of people from the gaming industry, they don’t know how to evaluate properly the campaigns and you know, because the ATT made it this actually pretty hard, but since they don’t don’t know how to evaluate this dropped spent. And now I, I felt like when COVID started, all the competition was just gone on the iOS side. So CPNs were down, everything looked pretty good, but in terms of like how to run these type of campaigns, I had to go back and forth with the product team and made all the, all the changes in terms of the, the configuration on the SK network framework and these type of things. But in, in general, everything looked pretty good. So I’m, I’m, I’m fine. I can, I can run these, these campaigns pretty profitably. And since the, the ATT happened, I have more work and I’m pretty happy about it.

Anish Shah (08:43):
That’s awesome. That’s good to hear. So what kind of changes helped you get, get, get these campaigns? So you said you had to get, go dig in with like your product and engineering teams. Like what, what, what have you sort of been, you know, what have..

Matej Lancaric (08:55):
Put in that has helped? Yeah, so the first 24 hours in, in games and especially on iOS now, those that is really important. So I had to just talk to the product team and the game team is about how we can grab as many events as possible in the first 24 hours. So for example, we had to implement different special offers in the game. So to just capture as many purchases as possible in the first 24 hours and not to just screw up the whole game economy as well, that was really important. So now when I’m looking at the, the ice care network schema, then I’m able to actually evaluate the, the raws and run even like value optimization campaigns. But it’s like, that was a long, long process until I get, I get where I am at the moment.

Shamanth Rao (09:46):
Okay.

Grace Ouma-Cabezas (09:47):
Yeah. Thanks for that.

Shamanth Rao (09:48):
You know, just to add, to work my data set, right? So in, I think how you evaluate campaigns is so critical because you cannot evaluate as deterministically as you used to. In fact, a number of folks we work with, they have grown, they’ve done well, but they’ve had to embrace the fact that they cannot evaluate campaigns anywhere as clearly, but like a year and a half ago, you were like, oh, this is my RO as this is exactly what, how this creative is doing folks who are doing well, that we work with are like, you know, there’s some amount of fuzziness, but we know we are growing. We, the, you know, and I imagine we’ll talk about this later, but, you know, folks have embraced some amount of incrementality testing, embraced blended models, you know, blended metrics evaluation. And of course, like matte said really dialed in on the first 24 hours whenever that’s possible. Yeah.

Grace Ouma-Cabezas (10:48):
For us at I mean, for us at, at Poppy Seed Health, we actually launched a year ago today so it shaped our go to market strategy. And, and in, in some ways it was a little bit freeing because we, we live, we didn’t have a historical performance and channel mix and we were worried about disrupting, but we also had to look at our first, how we’re kind of standing up our paid performance infrastructure is definitely different than it would’ve been had. We launched, you know, a year prior to this change. So we knew that, you know, the sort of the tried and true DTC model, if the look like audiences on Facebook, et cetera, was not going to work for us. And then also we, it also kind of had us take a step back in terms of how we wanted to think about privacy holistically, especially with our product, we’re touching people in, in vulnerable moments, along their birthing journey.

Grace Ouma-Cabezas (11:41):
So we actually opted not to do anyling at all for app download on Facebook, even though we knew, even though we knew that the quality wouldn’t be as, as, as, as you know, B good as it could be. So we just leaned in with a much more web based strategy actually which I think has been really productive for us, cuz there was some education around who we were, what we were and thinking about this onboarding lead generation, bringing people into the funnel for our cm and life cycle to nurture them into subscribers for our product. So it not so much a performance change, but it did heavily shape where we invested. And then of course I feel like Apple search ads was a big winner with all these changes because that became such a fundamental part of sort of our performance mix that I’m not sure if it would’ve been, if not for this change.

Anish Shah (12:34):
Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I kind of remember. I, I feel like over a year ago when as, as Facebook and Google had been evolving towards kind of removing deeper, deeper, deeper segmentation options, a lot of the conversation was around, you know, they’re trying to level the playing field so that it’s not the most, it’s not the best marketers, the best acquisition people who win, you know, it’s sort of like you could launch a product and it just because you don’t have a super senior or experienced acquisition team who knows the ins and outs of these platforms, you know, you could still compete. And that was kind of think where, where UAC came from, which I think removed some, some segmentation options from, from, from, from FA, from Google and then, you know, Facebook really pushing a lot of their, their automation and like AI and machine learning to, to kind of make the decisions for you on which campaigns to, to go. So I’m wondering whether a lot of these changes actually are reverting back to where, you know, some of the companies who have access to the best kind of like product engineering data and, and kind of like acquisition marketing teams can now actually gain some level of, of higher level leverage where the platforms previously were trying to level the playing field.

Shamanth Rao (13:51):
Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I, I would agree with what you said Anish, as I think Marty said a lot of his work was with the product team. And like I said, a lot of our works been with modeling out the data, just making sense of the data because again, two years ago the data was all there in the dashboard. Now it’s really understanding and making intelligent assumptions, making the right intelligent assumptions about what the data means, and that requires resources and expertise that folks that don’t have that expertise are not gonna be able to manage as easily. So definitely I think there’s a skew it, yeah. In favor of the more established Japaneses, I would say..

Anish Shah (14:39):
Makes a lot of sense. And then Daniel, so for those on who don’t know, he, he’s working at an agency that it’s a ton of as a general manager engine has a ton of D to C and e-commerce brands. Have you noticed there’s sort of difference between some of the brands you’re working across in, in terms of being affected more than others and if so, are there sort of like either some raw percentages or just something you notice, oh, companies who do this maybe have gotten there gotten affected more. So whether it’s size of budgets or you know, being on being at a certain scale or lots of different kind of like acquisition offline, online, et cetera kind kind of channels or any, any learnings from that.

Evan Woods (15:23):
Yeah. So I’d say that it, it does vary across the board. You know, most of our clients are, you know, B to C you know, not, not, I mean, some of them are higher price point, but not CRA high price point products. You know, somewhat immediate conversion as well. I mean a big change as well was the attribution windows going from 28 days to seven days. So if there is a longer buy cycle, then that makes it a bit more difficult for, for brands to attribute directly to Facebook. I would say the, we actually grew a lot during these changes, mainly because the, our strategies, you know, sort of, kind of Facebook core five type of strategies we’re implementing already. So a lot of our Facebook structures for example, are highly consolidated and already were, or, you know, we were really focused on broader audiences as opposed to interest or lookalikes.

Evan Woods (16:17):
So I think a lot of the, what has become best practice, we were, we were already doing somewhat in preparation for, but really because that’s where we saw the best performance outta Facebook. And as you said, it’s become much more about, you know, machine learning AI. I think where the brands have succeeded is creative. So if you are able to invest heavily, you know, with, you know, and, and it’s really costly, right? I mean, if you’re working with narrative or tube science or so many of those other agencies, you know, they’re charging like two or three full-time employees potentially to give you creative, but that is ultimately one of the most important levers now, as we all know with targeting being less important and having, you know, a ton of assets or a ton of campaigns being less important. So I think the advertisers that have done well have been ones that have been able to invest in creative and to do so, you know, iteratively and have the resources and, and see the importance of it.

Evan Woods (17:21):
I think are the ones that have had the biggest benefit, I’d say also ones where you know, they, they’ve also invested in other things outside of Facebook. So they’ve invested in their website, they’ve invested in collecting email addresses and understanding the impact they’ve invested in analytics, even if it’s, you know, as simple as GA and last click you know, they, they’re, they’re looking at Facebook as part of the picture, but they know the need to optimize what they own in order to compete. So those are some of the things that I’ve seen in terms of trends.

Anish Shah (17:53):
Yeah. That’s a great point about creative. Have there been any shifts in the types of creatives that, that are, that are doing well? Like I think, you know, and also the quantity of creatives that, that are needed on a regular basis. You know, as marketers are thinking about how to go about creative for like, let’s say the next quarter, you know, is it investing in like a couple of really slick pieces that are really well produced that, that drive a lot of that brand value or, you know, just getting a lot of quantity of maybe lower cost you know, creative out there, but you get to learn a lot more from, from, from having them run more regularly.

Evan Woods (18:31):
Yeah. I, I think it, I think it varies. I think a lot of the trends that we’ve seen over the past few years are the same, which is, you know, UGC native, creative obviously works well. Of course, there’s an anatomy of how to make an ad from the hook value, propositions, testing, different you know, value props and, and the order of those. I mean that that’s, you know, pretty much the same and has been for a while. I’d say that a lot more creative testing is important. I’d say that creative, that does work for broader audiences is also really important. So not, you know, being too niche because that, that’s really where I think a lot of advertisers have moved. And yes, definitely more volume at volume I think is important. And, you know, it varies, we have some brands where the founders are just making a bunch of EGC and we’re running it across Facebook and TikTok and it absolutely crushes it. And it’s super, you know, lofi just works really well. Whereas other brands, you know, they are partnering with these large agencies and are getting batches of 15 to 20 new creatives every week to two weeks. Right. And sometimes new production sometimes iteration. So yeah, I’d say, I’d say the tactics aren’t necessarily, or I guess the strategy of creative isn’t necessarily, you know, super different. But I would say the volume, absolutely. An investment is different.

Anish Shah (19:56):
Okay. And the volume investment, the investment in volume has gone up and 15 to 20 creatives that across just Facebook or, and, and do you do think that’s like a lot, so if someone was trying to like forecast out how many creatives they should be doing on a regular basis, does that feel like high, like, you know, for someone to do 15 to 20 creatives a week, or that’s kinda now I think.

Evan Woods (20:21):
Yeah. I think net new that is pretty high and that’s for, you know, one of our clients is sort of a seven, almost eight figure a month, you know, client. And so they, they need a lot. Right. And things saturate quickly, we’ve been working internally on sort of, you know, a calculator of sorts. If you’re spending as much a day, you know, how much creative will you actually need, but it really does vary because there there’s another client we have, they got onto Oprah’s favorite things, you know, that’s huge that creative, they wrote it for like almost five months, way after holiday, so it can vary. Right. But I do think that spend is a big indicator obviously of how quickly your creative will saturate. And we do try to, you know, triangulate, what is that number of video status, et cetera, that we need to constantly have in rotation in order to, you know, combat that saturation

Anish Shah (21:12):
Makes a lot of sense. And external validation is, is, is always really great in, in, in terms of creative. I feel like a lot of brands have seen that those creatives tend to, to do a lot better than just showcasing your product and trying to explain it. So I feel like that’s a good clue for a lot of people to go out and like try to, to get some of those even like high level affiliates, even if you can’t get an Oprah kind of hit, even though Oprah is new things can be a little bit more of like a high level affiliate program the way it’s, it’s it’s built out. So yeah, going and getting on the Oprah or Ellen, if anyone can go figure out how to do that helps a lot. And then, and then Grace, obviously you’re, you’re well, you’re, you’re marketing like a really high, high consideration product, right? Healthcare is so important to people and they have to be really trusting of it. Does your sort of creative, like strategy now change in that maybe like, I think, you know, with high consideration products, you often have to have multiple different ads and multiple different looks to get someone to trust you, but with some of the attribution, not as, as great as before, does that change a little bit or yet, do you feel like you have to like shrink a lot of messages into one ad? Or how do you think about that?

Grace Ouma-Cabezas (22:18):
Yeah, we’ve kind of tried both approaches actually, cuz our, our product is a little bit unique in that it’s a, it’s a health based subscription, but it also relates back to an acute need. Since the pregnant person, the birthing person may have a question or concern at 3:00 AM, right. That may be the driver or like, do I need this in my second trimester? How do I wanna deal with this pregnancy, et cetera. So we kind of sit in an, in between space when we first launch creatively though. Just doubling down on the creative point. I mean, we’ve done a lot of investment. We have just an amazing in-house creative team., it’s a small team, small but mighty team. So we produce everything in-house we invested a lot in that. And that has been a big help in performance with all of the I mean you can imagine all of the, in the old world, all the visibility that we could have had in terms of targeting new parents, expecting parents, et cetera, that really isn’t as robust as it is today.

Grace Ouma-Cabezas (23:11):
Right. So creative has been huge. But since what has been was really successful for us actually is we had a video asset that was really emotive and touched on these use cases across the different life stages that we support that performed the best. We also chopped it up into individual stories. So we had one that was more postpartum. One that was more pregnancy, you know, one that was, you know, a little bit ambiguous, like you just found out you’re pregnant. You’re not sure if you’re happy or sad, but the sort of the compilation video that showed just how we imagined our user and, and the instances in which they’d reach for their app and go to Poppy Seed Health performed the best by far the best. And then we found down the funnel that it was actually attracting primarily people in their early pregnancy.

Grace Ouma-Cabezas (24:02):
Like that was sort of the, the folks that we’re pulling through. So even though we were showing all these different use cases, I think for the user, they were able to kind of foreshadow how that may apply to them. So it was sort of broad in terms of our offering actually performed way better than sort of trying to drill in individually. So I don’t know if that’s a function of how targeting has changed or, you know but, but really digging into the emotion and the storytelling and trying to show them, you know, where you would be when you would need us really contextual, contextualizing ourselves in an emotional way has been the most powerful thing. And I think it’s helped us overcome some of these challenges targeting for sure.

Anish Shah (24:44):
Thanks for that. Can you explain kind like what is in one of those creatives that like has, has done really well? Like what, what, what would the end oh, per audience see?

Grace Ouma-Cabezas (24:53):
Sure. I’m happy to it’s it’s gotten us temporarily banned from a few platforms.

Anish Shah (25:01):
Even better. We

Grace Ouma-Cabezas (25:02):
Even better. Yeah. Nothing you, you haven’t lived until you’ve been temporarily, you know, suspended. But we show a woman pumping. We show someone changing a dirty diaper. We show a woman in the mirror combining her hair and it’s she, some of her hair is coming out like alluding to postpartum hair loss. We show somebody on the toilet we show somebody looking at a pregnancy test. So we really, we really get in there because that was a part of our brand was like eliminating shame and erratic and shame and taboo among those situations. So those were just really, really, really compelling to users. And actually the only individual ad that performed almost as well was our breast pumping where we showed a woman breast pumping and we always, we use real people, like real people that we actually know we’re, these are not models or professional talent that we use. And that I feel like was so resonant. We got just a lot of feedback around we used a woman who was plus size woman, and we got so much positive feedback about like, you never see this in maternity advertising, you know? So yeah. So occasionally had to, you know contest a few. This is not adult content to get those out, but once we did, they, they performed exceptionally well.

Anish Shah (26:27):
Thank you for those examples. I think that’s, that’s super helpful and everyone in the audience can, can try to do their best to guess which one of those got, got shut down by Facebook. Exactly. thanks for that, by the way. And then do you feel like there’s sort of like with, with that creative idea, like how much, how many new creatives you’re looking for in a particular week, month, et cetera. Yeah.

Grace Ouma-Cabezas (26:51):
I would just sort of double down on the original, the point around spend. I think it really does heavily depend on your spend, just having been at different brands and at different spend levels. I mean, we’re earlier stage we’re sort of up on the smaller end spend wise, so we’re able to get more life, you know, because there’s still so much that we haven’t penetrated, but I’ve been, I’ve been at other places with a heavier spend. We, you know, you really couldn’t run one piece of creative for more than like four to six weeks. And we usually had 10 to 15 in play. So I think it’s, it is been dependent and audience dependent too. You know, our, our life stage is dynamic. Right. One moment you’re in it. One moment you’re out of it. So I think we’re able to get a little bit more life out of our creative for that reason as well.

Anish Shah (27:34):
Because the spend is low. There’s a lot more audience for you to touch and yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Especially if you know it’s working. Okay. Yeah.

Grace Ouma-Cabezas (27:43):
Mm-Hmm,

Anish Shah (27:44):
Makes a lot of sense also
Matej Lancaric (27:46):
From, from the, the creative point and, and gaming, especially if you have a niche game there, you need to frequently refresh the creatives because, well, obviously the audience is really small or not really small, but smaller than if you have a wide appeal game and then you can just tap into like almost unlimited audiences. So, and that, that also depends. And from, from my point of view, we, I usually try to refer the creatives on a weekly basis. And ideally at least like one and one or two new creative concepts a week also depends on the spend, but anywhere between 100 K and two, almost like half a million spend a month, then you will just need like four ish a week because that’s just getting really interesting.

Anish Shah (28:34):
Okay. That’s great for a baseline. So like maybe with some of the stuff you’re working on two to four creatives per week, if you’re spending roughly half million to a million in that timeframe.

Matej Lancaric (28:45):
Yeah. I think two to four, like below how half a million and above half a million, then you would just, just need way more than, than like five a week creatives because, okay. That’s the, at least that’s what I’ve, I’ve seen working well.

Anish Shah (29:00):
Okay, great. So to revise that, so half a million and under per week, you know, maybe like, you know, four or less creatives, and then if you’re looking at half a million or more that you need five or more creatives per week. Yeah. If someone’s trying to just create a baseline of how you think about this.

Shamanth Rao (29:16):
Yeah. We also work on a weekly basis, weekly cadence basis, and we also find it helpful because we know there’s a weekly production cycle that goes you know, that goes on like a creative director and strategy. They’re like, look, every Monday we know we had consolidated concepts, we had to gather the results. So I think just in terms of an analysis cadence, it helps us have that discipline in having a structured testing process. You know, obviously the quantity depends on the spend. Like other folks have code here. But irrespective of the quantity, we still try to do it weekly just to make sure we have that driven going.

Anish Shah (29:58):
Okay. Makes a lot of sense. Cool. I think we jump to the next question, ally. Yeah, I mean, I, I think the original answer of how people were, were trying to approach the deprecation was, you know, spread across multiple different channels, especially companies who were incredibly paid Facebook and paid Instagram focus, which was really, I think almost the majority of D to companies that, that I had seen. Yeah. How, how have you, how all have you collectively thought about, you know, expanding channel mix and yeah. Yeah. I think the factors have been pretty straightforward, but like how have you sort of thought about channel mix expansion thinking like what channels to actually test et cetera.

Evan Woods (30:52):
Yeah. I, I can talk to this one. I think, you know, I’d love to say we’ve successfully diversified away from Facebook. It’s a small amount of, of all of our clients ad spend. It’s just not true. And unfortunately we’re all just still reliant on Facebook and Instagram. So I would say overall budgets have often decreased and just the idea of forcing budget or seeing sort of this month over month or quarter year over year growth, that, that sort of element I think has gone down in more smart media planning around, you know, seasonality promotions, other things that are happening and really capitalizing on those moments. It’s honestly sometimes diverting those dollars to, you know, CRO right conversion rate optimization, I think is the big thing as well of how can we, if we can’t target or optimize as effectively as before therefore leading to often lower conversion rates, can we actually impact that off of Facebook?

Evan Woods (31:55):
Right. or invest in better measurement, et cetera. So I I’ve seen that happen. And then in terms of actual dollars you know, I would say the two big channels I’ve seen are TikTok is one. I think that TikTok is obviously exploded, you know, has been exploding it’s ad platform becoming better and better and CPMs are just lower. And so, you know, I’ve seen a lot of advertisers, even one of, one of ours, you know, they have sort of almost six, you know, seven figure budgets on TikTok a month and, you know, very creative driven, like extremely creative driven, very different from Facebook, but we’ve seen a lot of success there. And just to have another platform of, of building that brand awareness prospecting has been really helpful. And then TV, for sure TV has been, I’d say a bigger investment for, for clients who can afford it.

Evan Woods (32:50):
Whereas TikTok, I think is, is, is a lot better for, you know, smaller sort of smaller brands who still have to invest, you know, let’s say 30 K for a test buy, but that’s, you know, the creative is, is, is cheaper and it’s easier to get a read. So those are sort of the biggest ones, but unfortunately you know, there, isn’t saying, you know, we diversified away to affiliate in all their channels and, and faced with becoming a significantly lower portion of the pie. I have not seen materialize for any anyone that I’ve worked with.

Anish Shah (33:22):
That’s super interesting. Yeah. And it’s, it’s not easy to just basically say, oh great. This channel that was performing great at scale with numbers that we were happy about. Yeah. Another channel is just gonna do the same thing. That’s not nearly as advanced in their technology. Doesn’t have as big of an audience and doesn’t have an audience with the same demographics is just gonna replace it. Yeah. It, it, there is some level of wishful thinking within that. So thanks for, thanks for eliminating that wishful thinking.

Shamanth Rao (33:53):
Yeah, I would say we’ve seen a little bit of spend away from Facebook, you know, definitely. And it’s very vertical dependent on, you know, on a number of subscription slash consumer apps. We’ve seen shift to TikTok much like Kevin pointed out. I think’s much more, much stronger outside of gaming. You also seen a shift to web based flows for apps. So the apps for which we build webpages. So landing pages, direct traffic to that. That’s been hugely effective, even if we just use Facebook for that. Right. So Facebook is still channel for that, but that’s big.

Anish Shah (34:28):
Can you explain that a little bit more deeply?

Shamanth Rao (34:30):
Sure. Right. So basically we set up a landing page to basically describe the product. I think Grace briefly mentioned something like that. Right. And the landing page has a CTA button that goes to the app stores. Right. the advantage is that the landing page provides a lot more context. It’s a longer copy, which the app store just doesn’t provide. So I think that’s one reason why that converts much better now, but again, that’s, I think much more effective outside of giving, I would say, yeah.

Matej Lancaric (35:02):
How did you manage the friction between the app store and the, you know, the lending page, because there is the extra step step that you know, people need to need to take

Shamanth Rao (35:11):
That is true. There is the extra step, but it, but at least the metrics we are seeing seem to suggest that having that extra step it more than, you know, the net metrics are still better than what we would do with the broken tracking with the app and install S with scan.

Matej Lancaric (35:31):
Yeah. I can imagine it works well because it’s also like uses different optimization methods rather than just UHI or any, a campaigns that all other companies are running at the moment. And then yeah. This creates a way lower CPMs and everything. Okay. That would make it make sense.

Grace Ouma-Cabezas (35:48):
Yeah. Yeah. We’ve had a lot of success with that strategy at Poppy with that web based strategy. It’s, it’s been awesome for us. And we incremental, we did some incremental, eh, incremental testing into that, just to validate that that was growth. We wouldn’t have otherwise seen. So that’s that, so that’s essentially how we’re using Facebook primarily is driving to, to our landing pages and then off to app store.

Shamanth Rao (36:13):
Yeah.

Anish Shah (36:14):
That’s interesting. Okay. Great. Which maybe previously you didn’t do as much of, or that would’ve been a strategy always anyways, cuz it is getting people to convert a little bit more more so,

Shamanth Rao (36:26):
Well, we didn’t need to do that in the past because Facebook would just target past purchases anyway, because they had the IDFA and if you have made a purchase in a different subscription app, it doesn’t matter if you have the long copy to convert you because you are a pregnant person, Facebook knows you’re a pregnant person. You’re gonna convert irrespective of how much information you give them.

Anish Shah (36:52):
Okay. That makes a lot of sense. And, and specifically with mobile, has there been kind of like a return to a lot of these random mobile ad exchanges and networks and trading desks and all of that where maybe people stopped really using that stuff when Facebook and Google were doing, doing a better job of pumping, pumping these, these folks or not so much. And everyone’s making these core platforms work, work as best.

Shamanth Rao (37:17):
For, to the bigger ones yes. On gaming we’ve seen. And you can thank you what they call what I’m saying to the bigger ad networks. And I think that’s primarily because some of these bigger ad networks still use device fingerprinting, which Apple very explicitly forbids, but has not cracked down on.

Matej Lancaric (37:37):
Nobody cares if they forbid it. If they, they use it, they use it anyway.

Shamanth Rao (37:41):
Well until until Apple, you know, cracks out. Right.

Matej Lancaric (37:45):
But until that happens, we can see better results on, on those ad networks. So exactly. Let’s leverage that.

Shamanth Rao (37:51):
Exactly. So to the bigger ad networks, I think the smaller ad networks might take, please, correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think that smaller ad networks are anywhere as prominent, at least in my mix. They’re not on gaming, but the bigger ones, that’s definitely a place where we’ve diversified spent away from Facebook because even if Facebook does well tracking is broken. Whereas with fingerprinting, I know tracking is there, I can, it feels somewhat more deterministic than Facebook is.

Matej Lancaric (38:24):
Yeah. Makes sense. From my side, I move a lot of spend from Facebook to, to Google unity ads. And there are like other ad networks because of the fingerprinting and actually the better results that I could get from these networks because Facebook honestly like the quality decreased so much in the, not in the last year, but even even before the a even happened. So since then I just start slowly moving the budgets elsewhere. And well, since a, it started, well, even though I said, like, there is still a very there are still very profitable channels or the Facebooks or the iOS campaigns are still very profitable for me, but still everything around like Android traffic and and other stuff that’s like trying to diversify even more

Anish Shah (39:15):
Interesting. Okay. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I, I feel like when I would meet people who run these ad networks or work at them, or even publisher side companies who would be selling ads directly, the biggest, one of a consistent thing I’d hear was, well, it’s a really shitty business model competing with Facebook or Google. Like you’re just not going to win, you know? And so the ad network model is now really difficult to get, to get anybody excited about. And so may, so now I’d imagine, I don’t know, are your, are your inboxes getting flooded a lot more with some of these folks who are like, by the way we’re, we’re now a better, a better option than we used to be? Yeah.

Matej Lancaric (39:53):
Yeah.

Grace Ouma-Cabezas (39:54):
I mean..

Matej Lancaric (39:54):
Sorry, just could we comment that thankfully I have like a UA consultant on my LinkedIn, so I don’t put all, all the, the companies I work with. So in that case I have zero inbox from, or zero messages from these guys, which is a blessing really so sorry, go, go ahead, Grace.

Grace Ouma-Cabezas (40:15):
No, it’s okay. Well, lucky you, I was gonna say yes in boxes and some of the calls I’m actually taking, which is a big change for, for the last few years were probably the last seven, eight years where I wouldn’t even consider it, but it just for direct buying actually is something that’s become more interesting to us, even at our relatively lower spend level, because we have a specific audience looking at media companies or content platforms that aren’t super huge. Cause we don’t need you to be huge. We just need you to have an audience of pregnant people and postpartum people. So that I think we’ve been more bullish about those kind of paid partnerships that I don’t think I would be, you know, if, if not in this world currently, and just, I know a lot of, there’s been a lot of conversation about TikTok, but we’ve been way more bullish about TikTok. And I think we probably would’ve been, well, we would’ve, you know, still experimented, but not looking at it as an experiment, but looking at it like this could potentially be like an always on big chunk of our, our effort and spend. I think that that was a change in, in mindset with our go to market strategy based on this, for sure.

Anish Shah (41:21):
That’s fascinating. I wonder. And I also wonder if from the customer side, for all, for like, let’s say a product that you’d sell Grace, which obviously need to be in a certain life stage to, to be, for, to be, to, to matter to you. If Facebook and Instagram aren’t as knowledgeable that you’re in that life stage, you’re not gonna be seeing ads on them. So, you know, if a customer is on a baby pregnancy, et cetera oriented website, they’re not, they, you know, you’re, you’re getting a better conversion rate cuz they’re not being pumped with ads from, from maybe other companies who are doing similar things. So the customer experience might actually be pretty good there. Yeah. From not being too inundated from some maybe other companies who do similar stuff as you.

Grace Ouma-Cabezas (42:02):
Yeah.

Anish Shah (42:03):
That’s fascinating. Have you gone through and done some of these buys or you’re sort of just like looking into them now.

Grace Ouma-Cabezas (42:09):
We’ve done at least two okay. And explored some further and I’ve had some success there, you know, and I think especially now with a lot of content platforms are willing to work in much more. They’ve had to get creative in terms of how they’re gonna sell media. So now in this stage where they, they’re more comp, they are more compelling option. It’s been a, it’s been a nice like intersection point, you know? So you’re able to buy in a little bit more innovative ways cuz they had to, to try and remain competitive. And now it’s, it’s more interesting to use part of the budget and test there to be in front of that audience.

Anish Shah (42:45):
That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Cool. And you probably get access to some of their like email lists if you really wanted to, or even content that you can repurpose otherwise if they’re doing interviews and or advertise or like advertorial kind of things.

Grace Ouma-Cabezas (42:59):
Yes, exactly. Exactly. There’s always a package around it that has some legs. So that’s been really valuable for us.

Anish Shah (43:07):
Cool. Makes a lot of sense. So it looks like everyone has, has somewhat expanded channels, but really is still investing quite a bit in the, in the core kind of like paid search, paid social kind of kind of world looks like there’s a little bit more open-mindedness towards ad networks a little bit more open-mindedness to buying directly from publishers, but yeah. Are there any sort of hidden channels that you’ve sort of not hidden, but maybe like, oh wow, this is a random area. Maybe it doesn’t have scale, but it performs really well with, with the smaller audience, you know, you hear about micro influencers, you hear about like smaller affiliate networks, et cetera, that might not, you know, give you the scale, but Hey, the numbers look good and you can blend it into your overall kind of like broader C.

Grace Ouma-Cabezas (43:48):
I mean we’ve been working with content creators again, it’s on TikTok, but we, that was a good target for us because of the price. It’s still, a lot of those folks are still emerging and there’s people who have relatively robust followings that have never done partnership deals before. So there’s still approachable. okay. You, you know, we, we, we worked with somebody who had a million followers and it was still a very economical, you know, relationship for us and it was their first partnership deal and they’re still excited. I feel like the talkers were still excited., they’re less jaded than the Instagram brand. You know, influencers then again, I’ve been in beauty and all this other stuff before, so maybe I’m the jaded one, but that it’s, it’s been great for reach impressions and then you can just take that asset and, and make, and make an ad with it. So we’re kind of getting some value on, on, on the asset too, that we’re not having to produce in house. So you look at the cost blended, it’s pretty efficient. We get, we’re getting the impressions from being on their platform. Then we have an ad we can use. And that cost is sort of all blended together. So that’s been, I don’t think it’s that hidden, but it’s been so like a flywheel that’s worked really well for us.

Shamanth Rao (44:59):
Yeah. I that’s great. You know, we do something very similar. We hire actors and not influences which is a lot, lot more affordable than hiring somebody that has a million plus followers. And because we are able to recruit these actors fairly cost effectively helps us build volumes of creators. Right. And we can test, you know, different appearances, different, different ethnicities obviously depending on the product. So definitely I would say for volumes of U GC slash influencer, like ads going with actors or micro influencers, if you will, rather than actually influencers, I think that’s definitely been a huge deal for us.

Evan Woods (45:46):
Yeah. And I think similarly, even just whitelisted pages, I mean we’ve created pages, we’ve had really small, like couple thousand people sort of content pages that are hyper relevant to whatever the product is and then whitelisted those and those have done extremely well. So sometimes it is the, you know, influencer and sort of how well known they are. Other times it’s just having a different handle, right. Getting those, you know, CPM and or CTR gains. And then the last thing I would say too, is just working, you know, on the partnership side, I’m sure Grace can attest you know, this skim so many other publications. I mean, you’re just buying their incredibly bought audiences. There is no issue around IDFA and you know, it is a flat fee, so you’re taking on risk, but you know, if you have the right audience and you’re able to activate them, the ROAS, you know, I know for that particular publisher with everyone that I’ve worked with is just like extraordinarily high. So, you know, relying on other brands and sort of having the right placement, you know, hopefully somebody that’s a little bit more editorial and explains, you know, the benefits of a product or service.

Anish Shah (46:59):
That’s cool. And you say, you know, flat fee and whatnot. I mean, when reaching out to a, so what’s really cool is Grace reach out sounds like reach out just directly to someone that maybe you found would be interesting for your audience who has a good following, who your audience would probably be like, this is potentially an authoritative person within, within this world that we operate in, you know, is that sort of priced at like a pretty flat fee as well? Like based on how many followers they have or it’s all kind of based on other things like likes or follows or anything like that.

Grace Ouma-Cabezas (47:28):
I mean, yeah. Content creator pricing is like all over the place.

Anish Shah (47:34):
Yeah.

Grace Ouma-Cabezas (47:35):
It’s all over the place. So many dependencies, so many dependencies where I’m in right now, we can afford it. We can, those people, even up to a million followers on TikTok or even half a million, we can still wrap our arms around it because of the space we’re in. It’s so specific if we even moved out into kids five and plus we’d be probably completely priced out. Right. So it’s like cuz we’re able to touch people if they’re in that life stage that may not even be their primary thing. They talk about, you know what I mean? It may be a part of their story, a part of their narrative. So we’re able to have some savings there, but yeah. I mean the sky’s the limit when it comes to content creator pieces.

Anish Shah (48:16):
yeah, yeah. It, it, it, well say, it sounds like you were able to access this person. They’re really thankful. And they like really were a great partner for you because they were thankful. But like when you look at like the, the big YouTubers and the big Instagram, they have like professional Hollywood agents that are negotiating all of that for them. Right. So that’s why I was kind of curious, like, okay, you, you found someone who was great, you got to go, not have to deal with an agent, you know, how do you, how do you think about that?

Grace Ouma-Cabezas (48:43):
Yeah, exactly. But yeah, exactly. We work directly and we are, I mean, we are, you know, being strategic and trying to find folks that not, I’m not, I don’t want to, like aren’t represented, that’s not a bad thing, but for us where we are in our budget, you know what I mean? We are looking for people who haven’t done a lot of partnerships before that have what they’ve shared of their personal story, connects to the product and kind of fit our brand ethos. And that we think would be excited about Poppy. And, and to your point, they are truly excited about what Poppy’s bringing to the world. They’re excited about having maybe their first or second brand partnership and it’s kind of a win-win for both of us. So that’s how we’ve kind of been able to save on the cost side. So we’ll take advantage of that while it lasts.

Anish Shah (49:27):
Yeah. I mean, look, not everyone has the energy to go and find these sort of like wonderful needles in the haystack on their own. Right. It’s why you go through agencies, platforms cetera. But when you do it really, it really pays off. And I think that’s advice that I often give to people for, for anything. Like if you’re hiring an agency to run your ads, if you’re doing anything, partnership oriented, you know, get someone who’s sort of hungry and on the way up and like needs to kinda make a few things successful before they can, you know, start bumping up their prices and, and scaling. Yeah. And in all of that. So you found someone at the right time and it’s beneficial for hopefully that person as well. Cause they can start building up their portfolio. Cool. Let’s go to the next question. I think montage, you, you sort of like dove into that. You’ve invested quite a bit in, in redoing your infrastructure. Are there any specific details that would be helpful for someone to understand, like, you know, if they were to just start going from relying so heavily on Facebook and Google attribution to now building some of their tech in house, like where do they start?

Matej Lancaric (50:35):
Well what’s changed quite heavily for for me it wasn’t about the infrastructure that much, honestly, but about more like trying to think about how to evaluate the, the whole activities properly, which well now properly is very well weird word to use, but in terms of the infrastructure, like I work with different size of the teams. So with smaller teams, they don’t have the data teams yet or the smaller companies. They don’t have the data team yet. So they rely on the, on the mobile measurement partner, like map flyer, just Ingrid or whatever else. And with that in mind, they just need to set up the, the SK network framework. And from my side, I, I worked with different companies before we had several data analysis done just to try to, to think about how we should actually set it, set this up.

Matej Lancaric (51:39):
And we went through different conversion schema as I tested it like millions of times. And then eventually came up with just like a revenue schema. We used the purchase that I mentioned before within the first 24 hours. That was really important. So afterwards the most important part for me is just trying to think about the evaluation. So with the, the MNPS set up, you just need to think what to, what to set up from my side, the revenue and the purchases for the gaming companies work the best or the custom custom conversion schema with some of the funnel events, for example, you use tutorial, completion, then level achieved and whatever else that you can see that the players are actually actually doing in, in order to achieve the purchase in the first 24 hours. And then afterwards you just use the purchase as an event with the different conversion or the revenue B brackets. So you can actually measure the, the raw afterwards.

Anish Shah (52:41):
Okay. Thanks for that. Any, anyone else have any kind of insights into different things you’ve done within kind of your infrastructure, especially that can help some folks who are just kind of making the shift to becoming a little bit more advanced?

Shamanth Rao (52:55):
No, I think incremental and really have investing in analytics to understand the incremental impact of channels. That is definitely an area where a number of folks you work with have invested. It is something that’s increasingly critical, I would say.

Anish Shah (53:16):
Okay. And, and like what, what kind of analytics tools do you think would be kind of best in class to start looking at.

Shamanth Rao (53:21):
The, you know, the folks that have inhow, you know, the, the folks that basically run spreadsheet based models or they work with third party incrementality tools or have the internal data science teams build out incrementality models but there’s different, different directions they could go in, but at the very least starting to think about what’s the incremental impact of a channel, which we didn’t need to do, or, you know, it was necessary, but you know, you don’t, it wasn’t necessary.. wasn’t really evident when you looked at the metrics in the past. So it’s certainly something we are seeing more and more need for.

Anish Shah (53:57):
Okay. Makes a lot of sense. Cool. We’ll jump to the next one. How has measurement changed since ATT do you feel like there’s any kind of like broad sense of, of answering this question that we in a, in a direction we haven’t really dive into just yet. Are you looking at different metrics? Are you looking at anything kind of differently?

Matej Lancaric (54:22):
Yeah, I can. I can elaborate a little bit more about the evaluation. So different sizes of the companies, very different measurement approaches, because, well, for example, the smaller size teams, they don’t have the data analytics team as we mentioned. So right now what we are doing with the small teams are just trying to see what kind of level of spend we have and what kind of level of revenue we can get. So taking the blended approach because, well, there’s not anything else that we can really do, unfortunately and then you just stack the channels. And then you see what kind of is the difference between the spend versus the revenue you are getting and then trying to assume, okay, so this is a good, good channel producing some revenues or, or is not. And then with the, the bigger teams you have the incremental tests and the models you can you can use, which is obviously way, way better or the, the medium mix modeling, which is the really advanced way of measuring the the ATT or the iOS traffic at the moment.

Anish Shah (55:27):
Okay, cool. Well, we’re gonna be closing up here any minute now as we’re, we’re almost at the hour. So if anyone else wants to get in some, some thoughts on, on how they’ve sort of like upgraded or, or evolved their, their measurement tactics over the last year would love to hear about it.

Evan Woods (55:47):
Yeah. I’d say most brands that we work with you know, sure. Some used, mm M if they can afford it, you know, it is a lot more advanced and also expensive but you know, large brands also use really basic tactics, you know, in addition to obviously GA and making sure that Google analytics, you know, for web anyway is, you know, you’re, you’re getting data from the adset and the creative and the campaign. You know, how did you hear about us? I’d say, you know, having a post-purchase survey purchase, you know, on the confirmation page or an email, I mean, huge advertisers are using it. It’s obviously submitted from an actual customer and you are able to, I think in a much better way, prove out upper funnel channels, you know, of their efficacy. I think it’s become a lot more important. And then, yes, I agree that looking at just blended aggregate and, you know, trying to isolate how much you’re spending on one particular channel at one given time and seeing, you know, is there marginal efficiency overall for the business as we’re making these larger changes? You know, just that alone, you know, I think that anyone can do, you know, could have a really big impact and allow you to allow you to scale.

Anish Shah (57:05):
Okay. Thanks for that. Super helpful. Well, this was an awesome chat. I feel like I learned a ton and I’ll throw my email address here. If anyone wants to follow up or have any questions, if anyone else wants to feel free to throw your email address in the chat. And thanks a lot, everybody.

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