How to Finally Understand Where Your Shopify Sales a REALLY Coming From with Phoenix Ha

Understanding the effectiveness of your marketing efforts’ is crucial, but figuring out how feels impossible.

One way to do this is through attribution—the process of figuring out which touchpoints or platforms get credit for driving sales.

Phoenix Ha, long-time Meta media buyer and marketer, now CEO and co-founder of the attribution platform AdBeacon is here to demystify the murky world of attribution for you.

Transcript

Jessie Healy: 0:02

You're listening to the e commerce impact podcast, where we share the latest marketing strategies to grow your e com store and have more impact. Hey, everyone, and welcome back to the e commerce impact podcast today. We have Phoenix heart on the podcast with us to talk about all things attribution. So welcome along Phoenix.

Phoenix Ha: 0:25

Thank you. It's good to be here. Thank you for

Jessie Healy: 0:27

Yeah, it's exciting. And we just recorded an episode for your podcast, which was super fun. So everyone should go and check out fail with fire podcast. That is that the right, I've got the name, right?

Phoenix Ha: 0:37

That is spot on.

Jessie Healy: 0:38

And we'll put all the details in the show notes, but before we get started on, on the chat, like, why don't you introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a little bit about your background and how you got where you are today?

Phoenix Ha: 0:50

Yeah. Great. No, thank you for having me again. I love, love having conversations with you and two in one day. Let's go. For those of you who don't know, my name is Phoenix Ha. I'm the CEO and co founder of a first party data and attribution platform called AdBeacon. But my life wasn't made to be a first party data nerd. It actually started. In modeling, weirdly enough. So my background is in modeling and I did it since I was seven years old. I learned everything from the, yeah, the warehousing side, all the way to the runway and print side. That was my life for a really long time. I think the constant in my life is craving more and digging deeper with questions that were unanswered. So the first one was, okay, I want to learn a little bit more about distribution and how this whole marketing thing works with modeling. Didn't feel fulfilled. So then I went to a creative agency, learned about that with PR and experiential marketing, worked with brands like Nike and impossible foods, et cetera. Loved it. But again, did not get to see a, a clear data point behind my effort. So it was a lot of like clout and like a lot of buzz, but not so much how much revenue we were driving. And that kind of bothered me. So I left and I actually got poached to go over to Supra footwear, which was a quick case with global brand. They had bought out Supra footwear, which is a skate brand. I was the interim marketing director there and I learned so much. And. Maybe a little too much too soon, but it was great because I learned what kind of leader I wanted to become and what to do with large budgets. But again, did not hone in on the DSC world. At the time, all I knew was scrappy mentality. How do I sell out, you know, footwear drops in minutes with no dollars in ad spend? Did that loved it. And then my whole life changed. I went, you know, and decided to work with small businesses and do some things. And I looked at a, I needed a job and I looked at this LinkedIn ad for paid search. And I was like, Oh, they're paying people to search things. It's like, I could do that. And I ended up landing a job at a local agency in Los Angeles as just like the grunt. Entry level paid social expert, quote unquote expert. But I got obsessed and again, this is that pursuit. And through that pursuit, I ended up becoming the director of that entire department was able to increase their book of business by 200 percent within a very short period of time. And then iOS 14 happened. Which is what demolished our industry in terms of tracking and attribution, which we'll go into a little bit later. But I lost almost 40 percent of my book of business. And my CEO looked at me, he's like, what are you going to do to fix this? So by strike of luck and chance and perfect timing, I actually started speaking out loud about how to pivot. And that's where I shared a lot of stages with Jesse, where I didn't necessarily get to meet you, but we were on similar stages and I was just testing out loud, Andrew, Android versus Apple. And then discover something beautiful called first party data. And again, obsessive felt like this is the answer. I know it is. However, I don't love what's on the market currently. I want to make something that I know is right for my team. And that's where ad beacon was born. So I had two co founders and myself, and I try to be the visionary with my co founders of what it's going to become. And we celebrated a two year anniversary in August of 2024, and we are thriving. I'm so happy. And. This is where my life is today.

Jessie Healy: 4:24

Amazing. What a story. So from model to marketer to digital marketer and now to like SAS entrepreneur, I love it. What a journey. And like, I'm sure every part of that journey, you've learned so much, which I'm sure you can talk to us about today. But I always think like variety really does like build us as entrepreneurs and allows us to. You know, be better at what we do. I always my waitressing job, I think, contributed to my great customer service. So

Phoenix Ha: 4:51

yeah,

Jessie Healy: 4:52

definitely. Okay. So tell us then. Like, imagine you are explaining this to someone who's pretty new in the space to attribution. They might have some questions around, should I be spending my money on Google or Facebook or what's happening here? I don't really like Google analytics isn't really telling me much of a story. Like what is attribution? What does it do and how does it work?

Phoenix Ha: 5:17

great questions. Okay. And I love, I wouldn't say dumbing it down. I say simplifying very complex concepts. I think that's really what it comes down to. So attribution in the simplest form is just basically who, who being what platform meta Google Pinterest gets credit for a sale. Within a given amount of time. So there's two aspects, like who gets credit and within what span of time. So a great example of that is an attribution window, right? These are big words, but it just means who gets credit within a window of time of, let's just say seven days. And you're like, okay, within seven days, who gets the credit? The secondary component of that is, well, how much credit? And there are different types of models and different types of concepts, which I'll go through. And then they're all very, very easy to understand if they're simplified. So, for example, first click attribution is just dumbed down to how do people find you? So what is their first interaction via click, a tangible click? And that's usually the introduction to the brand. Last click attribution, and what was the click right before they bought? So what platform did they click on in terms of an ad right before they bought or it could be organic. So that's last click attribution. So first click is how they find you. Last click is how they convert from you. And then there's other concepts like linear of giving equal credit to every single touch point, right? So if there's four clicks, four different channels, each one gets 25 percent credit. And then there's other ones and it gets way more complex. And there's always been this debate going back and forth of which one to use and when to use it. And my, my stance has always been. Every media buyer is different. That's why brains are gorgeous. I'm going to give you very clean data and let you decide. So that I think is the simplest form. And then there's one last layer to attribution. And it's two forms. One is view attribution and click attribution. So view just means if I saw an ad within a given amount of time, that platform gets credit. And click attribution is if they clicked on my ad within a certain amount of time, it gets credit. My personal stance is I don't look at view attribution personally, because. As much as I understand view is such a important metric, there is a difference between view metrics and view attribution. View metrics are things like, you know, someone viewing your ad for 25, 50, you know, 100 percent of the time if it's a video or there's certain things there. However, view attribution says, Let's just say meta gets the credit. And again, what is a view? Is it my grandmother scrolling through an ad fumbling, thinking things through, or is it a certain amount of time? So that proprietary blend of view metrics that deems it to be a view attribution, I would say credit. I don't know what that is because I don't know what that is. I don't trust it and I can't use it. So I hope that was clarified. We've got what attribution is and then the different types of attribution and the different types of attribution models.

Jessie Healy: 8:18

got it. So let's talk about just to like break it down even further, like how the different platforms. Attribute to themselves. And then like how a platform like Google analytics would attribute. So if I understand correctly, Facebook attributes only for seven days and by default, they, they attribute one day of view, like viewed ads and seven days of click, but you can change it yourself if you want to, but that only gonna, you're only going to get credit for the sale and Facebook ads manager. If the person converts within seven days, is that still the case?

Phoenix Ha: 8:51

You can still break it out to 28 day. I think they just opened it up. So like back in the day before iOS 14, the default was actually 28 day click seven day view. So it was much bigger. So think about like a company that sells one of my clients sells golf launch monitors or simulators. I always call it the Jay Z's unless you're Jay Z and have Jay Z money. You're not going to buy that within a day of looking at an ad. It's going to take some time. So You know, the 28 day click seven day view really helped that understanding that journey now that it's been cut down defaulted to seven day click one day view. right. It's, it's limited. You can open it up, but again, it's still kind of a hazy world.

Jessie Healy: 9:33

And you have to open it up and like find it. It's not, and the algorithm's not taking into account the 28 days. It's just taking into account the seven. So yeah, like, unless you are like a fast moving product where people make a pretty impulse decision, chances are a good chunk of your sales are going to happen outside of the seven day window from click. And therefore we're not going to know that Facebook is the reason or Mesa is the reason why that sale happened. Yeah. But Google, on the other hand is 28 day, right? By default. I

Phoenix Ha: 10:04

Yeah. It's 28. So there's a, there's a lot of flaws with both Google and meta, et cetera. And it's actually not their fault. So let's like take it back to iOS 14. So what is iOS 14? It was that pop up on an Apple device that said, do you to be tracked? You're asking to be tracked and 99 percent of everybody is going, heck no, I don't want to be tracked. You know, screw the government. I don't want it yet. Totally get it. Totally get it. However, what it really did is it handcuffed the ability for advertisers to identify who people are. Even the, the ability that we had was already limited, but even far more limited. It delayed data and also just put a lot of boundaries as to what Meta could share and couldn't share a track and couldn't track. And this impacted a lot. So again, to your point of like seven days is a very short amount of time. That's scary. Google, however, the way that Google tracks, very similar to meta. The thing is, is that Google is also kind of going through its own iOS right now with Google analytics for being an interesting product. A lot of users are not happy with a firm example of that. You look like you're laughing. You might be one of those

Jessie Healy: 11:15

just didn't, didn't want to have to learn a whole new package for a star. Like, and I think a lot of marketers, we, we learned it when we were like younger and we had time and now I don't have time to learn a whole new thing. Like it's a lot.

Phoenix Ha: 11:26

we all had it on our linkedin like google analytics certified, right? Like I don't even it's just again again back to a standpoint of a platform You want people to use it not learn how to use your platform and then use it that's just like another step in the process, but The biggest issue I had actually with it is that, you know, Google Analytics Universal doesn't translate over to Google Analytics 4. So all the data you had previously does not go hand in hand. Like, you can't do a comparison that's clean unless you, you completely extrapolated that data, put it with the new formulas with Google Analytics 4. Another thing that's really important for us to understand is that these platforms only care about themselves. Google Analytics 4 And that's like so important that we need to understand is I think for so long, we saw great numbers in Google and Meta and we're like, hell yeah, like this is great, but we never took a extreme look back to our Shopify WooCommerce or BigCommerce stores or whatever you're on. And went, is this true? When you see your business thriving, you obviously see a correlation. It might be not, might not be a complete picture, but you see a correlation of going up on meta and up on Google. And then you see your Shopify story going up. Why are you complaining? When iOS 14 happened, you started to see the veil back and it was way scarier than we thought. So let me take it back for a second. Google favors. Google. It's in the name. Meta favors meta. It's in the name. So, when you use these types of platforms to tell you how much money they made you, you just have to take that into account.

Jessie Healy: 13:04

Totally. And this is the thing, right? I've, I've said it a million times to brands I work with, like, We can only trust Google analytics as far as we can trust Google. And, you know, Google's goal, their absolute obligation to their shareholders is to make more money. And they'll make more money if they, if they make our campaigns look good. So is Google going to be the most neutral party to use, to tell us which platform meta or Google who are sworn enemies of each other works best? No, it's absolutely not. And like the, the way that, that the way they're like, Designing the way that data is kind of crunched in the back end. Like we're not, we're not data scientists able to see that whole algorithm and how that works. So I'm not saying that they are blatantly like making it. But it's definitely going to be making some decisions that make generally make Google appear better. And then Google has this other thing that I'm on my soapbox now. But Google is more of a bottom of funnel channel generally. I mean, they're trying to be higher funnel with like YouTube and other platforms like that. But generally like search, someone is already searching for the brand or they already know they need the product. They're going to convert fairly high at the bottom of the funnel, but oftentimes they won't even get there. If you haven't done something at the top, which generally happens on meta or tech talk or YouTube sometimes as well. So bottom of funnel channels always look like they perform better. So brands will always come to me and go, it'd be like, Google performs way better than meta. And I'm like, try turning meta off and then come back to me and see what you're going to say. So, yeah, I think the, the answer is we need a platform. That's neutral to the two or neutral to all the channels. That's not like funded for free. Like you get it for free from Google. That should tell you something. Right. Yeah.

Phoenix Ha: 14:50

mass adoption over a product that they want you to use more of. And, again, let's Go back to the concept of a funnel in marketing. It's a top of funnels, people who've never heard of you before. Then you've got middle of funnel, which is retargeting, you know, people who have heard of you, but haven't yet converted. And then the true bottom of funnel is people who have converted, but you know, you want to re engage with them. And what is the most common mistake people make is that they see great results at middle of funnel, the bottom of funnels. So they put all of their spend there, but they forget that they're squeezing out. The very small amount of people that know about them and they're no longer bringing in more people and to your point of like bottom of funnel channels like Google, that's very common. So everything looks great there because you're saying they're already looking for that product. It's going to happen, you know, with meta, it's different. It's like people might not need that product, but you're showing it to them. They're like, Oh, wow, this is a discovery channel. If you hear my dog drinking water, she's a loud yeah, no, and we, I really, you know, taking it back again, I was a meta paid media strategist. So like away from ad beacon, I needed a solution. And when I looked at meta, I just didn't feel right telling my client, like, let's just say, Jesse, you're my client. I'm like, congratulations, you made 50, 000. It says that in meta. And then I go into your Shopify store. It's like, you made 25, 000. And I'm like, I cannot say this. There is an attribution model that we have figured out that is as close to meta as possible. And there's two things I unveiled during this iOS 14 time that was really, really scary. The first one is this concept of full impact model. And I talked about linear, first click, last click. Full impact is basically every single click in the journey gets 100 percent credit. So if you think about it like this, if there were four clicks in a journey and a hundred dollars sale and we used full impact and all four clicks were meta, then it would report$400 and four orders. But that's not true. It was one order,$400, but we gave every click a hundred percent credit.'cause we wanted to look at the impact of every single campaign ad set and ad. So when I switched over to full impact in our platform, it got closer to the meta numbers. There's also a secondary component. That's scary. And I started to look through a lot of our clients because I did a beta test of 40 clients before we even launched this. And I was looking through and I saw that there was a hyperinflation between a 55 to 70 percent lean range of the revenue that was Yeah. So one of the things to remember is that no matter for how many people are watching video get 30 percent of what you're watching in the data, it's actually who you actually saw at one point, whatever. And so then you're going to set up a 55 to 70 percent of the revenue you're saying is just from that, but then the rest was click. That's a problem. And the problem with that is I can't prove the view side. I can only potentially prove the click side. So now you're at the mercy of a platform.

Jessie Healy: 17:49

that's definitely true in some accounts. It's not true in all accounts. And that's why like every, you know, every business, every account is different. Like we definitely see. I've noticed that for like beauty brands that have a lot of like organic reach and engagement, they'll get like so many views through conversions, because I think people are just like seeing the ad flash up before they buy, but they were going to buy it anyway because of like the founder's content. Whereas like in other, other areas where maybe they don't have as strong of a social profile or they just just for whatever reason, they're like, their business is different. We won't see as many. Like view through conversions being kind of like taking all the credit. So it's something to look for, isn't it? Like, regardless of whether you use an attribution platform, it's a, it's a metric you should always be looking at is like view through conversions versus. Click through conversions and then make a decision as to where this optimized for one or the other. So yeah,

Phoenix Ha: 18:40

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And you get to understand the buying behavior and you have to make the decision as a business owner of which one you feel more comfortable with, like to your, and again, the way I look at things is if I know it's a beauty brand and first click is really strong on meta, then I know for a fact that people are finding out, but they're probably be terrible last click because they probably come back. Through Google or, you know, organic search and then the organic channels have a lot of attribution towards it because they continuously re engage with the community aspect. It really depends on your business. So you, I think you nail right on the head.

Jessie Healy: 19:12

yeah, exactly. And it's like, no, your numbers know where to look for these things and like, and have a look at those numbers on a regular basis. Totally. Okay, cool. So attribution. In a general, in a general sense, we now understand it's like having a kind of neutral system in the middle that allows you to like, see the true story and you can decide whether you want to attribute the first click, the last click, give everyone credit, whatever you decide is up to you as a business and will depend on like what you're trying to kind of do. So tell us about, tell us about ad beacon and how ad beacon fits into that and like, what's different about your tool versus other tools that are out there. Right.

Phoenix Ha: 19:51

Yeah, easy. You know, I built this tool as something I needed selfishly. For my team, let's be completely honest. I have a different perspective. I'm a media buyer. So, you know, the first thing is I didn't build this for brand owners. I built this for the tacticians, for the agency teams, for the media buyers. Why? Because they're the ones using these tools to scale your brands. And often we were thrown tools that just, Were given to us and we had just deal with it. It was a good, but not a great. And I wanted to build a great for the team. So that was the first difference. And I knew what we needed. So attribution is just one part of the whole picture. AdBeacon is, understands that attribution is just the foundation. Now, what do we do with it? So, you know, that trickles all the way over to what makes us different. Well, now I know exactly what products people are buying all the way down to the ad level. and then I can optimize my landing pages to have higher conversion rates. I want to know little things like that are just like the aha moment. when we designed this platform, we really thought about like, okay, what's next? It's a read and react format. We're reading the data now. What? So. We have a full product journey that tells you a complete upsell flow. So I don't have to dig through the data nonstop to figure out if someone buys this product, they're most likely to buy this and this next. And then we ask ourselves, what's the lifetime value of that product? And that's where you take a junior media buyer into a senior media buyer, where they're now asking better questions to then help Brand scale. So that's just a completely different take that we had. Now, when it comes to, I'll be completely frank with you when it comes to tracking. We're no different than everybody else. Everyone has the same way of tracking. We have a pixel Okay, there's, and the margin of error is probably going to be relatively the same. Now it's what you do with that data and it's clean and it's easy to understand that takes you to the next level. So I would say that's, that's ad beacon and where we are.

Jessie Healy: 21:47

Interesting. Yeah. So like when we, and I guess you're solving one of those frustrations that you have as a media buyer, when you're looking at ads manager and you don't know what product people bought and whether they're a new customer or not as well, right, like And Google analytics doesn't tell you either what product people bought. I don't, as far as I know, I haven't found a way to do that. And it definitely doesn't tell you if someone was a net new customer to the business. It tells them, it tells you how many new users you've got within a time period, but not whether someone came and bought for the first time or the 20th time. So yeah, those are two things that are super super useful to have in a tool. So, okay. So can you walk us through like an example of a client of yours and how it. How a tool like AdBeacon can actually make them make more money. Like, how does that

Phoenix Ha: 22:34

Oh yeah. I'll use a, a brand called Brixton, Brixton Apparel. Love them. So I was their media buyer. And the first problem that I had was, I'll use this use case as my favorite case study is we were trying to figure out, okay You know, during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, what ads do best? And again, I don't like to work off data that I can't prove. It's literally what it comes down to. So, often what, and this is great for you, Jesse, with the creative side, is, We would often get the question from their team. What types of creatives do we need to do? Do we need to do more video? Do we do more stills, et cetera? But because we had first party data and we had proof behind every dollar, we were able to show them in ad beacon, which which media types are like zoomed in macro shots of the apparel off body did far better in terms of revenue than on body with a model. Huge. We were also able to tell them that one female model drove far more revenue than a different female model. However, the other female model drove far more clicks.

Jessie Healy: 23:37

Wow.

Phoenix Ha: 23:38

Interesting. So what we don't realize is commercial versus direct to consumer can be very different. So that's just one thing. Then we were able to do stand by new customers versus returning customers and what creative drove far more new customers versus returning. And then my second, so that was easy, low hanging fruit. So during black Friday, cyber Monday, they basically turned off all on body and just really pushed into their flannels of zoomed in macro shots and printed money. It was like you, you could, it was just un, it was ridiculous ROAS, ridiculous numbers and revenue. And I was so proud of that. The second portion that I thought was a next step was we had a collaboration with a local artist and they had a, like a really bright red sweater and, you know, the brand awareness is usually why you would do a collaboration. You bring in new eyes. So we drove people to the landing page of that red sweater. Pretty simple. And the CEO calls me at Brixton and was like, Turn off this ad. Turn it off right now. It's not doing anything. And I'm like, I'm not going to do that. It's printing money. And he's like, what do you mean? And I'm like, it's, it literally is one of our best performing ads. I'm not going to turn this off. And he went, turn it off because we're not selling any of those units. And I had to have that conversation. Well, well, the thing about direct to consumer is our job is to drive traffic, qualified traffic. They might buy other things cause they can browse the site by headwear or whatever. They might not buy that product, but that drove them to the site. And he goes, well, what products did they buy? And I couldn't answer that question and that really frustrated me. So we fixed it and now we knew. So what happened? We found out that people were actually buying headwear, snapbacks. So what do we do? We optimize the landing page to showcase that sweater. But we had three snapbacks. Then we had a AOV play, a bundle play, and we drove massive sell through. So those are just little things we did. Yeah.

Jessie Healy: 25:32

Yeah. It's like taking the blindfold off, isn't it? It's amazing. Yeah. And that whole thing of like, This, the ad that brings people in isn't necessarily the ad that the product that people buy is so true. When I worked at Etsy, I remember we would have, I think without shopping ads, it was something like 90 percent of the time people didn't buy the products that came in through the shopping ad to look at because they then landed on Etsy and found a whole bunch of other stuff that suited their needs and they would buy. So it's about like identifying what's the ad unit that's going to bring in the people that actually end up buying. And then deeper than that. Like what did they buy? And therefore, like, what should we show them when they get there? And then deeper than that, like which units will bring people in who have never like bought from the brand before, who are worth more to you, right? Because you can convert your existing customers. I mean, you should be through email, through social, et cetera, but bringing in net new customers is how business will truly be able to grow. So understanding that level. It's really, really important. That's awesome. So Brixton, are they, I have to ask, are they from Brixton in London? Cause I used to live there, but I don't think they are

Phoenix Ha: 26:38

No, they're a San Diego based brand, but I know that they take lineage from that. Yeah, they're, they're crazy. So they, they're a music driven brand, but then they kind of landed themselves in surf and skate as well. And they're very well known for their headwear. So like,

Jessie Healy: 26:56

I've seen their caps hats. Yeah, definitely.

Phoenix Ha: 26:58

yeah, caps like Peaky They have that and then they have cowboy hats and everything. And I grew up looking at this brand. So it was kind of easy to media buy for them, but really really fun

Jessie Healy: 27:08

Yeah. So how are you kind of like setting up a test like that, or like, how are you designing your creative testing framework in order to harness these? Kind of insights. Like, are you saying like in an ideal world, would you have set up like on body versus like, well, I think you said it was like on body versus model shots or something like that. So are you like designing a test where you have these diverse different elements in there and you're purposely kind of putting budget against them in order to like answer a question?

Phoenix Ha: 27:42

V1, V2. So let's go back to like traditional way of, of AB testing creative is you would go in there and I believe that you have to have a control. The control would be actually multiple aspects would be the headline and the copy that shouldn't change. The only thing that should change is the creative and it should be an image or if it's a video, it's a video, right? So it can't be, you know, a test a is an image and test B is a video and there's multiple components to So it would be version one would be same copy, same headline, but the image showcases. Let's just say a flannel up close commercial shot zoomed in with the branding. Not on a model. And the second V2 would be the same headline, same copy, but it would be a lifestyle shot on the model, right? Of the same flannel. I would make sure that we try to get relative same spend against AB and then see which performs better. And we did this across multiple flannels, multiple products. And we saw a clear winner because what we do in our platform is we take an image hash. So the idea is multiple mad or media buyers. What they do is they take one ad and then they duplicate it like 15 times across the entire ad account. It could live in multiple different audiences. What we do is we pull the image hash and say, how is that individual creative doing? So then we say, okay, there might be multiple forms of this different headlines, different copy, but how is this specific image performing and because of that we were able to deduce and through deductive reasoning, realize, wow, okay, this is what's working and then we leaned into it during Black Friday, Cyber Monday and saw such great

Jessie Healy: 29:22

Amazing. Yeah. So that's, that's the other unlock, isn't it? Because if you have a fairly complex account with like multiple like audiences that you're testing or like regions or whatever, you're not going to have the rolled up information about that one particular ad. Yeah. And you won't then be able to say and does it, does the system allow you to say like, whether this, you know, Worked at top of funnel versus bottom of funnel, like, because sometimes you'll be like, these are our best performing ads. Oh, those are just all our retargeting ads.

Phoenix Ha: 29:51

Yeah. So what it does, it's cool. You get to see it overview, like in a table format, like a nerd. I love it. And then you can actually click on the individual creative and it'll show you every single campaign ad set and add that this creative lives So you can see, and then spend relative to it. And then you can actually prove that. Every single person who bought from these ads. So it, it really gets granular. My personal favorite recently is two things we're able to do. One is tagging. So to your point of like, if you have a bunch of ads and let's just say this isn't a specific category of headwear, you just want to know how headwear ads are doing. You can tag certain creative, say headwear, and then do a comparison report against maybe bottoms. And that's separate tags. You can see that. Another thing I'm really stoked on is we're looking right now at carousel versus image versus video. It's a full roll up that tells you how many ads you have of that format, how much you've spent against each of those formats, and how much revenue in all those metrics, and then you can decide with your creative team which one you need to start doubling

Jessie Healy: 30:53

Right. Okay. So you can kind of splice and dice the data by creative unit, I presume via like copy or headline as well via like what format you're looking at, what part of the funnel it's in. Yeah, awesome. That sounds really cool. So I've had a demo of it myself and it looks like it's, you've sort of mirrored a little bit the the interface of like Facebook ads or Meta ads manager. Cause you've kind of, come at it as a media buyer, right? Yeah. Cool.

Phoenix Ha: 31:22

It's like a, I wanted, I wanted my team. So as a leader of, of the team, what is the hardest thing to do? Introduce another damn tool. Sorry if I curse, but like this, this is one of those things where it's like, I never wanted another tool. So let me just reduce the friction points. So we purposely had it look like, you know, the Facebook ads manager. We say it's inspiration of, so then you can go in and work within five minutes. We should make your life easier, not harder. So that, that was a big reason for that

Jessie Healy: 31:53

That's awesome. So. Taking a step back, like I work with early stage brands and then I work with some bigger kind of eight and nine figure brands as well. So I work kind of across the spectrum at what stage do you think attribution an attribution tool like this? Because there is a cost to it versus like using just the platform data or Google Analytics. At what stage do you think it becomes? ROI positive, I guess, to invest in an attribution tool.

Phoenix Ha: 32:20

Yeah. So it always starts with margins. I start there. You know, we purposely priced ourselves again, like not more than half a percent of your monthly revenue. The way that we looked at that pricing was very strategic. However, again, even so you might be really slim with your margins and that's still too much. So first of all, margins wise, make sure that you can afford this type of Second of all is what I look at as usually 50, 000, 20 to 50, 000 in spend. Across all channels is the right time in my opinion to start looking at this because if it's just one channel Yes, we will be helpful But it's always great to see the full picture and then the way that I look at it, too Is unless you are able to dive into this platform like an ad beacon It's really not going to help you, which is why I really targeted towards agencies and media buyers and no offense to brand owners. If you're in a stage where you're doing all the media buying and you're also doing the shipping and you're also talking to everybody in terms of, of all the vendors, et cetera, it's almost impossible to fully utilize a platform like AdBeacon to its extent to be able to scale. It's advanced. So I always say, you know, it's, it's more so who's doing your media buying than where you're at. But again, margins is

Jessie Healy: 33:39

Yeah. So you're, so ideally if you're hearing this and it sounds interesting and you haven't got attribution set up yet, could be something where you talk to your agency about them kind of adopting AdBeacon, or if you're doing media buying in house and you have like an expert media buyer who's running your ads for you, they're going to be super excited to work with a tool like this. And I mean, there's lots of other kind of like tools that do different things out there on the marketplace. Like, what do you think makes. different to say your triple whale, your North beam, or even ones like alivar or blood out that do a little bit different. They're kind of like sending data back into the platforms. What are the key differences?

Phoenix Ha: 34:18

I would say we're a no BS platform to be extremely blunt. And what I mean by that is we are a click attribution only platform. We actually do not report on view attribution. I made that pretty clear early on. The second thing is we don't have any proprietary or black box attribution models and most companies want and need that to be, you know, kind of the cool marketing play. We don't do that. We sterilize the data completely and that is really to put it back in your hands. And the last part is just the mentality and the way we designed it. We have a very different goal. Our goal is to be a tool for media buyers. Our goal is not to have brands swipe their credit cards. So for me, I listened to the media buyers. This is a community driven platform. It's a completely different take, and it's not a knock on any other platform, but you have to understand that to the back to the first question is. If you are a smaller brand that has invested in an agency to help grow you, AdBeacon is only going to make it 10 times better. It's just in the hands of someone who's qualified that's able to utilize it.

Jessie Healy: 35:21

Yeah.

Phoenix Ha: 35:22

Versus you going to my competitor and you have to incur that cost yourself, and you're feeling the weight of both an agency's price point, also another tool, and then all the other tools. So, I would say that's the big, big component

Jessie Healy: 35:34

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I would say to add to like, sorry, back to the earlier question. It just struck me that like the time when you need attribution beyond, like, if you're at that spin level of like 20 K plus, if you're maybe not quite at that spin level, but you're lying awake, asking yourself questions about, you don't know whether it's Google or whether it's meta, that's like the lever to pull. And you don't know how to answer that question. And you don't have like, A clean view of like, are people discovering me through Google or through meta or through tick tock or whatever else you're at, you know, you might be doing stuff with affiliates, SEO, et cetera. If those questions are holding you back and meaning that you can't move forward and make confidence spend decisions, and you're just sort of lost in a sea of contradictory data, that probably a good point when you need to look at exploring some kind of attribution tool, whether it's ad beacon or any of the others that I mentioned. And then So, yeah, I just thought that would kind of add to the conversation. Okay. Awesome. Well it's been a great chat. Is there anything else you want to share with the audience before we go? Any yeah, any insights about the industry? What's happening at the moment? Any advice for Black Friday?

Phoenix Ha: 36:41

Yeah, I mean, so first and foremost, I always like to leave a nugget. I'm seeing across a lot of accounts, carousels, image, like still image carousel ads are wrecking house right I always believe like creating silence in the noisy of noise is the way that you impact. So what was something that everyone was preaching so many years? It's like video, video, video. And because you've seen so much video, now you're seeing an image. It just stops you in your tracks. Founder led, founder led creative is killing it in terms of, I wouldn't say even UGC, but it's like a splice and dice of a video. But almost UGC esque, where it's just an iPhone telling the story of your brand because people want to invest in brands now and who they are and they don't want this. Kind of like a behind the veil type of vibe. They want to know. They want to be invested. And I think the only thing too is like, if you're going into Black Friday, Cyber Monday, my only suggestion is to have a plan and then have a backup plan.

Jessie Healy: 37:38

Yeah.

Phoenix Ha: 37:39

You never know what's going to happen, so be prepared to react And be be agile.

Jessie Healy: 37:44

a backup ad account too, it's not a bad

Phoenix Ha: 37:46

Yes, please. Please, please. Actually, Brixton, perfect example, needed a back up ad account right before Black Friday Cyber Monday a few years ago. We got hacked, and if it wasn't for that back up ad account, we would not, you know, been able to recover. So, I wish you guys the best of

Jessie Healy: 38:01

in my agency, we had, we used to onboard a new client and have them set up a backup account the day we onboarded them, because we were so spooked by like times when clients had accounts that got shut down and we'd got the blame. So we were like, if you've got a backup ad account, we told you this might happen. So, yeah. So quick question on the carousel, cause I'm always curious. So. You're talking like manual carousels. We're not talking like catalog ads that pull the catalog, like selecting individual products and putting them into the carousel telling the story. Interesting. And

Phoenix Ha: 38:32

right? I'm doing video. I'm doing a UGC carousel right now as a test because I just for everyone to know, like, yeah, I run a platform, but I also like to still media by to keep myself still in the game. Right? So we are testing UGC carousel video. So video carousel. We're also we did a lot of still imagery carousel. We just saw the algorithm just really lean towards that. Spending towards carousel, but then it was, it was the best, you know, generating in terms of performance. But then yeah, still imagery talent manual, of course, catalog this while DPA as well, you know, like always has

Jessie Healy: 39:10

Yeah. That's amazing. And yeah, founder ads. I could see that being, I remember founder ads popping off during the pandemic because people were like. I want to buy from people. I want to support real brands. This is a tough time. And I think now with the economic situation, it's probably the same thing. If I'm going to buy something, I want to buy something that helps someone, a nice real person, not a corporation. So lean into that. I would say, yeah, I love that. Awesome. So where can people follow you? Find your find your business, let us know, and I'll put it all in the show notes. Awesome.

Phoenix Ha: 39:41

Yeah. I mean, AdBeacon. com easy, easy, easy. But for me specifically, it's underscore. Phoenix ha on Twitter. You can find me on Tik Tok. That's actually a live case study for anyone who thinks this is fun. Went viral multiple times during the pandemic. And it was all actually just a test on different hooks sold out multiple products within a matter of days. So please check that out. And then you know, Instagram, if you want to know me personally, that's where like you see my dogs and my husband and my not so much marketing, but yeah, feel free to ask any questions. I'm here to help.

Jessie Healy: 40:14

to have you on. Thanks again.

Phoenix Ha: 40:17

Thanks for having me.

Jessie Healy: 40:20

Thanks so much for joining us here on the e commerce impact podcast. If I can ask you one favor, can you please make sure you subscribe? And if you can leave us a review, it helps us have a much bigger impact with what we're trying to do here at the e commerce impact podcast. Now, if you're ready to take your e com store to the next level, then go to www. ecommerceimpactpodcast. com and click on the button to book a strategy call with me and my team. We offer a free order of your advertising and a custom growth plan. So you really have nothing to lose by getting in touch and jumping on a call with us. See you soon and watch out for the next episode in two weeks time.