Show Intro & Meta Andromeda Survival Guide

On this episode of DTC & Jelly I'll be taking a few minutes to go over what the show is going to be about, who it is for, why you should listen, and what makes it different from all the other marketing podcasts out there. I'll then take some time to discuss one of my favorite topics... The Meta Andromeda Update 😱!

Transcript

What is DTC & Jelly going to be about?

Meta Andromeda: Measurement

Meta Andromeda: Creative is the New Targeting

Meta Andromeda: Landing Pages

SPEAKER_00 0:28

You are listening to the D D S and Jelly marketing podcast. This is our very first episode with your host, Chris Zulia. Find me on LinkedIn. My name is Chris. Last name spelled S-U-G-L-I-A. I talk about marketing content all the time. And I know it's a little funny the spelling. The reason it's Zulia is because it's an Italian background. And what I always tell people is the G is silent, like in lasagna. That seems to do the trick in terms of people getting it and not just giving it a very, very funny look. But without getting too far into that, I'm I'm so excited to finally be doing this. I've always wanted to start a marketing podcast. It was at the top of my list when I started Happy Hub five almost six years ago. Happy Hub is my marketing firm. We specialize in paid media. We do a lot of consulting. The biggest thing that I always tell people is we are experts at identifying conversion blockers. I originally did a show intro that was, I guess, more or less scripted. I had all the things I wanted to say written out. I tried reading from it. Even with my acting background, I did a terrible job of sounding natural. This is a good lesson of why and when you give a specific script to UGC creators, why they may give you something that just seems inauthentic or not natural. The thing that I always recommend when you work with UGC creators is giving them bullet points, giving them kind of more of a framework or guidelines to create under instead of having rigid line-by-line scripts that they need to follow. But this episode isn't going to be about UGC. So I won't go on a tangent about that or any more of a tangent. I'll be talking about later on in the episode all about the Andromeda update and how you can win with it, how you can survive ever since it hit last October. But before I get into that, I want to do that intro of who I am, why I started this podcast, and how this podcast is going to be different. So again, my name is Chris. I run a paid media agency for the past six years. I have been in marketing for almost 10 years. I have a writing for television background. It was actually writing for comedy television. And the reason that I went into marketing instead of the entertainment industry, other than it's extremely hard to make it in the entertainment industry, is that I find the most meaning in my work when I am supporting other people. When I help other people succeed, and I feel like one of my superpowers, if you will, is the ability to communicate to different people to really get into their shoes, to be very empathetic. And I saw it as so much more effective. I would be so much more effective if I could help 10, 20, 30, 40, how many ever people reach their dreams than me just doing it alone. Now, obviously, I love reaching success myself. I think everyone does. But I have found that success is significantly better when it is shared. Marketing is basically exactly that. It also has a huge problem solving and consumer psychology aspect, which I'm also pretty much a nerd about. So all of that wrapped in made marketing seem like the perfect place for me to go. But the reason why I am starting this podcast is because I feel like it's almost gotten taboo to talk about differences in the marketing world. There's a very much a people pleaser mentality, and if not that, people just avoid conflict. And probably the final thing is I do think there are a lot of people, gurus out there who don't really know what they're talking about, who are more prioritized with making money than they are helping people. And that causes them to be invested in strategies that don't work for everyone and not be honest and transparent about if it will work with someone, they're more concerned with closing that contract than they are of, you know, is this going to be a good good fit for me? Is my strategy actually gonna work for that client? And I think that really is the biggest reason why people are hesitant to talk about these different ideas, because if they get any sense that this person cares more about making money than helping people, cares more about making money than really digging into what's working, it's it becomes a very difficult conversation to have. And it also is, you know, not a not a not a conflict a lot of people in general, marketing or otherwise, want to have. So this is going to be a safe space for people to talk about those different ideas without worrying about being judged. And I myself, as a host, I will call out people who aren't being truthful or who are more prioritized with that money aspect or whatever it may be. Because I am going to allow no BS on this podcast. Um, I'm not doing this to get sponsors or anything like that. I, you know, might have some down the road, but any sponsor that I do have, it's going to be a technology or platform that I truly believe in and would use and recommend to all my clients for the only purpose that it will help them succeed. Now, who should be listening to this podcast? Who is this going to be for? This is going to be for D2C founders and operators and marketers who just feel like they haven't been able to reach their true potential. This podcast is going to be designed to get you to that next level for you to finally reach the potential that you always dreamed of. Like I said at the beginning, I'm really good at diagnosing specific problems that are broken in your business, stopping you from getting to that next level, whether it is zero dollars from one million, one million to ten million, ten million to fifty million. I have really seen and gotten to the weeds of the strategies that really move the needle, not that just looking on a case study, not that just sound good in terms of sales, but actually work. And I will be providing the nuance as to what strategies work for big brands, what strategies work for small brands, what strategies look for work for clothing brands, work for CPG brands that sell like deodorant and very high repeat purchase products, and really breaking down why they work for those certain businesses and why they won't work for others. And how is this podcast going to be different? Is the last thing I'll talk about before I get into all this meta andromeda update is instead of asking guests questions that I bring on, I'm going to ask them to respond to prompts. I will be responding to these prompts as well. I got this idea from the YouTube show Jubilee. Not sure if you've heard of it, not sure if you watched it, but what they do is have guests respond to prompts on very controversial topics, and they're able to have a very friendly, constructive debate about it where people listening are able to see both extreme sides, take their own opinions from it, and really get down to truth of the truth of things, or at the very least, seeing the polarizing difference of opinions and then being able to decide for themselves what to take away and what to believe from it. Now, with the time I have left, I want to get into the Andromeda update on Meta because that's something I get the most questions about, and it's a topic that I feel like I'm very fluid in speaking about. This update hit ad accounts last October, I want to say, sometime around there. I believe it was a somewhat slow rollout. So some accounts saw it earlier than others. But if you're doing marketing in 2026, you are absolutely experiencing it. I talked to a lot of brands who saw their marketing shift go on a downturn in that October time period, and they thought it was their creative. They thought it was something with their audience targeting. And creative is part of it, but what really changed with this update is it took the levers away from marketing, marketers. And this has been a trend for the past two years, but it finally kind of just like cut off. It took the power away from marketers to target exactly who they want at the ad set and audience level and serve them more or less generic ads. And I don't mean that as a shot to anyone who has been really successful with marketing for eight or 10 years before the Andromeda update. I myself, for example, used to love the audience targeting game. I had a Google Doc of at least 30 or more personas of interests, detailed interests that had 30, 30 or 50 sometimes interests to make those personas. I had stacked interests, you name it. I was doing every type of audience targeting strategy, and it all worked beautifully. And it was, you know, at least for me, easy in the sense that I didn't have to ask the client for new assets. I didn't even have to ask them to, you know, really develop a solid landing page. All I had to do was use these audience hacks and get their ads in front of the right people. And if we had a solid offer, we would be able to make revenue. And I think that's the biggest thing that's changed, especially within the last two years and even more so within the last six months, is you cannot win with paid media just by having an awesome media buyer. I can set up your campaigns perfectly in the platform. And if your creative isn't built how it needs to be, if you don't have enough creative variations coming through Meta every month or even every week, depending on how much you're spending, if you don't have a landing page that is incredible, and I do mean incredible, and if you don't have a bulletproof offer, and by offer I don't necessarily mean discount. I mean the way that you position your value propositions as a brand for your product. But if all of that stuff isn't dialed in, you are not going to be successful with marketing. And I guess a better way of saying it is this Andrew Meta update, what it did was simply make it so that Meta is a vehicle to amplify your brand. So if what you're amplifying isn't working or isn't good enough, you're not going to get any type of results in Meta. Now, some caveats to that would be if you have a huge brand and a lot of brand power, a lot of established customers, you know, you're kind of at the 10 million to 20 million dollar revenue range. You can get away with subpar creative. Um, you can get away with even subpar landing pages, even though I see a lot of brands in that revenue level, they they understand the creative is important, they understand that landing pages are important, and they've done a ton of research to refine their offers and positioning statements. You don't get that big by accident unless your product is just kind of something one of a kind. But with that context in mind, those larger brands who do get away with less, a lot of the times they are getting that revenue from repeat customers. A lot of times they're getting that revenue from brand search results. And if you, you know, I'm not one of those people who says every single click in ad dollar that you drive, especially through Meta, should be new customers. I'm not someone who even says you should ditch brand search completely. But if you are spending 80% of your budget on brand, if you are spending 80% of your budget on Meta for existing customers, and meta's made it really easy recently to show that current customer versus new customer split, you are most likely not driving incremental revenue. And it gets really hard when you are one of those companies in the 10 million to 20 million dollar revenue range. You can't, it gets muddy to understand what is actually driving incremental revenue because a lot of those companies grew in the age of attribution. What I mean by the age of attribution is when you could more or less trust the return on ad spend number and the cost for purchase that you saw in Meta, you saw in Google, whatever platform you were using, like the gospel. Those numbers were extremely correlated to your bottom line revenue. Now, even back then, I would say there was more nuance than people were really truthful about. And maybe truthful is not the right word because I don't think anyone was necessarily lying. But if you did media mix modeling, things like that, very advanced marketing studies, you would find that a lot of those return on ad spend numbers, cost per purchase, whatever they were, weren't as directly correlated as everyone took them to be. But they were much more correlated than they are today. And so all these brands who grew to 10 million, 20 million, whatever it was, were relying on this return on ad spend number that they still to this day trust without question. And more than ever, those return on ad spend numbers in Meta do not matter. You can use them as an initial gut check, but quite frankly, I see return on ad spend almost like I see click-through rate these days. You really have to dig in deeper to see if that is really driving incremental revenue, if it's really showing to enough new customers, if it's not just taking credit for purchases that would have happened anyways. One example is if you run a bigger brand and you have a solid email list, especially during sales periods, you may send an email out the day before a sale, and then all of a sudden your meta return on ad spend shoots up. Now, there is part of that where people are seeing those ads on meta and they are like, oh wait, I only have one more day to take advantage of the sale. I need I need to take advantage of it, or people may have saved the post and then they get retargeted again or have something in their cart and they're like, I really need to purchase this before the deal expires. That does happen. I'm not saying it doesn't, but if you see, you know, if you go from five return on ad spend to 20, 30 return on ad spend, I know those numbers sound crazy, but I have seen that for these larger brands, especially when you get close to that sales deadline. A lot of that revenue is just it being more of an assist or a view-through conversion for the email list. Now, I do think that there's a compliment there, and it is still worthwhile to send those ads, especially with offers like that to your current customers, especially if that offer isn't protected, if it's something you're advertising to everyone and then you're sending an email about it. But you can't look at that and be like, oh, Meta drove all this revenue for me. Because if you look at your meta revenue and you look at your email revenue and you add that up, it will definitely be more than whatever you got on that sales day. So this is just one example of how you need to be more mindful about those return on ad spend numbers. And I always start, a lot of my clients are on Shopify. I always start with the overall revenue in Shopify. I use this number called marketing efficiency ratio, which is taking your overall revenue divided by all your marketing costs, the ad spend, agency fees, consultants, all that type of thing. And then whatever that number is, that is a much better read on how efficient your spend is, how efficient you're growing, than your return ad spend number. Typically, I say client should be around three and a half marketing efficiency ratio. It really depends on how quickly you're scaling. It really depends on the exact product or vertical that you have. Some companies can have as high as a five or even eight marketing efficiency ratio. Some companies can still scale with a one and a half, two marketing efficiency ratio. It really depends on the time frame you're looking at and a lot of other factors, which is why I am recommending more than ever that people use platforms like Triple Whale. There's this new platform that's more popular in Europe called Clar that I'm actually really excited about. And I'm not a referral or affiliate partner to any of those platforms, but those platforms give you the profitability data and insight into aggregate all that revenue data. And it will show, like, oh, well, you know, this amount of assisted conversions came from Meta, this amount of customers who end up spending, you know,$500,$1,000 with you through the year came from Google. And you can really start to dissect where your most profitable customers are coming from, because that's what I found is the most important thing is the quality of the new customers that you are bringing in to your business. If you have a three return on ad spend, but every single one of those customers never comes back again or hates your product, you're going to have uh eventually you're gonna have diminishing returns. And it's gonna be impossible to catch up because once you realize that has happened, if you don't have the data for one of these tools or you're not sending out enough surveys, asking your customers what's really going on, going to, you're never going to be able to catch up from that. Or it's going to cause you a lot of money and a lot of investment. And if you're already behind or start going into the red, you don't really have the money or the capital to catch up after that has already happened. Reeling this back a little bit to the Andromeda update, you need more context for your marketing decisions and how you make adjustments because it's so much more messy the way attribution is. And like I've like I explained, a lot of it is just how the platforms have changed. Another reason is just experiences and journeys for customers and consumers have got a lot more complicated. Younger audiences don't click nearly as often on ads as older audiences. I've seen a ton of studies on that. You know, Reels placement has been extremely popular, and I for myself, I think I can count on one hand the amount of Reels I've actually liked or clicked on. Now I will swipe out out of the platform and then go to Google and search that brand because I don't want to lose my spot in my Reels feed. Like I liked all the content I was seeing there. And that experience is so subconscious that even seasoned marketers who are on the platforms all the time don't realize that that is happening. So attribution has gotten messier. One, because of the platforms have changed, but two, because the way users use platforms has also changed. Another thing about the Andromeda update is it really pushed you to use creative as the new targeting. And I'm sure that you have heard this phrase before, but I find a lot of owners don't really know what that means. They're like, okay, well, now my creative is gonna do all the heavy lifting, and I could just remove all my audience strategy from the account entirely, just run a broad audience with my previous top performing creative, and then I'm gonna be successful. This sounds easier. That's that's not actually what it is. What it is is it shifted that persona mindset from being at your audience and ad set level to being at the creative level. So what that means is with the mindset that you went into developing audiences and putting all those detailed interests in there, um, and even coming up with you know clever persona names, you need to do that in your ad. So if your ad doesn't have those details, and something that I always used to do for my audience targeting that I think could be a good example for this, is I would always go a layer deeper than just a surface level interest. Like, for example, let's take um let's take chiropractic care. Just because I used to do that a lot with this interest targeting when it was, you know, still working as well as it used to. You may have interests like physical fitness, physical exercise, sports-related injury, have been to chiropractors, but I would go a layer deeper and and think, okay, so we obviously know that people with those interests have those pain problems, pain points, but that's who everyone's targeting. So, what are people doing that will get those types of injuries and that will be visiting chiropractor? Well, they're probably very, you know, eco-conscious in a way, they're very mindful of what goes into their body, they're very open to more, more holistic therapies. I would develop interests based on that of people who are eating, you know, green foods, people who um like to do outdoor activities like rock climbing, people who who travel. The reason I did people who travel is because if you travel, you usually have a higher income, and so you're usually able to pay for those services. So instead of just targeting 10%, 25% of zip codes, you target people who travel. And so going that layer deeper is what I found the most success with those audience strategies. And again, just to clarify, none of this stuff works anymore. But you have to apply that same mindset to your creatives. If you were, let's just take the chiropractic example again. I know it's not e-commerce related, but like I said, it's just the best example I have from the audience targeting days. You would create an ad that has all, you know, has adventure imagery in the hook. Maybe you show a video of someone rock climbing, and then you have an overlay text that are you tired of not being able to do your favorite activities anymore? That speaks to someone who has pain without coming out and saying, Hey, do you have knee pain? Hey, are you visiting the chiropractor often? Hey, have, you know, did you get an MRI and were you not happy with the results? Did someone say you need to get surgery? Going that layer deeper is what really is the trick and the nuance on Meta right now, because I'm sure you've seen those ads that are just basically shouting at you with the hook and they worked for a while. For certain brands, they may still work to an extent, but you really have to go that layer deeper, just like you did with your audience personas, the ad set level, if you want your creative to take off and really use it in the sense of creative is the new targeting. Now, the last thing that I want to talk about with Andromeda is the we can get into the variety of your content, but I have a couple of guests lined up for that. So I think it would be better to do that kind of in a back and forth format with one of them. So I'll talk about landing pages. Landing pages have gotten so much more important over the last year. I mean, the last two years I started noticing a trend, but it started changing from a nice to have from a needs to have. Part of this comes from what I call the Amazon effect. Amazon has put literally millions, if not billions, of dollars into optimizing their shopping experience. And almost every consumer has used Amazon at one point or another. And because it is so easy, because it is so friction-free, because all the information about the products is readily available, the pictures are locked in, and you get that free two-day shipping, people expect a much higher level in terms of user experience and user interface when they are checking out on a website. If it's too clunky, if it's too hard for them to manage, even if the exact product doesn't exist on Amazon, if something close enough does, they'll be like, I'm tired of this. I'm just gonna go to Amazon. I'm gonna get my free two-day shipping. The product may not be as good, but hey, on Amazon it has tons of great reviews. So I'll get it faster and I won't have to deal with this bad website. And the bar for what makes a website bad is so much higher than previously. Before I might look at a website and say, you know, it's solid in the grand scheme of things, of you know, the best website you can have, I might. graded a C or a C plus, even a B minus, and that stuff would perform well. Nowadays, you really need your website to be in the B plus, A minus, even A range for you to have the conversion rate that you need to make Andromeda and really any paid media tactics successful. What I tell everyone in the D2C space is you want your conversion rate to be between two and a half to five percent. If you have a lower order value, like if you have a um consumer packaged good like spa care, if you have uh like cleaning wipes, things of that nature that have a large lifetime value and repeat purchase potential, um you're gonna have a you should have a higher conversion rate on those but lower first order profitability. If you have a product that is more physical like an apparel item or golf grips for example golf grips specifically that's not something that people replace you know they may never replace those. I've been a golfer myself for almost 20 years and I can't think of one time that I've actually replaced the grips on my clubs. I more often just get a new set of clubs or a new set of irons instead of replacing the grips on my old pair. So there's really little repeat purchase ability with a product like that. At most people are probably replacing them every two or three years. So first order profitability is extremely important. You'll have you'll need a higher average order value and with that you'll probably have a lower conversion rate but the two and a half to five percent is really the sweet spot that you want to be for e-commerce brands. Well that's all the time that I have for today tune in to the rest of the episodes we have a ton of great guests planned I'm already seven or eight lined up if you are interested in being a guest I am specifically looking for people who work in-house or work directly with brands maybe in a consultant capacity. If you are a you know freelancer or agency side still feel free to feel free to reach out. The one thing that I promise on this podcast is I'm never going to bring on a guest who isn't going to be interesting to learn to to listen to and who has something worth sharing. So you know they may not have a huge following but I promise that they will be extremely interesting to listen to and will have some valuable valuable feedback. So please feel free to DM me on LinkedIn my name is Chris and then Sulia S U G L I A and would have be happy to talk to you about coming onto the show.

SPEAKER_01 24:18

Thanks for tuning in and hope to see you next week with a baseball bat stay where you at where you at where you go here we go