Google Is Where Your Meta Spend Goes to Die (Or Get Saved)

Speaker A: If you feel like you've done everything right but still find it impossible to grow, you have to check out our latest masterclass at, uh, Kinship Co Free. Kinship Co Free. I'm sharing the exact system we use to help our clients scale profitably. It's not theory. These are actionable strategies that you can start implementing right away. Sign up for free at Kinship Co Free and see you there. I've looked under the hood of a couple hundred ad accounts at this point, and today we are not talking about meta, we are talking about Google. And almost none of them can answer the most basic question in all marketing. Not what's your roas, not what's your blended return. The actual question, right? What does it cost to acquire a new customer? And here's the part that should bother you. It's not that the answer is bad, right? It's that the data to even calculate the answer doesn't exist in the accounts that I look under the hood at. Essentially, the account was never set up to know the difference between a brand new customer and someone buying their fourth order. Typically when a founder tells me, hey, Google's working fine, our return's great, my thought is always the same, great compared to what? Uh, and I usually come with some suspect. So today's episode is all about. Google is usually a brand's single biggest structural mess. And that's actually good news. It's not a spend problem, it's, it's actually free growth sitting on the table. So let's get into it before any of the tactical stuff. I, uh, need you to hold one idea in your head the whole episode because everything hangs off of it. So there's two jobs in marketing. Generating demand and then capturing demand. And obviously they're not the same job and they are not the same channel. So as we all know, meta generates demand. I would say it's the best channel at doing so. It creates want where none existed. Somebody scrolling, not thinking about your product didn't wake up wanting it. Uh, and your ad creates that desire. That is demand generation. That is influencer marketing. Right? Google, for the most part captures demand, catches the people who have already got warmed up by your meta ads. Buy your organic, buy your influencers, buy your word of mouth, the exact moment that they go searching. So they've already decided that they're interested. Google just catches them at the bottom, quote unquote. But here's the mistake almost everybody is making that I'm seeing in endless ad accounts. They treat Google like a second demand generation engine. So like another, uh, place to go, create new customers from scratch. And when they judge it on a blended roas, which looks amazing because a huge chunk of those Google conversions where people were always going to buy, you didn't create that sale. You just stood at the finish line and took credit for it. Um, which is a lot of people's problems with Google. Now, capture is not a consolation prize. It's incredibly valuable. Search demand is steadier than social. So Google actually smooths out your CAC when meta gets volatile and it protects your branded search. So you have to know what job it's doing. Capture is the job. The whole game is doing the job cleanly. So you can actually read it though. One more thing on this and then I'll stop this rant. People love to ask me for the split of how much meta versus Google. I would say rough rule of thumb, which I hate rules of thumb, but I know everybody loves them, is 8020 meta to Google. I'll say that number just so you have it, but I generally don't love hard benchmarks and I want to be honest about that. It's not a law. The way that we think about budgets at kinship and specifically around the forecast is we want the efficiency to drive the budget so it's the next best dollar logic. You should spend the next dollar wherever it earns the most and let the ratio be whatever ends up being. So let's start with the mindset problem I've already addressed. Kind of demand capture, demand gen. Because it comes, the mindset becomes before any setting in the account. Like I said, most founders are thinking about Google as another channel to, to scale another lever. And the second that you frame it that way, you actually start asking the wrong questions. How do I scale Google? How do I add more channels? When do I turn on TikTok? When do I do YouTube? When do I get into Programmatic? And I want to reframe the whole thing. Google is not another channel. Google is the capture layer. For everything else that you're already doing. Here's the data point I'd anchor on for most DTC brands between roughly 5 million and a hundred million revenue, which is majority of our brands is meta and Google together drive somewhere around 80 to 90% of all the volume, just the two of them. A uh, caveat to that is Amazon because you know, probably 99% of our brands are also on Amazon. And so I'm just kind of using d2c.com only meta and Google. So the honest answer is what other channels should I add? Is for Most of you, none. Right? Like not yet. You shouldn't even be seriously thinking about multi channel expansion until you're up around the 50 millions. And look, I get why that's annoying to hear. Add more channels feels like progress, feels like growth. But it's usually just spreading yourself thin across things you can't manage or do well or it's quite frankly you're avoiding the hard work that you need to master those two channels that are actually going to carry you. So the goal is not add channels. The goal is to master the capture layer. You already have performance marketing scales business period. And brand makes the scaling cheaper. And Google is where that brand demand either gets captured or gets completely wasted. This is the emotional core of the whole episode. So I would say the reason most accounts can't answer that new customer question from the open that I, that I shared is brutally simple. The account literally cannot see new versus returning customers. So it's, it's really flying blind. Ultimately the buck stops with you. But it's most agencies that are operating Google. So for instance I audited one brand doing around almost 11 million. So there it was like 10.8. Their Google account showed something like 800 to 1100 total purchasers for a brand that size. That's not just low, it's actually mathematically impossible. 1100 total purchasers for 11 million nerd. Uh brand. There's no version of a ah, 10 plus million in revenue that comes from just a thousand purchasers. What it actually means is that the account wasn't tracking purchasers correctly. So 95% of the people who had been through branded shopping in the last 90 days had zero classification not tagged new, not tagged returning, just completely invisible. So that's example one. The second flavor of this is this one cuts probably the other direction is conversion tracking on um, some of these accounts is under reporting purchasers Honestly guys, somewhere in, in between 15 to 40% range because it's pulling conversions from GA4 instead of from a clean source. So now you got founders looking at their Google numbers going hey this isn't working, I'm not scaling this. When the reality is the channel is producing more than it's getting credit for. So they're starving a channel that's actually performing. I would say like probably the worst example of this is that some accounts have all, all converters audiences that label anybody who fired any event as a purchaser. So visit the site purchaser, view the product purchaser, added to the cart and left purchaser. So as we all probably would assume now the algorithm is optimizing towards purchasers, except that pool is mostly people who never bought anything. So you're literally training Google to go find more of your cheapest, lowest value. Never going to buy traffic. Basically the signal's so broken that everybody downstream is just reacting to garbage. So that's kind of the flying blind problem. Before we fix um, anything in the ad account like a bid or a budget, the account can't see, so you can't optimize what you cannot see. So that's kind of the first thing is got to fix what we can see. All right, so the six issues we find basically in every account. These are the six things I find. I want to say every account like it's close to every and I'll go in order and each one has a way, I think about it, that'll make it stick. So issue one. Branded search bleeding everywhere. I cannot tell you, this is pretty much a hundred percent. So your brand terms, people literally typing your company name are eligible to show and spending across a bunch of different campaigns instead of being walled off in one place. So ideally brand lives in exactly two campaigns, one isolated search campaign and one isolated shopping campaign. Branded search, brand shopping. That's uh, it. So when brand is leaking across everything, two bad things happen. Your roas looks very inflated because brand always converts. Well, um, right. And then you know, you don't understand the true cost to acquire a new customer gets completely hidden. So the way that I picture it, it's like trying to measure how good your billboard is while someone's standing in front of it and handing out flyers like, like you can't tell what's actually working. The second biggest issue is you're paying to reacquire customers you already own. So when there's no exclusions, basically every branded click gets treated identically. The brand new first time buyer and your 10 time repeat customer cost you the exact same amount to acquire. Uh, except one of them you already paid to acquire years ago. More than likely. For instance, like one 1 AD account, their name pulled up organically about 97% of the time with basically zero competition on the term. So meaning most of that brand spend was buying clicks for people who would have found them and bought for free on that account. The cuttable waste on brand alone was somewhere around 12 to $14,000 a month. Now I'm not telling you to turn off all your brand spend, right? That's not what I'm suggesting. Brand and spend can genuinely be incremental, especially as that final touch layer that Closes the sale. Like actually causes the sale. It's just a reminder. The honest move isn't turn it off, it's really test it. Um, which I'll come back to at the end. Issue three, non brand whack a mole. So you've got multiple non brand campaigns all bidding on the same queries. So what happens? You scale one brand campaign up or non brand campaign up, uh, it just steals volume from the other campaign. The attribution reshuffles, the dashboard moves around, everybody feels busy, but your actual total growth doesn't move an inch. And it's exactly that arcade game. Like you fix one campaign's budget, whack it down. The same customer just pops in a different campaign and said, you're not growing, you're just doing busy work, you're relocating. Issue for PMAX over Reliance again, 99% of brands, um, this is a big black box, most universal finding in all of them. This is par for the course on basically every Google audit I do. So PMAX eats the entire budget. It delivers something like 95% of its results through shopping anyway, which you could have run yourself with way more control and a genuine shopping campaign. The dirty secret is pmax often games its own allocation by skewing towards retargeting existing customers. People are going to convert regardless and then takes credit for it. So it's not performing better, it's just claiming easy conversions and it's a black box while it does it. So there's no ad group control, there's no audience control that you can't see in. So the hard claim, and I guess I'll stand on it, probably most people spend levels. There's never an account where a properly built standard search and shopping campaign doesn't beat PMAX. Standard shopping wins, in my experience, 10 out of 10 times. So we'll always compete and isolate shopping where PMAX. Not that it never makes sense, but it hardly does make sense for most accounts that we see. Issue five, no audience infrastructure. This is a huge one. This is the one that's almost sad because the fix is free. Like customer lists are missing or tiny or months stale, or they're loaded in on observation, but nobody ever actually did anything with them. So they're just sitting there observing. Like, one account had over a thousand audiences available and 24 to 68 of them actually turned on. Another had a purchaser list that was two months stale. But plus audiences built back in 2022 that aged out entirely. I'd be surprised if people didn't know this A little secret. I'll just say Google audiences expire at uh, 18 months. So 2022 lists are gone. So the picture I use is like you're collecting all this data and nobody's actioning on any of it. And the beautiful part of the fix is that you can wipe the floor on efficiency without touching anything else in the account just by turning on what's already sitting there. Issue six conversion, tracking and signal. I would say this is a foundational layer under everything else. The fix is Shopify auto import which has highest match rate and purchaser has to mean an actual shopify purchaser, a real person who actually bought, not anybody who fired an event. And so you know, get rid of the GA4 underreporting problem from earlier. The uh, analogy I would say is it's like splitting a classroom of 30 kids into 10 groups of three. No teacher can read how the lesson actually landed. You just, just dice the data so find that none of it actually means anything. What's the fix list? Honestly, the fix is basically the opposite of every issue I just walked through. So one, here's what we do. Isolate brand, uh, one dedicated search campaign. One dedicated shopping campaign walled off the most overlooked highest ROI move in here is branded shopping specifically that's had the highest new customer rate of anything. Almost nobody's running it as its own isolated campaign. They're doing a bunch of pmax. So two pull brand out of pmax, rip it out. Rebuild standard search and shopping with real exclusions. Stop bidding against each other, stealing from each other. 3 segment non brand shopping by product line or collection. So now you can actually bid and scale per category instead of one giant blob. You can't necessarily steal or you're doing the whack a mole thing. 4 Rebuild the audiences so auto import nightly sync so the list stay fresh and then layer every audience in in on observation and then actually applied bid modifiers by segments. So 3090 day purchasers, all time buyers purchase count tiers, lifetime value tiers. You want to bid differently on each because they're worth different amounts to you. So you can run a have different row as targets and this is where the audience bidding becomes unlock. Uh right. So right now Google treats everyone on the same whether they've never heard of you or they bought last week same bid. Audience bidding lets you say hey, bid up to X for the new customer who just saw our metad and is now searching us. That's the person we want. And then bid down for the repeat buyer. Right. So we don't need to pay full price for you know to capture someone who is already coming back. 5. A uh demand gen retargeting play so you can actually capture the demand meta is generating. One caution here is segment demand gen by placement format and audience or it'll just ramp spin forever with Nothing holding accountable. 6. Fix the tracking so Shopify auto import purchaser means purchaser. 7. Turn off auto apply recommendations. Just turn them off. They're designed to increase Google's revenue, not your profit. Which leads me to eight and this is the big mindset shift. Apply cost controls and financial guardrails on Google too. Obviously everybody thinks of cost caps and ROAS targets as a meta tool. They belong on Google just as much. What we generally recommend category agnostic. This kind of changes based on some of the marketplaces that brands could be on. But we want brand to be 15 to 20 x rows expectation. It should be very wildly efficient. And then non brand prospecting gets held to the same new customer target, same acquisition math, same AMER target as your meta. So same standard. And that's what I meant by we are letting efficiency lead the budget. So if we start to see non brand categorical prospecting scale on Google, we're going to let that budget rip. That's the way to think about it now the way that I was saying, if you're on marketplaces, if you're on you know, the Nordstrom's, you're on baby list, you're on all these different things that you know people can find you outside of just maybe an Amazon or Meta and Google then maybe that brand X RO expectation becomes more of like an 8 to 10 ROAs and then 9 run holdout incrementality tests on brand. I think this is the callback I I promised earlier. Instead of guessing whether your brand spend is incremental, just I'll just prove it so you can turn it off in a control test, see what actually happens to total sales. Sometimes you find that it's going to be surprisingly incremental. I would say again here's the philosophy that ties it all back to how we think about this stuff. We don't try to out tinker the machine. We're not here fiddling with bids every 12 hours trying to outsmart Google. Just in the same way that we don't try to do that on meta, um, give it the clean financial guardrails, rose expectations on brand, non brand and then how we need to go think about this is okay, what creative, what offers, what landing pages the account needs to be set up in the right structure that so that you can go think about those things. Let me bring this all the way back to the beginning. Google waste isn't really about the waste to spend. You could be lighting 10 to 15 grand on fire. That's real. But it's not necessarily the headline. The headline is the opportunity cost. Every dollar structured wrong is capturing is capping how much you could actually be profitably spending if the account were built right. So the waste isn't the leak, the waste is the growth you can't access because you can't clearly see enough to scale into it. So to the founder listening to this like before you think, go scale Google. Before you add a dollar, go find out whether your account can even tell you what a new customer costs. I find most people can't even answer that question cleanly. Open it up, ask that one question. What does it cost us, uh, to acquire a brand new customer here? If the account can answer it cleanly, you're in a rare company and you can go scale with confidence. If it can't, and statistically it can't, then understand what you're actually doing. When you say scale Google right, you're not scaling, you're guessing with a bigger budget. Um, so you need to fix the visibility first and then scale. All right, that's the episode. I'll catch you on the next one. Don't forget to subscribe. Comment below, always available to answer your guys questions and I'll see you next time.