Rabah Rahil has done it all when it comes to marketing. 

Rabah is the CMO for one of the hottest and fastest growing SaaS companies in the DTC world - Triple Whale. Prior to that, he worked on the digital marketing team at Whole Foods, was a part of an agency that managed traffic for Oprah, and owned and operated his own agency.

Triple Whale is a leader (and one of my favorites) in the world of 3rd-Party Attribution tools. Triple Whale helps you make sense of what channels, campaigns, and ads are moving the needle. It also brings all of your important data from Shopify, Amazon, and your ad channel into a single dashboard. 

In this episode, we talk about attribution from a high level and what platforms are getting the most ad spend right now. 

Here’s a look at what we cover:

• Why trying to get perfect attribution data is impossible (and why it’s not the point).
• A "party" analogy that could shift the way you view your ad channels. 
• With data from 6,000 Shopify stores, where are most advertisers spending their ad budgets? 
• Is TikTok where you should focus your time and budget in 2023 (the answer may surprise you)?
• Is Facebook slipping? 
• Where should I prioritize Snapchat?

Mentioned In This Episode:

• Rabah Rahil (LinkedIn)
• Rabah Rahil (Twitter)
• Triple Whale
• Triple Whale Podcasts - Ad Spend and You're Not Your ROAS
• Brett Curry (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (Twitter)

Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we are going to geek out and we're going to have fun, and this is going to be a high energy and hopefully entertaining but I've got my buddy Rabah Rahil on the podcast. I mentioned Geek Out because that's actually where we met was at an event called, yep, geek Out. But Rabah is the CMO of Triple Whale. Now, if you've been around the DTC space at all over the last couple years, you've heard of Triple Whale and if you're not very familiar, you're going to get familiar on this podcast, but we're going to talk about one of the hottest hot, most hotly contested topics in marketing, and that's attribution. Or another way of saying it is just how do we make sense of the data and what platforms are telling us and what GA is telling us, and then how do we make decisions on all of this? What is the truth? We want the truth when it comes to data and Rob's going to help us there. You can't handle the truth or <laugh>, you can't handle the truth. I love that. So Rabah man, you got a rich background. You were in the agency world, you worked for Whole Foods, you did some stuff with Oprah when you were doing agency. So give us the 32nd Rabah background. Why are you such a rockstar in this space?

Rabah:

Well, I appreciate that Laudatory introduction. I can assure you I am not as story as beautiful man over here. Brett

Brett:

Use the word laudatory. Yeah, he deserves a lot of law and praises. Yeah,

Rabah:

So I originally I went to school for economics. At one point in time I actually wanted to be an investment banker so I studied that and then I shadowed some investment bankers and I very quickly realized I did not want to be <laugh> an investment banker and mortgage on my twenties. So I got really nerdy. I totally see that. Yeah. I got really into websites building websites AWS stuff, photography, just super, super nerdy stuff. Then I had the epiphany that you can actually charge people more money if you make them money versus if you make them a cash register. So I would build people these gorgeous websites and then they'd come to me, he's like, is it broken? What's going on? It's like, no, your business just sucks. And so that was really my first epiphany into shifting into trying to make money. I had a really wonderful friend, she was a incredible yogi had a huge Instagram following, and we ended up doing an e-book together.

So I photographed the e-book, designed the e-book and then we sold it through her website, which I built, and then I ran Facebook ads against it. And this was back in the day where you could do some pretty awesome retargeting with Instagram. And she was, again, not massive, but she was maybe 500,750,000 followers, like a substantial amount of people. And we just started printing money. So that was my first foray into marketing. And then I just started skilling up. Like you said, I did a stint at Whole Foods, shut out. Really, really great place to work. It just wasn't my jam. I was actually there right before the Amazon acquisition. So the day I got hired, the Amazon acquisition was literally the previous day. So it was a really interesting dynamic in the sense of you had this really hippie corporate company by your gut stuff, and then you have the most ruthless C, not most ruthless in a pejorative sense, but just very data driven company. So there's a very unique

Brett:

Data driven there. Not a lot of perks. They're just cost cutting crazy. It was always interesting to me, I've, I've gone to some Amazon audiences or Amazon offices like the Amazon hq and you compare that to Google offices, they've been to several Google offices too, and then they're different world like Amazon is efficiency, cost cutting, they're still beautiful, but yeah, it's a different, exactly. It's not a hippie culture for sure.

Rabah:

Exactly. You're the VA column. Thank you. The other thing, so from Whole Foods, I went to Agency Life, like you said, I worked for a really great agency, had a Flatiron, they're amazing. We did a lot of app install ads, which was really I had never cut my teeth there. I've done leg genin and D to C, but not really app install ads. So that was really interesting. And I learned about MMPs. We used apps, flyers, so you had to aggregate all this data to make sure what's going on. So that was a really interesting it really made me understand the efficacy of aggregating data and understanding data across multiple channels, et cetera, et cetera. So that was really helpful. And then from that I did my own agency, which was awesome, running my own business. It was great. I loved it. I printed money.

I had a very unique model where basically would just partner with companies from 10 to 20, 25 million and helping them get to the next level. A easy way to describe it was like a mini CMO where I could sit across their whole marketing department. If I needed to deploy ads I could, but it was really people that just didn't know what they were doing, but had a really great product market fit and just had a ton of velocity in the business. So how could we scale them up? Met AJ and Max on Twitter, and then last August I came on board for a honeymoon period and then after that in September I came on full-time cmo. And as they say, the rest is history. It has been an incredible credible ride so far, but it is early stage startup is definitely not for the faint of heart. I mean, so true. Put in perspective. Yeah, I was running the marketing apartment by myself essentially up until March. So almost six months of writing the newsletter, deploying paid media, Facebook ads, Google ads, running the social

Brett:

Account, a podcast like yes,

Rabah:

Podcasting. I was actually editing the podcasts. I mean, it was candidly, it was too much. That's too much. It was too much. It wasn't the path, but it helped build the foundations that got us to where we are now. So it was definitely worth it, but I don't know if I would sign up for it again, <laugh> kind of the interesting part of not knowing you can done

Brett:

It sounds really fun. Editing podcast sounds great. Well, got to tip that to you, man. You've done an amazing job and the podcast, that host is great, which by the way, shout out to that the name of your podcast, and I love this. I don't know who named it but kudos, whoever did as you are not your roaz and it's so good. Thank you. I'm more than my roas. This is a freeing, such a freeing phrase, but that's super awesome. So how long have you been doing the podcast?

Rabah:

We did what, a hundred episodes so far? So we have or not a hundred in total. So have You're not your Roaz where it, it's similar to this where we bring on really interesting people, kind of that talking head stuff. And then we have another one that I host with Ash Mowan, the CMO over avi. And we bring, that's more tactical and DDC Hitt but we've had 30 ad spends and I think I've done a little over 50. So yeah, it's been nice enough to know that things need fixed sometimes, but at the end of the day, just getting started for people, man, if you go look at some of the biggest podcasts and go look at their first podcast, they're like Rogan's first podcast or all these other, yeah, they just get started. People, you just

Brett:

Got to start. Totally got to start showing up is huge part of success and you're never going to get better until you just do it and you got to be one. I

Rabah:

Couldn't agree with

Brett:

You more your first time. So yeah, that's awesome, man. So what I'd like to dig into a little bit I want to get into some juicy stuff right out of the gate, but first this is pretty juicy too. Triple Whale, you guys are, how many years old are you? Because I was hanging out with Max and aj, and I'll tell a quick story in a minute. I think at the very beginning of Triple Whale, or maybe they were kind of working on it behind the scenes, but it was not huge at the time and now it's massive. I can't turn around without either one of our clients using Triple Whale. Are people talking about Triple Whale, but how many years old is Triple Whale?

Rabah:

So we started again pretty much early, call it Q2 of 2022 or no, excuse me, 2021. So it's a little bit over a year old, but really it's almost just a year old because our big inflection point was when we launched the triple pixel and then gave people, there's kind of a bunch to it, but candidly, successful businesses are lucky, have great timing and a great product. That's really what makes it so we really got lucky. The market was very, very receptive. Exactly. And then if we, candidly, if Triple Pixel launched or Triple Whale launched two years ago or earlier, you could still drive within platform metrics. There just wasn't this need. And when people's businesses are blowing up, they're much more apt to see if something can help them versus when things are going good, it's really hard to sell somebody a text app.

Brett:

Yep, yep, totally. Yeah, yeah. And so interestingly enough, so we did a YouTube LA event. So at the Spruce Goose YouTube LA offices, Howard Hughes built these facilities back in whenever that was the movie that Leonardo DiCaprio was in called the aj, it's a wild back Howard Hughes. So the Hangar Google now owns that. So we did this YouTube event there and I was speaking talking about how to build your brand with YouTube ads and I met Max and aj. Max and AJ were there. No,

Rabah:

Yes.

Brett:

So I've got pictures I'll show you. We had a photographer coming so together there's like pictures of me chatting up with these guys, but they were there for one of their D TOC brands. And then later Max emailed me this, I don't remember when this was like, Hey, we're kind of working on this data thing, you should check it out. And so I saw the early stages of Triple Whale but then man, you guys have just exploded. And like I mentioned, we've got clients that use your platform to get a clear picture of their data. So I've got all kinds of attribution stuff I want to talk about. But first you guys also have a really inside look at ad spend, and I think this is one of those interesting things. What are the trends you're seeing, right? Because everybody's talking about, hey, you got to be on TikTok, and at the end of 2022 I heard people saying, well, we're going to reduce our Facebook ad spend, or I saw predictions that people are going to pull back on Facebook but what are you guys seeing in the data in terms of spend? Yeah, absolutely. And how many stores are you guys tracking because that that's an important part of this equation.

Rabah:

Yeah, absolutely. So before I go into that, I have to, every time Howard Hughes comes up, he's just one of the craziest characters ever. So have tell this crazy, crazy, crazy Howard Hughes story. So Howard Hughes, for people that don't know, he was this big business like magnate, but the end of the day he was basically inherited a lot of his business from his dad.

Brett:

He was from his dad. His dad was the business mine. Exactly. And he just lived off of that. He

Rabah:

Just, yeah, well, he just fell ass backwards into just super success. It was like he was trying to run his businesses into the ground and he would just print money Anyways, the too long didn't read. It's a crazy story, but one of my favorite stories of his was he didn't gamble and he became a recluse or later in his life and he went to Vegas and because he didn't gamble and he, while was recluse, he rented, I forget the hotel, but he rented out, I think it was the desert or something, I can't remember. But he rented out the top two floors, which essentially all the v i p rooms and Vegas, for people that don't know, the hotels don't make money from the actual hotel rooms. They make money from people going downstairs and gambling and he wasn't gambling and his whole security staff is Mormon and the Mormons don't gamble either. And so after the first month of staying there, the hotel person is like, Hey dude I like you, but we need these rooms for VIPs to spend money. And he's like, no, no, no, no, no. So eventually the guy's like, all right dude, you're out. We're going to kick you out. We need these rooms. And so you know what he does buys the hotel just so he doesn't have to leave. So that is what a gangster move there anyways,

Brett:

When got a money, you talking about printing money earlier, this dude was printing money thanks to his dad who built a real business, which is a cash cow. Yeah, that's stores buy the whole

Rabah:

Buy what a gangster move. Yeah. So right now we are tracking a little bit over 6,000 stores, actually probably closer to 7,000 stores in 53 countries. We're getting pretty close to almost 10% of Shopify's gmv. That's gross merchant volume for people that don't know essentially a fancy term for revenue. So proper, proper dataset,

Brett:

Shopify's gmv.

Rabah:

Yeah, it's pretty, it's insane.

Brett:

It's a

Rabah:

Lot. Kudos.

Brett:

It's a, it's awesome.

Rabah:

Yeah, it's a lot. And so the big trends that we're seeing is kind of counterintuitive what everybody was saying Meta's back meta's still by far the biggest ad spend that we see across all of our clients Google has exploded as well. Again, it's orders of magnitude less than meta still, but it's still a substantial amount definitely off the back of Pax. From what I've heard, people are just having, and you can talk to this as well, Brett, but it's, yeah, we're doing

Brett:

Max Tmax across

Rabah:

The board. Yeah, it's been, is

Brett:

Doing well.

Rabah:

Everybody's seeing some really good results there. The tertiary channel for most people is TikTok. Candidly, TikTok has fallen it, it's still on this hypers stick growth, but it's still really, really small. And in 2022, we had some people get up to almost, they would it leap fro Google in terms of the marketing mix. But what we've found is people have, I won't abandon as too much of pejorative, but people have really migrated away from heavy TikTok spend because the ads just die really quick and they don't give you any warning. And so you could be sending, so we had people, I think the biggest spender we had was spending on upwards of 50 K a day on TikTok. That was the most I'd ever seen. And they just couldn't do it anymore because one day would be incredible. And then the next day everything died and that all that money was just basically burnt up.

And so all things being equal, they would rather have a successful ad on Facebook that could live for three months, six months, sometimes a year. Versus TikTok, you didn't get it there. Then you had Pinterest comes in under TikTok pretty close to it in spend, but definitely not in terms of year over year growth. And then Evan Spiegels just laughing all the way to the bank. But Snapchat is it is as close to Defunk as a ad spend channel as you get across our data where that's interesting. Yeah, there's just not a lot of people putting any money into snap.

Brett:

Yeah, I don't hear anybody talking about SNAP right now. My teenagers use it, they like it, but I don't know anybody that's spending money there. And this is a unique data set. This is a big data set, 6,000 stores, almost 7,000, 10% of Shopify's gmv, which is crazy. But these are D TOC stores and these are not necessarily enterprise D TOC stores. That's

Rabah:

A

Brett:

Very good point. E-commerce stores that are growing and you're doing multiple millions, lots of them and beyond, but not, you're not getting data from walmart.com or that type of thing.

Rabah:

So that's a really good point. Our data set. So our biggest clients are around that 400, $500 million year run rate. So definitely not small, but to your point, it's almost like, I'm trying to think of a new term. It's almost like D TOC enterprise. Cause a half a billion dollar run rate is nothing but, or it's not nothing, but it's not, to your point a Walmart a target, a be like, these are proper balance sheets. That's what I would consider enterprise to really color in the lines about a mil. If you think of a bell curve, my first inflection point is about a million and the second inflection point's about 50 million. So the bulk of our users are in that 1 million to $50 million year run rate. Yeah. So that's a really good caveat that you made there. That's a great point.

Brett:

Yeah, it makes sense. Cause I think if you look at who drives the most ad revenue globally, Google's got a decent lead, but Facebook is a close second and then Amazon's actually third, and then everybody else is way below that, man.

Rabah:

Amazon ads

Brett:

Business, your growth mix meta is the, that's the winner. That's where people are spending the most money. And personally, and we don't manage meta at OMG Commerce. We're a Google, YouTube, Amazon, an email shop. But I love that it's doing well. I think everything does better. We do better when Facebook is working. So I'm glad. Absolutely. I did. Interestingly enough, I was at a trafficking conversion summit. Ryan Dice was speaking, he interviewed like 10,000 marketers who was showing some data. He said, Hey, what are the three channels you plan to spend more on next year? What are the three channels you spend plan to spend less on next year? And the number one channel to spend less on next year was meta. And I'm afraid. And then No shame on Ryan Ice. He asked people and he just relayed the answer. But everybody was lying or everybody changed their mind <laugh> because people are spending money on meta again. And YouTube was actually the number three, I'm going to spend more money here. TikTok was the number one. Anyway interesting times for sure. So any other insights that you have from all that spend data any other chats or any other points of interest mean?

Rabah:

The big things are it, it's kind of corny and it's kind of a little bit elementary if you will, but sometimes there's a great stoic line that people need to be reminded rather than informed. And so really what we're seeing is people that have great economics, so they have margin to play with people that have a really, really strong community and people that have a really strong retention game. So whether that be clavio or attentive sms, postscript, what have you and again, it's not seismic shifting or is this going to change people's minds, but candidly it's just what we're seeing. The fundamentals are fundamentals for a reason. And so those are what we're seeing the businesses grow on. So it just is what it is. Make sure you have a community, make sure that your retention game is really strong. And then understanding your metrics and understanding the economics of your business are really what's driving the biggest growth in across all of our users.

Brett:

I love it. And yeah, I actually just posted on Twitter about this the other day where we don't want to get obsessed, although you should look at it and analyze it or lowering our CAC or rising, increasing our row as important. But though ad costs are always going to go up, competition is always going to be shifting, changing and increasing over time. What you should look at is how can I raise my aov? And that happens by building a good brand and having a good community, having a good product, how can I raise my lifetime value that that goes into retention and your email and your sms, how can I increase my conversion rate? And that goes into branding and having the right messaging and all these components go in there. It's focus and obsess on those things. And that's what I think is going to be the trend going forward is these little hacks, little wins, little tricks, tips, whatever it's going to be, good brand building. And then just using your platforms and your data to the best of their ability where people are going to win. So

Rabah:

Take a quick

Brett:

Note A quick note on TikTok, and I love what you said there because we've like, we've even kind of felt the polling me, we should start offering TikTok. Everybody's asking for TikTok. But then I started observing, right? And we get to see inside of Triple Whale and other platforms and stuff, it's some of our biggest advertisers, they were going hard on TikTok, but it was still only 7% of their ad spend, 8% of their ad spend couldn't really go beyond that profitably. And so then it's like, well that's important, but man, if you got only so much time in the day, you should spend your time on Facebook and Google and what's going to move the needle. TikTok is fun, but for me, I don't like it. But yeah,

Rabah:

No, I mean I couldn't agree with you more and that that's exactly, again, anecdotally as well as quantitatively through the data is exactly what we saw where all the big spenders are just like it's way better to get a winner on Facebook than it is TikTok. The caveat I will give you, there are certain things that can do well on TikTok in terms of virality, but usually they're at the lower price points. So you're talking about under $50 a O V kind of impulse purchases type type of stuff. But I would push back on that and say that's not that it's not a business, but it's more akin to a drop shipper mentality than it is building a brand and creating value for your users that you can then have to your point like an L T V play of I acquire somebody for X, but I know in a year I'm going to get Y dollars out of them. So just kind of throwing that out there that I'm not saying TikTok is totally defunct, but people that are building totally a brand that have actual economics in terms of real price points, not down at these kind of impulse purchases have had a lot of headwinds to deal with.

Brett:

And I, I'd love to clarify that, and I'll clarify too. This is not an anti TikTok ran, it's just more of a understand where TikTok should likely fit for you in your marketing mix. So open and Facebook and Google and YouTube, they're going to be the big dogs, almost certainly TikTok has its place, but maybe it's 10% of your ad spend probably not going to be 50% of your ad spend for any large advertiser anytime soon.

Rabah:

And just to wrap that up, listen

Brett:

To this. Yeah, please.

Rabah:

Yeah I was just going to say the 10% of that ad spend might cost you 30 to 40% of resources to make sure that ad spend can perform. And so that's where you start to get into some real conflict of, dude, I'm only going to spend X amount of dollars on this. Why aren't I putting those resources where I'm spending 5 million on Facebook and I'm spending 50 a month on TikTok? Why am I putting another 50 grand to spend 50 grand where I could put 50 grand to spend 5 million? The math just stopped. Totally. The math. Just don't math. Yeah.

Brett:

Yeah. And you know said it with the Facebook creatives, you have creatives that can last several months or up to a year, and we see that on YouTube a lot, like boom boom, Joseph ER's company. We had some winners where each of them lasted about a year. And so we just hammered that video for a long, long time. That's pretty fun. And that's not resource intensive when you do that.

Rabah:

Exactly. Totally

Brett:

With you. Yeah, this last a day or a couple days or whatever, so awesome. Well let's do this. I want to talk about some misconceptions, misunderstandings that people have when it comes to multi-touch attribution and trying to make sense of what does the customer journey look like? What's moving the needle where I need to spend more money, less money in that type of thing. But maybe first if it's interesting or if you have a unique take on this, how do you guys define or look at multi-touch attribution or how do you do it differently maybe? And then let's get into some of the misconceptions.

Rabah:

So ultimately, without getting too much in the weeds, we're looking at a bunch of really unique identifiers. For example we'll store somebody's battery charge or something and then you can do some really weird metadata stuff that's borderline creepy but helps you make more money. So there you go there. But candidly, attri or multi-touch attribution is still a really hard nut to crack in terms of making sure that that's a hundred percent. And other thing too that you get into is attribution is, so there's something called an asso tope where it's basically two lines that will never touch, but they're always coming closer and closer together until they just get infinitely close, but they'll never touch. That's kind of how attribution is how I see it anyways, where it's just never going to be a hundred percent. And so if you come in with that expectation, the

Brett:

Thing is, I don't think that's the point. Right, exactly. Maybe one of the misconceptions, I'm stealing your thunder potential here, but the point of multitouch attribution isn't to get it exactly right because it'll never be right. And to use I think this is a great analogy, so I used to do offline marketing, tv, radio, prints, stuff that was kind of fun. But if you were a approach at a customer that just bought Nike shoes and you said, well, okay, well what did it for you? Was it the TV ad? Was it the billboard? Was it the magazine ad? The person would be like, I don't know, I just wanted to buy it. I don't know what did it like? So there's not really a way to say what moved the needle fully. We can get really pretty close with online stuff, but you'll never fully know and that's okay.

Rabah:

Yep. Now, and so essentially to wrap that up in a bow is the multi-touch attribution stuff is really, really important. It's awesome we do it but ultimately you're going to want to look at different attribution models to your point. And so there's first click, right? Okay, I invited Brett to the party. He was the first person that heard about the party. Okay, cool. Well John actually drove Brett to the party. Okay, great. But Sally actually got money from Brett at the door for the party. Who do you give credit to for getting the money? Well, is it the person that invited you? Is it the person that brought you or is it the person that took your money? And so the answer is to your point, what do you want to derive from that? And so that's really where we give people a bevy of different attribution operations.

First click, last click, fractional linear if you want to spread it across. And not getting too nerdy in attribution models, but that's ultimately the whole point of having different attribution models is do you want to see who's the best at bringing people to the party? You want to see these best is inviting people to the party you want to see the best is getting people getting money from people at the party. And then you can start to really level up the sophistication in terms of how you're deploying your paid media. Because if you're just operating on last click, so we run a SaaS company, which is totally different than D two C, but if you looked at our analytics, you would say, why aren't you spending more on Google search? Google search is closing all this deal for you. And you're like, well, is it that we have a ton of brand equity? We have a ton of these things. And so it's not to say that Google search isn't important and you shouldn't have it in your marketing mix, but there's a certain aspect of thinking through to your point, that customer journey and what's going on. And then understanding what attribution model is useful to derive the data you're looking for is to me more of the show than saying, Hey, we need this perfect multi-touch attribution solution that tracks everybody through the, it's just fantasy world and it also gives you a misrepresentation of what's actually causal.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah. It's so good. And I love that that party analogy by the way because yeah, if you were to look at that and just say, well, Sally's the one that collected the money, if I remember the name, the names, so let's just pay Sally money, let's get rid of Roba and let's forget about John. And eventually you got nobody at the party. Nobody. And I think I'm a Google ads guy, so I love Google ads, but you are right, especially for a SaaS company like yours where you got to understand it. And it's not like a 20 month thing. You're making a commitment. Exactly. It's totally worth it. It's awesome. But it's not going to just click on a search and buy it right away probably. But it, it's an important part of the journey. So yeah, you can't just say, well let's shut everything else off. Let's stop doing podcasts, let's stop speaking at events, let's stop doing other stuff and let's just do Google ads that would not work for your business. You would slow down tremendously. So really, really good. What of, we already talked about one misconception of trying to get perfect data cause it doesn't exist, but what are some of the big misconceptions that trip people up and keep them from being successful with their attribution?

Rabah:

Yeah, I mean, that's a really good question. I think the biggest thing is people think they need to be everywhere and across all channels. So I would recommend really trying to, so there's something called product market fit that I'm sure a lot of your listeners are familiar to, familiar with. But I like to think of things as well as channel product fit where finding the channel that really resonates. So I'm sure for you, there's a ton of people that you could just absolutely print money through YouTube ads that probably wouldn't succeed so much on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or something like that. And so I would say, especially if you're in that kind of one to 20 million kind of range where you're you in terms of run rate or you're, you're spending maybe a million dollars a month or below or something like that, really master a channel and really master your email, SMS and retention before you start to be everywhere.

Because when you get everywhere, it can one complicate the party analogy where you have this omnichannel that you have to track, but then two, it makes experimentation even harder. It just spins up complexity. And I think you should keep things as simple as possible for as long as possible. Complexity is really easy to introduce if you want to go across all channels, it's super easy to do. But I think being impactful across a specific set of channels versus I to your point, you were talking about where people, I need to be on TikTok, blah blah, blah. Sure, it's fun, test it, what have you. But I've, I've seen people that have way more success really ratcheting down, finding that channel product fit and then really drilling down into that channel and then once that channel starts to hit a ceiling. But I mean for example, for you, this is why it's in such a great business. The ceiling on YouTube is so high, I would argue it's one of the highest ceilings. It's huge.

Brett:

Yeah. I mean the inventory is almost limitless. Yeah, it's massive. And really every age group is there, right? I've got teenagers, they're there, my dad just turned 73, he uses YouTube for stuff and it's not hundred percent, it's not slowing down in any way. So it's massive.

Rabah:

So that would be, I guess my kind of misconception is you don't need to be everywhere. Be a specialist before you're a generalist. And so figure out what that channel product fit is, figure out how you can hammer that. And then really to your point back that up with a really strong retention game. Cause paid media's expensive and so you really want to bring that new blood in with that paid media. And then you want to close with much cheaper channels such as sms, email, community, things of that nature.

Brett:

Yeah, and I'm really glad you brought up simplicity. I was actually just chatting with a buddy of mine. We recorded a podcast too, but talked about, I think it was the Da Vinci said that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, right? Sophisticated sounds cool and sounds really smart, but great. It's like we have a tendency, we want to make things complex. Well, I just need more data, just throw more data at me and then something will make sense. Or let's just be everywhere, right? Because that's what customers want. Yeah. It's probably better to be simple. Let's be strategic, let's be in the places that have that channel market fit, a channel product, channel product fit, and then double down on that. And then let's not get all the data points, but let's get clear data and let's look at actionable data that we can look at and make decisions based on. And so let's talk about that. What are some of the things that are some of the ways you guys are demystifying or making data clear for people? If you have any examples, that'd be awesome.

Rabah:

So one of the biggest things, and it's our most used feature, is our dashboard. So it's available on mobile as well, which is pretty cool. So you can have any metric anywhere, anytime. And it's holistic as well. So it's your total business. So we have a lot of blended metrics. So in terms of blended ad spend. And then we also have a interesting thesis called three ROAS to rule them all where we essentially have these three different roas. So when you're deploying paid media, there's three things you care about. Care effectiveness, efficiency and profits. Those are the three things that essentially drive your business. And so we have a metric called MER or blended ROAS or whatever your preference is, but ultimately that's your effectiveness heuristic. How effective

Brett:

Are I that it's like total sales from all channels, total ad spend. So you're looking at bingo, this global picture.

Rabah:

Yeah. And so what's nice about that is you can say for every ad dollar spent I'm driving. So if you're MER is a 10 just for every ad dollar spent, I'm driving $10 in revenue. Fantastic. The challenge there is if you only concentrate on MER or your blended, you get into that party analogy where you're only playing painting the last click person and then there's nobody at the party. And so that person's trying to collect money from people that are no longer there. So that way, that's why we created a second heuristic for your efficiency. So this is called new customer. And so Shopify bifurcates to customers into new and returning what we're doing is taking the new customer revenue divided by your total ad spend. And so that's going to give you your efficiency heuristic so you understand how much of new customer revenue are you bringing in compared to how much you're spending. And then the last metric that we use again, the profitability heuristic is going to be your gross profits divided by your total ad spend. And so you can understand am I putting the ad spend behind the right products to generate profit for my company? Because what can happen is not every dollar is created equal. And so ideally you are only putting paid media behind high margin, high velocity products because there just doesn't make a lot of sense to have all this revenue and you don't take any of it home.

Brett:

Yeah, that's fantastic. And I love breaking that down, looking at the roaz for new versus returning, right? Because those should be quite different. It's more expensive to get a new customer and you don't want to overpay to get a returning customer. So breaking that down Yeah, exactly. Is really, really good. So that's all fantastic. What are some of the new features, new things you guys are launching that you're really excited about? Cause I know there's lots of cool stuff going on right now.

Rabah:

So we just launched our Amazon integration, which was really awesome. So we're bringing in all of your sales.

Brett:

There's definitely a roar going on at the OMG commerce offices. I mean a lot of us are remote now, so we're like Amazon, it's here.

Rabah:

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, so that was a big one for us. Again, having that visibility in real time to understand how much you're spending on Amazon, how much you're making, and then how does that blend into your Shopify which this is really important. So again, having that holistic view and really it's definitely helpful for the media buyers and people that are deploying the paid media, but really awesome as the owner operator to understand exactly where your business is at, not only in terms of revenue, in terms of across channels, but also profits because we do do profit tracking. So the Amazon was a big one. We have some really cool stuff that we're doing with ai. So right now we have internal testing a generative ai. So we're scraping all of your reviews, your website, your past ads, everything, and then you tell us the product or the sku and then we'll do all that and we'll actually make the ad for you in terms of the creative, the headline, the copy.

And so that's our big bet right now is that we want to give tools or we want to give the media buyers and strategists augmentations where they can start to really either refine that product and so we'll get that blank kind of slate problem goes away where we give you something. So I think there's a few, there's zero to one creators and then there's like shapers slash and I think that the zero one creators are very rare and really expensive, but if I can give you an iteration and you understand your brand, you're like, Hey, I don't like this, but I like this and I changed this and I can get you 80% of the way there for 20% of the cost. I mean that's almost quintessential disruption theory of it's not perfect, all things being equal. I'd love the zero to one creator, but one, they're really hard to find.

Two, they might not make economic sense, versus you can pay 20% of that price, get 80% of the way there, and then you mold it and massage it into the perfect ad for you. So that that's something that's really exciting to me is that augmented media buyer, we have our rules engine that'll kind of fold into that as well. And so I think that's kind of our big bet where media buying will start to get all the little bells and whistles and levers will start to be abstracted way. And it's going to be almost analogous to chat G P T T where it's more about creating the prompt than it is understanding all the things. And so if you can make better prompts, you're going to get better output. And that's kind of where we're headed. So that's really exciting to me. What else do we got coming down there? There's

Brett:

A lot of <crosstalk>. I think that's one of the keys to life run in businesses, learning to ask better questions. And so that's sort of what the better prompts are. It's not just that I have to do the thing, maybe I just need to, how do I ask the right question to suss out what I want and get the result that I want? And that's super cool. And I would agree with you, there's a lot of people that are great media buyers or strategists on their platform or just good marketers where they could be way more efficient if they weren't creating everything from scratch. So if they're a starting point for different ads or different suggestions and then we're just tweaking it. I love that concept. And I really think, and I know this is what you guys are thinking too, that's where AI is going to help marketers the most, I think in the near term is like, let us get you, let's let us help you so you're not starting from zero. And then you can improve and enhance and then go wild on things. So that is awesome. So yeah, I think I cut you off though. Anything else you're excited about right now?

Rabah:

No, I mean those are the big ones. We have some really cool stuff in terms of we're moving to a fancy infrastructure to be able to handle people that are over a billion dollars doing crazy transaction flow kind of the more architectural stuff. But to your previous point about ai, the way we're thinking about it is almost like the internet where pre, I'm old so the kids won't get this reference, but people that had the internet and people that didn't have the internet or access to the internet, they were just so disadvantaged. And so I think that's what's going to happen with AI is people that understand, to your point, how to ask better questions, how to prompt better people that are using AI to augment their output are just going to have an insurmountable advantage compared to people that don't. And I think it's going to be very similar to what you saw if you don't have the internet, it's really challenging to compete with against somebody that does.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah, that's a super good point. One thing I'll call out too, cause I've had the privilege of getting kind of front row seats and looking inside of Triple Whale and really I think you guys are top of the class, you're one of two. They're just a couple of platforms that I really like and really recommend that you guys are one of them. And one of the things that I like that I think you do better than anybody, I've never seen anybody that does this, and this is a simple ish thing, I'm sure it's hard to create, but the creative pilot where you get in the platform and you've got this view, and this is a podcast, so it's kind of hard to talk through, but it's just a beautiful way to look at here all my creatives and how are they performing, how are they stacking up against each other? Because sometimes it's a pain in the butt. You're looking at line items, sometimes you're looking in your ad account and you're like, this looks, this is looking at my tax return, right? Yeah. Just all great, all words and stuff. But the creative pilot is super cool. And I think I saw an early version, which may have only been Facebook because now the creative pilot works for YouTube as well,

Rabah:

Correct. And TikTok, yeah. Yeah. What's really cool about it is where the magic meets the road is you can make segments and then you can graph those segments against each other. And so what I mean, and those segments are built off of naming conventions, which is really cool because for example, you guys are an agency and if you take over an account that basically has no naming conventions in place or anything like that, you can actually change all those naming conventions without affecting any type of deployment or deliverability for the ads. And then you can do a post hawk analysis, which is really cool. And so what I mean by that, so say Brett is sell selling whale widgets and he has influencer one, influencer two, influencer three, he can easily make segments of those based off the naming convention. You can see what influencer is performing best or it angles.

So you have a price angle, you have a feature angle, you have a community angle, whatever, however you structure the deployment of your ads and your testing. And you can have a really easy way to not only visualize that, but you can also send a creative report card to whoever the stakeholder is to understand, Hey, here's how X, y, or Z is doing, or here's how that test went or for so on and so forth. Because I think creative is going to be, I mean everybody's preaching creative, creative, creative. So it's a little bit jumping on the bandwagon, but creative is going to be, if you can put better pardon in the war analogy, but better bullets in the gun, you're just going to have more success.

Brett:

Absolutely. Yeah. We believe that on YouTube. I know it's true on Facebook. It's true with search, it's true. Even with shopping and with display, the better, clear, more compelling you can get with your ads. And a lot of this comes down to testing and trying things and looking at the data and getting better and iterating. But those that can perform better with creatives are going to win. They can have a huge leg up. So awesome dude. Well, I'm nerding out and I've got so many more questions than I want to ask you, but we are right up against time, so No way. Yeah, I'm glad I looked actually, because we're about at time. I know you got a hard stop. So how can people check out Triple Will more? How can they find you? Cause I know you're active on the socials. We're not just real life friends, we're Twitter friends. I don't Twitter friend thing, but anyway. Yeah. So how can they connect

Rabah:

Current resurgence from your Yes, your defunct Twitter. You were back on the horse baby, let's go.

Brett:

I was Snapchat of twi. Yeah, Snapchat has, I took a 10 year break on Twitter. I was a big deal back at, not really, but I was doing something like 2010 and then I quit. Or 12 whatever.

Rabah:

10. That's good. Back.

Brett:

Yeah.

Rabah:

Feels good. Well, happy to have you back. Yeah, if you guys want to get more involved in Triple it's just triple.com. And then Shameless plug, we do have a fantastic newsletter that goes out every Tuesday, Thursday called Whale Mail. That's awesome. You can subscribe right@triplewell.com slash whale mail. And then I'm just on the Twitters at Robert Rahil, just my first and last name. Yeah, I'm pretty active on there sliding in my dms or mention me or anything like that. I try and get back to everybody. I'm not in the celebrity status. I am pretty terrible at my dms, but please DM me anyways. Now I'll figure out a way. I so dm,

Brett:

Just be patient like don't bug you if you're sliding. You got to be patient. Exactly. I'll, I'll link to everything in the show notes as well. But do check out Triple Whale. If you don't have a third party attribution tool, you need one. I really believe that as we go and grow in a privacy first world and all these things, like you need a third party attribution tool. Yeah, I do not say that lightly. Rabah did not pay me to say that but I believe it. And so you got to check it out. So yeah, I'll link to everything but the newsletter is fantastic. And also check out the podcast. So first one is your, you are not your Roaz. What's the other podcast name again?

Rabah:

Ad spend,

Brett:

Ad spend. So I'll link to those as well. So check those out as well. So Rava man, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much. Can't wait to do it again.

Rabah:

I'm crushed for not coming to the Whaleys. I'm I steak through my

Brett:

Heart. I'm so hard. The Whaleys. I know you got to come to the Yeah, yeah. The Whaleys in Austin, Texas. Check

Rabah:

It out Whale do com or the whales.com. But we'll have you out to some more stuff. It'll be fun. It's, it's always a pleasure. I got to see you. See you at the gorgeous event. Everybody gave really high marks on your presentation there, so it's always good to see you spreading your wings. And then good luck at the B Ball game, cheering for you and your daughters

Brett:

Bring home. That's the whales. I'm coaching my daughter at a tournament in Lawrence, Kansas. Go Jayhawks. It's

Rabah:

A high school. One of my best friends is from there. Yeah, one of my best friends is from there. So yeah. Yeah, wishing you all the luck. But Brett, thank you so much, man. I know I rescheduled a couple times, so I really appreciate the flexibility. You're just such a gem of a human. And let me know if you're ever out in Austin and we'll go grab a bite and a beer.

Brett:

Totally worth it. Thanks dude. All right. Really appreciate it. Chat soon.

Rabah:

Thanks Brett.

Brett:

Bye. And as always, thank you for tuning in and we'd love to hear from you. So if you'd like to let us know what you want to hear more of about on the show, leave that review on iTunes if you've not done. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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