Happy Sunday!
If you’re reading this, I hope you’re stoked the Knicks won today, you’re feeling relaxed this evening, sitting on a couch, feet up, and a beverage in your hand. I’ve got a chilled bottle of Essentia with me today (not my first pick for water, but top 3).
Today’s email is in a slightly different format—it's a write-up of the best parts of my talk with Bryan Cano, the CMO at Nood. We closed out with a live podcast recording at Triple Whale’s Whalies event.
Nood is a bootstrapped brand with revenues of $50M/year. The crazy part is that they’ve achieved this in just two years. Their advertising strategy is some of the best in the industry, and they also take pride in product innovation. In today’s newsletter, I want to share a bit of a recap and some of the nuggets that stood out to me from our conversation.
Alright, let’s dive in:
Do Platforms Lie?
I started off my interview by asking Bryan a very interesting question. I recently learned that Nood spent $500K last month on TikTok with a platform-reported ROAS of 0.5x.
So, according to TikTok, they lost $250K, not counting COGS. I asked Bryan why he did this, and his answer was pretty interesting. Here’s the gist of what he said:
In short, TikTok’s metrics don’t tell the full story. Bryan uses Triple Whale to look at upper funnel metrics like:
- 1-day click conversions and 7-day click conversions
- Cost per add-to-cart
- The percentage of new site visitors
- First click, 1 day click ROAS, and other metrics that aren’t available from what the native TikTok ad platform shares.
Bryan and his team created a new MTA (multi-touch attribution) model in Triple Whale and found that the channel is profitable despite what TikTok’s internal ROAS calculation says. Bryan said that TikTok is driving as much awareness as Meta, and despite what he saw in the TikTok ads manager, he has decided to double down.
I think the main lesson here is that you can’t always trust what the platform tells you. You have to use their metrics as a guidepost to tell you what’s directionally correct, but at the end of the day, you need to do your own due diligence, use other platforms like Triple Whale to help measure attribution and look at the overall business results.
He also said that he found a winning concept from a single founder story ad that they made which has continued to outperform. We’ve also always seen founder stories do extremely well on TikTok, and if the founder has a verified account to run the ads from, that’s how you can maximize the return.
Should You Use Different Attribution Models For Different Channels?
I asked Bryan if he uses different attribution models for different channels, and the answer was yes.
For Nood, they find the consideration to purchase period is only 7 days.
So, to measure the effectiveness of their ads, they need to look at their 1-day click conversions, 7-day click conversions, and sometimes their 14-day click conversions to better understand the truth.
They also look at CPMs, cost to add to carts, new site visitors vs returning etc to make additional assumptions about what is working and what’s not.
Bryan has a few different attribution models that he uses depending on the campaigns he’s running. In general, he prefers to use a combination of the platform’s reported ROAS, his MTA models from Triple Whale, and Google Analytics 4 to better understand his spend.
Because of Triple Whale 3.0’s dashboard, he can now ask questions like “What is the amount of time lapsed between first touch and first purchase for this cohort?” and he can do that on TikTok, Meta, Snap etc. Each one has slightly different user behaviors and consideration periods.
That’s why he uses first click, one-day click conversions as a proxy for how today is performing and seven-day click conversions as a lagging indicator of how the ads today might perform by the end of the week. He shared that there have been multiple occasions where his one-day click metrics look bad, but his seven-day click looks awesome, so he continues to spend. To Bryan, it’s always a blend of metrics and various attribution models to understand performance on different time frames each day, week, and month.
How Much is Scaling To $60M an Art vs Science?
The next thing we talked about is how much Bryan believes that getting to scale is an art vs science when it comes to the creative side vs the math.
Although Bryan loves the metrics, he still believes that winning ad creative is one of the most important variables for success.
Now that Nood is at scale, it’s not simply about running their top-performing ads. Bryan basically sets his goals based on a mathematical calculation of contribution margin and has a daily, weekly, and monthly benchmark that he wants to hit across his blended spend.
With this benchmark in mind, he always wants to have multiple angles, ads, and funnels running at the same time in order to keep a healthy cross-channel media mix live.
From the art and creative side, Bryan believes that in order to succeed, you need to understand the nuances of what’s happening on each platform and what’s happening in culture.
Yes, you can reuse your Meta creatives on TikTok, but most of the time, they won’t be your top-performing ads. Instead, you have to make contextually relevant, on-trend creative that make sense for each platform.
How do you do this? You have to be a consumer of the media and the platform on which you want to promote/advertise.
Bryan strongly advocates that if you want to run on Snap, you need to have a creative on your team living inside of Snap to see what trends are working and what creators are doing on the platform in order to make good ads. The same goes for TikTok, YouTube, and even Connected TV.
If you look at some of Nood’s viral ads on TikTok, they feel incredibly native and trend-driven. They also have some of the most jarring and thumb-stopping hooks I’ve ever seen.
If you didn’t know, Nood’s product helps customers with hair removal. This could be for your underarms, back, legs, or even for south of the border. They lean into this and have done some hilarious and provocative ads based on the use of their device. I feel like they could have played it safe, but they decided to go all in on some PG-13 thumb-stopping ads that have led to massive sales.
They also have a great library of UGC and review content from folks all over social who have bought, used, and loved their product. I’m not sure how active they were in seeding this content (we didn’t get to discuss this in our conversation) but it’s another big thing that I’ve noticed about how their social presence as well.
Whenever they run new ads and angles, they simply use the data from Triple Whale and GA4 to see if it’s trending in the right or wrong direction based on the metrics that matter most to them.
A Marketer’s Job is to Identify and Exploit an Arbitrage
I’ve said this a bunch of times, but Bryan had the same POV: A marketer's job is simply to find an arbitrage that drives sales. That could be a channel arbitrage, a creator arbitrage, a specific offer, some unique ad creative, a new funnel, affiliates, whitelisting, etc. The point is, wherever you can find an edge, you have to use it.
These arbitrage opportunities don’t last forever. Sometimes, it’s a day, sometimes a week, a month, a year, or two years.
The goal of any good CMO is to be a capital allocator against underpriced attention. You need to look at all of the potential channels that are available to you and allocate based on where you think the highest ROI might be.
For Bryan, he’s found an arbitrage with TikTok. Next, he wants to spend more time and money on YouTube and Connected/Linear TV.
He’s fascinated by connected and linear TV because the CPMs are so competitive. I’ve also written about this before, but Bryan is seeing $2-3 CPMs for linear TV on various networks and channels vs. Meta, which could be a $20-30 CPM.
This is the perfect example of an arbitrage and underpriced attention. Now the skill of a great marketer and brand builder comes from figuring out how to test this channel efficiently and then scale it if it works.
Just because the CPMs are cheap on linear TV doesn’t mean that it will drive sales or be as effective as Meta. That said, it’s your job as a marketer to notice these potential opportunities, test them, and learn for yourself if there’s alpha to gain for your brand.
How To Do Top of Funnel The Right Way
As I’ve written about before, I strongly believe that brands should not run pure awareness ads. IMO, you need every campaign tied to a conversion objective, even if the conversion event is not a sale. For example, the conversion event could be an email sign-up, add-to-cart, SMS sign-up, form completion, etc. It could also be a view content conversion with a time on-site threshold to ensure that you are optimizing for traffic that doesn’t bounce.
Meta is a for-profit business. They have billions of users to whom they can serve ads, and most of these users never engage or click. That said, they still need to monetize this inventory. That’s where awareness ads come in. When you run an awareness ad, my hypothesis is that they serve this traffic to the lowest-quality users—the folks who never click or engage. They save the conversion event traffic for customers that they know will click and buy.
So yes, you can get an infinite amount of reach from awareness ads and your CPMs will look incredible, but the site traffic and actual purchase behavior is going to suck. The bounce rates will also be incredibly high.
I asked Bryan what his thoughts were on this, and here’s what he said:
In short, he generally feels the same way. Although he has had some success running awareness campaigns, he prefers to have conversion events to maximize actions taken on the site. He likes to add to cart, and he also likes using Google Tag Manager to optimize for site visit duration.
For top-of-funnel awareness, he’ll have a custom event for time on site (typically 5-10 seconds) or for scroll depth (i.e having the pixel fire once a user scrolls 50% of the page) or for a specific button click.
This simple conversion event helps the algorithm optimize for higher-quality traffic versus users who will just bounce and leave.
He also likes to measure the cost per new qualified site visitor. He does this by looking at the total number of new sessions, multiplying that by the bounce rate, and then dividing it by spend to understand a custom metric he created called “qualified new site visitors” who are actually worth the dollars he’s spent to get them to the page. These are the ones who spend more than 5-10 seconds on the site and click vs. instantly bounce when they land.
How Valuable is Press and Earned Media?
The next thing I wanted to ask Bryan about is how valuable he thinks getting press is for a brand.
One thing I’ve noticed about clients who have worked with Sharma Brands is that one of the main variables that separates brands from the ones getting $40 CPMs vs. the ones getting $17 CPMs is that they’ve made the investment to get press and earned media in order to build their brand awareness into something much larger than just direct response ads.
I think Bryan agrees. He generally believes that anyone can make money with lower funnel direct response ads, but it’s hard to build a brand and an enduring business without doing more than that. He also believes that press helps with your media efficiency ratio (MER) and leads to lower CPMs and CACs due to the halo effect.
If you want to have a real business that can stand the test of time and be successful for 10+ years, you need to do more than just lower-funnel performance ads. That means getting press, running TV commercials, getting the founder on podcasts, getting featured in listicles and on the best product lists from major publications etc. It can also mean investing heavily in organic content, influencer seeding, and doing the work to create content around the lifestyle of the business beyond just the benefits and value props. All of this builds what marketers call “brand,” or the external perception and halo, which ultimately causes your CPMs to go down.
It’s a long process, but it’s worth it. Nood is leaning into this more and more and is trying to become a household name. I loved hearing Bryan’s take.
How to Drive In-Store Sell Through
The next question I had for Bryan was a fun one. I asked if I gave him a $250K budget to drive in-store retail sell-through, how would he do it?
His answer was a masterclass in marketing. For context, Nood is in Best Buy and Target, so he knows how this goes.
Bryan said that beyond doing what Ridge is doing (i.e. giving away $85,000 Ford Raptor trucks), he would start by getting a list of all the stores they are in. He would then do a data analysis to understand their current sell-through and metrics for each store.
He would then rank the stores based on their sales and have a list of the top 10 as either tier 1, 2, or 3 stores to promote.
He would then come up with a great offer to incentives people to shop in-store (this could be a discount, a free gift with purchase, a buy one, get one 30% off, etc.)
Then, he would develop ad creative and a landing page that promotes this offer and then start driving traffic to it.
He would also use segmented email and SMS campaigns in those areas to promote to existing customers in those geos to shop in store. He’d also run direct mail to existing customers in those areas with the same offer. As folks progressed through this funnel, and he captured more emails and SMS numbers, he’d be hitting them with texts and email blasts until they converted.
This is essentially the funnel they use to get folks in store today, and it’s worked.
What is in the Nood Tech Stack?
After this, I asked about what Tech Stack Nood uses to run a 60M/year brand. I don’t think this list is exhaustive but here’s what Bryan said.
- They use Shopify for their store
- TripleWhale and GA4 for data
- Sendlane for email
- Marpipe for catalog ads
- Nostra for site speed
- Fermat for landing page testing
- Heatmap.com for heatmaps
He’s also looking into Amped for their email popups, which I highly recommend.
Offers, Ad Creative, and Landing Pages
We closed with some audience Q&A, and this is the last point I wanted to include. One person asked Bryan how he thinks about his offers, ad creative, and landing pages and how he tests and optimizes for each component of his funnel.
Bryan had an answer that I loved.
He basically creates a Google spreadsheet with 3 main columns.
He has his offers, ads, and landing pages in columns A, B, and C. As he runs ads and tests variations, he measures the performance of each. He tries his best to isolate as many variables as best as possible. For example, after testing a bunch of offers, he’s found several that work. He doesn’t want to change the offer anymore, but he wants to continue testing the ad creative and landing pages. He might try 5-10 new variants of the ad creative and landing page designs to support the winning offer. Each time he tests a new variable, he writes down the results in his Google sheet.
He takes a very analytical approach to optimizing CRO across the full funnel of his campaigns. This is essentially what all great media buyers do. I think it’s the only way to actually know which piece of the puzzle is driving performance and which component needs to change.
Alright, that’s it for this week. On to some fun stuff…
Vendor of the Week:
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When you drive traffic to your site, you may be paying $0.25 to $3 to get someone there. They get hit with a triggered email pop-up, and you’re lucky if 4% of people fill that out. Black Crow’s Predictive Offers product knows precisely when to serve someone a second pop-up that will have the highest chance at conversion.
Predictive Offer has yielded brands ~40% more revenue from their welcome flows. If you previously made $100,000 with your welcome flow, you’ll likely see around $40,000 in new revenue with no extra work other than adding the Black Crow to your site. On the site, you’ll see a ~15% increase in new email and phone number signups of high LTV shoppers.
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That's all for this week
I hope today’s email was valuable — less tactical, highly insightful, and hopefully a fun read too. Bryan is a great guy and a great CMO. Find him on LinkedIn and Twitter if you want to connect with him directly.
I hope you had a relaxing weekend and you’re ready to go into this new week with excitement and ambition! Get that 9-hour sleep tonight to feel like a billion dollars tomorrow, and have an amazing week.
I’ll see you next Sunday!