Happy Sunday!

If you’re reading this, I hope you’re relaxed, feeling rested from the weekend, and you’re ready for a Sharma rant... This may feel like I’m scolding you for not taking advantage of an arbitrage, but if it does, then you probably aren’t testing it.

But before we get into that, let’s quickly talk about the measurement of all your acquisition efforts.

Vendor of the Week

WorkMagic — Run incrementality tests to calibrate MTA and MMM

Every brand I talk to these days is looking for an incrementality-based measurement solution. Why? Because your CEO and CFO are asking: “What’s the actual profit we’re getting from this $50K TikTok campaign?” Marketers need the correct answers, but we know you can't trust what platforms tell us themselves.

WorkMagic is becoming the default measurement choice for DTC brands serious about full-funnel impact, especially those who are:

  • Spending across multiple channels (Meta, Google, TikTok, and CTV)
  • Selling on multiple touchpoints (such as DTC, Amazon, and retail)

By running incrementality tests, WorkMagic captures the actual incremental lift of your marketing efforts across DTC, Amazon, wholesale, and retail (the halo effect). These insights are then used to calibrate your attribution model and MMM, so you have accurate and granular measurement of your full media mix.

With optimal spend recommendations and metrics like incremental ROAS (iROAS), new customer incremental ROAS (NC iROAS), and incremental POAS (iPOAS) at the campaign and ad level, WorkMagic makes it easy to optimize for what actually drives results.

Use WorkMagic to improve your MER. This is how you improve MER. Graza recently boosted their MER by 20% and Branch Furniture increased theirs by 19%, using WorkMagic for budget planning and optimization.

Book a demo and mention this email to get a 50% discount for the first 3 months.

Limited Supply

This past week on Limited Supply, I went through ~20 critical pieces to landing pages. If you hear something you don’t have on your own landing pages, add it, and watch the conversation rate increase. I promise.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or search “Limited Supply” wherever you listen to podcasts.

Let’s Meet Up IRL

  • Vibe Coding @ Shopify NY on Aug 19th: Join myself, Troy Osinoff and Billy Howel as we teach 200 of you how to code an app. You will leave the session with your own app, coded. Sign up here.
  • The Q4 Summit @ Webster Hall on Sept 16th: Join 450+ leading DTC brands (Jolie, Fab Fit Fun, Hello Fresh, Comfrt, etc) as we discuss what all the best brands are doing for Q4. Practical. Actionable. Something you can implement the day after. LIMITED: Get a free brand ticket on this link!
  • Virtual Events: If you can’t make it to NYC and want to get the recordings, make sure you’re in the Limited Supply Slack Community (sign up here). There are currently 5,500+ active marketers chit-chatting.

One of the reasons Apple broke through in their marketing, without running traditional advertising, is that they used to hold their annual keynote to showcase new product launches. Instead of just signage and videos, they had Steve Jobs, himself, walk you through his favorite things about a new product.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, used to watch the Apple keynotes that Steve Jobs would record (once he passed, they started to suck). It’s because people want to hear from people, and layered on with a personal experience, about why a product can be so good.

If you’ve followed any of my online journey within eCommerce and DTC, starting back in 2017 when I began posting online about my wins, you know that one of the biggest arbitrages I’ve always talked about has been whitelisting, partnerships ads, influencer marketing, advertorials, founder content that gets served from the founder’s Instagram, etc.

To the end-scrolling-user who just wants to watch funny videos and rot on their phone, it’s all the same thing — selling your brand’s products without the ad coming from your brand. Some call it “Secondary Presence,” the idea of third-party social proof, trust and content, combined with first-party targeting.

Well, as of now, Meta is rebranding what we had formerly known as, “Whitelisting” to “Partnership Ads” within their product suite. There are some product-related updates that I’ll explain as it relates to the new Partnership Ads product, along with some recommendations/things you can do to take advantage of the opportunity.

This isn’t sponsored, by the way. I always aim to write for those trying to maximize performance marketing opportunities and don’t have money to waste.

Since 2017, every year it’s proven that running these partnership ads with creators, publishers, influencers, customer accounts, employee accounts, meme pages, etc., all deliver a lower measurable CPA or CAC (whichever you prefer, I say, “CPA”). Yet, every year, brands still don’t want to run more ad spend behind creator accounts... why? I have no idea. The CPC can be half. The CPMs are lower (the creator content + accounts are more favored in the auctions). The CTR is higher. Many times the AOV and LTV can be higher too, because the content does a better job explaining the product than evergreen performance marketing static ads.

For the clients I work with, whether their AOV is $3,000 or $35, partnership ads always deliver a better ROI, and quarter-over-quarter (QoQ), we’ve been increasing the investment, with every brand, into partnership ads. They help balance Meta’s overall CPA, and build the brand, without having to allocate separate dollars to brand-building initiatives.

When I first joined Hint in 2017, I remember thinking, “I should text Jay Sean and ask him if I can run ads from his Facebook page... if people get retargeted by 5 different celebrity pages, they’ll think they NEED to buy our product.” Well, I did it. Very quickly, I had 28 Facebook & Instagram profiles in our business manager. I told the creators, “Let me run ads with your page. I’ll try to get it verified, I’ll make sure the comments are clean, AND you’ll get a few million impressions per week from our ad spend.” They were all into it, and we had a great system going.

The downside was that comment moderation was tough and very complex. The API that Facebook used at the time to connect with other comment moderation tools didn’t have the same effects on the CPMs as when you commented directly. It was also hard to get access to comment on influencer pages (they don’t understand how to navigate FB Business Manager!), let alone even get access in an easy way.

I used to have a Google Doc I would send to creators and media companies showing them exactly where and how to setup Business Manager, and then grant access, where to input the Partner ID number, etc. Then, TikTok made this process a 10-second approval between the advertiser and creator. 

Secondly, when doing it at Hint, or even up until recently, you had to track everything by hand, manually, or if it was through a vanity URL or another influencer platform, you’re reliant on their internal models to ingest data from Meta AND their own systems, to create something reliable.

With Meta’s new partnership ads product and for products like Superfiliate (the only official Meta partnership ads platform), it’s worth knowing what’s new.

  1. Ads can run from the creator itself, OR the creator AND brand together (i.e. either “Alyssa Lynch” or “Alyssa Lynch and CLEARSTEM Skincare”). 
  2. Permissions now take less than 30 seconds. Previously, they had to share access through Business Manager, now, within Superfiliate, it’s a 1-click request. The creator confirms within their Instagram app notifications.
  3. Comment moderation is easy. Because it’s not just sharing page access, with partnership ads, you get permission to use the page for: comment moderation, ad targeting, budget, and creative optimization. 
  4. Better analytics. Superfiliate is the only product directly integrated within Meta, so their reporting is accurate and not reliant on third-party modeling. 

So... what’s the punchline for today’s newsletter? Get started with partnership ads. Jump on Superfiliate and use their creator directory, reach out to creators within the platform, launch your ads campaigns with their Meta suite, and start acquiring customers for 20-30% lower CPA.

For brands that are scaling, partnership ads only represent 20-30% of their media spend... there’s so much opportunity to continue scaling that spend, without hitting a pint of diminishing returns.

If you have any questions about partnership ads or want to get feedback on your strategy, feel free to email me directly. It’s such a low-hanging fruit arbitrage opportunity (now 8 years and counting), I’m surprised more aren’t doing it.

That's all for this week

Thanks for being a reader of this newsletter — I don’t get to say it enough, or maybe feel like I say it enough to you, but thank you for reading this. I hope we get to meet one day and get nerdy about all things commerce.

It’s Sunday night, so I hope you’re planning to get 9 hours of sleep tonight and get ready to take on this upcoming week. Stay hydrated. Make sure to take breaks as we get into Q4. Look out for your homies. Have a great upcoming week!