We're here with Austin Harrison, a co founder of Northbeam, one of our favorite third party tracking platforms. try not to play favorites here. I try to be like Switzerland on perpetual traffic, you're here. We've had others, third party tracking platforms on the show as well. But the question at what point do I need a deeper level of tracking? When I think about businesses in general, we run the span, like we have a very much a startup local regional type of customer that we have an entire division for they. Do not need what we're talking about here today. Cause they're not at that level. Would it help? Yes, it would help, but it might be cost prohibitive. So maybe if we can explain in your mind, at what level do you see it? Cause obviously North beam deals with some massive customers like enterprise level, but you also have an understanding of probably that mid market, maybe less so on the smaller market. This isn't really the tool necessarily for them. If you've got a pizza parlor down the corner, you probably don't need North beam to track your customers. This is my guess. At what level Of revenue or aggressiveness from a business owner perspective. Should you start to consider a third party tracking platform because it starts to get muddy at a certain point, especially when you have all types of. Media channels. You've got email, you've got Amazon, you've got, Google, you got Facebook, obviously you've got all the meta platforms. So talk to me about, how you view it as a world view when a business probably needs something like a North beam. I think it's a really important topic because, the last thing we want is. We don't want folks paying for Northbeam or any other software tool that does attribution and what we do now, forecasting and modeling. So outside of just pure attribution is is where Northbeam is focused. So forecasting revenue for the month and the future you could argue, conceptually, that sounds good for any business. But we feel that it's not really the size of the business in terms of revenue, but it's their focus on scaling our investment and scaling. So are you going to invest in 5, 10 channels? Amazon, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest TV, like how aggressively are you going to scale? Because if you're just going to move along slowly, we would discourage you from using Northbeam or another tool, right? If your efficiency is really high, And you've got your system dialed in and you're, you feel like you're in a good place. We would also discourage you from, paying for North beam or anything else, right? It's really when it's not even the revenue size. It's the, when you're really going to press on the gas and. And invest in scaling, right? And if you're a business that wants to keep it simple, which we think is great, there's nothing wrong with that, then it's nice to have North beam, but, or any other software tool, but we think people can survive without it. You get to a level where you all of a sudden you're no longer dependent on just one channel. So it seems like as soon as that happens, from my perspective, everyone gets, brand name search and some level of branded SEO. So there's going to always be that on that side of the equation. But let's say if you're running meta ads and that's it. And you don't have any sort of marketing mix whatsoever. Maybe you've scaled up, you've gotten to a point I have a call with a potential customer in a couple of hours, like they're spending anywhere between 300, 000 and a million dollars a month. And it's all on meta really, basically, maybe a little bit of Google branded search and. things are getting a little cloudy here because they collect emails that we talked about, right at the beginning of the show, they want to be able to attribute like where is that email sale coming from? And at about a couple hundred thousand, they want to double that. it's a 30 million business. They want to go from 30 to 60 million. Like they're a candidate for a third party attribution tool, but are they coming to the party a little bit late in your opinion, or should they have done that a little bit earlier? Cause. it's not always an accurate picture just on one platform, obviously, yeah, the advantage of a third party tool, whether it's North team or something that is in our sphere would be a longer attribution window. Meta's attribution window is 7 day, you've got a 7 day window. If you're spending that much money and you want to see your return after 30 or 60 days, yeah. Yeah. That's something that is important, right? Especially at that spent level, right? Because, if you have a high AOV, right? So if you're selling something, that's 8, 10 bucks, 12 bucks. Maybe you're capturing a lot of that value within seven days of the spend, right? But if the AOV is higher and the consideration cycle is longer, or there's a lot of repeat purchasing, then it's good to implement something third party. But again, there's always ways to hack it yourself, I believe, that may or may not be sufficient. Depending on how you do it, if you're on one channel, right? I don't think it's too late to get tracking in order. And I think it can help you figure out which campaigns are the ones to scale or which ads faster when you're really investing in growth. So we have a customer just to give you context. Over Labor Day weekend, they spent 120, 000. On that day, and they actually wanted to spend and they were using North beam to calibrate throughout the day and then adjusting spend per campaign per ad based on our data flowing through. anD so that's on a daily basis, right? They're spending a lot. They wanted to actually spend more. And so whole nother can of worms, but I think that's where North beam gives you signal. When you're really investing on big, so like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, big sale periods, you're getting very fast signal through Northeam. So it's attribution window. It's your customer life cycle from first touch to final purchase is a factor here as well. So if it's beyond that seven day, it's just saying the seven day, the meta advertiser. we have a fair amount of customers that do offline conversions and use the 90 day window for offline, which is super, super helpful, but in most cases,, 20, 30 product and people are typically going to convert, it's not a higher consideration purchase. 7 days can pretty much cover it for you. you don't necessarily need it. All things being equal what I'm hearing. I think so. If you have a higher repurchase rate, that could be different, right? I looked inside an art being. For one of our customers and I looked, 18 months later at the, their meta ROAS on one particular ad set. And it was like more than two X what it was. I think it went from, a two to a 4. 3 or something like that over an 18 months span. So if you're planning and doing business planning, you're trying to figure out, okay, if I invest in growth now, what's that going to look like in four months and six months and eight months, if you're doing overall business planning even if you're AOV small, like we're talking about, if there's a repeat purchase rate or upselling or whatever the case may be, then you may want to have a longer window too. So there's exceptions to that kind of low aid AOV rule. Yeah. we talked to owners about this, it's like investing in that front end, maybe not quite yet conversion layer. We call that sort of the awareness or consideration phase not forget, like if you're investing in a million dollars, a month in YouTube ads, but your life cycle it's a six to nine month cycle. That's a lot advertising that you have to front. Or get from venture capital or bootstrap on your own in order to make that business really work. So current finances present day has a lot to do with it. Is this the type of conversations that you oftentimes have? With North beam customers, like they're asking you like, what should I do here? And the answer is always, yeah, it depends in a lot of different scenarios, but how do you advise people on that? To be able to be comfortable with investing today, even if they don't see the return, outside of the seven day window, for example, for maybe the smaller businesses, but if it's 30, 60, 90 days, like, how do you talk to them about that? Cause. You're really taking that risk. You never really know if that email that you collect today is the one that's actually going to create the sale 30, 60, 90 days down the road. Yeah. I'm a big fan of a lot of experimentation, trying a lot of different things. THe one great thing about an RPM over the last, four and a half years is just seeing brands go from, 5 million to 50 million or 15 million to 180 million in revenue. We've watched a lot of brands go through that journey of scale, in their scale process. And the common theme is lots of experimentation with different channels, right? Meaning trying influencer, trying YouTube, trying TikTok, trying new creative, trying new, really experimenting on a micro scale with a lot of different things and then looking for a signal to see, okay, what's working, what isn't. sometimes it's all of those things together. Is what finally turns the, where they turn the corner. So like you could just do YouTube and you're doing okay. There's a small blip, but then YouTube influencer, and now your YouTube paid is lifted by YouTube influencer and vice versa. Now the two together are driving me right. Versus one or the other on their own, right. Weren't cutting it. So you're looking for that media mix. It's not, everyone's looking for that one thing. It's Oh, if I just do this one thing, my business is going to take off. That's rarely the case. Are there exceptions? Sure. But from what I've seen, of course, there's exceptions with products that go viral, but like, when you think about the long term sustainable brands, they develop a mix and a playbook that lifts overall NBR or ROAS, right? And they're all working like a symphony is the idea. It's almost like building your orchestra, right? What is my orchestra for my brand and my. industry, and so figuring that out is the key. And of course, if you're smaller, you want to investigate what the successful brands are, what is the orchestra? What's. Do I need a violin? Do I need a cello? Do I need a flute in my particular industry? And then you start to experiment within those but it's tricky, right? Cause it'd be nice if it was just one thing. Okay. I'm just going to launch on this one channel and now I'm all set. I'm just going to spend, can it happen? Yes. But generally speaking for the longterm, you need to develop. A media mix that, that is going to work for you. it's a great analogy. I'm I have a visualization here of, the the conductor in the orchestra and then they have one violin, like that's your first Facebook campaign. And then you get more scale, you add more budget. Now you have two violins. Now you do some lateral scaling. You add some more. Audiences, get some different messaging. Now you've got three or four violins, but now you've got, is when there's three or four violins together and nothing else.