2 min read
Why Ad Platform Reporting Isn't Your Source of Truth
Why Your Ad Platforms Shouldn't Be Your Source of Truth
I sat down for a conversation about one of the most important...
Scott Desgrosseilliers
Recent posts by Scott Desgrosseilliers
2 min read
Cutting Amazon Spend to Fix Stalled Growth : A Case Study
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5 Missed Forecasts. Then One Budget Shift. Then 4 Straight Hits.
I joined Ralph Burns and the Perpetual Traffic team to walk through one of the most instructive case studies Tier 11 has run, a story that starts with five straight missed forecasts and ends with four consecutive quarters of growth.
The setup will sound familiar to a lot of operators. Ad spend was scaling, the dashboards looked fine, but the results kept coming in under forecast and customer acquisition costs were creeping up. The usual instinct in that situation is to double down on the channels that report the best numbers. The episode makes the case that this instinct is often exactly backwards.
What the team and I dig into is how a platform's reported performance can hide what is really happening. The conversation covers Meta's recycling loop, where the algorithm quietly re-converts existing customers instead of finding new ones, and why a channel that looks efficient on its own dashboard can be misleading once you measure it against real orders and genuine new-customer acquisition. They get into how multi-touch attribution and incrementality testing were used to figure out which channels were actually driving new business and which were taking credit for demand that already existed.
The turning point in the case study is a bold reallocation: cutting the vast majority of Amazon spend and moving that budget to top-of-funnel channels. It is the kind of move that feels risky in the moment, because you are pulling budget out of a channel that looks like it is working. The episode is candid about that risk, and about how the decision was pressure-tested with attribution and incrementality data before it was made. What followed was four straight quarters of growth, lower acquisition costs, and a meaningful lift in overall marketing efficiency.
It is a genuinely detailed, practitioner-level breakdown, not a highlight reel. If you have ever suspected that your best-looking channels might be holding you back, this conversation is worth the full listen.
Watch the episode below, and if the case study resonates, the multi-touch attribution and new-customer measurement behind it are exactly what Wicked Reports is built to provide.
Topics: Wicked Reports Marketing Attribution Amazon Budget Optimization Wicked Reports Podcast
2 min read
The Attribution Truth Google Won't Show You
The Attribution Truth Google Won't Show You: Scott on Grow My Ads
Scott Desgrosseilliers sat down with Austin LeClear on Grow My Ads for a conversation every ecommerce advertiser should hear: the attribution truth Google won't show you.
Here is the uncomfortable premise. Every ad platform reports on its own performance, and every platform is incentivized to take credit. Google grades Google's homework. That means the numbers in your Google Ads dashboard are not a neutral scoreboard, they are a self-interested one, and they can look healthy while your actual business growth tells a very different story.
In the episode, Scott and Austin get into why that gap exists and what to do about it. The short version of Scott's argument, the one he makes across every channel, is that platform-reported ROAS tells you what the platform wants you to see, not what it actually cost to acquire a customer who was not coming anyway. A brand can post a strong blended number while its true new customer acquisition cost quietly climbs. The metric that matters is not how much revenue a platform claims. It is what it costs you to bring in a genuinely new customer, measured against your real orders rather than the platform's own math.
That is the shift the conversation is really about: moving from trusting a single platform's self-graded report to measuring the full customer journey with first-party data, so you can see which channels actually start and close new-customer revenue. It is a practitioner-level discussion, not a pitch, and it is worth your time if you run paid traffic and suspect your dashboards are flattering you.
Watch the full conversation below, and if it resonates, that gap between what Google reports and what actually grew your business is exactly what Wicked Reports was built to close.