Why Most E-Commerce Brands Are Measuring the Wrong Metrics (And Paying for It)
The Vault Unlocked
In this episode of 'The Vault Unlocked,' e-commerce strategist Mark Young, founder of RYZE Agency and author of the 'E-Commerce Guide to the Galaxy'
Key takeaways
- ROAS should not be treated as a health metric but rather as a signal to guide strategy.
- Many e-commerce brands are misled by agencies that manipulate data through 'smoke and mirrors' tactics.
Main topics
- Misuse of ROAS in e-commerce decision-making
- Agency accountability and ethical marketing practices
Notable quotes
ROAS is not a health metric. It's a signal.
Conclusion
Mark Young's message is clear: e-commerce success hinges not on chasing vanity metrics like
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:00) Most e-commerce brands are measuring the wrong things. They're tracking ROAs like it's a health metric. It's not. It's a signal. And if you're building a business off a signal, you're flying blind. My guest today spent 12 years in the trenches of digital marketing, built an agency that works predominantly in health and wellness, earned a PhD in functional medicine, and then wrote a five-book series to make sure e-commerce founders never get burned by the wrong agency again. He's got a framework he calls the holy trinity of metrics. And by the time this episode is done, you're going to look at your ad spend completely differently. Mark Young is the kind of operator who hands you the playbook before you even ask for it. This is The Vault. Let's unlock it. Speaker 1 (0:59) Well, Mark, we're live here. Welcome to the show. I appreciate that. I appreciate the invite, buddy. Yeah, I think anyone that's listening right now, we are going to be deep diving into, I would say, all things e-commerce. So if you have an e-commerce brand, if you're an e-commerce business, this is going to be the episode for you. I know, Mark, we were just talking before the show and you said that you came out with this new book called E-Commerce Guide to the Galaxy. Is that correct? Speaker 1 (1:27) Yeah, it's actually five books, Kayvon, because I actually started writing it as one book. And literally, I was like, okay, this is like a 600-page book. No one's going to read that. So I ended up breaking it up and doing this stuff. So it's like, it's actually a five-book series. And really, it's about e-commerce. But here's my angle. I'm an agency owner. I'm just going to sell out and tell you. I own an agency that deals with e-commerce brands, by and large. But one of the things that, if I can say, pisses me off is that every single time I'm talking to a potential new client, I end up having to drudge through the baggage of what they've been through already. And, you know, it's like I end up having to take them through triage and then through the ER before I can even get them into the hospital. And a lot of that is... Speaker 1 (2:20) Their misunderstanding of the metrics that move their business and the agency did something and they thought it was wrong. And sometimes I'm like, no, actually, what they did was right. I'm sorry you don't like it, but the agency wasn't wrong. And sometimes it's the agency just started using smoke and mirrors to make it look like they were performing and they weren't. And here's the reality. Business owners. This is my thesis. I'll wrap it up here. My thesis is the business owners get into businesses because they're really, really good at people. Speaker 1 (2:49) And as my friend Ben Hardy says, this is a who not how situation, right? Like, so when it comes to marketing, find your who. Yeah. The problem is, is that business owners, they don't know how to do the marketing. And if they did, they wouldn't be running their business. They'd be running marketing companies. And my entire goal in all of this was I want to write a book that literally becomes this is your travel guide. never be taken advantage of by an agency again. And at the same time, this is my, if you're going to work with me, you need to understand all of these terms and all of these strategies, because now nothing I tell you is going to be a surprise. Like I'm literally handing you the playbook. You want to run it by yourself? Great. It costs you $12.95. You want me to run the playbook for you? Cool. You know in advance what you're getting. Yeah, I love it. I can tell you're Speaker 1 (3:46) The passion and the same thing that I deal with is just there's good agencies, there's bad agencies, and there's good business operators and there's bad business operators. And when you may have them all mixed in, good things come out, bad things come out, ugly things come out. It's a nightmare. So I can understand the pain. I'm going to call it the pain you've probably gone through from. like just discovering what was not working or what was working, but it wasn't working because of X, Y, Z. And we're going to get in all of that. So let me, before we go into the power of the books and the power of what you do, I think it's going to be a service to tell us a little bit of how you got here. Like what, what's the background, what, what's behind the vault that got you to where you are today to have the power to be able to bring e-commerce to another level for a business. Speaker 1 (4:42) So I'm a bit of an unusual animal, as I think most entrepreneurs are. And I always say I love, love working with entrepreneurs. They're all crazy. Like they're absolutely all crazy. And as much as I prefer sanity in my life, I also love a little crazy. I even live downtown because as much as I complain about it every morning and I drive to the office. I still choose to live downtown for Lauderdale because it's crazy. It's busy. It's traffic. It's all that. So I do love it. And entrepreneurs are my passion. And I'll say entrepreneurship is my passion. Like they're all nuts. You know this. You work with this audience too, right? Yeah. And they all get defensive and then they all kind of chuckle and go, yeah, I guess we are. Like it's just kind of the way that goes. Speaker 1 (5:31) I've been in an entrepreneurial family and I laughingly say that entrepreneurship is kind of like a nationality. Like you're just born into it. You can do nothing about it. And once you get the bug, you're just you're part of the part of the machine. My father actually ran an advertising and marketing agency. He's owned his for 30 years. I swore I would never be part of the family business. That is not what I wanted. I went to college a lot. And ended up becoming a college professor, worked in education, ran private colleges for ages. And what's really funny is I worked in private and public education. I loved private education more than anything. And part of the reason was because it was entrepreneurial. It was very granular in the way we ran the business. It was education. So I got the philanthropic high from actually helping students and seeing outputs. Speaker 1 (6:22) people that had nothing go to people who had established careers. Like that was exciting to me, but I loved the grid of the entrepreneurship. How do we, how do we hit enrollment goals? The next start, like all this kind of stuff. Well, I ended up getting out of that. And what's funny is like, I did end up going and working with my dad for, for a little bit after I got out of education, because I was like, I don't know what I want to do when I grow up. And that's a weird question to ask yourself when you're 39 years old. Yep. Yeah. Speaker 1 (6:51) And my dad's like, well, look, I need some help right now. We're working with some giant clients right now. And one of them happened to be in the health and wellness space. And I'm like, well, I'm not doing anything. I'm just sitting on the beach in Florida. So sure, I'll come back to Michigan for a little while. Didn't take me very long to decide several things. One, I didn't want to work for my father. Two, I didn't want to live in Michigan. And three. I not only fell in love with the marketing side of the business, which I had grown up around, but I also fell in love with the health and wellness side of the business. And I have subsequently come to the point that I even went back to school and earned a PhD in functional medicine. And what I find is entrepreneurs and longevity are probably the most overlapping Venn diagram I've laid eyes on in a really long time. Yeah. Speaker 1 (7:46) It's huge because partially we're all crazy. We love experimentation. We understand the value of time. So sickness is not about health. Sickness is about time lost. And I'll overlap that to say that we all love looking at dashboards and figuring out how to make them better. And that's all longevity is about. Whether I'm logging into an aura ring stats in the morning or I'm looking at my labs, it's no different than me looking at a digital marketing dashboard and going, OK, if I make this one change, I can do this. Like, how do I get my HRV to move? Like, it's the same thing. It's gamified. And I think entrepreneurs love gamified things. Speaker 1 (8:31) I get it. I love it. So and now you as a result of working with your father and then moving over, you really got into what it sounds like is the online game, the e-commerce game and working with big brands and specifically in health and wellness. Or have you kind of expanded? I would say that's probably 75 percent of our of our clientele falls in health and wellness, you know, CPG, direct to consumer. marketing. Not everything we do is e-commerce, but everything we do is online. So we do online support. As a matter of fact, just before this, I was working on an analysis for an international brand, rebuilding their U.S. market, but it's not direct to consumer at all. So it's not necessarily direct to consumer, but it is very much e-commerce in so much as it's online marketing. Speaker 1 (9:20) So, yeah, we dabble in other things like we certainly have expertise in other things. And where I thought you were going with that was that for me, I focus in the digital world. My father's agency actually is the exact opposite. Like it is such a complement to what we do. Their television, their radio, their their brick and mortar, like they're the people who have all the buying relationships with Walmart and Target and so on. It kind of is somewhat organically turned into this step one, step two, where what we're finding is sometimes he'll get leads that come into his agency and he's like, you're not ready to go national TV. Like, we need to get all your other stuff under control. Let me make an intro. And then we nurture them and then pass them back. Speaker 1 (10:06) Sometimes we're working with clients that expand to the point that they're ready to go national. They're ready to go into retail. They're ready now. They've hit that maturity in their business lifecycle. So it's a great partnership. And what's been fun about it 12 years later, because it's been that long, which is crazy to imagine, but 12 years later, like we're back together working hand in hand, but working as partners, not as subordinates. And it's... Speaker 1 (10:34) It's a fun handshake. So for anybody who listens to your podcast, who works in the family business, I have to tell you, it actually can work. I love it. Yeah. Well, it seems like you guys are running two adjacent like kind of businesses, but in parallel with each other to support each other. So much. Yeah. So you have your economy. You're not underneath your dad or your. Well, and I got to tell you, like for a lot of people out there and I'll speak to the children of entrepreneurs. And I will say that if mom or dad was successful in that world, there is a shadow that is always cast. And again, I say this at 51 years old, but even at 39, 40, 41 years old, it was like. Speaker 1 (11:19) Sorry, you got a 20 year head start on me. So you're, of course, going to be more accomplished than I am in that respect. But at the same time, there is an element of, I believe, and I'm speaking from, you know, N equals one, that there's a need to make sure that you're able to prove your own muster on your own. And as an example, like even in this partnership that we're working on between the RISE agency and Jekyll and Hyde is. Even his team, like all of a sudden the boss's kid is back around, you know, and it's like, there's a natural bent for people to, you know, to assume nepotism and, you know, and, and the laugh for me. And it's like, great, let's just pull out your resume, pull out mine. I have absolutely no problems with that. The funny thing is I'm, I mean, I'm a capitalist. So like when I hear about nepotism, yeah, like I have no, I have no problem. Speaker 1 (12:16) with nepotism because you're the business owner. You started the thing. You started it for legacy for your family to work into. Like it, to me, it just doesn't make sense. It's hopefully right. It's when it comes challenging is if the, the child or the young one is not good and they're in the seat and they're destroying the company, that's, you know, that that's a different story. But if they're pulling their weight, I, I mean, why not? Why would you hire outside when you can hire within someone you know? Well, yeah, because there's a trust factor that's somewhat just inherent in that. And there is a legacy, as you said. But I think that even goes one layer deeper to that. That is, they're my chips. I can bet on whatever number I want. Well, that's the thing, right? But I guess, you know, as an entrepreneur and an owner, I mean, I see that. I always think you have options in life. Speaker 1 (13:12) Right. So if you walk in, I'm in a business right now with mass nepotism and I know what I'm dealing with. You know, I don't complain about it. I there's not you can't complain about it. You either deal with it or you move on. Right. So one of my clients, you know, Dan Sullivan. I know Dan Sullivan. Dan's a good friend, strategic coach, the whole deal. And Dan has a philosophy called guesses and bets. Sorry. Guesses and bets. Oh, guesses and bets. Yeah. And his philosophy is that throughout your life, you've just made a lot of guesses. And all of those guesses had some kind of bet that you put on them. And then however it turned out, you learned from it, you guessed the next time. But every guess you take has chips on the table. And I think in this particular one with entrepreneurial families, it's like. Speaker 1 (14:04) Yeah. Is your is your kid the most qualified person to create legacy? Maybe. But that's up to the business owner to take that guess and take that bet. And if the business owner loses everything because the kid was the wrong person to run the company, it's his money. That's exactly like you said, it's his chips. So