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E-commerce isn’t single-touch - and your reporting shouldn’t pretend it is. Growth leader Andrew Maffettone breaks down how marketplace spillover (Amazon, Walmart, DTC, social) makes ROAS tidy but wrong, why profit beats channel vanity metrics, and how to design campaigns by channel purpose (education vs. capture). He shares a surprising SEO play—using low-cost Google Ads to accelerate rankings—then retargeting for conversion, plus a blunt take on why driving ads straight to Amazon often hurts organic rank.
You’ll learn:
- How to evaluate spend, revenue, and profit across channels, not in silos
- Why last-click is broken—and what holistic measurement looks like
- When Meta/TikTok work (and what to do when budgets are small)
- The SEO “quick lift” loop: traffic → rankings → retargeting → sales
- Why “send paid to Amazon” backfires and better ways to support listings
Connect with Andrew
• BlueTuskr: https://bluetuskr.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmaff
Work with Adam
👉 Book your 20-min Exploration Call: https://calendly.com/adamwbarney/explorationplugin-20min
🎧 Subscribe to Is Anything Real in Paid Advertising? wherever you listen — and if this episode hit home, share it with someone who needs to hear that you can scale without selling your soul.
🎧 Subscribe to Is Anything Real in Paid Advertising? wherever you listen — and if this episode hit home, share it with someone who needs to hear that you can scale without selling your soul.
Creators and Guests
What is Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising??
What’s actually working in marketing — and what’s just noise?
Hosted by Adam W. Barney, author of Make Your Own Glass Half Full and founder of Scale Smarter, this podcast brings honest, high-energy conversations with the operators, creators, and founders redefining how business growth really works.
From agency leaders and AI innovators to storytellers and strategists, Adam dives into what drives sustainable success — not vanity metrics. Together, they unpack the systems, creativity, and human energy behind $100M+ in advertising experience, real campaigns, and the lessons learned along the way.
🎧 No fluff. No funnels. Just what’s real — and how to scale smarter.
⚡ Ready to install your Energy-Driven Leadership OS?
Book your 20-minute exploration → https://calendly.com/adamwbarney/explorationplugin-20min
[00:05.6]
Welcome back to "Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising?", the podcast where we question the metrics, roast the platforms, and ask what's actually working out there. I'm Adam W. Barney, energy coach turned paid ads truth teller, and today, we're diving into the mess that is e-commerce attribution with a guy who lives it daily.
[00:25.3]
Andrew Moffetone is the founder of BlueTuskr, an e-comm growth agency that works across verticals. And he's here to talk about why most ad results aren't just overhyped, they're fiction. So if you've ever screamed at your GA4 dashboard or wondered if Snapchat could actually work, buckle up.
[00:44.6]
Andrew, welcome. What's going on, Adam? Can I call you the Roastmaster? I didn't know we get to roast the platforms. This is great. Let's do it. I get to vent. This is more like therapy than a podcast episode. I love it. Let's hit it right out of the gate. So I know you said attribution and e-commerce is a different beast.
[01:02.3]
What's broken there? And why can't we trust the ROAS the way we used to? I mean, the big thing is that there's so many different places that users can convert. Right. Like, traditional B2B. You're sending them to a website, there's a lead form they fill out.
[01:19.9]
That's the only place nine times out of ten that they can go. E-commerce anywhere you want. Amazon, Walmart, TikTok, Instagram, your own website, Chewy, eBay, Wayfair, like, you name it. If your product is there, that's where the user can convert.
[01:37.4]
So tracking that attribution, none of those platforms are sharing their data, right? Like, none of them. So there is no way in hell you're tracking anything accurately. Actually, not even kidding, I literally just got off a call about something very similar.
[01:53.6]
Speaking to a brand who the most stereotypical problem; they're running an insane amount of Meta ads, and they're not really getting the results that they want on their website, but they don't want to kill them because they know every time they've done that, their Amazon sales tank and they see an immediate drop in branded search traffic.
[02:16.1]
So, like, they're all going to the website. You have a website conversion problem. So they're leaving and they're going to Amazon because they still want to shop with you. That's awesome. That's kind of a good problem to have. But you can't track that at all, no matter what you do. I don't care what anyone says. None of these fancy, I won't name drop any of them.
[02:32.5]
But you've got like all these ridiculous trackers, that are basically just glorified UTM managers and they're like, oh, we can track. Like, no you can't. Everything breaks. It's BS. So that's my thought on it. So when a founder comes to you obsessing over that dashboard data, whether it's thinking it's an Amazon or something that connects it, Google, Meta, TikTok, whatever, what do you tell them?
[02:56.4]
And then is there any metric there that you still trust? Yeah, I mean in e-commerce you have to look at everything holistically. That is exactly how I always suggest doing it. A lot of brands strongly disagree. They like to look at their Amazon business as their Amazon business, their website as their website.
[03:13.1]
You know, Walmart's Walmart, that's it. But they spend all of this money on email, SEO, influencers, Meta ads, TikTok ads, social media marketing, all driving traffic to their website. And then they're like, yeah, but we're really not getting as much results as we want.
[03:29.8]
So they start to kill them. And then all of a sudden they see the entire business from both, all the other marketplaces are in start to tank. So I like to, when it comes to, it's a different beast when you're talking about like B2B stuff because it's pretty straightforward. It's, you're sending them here and that's the only place they can convert.
[03:45.1]
In this scenario for e-commerce, I look at it like digital marketing is becoming just like traditional marketing, right? Like back in the day, the good old Mad Men days. You cannot tell me the ROAS or the ROI on a billboard.
[04:00.5]
Like no one's saying, the individual billboard, no one ever said like, how much money did I make on that billboard? Like, you don't know. It's not, that's just not how it works. And so in e-commerce it's the same way. And so we like to look at it at more of a holistic level, just from a complete high level of okay, how much advertising did you spend?
[04:19.2]
Like Meta, TikTok, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Walmart, add them all together. How much revenue did you bring in? Great. Okay, now give me the percentages of revenue. Right? So, okay, of this amount of spend, this channel has x percent of revenue, this channel has x percent of revenue.
[04:39.0]
Then before we get even deeper into it, give me the percentage of profit, because that's a different beast on e-commerce. Right. Amazon's robbing everyone blind. So the profit actually comes more from the website, even though the volume's not the same. So then we have to look at, okay, Amazon's probably bringing in more revenue, but the website's bringing in more profit.
[04:59.2]
So based on these numbers, if we spend more money on Amazon, while we might see more revenue, we actually will probably see less profit. And people, while that does happen, it's rare that people leave Amazon and go to the website. So there's only so much I can do there. So do I want to actually invest more from an off Amazon perspective, and try to grow the website more?
[05:18.5]
Because it's actually more profitable knowing that those people are hopping over to Amazon. And so then on the Amazon side, what we usually do is split out branded search terms so we can see you still got to run ads on them, but you can actually see how much volume are you getting, how many conversions did you get that were branded.
[05:37.0]
And you actually contribute those sales to your off Amazon business to a certain extent because that's probably where they're coming from. And so now you've double paid for them. Good for you. And that's how I feel about it. And I mean this all gets into how so many founders, even outside of e-commerce, track towards last click like it's a religion.
[05:57.0]
But when you've got all of those different channels, that cocktail of DTC, you know, direct to consumer, Amazon, retail, email, Meta, that whole cocktail, how do you even start to unpack what's working, outside of working with you there at BlueTuskr.
[06:13.9]
Good plug. Thank you. You have to know what the purpose of each channel is. Right. Like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, very middle of funnel channels, people are actively looking for something, they want to find it.
[06:29.3]
Google, not display, not YouTube, but like the main Google part. It's right place, right time. That's it. Right place, right time. Then you got to have a good website or on Amazon's case, a good listing. Right. Right place, right time, they're going to convert Meta, TikTok, SEO stuff. Wildly different, very different beast.
[06:45.9]
It's education, it's going to take a while. So your ROAS may be different, but that's fine because you're educating a net new audience as opposed to trying to focus on people that may already know your product exists or why you're trying, why you're differentiated from your competition. So it's a little bit different there. Last click is insane.
[07:02.8]
It makes no sense to me. I think just focusing on last click is ridiculous. One of my favorite stories I always tell is years ago, before I started to kind of get on my high horse about on channel marketing, I watched my wife shop during Q4, and she got hit with one of those stereotypical heavily pasteled ads on Instagram.
[07:26.3]
Liked the product, clicked on a link. She goes to the product page, gets hit with a pop-up for 10% off her first order or whatever it was, fills it out. That obviously gets kicked to her email, she looks more on the PDP. Now she wants to know, well can I get this in a couple days? And she also, as an average consumer, because she has no idea what I do.
[07:44.5]
And I try to keep it that way because it's actually kind of nice to learn from a regular consumer. And so, her thought was the reviews on the website are probably controlled by this company because this company owns this website.
[07:59.8]
So she left, went to Amazon. Went to Amazon, saw that the price was the exact same, but read all the reviews, and the reviews were still good. Everything looked legitimate on the web, on Amazon. So she went back to the website. Actually I take that back. She went from Amazon, and she Googled their name, I don't know why. She Googled their name, and clicked on the Google Ad, and then went back to the website, then found her way to the PDP, then went back to the email to get the coupon code from the pop-up back to the website and converted.
[08:31.1]
So based on last click attribution, her email converted that sale. Right? That's ridiculous. That's not where all the steps were. I mean, and then add in platforms like like Rakuten and those other things that take that cash back on it, and then coupon codes like RetailMeNot, the whole mess gets even more complex.
[08:54.7]
Yeah, and look like that's clearly a wildly exaggerated version of what probably normally happens. But people are, you know, especially since 2020, COVID happens, people are really kind of forced to shop online, so they get more used to it.
[09:11.8]
And so now the average consumers, they're just doing more due diligence because they're tired of, you know, you buy some knockoff thing on TikTok or some ridiculous like cheap thing from overseas on Amazon, you get screwed. So people are doing more due diligence and so they're hopping around, they're going to websites they're going to Amazon, they're going to, you know, different influencers, see what they say.
[09:29.9]
So like controlling it all, it's the brands get so frustrated because they don't have control like they once did years ago, especially like back before the iOS change and stuff. And so they get angry about it and they're like, no, I want to do this, like, okay, but you've got to remember like this channel is meant for this, and this channel's purpose is that.
[09:50.8]
And they all work together cohesively, and catering to one versus another doesn't entirely make a lot of sense because especially Amazon. I just read a statistic the other day, the past five years, Amazon's CPCs have averaged an increase of 8% year over year.
[10:10.0]
So if they consistently increase that, and then I think it's FBA fees are up 10% year over year because they had a big increase like two years ago. And then competition from overseas has increased like 6% year over year. So it's just constant Amazon competition and Amazon fees, along with Amazon cost per clicks increasing.
[10:31.3]
But you can't really increase your price point because you've got overseas people coming in and keeping stuff really cheap. So like, yeah, you can jack up your ads all you want and bring in a ton of revenue, but like, you're not profiting. It's all single-digit profit dollars for the most part on Amazon. And so like, to not look at everything holistically just seems insane to me.
[10:50.3]
Right. So let's break some myths. Meta ads for instance, great for some, total waste for others. You know, working across a ton of e-commerce brands, what's the contrast there? Like, why does TikTok really work well for apparel?
[11:05.9]
Why does it crush it for apparel but flops for something like HVAC? And then also how does that get into, you know, you've mentioned before how Pinterest and Snapchat are possibly wildly underrated. That led me to get curious also of, you know, where those delivered for a client when Meta didn't.
[11:24.9]
Yeah. All right, so a few things to unpack there. I don't entirely believe that Meta isn't good for everyone. I think it's good for like most, if not all. And I know it's a bold statement because so many people. That double negative is a little sneaky there, but yes.
[11:41.7]
So many people. Yeah, so many people. Probably hear, I think that Meta is great for everyone and are like, screw you, you're wrong, I did it. It didn't work for me. The biggest problem is how are you using it? And for e-commerce the obvious is purchases.
[11:57.6]
I want to get more purchases so I'm going to set up a campaign to target purchases. Well the problem is, depending on your product, a, if you're not spending enough or if you have a wildly differentiated product, you've got to educate for a while, and so they're not going to convert right away. And so if you're not giving enough budget behind Meta for it to learn, it's not going to figure out who's more likely to purchase.
[12:17.7]
And so you're just never going to get purchases which look, if you don't have the budget that's fine. There's other ways to do it. So then don't go after purchases. Start looking at, okay, maybe I want to create like a gated content, and I just want to gain emails, and then I'll let my email do the work to actually convert them.
[12:32.9]
Or maybe I want to do more top of funnel, like let me just run some really inexpensive minute long video, just focus on through plays, and then I'll just retarget the people that actually watched like 50-75% of it. So I can really narrow it down, and that's wildly less expensive than if you're just hammering home purchases, especially if you're just starting off.
[12:54.4]
And that's why I think that that's not accurate because every time I talk to a brand they're like Meta doesn't work for me. Like I'll bet you spent $1,000 a month, and you went after just purchases, and it didn't work. And nine times out of ten that's exactly what happened. Great. If that's your budget.
[13:11.1]
Not necessarily sure I'd suggest doing Meta regardless, but there are other more cost efficient ways to try and test it out at a better rate. I love it. So really, it's being strategic about your audience, not thinking about the platform as much, and knowing where your buyers are living online instead of just following the guru playbook.
[13:33.8]
Right. Yeah. And what you're asking them to do. Like you know, asking someone to make a purchase is a big barrier to entry. Lower the barrier to entry. Just ask for an email, or just ask them to watch a video. Like just go further up the funnel and then work your way back down. All right, let's get into the weeds for a second.
[13:51.1]
If you don't mind, I want to hear about your favorite weird win. What's one unexpected thing that worked for a client that totally surprised you?
[14:03.4]
Let's see. Well, do you remember, so May of last year, 2024, Google "accidentally" released, leaked their SEO, like how they rank websites and stuff.
[14:21.7]
So I always had this theory on how much UX UI affects SEO. And everyone kind of knew it, they always knew it. But then this "leak" thing comes out and it was, it was very clear. It was like, while it was hundreds or hundreds of pages or whatever it was, it was pretty black and white in terms of like what works and what doesn't.
[14:44.2]
If you have a really good website and people are coming to it, Google's going to make sure you're showing up. Because Google just wants people to have a good experience when they use Google. So that was it. And so we realized, like okay, the more traffic a website gets, right? So we're pushing emails to a blog, or social media is promoting it, or whatever.
[15:03.1]
All of a sudden, that's when we started to see that like hockey stick SEO growth. And so what we actually did was we took a really small budget and did some Google Ads to more like top of funnel keywords, and just went to blog posts. So it was more like you know, people that are searching like oh, how to do this right, they're not, it's not a transactional search, but that's my audience, that's all I want to get in front of.
[15:26.5]
And so we would take a small budget, we would do a max clicks campaign towards the blog post, and honestly, I think we would run it for like a month. And then after that, the ranking was like we're probably on page one at this point. And so at that point depending on what the article is, then we just have Meta do some retargeting, or we had like some display ads or something, and we just let the retargeting side do the bells and whistles on the page itself to get people to convert and all that fun stuff.
[15:53.2]
But the speed at which you could then get something to rank really well, and then you just turn the ads off, and you move on to the next one, was amazing. So then from a more omnichannel perspective, we would also make sure that we were linking to their Amazon listings.
[16:11.0]
And so, because that page was getting so much traffic, those backlinks started to do better. So their Amazon listings actually started to rank better as well. So it was just like this holistic, like, oh, sh*t, this works. And so we would do that stuff all the time. Wow. I mean, on the flip side, Andrew, you know, what would you say right now is the most overhyped tactic in e-commerce.
[16:30.9]
and it's the one that makes you want to flip your desk. Oh, God. Overhyped tactic. I think that running ads directly to Amazon through e-commerce is ridiculous.
[16:48.0]
I know that. I understand the concept. You know, Amazon loves off Amazon traffic. The more traffic you drive to them, they're huge fans. What client doesn't love traffic that they don't have to pay for out of their ad budget, also?
[17:03.9]
Exactly. And in fact, I actually just heard yesterday, someone told me that Amazon killed all of their Google shopping ads. And I haven't been able to find one since someone told me yesterday. So I don't know if that's true, but I was like, interesting that they're like trying to get away from that because probably people are helping them anyway.
[17:20.8]
But anyway, the reason I'm not a fan is because the logic that people have is I'm gonna drive a ton of traffic to Amazon and Amazon's gonna love it, and they're gonna rank me better. Every time I've ever seen someone do this, it does the opposite effect.
[17:36.4]
Because yes, Amazon does love off-Amazon traffic. That is accurate. The problem is if you're not really focused on that audience, so you've got a ton of data, and you know exactly how to go after them and you're really honing in on them, well then you're driving a ton of traffic that's most likely not going to convert right away.
[17:56.8]
Amazon hates lower conversion rates and not selling through. So now, now Amazon thinks that your product's not as good as it once was. Your conversion rate's lower. So it actually hurts your organic ranking. If you have enough data to be able to do that and actually get the correct audience to Amazon, so it's not hurting your conversion rate, then you might as well just go to your website because you know exactly who you're going after.
[18:19.1]
You're gonna get better profit on it anyway. Interesting. Not a fan of it. Now there's ways around it though. So there is a way that I do like that I used to do, which was I used, before they came out, the whole "Buy with Prime" thing, I used to create a "Buy on Amazon" button.
[18:35.9]
Like it would be on the PDP right underneath the Buy Now button. And so what we would do is we put a Google Tag Manager event on it, and we would track how many people clicked it. Right? Yeah. Problem is Amazon's not talking to anyone. Right. So you're not, you're not feeding that data back to Google, you're not feeding it back to Meta, nothing.
[18:53.7]
So you're only able to target clicks. That sucks. Don't do it. You can't really optimize it. You can see the data, but you can't optimize it. Exactly. So what we used to do is you would use the Amazon attribution code, so you get your 10% off and all that fun stuff. But then you'd also get to see how many people converted and for how much.
[19:10.9]
And so we'd run the ads or we'd leave the button up for like a month or so, get enough data in, and then we would go, okay, we got X amount of clicks, we got X amount of orders, we got X amount of revenue. I can now do the math and figure out what is a click value. And so now that button gets fed into Google Analytics, that gets fed back to either Google or Meta, and now I have a value, so I can still focus on a target ROAS or a purchase value.
[19:38.4]
Wow. So it's kind of a way to still drive traffic to the listing and improve the listing without screwing myself. Yeah, I mean this is into an idea, you probably see this across the clients that you bring into BlueTuskr, right? There's funnel envy that people talk about and people trying to swipe strategies from other brands without asking, does this actually make sense for our product, our audience, or margins?
[20:03.1]
Right. Oh, yeah. I mean, everyone hates Amazon. I don't know. A lot of Amazon, it's a love-hate relationship because obviously they're making money from them. But no one that we talk to about omnichannel stuff is immediately like, yeah, let's totally do this.
[20:18.9]
The first kickback is like, I don't want Amazon to have any of my data. I don't want to send them any traffic. I hate them. Right? Like, I don't want to do that. So that conversation of, you know, that's a personal preference. And sometimes it's really easy to showcase the data of like, I know you hate them, but the pros outweigh the cons, but some people are like, I don't care how beneficial it is, I don't want to do it.
[20:46.8]
And like, okay, then we're not doing it. So everybody's different. Awesome. So let's land the plane with some blunt advice. You've got a founder listening right now in the e-commerce space, and maybe they're spending $10,000 a month on paid ads, wondering why nothing's converting.
[21:03.1]
What's the first thing they should audit or rethink before they throw more money at ads? You gotta audit. What channel are you on? What's the purpose of that channel? Who are you targeting and how are you talking to them? Right, like it's the most, it's the biggest cop out answer for every marketer.
[21:20.0]
But like it depends, right? Like you, you referenced HVAC on TikTok earlier. Yeah, duh. Like I'm not window shopping a duct right now. Like, if something broke and I need it, I found it. Can I get it? Great. That's it, right? Like I'm not like, oh, let me just casually look at some like stuff for my HVAC today.
[21:38.9]
Right. So like that guy who's running that stuff is doing stuff, very different than like an apparel brand who has to showcase it. And it's more aesthetic, and it's personal preference on if someone likes it. So they have to educate the market a little bit more. So everybody's very different. One of the more bold statements is like hitting your target ROAS is not hard, it's pretty easy.
[22:02.7]
But if you want to scale, that's where it becomes a challenge. Right? So if you're bleeding cash, you're spending $10k a month, look at what the platform is, who are you targeting? How are you targeting them? And then look deep into the data and figure out what's working, and then just question, like, why is that working and nothing else?
[22:19.2]
And then just pour gas on that. So many people get stuck on the shiny object, right? Like, oh, this works. So now I want to go to TikTok. Now I want to go to Pinterest. Now I want to do this. Like you have not hit a capacity on this platform. Cap out that platform, pour gas on what works, and then go to the next thing.
[22:36.1]
And I guess that's probably what you would probably tattoo across every e-commerce founder's forehead before they set up a campaign. Is that what it would say, or would there be something else you would put there? I guess, yeah, I think I would do that. Awesome.
[22:52.7]
Andrew, this was incredible. Where can folks find you. Follow BlueTuskr and get smarter before they waste another dollar? Bluetuskr.com, or that same name on any social media channel. Or you can follow me anywhere pretty much too.
[23:09.7]
Mostly on LinkedIn at Andrew Maff. Awesome, and we'll link to all those below. But thanks for joining today, Andrew. This has been "Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising?", the podcast where we call BS on marketing myths and spotlight the people doing it right.
[23:25.6]
Subscribe, leave a review Andrew, thank you very much for joining us and we'll catch you next time. Keep it real everybody. Thanks for having me.