Hey everyone,
On day 16 of our no-Meta experiment I went on LinkedIn and called our flat topline a fail. I posted it, I meant it, and then the closing days plus the first wave of returns made me about half right.
So here's the full wrap-up I promised. The numbers I like, and the ones I'd rather skip.
The unsexy bit first: returns. Net revenue reads +24% today, and I'd love to end the email right there. But we sell bras, bras get tried on, and a chunk of those boxes is still in the mail back to us. Gross revenue closed roughly 2% under last year. Once the return cohort settles, the topline lands somewhere around flat, probably a touch below. I had modeled it higher. We'll get to why.
The numbers returns can't touch: marketing cost down 47%. MER from 2.7 to 6.4, aMER from 1.3 to 2.5. Blended CAC down 46%. Sessions up 106%.
I also walked Roland Eisenbrand, OMR's editor in chief, through all of this for their podcast. The episode is live and you can listen to it here. You're getting the written version, with fewer ums.
What worked beyond the headline: the owned engine carried more than I'd dared to model. Organic search revenue closed at +68%, email at +28%, the referral channel at +42%. Even Google brand search grew, which I'd expected to dip without paid social feeding it.
Now the misses. The LinkedIn version was the short one, you get the longer one.
New customers closed just 2% under last year, which sounds fine until you remember we didn't run this for parity at half the cost. We planned it to bring in meaningfully more new customers than Meta would have, and that simply didn't happen.
The 20€ kickback voucher for existing customers who referred us got redeemed far less than we thought. My topline model leaned hard on reactivation: they refer, they collect, they come back and spend. The first two happened. The third is still mostly an open tab in their inboxes.
And the virality. I hope this doesn't sound entitled, because the traffic our community sent us was wild. But I'd quietly hoped for more public sharing on organic social, and for the PR spillover we'd seeded ourselves to grow bigger than it did. What we got instead was private sharing, WhatsApp groups and DMs we can't see. Advocacy moved into private channels somewhere over the last few years and nobody sent us a memo.
But hey, the campaign was never really the point.
The question was: how much of our paid spend buys demand we'd capture anyway?
Now I have an answer, and a lot of it was expensive demand. Four things change at erlich because of it:
Attribution numbers lose their final say. We keep the third-party attribution and the channel dashboards, but every one of those numbers now gets challenged against our blended shop numbers, MER and blended CAC. If a channel looks like a hero in attribution and the blended numbers don't move, the blended numbers win.
Paid traffic stops landing on product grids. Our data says around 3.7 touchpoints before someone orders, so cold prospects get brand-first landing pages and a proper hello before the bra. Rolling out now, in slices, because we're a super small team and everything competes for the same hands.
We keep questioning the rest of our setup, uncomfortable as that is. More on that once decisions are made, not while we're making them.
Meta goes full funnel. A fixed slice of the monthly budget now goes to top-of-funnel awareness, and mid and bottom funnel get proper plays of their own instead of everything chasing the last click. After the Andromeda update that mostly happens in creative production, so we're going much deeper into upper-funnel content pieces for paid social, with a budget process that plans them in and different goals for those pieces than for the closers.
If you want to run the play yourself: switch your biggest paid channel off for 10 days and watch blended CAC and revenue instead of in-platform numbers. Too reckless at your margins? Cut one campaign or one region and run the same math. The number will annoy you either way. That's the value.
One more thing this quarter is teaching me: being the operator and the strategist in the same body is a stretch.
We're deliberately pulling ourselves back up to the strategic level at erlich right now, between all the operative noise, and it costs real energy. In two weeks we have our team offsite where the whole point is to challenge each other on the fundamental stuff, think bigger than feels comfortable, and stop standing in our own way. I'm flying to Cologne for it, leaving Julia alone with the kids for a week, with a detour to old friends and my parents near Stuttgart. Living between worlds is the strangest part of this Portugal chapter, and I wouldn't trade it.
Also: the World Cup starts this week. My nine-year-old is properly football-crazy and we've been counting down the days. Open question in our house: Portugal or Germany? And what happens to the family peace if they meet?
Through all of it I kept surfing. Doesn't matter how the session goes, how many waves I catch, whether I take the bigger set or chicken out (i did, damn it). I come out of the water and my mood has flipped, and so has my perspective on whatever business problem I walked in with.
Tell me what you'd kill first in your setup, agency, channel or tool. And tell me who you're rooting for in the Worldcup.
Philipp
P.S. If you're staring at the same Meta-dependency question and want a sparring partner who just ran the experiment with real money, hit reply. No deck required.
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Have a great day,
Philipp
