To be honest this is very weird for me. I usually do long videos for this sort of thing. Test

However, if you’re reading this I am going to assume since you run ads you

• Are too busy for that
• Are super skeptical of any videos of a businesses website
• Like to have control and get the info you want fast…

Why? Because I am a business owner who runs ads just like you and that’s exactly how I feel.

So forgive me if I skip all formalities and fluff here and deliver exactly what the headline above promises in a clear cut blog post.

In this blog post, you are going to see what I KNOW is an unfair advantage in paid traffic ads because I have been abusing it for 2 years now and I cannot imagine how I could scale campaigns without it

You will see how to use “print tracking” to

• Save 5 to 6 figures on your ad spend WITHOUT reducing sales
• DRASTICALLY lower the cost to acquire a customer
• Unlock far more scale from your ads without sweeping changes
• Replicate what I do to generate about 30% more conversions
• Use this data to make your ad platform AI significantly better at finding customers

I know these seem like tall orders and that’s okay because they are. That’s why I call this unfair. I would not believe them either if I hadn’t been running my advertising off of it for years with great results.

Speaking Of Which What Are My Results? Why Listen To Me?

If you’ve never heard of me or been bothered by one of my ads on Youtube (I’m sorry by the way), my name is Alex Becker.

Now unlike the army of gurus online I won’t tell you about my social media following, my books or give you some rag to riches nonsense story. Why? Because I know you don’t care.

So let’s get to the only thing about me that matters to you.

In the past 2 years, I have generated JUST under 20 million dollars in cash revenue from ads. This is from spending 2.5-3 million a year of MY OWN money on these ads.

Here are my pay stubs for these businesses.

WARNING/DISCLAIMER : Hold up . This is not some get rich quick scheme. This is NOT a way to make money at home or fast. My results or other results on this page in no way suggest you will make any money copying what’s in this post. This is NOT a business model or way to start a business, this is business optimization for EXISTING businesses. In fact, if you don’t already have a successful business and run ads your chances are literally zero. This post is about OPTIMIZING the ads behind a business.

So in short. I have a bit of experience running profitable ads.

AND in my experience this has been the biggest key to scaling ads for any online business.

Why? Because this is what slung shot me from generating high six figures a year to over 8 figures.

In fact if you check out the image below it was the key to me scaling a new business to $800,000+ a month in sales in 3 months of launching ads.

The Secret Isn’t Some Hidden Strategy. It’s Not Being “Ad Fat”.

Let me explain so you have some context.

My “BOOM” moment from ads didn’t come from

• A Super advanced ad targeting
• A crazy funnel that no one knows about
• Some product or marketing break through

It came from not being “fat” on my ads.

I used to really struggle with ads. They would always work, then quickly get too expensive to scale.

I could never get that “BOOM” moment I was looking for above because I believe I was missing one of the three things above.

It wasn’t until I hired a data scientist and a top level engineer that I learned this

I spent years trying to master funnels, ad targeting, etc to achieve this “BOOM” moment. The last thing I was thinking about was data and tracking.

In fact, I tried to avoid it all cost for years DESPITE the fact that my ad platform conversion tracking would NEVER line up.

Some days I’d have $2,000 in sales and only $800 in sales would be reported back to my ads.

I had no real idea which ads were REALLY profitable and which ads were REALLY UNPROFITABLE.

In short, I was literally flying blind and guessing with my ads.

At one point I decided it couldn’t hurt to hire some people to set up a tracking system for me based on people’s IP address so I could get more accurate metrics on my ads.

I hired an engineer to create a custom tracking solution for us and a data scientist to read it. This cost me around $20,000 in total, but if it improved my ads just 10% it would be worth it.

The Results Were Horrifying

I won’t get into detail about the science of tracking… yet. However, I will tell you in simple terms IP tracking alone is not that accurate.

Even with in-accurate IP tracking, what I found when I set up even BASIC tracking made me want to throw up. I was losing money hand over foot.

Here’s some highlights

• Out of the $300k I was spending a year, $100k was completely wasted on unprofitable ads.
• On average about 25% of the ad campaigns I turned off were yielding a 200-500% ROI. I simply couldn’t see the ROI due to poor tracking.
• I had actually scaled some campaigns that delivered HORRIBLE long term numbers.

The Scary Part : Losing Tens or Even Hundreds Of Thousands Like This “On Accident” Is The Default

It’s actually not just easy for this to happen, its the default across almost every business I see running standard tracking. This isn’t some crazy “oopsie poopsie” mistake. This is the standard.

How Does This Happen?

Ad platforms simply aren’t getting all the data they need to track everything accurately. People change devices constantly and browsers like Safari actively block their tracking.

Even worse, the ad platforms don’t talk to each other. They also take credit for organic sales or sales they had nothing to do with on accident. This results in chronic misattribution of what really generated the sale.

The result?

On the best day across any type of business attribution of which ads generated sales is off by at least 20-30%.

If you are running a multi traffic source business OR

-Run sales call funnels

-Webinar funnels

-Typical multi-step (or Click Funnel style) sales funnels

It’s probably much closer to 50-60%. My tracking for my webinar/info funnels was consistently off by 50%. Don’t worry I’ll show you the data below…It’s gross.

It Gets Worth If You Look At The Actual Financials

Obviously, when your sales tracking is off by this much you are going to make some bad decisions.

However, it’s important to really put some data behind these decisions.

Across my businesses and the hundreds of businesses I’ve worked with the usual damage is

• About 30% of ad spend is spent completely needlessly
• About 25-45% of winning ads are missed. This results in them not being scale or even worse..turned off
• Nasty : The data your ad platforms optimize around is based off in-correct data.

Think about it…If you get 10 sales and 5 are missed those 5 are reported as NON-customers to the pixels on your ad platform. The ad platform then actively avoids your best customers in some cases.

Do The Math On A Business Spending JUST 10k A Month On Ads

That’s

-$3k a month wasted

-About $2-4k in extra revenue being lost

-The cost to acquire customers being much higher and coming out of profit.

Now kick that out over a year

-That’s $36k just..given away

-An extra $20-40k being left on the table

-And margins being way lower than they should be

The Biggest Problem At All. You Can’t Scale Because You’re “Ad Fat”

This is what being “ad fat” means. There is no way you can scale a business effectively with all this error and waste. It just doesn’t work. Here’s why.

You have to understand that the cost of your ads is not determined in a vacuum or the platform. It’s determined by the OTHER people on the platform. It’s determined by your competitors.

Scaling in its most simple terms comes down to making enough profit to be able to spend more money on ads.

Think about it. If you’re trying to scale ads with 30% waste, neglecting revenue and a higher cost per customer…It’s LITERALLY like trying to run a race while being 50 pounds overweight.

This would be fine if you were running by yourself BUT you are not. You are bidding on ads with other people.

At scale, the person who has the best optimized ads that deliver the most return gets the lion share of the traffic. Not only this, THEY are determining the price.

This is again just like trying to win a 100 yard sprint against an olympic athlete when you’re out of shape. It’s bonkers. In order to compete at the level you want to be at, you have to at least NOT be starting at a massive disadvantage.

This Is Why I (and most businesses) Never Had That BOOM Moment Of Scale With Their Ads

The waste from poor tracking and data attribution catches up to you, just like being out of shape. Because the cost of ads is determined by people who are optimized your cost get too high and your ads get stuck and die off.

It’s that simple.

Fortunately, the fix is simple to.

How I Fixed This

After seeing all the money I was losing and how badly I was shooting myself in the foot it didn’t take me long to realize I needed to triple down on tracking.

There are so many layers and ways to track though. One by itself does not get the job done. So, I had my engineer add every conceivable way to track to my custom tracking system.

The result? I could now clearly see which of my ads were profitable. I could see which ads were not profitable. I stopped wasting money. I reinvested the prior waste into my best ads and my business grew.

(Bonus: I could now pass the data back to the ad platforms to improve my targeting)

And that was…it. It’s not particulary hard to read clear data.

It’s also not particulary hard to scale ads that are profitable. It’s actually quite easy.

Within a short time, I had 5xed my business to an 8 figure level.

Yes It’s a Buzz Word BUT That’s Why I Call This Unfair

After I had this set up I didn’t have to do anything special or hard. I just looked at the correct data and used it to grow my ads.

My competitors didn’t have this data. They still had all the same waste and bad decisions I did. Therefor I beat them.

Just like an Olympic athlete running a race against a horde of out of shape people. It’s unfair.

Now That You “Get It” Here’s How To Set Up and USE Print Tracking (+Send The Data To Your Ad Pixels)

Step 1 : Set It Up

Using and benefitting from print tracking is actually not that hard. It’s setting its up that is the hard part.

When it comes to tracking there are a lot of things you need to take in mind first. Specifically

• People changing devices
• People changing browsers
• Clearing cookies
• Changing their IPs
• The most popular browsers online ACTIVELY blocking tracking

This why you need to set up what I like to call “print tracking”. Print tracking is tracking set up on 7 different levels with conversion priority in this order.

• Customer phone number
• Customer email
• Device fingerprint
• IP
• Cookie
• Browser session
• Browser cache

If you grab all these and order by the priority above you can track just about any type of sales process. E-Com stores, webinars, sales call funnel. It’s doesn’t matter.

Things that usually mess up ad platform tracking like time, device changes, blocking become non-factors as well.

For example in my print tracking history below you can see I tracked a person from their first ad click over a span of months to their sales call booking. I then tracked the conversion from my phone rep a couple of days later. Multiple devices, IPs and even emails were involved and I still nailed him back to his first click months ago.

But How Do You Build This?

There Are 3 ways

Option A : Hire A Team To Build It

You can do what I originally did. There are plenty of good engineers on Toptal or Upwork that can do this for you. With a bit of guidance on how you would like it designed and the priority of tracking it isn’t impossible to set up.

My custom system cost me about $35,000 in total to develop and 4 months to build.

Option B : Piece Together Data Aggregate Systems

You can piece together the tracking points to create a system with a tool like Segment. I love this company.

This again will take some engineering as well as a data scientist to actually put together. Segement is also extremely expensive and can easily break into six figures annually if you have a lot of traffic. I will also require other tools to collect and send in the data.

Option C : Just Use HYROS (Out Of The Box Print Tracking)

If you are not ready for or don’t want to deal with setting up B or C you can simply book a call here with us. Hyros does everything I described by default. We will even set it up for you, usually in minutes if your business is well organized.

The only drawback is we need to look at your business and make sure it’s a good fit. We also only work with businesses of a certain size. We are invite only so a call application is required.

Again setting up “print tracking” can be a challenge if you go with A or B. Once it’s set up though it’s well worth it. For example, this Hyros client grew his business from 150k to 300k a month within a few months of getting our print tracking set up.

Step 2 : Spot Misreported Winners ($32,000 SAVED Case Study)

For this example, I will need a video.

If you do not have time in the video above the ad platform I was using reported that I netted $12,000 in sales off of $13,000 in ad spend.

This would be a pretty bad day for me.

When cross checked with “print tracking” I had nearly $44,000 during this time period. Not 12k.

Simply seeing “better” numbers is not the point here though.

When cross checked, there were multiple campaigns that were delivering 300-600% ROAs. (Return on Ad Spend).

By the numbers above, if I had turned off just two of these campaigns I would have generated at least $60,000 less in revenue for the month. About $45,000 in GROSS profit.

That’s the price of a lower end Tesla I would have lost if I had not cross checked my ads.

The #1 most important thing you can do is find the true ROI of your best ads or stop the loss of profitable ads. Across all the clients I work at HYROS there are so many profitable ads being slept on or turned off.

This is EXTREMELY important on sales funnels, webinars and sales call based funnels.

Since sales usually happen on a time delay it is almost impossible to detect winning ads consistently. Before I set up print tracking I turned off countless ad tests that delivered huge ROAs simply because I didn’t have the correct data in front of me.

Go through your ads and look at the ROI of each one over 7-15 days. You will likely find ads that are doing way better than you thought that should be scaled immediately.

This is scaling 101. The first step is not killing your best ads. The second step is actually finding your best ads and growing them. Both steps are nearly impossible to do without some good old print tracking.

This is why at HYROS after print tracking is confirmed we go through our client’s accounts and literally point out their winning “hidden ads”. This often allows the client to scale another 15-20% further. The client results below are great examples of this.

Step 3: Kill False Performing Ads ($60,000 A Month In Waste Case Study)

Again, I will need another video to properly demonstrate this.

Summary : By just loading up my print tracking stats I found $60,000 + a month in waste in my account. Literally by flipping a few switched we saved $600k a year with ZERO drop in sales.

If you refer to the video above you will see with “print tracking” I was able to detect about $2,000 a day in waste in my ads.

This was $2,000 a day being spent on total dud ads. This can easily happen in a few cases.

1. Maybe the ads performed well in the past and you are just resistant to turn them off since you don’t have the full stat
2. You know you don’t have the full stats and are just guess
3. If you have multiple traffic sources the ad platform can take credit for sales it did not create

#3 is by far the most damaging. I have seen businesses blowing six figures a month on ads that were not actually generating sales.

The ad platform was actually taking credit for organic social and search sales.

My example in the video is a bit simpler. As I skim through my results there was a large batch of ads that were consistently not delivering sales despite having strong stats in the past.

As a result, I was able to remove these ads with zero consequences. This took my ad spend from close to 7k per day to 4k per day while still maintaining the same amount of sales.

This saved me more than 50,000 a month in ad spend overnight.

I then took this ad spend and reinvested it in my winning ads that I discovered in step 2.

At HYROS the second thing we do for a client when their account is live is go in and detect these big losses in ad spend. We then alert the client and show them exactly where they are losing money. This often results in a huge savings right out the gate like in the examples below.

Step 4 : Feed The Data Back To The Ad Platforms

This next step is quite simple. Facebook and Google ads both have the ability to receive “offline” conversion. This means you can re-upload your data to these platforms to improve your reporting.

MORE IMPORTANTLY : You can set the platforms to optimize around this data. This makes your ad targeting far more accurate and in return saves you a ton of money when acquiring a customer.

IN FACT: If you are running a sales call or webinar funnel where sales are most rarer this can make or break your ads. Because of the long click to sale time the sales are often missed and with very little data to work with ad platform can have a lot of trouble building a “customer profile”

To do this you have two options :

Option A)

1. On Google collect the Google click ID’s of your visitors. Then match them with conversions and upload them back to Google.
2. On Facebook collect your conversions phone numbers, address and email. Then upload this to Facebook.
3. Set both platforms to optimize around these conversions.

This will take a bit of engineering but the crop in cost per lead or cost per sale will be worth it.

Option B)

1. Just flip a switch in HYROS and this will be done for you. No engineering needed.

Step 5: Watch Your LTV ($126k Case Study Example)

One thing I constantly see businesses forget is that a large number of sales happen weeks, months, even years after the first ad click.

For example, look at the example below on a lead gen campaign I ran.

All of the ads were unprofitable upfront. However, after 3 months the customers that were generated from these leads generated a 3x return on the initial ad spend.

More importantly, I can see exactly which ad sets delivered customers with the best long term ROI. The difference is HUGE. Not all audience long term ROI is created equal.

You can see people with campaign targetng based around advertising spent 17x more with us over time than people that came from money oriented campaigns.

This is absolutely crucial because when you have these number you can employ very profitable long term focused advertising that doesn’t force you to have to be profitable on day one.

For example, at Hyros we have many clients who will, for example, spend $20 to get a $7 book sale. Thus losing $15. However, they know that after 6 months each book sale customer on average will spend $75 with them. They play these long term numbers to make a KILLING on their ads.

How To Get This Set Up In Your Business Now

The above are the 4 best strategies I can suggest to you without ever looking at your business.

Keyword : “Without ever looking at your business”

The one major drawback to todays blog post is that there is no “one size” fits all guide to tracking. Your business is super unique and tracking it will likely be unique as well.

I Don’t Want To Leave You Hanging

I cannot guarantee we can get you on Hyros. However, I can guarantee that if you give myself or my team a chance to look at your business we can point out exactly how you should go about tracking it.

Which is exactly what you can get below. At the bottom of this page is a link to schedule a call with me and a teammate. On this call we will go and based on our experience tracking hundreds of businesses show you

• EXACTLY WHERE Your Winning Ads Are
• EXACTLY Where YOUR Losers Are (Mis Attributions)
• How To Get YOUR Data Back To Ad Platforms
• EXACTLY How To See YOUR LTV 

Even if you are not a good fit/don’t want to use HYROS, we can save you a ton and make you a ton more just by going over those 4 things with you. We can even help plan out how to set up “rough” tracking that will at least get you to “good enough” tracking.

I really don’t like hyperbole, but this call could be the most profitable thing you do all year.

Do the math yourself

Take how much your business currently spends on ads monthly. Now take your current ROA from these ads.

Okay. Now ask yourself the following

-How much would you save if you just reduced waste by 10%

-How much more would you make if you scaled just 10% further

-What would a 10-20% reduction in cost to get a customer save

NOW..Multiply these numbers by 12. That’s how much you can save and gain over the span of a year. All from booking a free call with us HERE.

And That’s All There Is Too It

Regardless of how you decide to set up “print tracking” you need to do it now sooner than later. Hundreds of businesses already use HYROS or the custom solutions I mentioned above.

The disadvantage of not having proper sales attribution long term is not something most businesses can overcome. Eventually, as the market gets tight or gets competitors that are willing to collect the data.

So whatever you decide to do, do it. I would again highly suggest at least booking a call with us here before hiring an engineer or paying $30k to create a custom system as well.

That being said I hope you enjoyed the post.

-Becker