Live Q&A with Antonio Carneiro

Antonio Carneiro pulled up his HYROS account today and walked through how he finds the leak in a funnel before he touches a single creative. Six live questions, and a diagnostic most media buyers skip. Antonio has managed $350M+ in ad spend and generated $700M+ in revenue. He went deep on:

Our notes below: 1. The one step that's actually leaking (14:35) Most buyers see soft numbers and start testing new creative, new audiences, new angles. Antonio does the opposite. He benchmarks every step of the funnel against its target, click to lead to call to sale, and finds the single step that's off. Because every stage is proportional, fixing that one step lifts the entire funnel. The leak is rarely the creative. It's one step you've never isolated. Your ad platform won't show you the broken step. HYROS will. 2. Your worst front-end creative might be your best (37:38) A creative barely gets anyone to buy on the front end, so the instinct is to kill it. Antonio checks a back-end metric before he does. Sometimes that same creative has the highest overall ROAS in the account, because a hard front end pre-qualifies people and the few who convert turn into high-ticket buyers. The opposite happens too: an amazing cost per lead that never produces a real customer. That's why he reads two metrics on every creative, one front-end and one back-end, never just the surface number. Your ad platform ties the creative to the click. HYROS ties it to the sale. 3. Make your pixel learn from your best sales only (56:06) By default your pixel learns from every sale that comes in, a $20 order and a $2,000 order weighted the same. So it goes and finds you more $20 buyers. On HYROS you set lead, call, and sales rules that decide which conversions get sent back. Tell it to ignore anything under $100, or whatever your floor is, and it starts hunting the customers you actually want. You choose which data trains the platform instead of letting it guess. The platform takes every sale the same. HYROS lets you pick which ones count. 4. Name every test so you can isolate it (10:09) Most buyers can't tell which single change moved their numbers last week, because everything is tangled together in the account. Antonio names every split test as a variable in his naming convention: the funnel version, the offer, the angle. Then in HYROS he searches that variable at the ad-set level and sees its full-funnel metrics in isolation, across 7, 14, and 30-day windows. Now he knows whether that one test is winning or losing on its own. Set your naming up this way and diagnosis becomes a search instead of a guess. Your ad platform buries this. The HYROS search surfaces it. 5. The advertiser who can pay the most wins (20:18) Everyone is trying to lower their CAC. Antonio flips the question. It's an auction, so the business that can afford to pay the most per customer is the one that keeps winning it. The lever isn't a cheaper front end, it's a stronger back end. Improve your LTV and you can outbid everyone and still hit your margins. Price your CAC off the profit your business actually needs, then go make each customer worth more. Your ad platform shows your CAC. HYROS shows the LTV that justifies it.