I’ve been in Digital Scale since day one back in Nov 2024, and it’s hands-down one of the best communities I’m part of. These guys aren’t just “up to date” on paid media - they’re out in front, testing and implementing things months before the rest of the industry even catches wind of them. What I love most is they don’t treat campaign optimization like a game of whack-a-mole. Everything is big-picture, strategic, and grounded in what actually drives growth. And the live Q&As with Caden and John Moran? Easily worth 10x the price. I’ve lost count of how many times sharing my screen with them has gotten me unstuck in minutes - something you almost never get access to anywhere else. I follow a lot of marketers and media buyers. Most of them are just now talking about things we were already rolling out in June. John, especially, is operating on a different level - constantly creating and refining tactics the rest of the industry ends up copying. Some calls feel like drinking from a fire hose, but I never leave without at least one thing I can immediately implement. With the ridiculous amount of noise, gurus, and recycled advice out there, if you want one group to keep you on the cutting edge of paid media, Digital Scale is it. Highly recommend joining the Digital Scale Skool community.

Meta can never get a 100% complete picture of who is actually buying. It is basically impossible in the current privacy-restricted landscape. But we can get close using Blotout EdgeTag, which is what we do and recommend for all clients.

I use Blotout

I’ve been installing Blotout for several clients lately — and honestly, results usually improve fast. The funny part? The hardest thing is explaining why it works. Simple version, I tell clients: It helps Google & Meta understand who your real customers are — not just who clicked. Sometimes the biggest wins come from fixing signals, not ads.

When you strip everything down, there are really only three inputs that matter if you want to grow consistently: Creative pipeline. Clean data. Capital (liquidity). Here’s how we use all three to create a flywheel that scales brands past $1M+/month in spend. 1. Creative pipeline: You need a system that produces new ideas every week. Not one winner. A factory for angles, hooks, formats, and concepts. We've been using Google Gems to create micro-customer personas for each of clients. 2. Data pipeline: Clean tracking in, real signals out. If the feedback loop is broken, you’re just guessing with more budget. Northbeam and Blotout are our go-to's 3. Capital (liquidity): Enough budget to actually test, learn, and survive volatility. No budget = no learning. Understanding your cash payback cycle and LTV makes you more resistant to performance changes. The flywheel looks like this: More spend → more data More data → better creative decisions Better creative → better performance Better performance → ability to spend more Most brands stall because one pillar collapses: Great creative, no budget Big budget, no real creative engine Tons of data, no process to use it The brands that scale long-term aren’t chasing hacks. They’re building boring, repeatable systems around these three inputs. Creative. Data. Capital. Everything else is just tactics layered on top.

Mandar Shinde or bust

Mandar Shinde Talk to this guy. Blotout is awesome for tracking and attribution.

I’d recommend looking at Blotout and speaking to Mandar Shinde, they are second to none.

In #2016 I joined francescas and spent many wonderful years there before landing at Southwest Airlines. On my very first day, my new team welcomed me with lunch and this treasured photo. Over time, these incredible women moved on to amazing roles at Sephora, Express, and beyond. I’m deeply saddened to hear that francescas will be closing its doors. During my time there, I built lifelong friendships, found mentors who shaped my career, and had the opportunity to grow, learn, and lead incredible MarTech initiatives. As you see posts from francesca’s team members here on LinkedIn, please keep an eye out - they are phenomenal professionals with a wealth of knowledge that can be applied across industries. So, If you’re looking for Marketing, Digital, or Technology talent with experience in these platforms, here’s what they specialize in: Vibes – Mobile-first messaging (SMS, MMS, RCS) and wallet notifications with analytics and AI optimization. Movable Ink – Real-time, AI-driven personalization for email and mobile campaigns. AgilOne (Acquia) – Enterprise CDP with unified profiles and predictive modeling. Klaviyo – E-commerce CRM/CDP for email and SMS marketing with segmentation and automation. Attentive – AI-powered SMS and email platform for personalized, conversational messaging. Blotout – Server-side first-party data infrastructure for better targeting and attribution. Postie – Programmatic direct mail integrated with digital marketing data. Snowplow – Behavioral data platform for real-time event-level data and analytics. Retention.com – Identity resolution for anonymous traffic to power remarketing flows. Narvar – Post-purchase experience platform for tracking, returns, and customer engagement. Fast Company Simon – AI-driven search, merchandising, and personalization for e-commerce. Ketch – Privacy and consent management platform for data compliance. Yotpo – Customer content and loyalty platform for reviews, referrals, and retention. #MarTech #DigitalMarketing #CustomerExperience #Ecommerce #MarketingTechnology #CareerConnections #Networking #FrancescasFamily #OpenToWork #SouthwestCareers

Aziz is the man! Met with me right away to help fix my screwup!

I came across Blotout through an Email Marketing and connected with the founder Mandar. Managed to speak to him and then connected with his team to get into onboarding. His support team Priyanjana and Aparimit is super helpful and have helped me connect and disconnect(from other sources) patiently. We saw better results with Blotout and we are sticking with it. Appreciate the teams help from the founder to the onboarding team, cheers to each one of you!

How We Finally Chose Our 2026 Tech Stack (After Way Too Much Research) I'll be honest- I spent weeks going down rabbit holes. Every founder knows this feeling: you're comparing feature matrices at 2 AM, reading contradictory reviews, and wondering if you're about to lock yourself into the wrong ecosystem for the next two years. Stop optimizing for "best on paper." Start optimizing for "proven in practice." Here's what we're running at Tameta Tech in 2026: • Storefront: Shopify • Post purchase surveys: KnoCommerce   • Reviews: Judge.me • Affiliate program: Superfiliate • Customer service: Gorgias • Landing pages: Replo • Subscriptions: Stay AI • Pixels: Blotout • Analytics: Triple Whale • Email and SMS: Klaviyo Why these specific tools? Working with 30+ ecommerce brands over the years gave us something invaluable: pattern recognition. We've seen what actually works at scale, not just what looks good in demos. These aren't the flashiest choices. They're the reliable ones. The lesson that saved me weeks of analysis paralysis: Real-world validation beats feature lists every time. When you've watched a tool handle Black Friday traffic for 20 different brands without breaking, that data point matters more than any comparison chart. Here's the framework we used: 1. Longevity test - Do brands still love it after 12 months? 2. Scale test - Does it work for $100K/month AND $10M/month brands? 3. Support test - Can you actually reach a human when things break? 4. Integration test - Does it play nice with the rest of your stack? 5. ROI test - Does it save more time/money than it costs? This framework eliminated 90% of the noise and gave us confidence in our decisions. But here's what I know for sure: The e-commerce tech landscape evolves fast. There are incredible solutions emerging that we haven't discovered yet. New tools are solving problems we didn't even know we had. Staying curious and open to better solutions is how we keep making e-commerce better every day. So I'm asking the community: What tools should be on our radar for 2026? What's working exceptionally well for you that we might be missing? Especially interested in: • Attribution and analytics beyond Triple Whale • Customer retention tools • AI-powered personalization • Post-purchase experience optimization Drop your recommendations below- let's learn from each other's real-world experience. #EcommerceTech #TechStack #FounderLessons #Ecommerce

Most brands don’t have a CAC problem. They have a tracking problem. We’re still seeing it in 2025: → Meta optimized for Purchase, not New Purchase → Reporting looks great. ROAS is solid. → But your CAC is secretly tanked by returning customers who would've bought anyway. This one switch alone can change your whole P&L: ✅ Optimize for New Purchase (With Blotout) ✅ Filter returning customers out of key CAC metrics ✅ Build real prospecting performance Here’s what we’re seeing in some accounts: - 2.7x ROAS (Purchase) drops to 1.7x when filtering only new customers - Cost per purchase looks $15 cheaper than it really is - Blended CAC rises, no one knows why The fix is simple: → Track New Purchase in Events Manager → Build CAC/ROAS benchmarks from that → Let returning customers be a bonus, not a crutch It’s the first thing we implement when onboarding a new brand. Because you can’t scale what you can’t see clearly.

The exact DTC tech stack we’re using to grow our in-house brand in 2026: - Storefront: Shopify - Post purchase surveys: KnoCommerce - Reviews: Judge.me - Affiliate program: Superfiliate - Customer service: Gorgias - Landing pages: Replo - Subscriptions: Stay AI - Pixels: Blotout - Analytics: Triple Whale - Email and SMS: Klaviyo Working with 80+ incredible brands in the last few years at HYPE10 has let us familiarize ourselves with solutions we’re confident in using. But, I’m sure there’s awesome tech out there we should be thinking about. So, if there's something you think should be on our radar for next year, don't hesitate to drop it in the comments.

At the recommendation of the Meta Disruptors team, we started working with Blotout and it quickly became one of the most impactful technology partners in our marketing stack. Mandar and his team have been great — not just in what the platform does, but in how far they’re willing to go to help. Implementing custom event pixels to Meta, like our New Customer event and category-specific purchase events, fundamentally changed our marketing strategies and reporting, and it has significantly improved performance. And whenever we’ve needed something custom, including configurations that helped us qualify for and participate in Meta betas, the Blotout team has shown up fast and gone out of their way to support Thursday Boots.

Love working with you guys, always in the fields learning things

Blotout team is great to work with too. Really good dev support.

You can't grow what you can't measure. And right now, you have no idea how many new customers you're actually acquiring. Every e-commerce brand says they want to grow. But when we ask: "How many NEW customers did you acquire last month?" Silence.. They know: • Total revenue • Total orders • ROAS • MER • CAC But they don't know the only number that actually predicts growth: How many NEW customers you're acquiring and what you're paying to acquire them. Here's why this matters: John Moran ran a $40K/day test using Google's "new customer only" setting (link in comments). Google reported: 100% new customers Reality: 68% were returning customers Google can't tell the difference. And if Google can't, you can't either. Which means you're making decisions based on fiction: → Scaling campaigns that aren't actually acquiring new customers → Optimizing for metrics that don't drive growth → Hitting your "targets" while revenue stays flat To grow, you need two numbers: 1. How many NEW customers did we acquire? 2. What did we pay to acquire them? (nCAC) Without these, you're guessing. With them, you can actually scale. So how do you actually track this? The problem: Google can't see your order history. It only sees browser activity. So it calls returning customers "new" all the time. You need: 1. Backend attribution (like Wicked Reports / Scott Desgrosseilliers) that matches conversions to your actual customer records - showing who's truly new vs. returning. 2. Server-side tracking (like Blotout) that captures ALL conversions - bypassing ad blockers and iOS restrictions that hide 30-40% of purchases. Together: You finally know which campaigns acquire real new customers, and what you're paying for them. Want help fixing this in your account? Drop a comment or DM me.