Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
This is the Unknown
Secrets of Internet Marketing.
Your insider guide to thestrategies top marketers use to
crush the competition.
Ready to unlock your businessfull potential, let's get
started.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Howdy, welcome back
to another fun-filled episode of
the Unknown Secrets of InternetMarketing.
Hopefully, I will edit in thebumper and the front.
I don't know why it's havingissues, but thank you so much
for coming back.
Everyone, I have a great guestfor you.
I know we talk a lot aboutdigital marketing strategies,
seo, paid campaigns, emailmarketing, all the different
(00:37):
things and I thought it noneother to bring on Jeff
Greenfield with Prova AnalyticsProvalytics sorry, provalytics
and it's an AI-driven analyticstool that helps you figure out
where that marketing that you'respending is, where it's going,
what you need to do with it, howto reorient it.
(00:59):
A lot of people out there areusing just the GA4, the Google
Analytics, maybe a Supermetrics.
There's so many configurations,jeff, so it's so good to have
you.
What I can tell you is eachindividual client that we've
talked to over the last well, 26years, every single person
(01:22):
needs something a little bitdifferent.
So we've tried to use GoogleData Studio to set stuff up.
We've done different kind ofagency analytics.
We've used so many differenttools to try to find what works,
and what I've found is itreally needs to be customized to
the client on what works bestand for those clients that are
out there listening, or evenin-house marketers.
(01:44):
There's attributions, an issuelike conversions.
It's getting a lot harder withAI oversights in Google and
people are not clicking throughnow.
So there's so much going on,and I think that leveraging AI
to help you make decisions isabsolutely where the direction
(02:05):
is going, and so I reallythought, from a marketing
attribution standpoint, to bringyou on to kind of talk about
what you're seeing in themarketplace, what works.
Would love to hear your originstory, because I'm sure this was
an issue for you with clients,because, well, everybody needs
something different and no one'stracking everything, and then
(02:25):
there's different groups nottalking to each other and it,
you know analytics is a bigfocus for sure, so welcome.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
No, definitely.
And you know I'll tell you kindof, the dirty little secret of
analytics and of marketing isthat you know, if you're a new
brand that's just launching andall of a sudden you start
advertising and people startbuying, that's great.
You can see that cause andeffect relationship.
But if you're an existing brandthat's been around for a long
(02:58):
while and you're spendingdollars, the question that
always kind of haunts especiallythe folks in finance at night
is how many of these peoplewould have bought anyway if we
weren't advertising.
So, meaning, what impact didadvertising really have on the
bottom line?
And that kind of gets to thatold statement, the John
(03:20):
Wanamaker statement, thateveryone repeats half the money
I spend in advertising is wasted.
The only problem is I don'tknow which half.
Yeah, I mean people just saythat and people see the quotes
all over the internet, but thefact is it's a reality.
There's a lot of people whohave purchased from you in the
past who would probably comeback on their own without
(03:42):
advertising, and that's whythere's this big movement
towards incrementality, whichhas always been a component of
advertising.
Marketers have always thoughtabout what is actually moving
the needle for me versus I'mjust spending dollars and that's
kind of really what this getsto is the heart of is how do I
(04:02):
find out who you know, whatdollars should actually be spent
, what dollars are actuallyincremental and how do I find
the ones that aren't and movethem over so that I can get more
ROI with the same budget?
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Okay.
So before we get into it, I'mgoing to ask you something,
cause I know you talk aboutanalytics all the time, but I
want to, I want to take one stepback and talk about the
differences in your mind ofbrand.
Okay, cause, because biggercompanies brand drive sales
(04:36):
right, marketing supportsbranding right, but brand drive
sales like Nike, the brand drivesales.
Then they got all the otherstuff on top of it to encourage
movement Right, and of coursethey have so many skews and
they're trying to move everybody.
They have to continue to keepselling.
But but I well, I can tell youthe reason people are buying and
(04:58):
that reoccurring piece of it ison brand.
So, if you took a step back ofit, how do you look at brand
versus marketing?
And is there any kind ofmeasurement on brand measurement
versus marketing measurement,before we get into kind of like
attribution and marketinganalytics?
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Yeah.
Well, in order to answer that Iwant to take time travel a
little bit before digitalmarketing, because marketing was
branding.
Before digital marketing youcould say there was performance
marketing.
Back then there were couponsthat would come in the mail.
So let's kind of level set backthen all there was was tv,
(05:39):
radio, print, direct mail,coupons, and performance
marketing was probably couponsand direct mail, but everything
else was branding.
That's what things were back inthe day.
So when you think about all ofthe big brands that you know of
today the Pepsi, the Cokes, theBMWs those brands have all been
(06:02):
built based upon branding.
So branding, we know for a fact, branding works and over the
last 25 years or so there's beena lot of research to look at.
What is the impact of thisquote unquote performance
marketing versus branding.
But we first have to understandhow did performance marketing
take off?
Did all of a sudden theinternet came around and
marketers said let's move moneyover to performance?
(06:24):
It really wasn't like that.
What happened is that theInternet started up, there was
advertising, that kind ofstarted, and then there was the
dot-com crash around 2000, 2001.
And back then the newspapercompanies and the owners of
radio stations they werelaughing and they were saying
(06:46):
can you believe that thoseinternet folks thought that they
were going to put radio out ofbusiness and they were going to
put magazines out of business?
It's kind of funny now, butit's just important to
understand that.
But then what happened isadvertising started to take off.
It started to grow slowly butsurely to take off.
(07:07):
It started to grow slowly butsurely and around 2005, 2006,
the boards of directors wouldstart asking CEOs what is our
internet strategy?
And then that led CMOs to saylet's try this out.
So they would do a test and thereason they got excited about
it is because when you would buyTV or buy radio, at the end of
the month you would get aninvoice that would just tell you
(07:29):
what shows you were on andestimated impressions, and those
impressions would become partof a mathematical formula that
would get done once a year,something called marketing and
mixed modeling.
That would tell you how thingswork.
But you'd have to wait months ora year later, whereas with this
new internet advertising, atthe end of the month I got an
(07:50):
invoice, but I also got thisreport that showed me how many
people clicked on things, andclick was much closer to the
sale than this impression number.
So marketers quickly realizedthat if I spend dollars closer
to our sale, to where I actuallycan get credit for things, that
actually makes me look good.
(08:12):
And so what happened is moneystarted going from testing
budgets to where it startedmoving over to performance, and
everyone got very, very excited.
And what ended up occurring bylike the late, like 2010, 2011,
a lot of branding dollars hadbeen moved to performance, which
is at the lower part of thefunnel.
(08:33):
And when you're advertising isat the lower part of the funnel,
you're actually reaching afewer number of people.
So if you can picture, like thetraditional sales funnel with X
number of people in there, fromjust a hundred percent branding
, now you're spending only halfyour dollars on branding and the
(08:55):
other half down at the bottom.
You're reaching fewer people,which means less number of sales
overall, which means youradvertising has to work twice as
hard, three times as hard, fourtimes as hard.
And that's so.
That's how people kind of movedalong, and then it got to the
point where companies startedturning off branding altogether
(09:17):
because they couldn't measure it, because everything became
click-based around 2015, 2016.
And now we have this wholegeneration of marketers
Everything is about click.
And now we have marketers todaywho believe that the way
marketing functions is we investdollars to buy clicks and
clicks lead to sales.
(09:38):
But the reality is, the waymarketing actually works is we
invest dollars to buy eyeballsto get people's attention, and
that attention is defined asimpressions.
Every report we pull from Meta,google, wherever, there's always
a column called impressions.
Most people ignore it because Idon't care about it, but
(09:59):
impressions the job ofimpressions is that attention
which builds awareness.
The job of impressions is thatattention which builds awareness
.
When awareness is built up,eventually people will walk into
our store, and if our store isonline, that leads to clicks and
then clicks lead to sales.
So imagine, everything you'redoing, from targeting to
(10:20):
measuring, is all about just atthat lower point, which is where
clicks are Like.
Every marketer knows my costper click, but really what you
should be more worried about isthe relationship between
impressions to your sales, andthat puts us back to how things
were before there was digital.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Okay.
So there's two, two kinds ofthemes that I want to pull from
that that I think are, are, arereally helpful, and I I love
that history lesson and I I wantto share that online and
hopefully people will listen toit.
I think it's great, um, and Ithink that people that are
coming into the space that arenew don't understand how it used
to be Right and and a lot ofthe conversation around digital
(11:00):
marketing or you know whatever.
Like I remember when AdWordswas pennies, okay, like it was
pennies to do that and just the,the.
The goal was to get someone tobuy something online, like be
able to want to put in theircredit cards right, marketers
coming into the space.
Now you know this.
This is just like, um, you knowit's a, it's a, it's like a.
(11:21):
Not even an afterthought, noteven a prethought.
Like, they don't even thinkabout it at all and they're just
looking at the clicks to sales,right, like there's no um view
of, like the, the brandreputation of uh, of of the
storytelling of what you knowwhere that company came from,
(11:43):
what, what's its history?
Um, are people buying somenostalgia?
Like that's not even into theconversation.
Like in in one area, when I talkto a lot of new marketers or
I'm doing coaching or training,like they have no concept of
branding at all.
Okay, it's just direct.
You know, and hey, that is thedirect response world, right,
(12:05):
like, hey, I'm going to spendthis, I'm going to get this, I'm
just going to sell that and.
And a lot of those people thatcame into the space, maybe other
on the agency side internallymaybe had their hand at
affiliate marketing, right, andit was like I can only spend
this, I can get that.
So it's a very like narrow view.
But when you start working withbigger brands and bigger
companies like narrow view.
But when you start working withbigger brands and bigger
companies, branding comes intoit.
(12:25):
And also there is someintegrated marketing, there is
some traditional marketing and Iand one of the things that you
said that resonates with me isI've come in a lot of times with
really large brands wherethere's a multi cross-functional
team or multiple agencies thatare working together and we're
bringing the digital aspect ofit and to your point, they want
(12:48):
digital work like 10 times ashard, right, and you know you're
going after like a 3% or a verysmall percent of people that
are looking to buy at the bottomof the funnel and and and
typically like this is startingto change.
But radio TV get millions ofdollars budget.
Now TVs come way down right,and we're doing a lot more
(13:08):
streaming over the top stufflike that.
But terrestrial radio, um, forcertain brands is a great driver
to communicate a story andthose dollars are huge.
And so a lot of where, uh,we've been brought in is to test
how to make that conversion,how to kind of how to digitally
transform their advertising sothat we can track stuff better.
(13:32):
But, man, I run up against umon these cross-functional teams.
Uh, traditional marketers thatmaybe right, they're, they're
great at what they do, they'vedone it for 15 years.
The analytics and marketingattribution, all the stuff we're
going to get into is they?
(13:54):
Not everyone, but I've run in alot of them do not understand
this stuff because it's like youbuy a flight.
That's how they look at it andthat's how some of these bigger
brands look at it with digitaladvertising.
It's not management, it's likewe're going to spend this amount
, we're going to run it.
We're, we may pivot, we may not.
Because, like, once you buy abillboard, you buy an ad in a
(14:15):
book or a magazine or whatever.
Like you just got to like hopethat you got the right message,
like there's not a lot oftesting, You're just relying on
experience.
Well, like I'm a data person, Ilook at like how are people
responding to it?
Can we AB test?
Like I love running emailswhere I use the whole alphabet
on um, you know the, the, theheadline let's, and then
(14:35):
typically or not typically, butalways there's like three or two
headlines that work like 80%,90% better than the rest of them
and you have a clear winnerright.
So when you're AAB testing, youcan get that with data, you can
iterate, you can improve andyou can make those marketing
dollars work harder.
(14:56):
I've just seen that, like thesmaller companies um are are
more focused on the metric sideof things.
The bigger companies mightstill be really focused on the
brand side of things, but butthere's a lot of companies that
are lost in this kind oftraditional advertising or try
to view digital as traditionaland not measuring and not doing
(15:19):
anything.
And I think that that's whereum, uh, your product, your
company shines because youreally, if you're spending a big
amount of dollars and you havedifferent variables that you're
trying to test, um, if you don'thave that data all linked
together, it's almost like okay,well, we're going to add this
(15:42):
variable to it and we're goingto see what the output is or the
impact is.
But when you're runningmultiple campaigns on multiple
platforms, tying everythingtogether and talking about that
marketing attribution getsreally challenging and really
difficult.
I would love to hear kind ofyour viewpoint on, maybe, what
(16:05):
you're seeing in the space,because, also, I've seen, too
what I've typically seen.
When you start spending on metaor Google or anything like that,
a lot of clients are like nextday, like do we get any sales?
Like where are the results?
Like whatever it is, like itdepends on the client you're
talking to, but I've typicallyfound nothing's going to happen
(16:25):
for like two weeks.
Like you got to get enougheyeballs, you got to get enough
interest, they got to see thebrand out there a number of
times and and then, based on thecustomer journey, which I think
that's a good conversation thatwe could jump into if we have
time.
It's not linear, it's not yougo here, you go here, like you
(16:45):
know, it's almost more like a,like you have a center point and
then you go here, you come back, you go back to that point, you
go this direction, you comeback and then you got to get
kind of in that buying phase.
But they're, they're, they'relooking at multiple platforms,
they're having to see the admultiple times and you know,
doing a weighted attribution isprobably the best but, like,
adwords gets a lot of the creditfor, I think, brand work
(17:10):
sometimes because, um,advertisers, uh, marketers, like
to run a lot of ads on the namethat, to your point, as we were
talking before, is going to getthe click anyway.
And I've even seen that, like inthe affiliate space, like with
a lot of e-commerce brands, alot of marketers are running ads
(17:30):
on the name and that's a wholedebate in itself of like, would
you get that click anyway?
Do you got to protect the brand?
Do you got to drive what thatexperience is to a landing page,
whatever?
But?
But a lot of marketers aremeasuring and giving good data
to the client, like, and if youdon't know what you're looking
at, it's tough, and they're justsaying, oh, look, how great
AdWords is doing for you, butthose are clicks.
(17:53):
That I think you kind of saidthis but didn't say it like a
little under the surface.
Were you going to get thatbusiness anyway, right and so
how you use these tools.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
Yeah, and also to
kind of expand on that.
I mean, here's a.
Here's a real life scenario.
Someone's running campaigns onmeta they're measuring using GA4
, which is Google's analyticsand a consumer sees an ad in
their Facebook feed.
They just kind of scroll by it,but they become aware A couple
(18:25):
hours later they maybe hoverover an ad on Instagram and they
say, hey, that looks reallycool, I think I want to get this
.
But people get distracted.
And then the next day they say,oh yeah, let me see if I can
find that thing.
And then the next day they say,oh yeah, let me see if I can
find that thing.
And then they go and theyGoogle it.
They click on the ad there andthe sale comes in and credits
Google AdWords under the namewhich we would call brand search
(18:48):
and in their analysis at theend of the month or the end of
the week, they would see thatGoogle AdWords is doing great.
Let's shut down meta or let'sslow down meta, but the reality
is in that instance is that metais the one that you could say
originated.
The sale Broke the awarenessinitially.
Yeah, exactly, and this getseven more complicated as you
(19:10):
start to think about today'somni-channel world.
So let's expand that a bit.
Someone sees something on Meta,they Google it, they click on
Google, they go to the websiteand then they say, huh, I wonder
if I could get this on Amazon.
And then they take their phone.
So now they're in a completelydifferent thing.
(19:31):
They open up the app and thenthey order from Amazon and they
click on the ad that the team isbuying from Amazon.
So in that scenario, you've gotan agency that's handling meta.
You've got an agency that'shandling, let's say, google.
We've got a whole separate team, like the Amazon Marketplace
team, that is handling AmazonCompletely different budgets,
(19:54):
sometimes completely differentdepartments as well, because the
way most large companies areset up things like Amazon is set
up as a whole separate team,completely separate from the
website team.
And so now we're talking aboutthings like Halo how ads on
Amazon can drive sales to yourwebsite.
Ads on Meta can drive sales onyour website and back to Amazon.
(20:15):
It gets very confusing forfolks and very difficult to
manage.
But going back to your brandreally, really quickly.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Showroom sales to add
another layer to it, right.
So so you drive them into thestore.
They're looking at the product,right.
And then they want to priceshop, right, like where they're
looking at the product andthey're like do I buy in the
store?
Right, because you got, you gotpeople setting up displays.
You got people driving stuff instore.
(20:44):
You got, um, you know, mark, my, my, my sister works for Nestle
, um, uh, ferrara now, but butshe, she's doing that every day
with candy, right, and water,and um, you know, there there's
so many different factors onwhat drives that purchase at the
end of the day, to, to, to yourpoint.
And so the bigger you get, themore money you spend, the more
(21:05):
complex it gets, the more youneed to understand the data.
So right.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
And what most people
don't know is that they think
you know, I'm a smallentrepreneur, I've got a small
business.
My God, if I had money like aNestle or some of these even
larger companies that are sosophisticated.
They have all these specialtools and the reality is is that
the larger the company, themore regions of the world that
(21:28):
they're in, they're more likelyon last click and very
unsophisticated metrics, eventhough they know it's wrong.
It's consistently wrong, soit's consistent, and in the
corporate world, consistencymatters more than being correct.
Now, this is the first thingabout metrics and analytics is
(21:50):
that none of these things arecorrect.
There's nobody out there thathas devices that are hooking
into people's brains to find outspecifically what ads actually
drove them down that route.
But what you want to do as amarketer is you want to say,
okay, you just have to acceptthe fact that what you're doing
today is probably wrong.
(22:10):
Okay, just accept it.
I don't care how sophisticatedyou are, and your goal as a
marketer is that your decisionseach month, let's say you want
them to be less wrong Like thismonth.
I want my decisions to be lesswrong than they were the month
before.
It's a very simple goal,because if you say I want to be
more correct or I want to havethe right answer, there is no
(22:32):
right answer in this stuff.
So that's, first and foremost,is that everyone is using some
sort of mathematical model.
But whenever it comes to thesemathematical models, one of the
things that you should askyourself is where is the proof,
where's the validation?
Because, think about it, mathyou can always.
You know in high school,remember you're doing math.
(22:54):
You always check.
They always ask show me, showme your work.
And then you check to see ifthe number is correct.
So the cool thing with modelsthat deal with marketing is that
and this goes back to the timeof before digital we would
actually validate things, andthe way we would do it is you
give the data a bunch of models.
So, think about, like AI, youtrain the model.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
And it's all math
right.
It's all math right.
That's how the search engineswork.
It's all math.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
And then we get to a
point where we're like the
model's cranking along and it'sdoing good, and then you say,
okay, you're predicting what thesales will be, what the orders
will be based upon, how many adsare out there in the
combination of ads.
So what I'm going to do is I'mnot actually going to give you
the sales number I want you toactually now, I'm just going to
(23:44):
give you the ads that are outthere and I want you to predict
it.
So then you look at the modeland you see how well does the
model, what is the number fortoday?
Today's sales were a million.
Did it go over a million?
Did it go under a million andhow close was it?
And then you look at that over aperiod of time, like a month or
even a year's worth of data,and that's what gives you
(24:06):
confidence to say, hey, I cantrust this.
Now a lot of people will say,well, I'm using GA4.
How do I validate a GA4?
Well, you don't, and you reallycan't.
And that's the issue is that ifyou're using an approach in
terms of making decisions onwhere you're going to spend your
next dollar and there's no wayto predict and to show how well
(24:30):
your model is predicting thefuture, then you got to realize
you're not using, you're not upto par in terms of what should
be and what are best practicesthese days.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Well, you know.
So, jeff, a couple of thingsthat that at least these are
like high level metrics that Ilook at when I'm looking at what
the team's doing, right, so wehave layers of account managers
and experts, but I'm trying tokind of oversee the strategy,
what's going on, and so I'mtaking snapshots right Of like
what's happening and try to lookat it really quickly and
(25:06):
measure different things.
Like I'll look at searchconsole, depending on what we
have set up for the client,right, but we'll have.
I'll look at Search Consoleversus GA4.
And you know, I think SearchConsole is a better metric
because it's anybody that'sdriven to that page and one of
the things that you'll see andwhy Core Web Vitals and like
(25:28):
load time are so important, isyou drive advertising to a page
and it doesn't load, or theyjump and leave before the pixel
fires on the GA4.
And then you got a delta hereof like the differential, I
guess, of people that went tothe site and left immediately
before the pixel fired.
So either your website's slowand we've identified that for
(25:52):
clients I had to put together,for a really large client was
spending a lot of money.
I was like, look how much moneyyou're wasting by having a slow
website, right, like we have tofix this.
You're losing so much so wecouldn't even measure the
advertising because, like thewebsite so that's why it's
almost pass fail of core webvitals.
Like everything's got to loadso quickly because, especially
(26:13):
if you're pulling somebody offone platform to another, there's
a level of trust there you needstuff to load basically
instantly.
But then also, when I look atthe advertising, so if I'm
looking at advertising, one ofthe metrics I'm eyeballing and
looking for is going, what isthat rate of organic, maybe, or
paid, or the combination of,because Google doesn't give you
(26:34):
everything.
But if I'm doing paid or if I'mdoing display, like how quickly
are people leaving?
Like how long are thosesessions?
And I'll see some campaigns ifwe first start, which I'll have
to give it a little time, butit's like under 10 seconds,
right?
So I'm like, is this the rightaudience that we're reaching?
Because we're trying to, justlike anything else, this is an
(26:57):
answer to their question orsolving a problem for them?
Is this the right informationto be showing them?
And if they're going there andthen five seconds or 10 seconds
or three seconds are leaving,how can you say that advertising
is effective.
So, looking at the quote,unquote, dwell time, which I
know that Google has acombination of things that add
up to 12, but they say theydon't measure dwell.
(27:19):
That's really important.
Are people finding theinformation they're looking for
on the page and are theyconsuming it at that level?
Now, if it's 10 seconds andyou're getting all these signups
or purchases or whatever, maybeit is working great, but if
it's not, and you're, you're inthat testing phase.
That's one of the things thatI'm looking for immediately.
Okay, we've driven somebody here.
(27:39):
Do they stick around and forhow long?
And then, how is that weightedagainst all the other channels
to, to kind of see, of course,display less um or or typically
is less, but yeah, it shouldn'tnecessarily be if, if you're
getting the message out thereand they're ready to buy and
(28:00):
you're giving them something, uh, above the fold top of the page
, here you go.
Um, like, display is very, veryeffective of reaching a lot of
people and building a brandstory, and it's again how you're
using the tools.
But you know I I have somegreat rates on on display
advertising where people say, ohwell, that that's just not um.
(28:22):
You know that that's just notthat that's a normal rate.
I'm like well, is it workingeffectively?
Right, and I think that thatgoes in to the analytics of the
more you can see and how you canmeasure it and what you're
using it for.
Um, you can start gettingpretty sophisticated on how
you're running your ad campaigns.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
Well, time on site is
incredibly important and I'm
going to give away a littlesecret now which I should have
saved for later.
But I'm going to give it awaynow because I'm going to add a
new metric to what you'realready doing, because what
you're doing is you're lookingat time on site and relating it
to how that person showed up,what was the entrance that they
(29:01):
made to the site?
But what we know is that, inorder for people to get to the
point where they're ready toengage, there's other things
that came before that which arenot captured in GA4.
And, of course, we would wantall clients to invest in
advanced analytics and do allthis stuff, but the reality is
most are not.
(29:22):
I know that that's a fact, butone little hack that you can do
is that, as you're looking atGA4, and you're looking at it
day by day and you're looking attime on site based upon the UTM
source or whatever, you canalso go back in time for that
client for the last year anddownload from every place where
(29:44):
they advertised how manyimpressions there were for each
ad for every single day.
And so now, when you start tothink about that relationship
between time on site and theclick source instead of looking
at the source, because my guttells me that for the majority
(30:06):
of your clients, when you'relooking at the time on site and
you find that time on site isreally extended and long, and
they actually take action, thatthey come in through organic or
brand search, meaning that theyjust show up.
And so GA4 tells you that andthis is true of most clients
(30:27):
that the people who actually buyfrom you and do the actions
that you design the website todo are actually coming in
through a source that you don'tknow, meaning it's some other
source.
And so the secret to figurethat out is if you gather all of
the impression data for thelast 12 months by day and then
(30:49):
you graph it, create a graph soyou can see it day over day, and
then you create a graph of allthe clicks and then create a
graph of the time on site andcreate a graph of your sales or
leads.
Whatever you're looking at Now,start to look at when those
things happen.
When all of a sudden, time onsite goes up, clicks go up.
Now go back to your impressiongraph and go back not just a
(31:12):
couple of days, but a couple ofweeks.
You'll see an increase, maybe aday or two there.
Then you want to dig into thatday and figure it out what
happened on that day, what randuring those days, during that
timeframe, because that's theactual source of what's driving
that organic traffic, thatincreased the time on site and
(31:34):
increased the sales.
So that's the big kind ofsecret and takeaway.
And that goes back to theunderstanding of ads, because
you're buying ads and doingstuff to build awareness and
that awareness building takestime.
In fact, every ad that you buy,every ad you produce, even user
generated content, it has itsown unique time to conversion
(32:01):
and I'll explain that a littlebit more.
Let's assume that one of yourclients decides they're going to
blow $8 million Next year it'llbe $10 million on a Super Bowl
ad Awesome.
Well, chances are, if they'renot ready for it, their website
will crash.
But let's say they're all set.
They're ready to go withCloudflare, they're good to go.
That day their web traffic, assoon as the ad runs, is going to
go through the roof, and then,as soon as the ad is over, you
(32:24):
would expect it to go back downto its same level.
But the truth is that's notwhat happens.
It stays up, it goes down, butit stays up at a high level for
that entire day and, in fact,the next day it doesn't go down.
It goes down a little bit, butit still is at a huge level and
it'll stay at that huge levelfor at least seven to 10 days
(32:46):
and then eventually, it may wakeits way back down.
That phenomena is somethingthat's called advertising ad
stock, or it's also known ascarryover.
There's a great Wikipediaarticle about it.
Now, that's an extreme exampleof a Superbowl ad, or it's also
known as carryover.
There's a great Wikipediaarticle about it.
Now, that's an extreme exampleof a Superbowl ad.
And it's because, my God, 12million people, people see the
ad.
Maybe they don't go to the siteright away, maybe they go to it
(33:07):
a couple of days later, whoknows?
But every ad that's out there,every message that you put out
there, has a degree of this adstock, of this carryover, that
that, and what I mean by that isthat there's an immediate
effect when the ad happens, andthen there's there's a decrease
and a decline over time, andthat's everything from a a
(33:29):
pay-per-click ad, to a meta ad,to an Instagram ad, to a CTV ad
every one of them has it andit's by figuring out that ad
stock curve and there's a curveto it, then you can determine
what we call that time toconversion, that timeframe, and
then that's why kind of the hackis.
(33:52):
Well, let me go and grab allthe impressions for all the ads
we've done, and let's startthere.
Let's look at that curve overtime and then correlate that to
clicks, and then correlate thatto time on site, which is an
awesome metric, and then tosales, and then you'll start to
be able to unpack some of thesecrets of what's working and
(34:13):
what's not working.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
See, I my mind
immediately went to event-based
marketing or conferencemarketing of like, set up the
tracking for B2B companies to beable to look at that.
And a lot of what we've beendoing for clients recently for
conferences is pre and postmarketing as well as marketing
(34:37):
while at the conference.
Because you know the complaintwe get a lot is you know, I
spent a bunch on this conference.
My salespeople went, they cameback, they they have some names,
they maybe followed up on itand then what is the time to
that conversion?
Like, what else can we do?
A lot of these sales managershave big budgets and, um, you
(34:59):
know that that since post COVID,uh, I feel like like everybody
got a douse of like how powerfuldigital is over COVID and now
everybody's going back into theoffice and things are kind of
going back to the way they were.
But now they're like okay, likeit forwarded the progression
curve of like a digitaltransformation a lot faster.
(35:20):
So so I absolutely see that andalso one of the things I do see
in a lot of clients data causeI get to.
That's one of the cool thingsabout um working at an agency.
I get to see so many differentcampaigns and, um, our
methodology works acrossmultiple industries.
Like we, we build marketingprograms that produce leads and
(35:40):
produce new customersconsistently for clients and
across different industries.
I see spikes in data, okay, andyou know I'm usually moving a
little bit faster, but I do sayto the account managers it's
like, why did this spike?
Okay, um, what I've really seenis Reddit, reddit organic.
(36:06):
If you get, like you know, Iguess, user generated content or
people talking about your brandor you're using, like you know,
something to monitor mentionsor something like that, and some
event or some action happensand then people start to talk
about it.
I mean, I've seen spikes intraffic.
Like I'm talking, big sitestriple in traffic for a day or
(36:27):
two and then, and then certainlyit typically comes down pretty
close to where it was, but Ihave seen, depending on the
campaign or the things thatwe're doing, that new level is
higher than it was, and so thatadvertising stock is a very
interesting concept that I wouldlove to dig into more.
But, yeah, the time toconversion is absolutely there.
(36:48):
But, yeah, there's some actionthat created enough awareness of
all the other ads that aregoing on that they're familiar
with your brand based on what,what, what your, you know um,
brand promises of what you'retrying to solve, um, or the pain
point that they have thatconnects you to it.
And then you know really, um.
(37:09):
So Google has this methodologyof uh, seven, 11, four like
seven hours of consuming content, uh, senior brand, 11 times on
four different platforms.
Like they like seven hours ofconsuming content, seeing your
brand 11 times on four differentplatforms.
They've kind of boiled it downto that metric and I can see
when that big action happens, orwhether it's a PR event or
(37:30):
maybe influencer post somethingor whatever the brand repetition
.
They get comfortable with thebrand and then if they're
searching for it, and then youshow up in organic or SEO, uh,
for this term, and then theysearch for this long tail term
and you show up there again andthen they also see the ad there.
There's an affinity towardsyour brand, um, because they're
(37:51):
familiar with it, uh, and, andthen they have a higher chance
to buy from you If you'resolving the problem, if you meet
those requirements.
And of course, you have tocreate trust and even in math
that's a lot of my spring breakreading is going to be some math
models of basically how thingsare plotted on a graph or a
(38:14):
matrix and where those edges are.
And really each search inorganic there's kind of a
perfect score that you'remeasured against and then you're
competing against everybodyorganically on who answers that
question the best for thatkeyword combination.
And there's kind of weightedentropy and there's a bunch of
math associated with this andthe ads are the same way.
(38:35):
And so to understand SEO is tounderstand how the ads work,
because they're working off ofsome of the same platforms and
and they're looking at theclicks and there there's a lot.
There's a lot to understandingthe math and the analytics to
give you the visibility to makethe better decisions.
(38:56):
And I know I went on a littlebit of a tangent there, but I
thought it was worth sharing.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
It was a good tangent
, because what you're
demonstrating, matt, is thatmarketing, which used to be
primarily a creative pursuit,where people would get into
marketing because they wanted tocome up with really cool ideas,
is now in a world of math andoverly complicated.
(39:24):
And everything you were talkingabout there, concerning SEO,
has drastically shifted just inthe last 12 months from two
things.
One is that Amazon now controls35% of the search, and anybody
who is searching in the US forany product not a service, but a
(39:44):
product bypasses Google andpretty much goes direct to
Amazon.
So that's the first thing isthat the SEO for products is
completely different than itused to be, because now you have
to be optimized and have a pagein Amazon or you're going to
miss out on business.
That's number one.
And then number two is now wehave Gemini, which is showing up
(40:04):
right above everyone, andHubSpot used to be the king of
SEO for all their terms and it'sbeen published and shown how
their organic traffic justdropped down to.
I mean, it's still huge, but itlooks like.
The graph looks horriblebecause all of a sudden, people
are finding that when theyGoogle a question, that question
(40:25):
is already being answered rightthere and we haven't even
discussed the percentage of thepopulation that is now going
directly to CatGPT or other AIplatforms like DeepSeek or
Perplexity or Claude or Grok.
I mean, there's so manydifferent places.
So the world of search and again, to pan the camera back a bit,
(40:48):
this world is completelycomplicated and, like I've been
saying since I first got intothe digital space in the late
90s, and what I always have saidto clients is that if for six
months you've been doingsomething and it's been killing
it, you are on borrowed time.
(41:09):
And what I mean by that is thatall of these techniques and all
of these secrets and all of thead buying that you are doing,
just like you mentioned aboutReddit all of these techniques
and all of these secrets and allof the ad buying that you are
doing, just like you mentionedabout Reddit all of these
companies are publicly tradedand they face the pressures of
quarterly earnings, and what Imean by that is that they tweak
(41:30):
algorithms, they change theirplatforms in order to benefit
their shareholders in order tobenefit their shareholders, not
the advertisers and not themarketers.
So you have to always be onyour toes.
In today's marketing, it's lessabout creativity and more about
trying to keep up with what'scoming next.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
So I want to get in
and we can go a little bit long.
I love our conversation if youhave time because I think we're
now starting to get into andwe've teed up, like why
analytics is so important, right, because it's not one channel
anymore.
That's a silver bullet, andthat's why I wanted to bring the
(42:15):
conversation also back to thebrand conversation, cause your,
your brand, floats across allchannels.
That brand consistency and, andyou know, if you're trying to
do something on LinkedIn, forexample, okay, well, there's,
there's a LinkedIn algorithmthat you have to learn, and then
organic and then also for paid,and how do those two work
(42:37):
together?
And then you're adding anotherchannel of meta.
Now, right, and I mean, we'redoing a lot of stuff in WhatsApp
.
Okay, like, the WhatsAppfollow-up is phenomenal right
Now.
It's a moving target becauseshorts were doing really great
and then those changed, right.
And then live a couple yearsago it's constantly moving, and
I agree with you, right.
And then live like a couple ofyears ago, like it's constantly
(42:59):
moving and I agree with you,it's on borrowed time and it's
speeding up.
And then that's the big thingthat we're focused on right now
is ranking in the large languagemodels like chat GBT.
So the shift has been shiftedlike to Bing.
Right, like cause, they'repulling from Bing If people are
using chat GBT and then grok.
(43:20):
Well, twitter, right, like.
So now you have so manydifferent things playing
together and Amazon is justbecoming like the juggernaut
right Like there it is.
They're owning everything,right, and, and you have to warm
up those accounts and therethere's certain metrics that
that that you have to hit, andthey're building communities
inside Amazon.
(43:42):
Right, like cause.
They want to just be the oneapp for for everything.
And so there is then the, the,the, the zero position, and the,
the, the Gemini and AIoverviews and ranking there.
And that's not pulled from thefirst church result, like you
know.
So you're getting a schema.
So, you're right, everythinghas gotten more complicated.
So for the traditionalmarketers out there that may be
(44:05):
listening to this podcast tryingto figure out digital I'm sorry
, the world's gotten hard, okay,the world's gotten a lot harder
and for the new marketers thatare out there, you need to go
back to some of the basics ofbranding, right, so the pendulum
swinging the other way,absolutely.
Now getting into theconversation that it took 40
minutes to have that I know weboth want to have is well,
(44:29):
analytics sits in the middle ofit and you have to understand
what's going on and how allthese things interact.
And now there's so manydifferent variables.
But you have the power of ainow to help you figure out the
connections.
I mean, if you look at whatdoge is doing with the
government, like I think he'sgot the whole government mapped
out of where the spending isgoing, but he couldn't have
(44:49):
figured all that out like I mean, this is going to be a popcorn
kind of watch what happens overtime.
And I'm not trying to point anypolitical things, but the
access to the data and the powerof the data that he has of like
the connections you can find,can, of course, be applied to
marketing first, and that's howall these big companies have
(45:11):
applied it.
And now we're talking aboutmonetizing data, monetizing
information, attention, likethat is the real currency, right
Is is your brand on people'smind?
Like how does it make them feel?
What does it get them to do?
What is the call to action thatyou have?
Like, so it becomes overlycomplex, but it's also quite
(45:34):
beautiful to, to a certaindegree, of like understanding
the art of how all thisinteracts.
But you got to have eyes, yougot to be able to see what's
happening, and the more you'reable to see, the better
decisions you're able to make.
So I would love to transitionthe conversation to Provolitics
and what it offers, and what aresome of the challenges that
(45:58):
you're solving when we talkabout analytics.
Speaker 3 (46:02):
Yeah, I think the
biggest problems that we solve
is marketers today don't have asingle source of truth that they
can rely upon.
And the reason that that'simportant, especially for larger
marketers and I'm talking tochief marketing officers, vps of
marketing is that there'salways that very important
(46:25):
budget question.
As a marketer, I want moremoney, because the more money I
have, the more bigger team I canhave, the bigger win I can have
.
And that's what you want andwhat's happening right now in
organizations.
So imagine a typical company.
You've got a bunch of in-housemarketers that are managing,
let's say, five differentagencies and you're using, let's
(46:48):
say, ga4.
And each agency is working on adifferent channel.
They each have those platformmetrics, like what Google says,
what Meta says.
So that's five differentsources of truth plus GA4.
So we're at six, and then eachone of them is also going to do
their own analysis.
So that's another five, that's11.
Speaker 2 (47:11):
Okay, and they're all
siloed and not talking to each
other and you don't know whatimpacts are happening where
right?
Speaker 3 (47:18):
And then on top of
that, we've got an Amazon team
that has a completely differentset of metrics.
I have a wall.
They don't talk, they don'ttalk like Amazon.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
There's like a wall
there.
They do not talk to the rest ofthe marketing, yeah.
Speaker 3 (47:30):
And then same with
same with Walmart too.
So all these teams have theirown budgets.
And here you are, you're aheadof all of these marketers.
None of them are talking.
So now we're up to about 15different sources of truth.
And you go in and you talk toyour CMO or to the CFO finance
and they're looking at theirinternal dashboards and it's
(47:52):
bringing in GA4 data and theproblem is is that you want to
go and get a bigger budget forconnected television because
your connected television agencytold you it worked really well
and you saw something.
You saw more sales come inthrough organic.
And your CFO is looking in GA4and looking for the tab that
(48:12):
says connected television andthere is no connected television
tab in GA4.
There's no podcast tab, there'sno TV tab, there's no TV tab,
there's no radio tab.
There's none of that stuff.
That's inside of GA4.
So what we do is is that we comein with a platform that takes
in data from all of thesedifferent platforms, takes in
(48:33):
data from the client's datawarehouse, and we built an AI
driven model that literally kindof looks at the world through
the lens of how it was beforedigital and the way it was
before digital is thateverything was based on
attention and eyeballs.
How many eyeballs were youtrying to reach Impressions, and
(48:53):
so the best thing aboutimpressions is that it allows us
to look at everything under thekind of the same lens.
So think about it.
Podcast advertising is huge.
It's taking off.
A lot of ads in podcastadvertising today, a lot of ads
in connected television, a lotof ads with what we call digital
out of home, those digitalbillboards you see when you
(49:15):
drive and yet you know reallyquickly.
Speaker 2 (49:19):
Do you remember when
they sold cable, as you got to
pay for cable so you don't haveto have ads, right?
Oh yeah, that was back in theday.
Speaker 3 (49:29):
Yeah, I was just
talking to someone this morning
at the gym about this about now.
I can't download and watch thewhole show all the way through.
It only comes out once a week,I have to pay for it and there's
ads and I'm like, okay, how didthis?
Speaker 2 (49:42):
improve Well, even on
the phones now the game.
So I want to give my kids thelike games on my iPhone.
The game on my phone that comewith it now have ads in the
games, like I mean we're it is.
It is wild the access.
(50:22):
It's bad on one end if you'rethe consumer and you can access
people anywhere at any time,like doing anything, so the
world opens up of what you cando, right, like.
So it's always a double-edgedsword.
Sorry, I interrupted you.
Go back to it.
Speaker 3 (50:35):
So what we do is is
that we enable the marketer to
bring all this data together inour platform, then we use a
model that goes through andfigures out what's working and
what's not working, and it'sbased on incremental impact.
So, just like we talked aboutat the beginning of our
(50:55):
conversation, if an ad if, if,if an ad wouldn't have actually
driven additional sales, it'snot going to get credit.
So it's all based uponincrementality.
And then we bring it alltogether and unify all of this
stuff and then actually tellthem what the very granular
(51:16):
recommendations are where theyshould be spending and how they
should take their budget andreallocate it, not just for
those five agencies, but we alsoincorporate the Amazon and the
Walmart.
So we look at the whole brandholistically, because what's
happening today is that you runan ad and you tell people to buy
on your website and that adbuilds awareness and they say,
(51:37):
oh, let me check out Amazon,like we talked about earlier.
So that's the key is that, eventhough you're telling people to
buy in one place, they'rebuying someplace else, and that
makes measuring more and moredifficult, and so what our
platform does for these much,very large advertisers is tell
them how to actually move theirmoney around in order to get
(51:58):
more return for the sameadvertising dollars, so it
enables them to be moreefficient and increase their
sales, and so that's really whatwe solve.
The biggest problem is creatingthat single source of truth
within an organization.
Speaker 2 (52:14):
All right.
So I want to drill down.
I know we're a little over timehere, but I wanted to drill
down and just get a little geekyon me on the AI that you built
and the model of, like, how it'sanalyzing the data right,
because AI is so powerful.
Okay.
So, like, just what are some ofthe thought logic that's
(52:35):
happening with your AI?
Because, like, hey, there'sgoing to be people out there
that are saying I do AIanalytics, right, like, that's
going to be the new hot thing,like everybody's like
everybody's calling me like AIagency.
It was funny.
It was like.
This was like nine months agowe landed a client and, um, uh,
they called and said the onlyreason we're talking to you, the
only reason we're talking toyou, is because we were
(52:58):
searching on perplexity and youcame up number one as the SEO
agency on perplexity.
Okay, and this is eight monthsago, okay, and and and my first
question was like what isperplexity?
Like that, like we were, wewere doing, we were doing yeah,
I mean we were doing quality SEO, right, like that's what we
(53:20):
were doing.
We were doing quality SEO.
I wasn't kind of like trying totrick the algorithm to optimize
for that, like I was just doing.
You know quality SEO and itrecognized that Right, and so
you know.
Speaker 3 (53:34):
I'll give you.
I'll give you a couple of thesecrets of what we do and what
the AI does.
Speaker 2 (53:38):
Okay, so what it's?
I'll give you a couple of thesecrets of what we do and what
the AI does.
Speaker 3 (53:41):
Yeah, see how it
works, right.
What it's looking at?
Yeah, so what it looks at is itlooks at that causal
relationship between all ofthese paid, earned and owned
campaigns.
For some of our clients, we'retaking in all of their PR data,
all of their organic Facebookposts, everything.
And what it's looking at is wetalked about this earlier it's
looking at that ad stock,meaning those campaigns, how
(54:03):
long they have an effect for.
But then it also looks for thisconcept of what we call
saturation.
What I mean by that is thateverything you do where you're
spending dollars, there'ssomething called a marginal
response curve, and what thatmeans is is that, hey, I can
keep spending dollars on meta,they'll keep taking my money,
(54:24):
and I can keep spending more, Ican increase my budget.
So you hit a plateau or athreshold, right?
Yeah, you're going to reach athreshold, whereas you keep
spending.
So let's say, for every dollarI'm spending, I'm getting $10 in
revenue back.
So I double my spend and nowI'm at a nine, I'm getting $9
back.
That's great.
I doubled again, now I'm downto a five, and what that means
(54:45):
is that eventually that curve isgoing to start to go down.
And so, as you're lookingacross a very large campaign,
you want to start to think aboutwell, once I get from a 10 to a
nine to a five, is theresomething else that, right
around the same time, isactually going to give me a 6.5?
Maybe I should move somedollars over there, the level of
(55:07):
complications that are here.
Then, on top of that, the thirdthing is this concept of what we
call media synergies.
What I mean by that is that anad has a certain response that's
associated with it, both itsimmediate response and that
long-term ad stock response.
(55:27):
But when you combine one ad withanother, when someone is
exposed to, let's say, aconnected television ad and
maybe a display ad or a certainretargeting ad, it's not one
plus one equals two, it's oneplus one equals seven.
So in order to figure out thoseactual synergies, the math
(55:48):
that's involved is actually evenmore complicated, and you have
to run what we call simulations,where we take every single day
and we remove a very grand.
It's like we take that day andwe say to the platform we're
going to remove this one ad thisday.
You had a million dollars insales.
(56:10):
Now we're going to take this adout, and I want you to run a
simulation and figure out whatour sales would have been for
that day, because that allows usto actually calculate that
synergistic amount.
So it goes through this wholeprocess and then it layers in,
interestingly enough, twotechniques, both of which have
(56:31):
been around one for a very longtime.
The first technique is calledBayesian.
Bayesian is what's driving mostof the AI today and all of the
machines.
Speaker 2 (56:44):
The Markovian,
basically the advanced Markovian
right.
Speaker 3 (56:47):
Right, and that was
developed in the 1700s, a long
time ago before there werecomputers.
The other technique we use is atechnique out of the University
of Chicago that was developedin the early 60s, called
seemingly unrelated regressions.
Traditionally, whenstatisticians and math experts
(57:10):
would solve these types ofmarketing equations, they would
separate them based upon thechannel.
So they would solve the mathfor TV, separate it from search,
separate it from digital andthen manually combine them
together.
But that creates a scenariothat doesn't simulate what the
(57:33):
real world is.
The real world is all.
This stuff is all happening atthe same time.
Seemingly unrelated regressionsallows us to solve that all at
the same time.
Once we solve it all, then wewant to go back and see how did
we do?
We want to check our math, andthe way we do that is we use a
validation technique calledK-fold, which is common in
(57:54):
learning engines and machinelearning, where you want to
quickly iterate and what thatallows you to do is to hold back
a certain amount of, in ourcase, days, and what we do is we
hold back 20% of the days.
We train it with a month'sworth of data, we hold back 20%
of the days and then we run itfive times, so we actually do
(58:16):
what's called K fold five, andso we end up with a validated
result where we hold back ahundred percent of the data, and
so we can actually say, hey,this is how well the model
performed for the entire lastyear's worth of data, and that
gives our clients confidence toknow hey, I can start running
(58:37):
some tests based upon therecommendations of this model,
which is really cool.
Speaker 2 (58:43):
No, I love that.
I love that.
All right, jeff Provalytics,jeff Greenfield, go check them
out.
Where's the best place to findyou?
Where are you actively posting,talking about some of this
geeky math stuff, which I love?
Like I, I've really enjoyed ourconversation, um, I, I think we
(59:03):
could do a part two, uh, andand go even deeper on some of
this stuff, because I think, uh,there's there's a lot of uh
things that we're talking aboutuh from a different angle.
That definitely connect, uh, butyeah, how?
How's what's the best place forpeople to find you or find out
more what you do?
Check your out.
Speaker 3 (59:19):
Well, they can go to
Provalyticscom, but the place
where I'm the most active is onLinkedIn, so find me on LinkedIn
, check me out there.
I pretty much post somethingjust about every single day.
Speaker 2 (59:32):
To hit the algorithm
right.
Yeah, of course, one of thebiggest tips that I got that you
know, 15 minutes a day.
Set your timer 15 minutes a daybecause you've got to feed the
algorithm.
Like, and you know, youtubesays they don't punish creators
for not producing content, butthey absolutely do Right, yeah,
(59:53):
right, and so that's where thesecompilations and things for not
producing content, but theyabsolutely do right.
Of course they do, yeah.
Right, and so that's where thesecompilations and things people
are running stuff live likecause they, you gotta hit, you
gotta hit the metrics.
So everybody, go definitelycheck out Jeff's work.
Go check out Provolitics.
(01:00:13):
I'll put the link to hisLinkedIn and his company in the
show notes.
Jeff, thank you so much forcoming on Everyone that's
listening.
If you enjoyed thisconversation, please share it
like it.
It really helps us.
We are trying to move over toYouTube.
We are going to be pushing outsome more shorts.
(01:00:34):
We may be changing the name ofthe podcast.
I know that we've had thispodcast name for 13 years, so
that's really scary to me, but Iwill let you know more about
that.
If you are looking to grow yourbusiness, if all this stuff is
making your head spin and youneed a trusted source, a
marketing agency, to reach out,to reach out to EWR Digital for
(01:00:58):
more revenue in your business, Alot of people don't connect
this podcast with our agency.
We've been in business since1999, beginning of the internet,
and we've seen it happen.
My mom was one of the firstemployees of Microsoft.
I got some great stories.
Going to have some more greatguests.
Thank you for supporting us.
Until the next time.
My name is Matt Bert.
(01:01:18):
Great guests, Thank you forsupporting us.
Until the next time, my name isMatt Bertram.
This is the Unknown Secrets.
Bye-bye for now.