March 17, 2025 • 50 mins
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Ever feel like your marketing data is giving you half-truths? You're not alone. In this eye-opening conversation with Dan McGaw, founder and CEO of UTM.io, we dive deep into the critical but often overlooked foundation of all marketing attribution: UTM parameters and proper data governance.
We explore the real challenges marketing ops professionals face in implementing consistent UTM parameters across global organizations. Dan shares practical insights on how to transform your approach from the ubiquitous "UTM spreadsheet" to more robust systems that enforce taxonomies and ensure data quality. His advice comes with empathy for the marketing ops professionals caught between demanding VPs and busy campaign managers who "just want to get their job done."
Whether you're struggling with attribution models, considering a CDP, or simply trying to bring order to chaotic UTM parameters, this episode offers practical wisdom from someone who's seen it all. Dan's parting advice? Start with a spreadsheet to solve 85% of the problem, then iterate until you're ready for specialized tools. It's a refreshing reminder that sometimes the simplest solutions lay the groundwork for sophisticated attribution strategies.
Ready to bring order to your marketing attribution? Listen now and discover the power of proper data governance.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of
OpsCast brought to you byMarketingOpscom, powered by the
MoPros.
I'm your host, michael Hartman,joined today by Mike Rizzo.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hey everybody, welcome back, I'm here.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
This is new at noon Improved setup there.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
We're trying something new.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
At least new, anyway.
So we've got a guest with ustoday and we're looking forward
to talking about.
This is Dan McGaw.
So Dan is an award-winningentrepreneur and speaker.
He is the founder and CEO ofUTMio.
He has been coined as one ofthe original growth hackers and
is the former head of marketingat Kissmetrics.
(00:37):
In 2015, dan was selected to bea United States Ambassador of
Entrepreneurship by the UnitedStates government a thing that I
didn't even know existed wherehe had the privilege to advise
universities, governments andprivate corporations on how to
build entrepreneur ecosystems.
So, dan, thanks for joining ustoday, late in the day for you.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Yeah, thanks for having me, so I appreciate being
here.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Yeah, so I'm excited, so we'll hit the ground running
here.
So one of the topics and youand I talked about this, Dan
that we've covered regularly onthis podcast and continues to be
a hot topic it feels like everyweek or two there's something
on LinkedIn or in the Slackgroup for our marketing ops
folks out there is reporting,analytics, including attribution
(01:23):
, so and one of the things thatwe've talked about that's really
important is data governance,especially around UTM parameters
, something you know a littlebit about and at least I often
say discipline the discipline ofusing them consistently is key
to getting quality reporting.
So what's your take on just theimportance of that and why,
(01:50):
especially as we get into thisage of AI, where I think we've
all seen AI produce sort offictional stuff I guess is the
nicest way I could put it yeah,so your thoughts?
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Well, I mean, I think the first thing we have to
understand, like, just even withai and ai agents and ai
reporting and all that stuff,right if you feed it bad data,
it's not going to really be allthat helpful.
So, I mean, I think datagovernance is becoming even more
and more important, because aiis simply automation right, and
if you automate a shitty process, you're just going to have a
bigger pile of trash than youwould have had in the first
place.
Um, so you definitely want tomake sure that you have a
(02:26):
process set up to do that, butwhen we think about, like,
naturally, why do you want tohave a good data taxonomy and a
good way to enforce governanceis, at the end of the day, you
won't have good attribution.
And most organizations,especially a B2B organization,
right Like you need to make surethat you can actually
understand where pipeline iscoming from, so that way you can
either spend more on what'sworking or spend less on what's
(02:49):
not working, and without cleanattribution, you just don't have
that ability.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Yeah, mike, you're about to say something.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Yeah, I just think attributions, the four-letter
word, it feels like when itcomes to marketing ops, it's
like man, it's such a hot buttonitem and I think sometimes the
the I don't know On the subjectof automation and AI and just
(03:22):
like proprietary sort of walledgardens giving you what they
think is working versus or whatthey say is working.
I think the value of having areally strong foundation for
your UTM products and your ownprocess for analyzing your data
(03:44):
is that I'll bet you, if you digin, sometimes those proprietary
walled gardens are actuallylying to you.
And we're starting to see alittle bit of that right, like
we're, we're, we're noticing,like the down funnel, sort of
like attribution metrics, quote,unquote, uh are not necessarily
as cut and dry as the systemsare saying, because if you
(04:09):
actually go unpack some of thetraffic that you're getting, if
you have a strong system inplace to do so, you're able to
tie back some of thetransactions or at least the
conversion points and thetraffic sources.
That they're saying maybewasn't really there before, and
I know that.
I know I'm kind of likespeaking around about terms,
(04:30):
because I've only seen a handfulof these little moments pop up
on LinkedIn and it's not myexperience, so I don't want to
like steal somebody's thunder onthat.
But you know, dan, I don't know.
I would love to hear yourthoughts on you know, this idea
of these again, like LinkedIn,facebook, these are all walled
gardens, right, like?
They have their own ad networksand ways of tracking things.
(04:54):
Do you agree, disagree, like?
What are your thoughts?
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Yeah, no, I mean, I think at the end of the day, you
should never be using Facebook,linkedin or Google Ads
conversion tracking at the endof the day, to be what's driving
the ship.
I mean, they're going to takeas much credit as they possibly
can, no matter what, becauseit's in their best interest,
right?
If you don't have access tothat data, you can't actually
(05:20):
understand if it's true and youcan't tell the difference
between a bot on Google Ads likeyou can on your own stack.
So if you want properattribution, you really do need
to have a first-party trackingworld, and that's where UTMs are
going to be one of the mostpowerful things, and I can't
tell you the number of companiesthat I work with that they're
like hey, listen, we're spending$2 million a year on Facebook.
(05:42):
We're spending $4 million onGoogle Ads $2 million a year on
Facebook.
We're spending $4 million onGoogle Ads and we're just using
the out-of-the-box tracking fromGoogle Ads.
We've got the GCLID on the backend and we trust all of our
reporting to them and once theymove to a first-party world
where they're actually storing,they're using one.
You can still use GoogleAnalytics as a first-party
tracking tool, because it's justgoing to report what you give
(06:03):
it.
Don't get me wrong, you don'thave access to all the data.
But if you start tracking UTMsin your Marketo forms and of
course you're processing all theway through, you're leveraging
products like a CDP that'sconsuming your data, sending it
to a data warehouse, you'regoing to have a much, much more
realistic picture of what'sactually happening, compared to
applying too much credit to anyone of those channels.
(06:25):
And in a lot of cases right, weunderstand, like with
multi-touch attribution whichagain I would say is also
another four letter word outthere at this point right, like,
luckily, with multi-touchattribution, though at least you
understand, hey, this oneconversion that Google's taking
credit for, linkedin's takingcredit for and Facebook's taking
credit for, that was only oneconversion.
Right, so you can have a betterability to actually improve
(06:47):
your return on ad spend.
But I think that's just theinitial few stages of that of
making sure that you have yourown tracking methodology.
You have your own first partyworld where you're capturing
your own data.
I think what's interesting iswhen you start tying that
information to okay, so weunderstand, somebody came in
(07:10):
from a Facebook ad, we canactually identify that because
of course, it has appropriateUTMs.
But I think the second part ofthat is how do you make sure
that you design a UTM taxonomyto ultimately create a
convention which is going togive you additional reporting
and going to what we see a lotin the B2B space, especially
with marketing ops people, isyou've got to take in campaign
type.
You've got to take in theawareness channel.
You've got to take in was it alead gen thing?
(07:30):
You've got to make sure youknow what geo is coming from.
You've got to understand whatwas the key asset type.
And creating that convention inthe name field of a campaign is
where you really start gettingthe granularity and you really
start getting the actualunderstanding of, like, what
type of things are happening,because you can now report on it
in a Looker Studio or a PowerBI report or inside of a
(07:52):
Salesforce report, which youwouldn't be able to do in any of
those walled gardens at all.
They wouldn't give you thatinformation.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Yeah, I mean I've said for a long time, like the
UTM, getting your UTM parametersor any other things you're
using when you're putting stuffout in the market and having to
split around, that is the glueright to everything else, right?
It doesn't matter really, ifyou really want to understand
what's working, what's notworking and you don't want to do
what I inherited at one place,which is every campaign got a
(08:21):
unique landing page right, evenif it was exactly the same as
the one that was used for theprevious campaign, because that
was the only way we could trackit, and I was like I'd put a
stop to that nonsense as quicklyas I could.
Well, I mean, it's just well,it's inherently I laugh because
it's so true.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
That was the same thing as forums.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Yeah, yeah.
So it was a matter of likegetting the right scripting on
the pages and capturing it andgetting you know.
But to me, like there's twopieces of this that are really
important, right, one is likehaving the right taxonomy,
having the right standards youwant for codes or campaign names
(09:00):
, things like that.
But also then those do no goodif people don't actually who are
putting the stuff together togo out in the market are not
actually using it, which I haveseen Right and it's easy to miss
along the way.
If you're saying I'm going to,just I'm reusing the same
campaign, I'm doing somethingacross multiple channels, so
(09:21):
I've got your URL and I make amistake in copying and I forget
to update one of the parameters.
I'm going from Facebook toGoogle Ads, to whatever, and I
forget to do that.
So how do you guide yourcustomers and clients of UTMio?
How do you guide them to try toaddress that problem?
(09:44):
Is that even something?
Speaker 2 (09:45):
that the adoption piece.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Well, not just.
It's not even adoption.
I think there's part of hisadoption.
Part of it is just people aremoving so damn quick right that
they sometimes miss that right.
So how do you kind of have thechecks in place that still allow
you to move quickly but not,like, still get that the
benefits downstream?
Speaker 3 (10:05):
Yeah, yeah, I mean naturally, like I think
everybody's familiar with theUTM spreadsheet, right.
So like that is like thegeneric standard everybody's
going to start with.
But in the UTM spreadsheetthere's only so much you can
actually do to kind of lockthings in.
And that's where we've seen andwe've seen some really cool
things, right, like we've seenpeople build air tables, we've
seen people do things in Codawhich are pretty powerful, right
(10:28):
.
And we've had a lot of B2Bcustomers who have come to us
after using Coda and pushingCoda's databases and tables to
the ultimate limit.
And those products are great,right.
And what I think in our productwhich a lot of people really
appreciate is the fact that youcan assign a rule ultimately to
the way that somebody needs tobuild the UTM structure and then
also be able to say, hey, ifthey select social as medium,
(10:52):
they have to be able to out ofthe solar cities, they're only
going to be allowed to selectfrom these options.
And if they select geo as NorthAmerica namer, right, ok, great
, they're only going to haveaccess to these campaigns, right
.
Or if they select EMEA, they'reonly going to have access to
these campaigns, right.
Or if they select EMEA, they'reonly going to have access to
these campaigns.
So being able to enforce thosereally really complex things is
really difficult, especially ifyou're like a global
organization right, like one ofour clients, hexagon right, like
(11:16):
there's 36 different brandsbased in 27 different countries.
Trying to coordinate all ofthat and then do that in a
spreadsheet or a Coda street orsomething like that becomes just
kind of unwieldy and it justdoesn't make it easy and it
makes it frustrating because atthe end of the day, you've got a
VP of marketing who wantsaccurate marketing attribution.
(11:36):
You've got this poor marketingoperations manager, a director
of marketing operations, gettingyelled at by the VP my reports
suck.
Then you have the marketingoperations person trying to tell
the social media manager, anemail marketer, an advertiser
and a field marketer hey, youkeep messing up the UTMs and I'm
getting in trouble.
You got to use this spreadsheetbetter.
So it really puts the MOPSperson in a bad situation
(11:58):
because both sides the VP andthe social media manager are
going to complain, which is, Ithink, one of the things that is
the un With mobs.
Professionals like they reallysuffer in this environment
because they're in the middle ofall the arguments and they
don't get enough credit.
They don't get enough empathy.
They just got to make it workright, and so that's where I
(12:20):
think there's cool tools thatmake it easier.
Obviously, I'll shamelesslyplug utmio in there.
There, I think there's cooltools that make it easier.
Obviously, I'll shamelesslyplug utmio in there.
There's other ways to do it.
Like I mentioned, coda andthings like that, and
spreadsheets.
There's definitely.
I mean, I've seen some shit soI don't know, can I swear on
this podcast?
Sorry?
Speaker 2 (12:35):
You so definitely can .
Okay, cool, sorry, look, wehost the no bullshit demos for a
reason.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
Like it's a very good point.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Yeah, uh, no, it makes a ton of sense.
Yeah, I've seen, I've seen somenonsense too.
I have to, I have to agree.
Um, I think it's.
I.
I just think it's a reallyclear case, you know for, for
our listeners, if you want totake a clip of this show right
here, right now, and say, hey,this is, this is the clear case
for why bespoke tools are, youknow, better than a spreadsheet?
(13:11):
Because you you think, oh,can't I just do that in a
spreadsheet?
It's like, well, yeah, but atsome point it's actually gonna
break and as you say, I don'tknow, I can.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
I can tell you.
Probably dozens of times we'vehad a shared spreadsheet.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
We've had to go back and undo someone overriding
those complicated formulas rightand yeah because they weren't
protected and someone was movingfast and screwed it up yep, all
those concatenation rules thatyou have set up the macros, and
(13:49):
then you get some people who getlike super advanced, they throw
some visual basic on there andthey just try to make it so
super, super complex.
Like, yeah, so it can getdifficult.
I mean it's, it's similar tolike a product like lean data
right, like you didn't know youneeded it, but once you had it,
you can't live without it.
Um, cause it just does so muchthat enables you to run so much
better.
Um, so there's definitely toolsthat are going to make your,
(14:11):
your world better.
But I think, like what we tryto understand at utmio, is that
we have to remember, at the endof the day, the person who's
building the link.
Right, they do not care aboutyour marketing attribution, they
just want to get their job done.
They just want to post onLinkedIn, they just want to get
the ad live, they just want toset up their booth at the field
marketing event, so like they're.
In some cases, some people makethem like as if they're the
(14:32):
enemy because they're the onemessing up the data, but it's
like they just want to get theirjob done and that spreadsheet
is not always the most easy wayto.
But I will say I lovespreadsheets.
Like I use spreadsheets foreverything.
Build a process.
Once I've designed a process,okay, great, let's figure out
the tool.
I just was doing a webinar,maybe about two and a half
months ago, and everybody waslike, oh, we buy tools and it
(14:53):
solves problems.
And I'm like, no, no, no,that's not how this works.
Like you, design a process tosolve the problem, start with a
spreadsheet, build the processand then say, okay, we
understand what the hell we'redoing now.
Now let's go find the tool thatcan replace the spreadsheet,
because that spreadsheet's notgonna ultimately survive because
there's so many error proneways.
Like I mean, even our pipelineat my other company, mcgaw our
(15:15):
deal pipeline with MedPick iscurrently being done in a
spreadsheet.
Now do my sales reps like mefor this?
No, they wanna go back toSalesforce.
They wanna make it so thateverything's in Salesforce.
But we're transforming oursales process so we're using
everything in a spreadsheet sowe can figure out every single
step, every single category.
And then, once that's done, I'mthen going to go hire one of
the freelancers in marketing opscommunity and be like can you
(15:37):
build this in HubSpot for us soit works in Salesforce?
Speaker 2 (15:42):
That's a good way to do it.
We did the same.
We we started everything likeour sales process, uh, when
we're trying to engage withsponsors and things like that.
We were like, all right, let's,let's just lay this all out in
columns first and start trackinghey, how many touches did you
actually try today and all thatkind of stuff and then
eventually bring that over.
And I think that's true for,you know, running a business in
(16:04):
general, let alone a department,right?
Um, I think it's important.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Most people don't do that.
Yeah, I think there's somevalue in living with those
constraints, right Cause thetool, like the tool, is going to
.
If you're using a spreadsheet,it's going to limit you on what
you can do.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Yeah, and it's, it's.
It's a fascinating thing tothink about too.
Just because you're I don'tknow, I'm sure maybe forced into
constraints you actually have,you actually have to think, you
(16:48):
have to work a little harder tolike figure out what your
process is, and and so I think,I think it's an important step
to doing all this stuff.
Anyway, it's, it's a good, goodsubject to talk about, but yeah
, so so we?
Speaker 1 (17:00):
it's interesting Cause you brought up this to me
this is a often forgotten partfor a lot of marketing ops books
.
You said that they think of thepeople who are actually
deploying this stuff as theenemy, which I see a lot of that
too, which I think is a wrongway to think about it.
Right, and I think if you gointo it with that, it's going to
be hard to get them to listento you when you are trying to
(17:22):
get them to change theirbehavior.
But so maybe one of theargument, one of the ways to do
that, in my view, would be likehelp them understand what the
downstream impacts are.
So when you see these brokenprocesses and inconsistent ways
of using things like utmparameters, like, what do you
see is as the downstream impactsthat would impact those people
(17:47):
who are the problem child people?
Speaker 3 (17:51):
Yeah, well, I mean the biggest thing that I always
try to help people understand,especially if you're in a mops
role or even any type of roleand you're having to sell
something downstream to get themto take advantage of it.
There's a great thing calledthe Hero's Journey Framework by
Joseph Campbell.
And try to figure out how youmake them in a story.
Right, you understand that youneed to make this person the
hero, which means they need tohave a reward at the end of the
(18:11):
story, and they're trying toovercome a challenge, and your
job is simply just to be theguide that helps them get
through that, right?
So we always try to make surethat we understand what that
reward is, and a lot of times,that reward for a social media
manager hey, listen, you'regoing to be able to show that
the work you're doing is drivingpipeline, and you're either
going to get a raise, you'regoing to get a bonus, you might
get a promotion, but firstyou're most likely to get more
(18:32):
budget, which is a lot of things.
What these teams really want isthey want more budget so they
can do more of what they'redoing.
So, even if you think about afield marketing manager, their
job is to drive pipeline throughevents, but because they don't
have effective means of trackingall of those folks at an event,
they need tools to ultimatelyhelp them do that.
So you need to be able toclearly communicate to them like
(18:53):
, listen, I understand that,like, hey, your boss is probably
on your ass in regards tojustifying how much we're
spending on this event, but whatyou're now able to do is make
sure that you have clean QRcodes which you're going to be
able to use at the event.
All of your links will beproperly tagged.
That way, I can get Susan, theVP of marketing, to see that you
actually are driving 20% morepipeline than what is not being
(19:15):
captured, because, no matterwhat you're going to do, you
can't track everything.
We still have dark social, westill have word of mouth, there
are still those things but thereare ways to make it so that you
can increase the amount oftouch points that are trackable,
and that's where you really cantry to sell that story and make
them the hero ultimately, wherethey have a reward of more
budget, more accolades, morecredit for the good work that
(19:37):
they're doing.
And I don't know about you, butas a CEO, I give my team a good
job when they did somethingcool.
But when they actually drivepipeline and I can measure it to
them, I give them money and Ithink for a lot of people money
really matters.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
Yeah, no, I think there's something.
It's interesting because I lovethe idea that you're using I
forget I already forgot what yousaid it's called but that
storytelling piece right, and Ithink-.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
Yeah, Hero's Journey Framework.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
What's interesting to me is there's a little bit of a
side tangent here, but this issomething that I think is a
misnomer.
Everybody wants to be quotedata-driven right, and I think
there's value.
I think being data-driven isimportant, yeah, but if that's
all you do and you don't thinkabout the storytelling part of
(20:27):
it, you're missing the chance toreally impact, like really get
somebody to listen to the storypart of it.
So they may not eat, like thedata may mean nothing to them,
until you can put it in context,give them the story because,
yeah, that's how, that's howhumans communicate in general.
Right, it's based on stories.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
So that makes total sense to me.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
So I'm going to ask this random thought, random
question for for you, dan, thethe community sort of
gamification person in me is is.
I've had this idea before andI'm wondering if you've ever
tried it or have a um, apotential destination in your
product for it.
(21:14):
Like it'd be great if we couldjust reward people, like you
talked about rewarding peopleright, like, hey, the outcome at
the end of the hero's journeyis potentially a raise or more
budget or whatever, but alongthe way it'd be really fun to
gamify Like who did the most,who created the most trackable
(21:35):
links right, departmentally, asan individual, what you know,
whatever it is.
Have you ever heard of anybodydoing that Like as a, as a
method to drive adoption?
Speaker 3 (21:47):
Yeah, adoption yeah, this is actually something we're
building into the product laterthis year as a leaderboard.
Um, we've had this requestmultiple times because they want
to get more adoption and theyfeel by showing a leaderboard of
, hey, we have a leaderboard,who created the most links which
isn't always the fairest thing,right, because your social
media manager is going to createmore links than your field
marketing manager but then alsotallying in who has the most
(22:09):
clicks and things like that, whohas the most accurate links,
and different things like that.
So, yeah, we are looking atleaderboard and designing that
for later this year to try togamify it.
We have tested some interestingthings where you could like, as
a in the link table, you canbasically give somebody a thumbs
up or thumbs down on theirultimate link because you can
give them feedback.
We tested that for a littlewhile, which it was so-so.
(22:31):
Obviously there wasn't a lot ofthumbs downs, but you could
give somebody kudos and credits.
That was kind of cool.
But I think a leaderboard isgoing to be naturally what's
going to be most helpful.
What we want to try to do isattach it to Pipeline and
Salesforce or HubSpot, sowhoever's links are driving the
most pipeline.
You can actually be able to seethat in the product.
So, but yeah, I thinkgamification really helps.
(22:53):
I think the product which isinteresting I don't know if
anybody uses Fathom.
I recently am testing Fathomvideo for recording my meetings
and stuff like that.
You get points for everythingin that product, right.
So like recording your firstmeeting, you get like 25 points.
I think they maybe are likeskewed way too far, because I
don't know if it's working forthem.
(23:13):
For me.
I was like I went to my profilepage, I got 25 points.
I signed out, I got 10 points.
It was like wait a second, I'mgetting too many points here.
So gamification does workthough.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Yeah, yeah, but you them, yeah, yeah.
But you know you could tellright out of the gate with that
product, like they built it withthe intention of like you know,
there's products that throwstuff in later and it sort of
feels like an afterthought, andthen you can, you could tell
fathom was like hey, we're justgoing to start with.
Gamification is like the waythat we're going to try to get
people to adopt this thing andthat's like a whole freemium
(23:46):
model.
It feels like they startedthere.
I could be wrong about that,obviously, uh but I don't know.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
I'm the late adopter to fathom for sure yeah, same,
but that's cool, all right, cool.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
I.
That's just where my brain goes, like when you think about
running.
Uh, you know, in a community,for example, we're often you
know we're not using a propercommunity forum product when
most of us are hanging out inSlack.
I'd love for everybody to goadopt our forum product, and we
will see more of that in thecoming months.
However, the benefits of thoseforum products are that you get
(24:17):
to find who's sort of mosttopically relevant or answers
the most questions around aparticular thing, or is most
influential and all that otherstuff.
And so my brain often, when Ithink about products like yours,
utmio, um, when you're, whenyou're trying to get people to
find the right resources orperform the right action, you
(24:37):
want to, you want to reward themfor those things, um, and so
it's interesting.
Uh, you know, we'll have tocome back around and look at it
in real time once you, once youguys, get that out in the market
.
But thanks for sharing.
I had no idea that was a for mylisteners.
I had no idea if that was onhis roadmap or not.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
I literally just randomly thought no, I think, I
think we need to add a confettiexplosion when somebody creates
a link, because that we don't dothat.
So I think we should add thosethings.
I think trello recently rolledit out when you like, hit a due
date, you get confetti.
Uh, that's a super easy ad.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Uh, that's not gamification, but at least it's
some sort of celebratory thing Imean the platform we're
recording on right now doessomething like it did.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
I think it's gone away they did, they took it away
.
It was so sad.
Yeah, yeah, so we miss it.
Um.
Your, your recording getsuploaded.
You got confetti.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
I was like this all right I do remember that from my
podcast.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Unsolicited feedback on that idea of gamification.
I would be cautious about doinga gamification based on just
the number of URLs posted,because previous life work I did
something with customer supportand their closing number of
cases was one of the metrics andpeople game that system pretty
(25:50):
easily Right.
They have their friends call oryou know, so they drive the
metric up.
But I think the idea isinteresting.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
So it's funny because you bring that up, in regards
to like support tickets, I knowZappos in the book Delivering
Happiness, they had like thetypical metric of success and
like a call support or callcenter is like how short can you
be on the call and theyrewarded people for how long
they could be on the phone call.
So you really have to becareful with those kind of those
offers and incentivizing people, which I think Zappos it was
(26:21):
like a 19 hour phone call orsomething like that Like people
will call them and be like canyou order me pizza and just have
phone calls.
So like, um, no matter whatpeople will game any system you
create at some point right um,hopefully your values prevent
that from happening, but uhright, I mean yeah, I mean I yes
.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
There there's going to be people who who take
advantage of the system, nomatter what agreed.
But I think that that'shopefully there's outliers and
that's what you want.
But I think the idea of somehowmeasuring it and sharing it and
making it public, like I thinkthere's some value in that.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
Yeah, for sure.
I wanted to come back tosomething you mentioned, a topic
that's somewhat near and dearto my heart, having not been
able to really adopt much inthis area CDPs.
So I don't know, I feel like Ifeel like it's starting to
(27:17):
become a lot more of the norm.
I certainly, at the enterpriselevel, we see a lot more of the
data lake, data warehouse, CDPsort of discussion come up.
Particularly in the B2B side ofthings, though, and that's
where I want to sort of attackthis question from Is it a
(27:37):
necessary like?
At what point does it become anecessity to start thinking
about leveraging a database likethat, as you think about
analytics and attribution andutilizing tools like UTMio to
pass the right data into theright places?
You know CDPs come a lot in B2C,but B2B it doesn't feel like it
(28:00):
comes up as often, Are you?
It's sort of a two-partquestion.
I already asked the first part,but the second part is like are
we seeing more of it come inearlier in B2B conversations
rather than at the sort ofenterprise level?
What are you seeing in themarket right now as it relates
to that?
Speaker 3 (28:19):
Yeah, I mean, I think , at the end of the day, b2b in
general, right, like if you'reB2B SaaS, like a CDP is
primarily a requirement, right,because you need to be able to
have a single view of a customerand then also be able to have a
view of an account and beingable to capture that data
quickly and then as well asdistribute that data, because we
have to realize that there'snot like the CDP landscape is so
confusing now.
Thank you, high touch, forcoming out with composable
(28:41):
versus non-composable, and thennobody knows what composable is.
And now there's hybrid CDPs,there's customer experience CDPs
.
At the end of the day, all aCDP is is an ability to be able
to accept data, relation it withan identity and then be able to
distribute that data and thenbe able to build audiences.
However, a CDP has taken on somany different lenses.
(29:02):
Now at this point it can bereally really confusing whether
it's warehouse first, whicheverybody's warehouse first for
the most part now, so that'scausing a whole bunch of
confusion in the marketplace.
But if you're a company like aB2B SaaS company, it's nearly a
requirement because you have tobe able to track that user as
they go through marketing, sales, product and customer success,
and that CDP is going to be oneof the things that really
enables you to stitch thatreal-time clickstream activity
(29:24):
to what's happening in Marketo,to then be able to equate all of
that back into a warehouse orinto a product like Amplitude.
Now, if you're a B2B company,that of course, is a little bit
more traditional.
At my other company, which is aCDP consulting firm, we work
with a very, very large companythat rents construction
equipment.
So their sales reps are writingon yellow legal pads right and
(29:45):
then coming back to the facilityand typing into a CRM.
They have a CDP and they'reable to really do a lot of cool
stuff because they have allthese fragmented identities,
because of the way these salesreps work.
But in that type of industrysometimes you can get away with
just having a Marketo or aSalesforce or a HubSpot, but
those tools at the end of theday, are not really real-time
(30:07):
clickstream products.
Don't get me wrong.
I understand that Marketo and,as well as HubSpot, track events
, so I get it, they have thatability, but they are basically
glorified databases which aremeant to.
I have a first name.
Put something in it.
I have a company field.
Put something in it.
You have to set something upfor it to receive that.
Where a CDP is send, sendingwhatever you have, and I'm going
(30:34):
to automatically ingest it andthen create a new row and a
table for it.
So I think the mental model isdifferent.
I will say I think there's alot of benefits, but marketing
operations and revenueoperations professionals because
the mental model for them isreally really field name, field
value it does make it reallyreally hard to make the
transition to the way that a CDPtracks, because you're now not
just dealing with a field, whichis an identity value, you're
(30:56):
also dealing with the actions atthe same time.
So typically you have an event,you also have an identify call.
The way those two things workare really really hard and
usually you have to have alittle bit of a developer
mindset to understand the waythose things work.
So I think it's harder in theB2B environment for a MOPS or
RevOps person to understand that.
I think it takes time toovercome that paradigm shift
(31:18):
that you have in your head.
So do you need a CDP?
I highly recommend it becauseit's going to make it better for
your ultimate customer dataorchestration and then
optimizing that customerexperience.
However, you also have to makesure that you're ready for it,
because they're expensive ashell and if you don't take real
advantage of it, it can bereally, really painful.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
I didn't say anything about UTMs on that so I do
apologize there.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
I think the one thing on UTMs I was just going to ask
you about that.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
The thing about UTMs, though, is they work with
almost every single marketingtool and almost every tool out
there, right?
So when you have a CDP, it'sautomatically going to ingest
anything that you have as aquery parameter for your UTMs.
So that's great.
It's going to automaticallytrack that, and then if you're
sending it downstream, it'sautomatically going to work with
that.
Whether it's Google, whetherit's Mixpanel, whatever, it's
(32:11):
automatically going to work withthose tools.
So it does give you a lot moreflexibility on being able to
have that attribution, becausewhere I see the biggest mistakes
in regards to UTMs is peoplecapture it in the Marketo form
fields.
They then pass it to Marketo,they then add it to a campaign,
they then send it to Salesforce.
That's great, because thathelps you understand your
pipeline, but when you're doingtrue experimentation conversion
rate optimization, analysis ofyour funnels on your websites
(32:34):
that data is not going to helpyou in Marketo or Salesforce.
You really have to beleveraging an analytics product,
and that's where the CDP makesit easy, because it will send it
to both of those places,compared to having set up two
separate configurations.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Yeah, so punchline UTMs are foundational to you
know, once again, it's the glueTo establishing more advanced.
They're the oldest tracking wehave, yeah, right.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
Yeah, they're the oldest tracking we have.
And it's interesting because,you see, providers and don't get
me wrong like Adobe, has theirown tracking system, which is
basically UTM, they just call ittheir own Pwik.
They has their own trackingsystem, which is basically UTM,
they just call it their own Pwik.
They have their own UTMs thatthey use for their systems.
And it always is interesting tome why these providers come up
with their own naming structures, their own query parameters
that they add to a URL that onlywork with its tool in that
(33:22):
nature, because everybody workswith UTMs.
It's the oldest trackingassignment that we've had.
I mean, they've been aroundsince the nineties.
So it's like why?
Why try to do something else?
Speaker 1 (33:33):
Yeah, no, I mean it's kind of limiting there's, and
these are all flawed right.
So in some ways it's you knowwhether it's how it's deployed
by some systems outside of yourcontrol and everything else.
But what so um, so um you wetalked a little bit about like,
how do you sell the idea of likegetting consistent, disciplined
(33:54):
, about getting utms out therecorrectly?
What are some like, can youthink of some examples of
clients where, like, becausethey didn't have that, where,
like, what kinds of problems didthey run into, um, when they
were inconsistent or incompleteor just weren't doing that kind
of stuff?
Speaker 3 (34:12):
Yeah, I mean we have a lot of companies that come to
us from field marketing teamsthat just don't have any ability
to track almost anything right.
Those field marketing teams arein the wild trying to do stuff
and they're not able to actuallyattribute their revenue
ultimately to pipeline or theirpipeline dollars.
They're able to track the leadsthat get scanned right, but
they're not able to track therest of the things.
And that's where systems likeusing vanity URLs that are
(34:33):
attached to UTMs, using QR codesthat are going to be attached
to UTMs obviously the emails orwhatever you're sending out
there being able to betterattribute that.
So we've seen organizationsthat are spending a half a
million dollars to a milliondollars a year on field
marketing.
They're only able to attributewhat the sales rep was actually
able to collect.
They were not able to attributeany of the sponsorship that
they did on the side of thehotel building or on the
(34:55):
sponsorship packets or thelunches that they were
sponsoring, because the reps arenever talking to them.
So by being able to do that,they're able to attribute around
30% more of their marketingbudget to actually driving
pipeline and able to get morecredit on that, simply because
they didn't have a means to beable to connect those dots, and
I think that's whereorganizations need to get
creative in regards to how theyget people to ultimately click
(35:19):
back to the website and then beable to get tracked.
Vanity URLs are a great example.
Qr codes, obviously, are really,really popular and those are
some easy things, but I will say, even with those types of
things, I think companies needto definitely have a how did you
hear about us?
Because people hear from you on6 different channels.
The thing that I see is thefailure on the how did you hear
(35:41):
about us is people give you youhave to select from 1 of 9
options.
Don't do that, just make it sothat they can type in an open
text field and people will type.
We found out at utmio that overthe last 12 months, our number
two driver of users signing upis ChatGPT.
Like it blew me away thatChatGPT is now our second
(36:04):
largest acquisition channel, butwe wouldn't have known all the
different AI tools that werecoming in, because we've seen
Gemini, we've seen Notebook,we've seen, like, all these
different tools that are nowcausing us, or AI tools that are
causing us, to get users.
So, with the UTMs, don't get mewrong, but still try to add a.
How did you hear about us opentext field somewhere?
(36:25):
Because people are going tomention, hey, I heard about you
on the ops cast which I have noway to track anybody who's
listening to this podcast thatthey actually signed up, unless
I had a vanity URL, or if theyactually wrote in that field.
So the world's not perfect,yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
Okay, so you hear to hear first folks when you go to
utmio say you heard about itfrom OpsCast.
That's right.
There's OpsCast in there.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
It was interesting because there is this ongoing
debate.
Do you ask people were youheard from us or do you use UTM
parameters?
To me, you don't need to choose.
Both are valuable.
You do both, yeah.
Speaker 3 (37:06):
You do both.
Yeah, you do both yeah, we doboth and you should like.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
I think there's like, and I love the pushback I think
people are going to give you onthe don't.
You don't use a pick list astwofold, right one?
Well, how you know, how are wegoing to know, like, why do we
give people all these options?
Like, why do we just givelimited options so we can do
that?
Second is, if we leave it open,it's gonna be a lot harder to
(37:32):
analyze.
So how do you like, how do youaddress those kinds of comments?
Speaker 3 (37:37):
well, I'll tell a funny story.
So we worked with a extremelylarge um uh, it's a company
called forks, over nine.
They were very populardocumentary years ago and they
are a vegan documentary companyand they have absurd amount of
traffic and we were asking asurvey question in regards to uh
.
We had like a 16 questionsurvey people would fill out and
then everybody would answerwhich state they were from.
(37:58):
We had 75% of our users fromAlabama, which is not where
vegans list.
Like, I'm not trying to pick onAlabama, but it is not a vegan
state and most of our users wecould prove were in California.
But why did they select Alabama?
Well, it's because it was thefirst option and they did not
care about actually answeringthe question.
And that's the problem you havewith pick lists or even radio
(38:20):
buttons they just go for thefirst one.
So, yeah, it makes it really,really difficult.
But there's ways to solve thatproblem.
One you can build an AI botagent that ultimately, will
classify those things for you inreal time.
So that's not crazy.
Don't get me wrong.
It's not going to be easy.
I saw somebody buildingsomething like that with Treyio
recently.
But there's also ways to be ableto reformat that data.
(38:42):
So when we've had problems withthis in the past, we built I
don't know if it's still live inour Maga sites, but if you were
to Google I think it's Magakeyword phrase parser you can
basically drop in 10,000 rows ofopen text data and it will
reclassify that data and tellyou what actually people did.
So there's definitely ways tofix it right and there's
(39:04):
definitely ways to reformat thedata.
But that extra effort thatyou're going to get by, or that
extra effort you have to put into reformat the data, it's going
to wind up giving you muchbetter odds of understanding the
data compared to just thinkingall of your customers are in
Alabama because it was the firstpick list and there's obviously
tricks that you do with picklists where you can randomize
(39:24):
your pick list on every singlesession.
Still, you're just winding upwith more random data, which
isn't necessarily going to helpyou.
So that's where it getsdifficult, but I think that's
where, when you think about UTMs, obviously give you one leg to
stand on right.
You now have this how did youhear about us?
It helps out a little bit, butthat's where leveraging smart
(39:50):
analytics going back to the CDP,where it's automatically going
to choose where the sessionstarted from Was it a referral,
was it dark social?
Was it direct?
You'll be able to do that, andwhen UTM launches its dark
social tracking, you're going tobe able to even tie some of
those things closer together,because I think dark social is
the thing that we're all stilltrying to really understand and
try, try to get that going.
How do you attribute all ofthese different things together,
especially when michael issharing something with mike?
(40:11):
How do we connect those twoinfluencers together to
attribute where somebody camefrom?
So it's not going to be perfect, but you at least need to know
what angle to point your ship,right, I think that's really
what people?
why have I been successful atgrowing company?
It's because I don't need anexact answer.
I just need to know whether I'mgoing north or south, and if I
know, I'm going in the rightdirection.
At least I know how to grow thecompany.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
Yeah yeah, being directionally accurate is super,
super important, and I think itleans towards that mentality of
like I don't know, fail fast,fail often, kind of a thing,
like if you're just learningquickly, you can kind of like
get the right direction and keepgoing and you'll just keep
refining.
What a lot of what you shared,dan and um, this reminds me, uh,
(40:56):
of you know.
Of course, it's probably justbecause I have a bias for it now
, but, um, I've been pushingreally hard for people to think
of their go-to-market tech stackas a product, and what you're
talking about at the end of theday is a feature.
Right, you just talked aboutbuilding a very unique and
(41:18):
bespoke feature that comes witha little bit of experience when
you have seen around a couplecorners on some challenges and
you're aware of this.
And now you're HubSpot andyou're Marketo and you're insert
next marketing technologysolution.
Here they're not built to dothis stuff out of the box, and
(41:39):
what you said is you need to gobuild a feature to be able to
support a particulargo-to-market motion, and that
feature in this case is creatinga taxonomy and maybe an AI
agent or a script that you canquery your GPT API to say hey,
where did this person come from?
They just filled out the howdid you hear about us?
(42:00):
Empty text field, and now Ineed to standardize that data.
We did a version of that atmarketing ops.
We just branched, we lookedacross all of the information
that came in on our field right,the, the how'd you hear about
us?
And we said, all right, gpt,tell us generally, like some
categories here.
Now we're looking for keywords.
(42:21):
We created different branchinglogic so that if it contains a
particular keyword in HubSpot,it does this.
This was before AI became evenmore accessible, and now I could
literally just turn that wholebranch off and say stop looking
for specific keywords and justlet the AI do it for me.
Right, that's something that wehad to go build in order to
(42:44):
pursue the next sort of phase ofare we directionally accurate
and where we want to go now?
Right, because when, when wesigned up for HubSpot, it didn't
come with this stuff.
So all of this is to say I lovewhat you're saying.
What you're saying, um,establishing these sort of
(43:10):
boundaries and these rules andthese systems and these
processes to me means thatyou're ultimately like building
out products.
Um, but I'd love.
I know, I know this is atangent, but I'd love to hear
your thoughts on like what?
How do you feel about that likewith you?
Speaker 1 (43:23):
know, maybe, maybe we can frame it in this this way,
because I think we're gonna haveto wrap it up is like how, like
, if someone's listening andmaybe they're newer in their
career, this is new stuff forthem, like, or they're in a
place where they see thisprocess is broke, like, how
would you start to build outthis as a product within your,
your tech stack or your, yourenvironment?
Speaker 3 (43:45):
yeah, and just to be like, when we think about like
this and we talk about, inregards to the, regards to
classifying, how did you hearabout us and like, or just
ultimately like, how do you pushthis stuff forward?
Cause, like I think one youshould be.
In most companies, the areawhere they struggle the most is
being able to actually buildsomething unique which is not
(44:05):
currently done, whether that beworking with your development
team to build a microservice oranything that's going to do
these things right.
Like, going back to the, wecouldn't classify this data, so
we built a keyword parser right,and a phrase parser.
With AI, we're able to buildproducts really, really fast.
I literally saw a camera of thegentleman's name who's building
(44:25):
a competitor to us and he'sdoing it entirely using AI bots
and I was like, I think that'srad, like, keep doing that.
So I think, naturally, you needto be building products and
tools to be able to better serveyourself, but with AI, it just
makes it a little too easy where, like, there's a lot of random
tools there.
There's going to be a big trashdump of wallies of AI tools in
(44:47):
the next 12 months that we'rejust going to have a ton of
these crap products that wetried to build, which I'm sure
are going to die.
So there's a balance that youhave to find on that, because in
a company, when you build yourown product and I can speak
specifically for ourselves webuilt our own meeting agenda
tool because all the meetingagenda tools we use kept getting
acquired and then getting shutdown.
(45:09):
So we're like, forget it, we'rejust going to build our own,
but we could never keep up onthe innovation spectrum Like a
product like Fellow, whichFellowapp, which we use for all
of our meeting agendas andmeeting tools.
Their innovation is way fasterthan ours.
So when you build a product,you have to realize somebody is
going to outpace you ininnovation eventually.
So I don't know if that answersthe question, mike or Michael.
Speaker 1 (45:31):
So I was actually even thinking because we talked
about it at the very beginningright, like putting tools and
technology in place on somethingthat's already broken is not
going to get you, it's justgoing to make that bad process
faster.
So I'm like what are the firststeps they should be taking
before maybe even investing intechnology or changing
(45:55):
technology that you already have?
It's kind of where I was going.
Speaker 3 (45:58):
I would always revert back to a Google Sheet.
I'm sorry.
There's not a time in my lifethat a Google Sheet hasn't
solved 85% of the problem.
And then, once we have thatGoogle sheet and then build off
of there, and what I think isreally cool, even with the
Google sheets now, is like, withsome of the stuff we have an
advantage of with the extensionsthat we're integrating into
Google sheets from AI, beingable to leverage that data and
(46:19):
many, many other places has beena lot of fun.
But my first go-to is alwayshow do we use a Google Sheet for
everything?
Speaker 1 (46:31):
But sometimes I feel like I'm old because I use a
Google Sheet for everything.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
You're not old.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
So you'd like to find your taxonomy and all that kind
of stuff in there and thenbuild out maybe even something
formula-based, and then go fromthere 100%, Especially if you're
speaking in regards to UTMs orany of that type of stuff.
Speaker 3 (46:48):
First, you're going to want to start with using a
spreadsheet doing concatenationof multiple fields, multiple
dropdowns.
I mean Google Sheets do giveyou the ability to kind of lock
some things down.
If you want to get fancy, do itin an Airtable.
I've seen some really coolthings in Airtables.
We actually have Notiondatabases.
They and air tables we actuallyhave a like notion databases.
They do not work well for UTMs.
(47:08):
I want to be clear Like I'veattempted to build some things
in there, but anything that's asimple spreadsheet is going to
make it a lot easier to be ableto be flexible.
So you can talk around and findout, which is like the most
popular saying in Florida, whichI'm happy is starting to catch
on all over the country inAmerica now but yeah, get a
spreadsheet, fuck around, findout, keep iterating, keep
(47:28):
iterating.
And then when you feel like,hey, our attribution reporting
is getting better, it's notperfect, because I still have
some nuances that's when youshould really look at a tool.
So because I never tell anybodylike, hey, if you have no UTM
experience, you probably don'twant to start with UTMio, right,
you definitely don't want tostart with us Like go get a
spreadsheet that's going to beway easier to use before you
(47:50):
come to us, which don't get mewrong.
We replaced the spreadsheetwith no problem.
But for most companies who haveno idea how to use UTMs, a
spreadsheet is going to be way,way, way easier.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
Yeah yeah, Dan, I wish we had more time, but we're
going to have to wrap it uphere, so if folks want to learn
more about this, get in touchwith you.
Learn more about UTMio.
What's the best way for them todo that?
Speaker 3 (48:14):
Yeah for sure, definitely go.
Feel free to check out UTMio.
We do offer all the people atmarketingopscom a 30% lifetime
discount which, mike, we foundout existed the other day, un
unbeknownst to us, knowing thatstill existed.
But that's there.
But at the same time, if youwant to check out any of my
stuff, just go to LinkedIn.
Look up Daniel McGaugh, happyto be able to chat with you
(48:36):
online through LinkedIn.
That's my most active network.
I don't use X.
Once they switched from Twitter, I got confused.
I couldn't find the app anymore, so just on LinkedIn now.
Speaker 1 (48:47):
Yeah, you and me both .
What?
Yeah, hey, you have anyspeaking gigs?
Speaker 2 (48:48):
coming up, Dan.
I'm sorry, What'd you say, Mike?
I said do you have any speakinggigs coming up by any chance?
Speaker 3 (48:55):
I speak in London in two weeks at some exit event and
then, I don't know, I think I'mgoing to make a cameo at this
event called Spring Fling.
I might do a cameo there,that'd be great.
I do hope you can make it, Imight make it.
I think I might be speaking atTwilio Signals event in May as
well, but yeah, no, I'm tryingto lay low.
(49:15):
I've moved to Barcelona thispast year, so I now live in
Barcelona, so it's finallystarting to get dark on this
side of the world, so I'm doinga little bit less speaking
because I'm trying to spend moretime with my family traveling
Europe and getting to meet allthe interesting people across
Europe.
So it's been a ton of fun.
Speaker 1 (49:31):
That's awesome, fantastic Dan, tons of fun.
It seems like to me an oldtopic, but I've learned
something new, I think, eventhrough this, so I appreciate it
.
Mike, as always, thank you, andto our listeners, thanks to you
for continuing to support usand suggesting great topics and
guests.
If you have suggestions fortopics or guests or want to be a
(49:51):
guest, reach out to Naomi, mikeor me.
We'd be happy to work with youUntil next time.
Bye, everybody.
Speaker 3 (49:56):
See you.
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of
OpsCast brought to you byMarketingOpscom, powered by the
MoPros.
I'm your host, michael Hartman,joined today by Mike Rizzo.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hey everybody, welcome back, I'm here.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
This is new at noon Improved setup there.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
We're trying something new.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
At least new, anyway.
So we've got a guest with ustoday and we're looking forward
to talking about.
This is Dan McGaw.
So Dan is an award-winningentrepreneur and speaker.
He is the founder and CEO ofUTMio.
He has been coined as one ofthe original growth hackers and
is the former head of marketingat Kissmetrics.
(00:37):
In 2015, dan was selected to bea United States Ambassador of
Entrepreneurship by the UnitedStates government a thing that I
didn't even know existed wherehe had the privilege to advise
universities, governments andprivate corporations on how to
build entrepreneur ecosystems.
So, dan, thanks for joining ustoday, late in the day for you.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Yeah, thanks for having me, so I appreciate being
here.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Yeah, so I'm excited, so we'll hit the ground running
here.
So one of the topics and youand I talked about this, Dan
that we've covered regularly onthis podcast and continues to be
a hot topic it feels like everyweek or two there's something
on LinkedIn or in the Slackgroup for our marketing ops
folks out there is reporting,analytics, including attribution
(01:23):
, so and one of the things thatwe've talked about that's really
important is data governance,especially around UTM parameters
, something you know a littlebit about and at least I often
say discipline the discipline ofusing them consistently is key
to getting quality reporting.
So what's your take on just theimportance of that and why,
(01:50):
especially as we get into thisage of AI, where I think we've
all seen AI produce sort offictional stuff I guess is the
nicest way I could put it yeah,so your thoughts?
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Well, I mean, I think the first thing we have to
understand, like, just even withai and ai agents and ai
reporting and all that stuff,right if you feed it bad data,
it's not going to really be allthat helpful.
So, I mean, I think datagovernance is becoming even more
and more important, because aiis simply automation right, and
if you automate a shitty process, you're just going to have a
bigger pile of trash than youwould have had in the first
place.
Um, so you definitely want tomake sure that you have a
(02:26):
process set up to do that, butwhen we think about, like,
naturally, why do you want tohave a good data taxonomy and a
good way to enforce governanceis, at the end of the day, you
won't have good attribution.
And most organizations,especially a B2B organization,
right Like you need to make surethat you can actually
understand where pipeline iscoming from, so that way you can
either spend more on what'sworking or spend less on what's
(02:49):
not working, and without cleanattribution, you just don't have
that ability.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Yeah, mike, you're about to say something.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Yeah, I just think attributions, the four-letter
word, it feels like when itcomes to marketing ops, it's
like man, it's such a hot buttonitem and I think sometimes the
the I don't know On the subjectof automation and AI and just
(03:22):
like proprietary sort of walledgardens giving you what they
think is working versus or whatthey say is working.
I think the value of having areally strong foundation for
your UTM products and your ownprocess for analyzing your data
(03:44):
is that I'll bet you, if you digin, sometimes those proprietary
walled gardens are actuallylying to you.
And we're starting to see alittle bit of that right, like
we're, we're, we're noticing,like the down funnel, sort of
like attribution metrics, quote,unquote, uh are not necessarily
as cut and dry as the systemsare saying, because if you
(04:09):
actually go unpack some of thetraffic that you're getting, if
you have a strong system inplace to do so, you're able to
tie back some of thetransactions or at least the
conversion points and thetraffic sources.
That they're saying maybewasn't really there before, and
I know that.
I know I'm kind of likespeaking around about terms,
(04:30):
because I've only seen a handfulof these little moments pop up
on LinkedIn and it's not myexperience, so I don't want to
like steal somebody's thunder onthat.
But you know, dan, I don't know.
I would love to hear yourthoughts on you know, this idea
of these again, like LinkedIn,facebook, these are all walled
gardens, right, like?
They have their own ad networksand ways of tracking things.
(04:54):
Do you agree, disagree, like?
What are your thoughts?
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Yeah, no, I mean, I think at the end of the day, you
should never be using Facebook,linkedin or Google Ads
conversion tracking at the endof the day, to be what's driving
the ship.
I mean, they're going to takeas much credit as they possibly
can, no matter what, becauseit's in their best interest,
right?
If you don't have access tothat data, you can't actually
(05:20):
understand if it's true and youcan't tell the difference
between a bot on Google Ads likeyou can on your own stack.
So if you want properattribution, you really do need
to have a first-party trackingworld, and that's where UTMs are
going to be one of the mostpowerful things, and I can't
tell you the number of companiesthat I work with that they're
like hey, listen, we're spending$2 million a year on Facebook.
(05:42):
We're spending $4 million onGoogle Ads $2 million a year on
Facebook.
We're spending $4 million onGoogle Ads and we're just using
the out-of-the-box tracking fromGoogle Ads.
We've got the GCLID on the backend and we trust all of our
reporting to them and once theymove to a first-party world
where they're actually storing,they're using one.
You can still use GoogleAnalytics as a first-party
tracking tool, because it's justgoing to report what you give
(06:03):
it.
Don't get me wrong, you don'thave access to all the data.
But if you start tracking UTMsin your Marketo forms and of
course you're processing all theway through, you're leveraging
products like a CDP that'sconsuming your data, sending it
to a data warehouse, you'regoing to have a much, much more
realistic picture of what'sactually happening, compared to
applying too much credit to anyone of those channels.
(06:25):
And in a lot of cases right, weunderstand, like with
multi-touch attribution whichagain I would say is also
another four letter word outthere at this point right, like,
luckily, with multi-touchattribution, though at least you
understand, hey, this oneconversion that Google's taking
credit for, linkedin's takingcredit for and Facebook's taking
credit for, that was only oneconversion.
Right, so you can have a betterability to actually improve
(06:47):
your return on ad spend.
But I think that's just theinitial few stages of that of
making sure that you have yourown tracking methodology.
You have your own first partyworld where you're capturing
your own data.
I think what's interesting iswhen you start tying that
information to okay, so weunderstand, somebody came in
(07:10):
from a Facebook ad, we canactually identify that because
of course, it has appropriateUTMs.
But I think the second part ofthat is how do you make sure
that you design a UTM taxonomyto ultimately create a
convention which is going togive you additional reporting
and going to what we see a lotin the B2B space, especially
with marketing ops people, isyou've got to take in campaign
type.
You've got to take in theawareness channel.
You've got to take in was it alead gen thing?
(07:30):
You've got to make sure youknow what geo is coming from.
You've got to understand whatwas the key asset type.
And creating that convention inthe name field of a campaign is
where you really start gettingthe granularity and you really
start getting the actualunderstanding of, like, what
type of things are happening,because you can now report on it
in a Looker Studio or a PowerBI report or inside of a
(07:52):
Salesforce report, which youwouldn't be able to do in any of
those walled gardens at all.
They wouldn't give you thatinformation.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Yeah, I mean I've said for a long time, like the
UTM, getting your UTM parametersor any other things you're
using when you're putting stuffout in the market and having to
split around, that is the glueright to everything else, right?
It doesn't matter really, ifyou really want to understand
what's working, what's notworking and you don't want to do
what I inherited at one place,which is every campaign got a
(08:21):
unique landing page right, evenif it was exactly the same as
the one that was used for theprevious campaign, because that
was the only way we could trackit, and I was like I'd put a
stop to that nonsense as quicklyas I could.
Well, I mean, it's just well,it's inherently I laugh because
it's so true.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
That was the same thing as forums.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Yeah, yeah.
So it was a matter of likegetting the right scripting on
the pages and capturing it andgetting you know.
But to me, like there's twopieces of this that are really
important, right, one is likehaving the right taxonomy,
having the right standards youwant for codes or campaign names
(09:00):
, things like that.
But also then those do no goodif people don't actually who are
putting the stuff together togo out in the market are not
actually using it, which I haveseen Right and it's easy to miss
along the way.
If you're saying I'm going to,just I'm reusing the same
campaign, I'm doing somethingacross multiple channels, so
(09:21):
I've got your URL and I make amistake in copying and I forget
to update one of the parameters.
I'm going from Facebook toGoogle Ads, to whatever, and I
forget to do that.
So how do you guide yourcustomers and clients of UTMio?
How do you guide them to try toaddress that problem?
(09:44):
Is that even something?
Speaker 2 (09:45):
that the adoption piece.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Well, not just.
It's not even adoption.
I think there's part of hisadoption.
Part of it is just people aremoving so damn quick right that
they sometimes miss that right.
So how do you kind of have thechecks in place that still allow
you to move quickly but not,like, still get that the
benefits downstream?
Speaker 3 (10:05):
Yeah, yeah, I mean naturally, like I think
everybody's familiar with theUTM spreadsheet, right.
So like that is like thegeneric standard everybody's
going to start with.
But in the UTM spreadsheetthere's only so much you can
actually do to kind of lockthings in.
And that's where we've seen andwe've seen some really cool
things, right, like we've seenpeople build air tables, we've
seen people do things in Codawhich are pretty powerful, right
(10:28):
.
And we've had a lot of B2Bcustomers who have come to us
after using Coda and pushingCoda's databases and tables to
the ultimate limit.
And those products are great,right.
And what I think in our productwhich a lot of people really
appreciate is the fact that youcan assign a rule ultimately to
the way that somebody needs tobuild the UTM structure and then
also be able to say, hey, ifthey select social as medium,
(10:52):
they have to be able to out ofthe solar cities, they're only
going to be allowed to selectfrom these options.
And if they select geo as NorthAmerica namer, right, ok, great
, they're only going to haveaccess to these campaigns, right
.
Or if they select EMEA, they'reonly going to have access to
these campaigns, right.
Or if they select EMEA, they'reonly going to have access to
these campaigns.
So being able to enforce thosereally really complex things is
really difficult, especially ifyou're like a global
organization right, like one ofour clients, hexagon right, like
(11:16):
there's 36 different brandsbased in 27 different countries.
Trying to coordinate all ofthat and then do that in a
spreadsheet or a Coda street orsomething like that becomes just
kind of unwieldy and it justdoesn't make it easy and it
makes it frustrating because atthe end of the day, you've got a
VP of marketing who wantsaccurate marketing attribution.
(11:36):
You've got this poor marketingoperations manager, a director
of marketing operations, gettingyelled at by the VP my reports
suck.
Then you have the marketingoperations person trying to tell
the social media manager, anemail marketer, an advertiser
and a field marketer hey, youkeep messing up the UTMs and I'm
getting in trouble.
You got to use this spreadsheetbetter.
So it really puts the MOPSperson in a bad situation
(11:58):
because both sides the VP andthe social media manager are
going to complain, which is, Ithink, one of the things that is
the un With mobs.
Professionals like they reallysuffer in this environment
because they're in the middle ofall the arguments and they
don't get enough credit.
They don't get enough empathy.
They just got to make it workright, and so that's where I
(12:20):
think there's cool tools thatmake it easier.
Obviously, I'll shamelesslyplug utmio in there.
There, I think there's cooltools that make it easier.
Obviously, I'll shamelesslyplug utmio in there.
There's other ways to do it.
Like I mentioned, coda andthings like that, and
spreadsheets.
There's definitely.
I mean, I've seen some shit soI don't know, can I swear on
this podcast?
Sorry?
Speaker 2 (12:35):
You so definitely can .
Okay, cool, sorry, look, wehost the no bullshit demos for a
reason.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
Like it's a very good point.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Yeah, uh, no, it makes a ton of sense.
Yeah, I've seen, I've seen somenonsense too.
I have to, I have to agree.
Um, I think it's.
I.
I just think it's a reallyclear case, you know for, for
our listeners, if you want totake a clip of this show right
here, right now, and say, hey,this is, this is the clear case
for why bespoke tools are, youknow, better than a spreadsheet?
(13:11):
Because you you think, oh,can't I just do that in a
spreadsheet?
It's like, well, yeah, but atsome point it's actually gonna
break and as you say, I don'tknow, I can.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
I can tell you.
Probably dozens of times we'vehad a shared spreadsheet.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
We've had to go back and undo someone overriding
those complicated formulas rightand yeah because they weren't
protected and someone was movingfast and screwed it up yep, all
those concatenation rules thatyou have set up the macros, and
(13:49):
then you get some people who getlike super advanced, they throw
some visual basic on there andthey just try to make it so
super, super complex.
Like, yeah, so it can getdifficult.
I mean it's, it's similar tolike a product like lean data
right, like you didn't know youneeded it, but once you had it,
you can't live without it.
Um, cause it just does so muchthat enables you to run so much
better.
Um, so there's definitely toolsthat are going to make your,
(14:11):
your world better.
But I think, like what we tryto understand at utmio, is that
we have to remember, at the endof the day, the person who's
building the link.
Right, they do not care aboutyour marketing attribution, they
just want to get their job done.
They just want to post onLinkedIn, they just want to get
the ad live, they just want toset up their booth at the field
marketing event, so like they're.
In some cases, some people makethem like as if they're the
(14:32):
enemy because they're the onemessing up the data, but it's
like they just want to get theirjob done and that spreadsheet
is not always the most easy wayto.
But I will say I lovespreadsheets.
Like I use spreadsheets foreverything.
Build a process.
Once I've designed a process,okay, great, let's figure out
the tool.
I just was doing a webinar,maybe about two and a half
months ago, and everybody waslike, oh, we buy tools and it
(14:53):
solves problems.
And I'm like, no, no, no,that's not how this works.
Like you, design a process tosolve the problem, start with a
spreadsheet, build the processand then say, okay, we
understand what the hell we'redoing now.
Now let's go find the tool thatcan replace the spreadsheet,
because that spreadsheet's notgonna ultimately survive because
there's so many error proneways.
Like I mean, even our pipelineat my other company, mcgaw our
(15:15):
deal pipeline with MedPick iscurrently being done in a
spreadsheet.
Now do my sales reps like mefor this?
No, they wanna go back toSalesforce.
They wanna make it so thateverything's in Salesforce.
But we're transforming oursales process so we're using
everything in a spreadsheet sowe can figure out every single
step, every single category.
And then, once that's done, I'mthen going to go hire one of
the freelancers in marketing opscommunity and be like can you
(15:37):
build this in HubSpot for us soit works in Salesforce?
Speaker 2 (15:42):
That's a good way to do it.
We did the same.
We we started everything likeour sales process, uh, when
we're trying to engage withsponsors and things like that.
We were like, all right, let's,let's just lay this all out in
columns first and start trackinghey, how many touches did you
actually try today and all thatkind of stuff and then
eventually bring that over.
And I think that's true for,you know, running a business in
(16:04):
general, let alone a department,right?
Um, I think it's important.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Most people don't do that.
Yeah, I think there's somevalue in living with those
constraints, right Cause thetool, like the tool, is going to
.
If you're using a spreadsheet,it's going to limit you on what
you can do.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Yeah, and it's, it's.
It's a fascinating thing tothink about too.
Just because you're I don'tknow, I'm sure maybe forced into
constraints you actually have,you actually have to think, you
(16:48):
have to work a little harder tolike figure out what your
process is, and and so I think,I think it's an important step
to doing all this stuff.
Anyway, it's, it's a good, goodsubject to talk about, but yeah
, so so we?
Speaker 1 (17:00):
it's interesting Cause you brought up this to me
this is a often forgotten partfor a lot of marketing ops books
.
You said that they think of thepeople who are actually
deploying this stuff as theenemy, which I see a lot of that
too, which I think is a wrongway to think about it.
Right, and I think if you gointo it with that, it's going to
be hard to get them to listento you when you are trying to
(17:22):
get them to change theirbehavior.
But so maybe one of theargument, one of the ways to do
that, in my view, would be likehelp them understand what the
downstream impacts are.
So when you see these brokenprocesses and inconsistent ways
of using things like utmparameters, like, what do you
see is as the downstream impactsthat would impact those people
(17:47):
who are the problem child people?
Speaker 3 (17:51):
Yeah, well, I mean the biggest thing that I always
try to help people understand,especially if you're in a mops
role or even any type of roleand you're having to sell
something downstream to get themto take advantage of it.
There's a great thing calledthe Hero's Journey Framework by
Joseph Campbell.
And try to figure out how youmake them in a story.
Right, you understand that youneed to make this person the
hero, which means they need tohave a reward at the end of the
(18:11):
story, and they're trying toovercome a challenge, and your
job is simply just to be theguide that helps them get
through that, right?
So we always try to make surethat we understand what that
reward is, and a lot of times,that reward for a social media
manager hey, listen, you'regoing to be able to show that
the work you're doing is drivingpipeline, and you're either
going to get a raise, you'regoing to get a bonus, you might
get a promotion, but firstyou're most likely to get more
(18:32):
budget, which is a lot of things.
What these teams really want isthey want more budget so they
can do more of what they'redoing.
So, even if you think about afield marketing manager, their
job is to drive pipeline throughevents, but because they don't
have effective means of trackingall of those folks at an event,
they need tools to ultimatelyhelp them do that.
So you need to be able toclearly communicate to them like
(18:53):
, listen, I understand that,like, hey, your boss is probably
on your ass in regards tojustifying how much we're
spending on this event, but whatyou're now able to do is make
sure that you have clean QRcodes which you're going to be
able to use at the event.
All of your links will beproperly tagged.
That way, I can get Susan, theVP of marketing, to see that you
actually are driving 20% morepipeline than what is not being
(19:15):
captured, because, no matterwhat you're going to do, you
can't track everything.
We still have dark social, westill have word of mouth, there
are still those things but thereare ways to make it so that you
can increase the amount oftouch points that are trackable,
and that's where you really cantry to sell that story and make
them the hero ultimately, wherethey have a reward of more
budget, more accolades, morecredit for the good work that
(19:37):
they're doing.
And I don't know about you, butas a CEO, I give my team a good
job when they did somethingcool.
But when they actually drivepipeline and I can measure it to
them, I give them money and Ithink for a lot of people money
really matters.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
Yeah, no, I think there's something.
It's interesting because I lovethe idea that you're using I
forget I already forgot what yousaid it's called but that
storytelling piece right, and Ithink-.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
Yeah, Hero's Journey Framework.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
What's interesting to me is there's a little bit of a
side tangent here, but this issomething that I think is a
misnomer.
Everybody wants to be quotedata-driven right, and I think
there's value.
I think being data-driven isimportant, yeah, but if that's
all you do and you don't thinkabout the storytelling part of
(20:27):
it, you're missing the chance toreally impact, like really get
somebody to listen to the storypart of it.
So they may not eat, like thedata may mean nothing to them,
until you can put it in context,give them the story because,
yeah, that's how, that's howhumans communicate in general.
Right, it's based on stories.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
So that makes total sense to me.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
So I'm going to ask this random thought, random
question for for you, dan, thethe community sort of
gamification person in me is is.
I've had this idea before andI'm wondering if you've ever
tried it or have a um, apotential destination in your
product for it.
(21:14):
Like it'd be great if we couldjust reward people, like you
talked about rewarding peopleright, like, hey, the outcome at
the end of the hero's journeyis potentially a raise or more
budget or whatever, but alongthe way it'd be really fun to
gamify Like who did the most,who created the most trackable
(21:35):
links right, departmentally, asan individual, what you know,
whatever it is.
Have you ever heard of anybodydoing that Like as a, as a
method to drive adoption?
Speaker 3 (21:47):
Yeah, adoption yeah, this is actually something we're
building into the product laterthis year as a leaderboard.
Um, we've had this requestmultiple times because they want
to get more adoption and theyfeel by showing a leaderboard of
, hey, we have a leaderboard,who created the most links which
isn't always the fairest thing,right, because your social
media manager is going to createmore links than your field
marketing manager but then alsotallying in who has the most
(22:09):
clicks and things like that, whohas the most accurate links,
and different things like that.
So, yeah, we are looking atleaderboard and designing that
for later this year to try togamify it.
We have tested some interestingthings where you could like, as
a in the link table, you canbasically give somebody a thumbs
up or thumbs down on theirultimate link because you can
give them feedback.
We tested that for a littlewhile, which it was so-so.
(22:31):
Obviously there wasn't a lot ofthumbs downs, but you could
give somebody kudos and credits.
That was kind of cool.
But I think a leaderboard isgoing to be naturally what's
going to be most helpful.
What we want to try to do isattach it to Pipeline and
Salesforce or HubSpot, sowhoever's links are driving the
most pipeline.
You can actually be able to seethat in the product.
So, but yeah, I thinkgamification really helps.
(22:53):
I think the product which isinteresting I don't know if
anybody uses Fathom.
I recently am testing Fathomvideo for recording my meetings
and stuff like that.
You get points for everythingin that product, right.
So like recording your firstmeeting, you get like 25 points.
I think they maybe are likeskewed way too far, because I
don't know if it's working forthem.
(23:13):
For me.
I was like I went to my profilepage, I got 25 points.
I signed out, I got 10 points.
It was like wait a second, I'mgetting too many points here.
So gamification does workthough.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Yeah, yeah, but you them, yeah, yeah.
But you know you could tellright out of the gate with that
product, like they built it withthe intention of like you know,
there's products that throwstuff in later and it sort of
feels like an afterthought, andthen you can, you could tell
fathom was like hey, we're justgoing to start with.
Gamification is like the waythat we're going to try to get
people to adopt this thing andthat's like a whole freemium
(23:46):
model.
It feels like they startedthere.
I could be wrong about that,obviously, uh but I don't know.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
I'm the late adopter to fathom for sure yeah, same,
but that's cool, all right, cool.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
I.
That's just where my brain goes, like when you think about
running.
Uh, you know, in a community,for example, we're often you
know we're not using a propercommunity forum product when
most of us are hanging out inSlack.
I'd love for everybody to goadopt our forum product, and we
will see more of that in thecoming months.
However, the benefits of thoseforum products are that you get
(24:17):
to find who's sort of mosttopically relevant or answers
the most questions around aparticular thing, or is most
influential and all that otherstuff.
And so my brain often, when Ithink about products like yours,
utmio, um, when you're, whenyou're trying to get people to
find the right resources orperform the right action, you
(24:37):
want to, you want to reward themfor those things, um, and so
it's interesting.
Uh, you know, we'll have tocome back around and look at it
in real time once you, once youguys, get that out in the market
.
But thanks for sharing.
I had no idea that was a for mylisteners.
I had no idea if that was onhis roadmap or not.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
I literally just randomly thought no, I think, I
think we need to add a confettiexplosion when somebody creates
a link, because that we don't dothat.
So I think we should add thosethings.
I think trello recently rolledit out when you like, hit a due
date, you get confetti.
Uh, that's a super easy ad.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Uh, that's not gamification, but at least it's
some sort of celebratory thing Imean the platform we're
recording on right now doessomething like it did.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
I think it's gone away they did, they took it away
.
It was so sad.
Yeah, yeah, so we miss it.
Um.
Your, your recording getsuploaded.
You got confetti.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
I was like this all right I do remember that from my
podcast.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Unsolicited feedback on that idea of gamification.
I would be cautious about doinga gamification based on just
the number of URLs posted,because previous life work I did
something with customer supportand their closing number of
cases was one of the metrics andpeople game that system pretty
(25:50):
easily Right.
They have their friends call oryou know, so they drive the
metric up.
But I think the idea isinteresting.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
So it's funny because you bring that up, in regards
to like support tickets, I knowZappos in the book Delivering
Happiness, they had like thetypical metric of success and
like a call support or callcenter is like how short can you
be on the call and theyrewarded people for how long
they could be on the phone call.
So you really have to becareful with those kind of those
offers and incentivizing people, which I think Zappos it was
(26:21):
like a 19 hour phone call orsomething like that Like people
will call them and be like canyou order me pizza and just have
phone calls.
So like, um, no matter whatpeople will game any system you
create at some point right um,hopefully your values prevent
that from happening, but uhright, I mean yeah, I mean I yes
.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
There there's going to be people who who take
advantage of the system, nomatter what agreed.
But I think that that'shopefully there's outliers and
that's what you want.
But I think the idea of somehowmeasuring it and sharing it and
making it public, like I thinkthere's some value in that.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
Yeah, for sure.
I wanted to come back tosomething you mentioned, a topic
that's somewhat near and dearto my heart, having not been
able to really adopt much inthis area CDPs.
So I don't know, I feel like Ifeel like it's starting to
(27:17):
become a lot more of the norm.
I certainly, at the enterpriselevel, we see a lot more of the
data lake, data warehouse, CDPsort of discussion come up.
Particularly in the B2B side ofthings, though, and that's
where I want to sort of attackthis question from Is it a
(27:37):
necessary like?
At what point does it become anecessity to start thinking
about leveraging a database likethat, as you think about
analytics and attribution andutilizing tools like UTMio to
pass the right data into theright places?
You know CDPs come a lot in B2C,but B2B it doesn't feel like it
(28:00):
comes up as often, Are you?
It's sort of a two-partquestion.
I already asked the first part,but the second part is like are
we seeing more of it come inearlier in B2B conversations
rather than at the sort ofenterprise level?
What are you seeing in themarket right now as it relates
to that?
Speaker 3 (28:19):
Yeah, I mean, I think , at the end of the day, b2b in
general, right, like if you'reB2B SaaS, like a CDP is
primarily a requirement, right,because you need to be able to
have a single view of a customerand then also be able to have a
view of an account and beingable to capture that data
quickly and then as well asdistribute that data, because we
have to realize that there'snot like the CDP landscape is so
confusing now.
Thank you, high touch, forcoming out with composable
(28:41):
versus non-composable, and thennobody knows what composable is.
And now there's hybrid CDPs,there's customer experience CDPs
.
At the end of the day, all aCDP is is an ability to be able
to accept data, relation it withan identity and then be able to
distribute that data and thenbe able to build audiences.
However, a CDP has taken on somany different lenses.
(29:02):
Now at this point it can bereally really confusing whether
it's warehouse first, whicheverybody's warehouse first for
the most part now, so that'scausing a whole bunch of
confusion in the marketplace.
But if you're a company like aB2B SaaS company, it's nearly a
requirement because you have tobe able to track that user as
they go through marketing, sales, product and customer success,
and that CDP is going to be oneof the things that really
enables you to stitch thatreal-time clickstream activity
(29:24):
to what's happening in Marketo,to then be able to equate all of
that back into a warehouse orinto a product like Amplitude.
Now, if you're a B2B company,that of course, is a little bit
more traditional.
At my other company, which is aCDP consulting firm, we work
with a very, very large companythat rents construction
equipment.
So their sales reps are writingon yellow legal pads right and
(29:45):
then coming back to the facilityand typing into a CRM.
They have a CDP and they'reable to really do a lot of cool
stuff because they have allthese fragmented identities,
because of the way these salesreps work.
But in that type of industrysometimes you can get away with
just having a Marketo or aSalesforce or a HubSpot, but
those tools at the end of theday, are not really real-time
(30:07):
clickstream products.
Don't get me wrong.
I understand that Marketo and,as well as HubSpot, track events
, so I get it, they have thatability, but they are basically
glorified databases which aremeant to.
I have a first name.
Put something in it.
I have a company field.
Put something in it.
You have to set something upfor it to receive that.
Where a CDP is send, sendingwhatever you have, and I'm going
(30:34):
to automatically ingest it andthen create a new row and a
table for it.
So I think the mental model isdifferent.
I will say I think there's alot of benefits, but marketing
operations and revenueoperations professionals because
the mental model for them isreally really field name, field
value it does make it reallyreally hard to make the
transition to the way that a CDPtracks, because you're now not
just dealing with a field, whichis an identity value, you're
(30:56):
also dealing with the actions atthe same time.
So typically you have an event,you also have an identify call.
The way those two things workare really really hard and
usually you have to have alittle bit of a developer
mindset to understand the waythose things work.
So I think it's harder in theB2B environment for a MOPS or
RevOps person to understand that.
I think it takes time toovercome that paradigm shift
(31:18):
that you have in your head.
So do you need a CDP?
I highly recommend it becauseit's going to make it better for
your ultimate customer dataorchestration and then
optimizing that customerexperience.
However, you also have to makesure that you're ready for it,
because they're expensive ashell and if you don't take real
advantage of it, it can bereally, really painful.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
I didn't say anything about UTMs on that so I do
apologize there.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
I think the one thing on UTMs I was just going to ask
you about that.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
The thing about UTMs, though, is they work with
almost every single marketingtool and almost every tool out
there, right?
So when you have a CDP, it'sautomatically going to ingest
anything that you have as aquery parameter for your UTMs.
So that's great.
It's going to automaticallytrack that, and then if you're
sending it downstream, it'sautomatically going to work with
that.
Whether it's Google, whetherit's Mixpanel, whatever, it's
(32:11):
automatically going to work withthose tools.
So it does give you a lot moreflexibility on being able to
have that attribution, becausewhere I see the biggest mistakes
in regards to UTMs is peoplecapture it in the Marketo form
fields.
They then pass it to Marketo,they then add it to a campaign,
they then send it to Salesforce.
That's great, because thathelps you understand your
pipeline, but when you're doingtrue experimentation conversion
rate optimization, analysis ofyour funnels on your websites
(32:34):
that data is not going to helpyou in Marketo or Salesforce.
You really have to beleveraging an analytics product,
and that's where the CDP makesit easy, because it will send it
to both of those places,compared to having set up two
separate configurations.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Yeah, so punchline UTMs are foundational to you
know, once again, it's the glueTo establishing more advanced.
They're the oldest tracking wehave, yeah, right.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
Yeah, they're the oldest tracking we have.
And it's interesting because,you see, providers and don't get
me wrong like Adobe, has theirown tracking system, which is
basically UTM, they just call ittheir own Pwik.
They has their own trackingsystem, which is basically UTM,
they just call it their own Pwik.
They have their own UTMs thatthey use for their systems.
And it always is interesting tome why these providers come up
with their own naming structures, their own query parameters
that they add to a URL that onlywork with its tool in that
(33:22):
nature, because everybody workswith UTMs.
It's the oldest trackingassignment that we've had.
I mean, they've been aroundsince the nineties.
So it's like why?
Why try to do something else?
Speaker 1 (33:33):
Yeah, no, I mean it's kind of limiting there's, and
these are all flawed right.
So in some ways it's you knowwhether it's how it's deployed
by some systems outside of yourcontrol and everything else.
But what so um, so um you wetalked a little bit about like,
how do you sell the idea of likegetting consistent, disciplined
(33:54):
, about getting utms out therecorrectly?
What are some like, can youthink of some examples of
clients where, like, becausethey didn't have that, where,
like, what kinds of problems didthey run into, um, when they
were inconsistent or incompleteor just weren't doing that kind
of stuff?
Speaker 3 (34:12):
Yeah, I mean we have a lot of companies that come to
us from field marketing teamsthat just don't have any ability
to track almost anything right.
Those field marketing teams arein the wild trying to do stuff
and they're not able to actuallyattribute their revenue
ultimately to pipeline or theirpipeline dollars.
They're able to track the leadsthat get scanned right, but
they're not able to track therest of the things.
And that's where systems likeusing vanity URLs that are
(34:33):
attached to UTMs, using QR codesthat are going to be attached
to UTMs obviously the emails orwhatever you're sending out
there being able to betterattribute that.
So we've seen organizationsthat are spending a half a
million dollars to a milliondollars a year on field
marketing.
They're only able to attributewhat the sales rep was actually
able to collect.
They were not able to attributeany of the sponsorship that
they did on the side of thehotel building or on the
(34:55):
sponsorship packets or thelunches that they were
sponsoring, because the reps arenever talking to them.
So by being able to do that,they're able to attribute around
30% more of their marketingbudget to actually driving
pipeline and able to get morecredit on that, simply because
they didn't have a means to beable to connect those dots, and
I think that's whereorganizations need to get
creative in regards to how theyget people to ultimately click
(35:19):
back to the website and then beable to get tracked.
Vanity URLs are a great example.
Qr codes, obviously, are really,really popular and those are
some easy things, but I will say, even with those types of
things, I think companies needto definitely have a how did you
hear about us?
Because people hear from you on6 different channels.
The thing that I see is thefailure on the how did you hear
(35:41):
about us is people give you youhave to select from 1 of 9
options.
Don't do that, just make it sothat they can type in an open
text field and people will type.
We found out at utmio that overthe last 12 months, our number
two driver of users signing upis ChatGPT.
Like it blew me away thatChatGPT is now our second
(36:04):
largest acquisition channel, butwe wouldn't have known all the
different AI tools that werecoming in, because we've seen
Gemini, we've seen Notebook,we've seen, like, all these
different tools that are nowcausing us, or AI tools that are
causing us, to get users.
So, with the UTMs, don't get mewrong, but still try to add a.
How did you hear about us opentext field somewhere?
(36:25):
Because people are going tomention, hey, I heard about you
on the ops cast which I have noway to track anybody who's
listening to this podcast thatthey actually signed up, unless
I had a vanity URL, or if theyactually wrote in that field.
So the world's not perfect,yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
Okay, so you hear to hear first folks when you go to
utmio say you heard about itfrom OpsCast.
That's right.
There's OpsCast in there.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
It was interesting because there is this ongoing
debate.
Do you ask people were youheard from us or do you use UTM
parameters?
To me, you don't need to choose.
Both are valuable.
You do both, yeah.
Speaker 3 (37:06):
You do both.
Yeah, you do both yeah, we doboth and you should like.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
I think there's like, and I love the pushback I think
people are going to give you onthe don't.
You don't use a pick list astwofold, right one?
Well, how you know, how are wegoing to know, like, why do we
give people all these options?
Like, why do we just givelimited options so we can do
that?
Second is, if we leave it open,it's gonna be a lot harder to
(37:32):
analyze.
So how do you like, how do youaddress those kinds of comments?
Speaker 3 (37:37):
well, I'll tell a funny story.
So we worked with a extremelylarge um uh, it's a company
called forks, over nine.
They were very populardocumentary years ago and they
are a vegan documentary companyand they have absurd amount of
traffic and we were asking asurvey question in regards to uh
.
We had like a 16 questionsurvey people would fill out and
then everybody would answerwhich state they were from.
(37:58):
We had 75% of our users fromAlabama, which is not where
vegans list.
Like, I'm not trying to pick onAlabama, but it is not a vegan
state and most of our users wecould prove were in California.
But why did they select Alabama?
Well, it's because it was thefirst option and they did not
care about actually answeringthe question.
And that's the problem you havewith pick lists or even radio
(38:20):
buttons they just go for thefirst one.
So, yeah, it makes it really,really difficult.
But there's ways to solve thatproblem.
One you can build an AI botagent that ultimately, will
classify those things for you inreal time.
So that's not crazy.
Don't get me wrong.
It's not going to be easy.
I saw somebody buildingsomething like that with Treyio
recently.
But there's also ways to be ableto reformat that data.
(38:42):
So when we've had problems withthis in the past, we built I
don't know if it's still live inour Maga sites, but if you were
to Google I think it's Magakeyword phrase parser you can
basically drop in 10,000 rows ofopen text data and it will
reclassify that data and tellyou what actually people did.
So there's definitely ways tofix it right and there's
(39:04):
definitely ways to reformat thedata.
But that extra effort thatyou're going to get by, or that
extra effort you have to put into reformat the data, it's going
to wind up giving you muchbetter odds of understanding the
data compared to just thinkingall of your customers are in
Alabama because it was the firstpick list and there's obviously
tricks that you do with picklists where you can randomize
(39:24):
your pick list on every singlesession.
Still, you're just winding upwith more random data, which
isn't necessarily going to helpyou.
So that's where it getsdifficult, but I think that's
where, when you think about UTMs, obviously give you one leg to
stand on right.
You now have this how did youhear about us?
It helps out a little bit, butthat's where leveraging smart
(39:50):
analytics going back to the CDP,where it's automatically going
to choose where the sessionstarted from Was it a referral,
was it dark social?
Was it direct?
You'll be able to do that, andwhen UTM launches its dark
social tracking, you're going tobe able to even tie some of
those things closer together,because I think dark social is
the thing that we're all stilltrying to really understand and
try, try to get that going.
How do you attribute all ofthese different things together,
especially when michael issharing something with mike?
(40:11):
How do we connect those twoinfluencers together to
attribute where somebody camefrom?
So it's not going to be perfect, but you at least need to know
what angle to point your ship,right, I think that's really
what people?
why have I been successful atgrowing company?
It's because I don't need anexact answer.
I just need to know whether I'mgoing north or south, and if I
know, I'm going in the rightdirection.
At least I know how to grow thecompany.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
Yeah yeah, being directionally accurate is super,
super important, and I think itleans towards that mentality of
like I don't know, fail fast,fail often, kind of a thing,
like if you're just learningquickly, you can kind of like
get the right direction and keepgoing and you'll just keep
refining.
What a lot of what you shared,dan and um, this reminds me, uh,
(40:56):
of you know.
Of course, it's probably justbecause I have a bias for it now
, but, um, I've been pushingreally hard for people to think
of their go-to-market tech stackas a product, and what you're
talking about at the end of theday is a feature.
Right, you just talked aboutbuilding a very unique and
(41:18):
bespoke feature that comes witha little bit of experience when
you have seen around a couplecorners on some challenges and
you're aware of this.
And now you're HubSpot andyou're Marketo and you're insert
next marketing technologysolution.
Here they're not built to dothis stuff out of the box, and
(41:39):
what you said is you need to gobuild a feature to be able to
support a particulargo-to-market motion, and that
feature in this case is creatinga taxonomy and maybe an AI
agent or a script that you canquery your GPT API to say hey,
where did this person come from?
They just filled out the howdid you hear about us?
(42:00):
Empty text field, and now Ineed to standardize that data.
We did a version of that atmarketing ops.
We just branched, we lookedacross all of the information
that came in on our field right,the, the how'd you hear about
us?
And we said, all right, gpt,tell us generally, like some
categories here.
Now we're looking for keywords.
(42:21):
We created different branchinglogic so that if it contains a
particular keyword in HubSpot,it does this.
This was before AI became evenmore accessible, and now I could
literally just turn that wholebranch off and say stop looking
for specific keywords and justlet the AI do it for me.
Right, that's something that wehad to go build in order to
(42:44):
pursue the next sort of phase ofare we directionally accurate
and where we want to go now?
Right, because when, when wesigned up for HubSpot, it didn't
come with this stuff.
So all of this is to say I lovewhat you're saying.
What you're saying, um,establishing these sort of
(43:10):
boundaries and these rules andthese systems and these
processes to me means thatyou're ultimately like building
out products.
Um, but I'd love.
I know, I know this is atangent, but I'd love to hear
your thoughts on like what?
How do you feel about that likewith you?
Speaker 1 (43:23):
know, maybe, maybe we can frame it in this this way,
because I think we're gonna haveto wrap it up is like how, like
, if someone's listening andmaybe they're newer in their
career, this is new stuff forthem, like, or they're in a
place where they see thisprocess is broke, like, how
would you start to build outthis as a product within your,
your tech stack or your, yourenvironment?
Speaker 3 (43:45):
yeah, and just to be like, when we think about like
this and we talk about, inregards to the, regards to
classifying, how did you hearabout us and like, or just
ultimately like, how do you pushthis stuff forward?
Cause, like I think one youshould be.
In most companies, the areawhere they struggle the most is
being able to actually buildsomething unique which is not
(44:05):
currently done, whether that beworking with your development
team to build a microservice oranything that's going to do
these things right.
Like, going back to the, wecouldn't classify this data, so
we built a keyword parser right,and a phrase parser.
With AI, we're able to buildproducts really, really fast.
I literally saw a camera of thegentleman's name who's building
(44:25):
a competitor to us and he'sdoing it entirely using AI bots
and I was like, I think that'srad, like, keep doing that.
So I think, naturally, you needto be building products and
tools to be able to better serveyourself, but with AI, it just
makes it a little too easy where, like, there's a lot of random
tools there.
There's going to be a big trashdump of wallies of AI tools in
(44:47):
the next 12 months that we'rejust going to have a ton of
these crap products that wetried to build, which I'm sure
are going to die.
So there's a balance that youhave to find on that, because in
a company, when you build yourown product and I can speak
specifically for ourselves webuilt our own meeting agenda
tool because all the meetingagenda tools we use kept getting
acquired and then getting shutdown.
(45:09):
So we're like, forget it, we'rejust going to build our own,
but we could never keep up onthe innovation spectrum Like a
product like Fellow, whichFellowapp, which we use for all
of our meeting agendas andmeeting tools.
Their innovation is way fasterthan ours.
So when you build a product,you have to realize somebody is
going to outpace you ininnovation eventually.
So I don't know if that answersthe question, mike or Michael.
Speaker 1 (45:31):
So I was actually even thinking because we talked
about it at the very beginningright, like putting tools and
technology in place on somethingthat's already broken is not
going to get you, it's justgoing to make that bad process
faster.
So I'm like what are the firststeps they should be taking
before maybe even investing intechnology or changing
(45:55):
technology that you already have?
It's kind of where I was going.
Speaker 3 (45:58):
I would always revert back to a Google Sheet.
I'm sorry.
There's not a time in my lifethat a Google Sheet hasn't
solved 85% of the problem.
And then, once we have thatGoogle sheet and then build off
of there, and what I think isreally cool, even with the
Google sheets now, is like, withsome of the stuff we have an
advantage of with the extensionsthat we're integrating into
Google sheets from AI, beingable to leverage that data and
(46:19):
many, many other places has beena lot of fun.
But my first go-to is alwayshow do we use a Google Sheet for
everything?
Speaker 1 (46:31):
But sometimes I feel like I'm old because I use a
Google Sheet for everything.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
You're not old.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
So you'd like to find your taxonomy and all that kind
of stuff in there and thenbuild out maybe even something
formula-based, and then go fromthere 100%, Especially if you're
speaking in regards to UTMs orany of that type of stuff.
Speaker 3 (46:48):
First, you're going to want to start with using a
spreadsheet doing concatenationof multiple fields, multiple
dropdowns.
I mean Google Sheets do giveyou the ability to kind of lock
some things down.
If you want to get fancy, do itin an Airtable.
I've seen some really coolthings in Airtables.
We actually have Notiondatabases.
They and air tables we actuallyhave a like notion databases.
They do not work well for UTMs.
(47:08):
I want to be clear Like I'veattempted to build some things
in there, but anything that's asimple spreadsheet is going to
make it a lot easier to be ableto be flexible.
So you can talk around and findout, which is like the most
popular saying in Florida, whichI'm happy is starting to catch
on all over the country inAmerica now but yeah, get a
spreadsheet, fuck around, findout, keep iterating, keep
(47:28):
iterating.
And then when you feel like,hey, our attribution reporting
is getting better, it's notperfect, because I still have
some nuances that's when youshould really look at a tool.
So because I never tell anybodylike, hey, if you have no UTM
experience, you probably don'twant to start with UTMio, right,
you definitely don't want tostart with us Like go get a
spreadsheet that's going to beway easier to use before you
(47:50):
come to us, which don't get mewrong.
We replaced the spreadsheetwith no problem.
But for most companies who haveno idea how to use UTMs, a
spreadsheet is going to be way,way, way easier.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
Yeah yeah, Dan, I wish we had more time, but we're
going to have to wrap it uphere, so if folks want to learn
more about this, get in touchwith you.
Learn more about UTMio.
What's the best way for them todo that?
Speaker 3 (48:14):
Yeah for sure, definitely go.
Feel free to check out UTMio.
We do offer all the people atmarketingopscom a 30% lifetime
discount which, mike, we foundout existed the other day, un
unbeknownst to us, knowing thatstill existed.
But that's there.
But at the same time, if youwant to check out any of my
stuff, just go to LinkedIn.
Look up Daniel McGaugh, happyto be able to chat with you
(48:36):
online through LinkedIn.
That's my most active network.
I don't use X.
Once they switched from Twitter, I got confused.
I couldn't find the app anymore, so just on LinkedIn now.
Speaker 1 (48:47):
Yeah, you and me both .
What?
Yeah, hey, you have anyspeaking gigs?
Speaker 2 (48:48):
coming up, Dan.
I'm sorry, What'd you say, Mike?
I said do you have any speakinggigs coming up by any chance?
Speaker 3 (48:55):
I speak in London in two weeks at some exit event and
then, I don't know, I think I'mgoing to make a cameo at this
event called Spring Fling.
I might do a cameo there,that'd be great.
I do hope you can make it, Imight make it.
I think I might be speaking atTwilio Signals event in May as
well, but yeah, no, I'm tryingto lay low.
(49:15):
I've moved to Barcelona thispast year, so I now live in
Barcelona, so it's finallystarting to get dark on this
side of the world, so I'm doinga little bit less speaking
because I'm trying to spend moretime with my family traveling
Europe and getting to meet allthe interesting people across
Europe.
So it's been a ton of fun.
Speaker 1 (49:31):
That's awesome, fantastic Dan, tons of fun.
It seems like to me an oldtopic, but I've learned
something new, I think, eventhrough this, so I appreciate it
.
Mike, as always, thank you, andto our listeners, thanks to you
for continuing to support usand suggesting great topics and
guests.
If you have suggestions fortopics or guests or want to be a
(49:51):
guest, reach out to Naomi, mikeor me.
We'd be happy to work with youUntil next time.
Bye, everybody.
Speaker 3 (49:56):
See you.
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