Kevin Dieny: 00:00:00

Hello, and welcome to the Close The Loop podcast.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:03

I'm your host, Kevin Dieny.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:04

And today we're gonna be talking about making marketing analytics easier.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:09

And when we say easier, right?

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:10

Are we talking like, oh, it's gonna be done for you.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:13

It's gonna be just, you know, one click away.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:15

I think we're really, after helping you understand it better.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:19

Helping you see the value easier helping you just get a better understanding

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:23

and more confidence in yourself about yes, as a business leader, I

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:27

think I can really take marketing analytics and do something about it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:30

That's gonna help my company grow!

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:32

So to help us dive into that exciting topic.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:35

I have a really special guest with us today.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:37

His name is Scott Konopasek and he is the CEO and founder of Mint Measure.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:43

Scott is a media planning, ad buying and measurement guru.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:47

Scott has built and led digital media departments at agencies for over 10 years.

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So he is got a lot of experience here.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:54

He has worked with brands like the American Red Cross, Slack Bumble, and

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:59

Jenny Craig, some very big companies.

Kevin Dieny: 00:01:01

Scott loves learning about almost anything, but particularly enjoys

Kevin Dieny: 00:01:05

learning about ancient history.

Kevin Dieny: 00:01:06

Scott moved to Utah during the pandemic and he spends the winter

Kevin Dieny: 00:01:09

skiing and the summers camping.

Kevin Dieny: 00:01:11

So welcome and thank you so much for coming on Scott.

Scott Konopasek: 00:01:14

Hey, Kevin.

Scott Konopasek: 00:01:15

Thanks for having me.

Kevin Dieny: 00:01:16

So we'll go right into this.

Kevin Dieny: 00:01:18

If you could, for the people who are like mark the heck is marketing analytics.

Kevin Dieny: 00:01:23

can you maybe explain it like they're five.

Kevin Dieny: 00:01:27

Hah, what marketing analytics is and what it means for businesses?

Kevin Dieny: 00:01:32

Just in simple terms.

Kevin Dieny: 00:01:33

So they know, okay, what, this is what we're gonna be talking about a lot more.

Scott Konopasek: 00:01:36

Yeah, marketing analytics is about understanding

Scott Konopasek: 00:01:40

all the different data points that are available to a market.

Scott Konopasek: 00:01:44

And the end goal is to try and understand how did marketing drive

Scott Konopasek: 00:01:48

sales for the business and how can I do things maybe a little bit differently?

Scott Konopasek: 00:01:53

Or can I learn from this?

Scott Konopasek: 00:01:55

So there's certainly different levels to marketing analytics

Scott Konopasek: 00:01:59

and the depth that you go.

Scott Konopasek: 00:02:01

But all the analytics work that a marketer will do is going to be focused

Scott Konopasek: 00:02:05

around what worked and how do I get.

Kevin Dieny: 00:02:09

That's great.

Kevin Dieny: 00:02:09

That's a good in, that's a good overview.

Kevin Dieny: 00:02:11

And for businesses thinking, well, I've heard of this, but.

Kevin Dieny: 00:02:17

That's a topic that makes me cringe.

Kevin Dieny: 00:02:19

Right?

Kevin Dieny: 00:02:20

So why is marketing analytics perceived as being such a difficult, maybe even

Kevin Dieny: 00:02:25

cumbersome or annoying or diff like just a, just an emotionally charged

Kevin Dieny: 00:02:30

thing for a business to figure out

Scott Konopasek: 00:02:33

Yeah, if we think about data in general, the amount of

Scott Konopasek: 00:02:37

data that we have today is so much more than we've ever had in history.

Scott Konopasek: 00:02:43

And even in the last 20 years, most of the data in the history of

Scott Konopasek: 00:02:48

planet earth has been generated.

Scott Konopasek: 00:02:50

And so, relatively speaking data analysis is a very new skill.

Scott Konopasek: 00:02:56

Being able to look at data sets, find connections, and then understand what that

Scott Konopasek: 00:03:01

means is only something that we've had to do realistically since like 2008, 2010,

Scott Konopasek: 00:03:08

when it, at least in a marketing sense.

Scott Konopasek: 00:03:10

In 2012, when I was, uh, you know, my first years in my career, Facebook ads

Scott Konopasek: 00:03:16

was like the newest, hottest thing.

Scott Konopasek: 00:03:17

And so I remember sitting down with, the spreadsheet with hundreds of

Scott Konopasek: 00:03:23

rows of data and trying to like, what am I supposed to do with this?

Scott Konopasek: 00:03:26

And I think that most marketers feel that way, right?

Scott Konopasek: 00:03:30

They look at, you know, whether it's their data inside of an ad platform like Google

Scott Konopasek: 00:03:35

or Facebook, or it's Google analytics, or maybe it's even an export of like all this

Scott Konopasek: 00:03:40

complex data from like a Shopify store.

Scott Konopasek: 00:03:43

It's just overwhelming, right?

Scott Konopasek: 00:03:44

Like, oh, how do I do this?

Scott Konopasek: 00:03:46

And from our business standpoint, we've done a lot of like research into this.

Scott Konopasek: 00:03:51

And what we found is that something like 70% of marketers struggle to understand

Scott Konopasek: 00:03:57

the data and apply it to their campaigns.

Scott Konopasek: 00:04:00

And for one very simple reason, they're not analysts they're marketers.

Scott Konopasek: 00:04:05

And so, you know, this marketing team of like three to five people, they're

Scott Konopasek: 00:04:11

someone who knows how to buy ads.

Scott Konopasek: 00:04:12

They're someone who, is running email campaign.

Scott Konopasek: 00:04:15

There's someone else who's like maybe working on creative and

Scott Konopasek: 00:04:18

promotional materials, notably missing is a data analyst.

Scott Konopasek: 00:04:23

And so if you leave, or if, if brands in general leave the data

Scott Konopasek: 00:04:28

analysis to somebody who knows how to do it, well, chances are, there's

Scott Konopasek: 00:04:32

no one that knows how to do it.

Scott Konopasek: 00:04:33

So you'd have to be a weirdo like myself and just love the data

Scott Konopasek: 00:04:36

and like figure out how to do it.

Scott Konopasek: 00:04:38

Most brands need a little bit of help.

Scott Konopasek: 00:04:40

And so I think, analytics can be really scary.

Scott Konopasek: 00:04:43

And you know what we've also found, just through our experience is that

Scott Konopasek: 00:04:49

most people start to care about data analytics when things are going sideways

Scott Konopasek: 00:04:55

or when things are going bad, right.

Scott Konopasek: 00:04:57

As an early stage company, as a small and medium business, you're like, cool.

Scott Konopasek: 00:05:01

I just learned how to use Google and Facebook ads.

Scott Konopasek: 00:05:03

You just learned two brand new platforms.

Scott Konopasek: 00:05:06

You set up your campaigns, you wrote your creative, like

Scott Konopasek: 00:05:09

that's already a ton of work.

Scott Konopasek: 00:05:11

And so if you can just put a dollar into Facebook and $3 come out the other side,

Scott Konopasek: 00:05:17

most brands don't ask too many questions.

Scott Konopasek: 00:05:19

They're like, it works.

Scott Konopasek: 00:05:20

It keeps going well, if I add 50% more budget, does it keep going up?

Scott Konopasek: 00:05:25

And so typically brands wait until something breaks.

Scott Konopasek: 00:05:28

Uhoh I put a dollar in and only 90 cents came out no longer $3.

Scott Konopasek: 00:05:33

Now it's time to do some analysis.

Scott Konopasek: 00:05:35

Now it's time to like, figure out what went wrong.

Scott Konopasek: 00:05:37

And so, um, it's, it's really kind of funny to, to see these brands

Scott Konopasek: 00:05:42

who are like, no, it's fine.

Scott Konopasek: 00:05:43

It's fine.

Scott Konopasek: 00:05:44

And then we'll get a call back in a couple weeks, like, Hey, so it's not fine.

Scott Konopasek: 00:05:47

So I definitely think that there's like that element of, of, you

Scott Konopasek: 00:05:51

know, it's scary, it's a lot and it requires specialized knowledge.

Kevin Dieny: 00:05:55

Yeah, I was looking up, you know, before we met here,

Kevin Dieny: 00:05:59

what are some of the problems people had with marketing analytics?

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:01

And one of the one, one of the big ones I kept seeing was data overload.

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:05

Just like you mentioned it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:07

And when you just see red.

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:09

Basically, I just see data everywhere.

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:11

Well, okay.

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:12

I don't really quite know how to interpret it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:14

I don't, I'm not seeing solutions.

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:15

I'm not seeing dollar signs everywhere.

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:17

I'm seeing just a lot of information and data out there.

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:21

It feels overwhelming.

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:22

And, and then that sort of leads you to like, well, okay, so there's a lot of

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:28

information just like you've mentioned.

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:30

Maybe like I pick my corner of it that I'm gonna focus on and

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:33

then just ignore everything else until it becomes a problem.

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:37

Which is, taking bite size chunks out of it, sort of how people

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:40

do learn and figure things out.

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:42

But just like you said, like, oh, oh, now I've got problems.

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:45

Well, that sort of led me to like realize one of the second biggest

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:49

things people had was like, well, I don't really trust the data and where

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:54

I don't trust it, I don't use it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:56

I don't wanna see it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:57

And I start to use my intuition, like my gut and, or I just ask, Hey, you

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:03

know, look at what my competitors are doing and assume they're

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:06

doing it the perfect right way.

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:08

So how, how does marketing analytics help a business

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:13

overcome, trust issues with data?

Scott Konopasek: 00:07:17

Yeah, we hear from marketers all the time that trust in

Scott Konopasek: 00:07:20

the data is the number one problem.

Scott Konopasek: 00:07:23

So if you don't believe the numbers that Facebook is giving you, you

Scott Konopasek: 00:07:27

don't think that those are accurate.

Scott Konopasek: 00:07:28

Are you gonna keep spending your money there?

Scott Konopasek: 00:07:31

Maybe because you're getting some results, but you're gonna be really hesitant to

Scott Konopasek: 00:07:35

increase your spend or, you know, let's suppose that there's, Some reporting

Scott Konopasek: 00:07:40

from your email marketing platform.

Scott Konopasek: 00:07:42

And you're like, mm, this, this kind of seems fishy to me.

Scott Konopasek: 00:07:46

Well, you might make a pretty big adjustment and like, say I'm gonna

Scott Konopasek: 00:07:49

turn off email for a period of time.

Scott Konopasek: 00:07:51

And so not trusting the data leads people to, to your point, use their gut and

Scott Konopasek: 00:07:57

to guess, and sometimes you can guess correctly and those people are very lucky.

Scott Konopasek: 00:08:02

The first challenge is like how do I, as a marketer start to believe my data more.

Scott Konopasek: 00:08:07

And so I think my, my advice, my first piece of advice is no data set is perfect.

Scott Konopasek: 00:08:14

Even Google analytics, which is oftentimes heralded as the

Scott Konopasek: 00:08:20

standard and web analytics.

Scott Konopasek: 00:08:22

That's sample data.

Scott Konopasek: 00:08:23

It's incomplete data.

Scott Konopasek: 00:08:24

It is a very good picture of what's happening, but it's not perfect.

Scott Konopasek: 00:08:28

And so no data from any platform is gonna be perfect.

Scott Konopasek: 00:08:32

So you just have to understand that, like there's gonna be

Scott Konopasek: 00:08:34

a small variance in there.

Scott Konopasek: 00:08:36

And then beyond that, you just have to start to pay attention to the data.

Scott Konopasek: 00:08:41

I think this is like one of the things that feels.

Scott Konopasek: 00:08:46

Very like low effort to do, but requires a lot of consistency.

Scott Konopasek: 00:08:50

So how can I sniff bullshit in my data?

Scott Konopasek: 00:08:55

If this is the first time I've looked at my data in six

Scott Konopasek: 00:08:57

months, there's no way, right.

Scott Konopasek: 00:08:59

If I've been spending a thousand dollars a week on Facebook and I've been

Scott Konopasek: 00:09:04

consistently getting a hundred sales and all of a sudden, I go from a hundred

Scott Konopasek: 00:09:09

sales to 40 sales in a three week period.

Scott Konopasek: 00:09:13

I can.

Scott Konopasek: 00:09:14

Believe that like something happened in Facebook.

Scott Konopasek: 00:09:17

I might not know what I might not like have the specific answers, but I've

Scott Konopasek: 00:09:22

been paying enough attention to my data to know when something changed.

Scott Konopasek: 00:09:27

And so, you know, Analytics in general is a journey.

Scott Konopasek: 00:09:31

It's not a silver bullet.

Scott Konopasek: 00:09:34

You're not gonna be like, Hey, I did data analytics this month.

Scott Konopasek: 00:09:37

And now my marketing is like, perfect.

Scott Konopasek: 00:09:39

And now like, everything is delivering a five to one row as, analytics is

Scott Konopasek: 00:09:43

about saying, here's a snapshot in time.

Scott Konopasek: 00:09:46

We see what's working.

Scott Konopasek: 00:09:48

We see what's not working.

Scott Konopasek: 00:09:50

And, or maybe we, we see some stuff, but we don't know if it's.

Scott Konopasek: 00:09:55

Well, let's make a change and let's see how that change like impacts my results.

Scott Konopasek: 00:10:02

And so you come back and you look at that data two or four weeks later.

Scott Konopasek: 00:10:06

And so analytics is this really this process of looking at the data, making

Scott Konopasek: 00:10:11

a change, monitoring how the trend is changing over time and being close

Scott Konopasek: 00:10:16

enough to the data, to understand, or, or recognize when something has gotten

Scott Konopasek: 00:10:21

significantly, right or significantly.

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:24

Wow, yeah.

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:25

In our business.

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:28

And in my, you know, internal language here, of how I

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:31

describe it to my colleagues.

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:33

I tell 'em, this is the feedback loop.

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:35

This is I'm gonna do something.

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:37

And then I'm gonna see that impact of that change after and marketing is so

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:42

dependent, like the, the activity parts of it are so dependent on getting good

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:47

quality feedback so that we can say, Hey, this is working or this is not,

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:50

maybe this is something we could change.

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:53

And have optimization apply to, or maybe it's not, and it's like a budget that's

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:56

move our resources somewhere else.

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:58

So the, the question that this leads me to, which is like, I think really

Kevin Dieny: 00:11:02

fitting here is if you're a smaller business and you look at this like,

Kevin Dieny: 00:11:08

well, you know, I did some college.

Kevin Dieny: 00:11:12

I maybe graduated, I, I have a business.

Kevin Dieny: 00:11:15

I'm wearing my business hat most of the time, other times, I'm

Kevin Dieny: 00:11:18

putting on my hiring hat and I have a, a hat rack with a lot of hats

Kevin Dieny: 00:11:22

on it and you know what I mean?

Kevin Dieny: 00:11:23

So, I think I've heard that it's like, well, man, putting on the marketing

Kevin Dieny: 00:11:29

hat and the analytics hat it's heavy.

Kevin Dieny: 00:11:31

So how does a business, who doesn't have like dedicated people.

Kevin Dieny: 00:11:39

Is there a way that they can make it easier or is there like what things make,

Kevin Dieny: 00:11:43

can make it easier so that someone who's got a lot of hats doing a lot, could

Kevin Dieny: 00:11:48

still, just, as you described, still have a feel of what's going on there?

Kevin Dieny: 00:11:52

So they would be clued in, okay, this is what's working or not working, and they

Kevin Dieny: 00:11:56

could still effectively do the marketing analytics without, a whole marketing

Kevin Dieny: 00:12:00

team without a whole marketing analytics position or role or department there.

Kevin Dieny: 00:12:05

Still be effective at doing marketing, using, some bits of marketing analytics?

Scott Konopasek: 00:12:10

Yeah, so there's three options that a business would have.

Scott Konopasek: 00:12:15

One is the owner where picks up another hat, puts on that hat

Scott Konopasek: 00:12:20

and says, I'm gonna learn it.

Scott Konopasek: 00:12:21

As a business owner myself, I can say that that is usually not the solution.

Scott Konopasek: 00:12:26

The second option is to either hire for that role or to, you know, carve out the

Scott Konopasek: 00:12:31

time with one of your existing marketing staff and get them trained up on it.

Scott Konopasek: 00:12:35

So you have that internal resource.

Scott Konopasek: 00:12:37

And then the third option is to outsource it.

Scott Konopasek: 00:12:41

And I know that a lot of business owners are very hesitant to outsource

Scott Konopasek: 00:12:45

analytics or something that is like so sensitive to the business.

Scott Konopasek: 00:12:49

But analytics is a very special set of knowledge.

Scott Konopasek: 00:12:53

It's a very special skill set and paying someone a thousand to $3,000

Scott Konopasek: 00:12:59

a month to, do some analysis, provide a clear, concise report.

Scott Konopasek: 00:13:05

Let's call it $2,000 a month.

Scott Konopasek: 00:13:07

That $2,000 and the hour spent by that specialty person is going

Scott Konopasek: 00:13:12

to deliver way more value and way more specific knowledge around your

Scott Konopasek: 00:13:20

business than the owner learning it themselves or training somebody else.

Scott Konopasek: 00:13:24

It's like, could I spend, you know, a quarter and a few thousand dollars

Scott Konopasek: 00:13:30

for my internal person to like, take an online course to do some stuff.

Scott Konopasek: 00:13:33

Yeah, but they're gonna be operating, let's call it at a 201 level.

Scott Konopasek: 00:13:39

But an analyst, a specialty person that you pay a couple thousand dollars a month,

Scott Konopasek: 00:13:44

they're gonna be operating at a 401 level.

Scott Konopasek: 00:13:46

And just the quality of work that you're gonna get is gonna be a lot different.

Scott Konopasek: 00:13:49

Every business needs to evaluate what makes the most sense.

Scott Konopasek: 00:13:53

I think an apt analogy is like, could a business owner build their own website?

Scott Konopasek: 00:13:58

Probably they're tools like Wix, but like if you hire a web designer, the

Scott Konopasek: 00:14:03

things that they're going to build and the creativity that they're gonna bring

Scott Konopasek: 00:14:06

to that project is just far and away, more than, than you could do yourself.

Scott Konopasek: 00:14:11

And so it's the same type of thing with analytics.

Scott Konopasek: 00:14:13

And so it's worth considering for businesses to, to outsource.

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:17

I think that's a really apt analogy there.

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:20

A lot of times a business is serving a function where yeah.

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:23

The, their customer could maybe do it themselves.

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:27

It should be something that you could digest and be like, yeah, we

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:29

do the same thing with our customers.

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:31

They could probably try to do it themselves.

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:32

They could go to school for years and figure it out or become a doctor

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:36

and try to, figure out their own diagnosis or become an attorney

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:39

and then try to defend themselves.

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:41

But there's a reason why those things are specialized.

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:43

Right.

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:44

So in terms of marketing analytics, like what it, what it's doing, what's going on

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:51

there, like the, the nuts and bolts of it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:53

The data, the information itself, right?

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:56

So how is marketing analytics and the information that it provides a business?

Kevin Dieny: 00:15:00

How is it adding value to a business?

Scott Konopasek: 00:15:03

That's a really great question.

Scott Konopasek: 00:15:05

There, there are a number of different ways to quantify value.

Scott Konopasek: 00:15:08

And so oftentimes there's just value in understanding what's happening, right?

Scott Konopasek: 00:15:15

If you are spending a money on three or four different ad

Scott Konopasek: 00:15:19

channels, you might be profitable.

Scott Konopasek: 00:15:21

You might be growing your business, but.

Scott Konopasek: 00:15:24

The value in understanding, for example, which of those channels are your growth

Scott Konopasek: 00:15:29

driver and which of those channels is just capturing the demand in the marketplace.

Scott Konopasek: 00:15:34

That's hugely valuable because you can like adjust your marketing

Scott Konopasek: 00:15:38

strategies in ways that you can't, without that knowledge.

Scott Konopasek: 00:15:41

So like sometimes just like having that information and that insight allows

Scott Konopasek: 00:15:46

you to start thinking differently.

Scott Konopasek: 00:15:49

There's so I would call that like, informational or strategic value.

Scott Konopasek: 00:15:54

Then we spend a lot of time in our business talking

Scott Konopasek: 00:15:57

about the practical value.

Scott Konopasek: 00:15:59

And so we, we like to say that analytics without action is just research and

Scott Konopasek: 00:16:06

like, you're not gonna commission tens of thousands of dollars and use our research.

Scott Konopasek: 00:16:10

So then like say thank you and put it off to the side.

Scott Konopasek: 00:16:12

Like you wanna do something about it.

Scott Konopasek: 00:16:13

And so we really pushed the practical value and the

Scott Konopasek: 00:16:17

practical application of this.

Scott Konopasek: 00:16:20

If I learn something about an ad channel or a marketing tactic that

Scott Konopasek: 00:16:24

is, or isn't working, I want to then adjust my ad spend, or maybe it's my

Scott Konopasek: 00:16:29

creative strategy, or maybe it's, how much I'm spending in that channel.

Scott Konopasek: 00:16:34

We always try and push customers to like look at here's the data that I have.

Scott Konopasek: 00:16:40

How can I draw a line between this and a result or an action that I want to take.

Scott Konopasek: 00:16:46

You wanna be able to know at a high level, this is what's working.

Scott Konopasek: 00:16:50

This is the role of this channel, but then more tangibly next month I'm gonna

Scott Konopasek: 00:16:54

do these three things differently because this is what worked better last month.

Scott Konopasek: 00:16:59

And so, you called it, this feedback loop.

Scott Konopasek: 00:17:02

That's exactly what it is.

Scott Konopasek: 00:17:04

It's the, okay, I understand strategically what's happening now.

Scott Konopasek: 00:17:07

I need to apply that practically to my ad spent.

Scott Konopasek: 00:17:11

And so, you know, it's this iterative process, right?

Scott Konopasek: 00:17:14

You might learn something this month that you do something different and

Scott Konopasek: 00:17:18

improves your results by let's call it 3%.

Scott Konopasek: 00:17:23

Well, the next month you're gonna do something else.

Scott Konopasek: 00:17:25

That's gonna improve your results by 5%.

Scott Konopasek: 00:17:27

Wow.

Scott Konopasek: 00:17:27

You got a really big month.

Scott Konopasek: 00:17:28

You improve results by 5%.

Scott Konopasek: 00:17:29

The next month is 2%.

Scott Konopasek: 00:17:32

Well, your result isn't just that two or 3%.

Scott Konopasek: 00:17:35

It's the 3% in month.

Scott Konopasek: 00:17:37

One for every month thereafter.

Scott Konopasek: 00:17:39

It's the 5% every month thereafter.

Scott Konopasek: 00:17:41

And it's the 2% every month thereafter.

Scott Konopasek: 00:17:43

And so this is, you know, literally the exponential gains.

Scott Konopasek: 00:17:48

If you are able to just improve a small amount, every.

Scott Konopasek: 00:17:53

The results that that can have on a business over the course of

Scott Konopasek: 00:17:56

12 months is really astounding.

Scott Konopasek: 00:17:58

And I think people oftentimes underestimate what consistency can do.

Scott Konopasek: 00:18:03

You know, I tell brands all the time, you'd be better served, making a 1%

Scott Konopasek: 00:18:08

improvement, 12 months outta the year than a 3% improvement once every quarter

Scott Konopasek: 00:18:15

and, the ability of this, these results to compound and the learnings that you

Scott Konopasek: 00:18:19

get, are gonna be so much more valuable in we'll call it near real time.

Scott Konopasek: 00:18:24

Right, looking at data from like last month.

Scott Konopasek: 00:18:26

So I could do something differently next month versus like, hey,

Scott Konopasek: 00:18:29

it's now summertime, let me look at my spring results.

Scott Konopasek: 00:18:32

Don't get me wrong.

Scott Konopasek: 00:18:33

There's value there.

Scott Konopasek: 00:18:34

But having this more real time view of what's happening and how your

Scott Konopasek: 00:18:39

marketing is working, is always more.

Kevin Dieny: 00:18:41

The other aspect of that too, is marketing spend is coming

Kevin Dieny: 00:18:46

out of the cash and capital and it's coming out of a place in the business.

Kevin Dieny: 00:18:51

I mentioned this before, like it's coming outta a place in the business.

Kevin Dieny: 00:18:53

The business could literally do anything it wanted with it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:18:56

It could, it could be doing something else with it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:18:58

And so marketing analytics is base is proving to the business.

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:03

Okay.

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:04

The marketing dollars are helping.

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:05

Here's how they're helping.

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:07

But in addition, like you've mentioned it highlights learnings and

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:10

improvements that the company could do to make it even more effecti.

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:15

And the marginal, you know, 1% gain over time.

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:19

Is it compounds?

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:20

It can be such a big deal, for a business.

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:24

With our tools, we like to say, well, what if you just got one more customer?

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:29

Added to your roles every month, one new client every month, what would that,

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:34

well, how would that change your business?

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:36

And if it's just one, right?

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:38

That's like the smallest marginal unit of, of growth there.

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:41

Just one more, what would, what does that mean?

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:43

And they're like, okay, well it's this much value.

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:45

And so we like say, okay, so let's wind back.

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:49

Like how many, if you have one new customer, how many more leads do you need?

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:53

How much more does your ad spend, would it need to increase?

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:56

Well, that's maybe a thousand, couple thousand, maybe it's

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:59

triple digits, it's big numbers.

Kevin Dieny: 00:20:01

And so we say, okay, well, if you just increase the effectiveness of

Kevin Dieny: 00:20:04

your marketing, we're not increasing ad spend a penny, but you're getting

Kevin Dieny: 00:20:09

more out of what you're already doing.

Kevin Dieny: 00:20:11

So I like to look at it like marketing analytics is not

Kevin Dieny: 00:20:16

adding to your marketing spend.

Kevin Dieny: 00:20:18

It's just like charging it, making it more effective, making it more efficient.

Kevin Dieny: 00:20:22

And so in that way, it's a lot more easier for some businesses

Kevin Dieny: 00:20:26

to like swallow that, like that painful pill going down, like okay.

Kevin Dieny: 00:20:30

Because the other problem in marketing is there's a lag effect.

Kevin Dieny: 00:20:34

Like you've mentioned with the real time you spend money today, it might

Kevin Dieny: 00:20:37

take a little while for that to wind up.

Kevin Dieny: 00:20:40

How does marketing analytics, help a business plan and forecast

Kevin Dieny: 00:20:45

and, and try to make decisions today that will impact the future?

Scott Konopasek: 00:20:49

You touched on a couple of like really good things there.

Scott Konopasek: 00:20:51

And, and I just wanna kind of add one of my favorite expressions from John

Scott Konopasek: 00:20:55

Wannamaker the quintessential, I'm wasting half of my money on advertising.

Scott Konopasek: 00:21:00

I just don't know which half.

Scott Konopasek: 00:21:04

And it's like, well, like what if you could, just to your point,

Scott Konopasek: 00:21:08

improve that by a tiny bit.

Scott Konopasek: 00:21:10

What does that do for your business?

Scott Konopasek: 00:21:11

And what does that mean?

Scott Konopasek: 00:21:12

And so, you know, that's.

Scott Konopasek: 00:21:15

That's the approach that people should think about analytics.

Scott Konopasek: 00:21:18

How do I look at everything that's happening and look at the least effective

Scott Konopasek: 00:21:23

things and do less of those and reallocate that spend to the most effective things.

Scott Konopasek: 00:21:29

a lot of people use year over year data, and I think that's a really

Scott Konopasek: 00:21:31

good place for, brands to get started.

Scott Konopasek: 00:21:34

And just, what was I doing last?

Scott Konopasek: 00:21:36

If I had a thousand daily website visitors at my plus or minus this

Scott Konopasek: 00:21:40

year, you always have to kinda take that data with a grain of salt.

Scott Konopasek: 00:21:43

Especially over the last two years, 2022 is nothing like

Scott Konopasek: 00:21:46

2021, which is nothing like 2020.

Scott Konopasek: 00:21:49

We spend a lot of time encouraging clients to, yes, look year over year as a general

Scott Konopasek: 00:21:55

benchmark, but look at your last four.

Scott Konopasek: 00:21:59

Eight weeks of data, maybe even up to your last quarter, but the things that

Scott Konopasek: 00:22:03

we're trending in a good direction over the last four to six weeks are

Scott Konopasek: 00:22:06

probably gonna keep going in that trend.

Scott Konopasek: 00:22:09

If something has been declining, it's probably gonna keep going along that path.

Scott Konopasek: 00:22:13

And so using the data over the last four to six weeks, is

Scott Konopasek: 00:22:16

just a better way to evaluate.

Scott Konopasek: 00:22:18

We work with a number of customers where every month we meet with

Scott Konopasek: 00:22:22

them and we do two things for them.

Scott Konopasek: 00:22:24

We bring them insights about the data that's gathering in our platform and

Scott Konopasek: 00:22:28

the analytics about their ad spend.

Scott Konopasek: 00:22:30

And then we provide them with specific recommendations.

Scott Konopasek: 00:22:33

We'll say we saw some inefficiencies here, or we saw some opportunities there.

Scott Konopasek: 00:22:37

and so the customer is then able to take those.

Scott Konopasek: 00:22:40

And this typically happens like, you know, it's called like the 22nd of the month

Scott Konopasek: 00:22:44

and we're looking at the last six weeks.

Scott Konopasek: 00:22:46

And so they're saying, great, I'm gonna plan my ad budget for the next month.

Scott Konopasek: 00:22:51

Based on these learnings, these are the specific things I can do differently.

Scott Konopasek: 00:22:54

Short term planning is probably the best use case for analytics.

Scott Konopasek: 00:23:00

Certainly you wanna be able to look at your annual plan or your annual budget.

Scott Konopasek: 00:23:04

And the data that, that you have over the course of a year and, forecast

Scott Konopasek: 00:23:08

what you're gonna spend or the channel.

Scott Konopasek: 00:23:11

From a, a practical standpoint, going back to, you know, analytics

Scott Konopasek: 00:23:14

needs action, looking at your last four to six weeks and, and

Scott Konopasek: 00:23:17

saying, what can I do differently?

Scott Konopasek: 00:23:19

Or if I were to copy paste my plan from this month, what tweaks would I make?

Scott Konopasek: 00:23:24

Would I add a little bit more here?

Scott Konopasek: 00:23:25

Would I subtract a little bit more here?

Scott Konopasek: 00:23:28

Would I, you know, focus this campaign on building a higher frequency with users?

Scott Konopasek: 00:23:32

And so, from a planning standpoint, That's that's really where I think

Scott Konopasek: 00:23:37

most brands should, should focus.

Kevin Dieny: 00:23:39

Yeah, no, that's really good.

Kevin Dieny: 00:23:41

And you mentioned, something about data gathering that made me think of something.

Kevin Dieny: 00:23:46

A business, it gets almost too many opportunities.

Kevin Dieny: 00:23:49

Like marketing is an opportunity.

Kevin Dieny: 00:23:51

Selling is an opportunity, maybe a business calls them and they, they take

Kevin Dieny: 00:23:55

it, you know, 99% of the time it's spam.

Kevin Dieny: 00:23:57

So they're like, Ugh, you know, but maybe 1% of those times there's like

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:01

a valuable opportunity in there.

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:03

And that's the reason why they may take those calls is it's hard to

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:06

sort through, I think for a business, all the possible opportunities and

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:10

ways that that business could grow.

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:12

They really have to simplify it down.

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:16

and that means, okay, well, how do I know?

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:19

Like, there might be some clues, right?

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:21

How am I gonna figure out that this is a really good opportunity for

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:24

my business and how can I weed out the stuff that's just not relevant.

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:27

It's not gonna help me.

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:28

It's not helping me get to the goal that I've set and really,

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:32

you know, helping you focus.

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:34

And so it leads me to thinking like, well, a lot of times the

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:36

business is like, look, I'm.

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:38

My, my blinders are on my I'm really focused on, you know,

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:43

my financial sheets right now.

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:45

And I'm looking at my revenue, my expenses and my profit.

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:49

And so it's like, well, if, and if I look over across the way, way over,

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:53

there is all this marketing data.

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:55

And so all that data feels disconnected from my financial information.

Kevin Dieny: 00:25:00

So how does a business make it easier?

Kevin Dieny: 00:25:04

Gathering all that marketing data and actually connecting it to the

Kevin Dieny: 00:25:08

business' goals, aligning them with how a business wants to grow?

Scott Konopasek: 00:25:13

Yeah, this is where the analysis paralysis or like, it can

Scott Konopasek: 00:25:18

just feel really overwhelming, right?

Scott Konopasek: 00:25:20

Like, There's already so much to do.

Scott Konopasek: 00:25:23

I'm a business owner.

Scott Konopasek: 00:25:24

I have to focus on my P and L my unit economics.

Scott Konopasek: 00:25:27

I have this giant expense for marketing.

Scott Konopasek: 00:25:29

Like where do I even get started?

Scott Konopasek: 00:25:31

How on earth do I tie these two things together?

Scott Konopasek: 00:25:33

And for every business owner out there, listening to this,

Scott Konopasek: 00:25:37

hire an expert, like the.

Scott Konopasek: 00:25:41

Look, this is, this is literally the role of, of outsourcing this to somebody.

Scott Konopasek: 00:25:44

If you hire marketing analytics, you know, expert, whether that's a

Scott Konopasek: 00:25:48

platform that offers some tech and offers some consulting services,

Scott Konopasek: 00:25:52

or this is just someone in your local city, town state, who's able

Scott Konopasek: 00:25:56

to do this type of work for you.

Scott Konopasek: 00:25:59

This is where that specialty knowledge comes in.

Scott Konopasek: 00:26:01

They're gonna know exactly where to look.

Scott Konopasek: 00:26:03

They're gonna know exactly how to tie these two things together.

Scott Konopasek: 00:26:05

Marketing is oftentimes seen as an expense, especially by a

Scott Konopasek: 00:26:10

CFO or, or that type of a role.

Scott Konopasek: 00:26:12

And so, the best way to, champion the value of marketing is to dig down into

Scott Konopasek: 00:26:18

what's working and what's not working.

Scott Konopasek: 00:26:20

And so an unfortunate piece of news that a lot of people aren't gonna

Scott Konopasek: 00:26:24

want to hear is that trusting the data that comes out of Facebook and comes

Scott Konopasek: 00:26:29

out of Google and that, you know, is.

Scott Konopasek: 00:26:32

Aggregating and Google analytics.

Scott Konopasek: 00:26:34

That's a good first step, but it's whole, it's, it's incomplete.

Scott Konopasek: 00:26:38

It's not the whole story.

Scott Konopasek: 00:26:40

And if that's all the information that you are using to try and

Scott Konopasek: 00:26:44

inform your marketing, analysis, and like how to optimize, you're

Scott Konopasek: 00:26:49

leaving a lot on the table.

Scott Konopasek: 00:26:50

And so this is really where like a level or a layer of measurement

Scott Konopasek: 00:26:55

technology can really make all the difference in the world.

Scott Konopasek: 00:26:58

Whether it is, tracking your phone calls more accurately with like your

Scott Konopasek: 00:27:03

service, whether it is like adding in a piece of technology that can help feed

Scott Konopasek: 00:27:08

the data back into the ad platforms.

Scott Konopasek: 00:27:11

You can improve the data quality that they have or whether it's, a more full

Scott Konopasek: 00:27:15

on piece of, of marketing analytics, tech that, can de-duplicate your ads

Scott Konopasek: 00:27:20

and your channels and your results, and give you this whole unified view.

Scott Konopasek: 00:27:26

You know that this is really the place for marketing technology.

Scott Konopasek: 00:27:30

So I'm sure that everyone is listening is saying, well, when

Scott Konopasek: 00:27:33

do I need measurement technology?

Scott Konopasek: 00:27:35

How do I know if this is the right time and the right place for me?

Scott Konopasek: 00:27:39

There are a couple of criteria that, that we offer up to, to customers.

Scott Konopasek: 00:27:42

Probably the easiest one for most is if you're spending in three or

Scott Konopasek: 00:27:47

more ad channels, you should have a layer of marketing technology.

Scott Konopasek: 00:27:51

So if you're spending in Facebook in Google and maybe you're doing some, like

Scott Konopasek: 00:27:54

display remarketing, you could consider, a piece of measurement technology.

Scott Konopasek: 00:28:00

Now if you're doing those three things and you're only spending $20,000 a

Scott Konopasek: 00:28:05

month, you probably don't need it.

Scott Konopasek: 00:28:07

So the, the next kind of like level to this is if you're spending about a

Scott Konopasek: 00:28:11

hundred thousand dollars a month, so about a million dollars a year, $1.2

Scott Konopasek: 00:28:14

million a year, that's generally the level where you're spending a good

Scott Konopasek: 00:28:18

amount on, on PPC and cost per click.

Scott Konopasek: 00:28:21

You have some budget in Facebook and you're really starting to wonder

Scott Konopasek: 00:28:24

like, wow, a million dollars a year.

Scott Konopasek: 00:28:26

Like, what else could I be doing with this money?

Scott Konopasek: 00:28:28

Like, and so that's really where getting a 5%.

Scott Konopasek: 00:28:33

Improvement in performance over the course of a year.

Scott Konopasek: 00:28:36

Like if, if annually, all you got outta a piece of measurement,

Scott Konopasek: 00:28:39

technology was 5% gains, right?

Scott Konopasek: 00:28:41

Massive results for the business and like reallocating some of that less effective

Scott Konopasek: 00:28:46

ad spend into other channels or ways of delivering that that's more effective,

Scott Konopasek: 00:28:50

can have some really big results.

Scott Konopasek: 00:28:52

So three ad channels, and then typically about a hundred thousand

Scott Konopasek: 00:28:55

dollars a month in ad spend.

Scott Konopasek: 00:28:57

If you're below, you're probably still in that mode of a dollar

Scott Konopasek: 00:29:00

into a machine spits, $3 out.

Scott Konopasek: 00:29:03

And so, uh, if that's working for you, then, Hey, you don't need it quite yet.

Scott Konopasek: 00:29:07

But as you start growing like that, that'll really make a lot of sense.

Scott Konopasek: 00:29:11

I'll add a second qualifier here.

Scott Konopasek: 00:29:13

We were gonna a handful of brands that are really only spending in

Scott Konopasek: 00:29:16

like Facebook and Google, but they're spending like three to $5 million a year.

Scott Konopasek: 00:29:21

That's also a moment where you would say, Hey, like measurement technology

Scott Konopasek: 00:29:25

could really help me out because again, if you could only improve a

Scott Konopasek: 00:29:28

couple of percentage points on three to 5 million of ad spend, that's huge

Scott Konopasek: 00:29:33

downstream results in terms of new leads, new customers, top line revenue.

Scott Konopasek: 00:29:38

There's different needs and you know, every business is gonna

Scott Konopasek: 00:29:40

be a little bit different.

Scott Konopasek: 00:29:41

But those are generally when you know, you're gonna get the most value

Scott Konopasek: 00:29:44

out of measurement technologies.

Kevin Dieny: 00:29:46

I always picture like a, like a, the cartoon of a prison yard breakout.

Kevin Dieny: 00:29:52

And if your fence has like a hole in it and well, everyone's gonna escape,

Kevin Dieny: 00:29:56

like in marketing analytics, if you're tracking, with a laser, how everything

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:01

is coming in and how your marketing channels are interacting, engaging with

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:06

your leads, turning them into, prospects, and then you hand it over and then

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:11

suddenly there's absolutely no data.

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:13

Well, that's the hole in the prison yard and everyone busts out through there.

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:16

So it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:17

Your marketing analytics data is limited the way I always look at it is it's

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:21

always limited by the businesses and ability to track whatever really critical,

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:25

important thing isn't being tracked.

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:27

I always like a first pass assessment, what are the biggest,

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:29

most the biggest success points that are happening in the business?

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:33

And it's usually, well, there's the sale.

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:35

There's the lead, right?

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:37

Just to start there.

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:38

In between those points.

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:39

There's probably quite a bit before that there's a lot.

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:42

So is the business tracking those points where.

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:45

It's very clear.

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:47

It's very accurate that those are happening.

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:49

The tracking or measurement is very accurate, when someone buys, hopefully

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:53

you know, so yeah, so those are, those are really critical points.

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:58

And if you're not measuring those accurately, it makes all

Kevin Dieny: 00:31:01

the effort you've put somewhere else in the marketing analytics.

Kevin Dieny: 00:31:04

It, it's not helping it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:31:05

I would say it's still that maybe valuable to improving how the marketing is doing

Kevin Dieny: 00:31:09

within a channel or within a campaign.

Kevin Dieny: 00:31:11

But when that marketing is still always trying to drive business

Kevin Dieny: 00:31:15

results, if the business isn't able to.

Kevin Dieny: 00:31:19

Connect the dots or put tracking in place for those points.

Kevin Dieny: 00:31:22

There's usually a fall through like our, our technology is with the phone.

Kevin Dieny: 00:31:25

That's, that's just one piece of a very large generally customer

Kevin Dieny: 00:31:30

journey of, you know, how a business interacts and has conversations and

Kevin Dieny: 00:31:33

brings in customers and clients.

Kevin Dieny: 00:31:35

So how, how does a business though assess right where its gaps are using marketing

Kevin Dieny: 00:31:43

analytics, where is like the hole in the fence, in the prison that, you know,

Kevin Dieny: 00:31:46

all the everyone's escaping through.

Scott Konopasek: 00:31:49

Yeah.

Scott Konopasek: 00:31:50

So I typically start by asking what are all the ways that a customer can

Scott Konopasek: 00:31:59

send a signal to your company that they want to give you their money?

Scott Konopasek: 00:32:05

And so that could be a lead that you're gonna follow up with.

Scott Konopasek: 00:32:08

It could be a phone call.

Scott Konopasek: 00:32:09

It could be that they walk into your brick and mortar location.

Scott Konopasek: 00:32:12

It could be that they are initiating a checkout online.

Scott Konopasek: 00:32:16

And so the first step is to make sure that you have a way of accurately

Scott Konopasek: 00:32:21

tracking all of the different signals.

Scott Konopasek: 00:32:24

We recently started working with an automotive brand.

Scott Konopasek: 00:32:26

They're a smaller regional brand.

Scott Konopasek: 00:32:29

They have 10 locations.

Scott Konopasek: 00:32:31

And they use a call tracking service.

Scott Konopasek: 00:32:35

They have, some forms online and a big gap for them is they do these shows and they

Scott Konopasek: 00:32:41

like take their vehicles and they have people show up and they, they spend a lot

Scott Konopasek: 00:32:45

of money driving people to these events.

Scott Konopasek: 00:32:47

They're typically like short term events.

Scott Konopasek: 00:32:49

Part of the reason why we started working is to fill in that gap.

Scott Konopasek: 00:32:52

They didn't have a way of looking at the people who were arriving to

Scott Konopasek: 00:32:56

those locations, understanding if they were influenced by advertising

Scott Konopasek: 00:33:00

and then ultimately being able to connect that to a vehicle sale.

Scott Konopasek: 00:33:04

And so, if you think about all the different signals that a user

Scott Konopasek: 00:33:08

can give you, that they want to give you their money, start by.

Scott Konopasek: 00:33:12

Measuring all of those and chances are, if you are anything besides

Scott Konopasek: 00:33:17

eCommerce, you're gonna have at least two or three different ways.

Scott Konopasek: 00:33:22

There are free tools that can certainly help with some of this stuff.

Scott Konopasek: 00:33:25

As your business starts to scale up and as you start spending, let's say upwards

Scott Konopasek: 00:33:29

of half, a million dollars a year in advertising, that's really where like

Scott Konopasek: 00:33:33

specialty data, specialty providers, measurement technology can, can really

Scott Konopasek: 00:33:37

start to deliver, you know, strong value.

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:40

Yeah, no, I that's a huge example because just as an example

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:45

from, something that happened to our client, our client was spending

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:48

a huge amount of money in, in ads.

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:50

I'd spend.

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:52

They were, they were really being very efficient on that end.

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:55

They were really optimizing it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:57

What we found was they only had one number, one line for people to call in on.

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:02

And we found that about 70% of the calls they got, just went into the abyss.

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:10

And so it was painful for them to hear this because it was like, man, we're doing

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:15

so much marketing work on the front end.

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:17

And people are busting, their time and effort, blood, sweat, and tears

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:21

is bringing forward into the front end marketing optimization of this.

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:24

We're passing everything over, but at one point there's this

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:28

critical phone call that has to be.

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:30

and because there was nothing to tell them that they weren't coming in.

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:33

They just assumed, you know, there's this huge drop off right there.

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:36

And so the marketing was working with that and they were trying to optimize for that.

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:40

It turned out that if someone called between 11 and 12, when the person

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:43

was on lunch, There, there was no, people weren't getting through.

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:46

It also turned out that if marketing sent a bunch of stuff all at once, the busy

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:51

line came and then people weren't calling back after trying two or three times.

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:54

So it didn't have anything to do with marketing and marketing.

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:58

Didn't really want to look farther down the funnel into the operational,

Kevin Dieny: 00:35:01

you know, how is this going?

Kevin Dieny: 00:35:02

But when we came in and showed them just a few things, they're immediately

Kevin Dieny: 00:35:06

like marketing is gonna be involved and seeing sort of the life cycle now.

Kevin Dieny: 00:35:11

Right?

Kevin Dieny: 00:35:11

Like the whole.

Kevin Dieny: 00:35:14

And for this client, it was like day two.

Kevin Dieny: 00:35:19

They didn't have hardly any, if any dropped missed calls.

Kevin Dieny: 00:35:22

So like they were almost tripling doubling their leads to calls.

Kevin Dieny: 00:35:26

So it, and it was just a like moment like, wow, this was happening.

Kevin Dieny: 00:35:33

And so that was a quick win type of scenario where we felt like,

Kevin Dieny: 00:35:36

we're, you know, saviors of the day, something I could like talk about,

Kevin Dieny: 00:35:40

but, but generally speaking, marketing analytics can come in the form of.

Kevin Dieny: 00:35:45

Hey, here's something that, may be a little off, you know, it might be

Kevin Dieny: 00:35:49

harder to decipher harder to figure out.

Kevin Dieny: 00:35:52

And so that expert, I think, does come, come into play.

Kevin Dieny: 00:35:56

But at the end of the day, like whoever's making the decision

Kevin Dieny: 00:35:58

needs to have that information.

Kevin Dieny: 00:36:00

So with all the charts, with all the data, with all the forms, all the marketing

Kevin Dieny: 00:36:04

analytics takes, what is, what are some really good ways that marketing analytics

Kevin Dieny: 00:36:10

can be communicated to the business?

Kevin Dieny: 00:36:12

In a way that leads to, you know, decisions being made that leads to it

Kevin Dieny: 00:36:16

being acted upon that's gonna lead to it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:36:19

Being able to be improved, to get the, one to 5%, types of goals that a

Kevin Dieny: 00:36:23

business wants to use, analytics for.

Kevin Dieny: 00:36:25

So how does it, how does that, how does communication become more effective?

Scott Konopasek: 00:36:29

Whenever a brand is picking up an analytics program for the

Scott Konopasek: 00:36:33

first time, whether that's with a piece of technology or whether that's like

Scott Konopasek: 00:36:36

an internal hire or, dedicated effort.

Scott Konopasek: 00:36:39

There's usually a lot of panic and there's usually a lot of fear.

Scott Konopasek: 00:36:42

And, people have been looking at a cost per click and suddenly saying, well,

Scott Konopasek: 00:36:46

we're not gonna measure a cost per click.

Scott Konopasek: 00:36:48

We're gonna measure on a cost per lead, or we've been measuring on a cost per lead.

Scott Konopasek: 00:36:52

But actually we have this new piece of technology that's going to connect leads

Scott Konopasek: 00:36:56

to paying customers, and we're gonna evaluate on the cost of a customer.

Scott Konopasek: 00:37:01

You know, that just that disrupts workflows there's new charts, new tables.

Scott Konopasek: 00:37:05

And so it's, it tends to be a pretty big effort to like, get the department

Scott Konopasek: 00:37:10

on board, executive leadership or, owners championing this and, and,

Scott Konopasek: 00:37:15

showing enthusiasm, look, most people don't care about analytics.

Scott Konopasek: 00:37:19

Most people don't like data, but it's mission critical for

Scott Konopasek: 00:37:24

the leadership, whether that's a director or the owner or the founder.

Scott Konopasek: 00:37:28

To, show how important this is and to, help make this an organizational priority.

Scott Konopasek: 00:37:35

That's a really big part of the like, I'll call it getting started phase.

Scott Konopasek: 00:37:40

Part of this getting started phase is also.

Scott Konopasek: 00:37:43

Laying out, what are the things that we are going to measure and what are the

Scott Konopasek: 00:37:47

things that we're going to care about?

Scott Konopasek: 00:37:49

So this is the cost per click to a lead, or instead of measuring the

Scott Konopasek: 00:37:52

lead, or maybe we're gonna measure a lead, but we're really gonna evaluate

Scott Konopasek: 00:37:55

everything on a cost of a customer acquisition, or maybe we're gonna move

Scott Konopasek: 00:37:59

away from like average order value.

Scott Konopasek: 00:38:02

And we're gonna focus on profit, right?

Scott Konopasek: 00:38:05

There's like all kinds of different ways to level up.

Scott Konopasek: 00:38:08

And so developing an upfront measurement plan.

Scott Konopasek: 00:38:11

Probably the best way to lay the table for everybody.

Scott Konopasek: 00:38:15

I know this is probably not what other people want to hear again, but like,

Scott Konopasek: 00:38:18

this is where an expert comes in, right?

Scott Konopasek: 00:38:20

If you're the owner and you're trying to pick up the, the analytics hat,

Scott Konopasek: 00:38:24

you can, based off of some suggestions and some articles, and listicals

Scott Konopasek: 00:38:28

like, come up with a couple of ideas, but an analyst is gonna come in

Scott Konopasek: 00:38:32

and, and be able to do some of this.

Scott Konopasek: 00:38:36

At a better level.

Scott Konopasek: 00:38:36

So lay the foundation.

Scott Konopasek: 00:38:38

I think once you begin a program and you have a measurement plan in place,

Scott Konopasek: 00:38:43

um, the next thing that I like to do is start with the objective facts, right?

Scott Konopasek: 00:38:50

People are gonna be a little bit nervous.

Scott Konopasek: 00:38:52

Work is gonna be changing.

Scott Konopasek: 00:38:54

The things that, you know, the marketer was graded on and they

Scott Konopasek: 00:38:56

were like doing a good job.

Scott Konopasek: 00:38:58

Are going to be changing and things might not look so good.

Scott Konopasek: 00:39:01

So like let's, let's lay the facts, the objective facts on the table.

Scott Konopasek: 00:39:05

And, it's important that everybody, whether that's the owner or the marketer,

Scott Konopasek: 00:39:10

or, anybody else involved, is able to remove some of their emotion from this.

Scott Konopasek: 00:39:15

And so I really like to start with customer journeys and,

Scott Konopasek: 00:39:19

I always ask the question.

Scott Konopasek: 00:39:21

How do you know how to deliver your ads effectively?

Scott Konopasek: 00:39:24

If you don't know how long it takes to sell your product?

Scott Konopasek: 00:39:28

Well, like if I have a two week sales cycle, that's a very different way

Scott Konopasek: 00:39:32

of delivering my ads than if I have a 30 day sales cycle or a 60 day sales

Scott Konopasek: 00:39:36

cycle, if the needs of the business and the needs of the ads are fundamentally

Scott Konopasek: 00:39:41

different in each of those scenarios.

Scott Konopasek: 00:39:44

And so that's typically where I, I like to get started.

Scott Konopasek: 00:39:47

Here's how customers are currently coming into the website.

Scott Konopasek: 00:39:51

It takes, uh, 15 ads on average over the course of nine days.

Scott Konopasek: 00:39:57

Oh wow.

Scott Konopasek: 00:39:58

Okay.

Scott Konopasek: 00:39:58

And people, when they're here, they visit these number of pages

Scott Konopasek: 00:40:01

and then here's the percentage of people that convert on a first visit.

Scott Konopasek: 00:40:05

And then here's how many people leave.

Scott Konopasek: 00:40:07

Okay.

Scott Konopasek: 00:40:07

Well, when the people leave, how long does it take them to come back?

Scott Konopasek: 00:40:12

How many ads does it take to get them to come.

Scott Konopasek: 00:40:15

And suddenly you begin to form this picture of like,

Scott Konopasek: 00:40:18

oh, well, there's two parts.

Scott Konopasek: 00:40:20

I need to get people interested, bring them in.

Scott Konopasek: 00:40:23

I'm gonna convert a small percentage of those of my first visit.

Scott Konopasek: 00:40:26

But then for everybody else, I now know how many more days it's going to take.

Scott Konopasek: 00:40:30

So you might get that first visit in nine days.

Scott Konopasek: 00:40:33

People might come back in two days, right?

Scott Konopasek: 00:40:35

You have an 11 day sales cycle on average, or it might take them an additional nine

Scott Konopasek: 00:40:41

days and you have an 18 day sales cycle.

Scott Konopasek: 00:40:43

But it's gonna be really difficult to deliver your ad campaigns effectively

Scott Konopasek: 00:40:48

if you don't have that fundamental understanding of that buying cycle.

Scott Konopasek: 00:40:52

And, my experience with Google analytics and, and similar tools is

Scott Konopasek: 00:40:56

that that data's just not available.

Scott Konopasek: 00:40:58

So.

Scott Konopasek: 00:40:59

Again, this is where I would, I would champion for a piece of technology to

Scott Konopasek: 00:41:02

come in and give some of these insights.

Scott Konopasek: 00:41:04

As you are beginning to lay the foundation and show some of these like empirical

Scott Konopasek: 00:41:10

facts of like, this is how customers are currently interacting with things,

Scott Konopasek: 00:41:13

then you can begin to say, great.

Scott Konopasek: 00:41:16

How can we optimize for this?

Scott Konopasek: 00:41:19

And, I use the expression focus on what's right.

Scott Konopasek: 00:41:22

Not who's right.

Scott Konopasek: 00:41:23

So, okay, well maybe we find that 98% of people are leaving the website and

Scott Konopasek: 00:41:31

they're doing that within 30 seconds.

Scott Konopasek: 00:41:33

Okay.

Scott Konopasek: 00:41:34

Well, let's figure out how to optimize that landing page a little bit.

Scott Konopasek: 00:41:37

Maybe we drive them to a different page.

Scott Konopasek: 00:41:38

Maybe we make some content changes or we might find that we have, a ton of

Scott Konopasek: 00:41:44

people coming into the site and they come back multiple times, but it takes,

Scott Konopasek: 00:41:49

'em a really long time to purchase.

Scott Konopasek: 00:41:50

Maybe takes them four or five site visits before they're ready to purchase.

Scott Konopasek: 00:41:55

Okay.

Scott Konopasek: 00:41:55

Well then, like how do we adjust the ad campaigns to, account for this behavior?

Scott Konopasek: 00:42:01

Well, I would infer from something like that, that there's probably

Scott Konopasek: 00:42:04

a lot of research going on.

Scott Konopasek: 00:42:05

This person is considering your brand, considering your product.

Scott Konopasek: 00:42:09

They're probably doing competitive research, probably have a tab

Scott Konopasek: 00:42:11

open of your top five competitors.

Scott Konopasek: 00:42:14

And they're trying to understand why they should buy from you.

Scott Konopasek: 00:42:17

Great.

Scott Konopasek: 00:42:18

Well, all of a sudden with that, you can begin to say, wow, well, what if

Scott Konopasek: 00:42:21

we did some more educational content?

Scott Konopasek: 00:42:24

What if we did a competitive comparison page?

Scott Konopasek: 00:42:27

What if we did an FAQ that just told people why we're the, you know,

Scott Konopasek: 00:42:30

most awesome product on the market?

Scott Konopasek: 00:42:32

And so, um, There's certainly like the, the paid side of things and

Scott Konopasek: 00:42:37

understanding what, how many ads over what time period what's most

Scott Konopasek: 00:42:41

effective and what's not, but there's so much more around this that begins

Scott Konopasek: 00:42:46

to affect other parts of the business.

Scott Konopasek: 00:42:47

So, you know, to kind of bring this back to what you had asked earlier

Scott Konopasek: 00:42:50

about like, You have your P and L and you're looking at your profits

Scott Konopasek: 00:42:55

and all those, those metrics and marketing analytics feel separate.

Scott Konopasek: 00:42:58

This is a great way to bridge that together.

Scott Konopasek: 00:43:01

And so the marketing analytics, isn't just about what the paid advertising is doing.

Scott Konopasek: 00:43:05

It's about how users are engaging with the website, how paid advertising is

Scott Konopasek: 00:43:09

influencing that and the arrest of the experience that goes into somebody

Scott Konopasek: 00:43:14

being ready to purchase your product.

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:17

Yeah, well, I've, I've got a great example for this,

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:21

which was like, I had a room with sales support marketing leaders.

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:26

I had financial, I had the whole leadership in there and

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:30

we had presented quite a lot of data and I was like, Feeling.

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:33

Mm.

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:33

I don't know if they're translating this data into, you know, the business

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:36

results that they're all, accountable for.

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:39

And I don't think it's really hitting where like, as hard as I want it to.

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:42

So I just summarized it into like a one liner.

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:45

I was like, look, every time we get 11 visits to this page, we probably

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:50

are gonna bring in a new lead.

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:52

And so I was like, so I asked them, okay, and this is just very

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:56

generalized saying this, but.

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:58

Okay.

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:58

If we need 11 visits to the site, how can all these, how can

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:01

everyone here help us get 11?

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:03

Like one per how can we bringing someone back or bring

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:05

someone to the site 11 times?

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:07

And the sales team was like, well, we could call them and

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:10

we can send them an email.

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:11

And support's like, yeah, we could probably do that with current clients.

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:13

And marketing was like, well, we're gonna do this, this and this.

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:16

And we tallied it up and it was like nine.

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:18

So we were like, why can we get two more and then everyone was working together.

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:22

So I think sometimes.

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:25

Like you've mentioned, like you you've identified the

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:28

problem almost like present.

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:30

Here's the problem.

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:30

Here's the question we're trying to solve.

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:32

Working analytics is so good at taking those questions and being

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:35

able to give you so much insight.

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:37

And then once you have that, if you can, again, frame it around.

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:41

Okay, well, how can we work together to, solve this problem?

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:44

It might be a marketing only world where marketing analytics is serving marketing

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:47

and, that's where the data's ending up.

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:50

But if it's also allowed to help the rest of the organization,

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:53

there's some learnings there.

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:55

Sometimes it's like, Hey, this page is seeing a lot of traffic

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:57

and sales is like, wow, really?

Kevin Dieny: 00:44:59

That's interesting.

Kevin Dieny: 00:45:00

I've been telling everyone about that page and okay, well maybe

Kevin Dieny: 00:45:03

that's where it's coming from.

Kevin Dieny: 00:45:04

And everyone gets that.

Kevin Dieny: 00:45:06

It's like a shared knowledge becomes so valuable.

Kevin Dieny: 00:45:10

Was there anything else about this topic Scott, you wanted to mention,

Kevin Dieny: 00:45:15

that we haven't talked about yet or anything you wanted to reemphasize

Kevin Dieny: 00:45:18

that was really important to you?

Scott Konopasek: 00:45:19

Yeah, so I think to, to wrap things up, I, I wanna offer

Scott Konopasek: 00:45:23

what I'm gonna call, like some, some really core things that the marketers,

Scott Konopasek: 00:45:30

the business owners can do that can help set you on, on the right track.

Scott Konopasek: 00:45:35

Probably the first thing is to.

Scott Konopasek: 00:45:38

Evaluate do you need measurement technology?

Scott Konopasek: 00:45:40

Are you at a place where you can benefit from it?

Scott Konopasek: 00:45:44

We talked about the criteria being roughly three ad channels

Scott Konopasek: 00:45:48

and a hundred thousand dollars in spend a month or two ad channels.

Scott Konopasek: 00:45:52

If you're doing, north of two or $3 million a year, who's gonna

Scott Konopasek: 00:45:56

own that internally and, deciding what level of priority is this?

Scott Konopasek: 00:46:03

How are we going to, integrate this into our workflows, and getting

Scott Konopasek: 00:46:07

really the, the support and the vocal support of leadership to

Scott Konopasek: 00:46:12

the rest of the organization.

Scott Konopasek: 00:46:15

And then the last practical step is develop a plan,

Scott Konopasek: 00:46:18

develop a measurement plan.

Scott Konopasek: 00:46:20

And so if you are lacking the expertise and the knowledge yourself to do that,

Scott Konopasek: 00:46:25

if your marketing team doesn't feel very confident, being able to do that, this

Scott Konopasek: 00:46:30

is a service that mint measure does.

Scott Konopasek: 00:46:32

We do that for no cost, no obligation.

Scott Konopasek: 00:46:35

Feel free to send us a request on our website.

Scott Konopasek: 00:46:38

We'll develop this plan for you.

Scott Konopasek: 00:46:40

And if you're not in a place where you can benefit from our

Scott Konopasek: 00:46:43

technology, that's totally fine.

Scott Konopasek: 00:46:44

We'll, we'll develop a marketing plan or a measurement plan for you

Scott Konopasek: 00:46:48

anyways, and set you on your way.

Scott Konopasek: 00:46:50

And so, you know, these are really the core things that I would suggest

Scott Konopasek: 00:46:53

that every business really do.

Scott Konopasek: 00:46:54

And then your marketing plan or your measurement.

Scott Konopasek: 00:46:58

Is gonna lay that foundation and stay close to your data.

Scott Konopasek: 00:47:01

It's more important to review it once a month and really spend a couple

Scott Konopasek: 00:47:05

of hours doing that than it is to, deep dive on it once a quarter.

Scott Konopasek: 00:47:09

If you can do those things and, and have a plan of action, stay close to the data.

Scott Konopasek: 00:47:14

When you make those adjustments and something goes terribly well or

Scott Konopasek: 00:47:18

terribly wrong, you'll, you'll be able to understand where that came from.

Scott Konopasek: 00:47:22

Ultimately be able to get better and smarter over.

Kevin Dieny: 00:47:26

That's great.

Kevin Dieny: 00:47:27

Those are some really cool, almost like quick steps you could take in

Kevin Dieny: 00:47:32

the immediate future to assess okay.

Kevin Dieny: 00:47:34

Where, where where's my business at and how maybe what are some ideas for,

Kevin Dieny: 00:47:38

buttoning up my tracking and measurement.

Kevin Dieny: 00:47:40

So Scott, if anyone wants to reach out to you, connect with you, find more

Kevin Dieny: 00:47:44

about and measure, or just anything else that you're about, how can they.

Scott Konopasek: 00:47:50

You can find us at mintmeasure.com.

Scott Konopasek: 00:47:53

If you search Google for Mint Measure, we're the top result.

Kevin Dieny: 00:47:59

Okay, that's great.

Kevin Dieny: 00:48:00

Thank you again, Scott, for coming on and talking about helping businesses.

Kevin Dieny: 00:48:05

To help them understand, get more confident and ultimately to improve their

Kevin Dieny: 00:48:09

marketing with some marketing analytics, making marketing analytics easier.

Kevin Dieny: 00:48:13

So I really appreciate you, you taking the time and sharing everything you've

Kevin Dieny: 00:48:16

got and telling us about, avenues your company has for helping businesses

Kevin Dieny: 00:48:20

and just sharing all this wisdom.

Kevin Dieny: 00:48:21

So appreciate your time today.

Scott Konopasek: 00:48:23

Yeah, absolutely.

Scott Konopasek: 00:48:24

Uh, happy to do this.

Kevin Dieny: 00:48:25

And thanks everybody for listening to the Close the Loop podcast.