How Marketing Attribution Takes You From “No Numbers, No Business” to “Know Numbers, Know Business”

Scott Desgrosseilliers 0:05
You gotta go in and tune it up underneath the campaign, not just say, hey, this campaign is making to row as I’m going to spend more here, go in and see if one of the ad sets is outperforming the others. And are there any ads within that ad set that’s really resonating because that’s the message to the market based on the strategy.

Chris Bruno 0:22
Welcome to the all about digital marketing podcast, the show that dives into the best strategies, tactics and tools for entrepreneurs and marketers looking to exponentially increase their results online. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to a brand new episode of The all about Digital Marketing podcast. I’m here as your co host today, and I’m with Travis kitchen. But we are joined today by Scott to divorce you from Wicked reports. Scott, how you doing?

Scott Desgrosseilliers 0:51
I’m doing great now that someone knows how to say my name so eloquently.

Travis Ketchum 0:55
No matter how many podcast episodes do you ever do, Scott, we expect the Hall of Fame Award for the name pronunciation.

Chris Bruno 1:01
My friend Jackson finally came in useful that I don’t you can’t top

Scott Desgrosseilliers 1:05
that. That’s unstoppable. Just some maybe can meet that bar. That’s it.

Travis Ketchum 1:10
Super happy to have you here. Man. I’ve known you for years. And it’s about time we get John on podcasts that I’m on. So this is awesome. Yeah,

Scott Desgrosseilliers 1:16
I’m really excited. You know, I was saying before, when we were chatting, my wife’s like, you know, you can roll out of bed and talk about marketing attribution. I was like, I don’t think that’s a compliment. But it is going to bode well for today on the podcast.

Travis Ketchum 1:31
So well, you know, being a CEO of wicked reports, you kind of have to be able to do that. Right. Like if that’s your lane. And that’s, that’s what you really, you know, gone into headfirst. And we live in a world now, where attribution is getting harder and harder than you think.

Scott Desgrosseilliers 1:44
Yeah, it’s nothing that anyone is doing in terms of the ad platforms, or the CRMs, or the shopping carts or privacy is making attribution easier. And everything that any ad platform does is designed to make you spend more, and that’s about it, regardless of what they might say their values are or what have you. They just want more money spent on the platform. So you know, relying on them for tracking as the fox watching the henhouse. You know, they just want more money. And so it’s it’s a it’s a murky landscape, but you know, where there’s great, you know, risk, there’s great opportunity to so

Travis Ketchum 2:22
do you want to go ahead and give us kind of what your idea of marketing, you know, marketing attribution is, what wicked reports, really core competency is, and then we can talk about some exciting new stuff you’re doing to help break new ground on attribution and generalise the landscape is rapidly evolving.

Scott Desgrosseilliers 2:39
Sure. So wicked reports, you know, we solely focus on marketing, attribution. There’s a lot of other tools out there now that it’s a buzzword and a category, you know, say, hey, we do attribution. And they may throw it in as a little add on or, you know, something they cobbled together real quick. We’ve been doing this for 10 years, patents pending, somewhat of an obsession. And, you know, we started with the idea of provable first party data attribution back in 2013. And it all started with a friend of mine who sells lobsters online. And he had said, Hey, Facebook, sucks for lobster with this quote. And I said, Why is that he goes, I just blew my whole marketing budget, which at the time was 4000 bucks. I got 12,000 clicks, I only made one sale just lost my shirt for the month. And he was very stressed out. And I was like, you know, you’re some random lobster guy. You know, people see an ad, they’re not just going to be rehabbed hypnotised into buying immediately it’s gonna be like a, you got a warm a mob, you know, all this other marketing strategy, but he’s like, Well, how am I gonna know what worked. And I just assumed there was a lot of stuff out there. And I was, you know, just at the time was running the databases@apartments.com. And I also was moonlighting with him and a few others just, you know, it guys always have a side hustle. And so I was like, geez, I’ll set up some software for you. And it was nothing so we hacked together this idea that that I was gonna test on whether it would his tracking would lead to value over time because it might just might not that is some, you know, earth shattering revelation, but I was like, you have an expensive product. No one knows who you are. It’s going to take time to ROI is my opinion even though ecommerce people right now get in there and try to day trade their account, same day, like there’s some fancy traders, which is not the thing to do, we’ll get into that. But so we had this theory, people that like the Red Sox or the Patriots, I don’t know if you know this, Chris is a more European dude. There’s our New England centric sports teams. And people either really like our teams or you know, like any league or they really can’t stand us. And so we’re like, hey, if people like these teams, but don’t live in the area, they’re likely nostalgic for the food and lobsters is a very New England centric food. Let’s try and see if that’s going to work. So that was the strategy. And then the then the, the way that we had to track at the time was you’re going to click, we’re gonna have this big long string of text, I’m gonna shove it into some database somewhere, and then do all these spreadsheets to figure out did these people ever buy? Because one thing this guy did really well is he emails like three, four times a week, and they’re really funny emails, email all the time. And so that already was a multi channel strategies back 10 years ago, you know, it wasn’t always just like, I’m gonna throw a tonne of money on Facebook, and just hope I’m making money the same day I same amount of money I spent each day it was this deliberate. I need people on my list, because I’m good at emailing. So he does this. And you know, he spends five grand, and he breaks even in about baht a month. But then we kept tracking in the sales every day tracking down, you know, who’s buying, where the heck did they come from. And lo and behold, he actually made 10 to one on his money over three months, there just was delayed conversion time. And that origin story, I told the beginning, because that still is what happens in Facebook. And people still don’t exploit it enough. The ones that do the ones that win on paid ads, but the concept of different channels. And Facebook in particular, because it’s so challenging, and so popular, we can talk about that. But it matters for every platform, there’s a delay in time, the buyers don’t always see an ad and just oh my god, I gotta buy. I mean, granted deadline, timers, and other great hooks can do that. But people are gonna buy in their own timeframe, there’s tonnes of customer journeys, people can take like weeks and weeks to buy unfortunately. But when they do, knowing where they came from, so you can you know, reassess how good that channel is, is, is a powerful advantage if you if you have the data and know what to do with it.

Travis Ketchum 6:46
I just want to point out as a West coaster, that the fact that your Sass companies origin story is still about lobster is about the most East Coast thing I could pick up, and the Patriots and the Rams. And the Patriots, when I was going to

Scott Desgrosseilliers 6:59
pick a domain name, I was gonna be in traffic, we will go into the Infusionsoft used to have these now called key and fusion con. And I was looking at all these data II names and I was debating and I was like, too lame. And I was like, I gotta go wicked reports. And once I thought of it, nothing else was gonna do. And so I printed out shirts, and we went in those back when Digital Marketer was a smaller company, and they would have their own little booth. And I went up and pitch Ryan Deiss on tracking their ads. And then they were like our 10th customer, it turns out, worked out pretty good. So that’s amazing.

Chris Bruno 7:34
You mentioned a couple of things there. So I think for a lot of people listening, the idea of attribution and what we’re calling this, even the basics of understanding where your traffic is coming from to your website, where your consumers and people are actually buying from can be quite confusing. And I think one of the hardest things for people to understand is actually Google Analytics. And I’m saying this because for us, if you’ve been in this game for a long time, anything to do with data, the analytics behind what happens, how it happens, where it happened, is super important. But for a lot of smaller businesses and businesses that are still building up, they don’t necessarily use those tools in a great way. But recently, there’s been some big changes hasn’t there for Google. And it’s becoming harder. As far as I can tell. I’m someone who has used some of these tools for a long time. But it’s becoming harder and harder to actually understand where your consumers are coming from where your customers are coming from. Can you talk a little bit about that, Scott? Sure.

Scott Desgrosseilliers 8:23
So Google Analytics for coming out being pushed by Google, you know, they’re deprecating any other versions of Google Analytics, I think in July, which we’ve marked on our calendars, we’re very excited about it. And so smaller brands and bigger brands all use Google Analytics for various reasons. But one thing that bigger brands do, I don’t know, if the smaller ones do is you can upload your orders. And Google will report back information about what made that sale at the order ID level. And that’s nice because it helps build trust. And it may or may not be that accurate. You know, Google has, you know, you think Google, they can do anything, but they have their own motivations for what they’re trying to report. But that ability is going away. So anyone that’s currently relying on Google for last touch, meaning what close the sale, last touches the idea, there’s a customer journey. And the last thing is what made them buy. So just do more of that. And then you’re gonna get more sales, because that’s what finally close them. And I used to think that when I first started out, and I no longer think that now, but from looking at, you know, billions and billions of ad spend, you see trends, and you get to see these patterns. And the patterns are not that the last thing that happened is the most important thing. It’s one of many, few too many steps that you need to focus on. So that change is going to remove the transparency of what is driving the sales, which is tough. And then Google ads themselves are removing most attribution models, in particular first click, which was surprising because Google gets a lot of first click and a lot Linear, which is the idea of taking every touchpoint, you know about and sharing the revenue credit among all the points, which sometimes is a useful model, depending on what you’re trying to do, we’ll get into how you pick which model later what my opinion is anyway. And they’re just gonna have what’s called data driven attribution, which means behind the scenes, there’s a Google black box that knows better than you what you should do, and it’s going to tell you what you should do. Now, I don’t like black boxes. I’m an honest, transparent person, but everything’s I already don’t like that. Even if it is good. I don’t like it. Because it’s not transparent. But also the motivation is, well, Google ads showed 6% more conversions using this model. So we’re going to move everyone to that. Now, that already is puzzling, like, okay, yeah, you want more conversions, but why not show where in the journey so you can architect your reverse engineer how you’re going to acquire more customers? And so Facebook had an attribution tool come out and was like, oh, no, we’re gonna port you’re in trouble. And a lot of stuff mirrored ours, I used to fly out there for their accelerators talk to all their people, then they came up with something that looked kind of like ours. And I was like, wildly upset, even though maybe it had nothing to do with it. I don’t know. And then they ended up cancelling it, because I was like, You know what, I’ll be worried. If they actually say, Don’t spend on Facebook, go spend on Google and snap and tick tock, which they never did. The tool was designed not to tell you the truth. So it wasn’t useful in it. I’m cancelling. So getting back to Google, those two things are, you know, those are pretty big changes. Because if you’re someone who likes to advertise to cold traffic, which is brand new audiences, and then trigger all these retargeting elements or other strategies, and then when the sale occurs, you want to say, hey, where did this customer first hear about me? That’s the purpose of first click in Google ads is doing away with it. So you just kind of draw on the black box, which

Travis Ketchum 11:57
is, unless you use a tool, like your thing,

Scott Desgrosseilliers 12:00
exactly. That’s why we’re, that’s why I was on a podcast, I was like, this is pretty exciting.

Travis Ketchum 12:05
Great news. That’s a pretty big shift for sure. I mean, because I think about, you know, the affiliate world, which I had a lot of years. And it always used to be kind of frustrating when it would be last click attribution, who got the sale, right? Because we all know that, just because, you know, an email tip someone over the edge or a specific review page, tip someone over the edge where bonus page, right? It’s like, that’s not what actually built up the desire to buy, or convince them to buy, they were looking for the last reason to remove the last layer of doubt. And it’s kind of tough, right? Because in the affiliate world, like that’s still valuable, because they still click through and they did buy, but someone else may have done the heavy lifting, and someone else got the commission, right, those two things might be separated. So you could have someone that’s a an amazing storyteller and, and build the desire and agitates the pain and all these other marketing concepts we understand. And then someone else was good at getting paged SEO and say, don’t buy XYZ product until you read this review. And we’ll give you some crappy bonus, I feel like it’s something extra, if I buy through you click commission goes to the person that did very little to actually build up and and make that conversion a reality. So it’s complicated. Exactly.

Scott Desgrosseilliers 13:19
And furthermore, anyone that goes into Google Analytics, and you see a lot of direct conversions, which you always do, and then you see branded search, and ideally, you see email and SMS, those close a tonne, and particularly in E commerce, they had to come from all those had to come from somewhere else, by definition, unless you’re like a household brand. So any type of domain that’s doing you know, even I don’t know what anyone considers Big or small, we see all kinds of sizes. Say you’re $20 million business, you’re still not a household name. Not many people know about you, no one just woke up one day like the lobster guy, no one woke up and said, I have to go to get Maine lobster.com and buy lobster tails. He they had to know about him from some other channel to then close on those channels that Google Analytics is reporting. And so that I mean, I mean a lot of like, particularly, think of all the YouTube videos going on, while YouTube is a great top of the funnel, and then Facebook retargeting and then email, SMS or direct close, that’s a common common chain of channels.

Travis Ketchum 14:26
But it’s actually kind of reminds me of an interesting thing, the care of actually an AI models recently where they were trying to train AI models to identify cancerous or problematic skin, skin portions by photos of skin. But what they realised is that all the photos that had you know a cancerous or problematic portion of the skin also had a ruler in the picture. And so if you just put a ruler in the picture next to healthy skin, at a high probability of saying it could be unhealthy skin right so it’s like correlation and causation were not properly identified. In that because it was saying, Oh, I see this thing. And you know, in your case, or your example, it could be the email or SMS or whatever the last touch thing is, and things like, Oh, this is, this is where we got to put all of our weight, but it may be undervaluing the 98% of work that happened to get them on your list, educate them, indoctrinate them into your story, build desire, and then that last touch thing happened.

Scott Desgrosseilliers 15:22
Definitely. I mean, that’s why with attribution models, I always think, you know, it depends you the model, the pic depends on the intention of the particular thing you’re measuring, determines, it’s almost like, Hey, if you’re measuring height you need you need a ruler. If you’re measuring weight, you need a scale. Well, attribution models are similar. If you’re measuring top of the funnel, and it really mirrors your marketing funnel kind of overlays with your attribution. That’s why we have something called Funnel Vision, and we’ll talk about overlays it automatically. Because how you’re measuring brand new eyeballs is much different than how you’re measuring people that are on your email list for a year. They are going to respond differently to everyone says all match the message to the market at the right time. Everybody says that no one an attribution really? What is What exactly did he do to find out if you did that, right, and is to pick the right model based on what you’re trying to do, because they’re all measure different. It’s almost like a horse with blinders on. Sometimes you want the blinders to just focus on certain areas of the journey based on whatever you were trying to do with that marketing. If you’re retargeting people in your CRM, you want to use a new particular type of measurement. If you’re doing a flash sale, then it is less click, you’re saying, hey, you know, for three days only click here and save X percent or buy one get one free ship, whatever you’re doing

Travis Ketchum 16:43
50% of those would be the last four hours.

Scott Desgrosseilliers 16:47
Then the last what’s great for that, you know, but if you’ve got a you know, if you got anything with a longer consideration, or higher dollar value, or multi step funnel, booked calls, I’m going to talk to you, you need three attribution models minimum is my opinion, if you have a book called funnel.

Travis Ketchum 17:04
So I know you’ve had this breakthrough that you call Funnel Vision, which is, which is a fun name. But I’m really interested to see how how Chris, you know, choose on it from the agency perspective, because he’s run an agency for a long time. I mean, we’re, we’re both simultaneously young guys, and also feel like, you know, you could use a sundial to make our age. So I want to hear you talk about that. And then I’m really curious for Chris to dive in from the agency’s perspective about how that’s really powerful. Because of course, as any business owner, it’s interesting, but when you’re especially going into a new sort of customer black box about, I don’t know, we get sales, where do they come from and and how you can actually apply the breakthrough that you’ve had to not only their own business, but to client businesses. So if you wanna start by explaining your Funnel Vision, that’d be amazing.

Scott Desgrosseilliers 17:55
I’d love to because we realise that our ICP is not what’s on our website, which puts me like, you know, a fair amount of other business owners, but also, you know, sort of embarrassing revelation I was like, agencies are the ones that love our stuff. Now, what’s that just people

Travis Ketchum 18:11
that are listening ICP, we love our acronyms and the marketing, ideal customer profile, just wanna, yeah, pin that one on the board.

Scott Desgrosseilliers 18:18
So we realise our ideal customer profile as an agency owner in the media buyers that work for that agency owner, is actually the people that we help the best. I mean, we do have some brands that are raving fans, and our software works great for them, too. But if we had to pick an exact niche, we’re going to focus on agency owners, that is the perfect use case. So we’ll see if you agree, Chris, or maybe you just blow up my Sep algo, go back to the drawing board after the after the call here.

Chris Bruno 18:49
Based on my input, don’t blow up anything, trust me. Because we actually, we spoke about this, I think, the last episode where Travis and I were saying, we work a lot in the web three space, which basically means 90% of our customers have been wanting to build something and get something out, but don’t actually necessarily have the product yet. So they’re not necessarily in a position whereby we can match or monitor sorry, in the in a simple way. Look, we did all of this. And then you sold X amount of this. A lot of the time, they’re sort of actually targeting investors trying to get investor meetings, etc. So we look at these things in slightly different ways. But I know for a fact and I literally had a meeting, I think last week with somebody who’s talking to me purely about this, the analytics for the data side of things are saying they can’t figure out what they should and shouldn’t be spending money on, which I think is a massive kind of worry for a lot of companies. You mentioned the guy from Maine 10 years ago, but I think, you know, fast forward 10 years 2023 How is it possible that you know, you spend $5,000 And you go I don’t really know what came out of that really to be honest with you. But this is the kind of conversations you end up having with with smaller businesses that are still trying really hard to get into that. So I Uh, yeah, explain more. Let me see how, how it all works.

Travis Ketchum 20:03
In fairness, the old that like before the internet made things a lot more tractable. I remember, you know, when I went to college with with marketing professors, you say, Yeah, old ad agencies, you know, they’d spend $10 million on a campaign, they say, Yeah, half of your ads been worse. The problem is, we don’t know which half? Yeah,

Chris Bruno 20:20
the only the only bit that works was the coupons, you must cut this coupon out, and bring it to the store. Otherwise, you didn’t know anything.

Travis Ketchum 20:26
If you’re JC Penney, then that works. But everyone else your host.

Scott Desgrosseilliers 20:29
Yeah, a couple of things from that, you know, what we have coming out this quarter is automatic recommendations based on our scale kill chill framework of how we think you should act on the data. But then also, the agency can put in their rules of what they would look at and how they would scale or turned on adspend. And we’ll run multiple systems and kind of bookmark timestamp when the recommendation or you’re almost like a day trading system, it’s going to say, you’re actually going to have your agency adspend optimization process on autopilot. So it will look at you know, whatever metrics you want create rules, and I’ll tell you what it is now, then if you want to have an automatically act, something great is real reveal bot is a beautiful tool that will then automatically act on on the stuff. But that’s our goal, because we find agency what I mean one thing with immediate buyers, they don’t always run the process you think are just getting them to follow the SOPs aren’t always doesn’t always pan out. And then that can cause client churn. What we found with Funnel Vision, so the idea here with as a mediated agency is one is the company, you know, let’s say they’re doing a million dollars a month, they do a million bucks, well, and they did you go into Google Analytics, and you see email, SMS, direct branded search, bunch of the sales, well, likely all your paid media drove those either in that month, or was previous months or old ad spend campaigns that drove those leads, or drove that traffic that’s now converting now. And attribution in the past would be like well, meaning like emails getting it, or would do a linear approach where say, oh, there was 20 touchpoints, the thing cost 20 bucks, every touchpoint gets a buck. And then those harder to earn clicks up front, just don’t look that valuable, because you have to spend on those. And then when they’re familiar with the brand at the bottom, you know, it’s all earned media getting the conversion. So the agencies would get screwed, basically. And so we had this idea. And so, Funnel Vision, pulls in the CRM in the shopping cart to help create a journey using the actual clients data themselves. And then we layer layer that with all the paid media that we track. And we bucket it based on top, middle or bottom of the funnel. So rather than all the hacks you have to do to try to get credit, if someone was clicked on an ad, and they weren’t in any of the client’s data, then they’re top of the funnel. If they’re in the data, at any customizable time window you want, then they’re in the middle. And if it’s right at the end, which is you know, one day to a week, or whatever you decide is the end, the bottom, then the bottom. So it’s like this accordion, you can set this funnel of date ranges to say, hey, here’s how this funnel works, and will automatically cross reference all the data in bucket, the spend, and the results in the top, middle or bottom. And then adding to that whenever anyone buys will look all the way back through time and add that revenue wherever it needs to go top, middle or bottom. And what this leads to is that two thirds of like Facebook is usually taught. And then another 20% 15%, the middle 15, or 20 is the bottom. Because if people are doing something on Facebook to buy, I mean, this isn’t every customer is different. But a lot of them, particularly when you see a lot of email, SMS brand search direct, that’s the bottom, in the middle is usually or the top is usually Facebook is driving a lot of that. And so that’s what we do. And then we give the agency owners talk tracks to explain to their clients dedicated slack so we can go back and forth. But also, if you’ve turned things off, and those people now by, you’ll see, you know, 10 to $100,000 in credit that you can send to the client, hey, you know, 50 grand you close this month, that was from ad spend three months ago, that was us that did that. Don’t forget, you’re starting the day up 50k You’re starting the month up 50 grand on what I did for you. And that helps retain people because you gotta keep reinforcing your value. It’s like crazy out there. People change agencies like they change their outfits. You know, it’s it’s pretty intense right now. So that’s, that’s how it works.

Chris Bruno 24:51
For a lot of people that’s going to be mind boggling as well. And I say that in the nicest possible way and also remembering the couple of conversations I’ve had in the past where I’ve sort of asked the questions stupidly or naively thinking, these guys will be well on top of it and said, What is your sales cycle look like? Right? We’re talking about lots of different models and ideas here in different companies and different ways that they do these things. But for a lot of companies that are selling a higher ticket item, there won’t be a, you know, you see an advert you close a deal, they might even involve several stages of going back and forth. And having that conversation. As an agency owner, we have probably, say, three, four meetings with a client before we actually end up closing a deal. For a lot of people, they don’t actually know those pieces are their own business. So I’m guessing that with these kinds of tools, this is almost a bit of a revelation as well, right? That first touch to sale could be a hell of a lot longer than they originally thought,

Scott Desgrosseilliers 25:42
perhaps. Yes, we have predictive behaviour reports, we run historical analysis, from your CRM to your cart to see how long people take the clothes, because they won’t believe it. And we’ll just say, hey, in the past, you know, because we want to create a model of expectation of how long cold traffic normally takes to close. Because otherwise, you’re going to get in there, you’re going to run first click after it’s like, two, three days and be like, Wait reports is terrible. It’s not showing many sales and be like, well, because no one’s buying yet half the stuff we can show you at all time stamped out. And you know, people just don’t like they don’t like. And so what we do now instead is we run this analysis of, well, once they got in your CRM, how long did they take until they showed up in the car? And then we can say, hey, that and then we bucket it all out and give you what’s called a campaign evaluation period of here’s how long cold traffic should take. Here’s why. And so it’s built into our framework. So how to act on the data is that first thing to do is has it been running long enough? That’s the first checkpoint, because if it’s only one day, and you’re looking at Funnel Vision, you better not make a decision. And let’s just sell them like a toothbrush, then yeah, maybe it should close in a day.

Travis Ketchum 26:57
So what is kind of a normal timeline? Because I think a lot of people either don’t know, or they intuitively for those that are listening, I’m using air quotes here intuitively think that oh, you know, someone hears me, they hit the website, they fill out a form and they buy and it takes like 24 hours. But what do you find, you know, the average times are and how elastic is that? Based on the price point that is being sold? I mean, I know you said like a toothbrush might be a day right? But I would assume 1015 $20,000 sales might take longer i What are you finding on all that?

Scott Desgrosseilliers 27:34
You know, yeah, a lot longer. A lot longer. Yeah. Like our LTV and a customer can be 10 to 50k and hours or you know, three weeks plus and we’re always doing everything to speed it up but that’s just what they’re gonna take the bigger the ticket the longer they take you get to five grand plus a month client coming in it’s gonna be like, they’d be like yeah, we’re ready to buy get started we’ll be like just buy they’ll still just like stall it out. Because they want to be all ready to go and their team member you know, the bigger the org The more they gotta be like their ducks in a row that’s probably why they’re bigger. takes more time the bigger they are

Travis Ketchum 28:09
are just you got to be an ESP or get them to the buyer quick win.

Scott Desgrosseilliers 28:14
I don’t know I don’t know let me know what the secret is because they take time like with the last when the last guy started we did this because I’ll send me was like he still would get upset he launched a new campaign and two days in and he’d be like whining about this ad spent you know, I didn’t manage ads for him he just he complained to me about whatever I’d be like hey, you know I wicked reports. You know, you know why we have these attribution models I go it’s because your leads take time to buy not like it’s not a theory. It’s your actual leads. We built it originally for you and then it expanded based on other advertisers. But his original timeframe was 44 days was his average which he hated. You can’t be that lie It’s e car. It is and I go through either say hey, look at here’s the last 100 sales. Let’s just go look at some of them when they first showed up and he was using Infusionsoft and WooCommerce at the time. And here’s your woo orders. Here’s your Infusionsoft here’s the math of create date in Infusionsoft and order date in whoo and that’s the that’s the data and then he whittled it down he’s got it down to in the 20s now but it’s still so he’s tuner box pure e comm 20 days. For him. We see some people that are you know, if they’re under 100, they can get down to they try to go same day profitability, which may or may not happen based on whether the algorithm is good to them that day. And I’m like, Well, you know, the conversions are delayed and modelled. So this delay data even acted on because they’ll try to, you know, shove more data in because it’s going well, and sometimes that does work. Sometimes it it fails miserably. It’s not repeatable or consistent. So it’s tricky.

Travis Ketchum 29:58
So do you do you ever strong belief then that once you understand your sort of conversion pipeline and where your profitable sources are, where they’re not, and what levers are making it all happen, is that what then gives them the data, they need to be able to collapse that time because like the lobster example you use, you said he went from like, you know, mid 40s, tomorrow, like 20s on the number of days to convert, what what kind of actions that he did once he understood the pipeline understood what was working to collapse that time, essentially in half, like, how did that data inform what he did differently? Can you speak to that?

Scott Desgrosseilliers 30:36
Yeah, sure. So you use the top of the funnel attribution models to figure out what is what cold traffic stuff is attracting the customers the best is always ad 20 rolling all this is, you know, you got to throw out 10 campaigns to we’re going to be good. Eight are going to be crap, just the way it is. And then you look at the middle funnel stuff, what’s what’s converting my, you know, everyone has these huge CRMs. And like, 10% of them are actually customers and 90% or, you know, whatever. And so then what’s actually converting these longer CRM leads? And what do I What can I do there. And then bottom of the funnel, which everyone always usually focuses on is what sales or things have worked the best in his case, it was always buy six, or maybe he does a different quantity. Now buy six gets six lobster tails, just he’d be like, I’m so bored of doing this. And I’m like, Are you bored making all this money. So people like now people on his list that have been seeing the same damn offer forever, they get sick of it. So we got to rotate new stuff in, but that thing just works. And so and then he has these great emails, and the emails are the same thing. I mean, most of you paid media just focused on that. But email and SMS, there’s certain offers that work better or worse, but you got to make sure that the best emails and SMS are queued up. As you get new people flowing in, they’re getting the best stuff, not just the latest stuff. Now, I said that is realise you know what, I need to do a reorientation of mine because you get busy you forget. We’ve been I’ve been doing some stuff that I kind of liked lately. And you know, what is a lead today gonna get it from wiki reports? No, they’re not because it was like not automated. Yeah. So we’d really hammer home that piece for them too, because we do some consulting and people want focus on each piece one at a time.

Travis Ketchum 32:22
And so basically, they’re using the data to decide, okay, these are the effective things, let’s put all of our wood behind those arrows, so to speak, right, so that we’re, we’re maximising our opportunity at each touchpoint. Is that? Is that sort of an accurate understanding?

Scott Desgrosseilliers 32:35
Yeah, so if you break it down, just like a three stage funnel, top, middle bottom, for each one, optimise you know, keep whittling off the ones that aren’t working and moving the ad spend to the ones that are, we find lots of times within campaigns, if you have like one campaign with like three different targets and three ads per target. There’s little pockets in there. They’re the ones driving all the ROI at the campaign level, you gotta go in and tune or tune it up underneath the campaign, not just say, hey, this campaign is making 202 row as I’m going to spend more here, go in and see if one of the ad sets is outperforming the others likely? And are there any ads within that ad set that’s really resonating, because that’s the message to the market based on the strategy. And then you move the money rather than having to go find more money to invest. Sometimes you just optimise the spin intra campaign.

Travis Ketchum 33:29
So cutting the dead weight of the small pockets within a campaign that aren’t performing and all sudden your 2x realises six.

Scott Desgrosseilliers 33:37
Yeah, exactly. Sawsan, your rise goes up and you didn’t. You just did a very simple click, click click and then your more requests like that. Not that tough, but you got the discipline to do it to look at it periodically. So it’s it’s more of a mental mindset game than a

Travis Ketchum 33:53
well as I like to joke the closer you can get to click the button, make the money, the better off you are. And it sounds like you’re basically there. Right? Click the button, turn off the ad. Make them money. Yeah. So

Scott Desgrosseilliers 34:03
we’re not going to send exactly what actions and then the next piece will be clicking it happens. And then hey, you want it on autopilot? Reveal bot does that great. So we have an integration with them. And we can set up the autopilot once you’ve vetted out because people have these SOPs, but there’s a lot I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, Chris, but the media buyers, you follow a process? You got one, that’s why you’re an agency. But it just like anything, how, how tight is the adherence to how it’s supposed to be done? I mean, maybe yours is airtight? I don’t know. But that would be the first.

Chris Bruno 34:34
Absolutely no. And the worst part is, is also we’re working with clients. And clients will push every single button they can when it comes to telling us what they want, how they want it done, where it has to go, what sort of things they want. They’ll review content, copy ads, even if the numbers prove that it’s not working. And they’ll continuously say, Yeah, but we’re not going down that route. We’re sticking to this language or that language for a particular God knows what reason you said something really particular, like, the bigger the organisation, the harder it is for them to get their ducks in a row. And for me, the slower they are, the slower and the less likely they are to move quickly towards what actually works. And that’s a big challenge. We worked recently with a company that raised like $750 million, and hugely exciting, awesome tech. Can we show this? Can we show that? No, no. Can we talk about this? No. Cool, guys, like we can’t give you results like I did. Literally, that was the end of the conversation and the end of the contract to be honest, because I’m like that, we’re never going to move the needle, where you want it right, you’re asking me to get you double the traction and double the followers. But I got to keep doing the same stuff you’ve been doing for six months that hasn’t produced any kind of results, then that’s a really challenging thing, I think, for a lot of agencies. And it’s why I think, at least in my experience, and a lot of agency owners have to manoeuvre within that. And I think that’s also what ends up meaning that SOPs move quite, quite a bit as well to try and to try and keep those clients on board. Because otherwise you don’t end up with a big agency, you fall out with everybody who’s not those amazingly brilliant clients that decide they’ll just trust you 100%.

Travis Ketchum 36:14
My question for both of you is, how do you balance basically what customers want, versus what they actually need? Because this is always an interesting debate. I feel like whenever you have especially unique mechanism, like Funnel Vision, or unique strategy, when it comes to your agency, like, you know, they usually come to you opinionated, right? Like, you know, the larger guy thought, Oh, it must be much, much quicker, right. But that wasn’t the case. Or, you know, you just talked about your client had interesting tag where you can talk about it, how do you balance what they think they want, versus what they actually need in order to be the level of success that they’re truly looking for? Because those aren’t always in alignment. And

Scott Desgrosseilliers 36:55
that challenge never goes away?

Travis Ketchum 36:58
Well, so what are you doing to mitigate that? I mean, like, what, what what?

Chris Bruno 37:03
I was hoping Scott had an answer for me, to be honest with you, I say that come on, Scott, tell me how you do it,

Scott Desgrosseilliers 37:08
you have a sound bite, but it’d be a lie, I don’t have that fear, I don’t. So what happens, it’s like we release Funnel Vision, half the people using it, how happy you know, we got a fair amount of people using our platform. Bunch of them, we have, you know, very detailed user analytics, we can’t get some people we just can’t get over there. They just like the old way, the always working for him. So I mean, they’re still paying us and they like they’re getting results. So that’s, that’s fine. We keep nudging them. But so what we’re going to do with this automatic recommendations is we’re going to build it in just to Funnel Vision because that’s what we think they should be using. Going forward. We think it’s just better. So we’re going to just innovate in the area, we need them to go. But I mean, why people are using agile, why you should be using it is you should be optimising your ad spend based on what you see, are people doing that? Sometimes they do, sometimes they just like, just verify what’s going on. You know, I mean, we’re business will gladly provide that service as well. But you shouldn’t be making decisions based on it. So that’s where we’re like, okay, if I’m an agency owner, and I got media buyers, what are they doing? What should they be? How can I save them headcount and time, retain the clients and get new ones. And for us that meant one of the things was, let’s on a platter, tell them what to do to save them all that time of even risk of Miss analysing in a hurry. They can then they can worry about strategy and creative and other things. And we can provide the here’s what the data is telling you to do. So your strategy is fully answered your question, because I don’t

Travis Ketchum 38:45
think about it, but it sounds like your strategy is trying to offer them a bigger carrot. Yes,

Scott Desgrosseilliers 38:49
you’re good. synthesiser very fast at that.

Chris Bruno 38:55
It’s like chat GPT. But personal one I brought along to all my

Scott Desgrosseilliers 38:59
cheese, Travis. Yeah.

Travis Ketchum 39:01
Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure I could come up with a fun acronym for that. But moving on. So So Chris, so when you’re talking about, you know, with your clients, obviously, there’s a whole suite of things that you do for your customers or clients as an agency. But if you think about in Scott’s context, with analytics, like it simultaneously, people want to know what’s working. So they say their actions sometimes aren’t always in alignment with that. But they say they want to know what’s working. How do you take something that’s like, so black and white, right? Well, either it’s it converted or it didn’t, and it came from here or it didn’t, right? Like that’s very binary. How do you take something like that that can really inform your decisions going forward and talk with customers in businesses on on the level that you have, where it’s oftentimes a very emotional or intuition driven conversation and move the move the goalposts more to the binary situation so that you have the tools and resources to make effective marketing decisions, how do you navigate those kinds of conversations.

Chris Bruno 40:03
I’m a bad example for this like straightaway. So as an agency owner, I’ll quite happily have a conversation and if it’s not gonna work out, and if I feel like I’m gonna have to hit my head against the wall a lot, I’ll happily walk away. And what that’s resulted in is I’ve stayed a fairly small boutique agency as it goes up and down, up and down. It’s not a good secret to growth, I’ll be completely honest here on the show. But the key thing to me is actually being transparent and 90% of the companies I speak to, if they have an objective, we do a lot more on the social space. And we do a lot of content space, if they have a goal and a KPI that we can actually write down together, it will often be something like, I want to double my following, I want to get X number of people or whatever it might be. And when we get to those sorts of numbers that they ask us for and like that, right, cool. Let’s look at how we’ve got this growth, how you’ve got to where you are, so far, you’ve got these numbers. And when you see that it’s like slow drip fed, not going and then there’s just this one spike. But one thing happens and they gained 5000 10,000 followers, whatever it might be. I’m like that you see this little bit here. These are the pieces of content that went out around that. This is what happened. This is what we have to replicate, you know, like success leaves clues as a something somebody told me years ago. And I’ve just always kind of gone back to that, you know that we don’t have to come up with a new strategy and an idea, if you’ve got 250 1000 followers, there’s a reason you got to that number. And you can start looking into those sort of things. And I think one of my hardest positioning for me anyway, and I’m not very good at this, like I said is I will have the Convo and go, I understand what you’re saying, I appreciate what you’d like. However, what I’m telling you is if I give you what you like, you’re going to blame me for not getting results. And then you’re going to badmouth me in six months time and say that I’m a bad agency, when I’ve told you what we need to do is this or that or the other or change, you need to just do try something different, at least. Right? It’s the definition of insanity, right? Doing the same thing again and again, and expecting a different result. And I think that’s something that’s a real challenge, probably not just for me, probably for a lot of people. I’m just one of those people that much prefers to tell people to do one, rather than actually keep them on board, and then keep fighting and trying to find a way.

Travis Ketchum 42:17
I think for me, and this might be useful for both, both of you guys. Because it’s very interesting to sort of like as a third wheel in this conversation today. And in terms of like, I’m not an agency, right? But like, tracking is still important. And so I find this, this whole conversation really interesting. Is that is oftentimes I’ll try to act like a toddler. And it’s like, they’ll tell me, you’re someone’s telling what they want to do. And it’s like, but why? And then they tell you something that that’s pretty superfluous. Right. But why rowboat why keep drilling down? You know, it’s

Chris Bruno 42:46
like, one by one.

Travis Ketchum 42:48
One of my friends, Travis Cody had this awesome exercise that he does when he’s writing marketing copy. And I think the same thing can become true when you’re trying to get someone from what they said they want to what they actually need, and getting him to feel like it was their idea. So his His strategy was basically a benefit table. So you write down, you know, features, right? And then you write down the benefit, okay, that for a lot of us, that’s marketing 101, right. But what he does is then he goes away, you know, goes for a walk, goes has a cup of coffee, and then it comes back. And in the next column, he writes the benefit of the benefit. Right? And then it goes away has a coffee. That’s another why then because backing writes the benefit of the benefit of the benefit. And then when you do that, you can start to distil what your real motivations are, because I think a lot of times we sort of get enamoured or in love with a thing that may or may not actually be in our best interest. And if we continue distilling it down, suddenly, we understand oh, what we actually need is, blah. So even if the conversation started from one, one goalpost, you can sort of stair step them along the way, the same way you would stairstep. A feature down to the core benefits, like why are they actually doing this? Why are they actually buy? And the same can often be said about their strategy, right? How do you distil that down to the real motivations? You want 50,000 new followers or you want to get you want to double your open rate? Well, why do you want to double your open rate? Well, I want to get more clear, why do you want to get more clicks? I want to get more people to buy my thing or submit an affiliate, you know, CPA offer or buy an affiliate product. Okay, great. Now that we know that that’s the goal. Do you really care about people that don’t open your emails? Like can we segment down and just get rid of them because they aren’t going to ever convert? Right and all sudden, that becomes so clear, when people you can sort of tease down the funnel about what are you actually trying to get them to do? And it gets them removed emotionally from like, I need more openers, and it’s like, okay, what you really need though, is more people buying your crap. So if we can agree that that’s the real goalpost. Let’s shortcut and cut out a lot of other stuff that would be easy to get lost on. Please That’s That’s Mind No, I agree

Scott Desgrosseilliers 45:00
that you get caught up on a tactic. When the strategy in it’s not really aligned to the strategy, you just have decided it’s going to help. The strategy because it sounds

Travis Ketchum 45:12
cool, right? Yeah, you went to you went to a conference, you heard about a cool thing or for someone that may have entirely different goals than you for entirely different reasons. But it sounded cool. And somehow they made a lot of money. And you think, well, I should make a lot of money, but more money too. So maybe we should do the thing that works for them. Even though we’re a different business with a different objective and different product and different price point and different avatar. Everything else was different.

Scott Desgrosseilliers 45:37
So that reminds me April Dunford has a book, obviously awesome, that has a framework sounds like what what your friend use Travis?

Travis Ketchum 45:45
Yeah, it’s super useful. It sounds simple, but like just just going actually going through the process and sort of trusting it. It’s amazed what your mind will come up with that time, it’s the benefit of a benefit of benefit. That It seems so. So in your face data. But when you sit there and you try to think about when you’re reading the feature list, it feels like an impossible task to get there. By just sort of going through the motions, trusting the process, can really spit out an interesting solution sometimes.

Chris Bruno 46:16
I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, gents, but I am going to wrap us up so that we don’t keep everyone for too much longer. Scott, absolute pleasure to have you here on the show. Where can people find more about you more about wicked reports? What can they do to get in touch with you if they’ve heard this and they want to speak to you?

Scott Desgrosseilliers 46:32
Sure. Wickard reports.com, we have live chat on the site. You can grab our on demand demo, if you want to learn more about the product. I’m available on LinkedIn, you’ll have to figure out how to spell my name maybe in the show notes. And that’s where you can find me. Cool.

Chris Bruno 46:48
Fantastic.

Travis Ketchum 46:49
Thanks for coming on, Scott. It’s always great to catch up with you.

Scott Desgrosseilliers 46:53
Yeah, it was great. I really appreciate the time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai