Trent: Hello everybody, welcome back to the Bright Ideas Podcast as always I am your host Trent Dyrsmid and this is the podcast where we take a big brake flashlight and we shine a light on what is working in the world of e-Commerce and online marketing and the way that I do that is time I bring proven experts on to the show to share with me and you what exactly is working for them and then I ask them all sorts of really detailed questions so they’ll get really detailed answers so that you, when you finish listening to an episode are armed with hopefully at least a page of what I like to call actionable golden nuggets; things that you can actually implement in your business starting today and this episode is no different my guest who we’ll get to in a minute is a fellow by the name of Scott and Scott I didn’t ask you how to pronounce your last name but I’m going to say it’s Desgrosseilleirs. 

Okay, so we’ll get to Scott in a second we do have a sponsor for this particular episode and our sponsor for this episode is a company called SCM Rush and they have a new tool called ‘Sellerly’ well Sellerly is a free AB split testing tool for Amazon listings and if you’ve been following my show for a long time you know that I have a multi-million dollar per year Amazon selling business and a big part of making our business successful is making sure obviously that our listings have the highest conversion rate possible in the way that we accomplish that is that we run split test. 

So now with Sellerly for free, you have a tool that’s going to make this a whole lot easier for you to do, their key elements on an image that you want to split tests it’s going to be the title, it’s going to be the images, it’s going to be the bullet points and the product description is always going to be some variation it’s going to perform better than the others and Sellerly  is this new wonderful tool that is going to allow you to be able to measure that and get a conclusion on which is the better version for you to take. So, if you would like to try it out you just go to brightideas.so/sellerly. 

So talking about numbers and split tests variations very, very aligned with what Scott and I are going to be talking about today in this particular episode so Scott, let’s start off by giving you the probably the easiest question of the entire episode and that’s who are you and what do you do? 

Scott: Hi Trent thanks for having me first of all, excited to be on here; so I’m Scott Desgrosseilleirs founder and CEO of Wicked Reports with a leading marketing attribution platform for small businesses. So, when people buy a platform, we’re going to tell you what are your best leads that have the highest customer lifetime value? Where is your marketing that’s not working that you should stop doing and where you’re getting the highest ROI based on real verifiable first party data. So you can trust the data and take action on it and your business will grow or your overall marketing ROI as a result will improve.

Trent: Who is the ideal person in your mind to be paying attention to this stuff? 

Scott: Multi-channel Marketers spending at least 10k a month and pay per click. Our average customer spends around 30grand a month, we have all ranges and multi-channel which most people are doing is where attributions really becomes a factor or if your leads take time to buy; which I mean in essence a lot of most businesses that we’ve take time to buy but not always if you’re a pure product— you know selling toothbrushes online or something then you can just— people are already looking for a tooth brush you don’t need to convince them on that. When our customers the average time between new lead to purchase is around 40days in and that’s because you know most small medium business is for a small medium business being you know one to 1m-100,000,000m in revenue. 

They’re not household brands and so they’ve got to do things to get leads and then convince them to buy and the more that process the longer it takes and the more channels you’re doing the more important marketing attribution is for you to be actually scale your success beyond whatever an initial success you had getting to the level you’re at.

Trent: So just a couple of episodes ago, I interviewed a fellow by name Chris Mercer in episode 273 it looks if you want to get to it it’s brightideas.co/273 as a matter of fact that was the prior episode, this is 274 and we used that interview Scott to treat me as kind of a guinea pig as I mentioned in that interview, I started to use paid traffic to drive leads into an evergreen funnel using webinars and the first 3 weeks it worked exceedingly well and then for reasons that I’m still trying to figure out it just sort of stopped. 

And I learned a great deal from Chris about the importance of implementing Google Tag Manager to give me all sorts of visibility that I didn’t currently have because when as a Chris explained it when you’re coming from Facebook and maybe you’ve got a lander that’s running on a landing page software platform then you’ve got your sales page then maybe you’re checking out yet another url tracking the data across all those url can be exceedingly difficult problem one of the big problems that Google Tag Manager solves. In preparation for your interview and looking at what good reports I am. As I was perusing the web page I immediately became curious as to will is Wicked Reports different than Google Tag Manager or is it sort of a beautiful software layer on top of Google Tag Manager? Like for a guy like me who is obviously interested in being able to pay for traffic and hopefully acquire those leads at break even or profitability so attribution is going to be pretty important. Why would I also want to maybe pay attention to what Wicked Reports; how do the two play together, do they play together? 

Scott: Sure we’re different than Google Tag Manager, for starters you know we’re focused strictly on attribution and very minimal set up in almost no maintenance from our customers are required. So, it’s not on you to be in Google Tag Manager doing anything to use regular reports. So, if you’re the type that likes to do that and want to green your only track every micro commitment in your funnel and also has a custom event tracking, Google Tag Manager could be a great option and I know Chris and he’s a really smart dude that knows his stuff, you know his blueprints and he’s a great guy to know and follow for sure. 

We’re different, Google Tag Manager for us you would only use it if you had Google Tag Manager on all your pages already and then to set up our tracking you would create a new tag but our work attracting there and have it fire on all pages and then you’re done. You no longer have to tell Wicked Reports anything in terms of events or what specific actions or customers or leads or traffic is doing, where it came from, why is it there? Did they buy or not? Did they come only do they or know about your brand? We deduce all that from your first part of data because we’re wired into your CRM and your shopping cart and then we’re on your pages.

And so what we do is we’re verifying inbound clicks from ad platforms or emails or organic tracking which we have not released yet but it’s now working behind the scenes and it will be out of the time episode is live so we’re tracking all your in-bound traffic to determine what sources, campaigns, content, audiences are turning into new leads or are already leads that are re-engaging or become customers in that visit and then tracking back that revenue that comes from your shopping cart against your CRM to say, “Hey, was that marketing inbound activity something that created a new lead that became a customer over time. Or were they already on your list and they were an existing leave that now converted and became a cost for a lifetime value” and were then pulling in the ad cost from the platform so we can compute your ROI say you know it verifiably, “Am I making more than I’m spending over time?”

Trent: So let me preface all of my questions by saying I’m not yet an expert in any of this stuff so I’m going to do my best to ask you good questions to get the best for the audience that I can. In the use case I’m going to keep myself on the guinea pig see for a minute– in the use case where a funnel was performing and when I say was performing I mean we were acquiring traffic on YouTube which is obviously different url traffic was going to a lander which was on my your url and then it was checking and then it was going into my ever webinar software which is on a different url and then it was checking out on my Infusionsoft app which is yet another url. 

Obviously analytics does not have the ability to track that session from point A all the way through to checkout so I would have to rely on you know YouTube’s data for what’s happening in the YouTube url I’ll have to rely on my lander, my blog status for what’s happening about lander have to rely on my lander every webinar our state or for what’s happening there and it’s used and so and as Chris explained it to me when you take that approach, there’s all sorts of room for mix ups and in accuracies I guess in the data to paraphrase what he told me the other day.

By implementing Tag Manager he’s saying you know, “Hey, you’re going to be able to get a consistent view and if something breaks at any point during the journey because your data would go look really bizarre at that particular step that would give you in essence like a magnifying glass or flashlight or a blinking yellow light on that section of the journey and maybe that’s where the breakage is” 

Are you able to accomplish if I’m not using Tag Manager how to take all the time so all this stuff up and I find your software and I think, “Hey, this sounds just like what I’m looking for” am I able to be able to diagnose in the same way that Chris tells me I could if I’ve set up my tags correctly? 

Scott: Well, I have to listen to that episode to know if you diagnose it the same way but I do know that we do cross domain tracking because our first customer ever had that problem where they were running traffic to their click funnels page; when they clicked it, was the opt-in was a pop up that was on their domain and then you went to a Infusionsoft auto form and then I think they had upsell which was the forth domain.

So I originally had an idea where I would collect UTM send tracking parameters or what have you it passed them through all these pages and our third customer that whole idea collapsed because of the problem you mentioned. So, we merely re crafted our entire text back so that it would not matter as long as the same tracking script is on unlimited domains really, we can nap the whole user journey together. So I mean we were faced with that challenge so we solved it so the magnifying glass aspect of you know without knowing enough about what happened there, it’s not on you to look around that way when you use Wicked Reports. It’s on our studio that in the event there was a massive drop off. 

Now, there shouldn’t be because of the tracking script in your scenario is on your lander and then is on your Infusionsoft order form in the click coming from YouTube if it’s maybe using the true view action ads that have the call the action layover real quick that are tracking So Google has a cool thing called a tracking template that layers the right IDs we need on every click so there’s no need to build links to redirects, create naming schemes, none of that because when they click on that call to action it’s going to inherit the template which was there which we can then use to look up whatever we need so it’s not on you to constantly name all your links differently and then we can capture it. 

We have a lot you know if five different ways that we’re trying to keep track of things but trust a main was we had to solve it; I mean before I was actually with Wicked Reports I was just my own Gmail run accounts at that point like my third account so I remember that very vividly situation So, we would handle that so we would handle that but from a Google Tag Manager perspective, if you want to grandly look at all the different things a user might have clicked on or how long did they stay on a page or a session analysis of user behavior Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager are phenomenal truth for that, we’re not trying to do that. 

We’re trying to say you spent money or time or effort doing something somewhere to promote your business; brought in incoming traffic did that incoming traffic turn into a new lead or did it opt in for something they were already a lead then we keep track of that point and see if it turns into customers or not? Or did they come in to become a customer right away?

We have you know we have funnel analytics floating around in our various tech stack and people don’t act as linear as you hope, I mean sometimes they do but not of people like to you know hack your funnel trying to see if that deadline funnel still work or you know link or Oh I see it says pricing dash two I want to try pricing dash three see if it’s cheaper, people do everything.

So we had to devote a lot of that you know causes people to test us on our numbers so we transparently show, “Hey, we think you have 80 leads from this, here are the actual CRM IDs you can go see them in your account and here’s the time they were created and here the orders, here’s the order ID from Shopify or you know woocommerce or what have you here you can map it back and furthermore here’s all the track information we know about that person” 

So you can verify our data we’re very transparent and we’re actually moving to a model where we only get paid for what we track so it’s on us to track it or you know you’re not paying; really aligns to why you should buy us. But I found that the reason we took that approach was you could suffer from data overload you’re working a lot and normally our people are marketers who are using it for ROI data, they’re not trying to get any granularly you know micromanage every step of their funnel; they’re still value and then if you want to do that that’s great for us it’s like am I making money over time with the funnel based unverifiable first party data? Is there so I want to scale it if I’m breaking even or doing so I might chill out and if I’m losing money, I want to kill it and that’s what you use Wicked Report for. 

Trent: And you’re the founder, right? 

Scott: Correct! 

Trent: When did you start it? 

Scott: So, I started officially April 2015 but 2014 February my first eventual customer I was doing some Infusionsoft consulting for and he said, “Facebook sucks for selling lobster online” and I said, “Oh yeah why is that?” he said, “I just spent 4 grand and I got a ton of clicks only one person bought right away, doesn’t work I lost 30000 bucks lost my share” and I was like, “Well, how many people scrolling through Facebook or just going to buy from some random lobster guy and I’m surprised one person”

And he said, “Well, oh yeah that’s true how my going to know if it works or not?” and I go, “What does that mean?” he goes at the eventually going to buy because of that and that led me down a path in so I said, “Well, let me see if I can figure it out myself and there was nothing out there that was really maintainable and manageable. 

At the same time you know being from Boston and he’s doing a guy there’s a lot of Boston sports team hatred because the red you know that we were winning a lot of teams a lot of sports, shrimps and chips we’re all shocked at this news and so he wanted to test the theory which was people that like the Patriots of the Red Sox but then live in New England maybe the buy lobster because why else would they like us and they would be nostalgic. 

So we ran some ads and I was able to show I’m not immediately but in 3 months he would make 10:1 on his money and he like lost his mind and so and now up to this point he’s made over two and a half million in four years on a few 100K spends they like 600% ROI and he was ready to throw pay per click out because people think that super narrow focus. That a convert right away or when they dig in they see Facebook or Google vastly overstating because you scroll by and saw an ad and then you bought and then try to scale your ads spent and view data doesn’t work, that’s not a strong enough signal.

The method to our madness is highest value signals that we can verify so that you can trust them backed by real sales against real leads in provable ROI and when you act on it you tend to make more money or wins less and so that’s why you should keep using it you know if not anything that doesn’t work then why would you pay?

Trent: That’s actually a very interesting story and if we can, I’d like to unpack it a bit to try and get it a little bit more detail; let’s go a little deeper in the weeds. So, he says to you this isn’t working and you start asking him questions was the first so each so obviously you had to start getting better tracking based upon better signals I’m guessing but help me to understand like what we’re summit first steps that you took? 

Scott: Sure! So first, we said let’s do UTMs I’m going to individually name each link so that we know for sure the ads set, the ad, the campaign that are with Facebook in those paperclip and then if you’re doing it on your fan page or business page what have you I mean the whole camp ages that you’re going to do different UTMs proposed an app and then we’re going to store the UTMs that inject them into hidden field in the form of an export or modern fusion soft and do some razzmatazz in Excel to divvy out the UTM I’m going to match the use the UTMs for my links and say forget it; 4 hours later I ran an ROI and then the next page goes, “Can you refresh?” I feel like, it’s weird if I guess but it’s you to follow and so that was the first thing and then he was like I did they tell him that leaving you like well as a new leads or existing leads? 

And I’ll be like, “Why does it matter that will newly started to get and I well I don’t want to count my existing leads” that was how we thought then and I mean we’ll dig into that later but he wanted to know new versus existing leads. And I was like, “What does that mean?” that I was like well we know they’re new if they are not in your CRM yet and they may not be brand, brand new but they’re not willing to do the commitment of opting in which is a big commitment then you’re going to get retargeted, you’re going to get their email, you’re going to see them on YouTube, they’re going to start stocking you, the big commitment to get the email now and yet you don’t tell to get that e-mail address given you to sell your offer. 

And so, what converts them at least to that point and often being the next most powerful signal next to an order in a quick being the next one in the hierarchy of you know intent and then of you being at the bottom. And so, I looked at that because just from my own behavior talking to people and looking at all these data plus what we could actually track, view data we have some we can dig into the how we track views and somewhat. I don’t love it because it’s less true. 

There are cases where it’s true you have a killer video and then you have a bunch of organic sales a day later then it’s definitely true and then we can talk about it if that’s a scenario you want to but in general view data is vastly overestimated or overestimate in terms of the value. 

Because how many times do you scroll on something and remember it the next day even? I don’t remember what I ate like a week ago and I’m 22 days ago, I viewed an ad and then I bought, like that makes no sense to me at all. Particularly with Google you know now there’s ways to mess with your windows if you know what you’re doing so that you’re not getting bad view attribution but you know that you’re acting on bad data so get bad results even if you might have a good idea and you just are using bad data to begin with.

Back to the Mark, so he was really hell bent on where the lead new or not and then how long is it taking me to convert because I can’t just spend at a loss forever, I’m a small business, I have a 10k a month budget I can just spend into the abyss knowing that eventually hopefully we are going to buy; so we needed to have provable ROI. So, that’s what got me into pulling from the shopping cart to make sure it was a real order; net payment not gross because what the credit card fail, it was a payment plan and we realized 30 bucks out of my 100, we got the other show Net ROI. 

So, that was my first big venture into that whole world for e-Commerce and then digital marketer came along they were might like 10th customer and they totally got it and they were like, “Hey I have 500, I’m always happens like I have 500 ads running I’m not doing UTMs on all those I mean John Grimshaw would slave away try to do UTMs like this sucks so we created a way where an ad ID and using we go look up what your UTM values are so you don’t have to create links you know that was a big hit. You know and then it’s like, “Oh man, I have all this flood of data coming in, how do we make it actionable if I have all these different attributes and points?” 

Sometimes I want to give credit to one point entirely because it maps to my strategy and other times I want to look across all campaigns and all Journey points and just sprinkle credit throughout all of them and just know is it working or not and so you’ve got to have a game plan for your attribution, what are you trying to do with your marketing and then look at the right measurement model that matches your point and then I could stop there for some questions, I got a couple more to get into. 

Trent: You keep going. 

Scott: Okay, well subscriptions you’ve got someone that’s rolling on subscription every month that’s your most valuable customer, yet achieving those subscriptions together and you can’t count them on the current clicks after the subscription started but they are most valuable customers so you’re tracking for the lead for the sale that created that subscription is your most valuable click by far the measurement model which Google and Facebook don’t take into account that’s why we’re you know high level partners with them because they’re all going for us to help them with this that, if someone bills every month you want to keep— measurement signal has to be screaming at you, this was really valuable we’ll get the lifetime value here and so where my patents are all involved in is we wired it to the subscriptions get the monthly bill going and map it back to what created that new lead because the cold traffic got them to become a lead and then down the road they became those high value subscription rebuilds, that’s the most valuable marketing, it’s the hardest to find and it’s gold. So, we are in a lot of our attribution around trying to make sure you’re aware of this is where you found all the subscription customers you know and the signal being revenue.

Trent: So this as I listen to you, I think this is something that everybody who sells anything online wants to know and man oh man does it ever sound complicated?

Scott: So it has been decreasing in complexity over time but it started out very complex in 2014 

Trent: The value prop of your software Wicked Reports is saying, “Hey, we’re going to give you this visit villainy that you all need to have to make informed decisions based upon attributable data but we’re not going to make it really hard to do” 

Scott: Yes! So we spent a lot of time and we actually lowered our marketing budget in chatter until we could get our churn down to super low which is currently 3% which is quite low for analytic sales that’s even including people that bought that’s turning out we’re counting them in there. 

So now, we’re actually getting to scale the Podcast was good you know we’re lowering our onboarding we’re. Quitting organic features coming out one of which will be very interesting to you which we’ll talk about a few minutes but what we found was that certain integrations are slam dunk for people to set up. Like if you’re Shopify, Woocommerce, in HubSpot or Clavio or Mail Chimp interactive campaign with a few and you have Google Tag Manager set up, you’re set up in about 15 minutes -20 minutes you have all your tracking where the excitement comes in or the effort is when people have non-unique funnels or they want to track custom events or they have a homegrown CRM or they’re doing the API or they have straight in their product that isn’t in there they wanted and they’re, like we can only act on the source data we have and so granted I just said 15 minutes that could happen, it also could be up to him of because I have a cart in overseas that we never heard of and we have to wire in the API

“Oh shoot I have an iFrame and I forgot about us when I said my tracking I put in that iFrame which captures all my often so I’m not showing any leads, Oh crap I didn’t put a track in there” And so there’s degrees of complexity like a HubSpot, Mail chimp active campaign, a web or Clavio; we automatically track all e-mail clicks any doing it, nice just to get individual UTM going every email that not fun to do but if you do it your site and you can know what’s email close the sale and if you don’t then you’re on, that how it goes.

A tricky thing for us though is a video tracking; if we have to know who the person is and so we can know it if you have a layer call to action over the video. Or if you have unique UTM in description of the video which is always fun to do if you have like 80 videos you want to do that; if you have two videos you’re fine. 

But you know, if you have a funnel where it’s a you want to track multiple steps and like one of the steps is talk to a human in— you have to set up an http post for us on that that, might be easy if using my computer I don’t want you know I ripped on if you stopped email you start very easy to set an http post for an event and then we can attribute that just like anything else. But then you got to set it up, you got to test it okay I understand, I know what I’m doing. 

So, it depends how far down the rabbit hole you want to go, if you stick with our basic use case and our native integrations of I’m doing Google, Facebook, e-mail and I have a good integration and a good cart good Wicked Reports a point of view and I already have Tag Manager set up on my pages on everything and it’s very easy, you know it depends how far down your text I mean text nowadays or you know scary so I walk into the superhero you know what if you down there you know.

Trent: And the data so once I’m set up properly I’m looking at the real time data that’s to the minute or is it only 15 minutes or how accurate is it or how real time is it?

Scott: Yes, so right now where next day because our attribution isn’t intended for you to pivot on a campaign that you just started running a few hours ago; you noted that the ad platforms have faster data we can’t get the data as fast as they’re giving it to you, we couldn’t support you in that manner. We don’t have full cost data like Facebook and AdWords you do a cleanup job the couple days later because they’re still calculating your cost after the days over which you know one of its kind of puzzling how do they not know Google, Facebook don’t know they have good reasons.

So when you’re optimizing and split testing just based on a couple hours the region frequency or the you know click rates, those are already great in the platforms, we don’t try to we’re trying to do things that are going to the value ads not repeating what you already have in the platforms you exist; so we’re more a daily or weekly analysis we have you know we have people to login 4000 times they use it and they want it real time if they can get it right not to use real times we’re going to pull from the cart, we got to pull from the CRM, we got to attribute it we got a public clicks in from the platform thinking those up real time is just wasn’t paying at all.

We’re looking at maybe doing every 4 hours for Google clicks related to a project we’re launching in August with Google where the first one’s working with Google to send CRM data via what’s called G-click ID or Google-click ID into the platform so that Google has attributable CRM and sale data will automatically import Google click ID with a verifiable first party data revenue so you can see your actual view session data in Google but more importantly it drives all the automated bidding based on actual provable ROI business outcomes. 

So Google’s like I mean we work with them for 8 months and it’s finally ready. So I guess this is the first time I’m announcing it. It’s been a labor of love and Google’s all you know Google supporting it with cool branding webinars, recommending us and around to speak about us so it’s a big deal for our little company to get this far with them but also it’s we’ve had a couple of fantastic case studies where people have killed it not it’s not guaranteed but people a couple have really killed it if they use this beating strategy that aligns with the real data and they follow Google’s best practices for machine learning optimization which can be challenging for people to do.

Trent: Can we talk about one of those case studies? 

Scott: There’s a guy selling a Youth Ministry Training which I don’t know, there are so many ways to make money on the internet, one of the keywords is Youth Ministry Training and others like one of his key waited to admit the word youth ministry and then I don’t know maybe make sure he’s not doing a call. Great guy but here’s how it started like his conversion data wasn’t very good in Google; I know he was spending around 10 grand a month which we like to have but we were trying to even get it for even smaller amount. This case was like piloting was like really small ads like under 10K, wanted to see if it would work and I told the guys, “Okay, Google says do the following and you going to do it” we’re going to wire in your conversion data and we’re going to die I don’t want you to even look at the damn thing for like a couple weeks because it’s going to lurk and then we’re going to hope that it works and if not I owe you like three Wicked Reports credit or something but just hang in there and let’s see if the machine can figure out things which I’m honest beeves that right up front it doesn’t always work but it can work dramatically. 

This guy improved because I want to pull it off that I want to mistake actually from memory I think was like 4000% growth or something astronomical where now he was making like 9:1 and this is just from learning on his but he also set up his campaign correctly which not everyone can do in this marketing actually works I mean from the get go if you don’t have a good offer you’re hooked sucks you know data; you’re going to get that it’s data telling you like you’re a marketing failure.

You got to try something new obviously I mean we track 3.3b instead orders from 1.3b sales maybe 20% of campaigns work you know it’s the people that hang in there and keep testing what you do to the point of your sponsor you need to test and I know what you need to marketing what you should not hire them, they might know what you need to test to get to what you know. 

So he gets in there he has actually set eyes wired in his conversion data so every morning, we would send the new lead count with his 30 days lead value is opt-ins which were his existing leads that reacted in for whatever he was doing with his 30 day lead value. New lead sales that occurred within 90 days because that’s all Google gave us for a window so I joined a Google ad I created I became a lead and then within 90 days I bought we’d send that idea back up with dollars or if someone actually bought at the end of the funnel as everyone always thinks less isn’t recommended by Google think that way anymore, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t just what they say. 

So I wired this in and he did what the correct machine learning survival guide that I have coming out from going through his experience which was he spent enough so that he was getting a couple conversions a day because the machine needs to know if the doing a good or bad job otherwise, you’re not going to get a lot of machine learning lock, it can’t help you if it doesn’t know how it’s doing. 

Secondly, he gave it materials to test with meaning when he had search he did responsive search ads that’s what the machine likes to use to test, the display upload it enough very creative that he was happy and he was running video which you know I didn’t even look at so I don’t want to speak to I’m not sure what he’s doing video something positive; and he just kind of left it alone I think he was traveling or maybe just listen because I had emailed the pile of people and that this is 90 days to success not oh my god Google is going to save my marketing and these people did know they are good successful marketers otherwise from what I can tell. But it was 90 days and we’re going to let it run for a couple of weeks or a month and then we’re going to look at it and adjust.

This particular person listened and he had good marketing and he was 8-9:1 this was like a month and a half ago, I mean it’s just going up and up you know that it’s not always going to be the case. 

And then another guy who started out as a lobster guy he didn’t listen he was panicking after 3 days and he’s like, “I don’t know men, it’s not working out” and I was like you know why Wicked Report exist? Because your leads take time to buy not if this isn’t the theory of leads take time to buy your leads take time to buy and you’re freaking out on me after 3 days about your marking that I don’t even know what you’re doing in there and you’re waiting 3 days when I can show you—I mean we run stats you know we show people lead over time…

Trent: What’s the lobster guy average sales cycle?

Scott: His most sales are greater than 180 days which he doesn’t like to know but his that he’s got a big wad of them in 15-30 days OK you’ve got to give it to me because we have reams of historical data going back from when 2014 that your leads never— they don’t buy often right away when they see that he’s freaked freaking out about it so we go back and forth you know pretty good friends of them of and then I’m like, “Okay well, just can you try to leave these couple alone” and he did in lo and behold. He was making life for the wonderful he’s making the 4:1 for June, he finally did what the machine felt like all the machines to do and he still been optimized correctly he’s doing $50 dollars a day for campaign at least $100 you should do less campaigns so there’s more data.

That’s been said a lot of people do have successful hype if your hyper segmentation is working well, go ahead do it I’m not here to say I know the answer to every funnel I’m telling you what Google has told me and what I’ve seen work for a couple cases. Now, there’s a couple cases where went back and those people had hyper segmentation and then they switched to using real you know and they had some conversion date in it that wasn’t quite verifiable You know they had like hey look I made 7000 leads in this week and I feel like that’s weird, your CRM says 3000 and that can’t be true.

Trent: I remember having the problems running contest funnels in those two numbers would never agree between what Facebook was telling me and what my CRM was telling me.

Scott: They never do and so then we really we have a third number but we start from the CRM and try and figure it out for starting from the real reality and so at least our foundation is strong and if you would argue with how we put a window in whatever but I mean our foundation is this all of the of the sort.

So he ended up doing well and so then he had an interesting thing I don’t like that I mean no one likes it when the sales of brand it and I always was anti branded and I was like you know what though, if all you’re the marketing was working, how come they still needed the branding link to close a sale? They were online googling and went to your brands link because people are betting on his brand now, he has to bet on his own brand even tries not to like those other people in there are betting on your bread you have and one of his best aggregates is its competitors, you’re stealing from your competitors you have to bet on your brand if you have people been like don’t get mad at me, it’s the data. Was always our ally for brand but I mean it wasn’t like that. 

Trent: And when you say betting on competitors or his competitors are betting on him they’re just taking his brand name into putting it as a keyword in their campaigns so they’re showing ads regularization just can’t get his brand. 

Scott: Yeah that’s a very— you see that all over the place and it works generally, it generally works well. So, a couple of one well known marketer didn’t do that well in a couple others and in some cases what I found machine learning this is spread among the 10 people we tested; if you need— if you’re going to be panicky while the machine is learning, you have every right to do that if you want to; if you’re not comfortable giving up control to the machine, you shouldn’t do bid strategy based emotional learning this is based on what you’ve got let the machine learn and then the clicker is it may learn and decide, “Hey, guess what this campaign sucks”

And then you just wasted a week and you didn’t do any optimization and you’re driving nuts but you got to let the machine get out of learning if you do an automated bet strategy. 

Trent: And buy the machine you’re talking about the engineer software? 

Scott: I’m talking about so Google’s automated bidding using owner and in your up we are uploading the conversion data based on the real sales 

Trent: To help the machine to learn. 

Scott: The machine learns based on the real outcomes you want. So then the other one is that people don’t spend enough or they have a high ticket item and on a volume, you’ve got to have enough budgets for enough conversion data for your campaign before you’re going to hyper segment within that.

Trent: How much is enough conversion data? 

Scott: Google says 15 conversions within 30 days that’s their barest minimum; I’d like to see at least two conversions, three conversions a day and it doesn’t have to be— it could be lead conversions if you’re comfortable with the leads knowing they’re going to convert but they just need conversion data with value.

And then the initial when you go to machine learning and you go to automated bidding with real outcomes, there’s a definition way because right now you’re sending fake conversion data but inaccurate for various reasons that adjustment period the machines like, “Whoa, wait things are different, it slows down for a couple of days and nobody likes that.

I’m still experimenting with how do I gracefully on board you know without that traumatic first couple days of learning but fortunately now I’ll tell you how long until things that learn it’s going to be—I’ve learned enough about your campaign and that’s when you can go in an optimized but that’s currently you know a gray area for people.

Trent: So let’s— in the interest of kind of closing the loop before we run out of time today, I’m sitting here I’m listening to this and probably like many other people who are listening to you talk, they’re thinking, “Yeah, you know I definitely want to make improvements in this area of my business, I need better visibility in this area of my business to make better decisions and higher ROI, how do I get started?” 

So, let’s assume that someone wants to use you software, they’re going to go there, they’re going to go is it a free trial what’s the onboarding look like you have consultants that help people get all this other stuff set up or are they what does the experience look like? 

Scott: Sure, so wickedreports.com/pricing you go there and then you book time with— you can pull it right we’re results based pricing, so we’re price based on your annual revenue $199 plus $49 for every additional $1m 

You know it’s like some infinitesimal small percent of your annual Rev; now on boarding is custom ported now because what we found is you know we don’t want to have you buy in and be angry in 45days that you’re not onboarding right, at the same token if you have Google Tag Manager and Shopify an active campaign or one of those other, you can get set up really quick and we shouldn’t charge you that we should charge you a much less on board. So, we have 5 questions that people go through on the call and then you get a quote of onboarding on the spot but it can be from $0-$5000.00 but the median is $750 and there’s a lot of $250 and it can handle your stack in your situation and what you’re trying to track.

So like I mentioned, Shopify and one of our good CRM integrations to spend in 10K a month and you just and all your sales are online on Shopify, it’s 250bucks or zero. A lot of people want to pay for onboarding because the onboarding would be you go through our Wizards and then we’ll get on there and personally verify not me but some of my team are personally verify with our SOPs that you have set everything up correctly and if you have been that call becomes free data consulting or some people want to pay for I want to verify my tracking, I want to set up zaps with you and I want data consulting and that might be $750 or a little higher depending on how much service you want. 

And you know a customer card or you know you have you know some people you know if your text back is a hot mess then we don’t want you citing sheep and having another aggravation of room or taken you away from growing a business when you just needed an expert that’s done this a bunch of times; so what we’ve found is that if we can have 15 minutes of your time we can save you a ton of time and probably save you money on onboarding but if not we can be firm like we really don’t want you to onboard unless we help you because of what we’ve heard. I just find that works best for us.

I would say it’s 750 onboard would be probably people like that one because they want initial data consulting after all their data is flowing in, they want to or one of our experts to click around and tell them initial optimizations to do. So, that’s a really popular one. $250 if you don’t want that if you’re say I know data I just want to you know set up verify 250 bucks gets you started.

Trent: For the last question, I always like to throw this back to you and say because you know more about this topic than I do, if you are interviewing yourself, is there anything that we haven’t yet talked about or is there a question that you would ask yourselves which you feel would make the interview better for the audience members who again all know probably less about this topic than you do?

Scott: Yes I would say the question I would have would want to be asked and now I’ll ask myself is how should I use attribution models? And the answer is, you should have a game plan to map and what was your marketing intent with that campaign and then use the right actually fusion model that supports measuring if that campaign was a success give you an example. 

If you’re trying to find new leads that become high value customers which everyone on earth should be trying to do, then you want to attribution model that least focuses on that particular point in time of how do they get these new leads and then correctly attributes revenue only based on that particular point in time because it’s I found the hardest thing for people to do, next to converting people the end of the funnel the hardest thing is finding new leads, then when you find them a did I find customers out of this mess? 

And more importantly, was that a high enough ROI quick enough in time that I can start to worry about scaling it because that gives you the base point of how you’re going to attract the top your funnel, the top of the funnel of the hardest thing to do to find the goods, we you know the Glengarry leads, the hardest thing to do in people to say otherwise are you know either lying or you should buy their course and do exactly what they said.

You can find leads they just crappy or they don’t buy it they go summit. In the you know when you’re looking at your subscription company you start the month with a 100k in subscription your goal I should be where did I find me so I go find more of them are one book that I used to get and then work there’s all the other pieces in your funnel you can worry about but you’ve got to start feeding that flow of leads and from top of the funnel and that’s why Facebook and Google shy away from that is measurement is the hardest thing to do and it doesn’t always look so rosy from your campaigns when you’re doing that. But they do work great for it but there’s a lot of nuance and that’s what we focused on and also it’s a self-serving question that’s why we were created because it was such a big need and that’s when people buy us for that reason they never leave.

But also it’s critical to oxygen to be a business if the car grow go faster so that’s why you should look at that but then And then in the flips of the defile up for that is, “Well, okay I have this big e-mail list that dead and I just inherited it as a marketer. I’ve got to get it going again, how do I know if it works. They still have it so you created some new great funnel it’s a 21 day guaranteed amount of clothes and a set of whatever well you’ve got this list of 100K that’s just sitting there are more maybe well you’re going to run ads or and emails you I mean ideally you’ll have a you know download our new guide to XYZ. 

Well, you can e-mail them to get on to download it, you’re going to target your unconverted leaving is a Facebook ad said and hopefully you’re going to target them on Google if your Google match isn’t high enough and they’re going to hope for the opting in and then you want to head to that work or not you know 21 days later? Look I converted a 1000, where they come from? Well, if it was a good thing lead you need a measurement model that looks like, “Hey, was there an existing leads” because otherwise you can’t scale it because it might have worked and it was only on people that were already familiar with your brand not the cone traffic and not the hot to trot at the bottom but the mid funnel magic like what get a stale lead to say, “Oh damn I need to buy this”

At most that point in time was that great lead magnet that you sent them but it wasn’t a lead magnet, it was a re-engagement magnet to find out and then you can architecture funnel to say hey once they’re on the list and I tried you know offer X. Y. and Z. I’ll send in this re-engagement final because I know it converted it converts pretty well once people know my brand but they haven’t bought. And you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t map the right attribution model right intention of the marketing if you do that it’s like you love that traction and if you don’t then it still can help you but. That’s when you get the most value.

Trent: Loving it and I would love to have all of that happening in my business and right now immediately; that would be a wonderful thing so we’re going to talk more when we get off camera but how we can make that happen; so thank you very much for making some time to be on the show. 

wickedreports.com is where people should go to learn more about your stuff if someone is listening to this and they want to contact you about some type of joint venture, what would be the single easiest way for them to do that Scott? 

Scott: Yeah on our website we have you know they just mentioned joint venture, Operator will route it to me so that okay or my Partnership Manager or Marketing Manager they usually come to come to me and I route to one of them and then we get on and get something out.

Trent: Okay wonderful, thanks again for making some time 

Scott: Thanks for having me, it was great.