Podcasts about google tag manager

How can embedding the booking engine and reintroducing voice finally tip the scales for direct bookings?In this episode of dojo.live, we welcome back Josh Graham, Head of Marketing Development for North America at Cloudbeds. This conversation explores the future of direct bookings and digital storefront innovation, with a spotlight on Cloudbeds' embedded booking engine and their AI concierge solution, Engage. From voice-assisted reservations to the power of Google Tag Manager, Josh unpacks how simplifying the guest's path to purchase—and enabling end-to-end journey tracking without data gaps—is helping hotels dramatically improve conversion and loyalty, while also optimizing marketing performance and user experience more effectively.After 10 years in hotel operations at branded and independent hotels in Washington, D.C., Josh Graham transitioned to technology at TravelClick. Over 13 years, he held a number of senior sales, marketing, and go-to-market roles, working with CRS, Business Intelligence, and e-commerce/digital marketing. In his final role, he served as Regional VP for their guest management/CRM product.Following TravelClick's acquisition by Amadeus in 2018, Josh joined Revenue Analytics in 2020 to help launch their RMS solution, N2Pricing. After roles at Salesforce in their Travel and Hospitality unit and FLYR for Hospitality, Josh found his home at Cloudbeds. As Head of Market Development for North America, he drives market awareness and introduces Cloudbeds to new hotelier segments.About Josh

In this powerful episode of the Millionaire Car Salesman Podcast, hosted by Sean V. Bradley and LA Williams, we bring in a special guest: Penny Vettel-Diersing! Penny shares her extensive experience in auto dealership marketing, starting with a breakdown of intelligent lead routing within the BDC and why customized communication strategies are critical for maximizing every lead opportunity.  "What value before you click send, on a text, on a chat, on an email, what value are you giving to the customer." The conversation then leads to Penny's innovative take on digital marketing, Google tagging, and advanced analytics — showing how dealerships can move beyond simple reply metrics to truly measure the value of every communication effort. And her #1 success in her dealership - Text messaging! "A successful text campaign isn't about the reply count. It's about the action a customer takes after getting your text." If you're ready to sharpen your marketing, drive more meaningful engagement, and rethink how you track success, this episode is a must-listen!   Key Takeaways: ✅ Intelligent Lead Routing: Penny emphasizes the importance of routing leads based on dealer expertise to boost sales efficacy rather than the traditional round-robin method. ✅ Text Communication vs. Marketing: The distinction between communication and marketing was highlighted by Penny, as she proposed data-driven, actionable strategies for improving dealership engagement. ✅ AI-Powered Marketing Tools: The use of technology, particularly AI like Google Gemini, provides cutting-edge solutions for marketing strategies under fluctuating market conditions, improving customer interaction. ✅ Value over Engagement: Penny argues that effective communication should aim to drive customer action rather than merely waiting for a reply, revolutionizing standard dealership practices. ✅ Google Tagging Efficiency: Implementing URL tagging in communications not only tracks engagement but provides essential insight into the effectiveness of each marketing campaign.   About Penny Vettel-Diersing Penny Vettel-Diersing, is a 27-year automotive industry veteran who has mastered digital marketing, business development, and sales strategies! Penny began her automotive career in 1998 at Reynolds & Reynolds, where she specialized in web-based internet lead software, programs, and processes. In 2002, she moved into retail and began building and running business development centers. Since then, her career has expanded to include digital marketing strategies. She manages the sales process from advertising to business development (and everything in between)! Penny is a published author writing: Texts That Sell: How Modern Text Strategies Can Revolutionize Sales Engagement in Automotive Retail!   Inside the Dealer's Mind: Innovative Strategies for Success in the Automotive Industry   Key Takeaways: Strategic Communication: Crafting text marketing campaigns with value-driven calls to action is crucial for engagement and conversion. Intelligent Lead Routing: Tailoring lead allocation based on individual agent expertise can significantly enhance dealership performance and customer satisfaction. Leveraging Technology: Utilizing AI and analytics tools can provide deeper insights and improve marketing outcomes.   Transforming Communication Strategies in the Auto Industry In the fast-evolving landscape of the automotive industry, staying ahead hinges on the ability to embrace innovative communication strategies. Penny Vettel-Diersing, a veteran with 27 years of industry experience, shares a profound insight into how text communication and marketing techniques can redefine dealership success. "You never send a text message to a customer that doesn't give them something exciting to do," Penny emphasizes. This approach not only encourages engagement, but also empowers potential buyers with actionable information. Through the strategic use of Google Tagging and analytics, dealerships can track customer actions, gaining insights into what works and what doesn't. Penny states, "I want to know if they actually did it right… I take that tiny URL and when you click it, I see what you're doing on my website." By focusing on the actions that customers take rather than merely their replies, dealerships can refine their strategies to maximize conversions. This shift in perspective allows dealers to offer solutions tailored to the unique needs of each customer, driving both engagement and sales. Overall, the emphasis on creating value before clicking send and adopting a detailed approach to text communication highlights a pivotal change. Texts should be more than mere messages—they should be dynamic touchpoints that bring meaningful value to the customer. With this strategy, dealerships can foster stronger relationships and enhance customer loyalty. Intelligent Lead Routing: The Path to Empowerment The whirlwind of leads that dealerships manage can often become chaotic without a structured strategy. Penny's approach to intelligent lead routing serves as a beacon of efficiency. By recognizing and capitalizing on the unique strengths of each team member, dealerships can align customer needs with the right expertise. "A lot of dealers want to try to have the government cheese mentality… here's a lead for you, here's a lead for you," remarks Sean V. Bradley. By implementing a system of intelligent lead routing, dealers can customize the lead allocation process. This ensures that opportunities are distributed based on proven strengths, allowing the most capable agents to handle specific customer inquiries. This targeted approach eliminates the pressure of trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and instead nurtures precision and efficacy. The use of intelligent lead routing establishes a comprehensive understanding that each lead requires a distinct approach, aligning resources to meet customer expectations effectively. Beyond improving operational efficiency, this strategy nurtures personal growth within the sales team, transforming the mindset from mere opportunity handling to strategic problem-solving. With detailed insights into their performance, agents can continuously refine their skills, enhancing overall dealership performance. Capitalizing on Technology for Success The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and analytics is an evolving force with the potential to redefine success in automotive marketing. As Penny illustrates, leveraging AI tools like Google Gemini can uncover valuable insights, generating innovative approaches to customer communication. Through AI-generated strategies and templates, dealerships can streamline the creation and deployment of marketing campaigns, amplifying their effectiveness. The power of AI lies in its ability to deliver personalized and insightful information rapidly. "You know, you have to take the high road," Penny notes, stressing the importance of communicating with confidence and competence. By automating repetitive tasks and uncovering hidden patterns, AI enables dealerships to focus their energy on nurturing meaningful connections with potential buyers. The use of analytics tools, such as Google Tag Manager, complements AI, allowing dealerships to measure the success of their campaigns with precision. By integrating tagging and analytics, dealerships can gain visibility into the customer journey, monitor their interactions, and make data-driven decisions that optimize future efforts. This fusion of technology empowers dealers with the knowledge to not only meet but exceed customer expectations, ensuring continued success. Reflecting on Innovative Dealership Practices The insights shared by Penny Vettel-Diersing and Sean V. Bradley emphasize the transformative power of innovative strategies in the automotive industry. By redefining communication strategies, dealerships can engage potential buyers with purpose, creating value-driven interactions that foster engagement and loyalty. Emphasizing intelligent lead routing ensures that each prospect is matched with the right expertise, enhancing customer satisfaction and sales team efficiency. Leveraging AI and analytics technology transforms marketing efforts, delivering targeted insights and enabling data-driven decision-making. These strategies illustrate a holistic approach to dealership success. By integrating these techniques, dealerships can adapt to changing customer preferences, capitalize on technological advancements, and forge deeper connections with their customers. As the automotive landscape continues to evolve, dealerships equipped with these innovative practices will be poised to navigate the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.   Resources: Podium: Discover how Podium's innovative AI technology can unlock unparalleled efficiency and drive your dealership's sales to new heights. Visit www.podium.com/mcs to learn more!   NCC: Credit-Driven Retailing - NCC delivers industry-best credit-driven retailing for auto dealerships, combining a powerful credit and compliance engine and fully integrated CRM/Desking platform for maximum profitability. Visit www.nccdirect.com/dealer-synergy to learn more!   Complete CRM: Complete CRM is a streamlined, all-in-one system that simplifies your dealership software and processes so you can manage every aspect of your operation with ease; from tracking and following up on leads, desking deals, managing inventory, marketing to your customers, and more. Visit www.nccdirect.com/dealer-synergy to learn more!   Dealer Synergy & Bradley On Demand: The automotive industry's #1 training, tracking, testing, and certification platform and consulting & accountability firm.   The Millionaire Car Salesman Facebook Group: Join the #1 Mastermind Group in the Automotive Industry! With over 28,000 members, gain access to successful automotive mentors & managers, the best industry practices, & collaborate with automotive professionals from around the WORLD! Join The Millionaire Car Salesman Facebook Group today!   Win the Game of Googleopoly: Unlocking the secret strategy of search engines.     The Millionaire Car Salesman Podcast is Proudly Sponsored By: Podium: Elevating Dealership Excellence with Intelligent Customer Engagement Solutions. Unlock unparalleled efficiency and drive sales with Podium's innovative AI technology, featured proudly on the Millionaire Car Salesman Podcast. Visit www.podium.com/mcs to learn more!   NCC: Powered by proprietary solutions such as Intelligent Credit Engine™ and LenderSelect™, NCC transforms the car-buying experience for dealers and their customers. From compliance and lender selection to CRM and desking, to marketing and data mining—NCC integrates them all in a single, seamless platform to deliver better customer experiences, maximum efficiency and maximum profit. Visit www.nccdirect.com/dealer-synergy to learn more!   Complete CRM: As an innovative leader in the industry for the last 30 years, Complete CRM is designed to give your dealership the competitive edge in a demanding marketplace. Powered by Complete Credit™ and award-winning desking, Complete CRM™ is the industry's only credit and compliance-enabled CRM that lets dealers achieve maximum profitability on every deal. Built on modern technology, Complete CRM seamlessly integrates credit, compliance, inventory, data mining, lead generation, enterprise functionality, and customized reporting in one tool with a single login. Visit www.nccdirect.com/dealer-synergy to learn more!   Dealer Synergy: The #1 Automotive Sales Training, Consulting, and Accountability Firm in the industry! With over two decades of experience in building Internet Departments and BDCs, we have developed the most effective automotive Internet Sales, BDC, and CRM solutions. Our expertise in creating phone scripts, rebuttals, CRM action plans, strategies, and templates ensures that your dealership's tools and personnel reach their full potential.   Bradley On Demand: The automotive sales industry's top Interactive Training, Tracking, Testing, and Certification Platform. Featuring LIVE Classes and over 9,000 training modules, our platform equips your dealership with everything needed to sell more cars, more often, and more profitably!  

This Podcast is sponsored by Team Simmer.Go to TeamSimmer and use the coupon code DEVIATE for 10% on individual course purchases.The Technical Marketing Handbook provides a comprehensive journey through technical marketing principles.Sign up to the Simmer Newsletter for the latest news in Technical Marketing.Latest content from Juliana & SimoSign-up to Juliana's newsletter: Beyond The Mean. Subscribe here: https://julianajackson.substack.com/Latest from Simo: Clarification On GTM Auto-Loading Google Tag For Ads And Floodlight EventsLatest from Juliana: Brand Moments, Contextual Experience Debt, and Perception-Led Segmentation: A New Framework for Digital ExperienceConnect With Dave CainLinkedin This podcast is brought to you by Juliana Jackson and Simo Ahava.

Welcome to another engaging episode of MOJO: The Meaning of Life and Business, where host Jennifer Glass delves into the often underestimated importance of tracking website conversions. In this episode, Jennifer is joined by Mark Harbeke, an expert in marketing analytics and founder of Harbeke Marketing, who brings a wealth of experience dating back to 2006. As many businesses invest significant resources into developing their websites, it's crucial to understand how visitors interact with these sites and convert into customers.Mark discusses his journey from journalism into marketing analytics, detailing the evolution of tools like Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Google Tag Manager (GTM) to aid in this process. He breaks down the transition from GA3 to GA4, emphasizing the enhanced reporting capabilities and user-friendly interfaces that make it easier for business owners to track user engagement. Additionally, Mark introduces the concept of GTM, explaining its role in creating custom tracking events that shed light on the effectiveness of specific calls to action (CTAs) on a website.Listeners will discover the critical nature of analyzing unique visits, user paths, and other data points to optimize their websites and improve their return on investment. For those feeling overwhelmed by technical jargon, Mark and Jennifer ensure the discussion remains accessible, highlighting how even non-tech savvy individuals can implement and benefit from these tools. Furthermore, they touch upon the use of UTM parameters for detailed tracking of campaign performances.Whether you're a small business owner or part of a marketing agency, this episode offers practical insights and actionable steps to make your website work harder for you. Dive into this comprehensive discussion to enhance your understanding of GA4 and GTM and discover strategies to maximize your website's impact on your business success.About my guest: Mark Harbeke has been in the marketing industry since 2006 and founded his company, Harbeke Marketing in 2023. Mark helps small businesses to improve their website conversion tracking, including clients of marketing agencies and fractional CMOs. He also offers a video course that helps service business owners and solopreneurs to grow their leads pipelines.Keywords: Website conversion tracking, GA4, Google Analytics, Harbeck Marketing, website optimization, small business marketing, website conversion tools, website data analysis, user experience reports, e-commerce transactions, unique visitors, mobile visits, desktop visits, demographic data, GTM, Google Tag Manager, conversion events, UTM, Urchin Tracking Module, link tracking, form submissions, call-to-action tracking, conversion rate improvement, Facebook retargeting, Ad return on investment, website usability testing, online marketing strategies, analytics reporting, website traffic sources, email campaign tracking, lead generation analytics

In this episode of The Pro Church Marketing Podcast, we're diving deep into conversion tracking—why it matters and how to do it right. Jono Long is joined by Google Ads expert John Hosko and Faithworks's Melissa Keane to simplify the ins and outs of tracking actions like form submissions, phone calls, and donations using Google Tag Manager and GA4 Analytics. Whether you're a church using the Google Ad Grant or a nonprofit running paid ads, this episode shows how conversion tracking can be the key to unlocking performance. Learn how to stay compliant with Google's ad grant rules, get practical steps to set up tracking without coding, and discover how to use that data to improve your website's effectiveness and campaign results. You'll also hear real-world examples of how small changes on your website can lead to major gains—and how not tracking your conversions could be costing you clicks, opportunities, and even your grant. ✅ Great for churches, nonprofits, and anyone managing Google Ads! #GoogleAdGrant #ConversionTracking #ChurchMarketing #FaithworksMarketing #NonprofitMarketing #GoogleTagManager #GA4 #DigitalMissions

En este episodio se discute el estado de la medición en 2025, abordando los cambios en Google Tag Manager, la pérdida de datos en campañas publicitarias, y los desafíos que enfrentan los profesionales del marketing debido a las nuevas regulaciones de consentimiento.Analizan cómo estos cambios impactan la recolección de datos y la efectividad de las campañas publicitarias, así como el futuro de la analítica en un entorno digital en constante evolución.En esta conversación se discuten los desafíos actuales en la implementación de soluciones de medición digital, especialmente en relación con Google y su sistema de etiquetas.Se abordan las limitaciones de las soluciones actuales, la importancia del server side tracking y las mejores prácticas para optimizar la recolección de datos en un entorno regulado.Los participantes también analizan los costos asociados y las oportunidades que surgen en un contexto complicado para el marketing digital.En esta conversación se abordan los desafíos actuales en la gestión de datos en marketing digital, la importancia de la calidad de los datos y las estrategias de atribución.Se discute el futuro de la medición y la analítica, así como recomendaciones para la recopilación de datos de manera legal y efectiva.Los participantes enfatizan la necesidad de diversificar las estrategias de marketing y la importancia de la medición homogénea para obtener resultados óptimos.00:00 Introducción al Estado de la Medición en 202502:56 Cambios en Google Tag Manager y Etiquetas05:59 Impacto de la Pérdida de Datos en las Campañas09:01 Consentimiento y Regulaciones en la Recolección de Datos11:56 Desafíos de la Medición en un Entorno Cambiante14:57 El Futuro de la Publicidad y la Analítica17:56 Reflexiones Finales sobre la Medición y el Consentimiento23:05 La Realidad de Google y las Soluciones a Medias26:07 Desafíos en la Implementación de Etiquetas de Google28:01 Nuevas Funcionalidades y el Modo Propio de Google30:44 El Impacto del ITP y la Prevención de Tracking32:20 Buenas Prácticas para la Medición Efectiva34:13 El Server Side Tracking como Solución39:17 Costos y Beneficios del Server Side Tracking43:29 Oportunidades en un Entorno Complicado44:13 Desafíos en la Gestión de Datos47:04 La Importancia de la Calidad de los Datos49:11 Atribución y Cookies en el Marketing Digital51:37 El Futuro de la Medición y la Analítica54:53 Recomendaciones para la Recopilación de Datos01:00:20 Cierre y Reflexiones FinalesPPCFest: ppcfest.comPPCCast+: ppccast.com/plusPatrocinadores:Raiola Networks: ppccast.com/raiolaData Feed Watch: ppccast.com/datafeedConvertiam: ppccast.com/convertiam

In this episode of No Hacks Snacks, I talked to Marin Radovan, a digital analytics and martech expert about the intricacies of consent mode in Google Tag Manager. Marin emphasized the importance of setting up a proper Consent Management Platform (CMP) and the significant repercussions of neglecting this essential step. Marin highlighted legal risks, particularly under GDPR regulations, and the potential loss of crucial data that can hinder business decisions and optimizations. Common issues he encounters include incomplete consent setups across different subdomains and outdated CMP versions. To address these challenges, he provides actionable insights on identifying stakeholders and implementing ideal CMP setups that are both user-friendly and compliant with privacy laws.Tune in to learn why getting consent right is crucial for both legal compliance and effective digital marketing.---If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with a friend!No Hacks websiteYouTubeLinkedInInstagram

Google Tag Manager (GTM), dijital pazarlamanın gizli silahı mı? Yoksa gereksiz bir araç mı? Eğer hala GTM kullanmıyorsan, büyük ihtimalle dönüşüm takiplerinde hatalar yapıyor, kampanyalarını yanlış verilerle yönetiyor ve en önemlisi, zaman kaybediyorsun! Bugünkü bölümde GTM'nin neden her pazarlamacının bilmesi gereken bir araç olduğunu konuşacağız. Teknik bir konu gibi görünebilir ama merak etme, GTM'yi en basit haliyle anlatacağım. Eğer Google Ads, Meta Ads, TikTok veya diğer platformlarda reklam veriyorsan ve dönüşümlerini takip etmek istiyorsan, bu bölümü sakın kaçırma! Bölümde Neler Konuşacağız? ✅ Google Tag Manager nedir, ne işe yarar? ✅ Pazarlamacılar neden GTM kullanmalı? ✅ GTM ile kod yazmadan etiket yönetimi nasıl yapılır? ✅ E-ticaret ve performans pazarlamasında GTM'nin sağladığı avantajlar ✅ GTM ücretli mi? Alternatifleri neler? ✅ GTM vs. Alternatif araçlar: Hangisi daha iyi? ✅ GTM'yi kullanmaya başlamak için yapman gerekenler Öncelikle, dijital pazarlamada en büyük hatalardan biri, dönüşümleri doğru takip etmemek! Belki Google Ads'te reklamlar veriyorsun, Facebook ve Instagram'da kampanyalar yürütüyorsun… Ama gerçekten kaç kişi sitene geldi, hangi sayfalarda vakit geçirdi, hangi butona bastı ve en önemlisi, alışveriş yaptı mı? Bunları yanlış ölçüyorsan, verdiğin reklam bütçesini boşa harcıyor olabilirsin! İşte tam burada Google Tag Manager devreye giriyor! Eskiden her bir takip kodunu web sitesine eklemek için bir yazılımcıya ihtiyacın vardı. Facebook Pixel mi eklemek istiyorsun? Geliştiriciye haber ver, kodu eklesin, sonra test edilsin… Günler sürebiliyordu! GTM sayesinde, hiçbir kod yazmadan tüm bu süreçleri tek bir panelden yönetebiliyorsun. GTM Nasıl Çalışıyor? Düşün ki GTM bir kontrol paneli gibi… Web sitene veya uygulamana eklediğin tüm etiketleri buradan yönetiyorsun. Örneğin:

Google Tag Manager to coś więcej niż wsparcie dla marketingu. To narzędzie, które pozwala każdemu działowi działać szybciej i efektywniej. ➡️ Marketing – uruchamia kampanie samodzielnie bez czekania na dział IT czy firmy zewnętrzne. ➡️ Sprzedaż – ma dostęp do precyzyjnych danych o klientach i może się z nimi kontaktować od razu. ➡️ Dział prawny – kontroluje tryby uzyskiwania zgód i inne regulacje. ➡️ IT – nie musi każdorazowo kodować, co oszczędza czas i zasoby. Nie trać czasu i pieniędzy. Obejrzyj ten odcinek i dowiedz się, jak wykorzystać Google Tag Manager w praktyce. Zapraszam do oglądana! –

From our Sponsors at SimmerGo to TeamSimmer and use the coupon code DEVIATE for 10% on individual course purchases.The Technical Marketing Handbook provides a comprehensive journey through technical marketing principles.Latest content from Juliana & Simo#GTMTips: Quickly Duplicate Tags In Google Tag Manager by Simo AhavaSend App Data To Server-side Google Tag Manager by Simo AhavaHow to Nail Client Discovery using 10 Behavior Science Principles by Juliana JacksonHow to Measure AI ROI in CX: The Value Chain Framework by Juliana Jackson This podcast is brought to you by Juliana Jackson and Simo Ahava. Intro jingle by Jason Packer and Josh Silverbauer.

Send us a textIn this Office Hours episode on The Digital Marketing Mentor Podcast, Danny sits down with Optidge's Head of Paid Search, Brianna Deboever, to dive deep into Google Ads. As our resident expert in paid search, she shares her insights on spotting red flags, optimizing campaign settings, and avoiding common pitfalls.  Whether you're a seasoned marketer or just getting started, this episode will guide you through building stronger, more efficient paid search campaigns. Our Office Hours episodes are your go-to for details, how-to's, and advice on specific marketing topics. Join our fellow Optidge team members, and sometimes even 1:1 teachings from Danny himself, in these shorter, marketing-focused episodes every few weeks. Get ready to get marketing!Episode Highlights: When it comes to Google Ads campaign setup, a few best practices include limiting ad groups to 3-7 keywords, avoiding overuse of broad match keywords, and setting location settings to “presence only.” Once your campaigns are ready to go live, Brianna recommends beginning with manual bidding and regular monitoring of conversion tracking to ensure accuracy and alignment before transitioning to automated tracking tactics. Brianna suggests incorporating negative keywords to reduce wasted ad spend and reviewing search terms frequently to refine keyword lists, assign accurate values to conversions, and enhance targeting. It's good practice to utilize tools like Clickcease, Google Tag Manager and GA4 in paid search to block spam traffic, streamline conversion tracking, and ensure alignment with campaign goals. Episode Links: Brianna's Linkedin Brianna's previous The Digital Marketing Mentor podcast episodeFollow The Digital Marketing Mentor: Website and Blog: thedmmentor.com Instagram: @thedmmentor Linkedin: @thedmmentor YouTube: @thedmmentor Interested in Digital Marketing Services, Careers, or Courses? Check out more from the TDMM Family: Optidge.com - Full Service Digital Marketing Agency specializing in SEO, PPC, Paid Social, and Lead Generation efforts for established B2C and B2B businesses and organizations. ODEOacademy.com - Digital Marketing online education and course platform. ODEO gives you solid digital marketing knowledge to launch/boost your career or understand your business's digital marketing strategy.

Remarketing is one of the most underrated yet impactful strategies in digital advertising. But how do you re-engage potential customers without crossing the line into annoyance? On this episode of the Stay Hungry Podcast, Joel Stone and Martha Dale reveal the secrets to mastering the art of remarketing. Packed with real-world examples and actionable tips, this episode will help you transform lost opportunities into loyal customers.Joel and Martha begin with the fundamentals of remarketing - what it is, why it works, and how familiarity can dramatically boost conversions. Did you know that only 2% of visitors convert on their first visit? Remarketing bridges that gap, and this episode shows you how.Key Topics Discussed:Why Remarketing Matters: Discover how retargeting past visitors and customers drives trust, builds familiarity, and increases conversions.Best Practices for Remarketing: Learn the golden rule of adding value without overwhelming your audience, tailoring messages to different user actions, and avoiding ad fatigue with techniques like frequency capping.Success Stories: Real-life case studies of businesses boosting sales and conversions with dynamic product ads and email retargeting.Common Mistakes to Avoid: Don't fall into the traps of over-targeting, mismatched messaging, or poorly timed campaigns.Actionable Takeaways: Practical steps like setting up tracking tools (Facebook Pixel, Google Tag Manager), building audiences, and launching your first remarketing campaign.Whether you're an entrepreneur, marketer, or small business owner, Joel and Martha's insights will give you the confidence to dive into remarketing with strategies that work. With their expert guidance, you'll be able to engage your audience smartly, drive results, and avoid the pitfalls that can damage trust.Links Website: https://www.codebreak.co.uk Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/codebreakcrew/ Facebook: https://facebook.com/codebreakcrew/Joel's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joelstoneofficial/ Joel's Facebook: https://facebook.com/joelstoneofficial/Free Marketing Budget Calculator: https://codebreak.outgrow.us/knowyournumbers Arrange a call with Codebreak: https://form.jotform.com/241272835208051 InstagramFacebookLinkedIn

Visit thedigitalslicepodcast.com for complete show notes of every podcast episode. Join Brad and Mercer as they chat about how small business owners can identify key metrics and master measurement marketing to guide their decisions.  Chris Mercer is an esteemed measurement marketing expert and the co-founder of MeasurementMarketing.io. With an unwavering dedication to helping marketers, marketing teams, and agencies understand and leverage data, Mercer has become a trusted name in the industry. Mercer's approach to measurement marketing is comprehensive and actionable. He guides his audience through the crucial steps of identifying key metrics, implementing measurement tools like Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics 4, and creating insightful dashboards. With his extensive knowledge and ability to simplify complex concepts, Mercer has become a sought-after speaker at prestigious conferences and events, including Traffic & Conversion, Social Media Marketing World, Content Jam, and more.  The Digital Slice Podcast is brought to you by Magai, up your AI game at https://friedmansocialmedia.com/magai.

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In this episode, we welcome marketing expert and official Google expert and trainer Maria Elena Duron, who shares invaluable insights into how bloggers and content creators can boost visibility and build audience trust using Google tools. https://creativesonfirepodcast.com/episode168 Key Points: Optimize with Google Tools to Build Trust Google puts extra trust in content creators who utilize its tools, like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Business Profile. Ensure consistency across these tools to increase Google's confidence in your content, improving your chances of appearing in top search results. Prioritize Content Quality and Reader Relevance Write for your audience by addressing their key questions and challenges. Use Google Search Console to see which keywords and questions are leading people to your blog, so you can create more content that truly resonates with readers. Speed and Security Matter A secure and fast-loading site (especially on mobile) is crucial; Google rewards these factors in search rankings. Consider using tools like Google Tag Manager to offload heavy plugins and improve site performance. Why It Matters: Building trust and focusing on relevant, valuable content creates a foundation for strong SEO and a loyal audience, increasing organic reach over time. Listen in and take your blogging visibility to the next level! New to blogging or looking for a refresh? Visit CreativesOnFirePodcast.com/start to get started. Remember, no one is you, and that's your superpower! Links and resources mentioned during this episode: 164 | The Achieve Conference 2024 Connect with Maria on Instagram @MarketingCoachMaria or LinkedIn, and visit her website, KLIbrand.com, for free webinars and community support. Free Guide: How to Start a Blog 2025 Content Planner is HERE! SUBSCRIBE AND REVIEW I am honored to share a new Blogging Creative on Fire each week on the podcast to bring you inspiration, behind-the-scenes secrets, and quality tips. I hope it is truly helpful for you. One of the best ways you can bless me in return is to subscribe to the show and leave a review. By subscribing, you allow each episode to be downloaded straight to your phone which helps the download numbers and ensures you never miss an episode. And when you leave a review, you help show others the value of what we provide! You can GO HERE to subscribe and review

From our Sponsors at SimmerGo to TeamSimmer and use the coupon code DEVIATE for 10% on individual course purchases.The Technical Marketing Handbook provides a comprehensive journey through technical marketing principles.A new course is out now! Chrome DevTools for Digital MarketersLatest content from Juliana & SimoArticle: Cookie Access With Shopify Checkout And SGTM by Simo AhavaArticle: Unlocking Real-Time Insights: How does Piwik PRO's Real-Time Dashboarding Feature work? by Juliana JacksonAlso mentioned in the EpisodeStape's blog: https://stape.io/blogStape website: https://stape.ioMeasure Slack: https://www.measure.chat/Connect with Denis Golubovskyi This podcast is brought to you by Juliana Jackson and Simo Ahava. Intro jingle by Jason Packer and Josh Silverbauer.

Benutzerdefinierte Vorlagen für den Google Tag Manager gibt es nun schon seit über 5 Jahren. Warum sollte man sie nutzen? Wir reden drüber!

Benutzerdefinierte Vorlagen für den Google Tag Manager gibt es nun schon seit über 5 Jahren. Warum sollte man sie nutzen? Wir reden drüber!

Title: Insider Secrets for Digital Marketing Success Part 2In this episode, join Steffen Horst and digital marketing expert Navar Hopkins in Part 2 of their insightful series on how small businesses can thrive through digital advertising. Discover the essential strategies for effective advertising, explore the latest ad channels like local service ads and DemandGen, and learn how to avoid common pitfalls. With over 15 years of experience, Navar shares her expertise on budget allocation, conversion tracking, and the importance of data-driven decision-making. Don't miss this opportunity to elevate your digital marketing game!On this episode, We'll talk about:Advertising Strategies: The importance of location targeting and time zone considerations when running ads, particularly in the U.S. market.Conversion Tracking: The significance of using Google Tag Manager for efficient tracking and how it can improve site speed and diagnostics.Primary vs. Secondary Conversions: Understanding the difference between primary conversions (which impact reporting and bidding) and secondary conversions (which do not) and how to manage expectations during periods of volatility.Micro Conversions: The suggestion to incorporate micro conversions if a business is struggling to reach the required number of conversions for effective ad performance.Community Engagement: Navar Hopkins shares ways to connect with her and learn more about PPC management through various platforms and groups.The views and opinions expressed on the “Performance Delivered” podcast are solely those of the author and guests and should not be attributed to any other individual or entity. This podcast is an independent production of Performance Delivered, and the podcast production is an original work of the author. All rights of ownership and reproduction are retained—copyright 2024.

Show Resources: Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's YouTube Channel LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Notes: Episode Summary: In this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show, host AJ Wilcox dives into LinkedIn's product roadmap, detailing new and upcoming features advertisers should get excited about. If you're looking to stay ahead of the curve and leverage the latest tools in LinkedIn Ads, this episode gives you everything you need to know. AJ shares personal insights, community feedback, and predictions for how these features could impact your campaigns. Key Topics Covered: Pro Tip for Lead Generation Ads: Keep ad copy between 100-160 characters to avoid the “See More” link, saving costs on unnecessary clicks that don't trigger lead forms. Dynamic Sponsored Content in Alpha: Salesforce is testing dynamic variables (like industry or company name) in sponsored content. Expect more personalization options coming soon. Reserved Ads & Primetime Ads (2025): Reserved Ads: Secure the first ad slot in the feed for maximum visibility. Primetime Ads: Achieve 100% audience reach within a 24-hour period—ideal for major campaigns. Live Event Ads Rolling Out: Promote live events dynamically before, during, and after the event, with advanced retargeting options based on attendee engagement. Connected TV (CTV) in Public Beta: Use LinkedIn targeting to deliver non-skippable video ads on streaming services like Roku, Hulu, and Peacock. Buyer Group Targeting (Q2 2025): Automatically target the entire buyer's committee with roles and titles relevant to a specific prospect. Conversion API Now Available: Report conversions with high accuracy without relying on cookies. Partners include HubSpot, Zapier, and Google Tag Manager. Dynamic UTM Parameters Launched: Apply dynamic UTM tracking at the campaign or account level to streamline campaign setup and reporting. Business Manager Enhancements: Block/Allow Lists can now be applied at the Business Manager level, simplifying brand safety management across multiple accounts. Coming Soon: Publisher Reporting & Share of Voice Insights: Get performance breakdowns by publisher for LAN and CTV ads, and measure how much visibility your brand captures compared to competitors. Objective-Aware Creative Rotation (Q1 2025): AI-powered ad rotation tailored to campaign objectives for better performance. Predictive Companies Beta: Expands on predictive audiences by identifying entire companies showing interest, offering more precise B2B targeting. If you want to stay ahead with these new LinkedIn Ads features, we've got AJ's expert breakdowns and actionable tips! Don't miss this opportunity to prepare for the future of LinkedIn Ads. Get insights into what's working, how to optimize campaigns with the latest tools, and how to use new features to boost your results. Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community to discuss strategies, learn from experts, and upgrade your advertising game! Show Transcript: For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 151

Send us a textEver felt overwhelmed by the myriad of tracking codes needed to optimize your website's performance? Imagine a world where you only need to place a single piece of code once and manage everything else through an intuitive web interface. Join me, Ed Dawson, as I unravel the wonders of Google Tag Manager, your new best friend for seamless website management. From my recent Shopify setup experience, I'll share how Tag Manager revolutionized my workflow, saving time and reducing the risk of errors.In this episode of "SEO is Not That Hard," you'll gain practical insights on integrating essential services like Google Analytics and Facebook tracking pixels without the hassle of constant code updates. Whether you're an SEO veteran or just starting, understanding the power of Google Tag Manager can significantly boost your site's functionality. Tune in to discover how this tool can make your SEO efforts not just efficient, but downright enjoyable!SEO Is Not That Hard is hosted by Edd Dawson and brought to you by KeywordsPeopleUse.comYou can get your free copy of my 101 Quick SEO Tips at: https://seotips.edddawson.com/101-quick-seo-tipsTo get a personal no-obligation demo of how KeywordsPeopleUse could help you boost your SEO then book an appointment with me nowSee Edd's personal site at edddawson.comAsk me a question and get on the show Click here to record a questionFind Edd on Twitter @channel5Find KeywordsPeopleUse on Twitter @kwds_ppl_use"Werq" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

From our Sponsors at SimmerGo to TeamSimmer and use the coupon code DEVIATE for 10% on individual course purchases.The Technical Marketing Handbook provides a comprehensive journey through technical marketing principles.A new course is out now! Chrome DevTools for Digital MarketersLatest content from Juliana & SimoArticle: GA4 to Piwik PRO Using Server-side Google Tag Manager by Simo AhavaArticle: Unlocking Real-Time Insights: How does Piwik PRO's Real-Time Dashboarding Feature work? by Juliana JacksonAlso mentioned in the EpisodeKick Point Playbook content consumption tracking recipe from DanaKick Point Playbook Newsletter - The HuddleDana's LinkedIn Learning CoursesGoogle Developers AcademyConnect with Dana DiTomasoDana's LinkedinKick Point Playbook website This podcast is brought to you by Juliana Jackson and Simo Ahava. Intro jingle by Jason Packer and Josh Silverbauer.

From our Sponsors at SimmerGo to TeamSimmer and use the coupon code DEVIATE for 10% on individual course purchases.The Technical Marketing Handbook provides a comprehensive journey through technical marketing principles.A new course is out now! Chrome DevTools for Digital MarketersLatest content from Juliana & SimoNew Piwik PRO Templates In Server-side Google Tag Manager by Simo AhavaArticle: Unlocking Real-Time Insights: How does Piwik PRO's Real-Time Dashboarding Feature work? by Juliana JacksonAlso mentioned in the EpisodePiwik PROServer Side Webinar with Simo and Piwik PROGTM ToolsStape.ioGoogle Algo Leak explainedGenerative Engine OptimisationGoogle Satisfaction Score PaperSMX LondonConnect with Michael KingLinkedinhttps://ipullrank.com/ This podcast is brought to you by Juliana Jackson and Simo Ahava. Intro jingle by Jason Packer and Josh Silverbauer.

Send us a Text Message.Ever wondered how to truly crack Google's SEO code? This episode of "SEO is Not That Hard" promises to arm you with the knowledge and strategies that can elevate your website's visibility. Join me, Ed Dawson, as we delve into the often-overlooked world of Google's patent applications and their hidden secrets about search ranking algorithms. Discover how to use Google's specialized search engine for patents to your advantage. We'll also demystify the role of Google quality raters and their comprehensive guidelines—a must-know for anyone serious about SEO. Plus, learn actionable tips to boost your local SEO through positive Google reviews and navigate the controversial concept of the Google sandbox with insights from my personal experiences.But that's not all; the second half of the episode is a treasure trove of essential Google tools and guidelines. Get acquainted with Google Search Console for monitoring your site's performance and Google Search Essentials for best practices. From leveraging Google Suggest for effective keyword research to mastering Google Tag Manager and Google Trends, you'll find practical advice to optimize your site. We also dissect the impacts of Google Updates on your rankings, the role of Googlebot in crawling your pages, and introduce the intriguing concept of GPT in AI. Finally, we explore the grey areas of SEO tactics that sit between black hat and white hat practices. This episode is packed with invaluable insights to help you navigate the complex world of SEO and take your website to the next level.SEO Is Not That Hard is hosted by Edd Dawson and brought to you by KeywordsPeopleUse.comYou can get your free copy of my 101 Quick SEO Tips at: https://seotips.edddawson.com/101-quick-seo-tipsTo get a personal no-obligation demo of how KeywordsPeopleUse could help you boost your SEO then book an appointment with me nowSee Edd's personal site at edddawson.comAsk me a question and get on the show Click here to record a questionFind Edd on Twitter @channel5Find KeywordsPeopleUse on Twitter @kwds_ppl_use"Werq" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Google Tag Manager is an excellent tool… when it works and is used properly. GTM allows marketers to insert code into your website without needing a developer, who are frequently busy. But to a developers fear, GTM lets marketers insert code into a live website. In this episode of the Digital Marketing Podcast, we are joined by digital marketing consultant Becky from Tattoo Ink Marketing, who will help us identify the most common mistakes to avoid with Google Tag Manager and how to fix them. -- Show notes:   Have any feedback on the show? , tell us what you love and what you think could be better. And, if you are really enjoying the show, please 

Send me a text!In this episode of the Simple and Smart SEO Show Podcast, I interview Katlyn Paskorz, the owner of KatydidPGH. We discuss her journey from an unfulfilling career in banking to becoming a WordPress designer and SEO expert for small business owners. Key points include Katlyn's transition to SEO, the importance of talking to customers for creating effective strategies, and leveraging tools like Google Business Profile and Google Ads for optimizing web presence. Katlyn also shares practical tips like using Google Tag Manager with Google Analytics and creating local-customized content for better traffic conversion. We finish by highlighting the importance of gradually implementing SEO principles into everyday business processes and making SEO accessible and straightforward for everyone.Connect with Katlyn:LinkedInInstagramFree Website GuideFree Meta Description Guide0:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome00:17 Katlyn's Pittsburgh Connection01:27 Katlyn's Journey to Starting Her Agency03:05 The Creative Side of SEO04:10 Client Strategies and Packages04:54 Importance of Customer Interaction06:57 Leveraging Google Business Profile and Ads14:45 Using Google Tools for SEO17:51 Understanding Google Analytics for Small Businesses18:18 Setting Up and Tracking Key Metrics18:50 The Importance of Quality Traffic20:27 Optimizing Blog Content for Conversions22:22 Creating Conversion-Focused Content23:42 Leveraging LinkedIn for SEO24:51 SEO Tips for Busy Entrepreneurs27:33 Conclusion and ResourcesSchool of Podcasting -Launch, Grow, Monetize Your PodcastYou're don't know where to learn to podcast. Now You do. Click the link.Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifySupport the Show.Search the Simple and Smart SEO Show podcast for something you heard! It's free!Apply to be my podcast guest!

In this video, we will delve into the basic principles of Google Tag Manager and how to track website events without any coding. Google Tag Manager is a tool that enables you to easily update and manage tracking codes on your website or mobile app. While this tool allows you to track various conversion actions such as video views, file downloads, bounce rate, and page scroll length, today we will focus on setting up event tracking for Google Analytics and AdWords. You will learn: The Basics: Container, Tag, Trigger, and Variable concepts You can also watch the video: https://youtube.com/live/OQL0E0m9Fwg Work with us to grow your apps faster & cheaper: *************** SPONSORS Are you aiming to make your messaging more unique? Elevate your communication with Phoji custom emojis. Designed from authentic content, our custom emojis convey genuine emotions and meanings. Whether it's for individual chats or mass communication, Phoji SaaS seamlessly integrates across all platforms. *************** Follow us: YouTube: ⁠AppMasters.com/YouTube⁠ Instagram: ⁠@App Masters Twitter: ⁠@App Masters TikTok: ⁠@stevepyoung⁠ Facebook: ⁠App Masters⁠ *************** How to track various user touchpoints on the web How to set up Google Tag Manager on WordPress/Shopify sites --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/app-marketing-podcast/message

In this episode, Nick and Michael are talking strategy with our Google Ads Specialist, Philip. They discuss the importance of Google Ads for urgent care clinics and the common mistakes made by businesses when running their own ads. Philip emphasizes the need for proper conversion tracking and the use of Google Tag Manager. They also talk about the importance of setting up assets correctly, such as call assets and location assets, and the benefits of using landing pages instead of sending traffic to the homepage. They also warn against relying on Google's automated recommendations and highlights the importance of patience and monitoring in Google Ads campaigns. Have a question or a story we should feature as an episode? Email us at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠hello@patientcaremarketingpros.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Intro/Outro Music by Devin Smith ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/artist/4UdQjNXnACFE2VpkEoP8v2?si=pDx5jsgtRFOtwrpMOKOkuQ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Are you ready to elevate your digital marketing game and become a sales powerhouse? This week on "Invest In Yourself: the Digital Entrepreneur Podcast," host Phil Better sits down with the astounding Anthony Franck, an online marketing virtuoso who has a wealth of knowledge to share from his staggering success in consultative selling and Facebook advertising. This episode is a goldmine for entrepreneurs eager to drive their business growth through precise customer targeting and smart ad optimization. Anthony divulges his expert strategies on using customer lists to supercharge Facebook ad campaigns and sheds light on the often-overlooked importance of robust tracking systems. Learn from Anthony's proven track record – find out how a mere $1.86 ad click astonishingly turned into a $60,000 sale! Plus, get insider advice on boosting your self-confidence and why having the right circle around you can make a significant difference in your entrepreneurial journey. Beyond tactics and techniques, Anthony offers you an exclusive chance to enhance your business through a free audit and connection to a valuable support network via secrettobillions.com and their Discord community. Phil isn't just impressed; he's inspired – and he plans to join the Discord community himself! The episode also explores Anthony's insights on the "AI advantage" in digital advertising, the transformative journey from being the "Facebook guy" in town to a sought-after expert, and the critical shift from agency work to lucrative partnerships with established businesses. Entrepreneurs, this is your chance to grasp what it takes to adapt to rapid digital changes and grasp the essence of successful business models. From understanding customer demographics and refining sales tactics to embracing the importance of recurring income and referral programs, this episode has it all. Fueled by lessons from his own career evolution and that of other affluent entrepreneurs, Anthony addresses the need to act upon your business plan without awaiting perfection, using real-world examples to illustrate the effectiveness of his approaches. Don't miss out on the opportunity to transform the way you think about online business, advertising, and customer acquisition. Turn those digital challenges into your entrepreneurial successes by tuning into our enlightening conversation with Anthony Franck. Listen now – because investing in yourself is the best investment you'll ever make! Find the full wisdom-packed episode with Anthony Franck on "Invest In Yourself: the Digital Entrepreneur Podcast" and take the first step toward revolutionizing your digital business strategy.

 Ever wondered how a chance snowstorm and an RV can lead to profound insights on shed industry marketing? That's precisely where our adventure begins as Dylan Street and I, Shannon Latham, reminisce about our snowy escapade to Knoxville, setting the stage for an episode that's as unpredictable as the weather. We unpack the story of our professional journeys—mine from the sales floor to the marketing sphere, and Dylan's from the world of heavy machinery to the heart of the shed industry—highlighting the transformative power of effective communication and the importance of truly understanding our audience.Peek behind the curtain of shed design and industry collaboration with us. We explore the innovative My Shed 3D tool, which empowers customers to customize their dream sheds with a few clicks, and discuss Shed U's role in fostering a collaborative dealer network. Our personal tales interlace with the shared narrative of community and growth, reminding us that at the core of our bustling industry lies the simple goal of serving through selling. This episode is a toast to the technology that's reshaping our trade and the communal spirit steering us toward collective success.Strap in as we chart a course through the maze of marketing strategies that can turbocharge a shed business in the digital age. From capturing lead details with pinpoint precision to differentiating our approach to sales and marketing, we tackle the Idaho client conundrum—swamped with leads but starved for sales—and the solutions that flipped the script. And don't miss our practical guide on navigating the often-treacherous waters of Facebook advertising, the usefulness of Google Tag Manager, and why data is the new currency in our tech-savvy marketplace. Join us, and you might just find the digital marketing keys to unlock your business's potential. Also, find out how the podcast can be heard throughout the plain communities by dialing the number 330-997-3055. If the number is busy, just dial again! For more information or to know more about the Shed Geek Podcast visit us at our website.Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube at the handle @shedgeekpodcast.To be a guest on the Shed Geek Podcast visit our website and fill out the "Contact Us" form.To suggest show topics or ask questions you want answered email us at info@shedgeek.com.This episodes Sponsors:Studio Sponsor: Union Grove LumberMy ShedDigital Shed BuilderShed HubCAL

Welcome back to seasoned marketing analyst, strategist, educator, and owner of BEAST Analytics, Brie Anderson, for her second interview segment. The last episode was all about setting the stage. This week, Erin and Brie will take you through the rehearsal process necessary to rock out a live GA4 performance! Learn to develop a rehearsal plan of analyzation tactics so that you can steer your content in the right direction come showtime. Now you've taken the stage! Get ready to execute an analytical symphony that springs the audience to their feet this week on the EDGE of the Web! [00:03:21] Introducing Brie Anderson [00:04:06] Brie's GA4 Session at Brighton SEO  [00:06:05] Testing GA4 Before the ‘Show'  [00:11:22] Can You Set Up GA4 Tracking to Expand Behavioral Analysis? [00:16:12] EDGE of the Web Title Sponsor: Site Strategics [00:17:14] What to Actually Do With All This Data [00:19:58] Is Multi-Touch Reporting in GA4? What About Assisted Conversion Reporting?  [00:23:18] Benchmarks of User Experience  [00:29:00] EDGE of The Web Sponsor: Wix  [00:30:11] Mapping Out The User Journey [00:38:40] Brie's Experience From Developing Educational Courses [00:41:11] Final Pro Tip From Brie Anderson Thanks to Our Sponsors! Site Strategics: http://edgeofthewebradio.com/site   Wix: http://edgeofthewebradio.com/wix Follow Our Guest Twitter: https://twitter.com/brie_e_anderson?lang=en LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brieeanderson/ Resources:  BEAST Analytics GA4SEO - BEAST Analytics  UTM Generator Google Sheet

In this episode, we bring Daniel Roe, the Lead Maintainer of Nuxt.js, an open source framework that makes web development intuitive and powerful. Today, he shares his journey into the framework and sheds some light on intriguing questions surrounding its development and usage. Today's talk ranges from the origins of Nuxt to its unique features and practical tips for developers, deliberate naming, comparison with Next.js and technical and detailed discussion regarding performance optimization and project structuring.Learn back-end development - https://boot.devListen on your favorite podcast player: https://www.backendbanter.fmDaniel's Twitter: https://x.com/danielcroeDaniel's Website: https://roe.dev/Nuxt Framework: https://nuxt.com(00:14) - How did Daniel Roe join Nuxt? (02:53) - Elk, Moose and Wilderness (06:07) - Was it named Nuxt intentionally to confuse people? (08:32) - Next.js vendor lock-in criticism and does Nuxt have any similar issues (11:31) - Boot.dev moved from a Vue 3 SPA to Nuxt (14:19) - Auto-importing by default? (20:01) - Using longer variable names because of global namespace (21:58) - Explaining the default Nuxt payload behavior (26:59) - Default prefetching (30:17) - What are the most common use cases for Nuxt apps (32:32) - Who has control in your project? (33:45) - Enabling JavaScript or not? (37:25) - Updating head tags in Nuxt (39:09) - New feature that improves script handling in Nuxt (41:01) - What do you prioritize? Interactivity or Scripts? (42:06) - Google Tag Manager (46:07) - What's Daniel's favorite Nuxt feature? (47:11) - Types are amazing! (49:37) - How did the Idea of Boot.dev came to be? (51:24) - Gamification of coding (53:46) - Theory is picked up from practice (56:05) - What's one thing you'd instantly change about Nuxt if you could (59:04) - Separation of what goes on in the client vs the server in the same file (01:04:44) - Where to find Daniel

If you missed the other episodes with thoughtbot Incubator Program partcipants and founders Mike Rosenthal and Chris Cerrito of Goodz, you can listen to the first episode (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com/s3e2incubatorgoodz) and the second episode (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com/s3e4incubatorgoodz), and the third episode (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com/s3e6incubatorgoodz) to catch up! Lindsey Christensen and Jordyn Bonds catch up with the co-founders of Goodz, Chris Cerrito and Mike Rosenthal, where they share insights from their journey during the Incubator program, including the usefulness of the application process in aligning their vision and the challenges and benefits of user interviews and the importance of not overreacting to single user feedback and finding a balance in responding to diverse opinions. They reveal the varied reactions of users to Goodz's product, highlighting the different market segments interested in it. As the Incubator program nears its end for Goodz, Chris and Mike reflect on their achievements and future plans. They've made significant progress, such as setting up an e-commerce site and conducting successful user interviews. The co-founders discuss their excitement about the potential of their product and the validation they received from users. Mike mentions the importance of focusing on B2B sales and the possibility of upcoming events like South by Southwest and Record Store Day. Transcript: LINDSEY: Thanks for being here. My name's Lindsey. I head up marketing at thoughtbot. If you haven't joined one of these before, we are checking in with two of the founders who are going through the thoughtbot Startup Incubator to learn how it's going, what's new, what challenges they're hitting, and what they're learning along the way. If you're not familiar with thoughtbot, we're a product design and development consultancy, and we hope your team and your product become a success. And one way we do that is through our startup incubator. So, today, we are joined by our co-founders, Mike Rosenthal and Chris Cerrito, Co-Founders of the startup Goodz. And we also have another special guest today, Danny Kim, from the thoughtbot side, Senior Product Manager at thoughtbot. So, I think, to start off, we'll head over to the new face, the new voice that we've got with us today. Danny, tell us a little bit about your role at thoughtbot and, specifically, the incubator. DANNY: Yeah, sure. First of all, thanks for having me on, and thanks for letting me join in on all the fun. I'm one of the product managers at thoughtbot. I typically work for the Lift-Off team. We usually work with companies that are looking to, like, go into market with their first version MVP. They might have a product that exists and that they're already kind of doing well with, and they kind of want to jump into a new segment. We'll typically work with companies like that to kind of get them kicked off the ground. But it's been really awesome being part of the incubator program. It's my first time in helping with the market validation side. Definitely also, like, learning a lot from this experience [laughs] for myself. Coming at it specifically from a PM perspective, there's, like, so much variation usually in product management across the industry, depending on, like, what stage of the product that you're working in. And so, I'm definitely feeling my fair share of impostor syndrome here. But it's been really fun to stretch my brand and, like, approach problems from, like, a completely different perspective and also using different tools. But, you know, working with Mike and Chris makes it so much easier because they really make it feel like you're part of their team, and so that definitely goes a long way. LINDSEY: It just goes to show everyone gets impostor syndrome sometimes [laughter], even senior product managers at thoughtbot [laughter]. Thanks for that intro. It's, you know, the thoughtbot team learns along the way, too, you know, especially if usually you're focused on a different stage of product development. Mike, it's been only three weeks or a very long three weeks since last we checked in with you, kind of forever in startup time. So, I think the last time, we were just getting to know you two. And you were walking us through the concept, this merging of the digital and physical world of music, and how we interact with music keepsakes or merchandise. How's my pitch? MIKE: Good. Great. You're killing it. [laughter] LINDSEY: And has anything major changed to that concept in the last three weeks? MIKE: No. I mean, I can't believe it's only been three weeks. It feels like it's been a long time since we last talked. It's been an intense three weeks, for sure. No, it's been going really well. I mean, we launched all sorts of stuff. I'm trying to think of anything that's sort of fundamentally changed in terms of the plan itself or kind of our, yeah, what we've been working on. And I think we've pretty much stayed the course to sort of get to where we are now. But it's been really intensive. I think also having sort of Thanksgiving in there, and we were kind of pushing to get something live right before the Thanksgiving break. And so, that week just felt, I mean, I was just dead by, you know, like, Thursday of Thanksgiving. I think we all were. So, it's been intense, I would say, is the short answer. And I'm happy, yeah, to get into kind of where things are at. But big picture, it's been an intense three weeks. LINDSEY: That's cool. And when we talked, you were, you know, definitely getting into research and user interviews. Have those influenced any, you know, changes along the way in the plan? MIKE: Yeah. They've been really helpful. You know, we'd never really done that before in any of the sort of past projects that we've worked on together. And so, I think just being able to, you know, read through some of those scripts and then sit through some of the interviews and just kind of hearing people's honest assessment of some things has been really interesting. I'm trying to think if it's materially affected anything. I guess, you know, at first, we were, like, we kind of had some assumptions around, okay, let's try to find, like...adult gift-givers sounds like the wrong thing, adults who give gifts as, like, a persona. The idea that, like, you know, maybe you gift your siblings gifts, and then maybe this could be a good gift idea. And I think, you know, we had a hard time kind of finding people to talk in an interesting way about that. And I think we've kind of realized it's kind of a hard persona to kind of chop up and talk about, right, Chris? I don't know [crosstalk 04:55] CHRIS: Well, it also seemed to, from my understanding of it, it seemed to, like, genuinely stress out the people who were being interviewed... MIKE: [laughs] CHRIS: Because it's kind of about a stressful topic [inaudible 05:03], you know, and, like, especially -- LINDSEY: Why? [laughs] CHRIS: Well, I think, I don't know, now I'm making assumptions. Maybe because we're close to the holiday season, and that's a topic in the back of everybody's mind. But yeah, Danny, would you disagree with that? Those folks, from what we heard, seemed like they were the most difficult to kind of extract answers from. But then, if the subject changed and we treated them as a different persona, several of those interviews proved to be quite fruitful. So, it's just really interesting. DANNY: Yeah. It really started, like, you kind of try to get some answers out of people, and there's, like, some level of people trying to please you to some extent. That's just, like, naturally, how it starts. And you just, like, keep trying to drill into the answers. And you just keep asking people like, "So, what kind of gifts do you give?" And they're just like, "Oh my goodness, like, I haven't thought about buying gifts for my sister in [laughs], like, you know, in forever. And now, like [laughs], I don't know where to go." And they get, like, pretty stressed out about it. But then we just kind of started shifting into like, "All right, cool, never mind about that. Like, do you like listening to music?" And they're like, "Yes." And then it just kind of explodes from there. And they're like, "This last concert that I went to..." and all of this stuff. And it was much more fruitful kind of leaning more towards that, actually, yeah. LINDSEY: That's fascinating. I guess that speaks to, especially at this stage and the speed and the amount of interviews you're doing, the need for being, like, really agile in those interviews, and then, like, really quickly applying what you're learning to making the next one even more valuable. MIKE: Yeah. And I think, you know, like, we launched just a little sort of website experiment or, like, an e-commerce experiment right before Thanksgiving. And I think now, you know, we're able to sort of take some of those learnings from those interviews and apply them to both sort of our ad copy itself but also just different landing pages in different language on the different kind of versions of the site and see if we can find some resonance with some of these audience groups. So, it's been interesting. LINDSEY: Are you still trying to figure out who that early adopter audience is, who that niche persona is? MIKE: I think we -- CHRIS: Yes, we are. I think we have a good idea of who it is. And I think right now we're just trying to figure out really how to reach those people. That, I think, is the biggest challenge right now for us. MIKE: Yeah. With the e-commerce experiment it was sort of a very specific niche thing that is a little bit adjacent to what I think we want to be doing longer term with Goodz. And so, it's weird. It's like, we're in a place we're like, oh, we really want to find the people that want this thing. But also, this thing isn't necessarily the thing that we think we're going to make longer term, so let's not worry too hard about finding them. You know what I mean? It's been an interesting sort of back and forth with that. CHRIS: From the interviews that we conducted, you know, we identified three key personas. Most of them have come up, but I'll just relist them. There's the sibling gift giver. There was the merch buyers; these are people who go to concerts and buy merchandise, you know, T-shirts, albums, records, things along those lines to support the artists that they love. And then the final one that was identified we gave the title of the 'Proud Playlister'. And these are people who are really into their digital media platforms, love making playlists, and love sharing those playlists with their friends. And that, I would say, the proud playlister is really the one that we have focused on in terms of the storefront that we launched, like, the product is pretty much specifically for them. But the lessons that we're learning while making this product and trying to get this into the hands of the proud playlisters will feed into kind of the merch buyers. MIKE: Yeah. And I think that, you know, it's funny, like, this week is kind of a poignant week for this, right? Because it's the week that Spotify Wrapped launched, right? So, it's like, in the course of any given year, it's probably, like, the one week of the year that lots and lots and lots of people are thinking about playlists all of a sudden, so trying a little bit to see if we can ride that wave or just kind of dovetail with that a bit, too. LINDSEY: Absolutely. And do you want to give just, like, the really quick reminder of what the product experience is like? MIKE: Oh yeah [laughs], good call. CHRIS: This is a prototype of it. It's called the Goodz Mixtape. Basically, the idea is that you purchase one of these from us. You give us a playlist URL. We program that URL onto the NFC chip that's embedded in the Good itself. And then when you scan this Good, that playlist will come up. So, it's a really great way of you make a playlist for somebody, and you want to gift it to them; this is a great way to do that. You have a special playlist, maybe between you and a friend or you and a partner. This is a good way to commemorate that playlist, turn it into a physical thing, give that digital file value and presence in the physical world. LINDSEY: Great. Okay, so you casually mentioned this launch of an e-commerce store that happened last week. MIKE: It didn't feel casual. LINDSEY: Yeah. Why [laughter]...[inaudible 09:45] real casual. Why did you launch it? How's it going? MIKE: I don't know. Why did we launch it? I mean, well, we wanted to be able to test some assumptions. I think, you know, we wanted to get the brand out there a little bit, get our website out there, kind of introduce the concept. You know, this is a very...not that we've invented this product category, but it is a pretty obscure product category, right? And so, there's a lot of sort of consumer education that I think that has to go on for people to wrap their heads around this and why they'd want this. So, I think we wanted to start that process a little bit correctly, sort of in advance of a larger launch next year, and see if we could find some early community around this. You know, if we can find those core people who just absolutely love this, and connect with it, and go wild around it, then those are the people that we're going to be able to get a ton of information from and build for that persona, right? It's like, cool, these are the people who love this. Let's build more for them and go find other people like this. So, I think, for us, it was that. And then, honestly, it was also just, you know, let's test our manufacturing and fulfillment and logistics capabilities, right? I mean, this is...as much as we are a B2B, you know, SaaS platform or that's what we envision the future of Goodz being, there is a physical component of this. And, you know, we do have that part basically done at this point. But we just, you know, what is it like to order 1,000 of these? What is it like to put these in the mail to people and, you know, actually take orders? And just some of that processing because we do envision a more wholesale future where we're doing, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of this at a time. And so, I think we just want to button up and do some dry runs before we get to those kinds of numbers. CHRIS: I think it also it's important to remember that we are talking in startup time. And while this last week seems like an eternity, it's been a week [laughs] that we've had this in place. So, we're just starting to learn these things, and we plan on continuing to do so. MIKE: Yeah. But I think we thought that getting a website up would be a good way to just start kind of testing everything more. LINDSEY: Great. Danny, what went into deciding what would be in this first version of the site and the e-commerce offering? DANNY: I mean, a lot of it was kind of mostly driven by Chris and Mike. They kind of had a vision and an idea of what they wanted to sell. Obviously, from the user interviews, we were starting to hone in a little bit more and, like, we had some assumptions going into it. I think we ultimately did kind of feel like, yeah, I think, like, the playlisters seem to be, like, the target market. But just hearing it more and hearing more excitement from them was definitely just kind of like, yeah, I think we can double down on this piece. But, ultimately, like, in terms of launching the e-commerce platform, and the storefront, and the website, like, just literally looking at the user journey and being like, how does a user get from getting onto a site, like, as soon as they land there to, like, finishing a purchase? And what points do they need? What are the key things that they need to think through and typically will run into? And a lot of it is just kind of reflecting on our own personal buyer behavior. And, also, as we were getting closer to the launch, starting to work through some of those assumptions about buyer behavior. As we got there, we obviously had some prototypes. We had some screenshots that we were already working with. Like, the design team was already starting to build out some of the site. And so, we would just kind of show it to them, show it to our users, and just be like, hey, like, how do you expect to purchase this? Like, what's the next step that you expect to take? And we'd just kind of, like, continue to iterate on that piece. And so... LINDSEY: Okay. So you were, before launching, even showing some of those mockups and starting to incorporate them in the user interviews. DANNY: Yeah, yeah. I mean, we tried to get it in there in front of them as early as possible, partially because, like, at some point in the user interviews, like, you're mostly just trying to first understand, like, who are our target customers? Who are these people? And we have an assumption of or an idea of who we think they are. But really, like, once you start talking to people, you kind of are, like, okay, like, this thing that I thought maybe it wasn't so accurate, or, like, the way that they're kind of talking about these products doesn't 100% match what I originally walked into this, you know, experiment with. And so, we, like, start to hone in on that. But after a certain point, you kind of get that idea and now you're just like, okay, you seem to be, like, the right person to talk to. And so, if I were to show you this thing, do you get it, right? Like, do you understand what's happening? Like, how to use this thing, what this product even does. And then also, like, does the checkout experience feel intuitive for you? Is it as simple as, like, I just want to buy a T-shirt? So, like, I'm just going to go by the T-shirt, pick a size, and, you know, move on with my life. Can we make it as seamless as that? LINDSEY: And so, you mentioned it's only been a week since it's been live. Have you been able to learn anything from it yet? And how are you trying to drive people to it today? MIKE: Yeah, I think we learned that sales is hard [laughs] and slow, and it takes some time. But it's good, and we're learning a lot. I mean, it's been a while since I've really dug deep in, like, the analytics and marketing kind of metrics. And so, we've got all the Google Tag Manager stuff, you know, hooked up and just, you know, connecting with just exploring, honestly, like the TikTok advertising platform, and the YouTube Pre-Rolls, and Shorts. And, like, a lot of stuff that I actually, since the last time I was heavily involved in this stuff, is just totally new and different. And so, it's been super interesting to see the funnel and sort of see where people are getting in the site, where people are dropping off. You know, we had an interesting conversation in our thoughtbot sync yesterday or the day before, where we were seeing how, you know, we're getting lots of people to the front page and, actually, a good number of people to the product page, and, actually, like, you know, not the worst number of people to the cart. But then you were seeing really high cart abandonment rates. And then, you know, when you start Googling, and you're like, oh, actually, everybody sees very high cart abandonment rates; that's just a thing. But we were seeing, like, the people were viewing their cart seven or eight times, and they were on there sort of five times as long as they were on any other page. And it's this problem that I think Danny is talking about where, you know, we need to actually get a playlist URL. This gets into the minutiae of what we're building, but basically like, we need to get them to give us a playlist URL in order to check out, right? And so, you sort of have to, like, put yourself back in the mind of someone who's scrolling on Instagram, and they see this as an ad, and they click it, and they're like, oh, that thing was cool. Sure, I will buy one of those. And then it's like, no, actually, you need to, you know, leave this, go into a different app, find a play...like, it suddenly just puts a lot of the mental strain. But it's a lot. It's a cognitive load, greater than, as you said, just buying a T-shirt and telling what size you want. So, thinking through ways to really trim that down, shore up the amount of time people are spending on a cart. All that stuff has been fascinating. And then just, like, the different demographic kind of work that we're using, all the social ads platforms to kind of identify has been really interesting. It's still early. But, actually, like, Chris and I were just noticing...we were just talking right before this call. Like, we're actually starting to get, just in the last 12 hours, a bunch more, a bunch, but more people signing up to our email newsletter, probably in the last 12 hours that we have in the whole of last week. Yeah, I don't know, just even that sort of learning, it's like, oh, do people just need time with a thing, or they come back and they think about it? CHRIS: Yeah. Could these people be working on their playlists? That's a question that I have. MIKE: [chuckles] Yeah, me too. CHRIS: It's like, you know, I'm making a playlist to drop into this product. It's really interesting. And I think it gives insight to kind of, you know, how personal this product could be, that this is something that takes effort on the part of the consumer because they're making something to give or to keep for themselves, which is, I think, really interesting but definitely hard, too. DANNY: Yeah. And I also want to also clarify, like, Chris just kind of said it, like, especially for viewers and listeners, like, that's something that we've been hearing a lot from user interviews, too, right? Like, the language that they're using is, like, this is a thing that I care about. Like it's a representation of who I am. It's a representation of, like, the relationship that I have with this person that I'm going to be giving, you know, this gift to or this playlist to, specifically, like, people who feel, like, really passionate about these things. And, I mean, like, I did, too. Like, when I was first trying to, like, date, my wife, like, I spent, like, hours, hours trying to pick the coolest songs that I thought, you know, were like, oh, like, she's going to think I'm so cool because, like, I listen to these, like, super low-key indie rock bands, and, like, you know, so many more hours than she probably spent listening to it. But that's [laughs] kind of, like, honestly, what we heard a lot in a lot of these interviews, so... LINDSEY: Yeah, same. No, totally resonates. And I also went to the site this week, and I was like, oh damn, this is cool. Like, and immediately it was like, oh, you know, I've got these three, you know, music friends that we go to shows together. I'm like, oh, this would be so cool to get them, you know, playlists of, like, music we've seen together. So, you might see me in the cart. I won't abandon it. MIKE: Please. I would love that. CHRIS: Don't think about it too long if you could -- [laughter]. LINDSEY: I won't. I won't. CHRIS: I mean, I would say I'm really excited about having the site not only as a vehicle for selling some of these things but also as a vehicle for just honing our message. It's like another tool that we have in our arsenal. During the user interviews themselves, we were talking in abstract terms, and now we have something concrete that we can bounce off people, which is, I think, going to be a huge boon to our toolset as we continue to refine and define this product. MIKE: Yeah, that's a good point. LINDSEY: Yeah. You mentioned that they're signing up for, like, email updates. Do you have something you're sending out? Or are you kind of just creating a list? Totally fine, just building a list. MIKE: [laughs] No. CHRIS: It's a picture of Mike and I giving a big thumbs up. That's, yeah. [laughter] MIKE: No. But maybe...that was the thing; I was like, oh great, they're signing up. And I was like, gosh, they're signing up. Okay [laughter], now we got to write something. But we will. LINDSEY: Tips to making your playlist [crosstalk 19:11] playing your playlist -- MIKE: Yeah [crosstalk 19:13]. CHRIS: Right. And then also...tips to making your playlists. Also, we're advancing on the collectible side of things, too. We are, hopefully, going to have two pilot programs in place, one with a major label and one with a major artist. And we're really excited about that. LINDSEY: Okay. That's cool. I assume you can't tell us very much. What can you tell us? MIKE: Yeah. We won't mention names [chuckles] in case it just goes away, as these things sometimes do. But yeah, there's a great band who's super excited about these, been around for a long time, some good name recognition, and a very loyal fan base. They want to do sort of a collection of these. I think maybe we showed the little...I can't remember if we showed the little crates that we make or not, but basically, [inaudible 19:52] LINDSEY: The last time, yeah. MIKE: So, they want to sell online a package that's, you know, five or six Goodz in a crate, which I think will be cool and a great sort of sales experiment. And then there's a couple of artists that we're going to do an experiment with that's through their label that's more about tour...basically, giving things away on tour. So, they're going to do some giveaway fan club street team-style experiments with some of these on the road. So, first, it's ideal, provided both those things happen, because we definitely want to be exploring on the road and online stuff. And so, this kind of lets us do both at once and get some real learnings as to kind of how people...because we still don't know. We haven't really put these in people's hands yet. And it's just, like, are people scanning these a lot? Are they not? Is this sort of an object that's sitting on their shelf? Is it...yeah, it's just, like, there's so much we're going to learn once we get these into people's hands. LINDSEY: Do you have the infrastructure to sort of see how many times the cards are scanned? CHRIS: Mm-hmm. Yep, we do. MIKE: Yeah. So, we can see how many times each one is scanned, where they're scanned, that sort of thing. CHRIS: Kind of our next step, and something we were just talking about today with the thoughtbot team, is building out kind of what the backend will be for this, both for users and also for labels and artists. That it will allow them to go in and post updates to the Goodz, to allow them to use these for promotion as people, you know, scan into them to give them links to other sites related to the artists that they might be interested in before they move on to the actual musical playlist. So, that's kind of the next step for us. And knowing how users use these collectibles, both the kind of consumer Good and the artist collectibles that we were just talking about, will help inform how we build that platform. LINDSEY: Very cool. And right now, the online store itself that's built in Shopify? MIKE: Yeah. The homepage is Webflow that Kevin from the thoughtbot team really spearheaded in building for us. And then, yeah, the e-commerce is Shopify. LINDSEY: Y'all have been busy. MIKE: [laughs] LINDSEY: Is there anything else maybe that I haven't asked about yet that we should touch on in terms of updates or things going on with the product? MIKE: I don't know. I don't think so. I think, like Chris said, I mean, we're just...like, now that the site has kind of stood up and we're really switched over to kind of marketing and advertising on that, definitely digging into the backend of this kind of SaaS platform that's going to probably be a big focus for the rest of the, you know, the program, to be honest. Yeah, just some other things we can do on the next front that could eventually build into the backend that I think can be interesting. No, I guess [laughs] the short answer is no, nothing, like, substantial. Those are the big [crosstalk 22:26] LINDSEY: Yeah. Well, that was my next question, too, which is kind of like, what's next, or what's the next chunk of work? So, it's obviously lots more optimization and learning on the e-commerce platform, and then this other mega area, which is, you know, what does this look like as a SaaS solution? What's the vision? But also, where do we start? Which I'm sure, Danny, is a lot of work that you specialize in as far as, like, scoping how to approach these kinds of projects. DANNY: Yeah. And it's interesting because, I mean, we were just talking about this today. Like, part of it is, like, we can, like, really dig into, like, the e-commerce site and, like, really nailing it down to get it to the place where it's like, we're driving tons more traffic and also getting as low of a, like, cart abandonment rate as possible, right? But also, considering the fact that this is in the future, like, large-scale vision. And there's, like, also, like, we're starting to, I think, now iron out a lot of those, like, milestones where we're kind of like, okay, like, we got, like, a short-term vision, which is, like, the e-commerce site. We got a mid-term vision and a potential long-term vision. How do we validate this long-term vision while also still like, keeping this short-term vision moving forward? And, like, this mid-term vision is also going to, like, help potentially, either, like, steer us towards that long-term or maybe even, like, pivot us, like, into a completely different direction. So, like, where do you put your card, right? Like, how much energy and time do we put into, like, each of these areas? And that's kind of, like, the interesting part of this is starting to talk through that, starting to kind of prioritize, like, how we can maximize on our effort, like, our development and design effort so that things just kind of line up more naturally and organically for our future visioning, so... MIKE: Yeah. A lot of different things to juggle. I saw there was a question. Somebody asked what the URL is, but I don't seem to be able to [crosstalk 24:10]. LINDSEY: The same question as me. We got to drop the link for this thing. MIKE: Yeah, getthegoodz.com. CHRIS: That's G-O-O-D-Z. LINDSEY: Get in there, folks MIKE: Yeah, get [crosstalk 24:23]. LINDSEY: And let us know how it goes. MIKE: Yeah, please [laughs]. Any bugs? Let us know. Yeah. I think that those...yeah, I mean, it's a good point, Danny, in terms of juggling kind of the near-term and longer-term stuff. You know, it's a good kind of reminder our big focus, you know, in the new year is going to be fundraising, right? We're already talking to some investors and things like that. So, it's like, okay, yes, as you said, we could tweak the cart. We could tweak the e-commerce. Or, like, can we paint the big picture of what the longer-term version of this company is going to be in a way that makes it compelling for investment to come in so that there can be a long-term version of this company? And then we can build those things. So yeah, it's definitely a balance between the two. LINDSEY: Oh, also, just casual fundraising as well. [crosstalk 25:06] MIKE: Yeah, yeah. LINDSEY: [laughs] MIKE: But it's hard. It's like, you wake up in the morning. It's like, do I want to, like, write cold emails to investors? Or do I want to, like, look at Google Analytics and, like, tweak ad copy? That's actually more fun. So, yes. LINDSEY: Yeah, life of the founder, for sure. All right. So, that's getthegoodz (Goodz with a z) .com. Check it out. We'll tune in and see what happens with the e-commerce site, what happens with the SaaS planning the next time that we check in. But Chris, Mike, Danny, thank you so much for joining today and sharing what's been going on over the last few weeks: the good, the bad, the challenge, the cart abandonment. And, you know, best of luck to you over the next few weeks, and we'll be sure to check in and see how it's going. AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions. Transcript:  LINDSEY: Thank you to our viewers and listeners. We are catching up once again with one of the startups going through the thoughtbot Incubator. My name is Lindsey Christensen. I'm joined today by Jordyn Bonds, who heads up the thoughtbot incubator, as well as our Co-Founders of Goodz, Chris Cerrito and Mike Rosenthal. Welcome, everybody. MIKE: Thanks, Lindsey. LINDSEY: Before we get started, before we put Chris and Mike back in the hot seat, at the top here, Jordyn, we have a special announcement for our viewers and listeners. JORDYN: Application window is open for session 1 of 2024, folks. You can go to thoughtbot.com/incubator and apply. And Chris and Mike can tell you how easy or hard applying was. MIKE: It was easy. It was totally easy. It's a very straightforward process. CHRIS: Yeah, it was way more straightforward than a lot of applications that we've dealt with in the past, for sure. JORDYN: Ha-ha. And if you've got a business idea that involves software but you haven't gotten anything out there yet, come talk to us. We will help you make sure that it's a good idea and that there are people who might buy it, and maybe get you even a little further than that. MIKE: We actually have a friend who's considering applying. I'll tell him applications are open. He's worried his idea is not big enough to actually be a business idea, so we'll see. CHRIS: Even the process of doing the application was really helpful for us because it helped us get aligned on exactly what we were doing, yeah. JORDYN: I love that. And I found that to be true when I was a founder applying to some of these things, in particular, applying for an SBIR grant was one of the most challenging things that we did, but it was so productive. I was so annoyed by it at the time, and then I cribbed from that thing. It actually sort of forced us to make a business plan [laughs], and then, basically, we ran it, and it was great [laughs]. CHRIS: Yeah. I think that was, for us, that was our point where we were like, "Is this idea fleshed out enough to move forward?" And we were like, "Yes, it is. Let's go. Let's do this." JORDYN: So, use the application as a forcing function, everybody. It will help you clarify your thinking. LINDSEY: Yeah. Jordyn, what would you say to Mike's friend who's questioning if their idea is big enough? How do you respond to that sentiment? JORDYN: That is a fascinating sentiment because I feel like so much more often, I am trying to help founders with the opposite problem where they think this thing is so big that they are not thinking about what step 1 is going to look like. They're just, like, in 10 years, we're going to be the next Amazon, and I'm like, "Maybe [laughter]. Let me help you figure out how to get to that giant vision." So, I don't come across the "Is this big enough to be a business?" question as often. And, I don't know, what would I say? I guess I need the details. LINDSEY: It could be a perfect fit MIKE: It could be. JORDYN: It could be a perfect fit. LINDSEY: In a way, that's what you're answering, right? MIKE: Right. LINDSEY: In some of this work. MIKE: That is true. So, yeah, you guys would certainly...just thinking through the process we've gone through the last two months, it would definitely help them flesh that out. LINDSEY: Which is a great segue. MIKE: Great segue. LINDSEY: Chris and Mike, we're actually coming up to the end of your incubator time. CHRIS: It's so sad. LINDSEY: Can you believe it? MIKE: It's gone by really fast. I mean, eight weeks is not a long time, but it has gone by very, very fast. CHRIS: It felt like a very long time in the middle of it. MIKE: [laughs] CHRIS: But now that it's over, it feels like a blink that it's coming to a close. MIKE: I don't know. It's funny. I think we had some note in our retro today that was like, maybe the very end of the year is not the best time to do an accelerator just because you have, like, the holidays kind of jumping in here in the end. So, that might have helped make it feel like a... I feel like the end of the year always feels like a rush anyway. So, I think just life gets a little bit busier this time of year, too, but yeah. CHRIS: Yeah, my gingerbread man decorating game is, like, really down this season because we've been so busy. Tragic. LINDSEY: Chris, can you remind our viewers and listeners who might not be familiar what was the idea that you and Mike have been exploring with the incubator or, like, what did you come in with? CHRIS: So, with Goodz, what we're trying to do is make little, physical collectibles objects that connect back to the digital content that a user loves. The idea being that today, we are awash in these digital files, links, so many things on our desktops, on our phones, on our devices, and it's really hard to tell which part of those are really, really important to us. So, by giving them a presence in the physical world, that denotes that's something that's really important, worth keeping, worth sharing, and showing off to your friends and family. And to start this off, mostly because Mike and I are both kind of music nerds, we're starting off with a music focus, but at some point, we're hoping to move into other realms, too. LINDSEY: And a lot of the incubator, as repeat listeners will know, is focused on really kind of evolving user interviews all the way through and narrowing in on, you know, a core audience, a core market. Mike, how has that evolution been? I think the last time we chatted was around three weeks ago. What has the latest iteration of user interviews looked like in terms of the people you're talking to and even what you're asking them? MIKE: It's been a really fascinating process. I mean, I'm trying to think of where we were exactly the last time we talked to you, but I think we'd probably just launched the e-commerce site that we had been experimenting with putting up. LINDSEY: Yeah, exactly. MIKE: And so, and we really then started cranking on user interviews kind of once that was live. And so, moving away from the conceptual and more into like, "Okay, share your screen. Here's the link. Like, tell me what you think is going on here," and really sort of getting users who had never, you know, never heard our pitch, never been involved with us to sort of try to wrap their heads around what we are and what we're doing just based on that website and trying to sort of make iterative changes based on that. You know, for me, because I had not done user interviews very much in the past, like, it's very tempting, like, you get sort of 1 note from 1 person in 1 interview, and you're like, oh, we need to change this word. That word didn't make any sense to them, or this thing needs to be blue instead of pink. I think, for me, it was like, all right, how do we kind of synthesize this data in a responsible way? And it emerged naturally, which, I mean, Jordyn and all thoughtbot folks said that it would, but you sort of started hearing the same things again and again. And we never really got to a place where, like, you heard the exact same things from everyone. But there were enough buckets, I feel like, where we're like, okay, like, this part really isn't making that much sense to people, or, like, we do really need to, you know, structure this differently to convey. So, it was a bunch of that kind of work over the last three weeks or so and sort of just getting a sense of like, are we conveying our message? It's hard. I mean, it's a new, like, we're not the only people making physical products with NFC chips in them, but it is not the most common, like, product. Like, it is kind of a new category out there. And so, really trying to understand just right off the bat, do people get it? And you get wildly different answers [laughs] as to whether they get it or they don't, which has been fascinating, too. JORDYN: Yeah. [crosstalk 7:12] LINDSEY: Chris or Jordyn, anything to add there? JORDYN: Yeah. You get the best, like, bootcamp in the don't overreact to a single user interview experience in some ways because we [laughs]...it would literally be like, interview in the morning someone says this thing. Interview in the afternoon, someone says the exact opposite thing [laughter]. And you're like, okay [laughs], like, which one of these things are we going to respond to, if either of them? CHRIS: Yeah. It's hard. As somebody with, like, a strong desire to please, it's hard to reign yourself in and want to change things immediately, but it definitely makes sense to do so in the long run. MIKE: But yeah, but, I mean, like I said, I do feel like it kind of came down to buckets. It's like, okay, you're that. I can, like, categorize you with all those other people and you with all those other people. And yeah, I hear you. I'm like, yeah, it's tempting to want to please them all. But I think with this one, we're fighting hard to be like...or we sort of have a philosophy that this product is emphatically not for everyone because, at the end of the day, you get a lot of people who are like, "Wait, you're just putting a link to a streaming playlist on a physical object? Why don't I just text someone the link?" And sometimes that breaks down by age group, like, 18-year-olds being like, "What are you talking about, old man? LINDSEY: [laughs] MIKE: Like, why the hell would I do that? It makes no sense." But it sort of skews all over the age ranges. But then there'll be other people who are 18 or 20 years old who are like, "Wow, I never had cassettes when I was growing up," or "I never got to make, you know, mixtapes or CD-Rs for people." And like, you know, so it's, yeah, it's about finding the people who are the early adopters. As Jordyn has said a lot, it's like, we need to find those early adopters and, like, make them love us, and then other people will come later. CHRIS: I mean, some of the most gratifying moments, I think, are there's been some interviews where people have been so excited that after the interview, they've gone and purchased our products, which is just, like, the coolest feeling ever. LINDSEY: Wow. MIKE: Yeah, it's pretty cool. LINDSEY: Are you open to sharing a little bit more about what those buckets or what those segments look like? CHRIS: I mean, I think there's folks who outright just get it almost immediately, and I think those people tend to be hardcore music collectors, hardcore music fans, Jordyn and Mike, please feel free to jump in if you disagree with any of this. They just get it right off the bat. Then I think there's, in my experience, there's another bucket of people who are a little more hesitant, and maybe they wouldn't buy it, but they seemed really excited about the idea of getting one as a gift, which is really interesting. They're like, "I don't know if I'd buy this, but I'd really like to have one." And then there is another segment, like, which Mike just mentioned, of folks who just don't see the value in this whatsoever, which is totally fair. MIKE: Yeah, totally. I think it's also...I see it almost as, like, a matrix. There's, like, desirability, and, like, technical understanding because people were like, "I technically understand what this is, and I do not want it in my life." Or like, "I get what this is and, oh my God, I have to have that," or like, "I don't really understand what you're talking about, but, man, I love physical stuff. Like, sure I want..." you know, it's like, it goes across those two planes, I think. JORDYN: I will say that it, I think you alluded to this before, Mike, but, like, we're going to run a whole analysis of...because we did a ton of interviews, and we haven't actually done that, like, sort of data-driven thing of like, are there trends in the demographics somewhere that we're not getting? Because the pattern has not been there. Like, someone will talk to an 18-year-old, you know, at 1:00 p.m. who is just, like, "Why on earth would I ever want this?" And then I, like, you know, will talk to a 21-year-old who is like, "I love this." And it's like, why? Like, this is the answer. The thing we're trying to get out now is, like, what is the difference between those two people? It's not a demographic thing that we can see from the outside, so what is it instead? But with consumer stuff like this, often, you don't necessarily...you don't need that in such great detail when you're starting. You just kind of, like, throw it out there and see who grabs it, and then you start to build sort of cohorts around that. And that is kind of what these interviews have shown us is that there are people who will grab it, and that was part of what we were trying to validate. Are there people who Mike and Chris do not know personally who will, like, get this and be psyched about it immediately? And that is, you know, check unequivocally true. Like Chris said, there are people that we were, you know, that we had recruited on this user interviews platform [chuckles] who then just turned around and bought the product because they were so psyched about it. One of the guys I interviewed was like, "Can I invest in your company right now?" Like, during the interview, and I was like, "Maybe?" [laughs] CHRIS: There was, like, another person who wanted to work for us immediately... JORDYN: Yes, great. CHRIS: Which was really interesting and kind of awesome. JORDYN: Yeah, they're like, "Are you hiring?" You're just like, okay. So, it's validating that there are people all over that spectrum. Like, where those trends lie, though, which is, I think, what you were asking, Lindsey, not as straightforward and in a fascinating way. So, we still have a little more, like, number crunching to do on that, and we may have an answer for you later. LINDSEY: That's exciting. Exactly. I'm curious: what are the connecting dots between the folks who are really into it, and how might that impact how you approach the business? MIKE: Yeah, it's hard. It's definitely going to be a niche to start. And so, we got to figure out kind of got to crack the code on how we find those people. LINDSEY: And, Mike, I think you had also mentioned last time that, you know, you or both of you have a network kind of in the music industry, and you've been floating the idea past some people there. Have you been having more of those conversations over the last few weeks, too? MIKE: We have, yeah. Well, so yeah, we've had a couple more just kind of straight-up pitch calls versus like, "Hey, there's this cool thing we're doing," and having those people be like, "Cool. Let's do a pilot." And so, they're ordering, you know, 500 or 1,000 units at a time, which is rad. LINDSEY: Whoa. MIKE: For the first...yeah. LINDSEY: Okay, very cool. MIKE: Yeah. The first two or three of those should happen in January or maybe early February, but yeah, those are done and in production and arriving soon. So, that's really exciting with some cool bands. We won't say the names in case it doesn't [laughs] work out, but it does look like it's going to work out. LINDSEY: And so, it's specific bands that are creating merch for their fans. MIKE: Yeah, yeah. So, we're working with one artist manager on a band that he manages, and then we're working with a record label. And they're going to try with a couple of smaller artists. And so, yeah, it's actually really good for us. One is going to be straight-up sales, most likely, and it's, like, selling these things. And the other ones will be given away as kind of promo items on tour artists, which is also a really interesting use case for us, too, that we're excited about and using them as a way to sort of get email addresses and, like, fans engaged and stuff, so... And then yeah, then I had another conversation, and they want to talk about doing some pilots. So far, like, that side of things is going great. We're sort of 3 for 4 in terms of initial calls leading to pilots right off the bat, which is kind of unheard of from [laughs] my experience. LINDSEY: Yeah, I'd say so. No, a lot of very good signals. MIKE: Really good signals. But then we were able to turn some of those into user interview conversations, actually, as well over the course of the last couple of weeks, which has been really helpful, like, talking to manager and label-type people about what they might want out of a software product that is associated with this because we're not just thinking about making physical products but sort of coupling that with an online toolset. And that part, we haven't gotten as far along as we did with the direct-to-consumer e-commerce, but it's been fascinating. LINDSEY: So, what has been happening with the online shop? As you noted the last time we talked, it was just a baby less than a week-old Shopify site getting, you know, some first hits of people going around maybe putting things in their basket. I'm sure a lot has happened over the last few weeks. What kind of work, what kind of insights have you seen around the site? CHRIS: We've been, I mean, we've been selling stuff at a slow but steady pace. It's been great because it's enough to, you know, because our product really straddles the line between physical and digital; there's a lot of physical aspects to this that we need to figure out and kind of the level of orders that we've been getting have been really...it's, like, the perfect number to think about fulfillment issues, things like what kind of package does this go in? How do we mail this out? Things along those lines, just very basic, practical questions that needed to be answered. But yeah, it's been great. We actually, I mean, we hit our goal for the amount of these that we wanted to get in people's hands before Christmas, which is pretty awesome. And we continue now with the lessons learned. I think our plan is to try and make a push for Valentine's Day because these seem like they would be a great Valentine's Day present: make a playlist; share it with your loved one; share it with a friend; share it with somebody you don't like at all. Who knows? LINDSEY: [laughs] CHRIS: But yeah, that's kind of our next sales push, we think. LINDSEY: The hate playlist. CHRIS: [inaudible 15:40] hate playlist. MIKE: Yeah, perfect. Real passive-aggressive. CHRIS: Just Blue Monday, like, by New Order, like, 14 times. LINDSEY: [laughs] Yeah, every song is just like a sub-tweet... MIKE: [laughs] LINDSEY: About something they've done and [inaudible 15:53] Have you updated the site? Like, how do you decide what gets updated on the site? [laughter] Everyone laughed. MIKE: It was a little haphazard, I would say, there for a minute. But -- CHRIS: We got the site up very, very quickly. And from my perspective, I've been dealing a lot with the physical side of things, just getting great product photos up there, which is, like, something that thoughtbot has actually been super helpful with. You know, everybody on the team is starting to submit photos of their Goodz in the real world and using their Goodz, which is great. And we continued to update the site with that but also making sure our text made sense, refining copy in response to things that people said during user interviews. The checkout process, the process of adding the URL that we point the Good to that, we did a bunch of experimentation there based on what people were saying during user interviews. So, it has been a little haphazard, but we have made a bunch of changes. LINDSEY: Jordyn, has there been any experiment, like, structured experimentation around the site or how you're getting people to the site? JORDYN: Mike actually did a little bit of ad funnel work that I don't think we've, like, even remotely scratched the surface of. So, I wish I could say that was conclusive, but I think we've found a little bit more...here are plenty of sales that are from people that nobody here knows. MIKE: True. JORDYN: So, people are finding out about this somehow [laughs]. But I think it's a little bit, like, word-of-mouth sort of chain of events is our sense so far. I wanted to say, though, about the site, we did get what Chris was saying about, like, this experiment was, in part, about fulfillment and figuring out how fulfillment would work and packaging, and not just messaging and not just closing the sale with consumers, but also, just, like, how do you fulfill these? But one of the really fun things we've managed to do in the last, since we talked last time, which I can't even believe...I feel like this wasn't even a gleam in our eyes for this project, but we managed to get out, like, stood up and out the door, and working in production in the last few weeks is a way for folks to actually assign the URL to their mixtape themselves. Previously, the plan had just been for Chris and Mike to do that, which is fine but a little bit unscalable, right? CHRIS: That was a huge dream or, like, that was high on our wish list. And we didn't think we'd get to it. And it's been pretty amazing that we have, yeah. JORDYN: Yeah, so that was one thing that is an update to the site. So, then we had to do a little bit of, like, micro iterating, on, like, the messaging around that. Like, how do you communicate to people? This is, like, a little bit of an abstract challenge, right? Like, here's this object. It's going to point to a digital thing. How do you tell the physical object which digital thing it's pointing to [laughs]? So, a lot of our recent interviewing has been to sort of get inside the mind of the consumer about how they're thinking about that and how we can best communicate that to them. So that's been a lot of the, like, recent iteration is getting that mechanism stood up and then the messaging around it. CHRIS: It's also really cool because it adds to the utility of the object itself in the sense that now our Goodz, when a user gets one, they can add a URL to their Good themselves, but they can also change that URL. So, it's much more malleable. JORDYN: Which is something that in one of our early user interviews was, like, a hot request [laughs], and we were like, "Someday, someday." And it's, you know, I should actually go back to her and be like, "Someday is today." [laughter] MIKE: Well, yeah, and just as Chris was saying, it just makes it so much easier to ship these out without having to manually load them, and you could sell them, and yeah, retail outlets, like, it just opens up a lot of opportunities for us for them. LINDSEY: And Mike mentioned that some of the, like, kind of future looking aspirations for the solution are, you know, how might you figure out the B2B, like, SaaS aspect of it? Jordyn, is that something that's been explored at all at this point, or is it early? JORDYN: That experiment I just described is actually sort of the link between the two projects. It sort of proves the concept and proves the value in some ways, and it has given us a little bit more visibility into sort of how we're going to execute some of this technical stuff. Like, how easy, how difficult is it going to be? These little experiments all build your confidence around your ability to do those things and what it's going to look like. And so, this experiment absolutely feeds into that question. But I would say it was really this week where we got to have a really fun brainstorming sort of blue sky conversation about that that I don't think would have been nearly as both creative and blue sky or rooted in reality as it was if we hadn't done these experiments and hadn't talked to so many...we had so much work...we could participate in a conversation like that so much more confidently and creatively because all of us had a lot more shared context. So, we really got to dream big, like, what is a SaaS platform built around these physical objects? And I don't want to, you know, I'm not going to give it away at this moment because we had a lot of, like, really cool ideas. It's one part talking to the B2B customer, which, you know, you mentioned earlier, getting what their pain points are, and what they're looking for, what they need, but then also dreaming big about now we understand the technology a little bit more and how it feels to use it. What does that unlock in our brains? The analogy I used in that conversation and that I use all the time is like, the users of Twitter invented hashtags, right? Twitter did not invent hashtags. And so, hey, everybody out there, newsflash: users invented hashtags, not Twitter or something else, if you didn't realize that Twitter was where those things kind of emerged. But there was just a user behavior that was happening in the wild, and Twitter was just very good at making that easier for them, looking at that and being like, "Oh, hey, is this a thing you all want to do? Here, we'll make that even more useful for you." And it was part of Twitter's early success that they were able to do that. And so, that was the kind of thinking we were trying to employ here is, like, now that we have these objects and we understand a little bit more how it feels to use them, you get these second order effects. What does that then make us think of? What is then possible to us that we wouldn't have been able to dream of previously because we didn't quite get it? So, that was really happening this week. LINDSEY: So, as the incubator time wraps up, what are the kind of final activities or deliverables, one, that Goodz wants and you know that they're going to get? What are the parting gifts as we send you out into the next phase? MIKE: Yeah, well, loads of stuff. I mean, we're getting all that code that [SP] Guillermo and the guys worked on to let people set their own playlist settings. And we've got that up in a GitHub repository now. And we've got a bunch of great design work that's all being handed over, like Chris was saying, product shots that a bunch of the team members were taking, synthesizing all the user interviews. We're actually sort of making some kind of final reports on those, so it's kind of more usable, actionable data for us. The whole website, you know, that didn't exist before. And that will sort of continue to grow as the entire website for Goodz moving forward. I don't know. That's a lot. What else was there, Chris? CHRIS: As a result of all that, I mean, one of the things I'm most excited about is now we have a small user base who actually has the physical products that, hopefully, we can get them to answer questions. That's huge for what's coming next. Starting the path towards the SaaS platform, too, it's really helped narrow our scope and think about, you know, how to make that successful or if it will be successful. LINDSEY: Yeah, that sounded like a big discussion this week that I know has been on your minds from the beginning. Wait, the last time, also, you said you were starting to get emails, too. Have you emailed anyone yet, or are you still holding on to them? MIKE: Oh. No, I still haven't sent a newsletter out [laughs], actually, but we have Mailchimp set up. Yeah, no, we've got a good kind of core of our, yeah, early folks on there. We'll start getting a newsletter out with some sort of regularity. We're building up the socials very slowly just focusing on Instagram mostly right now and trying to get back into that game. It's been a long time since I've had to do kind of social marketing stuff. And so, it's a lot of work, as it turns out, but we'll get all that cooking. I think this was just such a sprint, working with the thoughtbot folks and trying to get all this stuff done. Before the end of the year, now we can sort of take a breath and start engaging folks in the new year. LINDSEY: Yeah. Well, so, do you know what you want to do next or what the next phase looks like? Are you going to do fundraising? MIKE: We're certainly going to continue to have some fundraising conversations. We've had some conversations emerge over the last, you know, since we've been in thoughtbot, again, not the greatest time of year to try to be raising a round. But we're also not, like, desperately, urgently needing to do that right this second. I think, you know, part of it is the fundraising landscape, you know, doesn't look amazing. And we're still sort of building out a lot of traction, and sort of every week, there's some new, exciting thing, or we've got some new, big artists who wants to do something. So, I think, in some ways, to the extent that we can bootstrap for a little while, I think we will, yeah. So, we will focus on...I'd like to get back to focusing on, like, B2B sales. I'd like to hit the ground in January and just start talking to a bunch of music industry folks. And thinking ahead a little bit, sort of Q1 and Q2, like, what are the big tentpole events? You know, you got South by Southwest coming up in March. You got Record Store Day in April, or whenever it is. But, you know, there's, like, a bunch of those sorts of things that it's like, oh, let's not let those things suddenly be tomorrow. Like, right now, they're all still two or three/four months out. Like, let's make sure we're queued up for those things and see what happens. And Jordyn has been giving really good advice on the fundraising side where it's just like, just keep getting cool stuff like that and just do almost like little drip campaigns with funders who aren't maybe giving you the time of day or think it's too early, and just kind of keep going back to them. Like, the best excuse to go back to funders is like, "Hey, we just closed this new thing. We just launched this new thing. We just got this thing working. Hey, we're launching with this major band," Like, enough of those happen, and I think the fundraising will happen more organically. It's a strategy. CHRIS: I think we're really lucky in the fact that, you know, now, at this point, we're not talking about vapourware, you know, like, these are actual things that actually exist that, like, anybody could go onto our site right now and buy, which is awesome. And because of that, the product's going to continue to evolve, and, hopefully, our sales record will continue to evolve, too. LINDSEY: Amazing. Well, that feels like a good place to wrap up, maybe. Are you going to hang around in our incubator Slack, the thoughtbot incubator Slack for all our past founders? MIKE: Yes. Emphatically, yes. LINDSEY: Okay. We're holding you to it then [laughs]. CHRIS: I'm excited about that. We met with the other founders yesterday for the first time, and it was a really great and interesting conversation. It was cool seeing how diverse all these projects are and how folks are working on things that we had no idea about and how we're working on stuff that they have no idea about, and it was really great. It felt like a good cross-pollination. MIKE: Agreed. LINDSEY: That's awesome to hear. Jordyn, any final thoughts? JORDYN: [inaudible 26:58] out there listening and watching and want to join this community of founders [laughs], don't you want to have office hours with Chris and Mike? LINDSEY: All right, thoughtbot.com/incubator. You can apply for session 1 of the 2024 incubator program. And yeah, you two, if you have more recommendations, referrals, definitely send them our way. Chris, Mike, Jordyn, thank you so much once again for joining and catching us up on all the exciting developments for Goodz. MIKE: Thank you. LINDSEY: A lot of really cool milestones. JORDYN: I got to say, so much good stuff. And like, you know, just wrapping it all up almost diminishes the impact of any single one of those things that we just talked about, but it's, like, pretty amazing. People out there, apply to the incubator but also go buy yourself a Goodz mixtape. It's cool with playlists on it. MIKE: It's a good point. JORDYN: Give it to your BFF. Come on. LINDSEY: Getthegoodz.com. MIKE: Getthegoodz.com. Awesome. LINDSEY: All right. Thanks, Chris and Mike. AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions. Special Guests: Chris Cerrito, Jordyn Bonds, and Mike Rosenthal.

If you missed the first and second episodes with thoughtbot Incubator Program partcipants and founders Mike Rosenthal and Chris Cerrito of Goodz, you can listen to the first episode (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com/s3e2incubatorgoodz) and the second episode (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com/s3e4incubatorgoodz) to catch up! Lindsey Christensen, head of marketing at thoughtbot is joined by Mike Rosenthal and Chris Cerrito, co-founders of the startup Goodz, and Danny Kim, Senior Product Manager at thoughtbot. Mike and Chris discuss the progress of Goodz, focusing on the recent intense weeks they've had. Goodz, a startup merging the digital and physical worlds of music, has stayed on course with its initial concept. Mike details their approach to Thanksgiving and the launch of their e-commerce experiment. He shares insights from recent user interviews, which have influenced their approach and understanding of their target audience. When the discussion turns to the challenges of launching and maintaining their e-commerce platform, Mike and Chris talk about learning from analytics, marketing strategies, and the importance of understanding consumer behavior. They discuss the challenges in balancing short-term and long-term goals, and the upcoming fundraising efforts. Transcript: LINDSEY: Thanks for being here. My name's Lindsey. I head up marketing at thoughtbot. If you haven't joined one of these before, we are checking in with two of the founders who are going through the thoughtbot Startup Incubator to learn how it's going, what's new, what challenges they're hitting, and what they're learning along the way. If you're not familiar with thoughtbot, we're a product design and development consultancy, and we hope your team and your product become a success. And one way we do that is through our startup incubator. So, today, we are joined by our co-founders, Mike Rosenthal and Chris Cerrito, Co-Founders of the startup Goodz. And we also have another special guest today, Danny Kim, from the thoughtbot side, Senior Product Manager at thoughtbot. So, I think, to start off, we'll head over to the new face, the new voice that we've got with us today. Danny, tell us a little bit about your role at thoughtbot and, specifically, the incubator. DANNY: Yeah, sure. First of all, thanks for having me on, and thanks for letting me join in on all the fun. I'm one of the product managers at thoughtbot. I typically work for the Lift-Off team. We usually work with companies that are looking to, like, go into market with their first version MVP. They might have a product that exists and that they're already kind of doing well with, and they kind of want to jump into a new segment. We'll typically work with companies like that to kind of get them kicked off the ground. But it's been really awesome being part of the incubator program. It's my first time in helping with the market validation side. Definitely also, like, learning a lot from this experience [laughs] for myself. Coming at it specifically from a PM perspective, there's, like, so much variation usually in product management across the industry, depending on, like, what stage of the product that you're working in. And so, I'm definitely feeling my fair share of impostor syndrome here. But it's been really fun to stretch my brand and, like, approach problems from, like, a completely different perspective and also using different tools. But, you know, working with Mike and Chris makes it so much easier because they really make it feel like you're part of their team, and so that definitely goes a long way. LINDSEY: It just goes to show everyone gets impostor syndrome sometimes [laughter], even senior product managers at thoughtbot [laughter]. Thanks for that intro. It's, you know, the thoughtbot team learns along the way, too, you know, especially if usually you're focused on a different stage of product development. Mike, it's been only three weeks or a very long three weeks since last we checked in with you, kind of forever in startup time. So, I think the last time, we were just getting to know you two. And you were walking us through the concept, this merging of the digital and physical world of music, and how we interact with music keepsakes or merchandise. How's my pitch? MIKE: Good. Great. You're killing it. [laughter] LINDSEY: And has anything major changed to that concept in the last three weeks? MIKE: No. I mean, I can't believe it's only been three weeks. It feels like it's been a long time since we last talked. It's been an intense three weeks, for sure. No, it's been going really well. I mean, we launched all sorts of stuff. I'm trying to think of anything that's sort of fundamentally changed in terms of the plan itself or kind of our, yeah, what we've been working on. And I think we've pretty much stayed the course to sort of get to where we are now. But it's been really intensive. I think also having sort of Thanksgiving in there, and we were kind of pushing to get something live right before the Thanksgiving break. And so, that week just felt, I mean, I was just dead by, you know, like, Thursday of Thanksgiving. I think we all were. So, it's been intense, I would say, is the short answer. And I'm happy, yeah, to get into kind of where things are at. But big picture, it's been an intense three weeks. LINDSEY: That's cool. And when we talked, you were, you know, definitely getting into research and user interviews. Have those influenced any, you know, changes along the way in the plan? MIKE: Yeah. They've been really helpful. You know, we'd never really done that before in any of the sort of past projects that we've worked on together. And so, I think just being able to, you know, read through some of those scripts and then sit through some of the interviews and just kind of hearing people's honest assessment of some things has been really interesting. I'm trying to think if it's materially affected anything. I guess, you know, at first, we were, like, we kind of had some assumptions around, okay, let's try to find, like...adult gift-givers sounds like the wrong thing, adults who give gifts as, like, a persona. The idea that, like, you know, maybe you gift your siblings gifts, and then maybe this could be a good gift idea. And I think, you know, we had a hard time kind of finding people to talk in an interesting way about that. And I think we've kind of realized it's kind of a hard persona to kind of chop up and talk about, right, Chris? I don't know [crosstalk 04:55] CHRIS: Well, it also seemed to, from my understanding of it, it seemed to, like, genuinely stress out the people who were being interviewed... MIKE: [laughs] CHRIS: Because it's kind of about a stressful topic [inaudible 05:03], you know, and, like, especially -- LINDSEY: Why? [laughs] CHRIS: Well, I think, I don't know, now I'm making assumptions. Maybe because we're close to the holiday season, and that's a topic in the back of everybody's mind. But yeah, Danny, would you disagree with that? Those folks, from what we heard, seemed like they were the most difficult to kind of extract answers from. But then, if the subject changed and we treated them as a different persona, several of those interviews proved to be quite fruitful. So, it's just really interesting. DANNY: Yeah. It really started, like, you kind of try to get some answers out of people, and there's, like, some level of people trying to please you to some extent. That's just, like, naturally, how it starts. And you just, like, keep trying to drill into the answers. And you just keep asking people like, "So, what kind of gifts do you give?" And they're just like, "Oh my goodness, like, I haven't thought about buying gifts for my sister in [laughs], like, you know, in forever. And now, like [laughs], I don't know where to go." And they get, like, pretty stressed out about it. But then we just kind of started shifting into like, "All right, cool, never mind about that. Like, do you like listening to music?" And they're like, "Yes." And then it just kind of explodes from there. And they're like, "This last concert that I went to..." and all of this stuff. And it was much more fruitful kind of leaning more towards that, actually, yeah. LINDSEY: That's fascinating. I guess that speaks to, especially at this stage and the speed and the amount of interviews you're doing, the need for being, like, really agile in those interviews, and then, like, really quickly applying what you're learning to making the next one even more valuable. MIKE: Yeah. And I think, you know, like, we launched just a little sort of website experiment or, like, an e-commerce experiment right before Thanksgiving. And I think now, you know, we're able to sort of take some of those learnings from those interviews and apply them to both sort of our ad copy itself but also just different landing pages in different language on the different kind of versions of the site and see if we can find some resonance with some of these audience groups. So, it's been interesting. LINDSEY: Are you still trying to figure out who that early adopter audience is, who that niche persona is? MIKE: I think we -- CHRIS: Yes, we are. I think we have a good idea of who it is. And I think right now we're just trying to figure out really how to reach those people. That, I think, is the biggest challenge right now for us. MIKE: Yeah. With the e-commerce experiment it was sort of a very specific niche thing that is a little bit adjacent to what I think we want to be doing longer term with Goodz. And so, it's weird. It's like, we're in a place we're like, oh, we really want to find the people that want this thing. But also, this thing isn't necessarily the thing that we think we're going to make longer term, so let's not worry too hard about finding them. You know what I mean? It's been an interesting sort of back and forth with that. CHRIS: From the interviews that we conducted, you know, we identified three key personas. Most of them have come up, but I'll just relist them. There's the sibling gift giver. There was the merch buyers; these are people who go to concerts and buy merchandise, you know, T-shirts, albums, records, things along those lines to support the artists that they love. And then the final one that was identified we gave the title of the 'Proud Playlister'. And these are people who are really into their digital media platforms, love making playlists, and love sharing those playlists with their friends. And that, I would say, the proud playlister is really the one that we have focused on in terms of the storefront that we launched, like, the product is pretty much specifically for them. But the lessons that we're learning while making this product and trying to get this into the hands of the proud playlisters will feed into kind of the merch buyers. MIKE: Yeah. And I think that, you know, it's funny, like, this week is kind of a poignant week for this, right? Because it's the week that Spotify Wrapped launched, right? So, it's like, in the course of any given year, it's probably, like, the one week of the year that lots and lots and lots of people are thinking about playlists all of a sudden, so trying a little bit to see if we can ride that wave or just kind of dovetail with that a bit, too. LINDSEY: Absolutely. And do you want to give just, like, the really quick reminder of what the product experience is like? MIKE: Oh yeah [laughs], good call. CHRIS: This is a prototype of it. It's called the Goodz Mixtape. Basically, the idea is that you purchase one of these from us. You give us a playlist URL. We program that URL onto the NFC chip that's embedded in the Good itself. And then when you scan this Good, that playlist will come up. So, it's a really great way of you make a playlist for somebody, and you want to gift it to them; this is a great way to do that. You have a special playlist, maybe between you and a friend or you and a partner. This is a good way to commemorate that playlist, turn it into a physical thing, give that digital file value and presence in the physical world. LINDSEY: Great. Okay, so you casually mentioned this launch of an e-commerce store that happened last week. MIKE: It didn't feel casual. LINDSEY: Yeah. Why [laughter]...[inaudible 09:45] real casual. Why did you launch it? How's it going? MIKE: I don't know. Why did we launch it? I mean, well, we wanted to be able to test some assumptions. I think, you know, we wanted to get the brand out there a little bit, get our website out there, kind of introduce the concept. You know, this is a very...not that we've invented this product category, but it is a pretty obscure product category, right? And so, there's a lot of sort of consumer education that I think that has to go on for people to wrap their heads around this and why they'd want this. So, I think we wanted to start that process a little bit correctly, sort of in advance of a larger launch next year, and see if we could find some early community around this. You know, if we can find those core people who just absolutely love this, and connect with it, and go wild around it, then those are the people that we're going to be able to get a ton of information from and build for that persona, right? It's like, cool, these are the people who love this. Let's build more for them and go find other people like this. So, I think, for us, it was that. And then, honestly, it was also just, you know, let's test our manufacturing and fulfillment and logistics capabilities, right? I mean, this is...as much as we are a B2B, you know, SaaS platform or that's what we envision the future of Goodz being, there is a physical component of this. And, you know, we do have that part basically done at this point. But we just, you know, what is it like to order 1,000 of these? What is it like to put these in the mail to people and, you know, actually take orders? And just some of that processing because we do envision a more wholesale future where we're doing, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of this at a time. And so, I think we just want to button up and do some dry runs before we get to those kinds of numbers. CHRIS: I think it also it's important to remember that we are talking in startup time. And while this last week seems like an eternity, it's been a week [laughs] that we've had this in place. So, we're just starting to learn these things, and we plan on continuing to do so. MIKE: Yeah. But I think we thought that getting a website up would be a good way to just start kind of testing everything more. LINDSEY: Great. Danny, what went into deciding what would be in this first version of the site and the e-commerce offering? DANNY: I mean, a lot of it was kind of mostly driven by Chris and Mike. They kind of had a vision and an idea of what they wanted to sell. Obviously, from the user interviews, we were starting to hone in a little bit more and, like, we had some assumptions going into it. I think we ultimately did kind of feel like, yeah, I think, like, the playlisters seem to be, like, the target market. But just hearing it more and hearing more excitement from them was definitely just kind of like, yeah, I think we can double down on this piece. But, ultimately, like, in terms of launching the e-commerce platform, and the storefront, and the website, like, just literally looking at the user journey and being like, how does a user get from getting onto a site, like, as soon as they land there to, like, finishing a purchase? And what points do they need? What are the key things that they need to think through and typically will run into? And a lot of it is just kind of reflecting on our own personal buyer behavior. And, also, as we were getting closer to the launch, starting to work through some of those assumptions about buyer behavior. As we got there, we obviously had some prototypes. We had some screenshots that we were already working with. Like, the design team was already starting to build out some of the site. And so, we would just kind of show it to them, show it to our users, and just be like, hey, like, how do you expect to purchase this? Like, what's the next step that you expect to take? And we'd just kind of, like, continue to iterate on that piece. And so... LINDSEY: Okay. So you were, before launching, even showing some of those mockups and starting to incorporate them in the user interviews. DANNY: Yeah, yeah. I mean, we tried to get it in there in front of them as early as possible, partially because, like, at some point in the user interviews, like, you're mostly just trying to first understand, like, who are our target customers? Who are these people? And we have an assumption of or an idea of who we think they are. But really, like, once you start talking to people, you kind of are, like, okay, like, this thing that I thought maybe it wasn't so accurate, or, like, the way that they're kind of talking about these products doesn't 100% match what I originally walked into this, you know, experiment with. And so, we, like, start to hone in on that. But after a certain point, you kind of get that idea and now you're just like, okay, you seem to be, like, the right person to talk to. And so, if I were to show you this thing, do you get it, right? Like, do you understand what's happening? Like, how to use this thing, what this product even does. And then also, like, does the checkout experience feel intuitive for you? Is it as simple as, like, I just want to buy a T-shirt? So, like, I'm just going to go by the T-shirt, pick a size, and, you know, move on with my life. Can we make it as seamless as that? LINDSEY: And so, you mentioned it's only been a week since it's been live. Have you been able to learn anything from it yet? And how are you trying to drive people to it today? MIKE: Yeah, I think we learned that sales is hard [laughs] and slow, and it takes some time. But it's good, and we're learning a lot. I mean, it's been a while since I've really dug deep in, like, the analytics and marketing kind of metrics. And so, we've got all the Google Tag Manager stuff, you know, hooked up and just, you know, connecting with just exploring, honestly, like the TikTok advertising platform, and the YouTube Pre-Rolls, and Shorts. And, like, a lot of stuff that I actually, since the last time I was heavily involved in this stuff, is just totally new and different. And so, it's been super interesting to see the funnel and sort of see where people are getting in the site, where people are dropping off. You know, we had an interesting conversation in our thoughtbot sync yesterday or the day before, where we were seeing how, you know, we're getting lots of people to the front page and, actually, a good number of people to the product page, and, actually, like, you know, not the worst number of people to the cart. But then you were seeing really high cart abandonment rates. And then, you know, when you start Googling, and you're like, oh, actually, everybody sees very high cart abandonment rates; that's just a thing. But we were seeing, like, the people were viewing their cart seven or eight times, and they were on there sort of five times as long as they were on any other page. And it's this problem that I think Danny is talking about where, you know, we need to actually get a playlist URL. This gets into the minutiae of what we're building, but basically like, we need to get them to give us a playlist URL in order to check out, right? And so, you sort of have to, like, put yourself back in the mind of someone who's scrolling on Instagram, and they see this as an ad, and they click it, and they're like, oh, that thing was cool. Sure, I will buy one of those. And then it's like, no, actually, you need to, you know, leave this, go into a different app, find a play...like, it suddenly just puts a lot of the mental strain. But it's a lot. It's a cognitive load, greater than, as you said, just buying a T-shirt and telling what size you want. So, thinking through ways to really trim that down, shore up the amount of time people are spending on a cart. All that stuff has been fascinating. And then just, like, the different demographic kind of work that we're using, all the social ads platforms to kind of identify has been really interesting. It's still early. But, actually, like, Chris and I were just noticing...we were just talking right before this call. Like, we're actually starting to get, just in the last 12 hours, a bunch more, a bunch, but more people signing up to our email newsletter, probably in the last 12 hours that we have in the whole of last week. Yeah, I don't know, just even that sort of learning, it's like, oh, do people just need time with a thing, or they come back and they think about it? CHRIS: Yeah. Could these people be working on their playlists? That's a question that I have. MIKE: [chuckles] Yeah, me too. CHRIS: It's like, you know, I'm making a playlist to drop into this product. It's really interesting. And I think it gives insight to kind of, you know, how personal this product could be, that this is something that takes effort on the part of the consumer because they're making something to give or to keep for themselves, which is, I think, really interesting but definitely hard, too. DANNY: Yeah. And I also want to also clarify, like, Chris just kind of said it, like, especially for viewers and listeners, like, that's something that we've been hearing a lot from user interviews, too, right? Like, the language that they're using is, like, this is a thing that I care about. Like it's a representation of who I am. It's a representation of, like, the relationship that I have with this person that I'm going to be giving, you know, this gift to or this playlist to, specifically, like, people who feel, like, really passionate about these things. And, I mean, like, I did, too. Like, when I was first trying to, like, date, my wife, like, I spent, like, hours, hours trying to pick the coolest songs that I thought, you know, were like, oh, like, she's going to think I'm so cool because, like, I listen to these, like, super low-key indie rock bands, and, like, you know, so many more hours than she probably spent listening to it. But that's [laughs] kind of, like, honestly, what we heard a lot in a lot of these interviews, so... LINDSEY: Yeah, same. No, totally resonates. And I also went to the site this week, and I was like, oh damn, this is cool. Like, and immediately it was like, oh, you know, I've got these three, you know, music friends that we go to shows together. I'm like, oh, this would be so cool to get them, you know, playlists of, like, music we've seen together. So, you might see me in the cart. I won't abandon it. MIKE: Please. I would love that. CHRIS: Don't think about it too long if you could -- [laughter]. LINDSEY: I won't. I won't. CHRIS: I mean, I would say I'm really excited about having the site not only as a vehicle for selling some of these things but also as a vehicle for just honing our message. It's like another tool that we have in our arsenal. During the user interviews themselves, we were talking in abstract terms, and now we have something concrete that we can bounce off people, which is, I think, going to be a huge boon to our toolset as we continue to refine and define this product. MIKE: Yeah, that's a good point. LINDSEY: Yeah. You mentioned that they're signing up for, like, email updates. Do you have something you're sending out? Or are you kind of just creating a list? Totally fine, just building a list. MIKE: [laughs] No. CHRIS: It's a picture of Mike and I giving a big thumbs up. That's, yeah. [laughter] MIKE: No. But maybe...that was the thing; I was like, oh great, they're signing up. And I was like, gosh, they're signing up. Okay [laughter], now we got to write something. But we will. LINDSEY: Tips to making your playlist [crosstalk 19:11] playing your playlist -- MIKE: Yeah [crosstalk 19:13]. CHRIS: Right. And then also...tips to making your playlists. Also, we're advancing on the collectible side of things, too. We are, hopefully, going to have two pilot programs in place, one with a major label and one with a major artist. And we're really excited about that. LINDSEY: Okay. That's cool. I assume you can't tell us very much. What can you tell us? MIKE: Yeah. We won't mention names [chuckles] in case it just goes away, as these things sometimes do. But yeah, there's a great band who's super excited about these, been around for a long time, some good name recognition, and a very loyal fan base. They want to do sort of a collection of these. I think maybe we showed the little...I can't remember if we showed the little crates that we make or not, but basically, [inaudible 19:52] LINDSEY: The last time, yeah. MIKE: So, they want to sell online a package that's, you know, five or six Goodz in a crate, which I think will be cool and a great sort of sales experiment. And then there's a couple of artists that we're going to do an experiment with that's through their label that's more about tour...basically, giving things away on tour. So, they're going to do some giveaway fan club street team-style experiments with some of these on the road. So, first, it's ideal, provided both those things happen, because we definitely want to be exploring on the road and online stuff. And so, this kind of lets us do both at once and get some real learnings as to kind of how people...because we still don't know. We haven't really put these in people's hands yet. And it's just, like, are people scanning these a lot? Are they not? Is this sort of an object that's sitting on their shelf? Is it...yeah, it's just, like, there's so much we're going to learn once we get these into people's hands. LINDSEY: Do you have the infrastructure to sort of see how many times the cards are scanned? CHRIS: Mm-hmm. Yep, we do. MIKE: Yeah. So, we can see how many times each one is scanned, where they're scanned, that sort of thing. CHRIS: Kind of our next step, and something we were just talking about today with the thoughtbot team, is building out kind of what the backend will be for this, both for users and also for labels and artists. That it will allow them to go in and post updates to the Goodz, to allow them to use these for promotion as people, you know, scan into them to give them links to other sites related to the artists that they might be interested in before they move on to the actual musical playlist. So, that's kind of the next step for us. And knowing how users use these collectibles, both the kind of consumer Good and the artist collectibles that we were just talking about, will help inform how we build that platform. LINDSEY: Very cool. And right now, the online store itself that's built in Shopify? MIKE: Yeah. The homepage is Webflow that Kevin from the thoughtbot team really spearheaded in building for us. And then, yeah, the e-commerce is Shopify. LINDSEY: Y'all have been busy. MIKE: [laughs] LINDSEY: Is there anything else maybe that I haven't asked about yet that we should touch on in terms of updates or things going on with the product? MIKE: I don't know. I don't think so. I think, like Chris said, I mean, we're just...like, now that the site has kind of stood up and we're really switched over to kind of marketing and advertising on that, definitely digging into the backend of this kind of SaaS platform that's going to probably be a big focus for the rest of the, you know, the program, to be honest. Yeah, just some other things we can do on the next front that could eventually build into the backend that I think can be interesting. No, I guess [laughs] the short answer is no, nothing, like, substantial. Those are the big [crosstalk 22:26] LINDSEY: Yeah. Well, that was my next question, too, which is kind of like, what's next, or what's the next chunk of work? So, it's obviously lots more optimization and learning on the e-commerce platform, and then this other mega area, which is, you know, what does this look like as a SaaS solution? What's the vision? But also, where do we start? Which I'm sure, Danny, is a lot of work that you specialize in as far as, like, scoping how to approach these kinds of projects. DANNY: Yeah. And it's interesting because, I mean, we were just talking about this today. Like, part of it is, like, we can, like, really dig into, like, the e-commerce site and, like, really nailing it down to get it to the place where it's like, we're driving tons more traffic and also getting as low of a, like, cart abandonment rate as possible, right? But also, considering the fact that this is in the future, like, large-scale vision. And there's, like, also, like, we're starting to, I think, now iron out a lot of those, like, milestones where we're kind of like, okay, like, we got, like, a short-term vision, which is, like, the e-commerce site. We got a mid-term vision and a potential long-term vision. How do we validate this long-term vision while also still like, keeping this short-term vision moving forward? And, like, this mid-term vision is also going to, like, help potentially, either, like, steer us towards that long-term or maybe even, like, pivot us, like, into a completely different direction. So, like, where do you put your card, right? Like, how much energy and time do we put into, like, each of these areas? And that's kind of, like, the interesting part of this is starting to talk through that, starting to kind of prioritize, like, how we can maximize on our effort, like, our development and design effort so that things just kind of line up more naturally and organically for our future visioning, so... MIKE: Yeah. A lot of different things to juggle. I saw there was a question. Somebody asked what the URL is, but I don't seem to be able to [crosstalk 24:10]. LINDSEY: The same question as me. We got to drop the link for this thing. MIKE: Yeah, getthegoodz.com. CHRIS: That's G-O-O-D-Z. LINDSEY: Get in there, folks MIKE: Yeah, get [crosstalk 24:23]. LINDSEY: And let us know how it goes. MIKE: Yeah, please [laughs]. Any bugs? Let us know. Yeah. I think that those...yeah, I mean, it's a good point, Danny, in terms of juggling kind of the near-term and longer-term stuff. You know, it's a good kind of reminder our big focus, you know, in the new year is going to be fundraising, right? We're already talking to some investors and things like that. So, it's like, okay, yes, as you said, we could tweak the cart. We could tweak the e-commerce. Or, like, can we paint the big picture of what the longer-term version of this company is going to be in a way that makes it compelling for investment to come in so that there can be a long-term version of this company? And then we can build those things. So yeah, it's definitely a balance between the two. LINDSEY: Oh, also, just casual fundraising as well. [crosstalk 25:06] MIKE: Yeah, yeah. LINDSEY: [laughs] MIKE: But it's hard. It's like, you wake up in the morning. It's like, do I want to, like, write cold emails to investors? Or do I want to, like, look at Google Analytics and, like, tweak ad copy? That's actually more fun. So, yes. LINDSEY: Yeah, life of the founder, for sure. All right. So, that's getthegoodz (Goodz with a z) .com. Check it out. We'll tune in and see what happens with the e-commerce site, what happens with the SaaS planning the next time that we check in. But Chris, Mike, Danny, thank you so much for joining today and sharing what's been going on over the last few weeks: the good, the bad, the challenge, the cart abandonment. And, you know, best of luck to you over the next few weeks, and we'll be sure to check in and see how it's going. AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions. Special Guests: Chris Cerrito and Mike Rosenthal.

In this episode, we discuss eCommerce performance marketing and data strategies that will help you achieve profitable scale in 2024. Our featured guest on the show is Wesley Hartley, Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at leaf.fmTopics discussed in this episode:What are some effective methods to mitigate companies dealing with attribution overlapHow shifts in privacy restrictions affected the long-term marketing strategies for ecommerce businessesWhat role do profitability metrics play when it comes to scaling an ecommerce businessCommon structural issues in ad accounts and how can these impact scaling effortsLinks & ResourcesWebsite: https://www.leafgrow.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/leafgrowio/X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/leafgrowioGet access to more free resources by visiting the podcast episode page athttp://tinyurl.com/38h93584Subscribe & Listen Everywhere:Listen On: ​ecommercecoffeebreak.com | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsEpisode SponsorsLoyaltyLion: Rocket your returning customer rates with LoyaltyLion. LoyaltyLion is a leading loyalty platform, helping Shopify brands increase returning customer rates with their own integrated loyalty programs. We were the first loyalty platform to integrate with Shopify and we are #1 on G2 today, providing the tools and expertise that brands need to increase returning customer rates, improve retention, and build customer lifetime value. Visit: https://loyaltylion.comPartnerHero: Enhance your eCommerce business with PartnerHero. Our comprehensive support solutions, which include 24/7 customer assistance, expert marketplace insights, and self-service infrastructure, will empower your brand's customer experience. We prioritize exceptional customer service, maintaining language standards, multi-channel support, and user/system assistance. Visit us at: https://pages.partnerhero.com/ecommerce-coffee-break Talk to us, and lets create a tailored customer support solution for you!Support the showOur Newsletter Join over 6,000 other merchants & marketers to stay updated on eCommerce news, marketing strategies, tools & resources, and podcast interviews, all designed to help you grow your revenue. Every Thursday in your inbox. Consumed in 3 minutes. 100% free. Sign up at https://newsletter.ecommercecoffeebreak.com

Episode Resources:Go to TeamSimmer.com and use the coupon code Deviate for 10% off on individual course purchases.Latest from Juliana Jackson:Ecommerce Analytics Course for PiwikPRO - learn how to set up your store for successData Contracts Explained - by Doug Hall and Arman DidandehMastering the Art of Adaptability in Marketing and Analytics - article by Juliana JacksonOutsider Thinking in the Age of AI - article by Jason Packer featuring Juliana JacksonLatest from Simo Ahava and Simmer:Sign up for the Simmer newsletter for industry updates and technical marketing newsHow Do I Assign A Static IP Address To Outgoing Server-side GTM Requests? - article by Simo AhavaJOIN GOOGLE ADS AND GA4 DATA IN GOOGLE BIGQUERY - article by Arben KqikuConnect with Charles Farina on Twitter or LinkedinThe book mentioned in the episode:  Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and SoftwareTools and vendors mentioned:PiwikProAmplitudeCustomer Journey Analytics (Adobe) This podcast is brought to you by Juliana Jackson and Simo Ahava.

Visit thedigitalslicepodcast.com for complete show notes of every podcast episode. Join Brad and JJ Reynolds as they chat about the importance of business owners gathering the right data, so they can make informed decisions about growing their business.  JJ Reynolds is a seasoned digital marketing professional who has helped numerous companies optimize their marketing data and make data-driven decisions to improve their marketing results. With over a decade of experience in digital marketing and managing large ad budgets, JJ has honed his skills in using tools like Google Analytics, Looker Studio, and Google Tag Manager to eliminate guesswork and capitalize on small improvements in online marketing strategies. JJ is also passionate about educating agencies and consultants on structured data usage. He believes that what most digital businesses need is someone to provide reliable, consistent data to take action and make informed decisions.

In this episode, Jenny welcomes Hedy & Hopp's own Director of Marketing, Julia Pitlyk. Reflecting on their latest discussions around changes to patient data privacy, Jenny and Julia discuss what healthcare marketers should expect from their marketing tactics and analytics. They focus on two main areas of change: marketing activation and analytics, and specifically discuss how those two areas will be impacted by implementing server-side Google Tag Manager to address new privacy guidelines. They also discuss how other solutions, like new analytics tools and CDPs (Customer Data Platforms), differ in terms of how they impact these areas. Jenny and Julia also recommend ways to reset the benchmark of marketing performance and emphasize the importance of making sure marketing and legal/compliance leadership develop a shared point-of-view on how to move forward with new guidelines.  Connect with Jenny: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/  Connect with Julia: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jpitlyk/  Follow Hedy & Hopp on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hedyandhoppagency/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@HedyHopp Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/hedyandhopp Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hedyandhopp/  Listen to our other episodes on healthcare privacy: https://hedyandhopp.com/healthcare-marketing-services/healthcare-privacy-compliance/ 

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Julian Juenemann, the founder of JJAnalytics, a company that helps businesses adopt the data-driven way of Digital Marketing. In 2015, he launched the MeasureSchool YouTube channel to reach out and teach this new way of marketing to others. With over 150,000 subscribers, MeasureSchool has become the leading video source for many marketers to learn these data-driven methods. During this episode, we discuss the transition from Universal Google Analytics to Google Analytics G4 and its significant differences from the previous version. We also learned how privacy concerns and changing data retention practices have driven the need for this transition. Additionally, we talk about how businesses need to adapt and leverage data visualization tools for better insights since AI is playing an increasing role in data analysis. However, trust in the output of such tools remains a critical issue. Here's a glance at this episode: [00:54] What are the differences between Google Analytics and the new Google platform? [04:41] About this new platform, what does it do differently and what does it do better? [07:08] How does the data visualization work in this new platform? [09:11] What's the relationship between Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager? [14:12] Does this new tool have any enhancements for ad tracking? [16:30] Besides Google, what other analytics tools would you recommend? [18:46] What's the role of AI in analyzing Google Analytics data? You can view the show notes here -https://ducttapemarketing.com/navigating-google-analytics-landscape More About Julian Juenemann: -Connect with Julian on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/julianjuenemann/?originalSubdomain=de -Find out more about The Measure School -https://measureschool.com/ Like this, show? Click here, scroll to the bottom, rate 5 stars, and select "Write a Review." Then be sure to let me know why you like the show! Wanna chat? Connect with me on LinkedIn -https://www.linkedin.com/in/ducttapemarketing/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Also on YouTube: youtu.be/LZlbfPiEYYYThis week, Kurt and Paul tackle a series of questions from real Shopify merchants. The specter of Black Friday is upon us, but the message is clear: prepare, don't panic. The conversation shifts to the pros and cons of one-page checkouts and dives deep into the world of Google Analytics. If you're an international seller, the topic of duties and taxes will be of particular interest. And for the bootstrappers out there, the episode closes with indispensable advice on growing without a hefty ad budget.Show LinksGoogle Sales ChannelElevarDuties and import taxesDHL Duty and Tax CalculatorSponsorsFree 30-day trial of Zipify OCU - To get an unadvertised gift, email help@zipify.com and ask for the "Tech Nasty Bonus".Elevar - Never miss another conversion with Elevar's server-side tracking. Enhance Klaviyo flow performance 2-3x. Plans from $0 a month + 15-day free trials on all plans.Theme Updater Plus: Vault - Effortlessly back up and quickly restore your Shopify StoreLoop Returns: Ecommerce Returns Management for Shopify - Brands using Loop retain over 50% of their revenue by promoting exchanges over refunds.Not on Shopify? Start your free trialNever miss an episodeSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsJoin Kurt's newsletterHelp the showAsk a question in The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Facebook GroupLeave a reviewSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsWhat's Kurt up to?See our recent work at EthercycleSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelApply to work with Kurt to grow your store.

Apple er ikke gode venner af alle, der arbejder med digital marketing. I deres seneste opdatering af Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), går de i rette med A/AAAA-cloaking - også kendt som teknikken, der bruges, når man (som Obsidian) opsætter serverside tagging via Google Tag Manager. Den dårlige nyhed er, at Apple går ind og begrænser dine førsteparts-cookies levetid til bare 24 timer. Men den gode nyhed er, at du kan omgå restriktionerne i endnu en runde ‘Whack-a-mole' mellem Apple og hele marketing-industrien. Hør hvordan her. Hvis du har en webshop, har du ikke råd til at lade være.

Chris "Mercer" Mercer is an esteemed measurement marketing expert and the co-founder of MeasurementMarketing.io. With an unwavering dedication to helping marketers, marketing teams, and agencies understand and leverage data, Mercer has become a trusted name in the industry. Mercer's approach to measurement marketing is comprehensive and actionable. He guides his audience through the crucial steps of identifying key metrics, implementing measurement tools like Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics, and creating insightful dashboards. With his extensive knowledge and ability to simplify complex concepts, Mercer has become a sought-after speaker at prestigious conferences and events, including Traffic & Conversion, Social Media Marketing World, Content Jam, and more. Learn more here: https://ishusingh.com/

Market Proof Marketing · Ep 299: One Stop ShopIn this episode, Kevin Oakly, Beth Russell and Julie Jarnagin marvel that they're only one episode away from episode 300! They discuss Zillows new "Super App" which promises to be the one-stop shop for everything by cutting out the middleman and how the one group that will struggle with the change is realtors. Together, they celebrate kids going back to school and discuss the difference between highlighting scarcity and creating artificial scarcity.Story Time (04:45)Julie says she gave her son “bad parenting advice” by telling him he doesn't need to do his best in school…other than math.Kevin helped a builder problem solve: 6 leads to 54 (18 walk-ins + 36 online leads) Beth has another house update: their house is nearing completion and have a closing date of Sept. 5th!Kevin says AI is not going to solve your “people problem” or make them adapt to change.News (21:38)Zillow Group to acquire Spruce, a tech-enabled title and escrow company, as a building block in the housing super app (https://www.zillowgroup.com/news/zillow-group-to-acquire-spruce/)Real estate agents grapple with cyberattack on Rapattoni (https://www.housingwire.com/articles/real-estate-agents-grapple-with-cyberattack-on-rapattoni/)Strained housing affordability is a ‘manufactured crisis' created by bad zoning—just look at L.A. (https://fortune-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/fortune.com/2023/08/13/los-angeles-housing-affordability-manufactured-crisis-through-oning/amp/)Self-driving cars were supposed to take over the road. What happened? (https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/01/business/self-driving-industry-ctrp/index.html)Favorites/Hates (55:03)Julie is propagating her house plants.Beth hates when one person can taint an organization, that one friend or family member who can taint a room.Kevin's favorite is his peek design wallet.Questions? Comments? Email show@doyouconvert.com or call 404-369-2595 and we'll address them on the next episode. More insights, discussions, and opportunities can be found at Do You Convert All Access or on the Market Proof Marketing Facebook group.Subscribe on iTunesFollow on SpotifyListen On StitcherA weekly new home marketing podcast for home builders and developers. Each week Kevin Oakley, Andrew Peek, Jackie Lipinski, Julie Jarnagin, and other team members from Do You Convert will break down the headlines, share best practices and stories from the front line, and perform a deep dive on a relevant marketing topic. We're here to help you – not to sell you!Transcript: KevinWelcome to episode 297. I'm Kevin Oakley. And with me today is Julie Jarnagin and Andrew Peek, because Beth Russell went full on Miley Cyrus with her voice today. I didn't know thats a thing.AndrewAnd?KevinWe were conversing this morning. And I was like, huh, You're talking about you've gone for Miley Cyrus and she's like, Sorry, that was a mom joke, which I didn't realize mom jokes were a thing. So I just was happy that we have equal opportunity bashing adult jokes.AndrewI, I support it. Yeah. Miley has a pretty low voice, little boy raspy. It's not that. Well.JulieHer kid has been sick and so apparently it got passed down.AndrewIt's this is the beginning. Schools just started. So.JulieYeah, that's true. That's true. It's going to hit all of us.AndrewIt will only get worse.KevinNo one else in my family got an apology covered. That was shocking.JulieGood.AndrewGood.KevinTotally. Totally in the clear. All right, story time. Who's going first?JulieI can go.AndrewOh your first.JulieMine is kind of. Kind of random. So just randomly in my email, I got an email, like a marketing email from Hidden Valley Ranch. I was like, How in the world did I end up on this list? Is it a really, really old list I was on from like, maybe I got a recipe or maybe they sold it.JulieSomebody? I don't know. I just thought it was funny that I got it because I was like, That's random. Then I woke up the next morning. I had two from them overnight, so that was my third. Then within the span of like less than 48 hours, I had six different marketing emails from Hidden Valley Ranch, and I would try to and I would try to unsubscribe and I would keep getting them.JulieAnd so finally I just had to hit the like, this is spam button in my email, you know, quit sending them to me because it's just a reminder, not that you're Hidden Valley Ranch, but don't if you have a list and you haven't sent any emails and you just start spamming, don't do that. You need to send emails consistently on some kind of normal basis so people are expecting them.JulieAnd don't just send six in a day about Hidden Valley Ranch because.AndrewIt's like they're it's like a marketing automation just exploding.JulieCrazy.AndrewThe more, you know, thank me. What could they even promote? Like, do you get like a 36 pack of of all these.KevinOh no they they cross promote using recipes like sour cream or something. Yeah. Like you know you can ads you can add a ranch packet to sour cream and make them.JulieIt was a lot of recipes, I think. So I don't know how I ended up on it, but they were aggressive fun.KevinIs there a preferred email cadence like as well? I got this email today from someone said, Hey, my onsite team doesn't ever want marketing to send emails because they said, We don't want to overwhelm our customers with too much communication when it comes to too from marketing, what do what do we think?JulieI personally, I say twice a month from from marketing, maybe once a month. If you can't do two good once a month, do one good one a month, and probably no more than two a month. That's me. You all may have a different.KevinNumber two is my cap from marketing.AndrewLike and I like that I gave props to Opendoor a while ago where they gave a lot of value in their email. They're like, your new offer. Your new offer. I think it's every three weeks and it's there's value in there. They probably see that I open it. And so that's why they're giving me maybe I have an accelerated cadence compared to someone else.AndrewYeah, I think twice. And then maybe some type of like trigger that helps you slow down that cadence. Like, okay, now they're a purchased let's not give them all of the marketing emails, maybe they switch different list whatever maybe. But I think we all agree lean on less versus more from marketing.JulieWell, less as long as it's not non or randomly have a new just when we think that everybody needs some, I feel like it needs some kind of plan and strategy around it instead of when we get to it, because that usually means never until we're panicking. And then people get it and they're like, Wait, who is this?JulieWhat is this? If you do have a cadence, they at least are used to seeing you pop up in their inbox and it's not so insulting. I don't know if it's things are awkward, but with Hidden Valley Ranch Spammy.AndrewYeah.KevinYeah. It's one of those areas that as an industry we still don't use data properly, I think, to clearly find like, you know, from the time something becomes a lead to the time they decide to go on an appointment, I would argue that you you could if you to your point, if you had the great content, Julie, if you had, let's say, 15 amazing in-depth articles, slash blogs with photo galleries and or videos or virtual walkthroughs, about 15 different stories of customers who chose your homes and love them.KevinI think you could send one of those a month if they're good enough or sorry, one of those a week if they're good enough over 15 weeks. But the signal of once they once you go to an appointment, you're kind of transitioned to another phase. And while it might still be interesting to get those, you might then have to do the work of saying where are the best three that they haven't already seen and spacing them out more because there's now it's it's still going to be interesting just like people love watching issue TV even though they already know where they're going to move or you know, they just bought something.KevinThey still want to, but they don't need to be deluged with it in the same way. And of course, all those ideally would have the signal of go here in view more if you want, let the customer binge them, but then know not to send them because they've already seen them in an ideal world.AndrewSo maybe.KevinI'll write. Mine comes from a call early this week because I feel like this is happening a lot, not just with the builders that we work with, but but around the country where traffic is still high. In fact, the aggregate data set from homebuilder data, it's about the same as where it was in February, March in terms of traffic to homebuilder websites, lead volume depending on the price point an area some some places are down.KevinBut if you look at year over year, most people are still up tens. And so you're talking about a struggling neighborhood. And this last month in June, they had six leads in there. So this particular better uses lasso. When you use lasso and you're analyzing lead volume, a reminder that you typically have to go look in two places.KevinYou have to go look into the individual community project. And that's going to let you see all of the online leads that have transitioned to on site through an appointment as well as walk in traffic. And then you're going have to go to the online sales bucket project and look at the leads that have come in just for that neighbor.KevinThen you have to add the two together. So we started out looking in the project folder. First thing was that no one on the call immediately kind of already had their finger on the pulse of what the lead volume was for the community, which is marketers. We should always, especially the ones that are high focus, like this is a neighborhood that I taken over the call from Jacqui, the Penske issue on maternity leave, but they're like, Oh yeah, we talk about this one like every time.KevinSo cool, so many leads that we have. Last month. It's okay. Like, you know, they didn't know it, but we looked it up and they had 38 leads in the onsite project. And I was like, okay, cool. Well, we looked at where the lead sources were coming from, both in terms of like just phone call form submission as well as actual marketing source.KevinAnd then we go to June and there were six. It's like, Wow, that's a statistically significant difference. Like something changed what happened? And we go through the list and you want to guess what changed? Actually, I'm going to make a guess. You probably don't want to because you're like, I don't know, but.AndrewWhat's the number.KevinOf 6 to 38 leads just in the onsite project? What do you think.AndrewSix up to 38.JulieMM Oh, they increased more finished quick movements listed or I.KevinGuess.AndrewI think they just added them. They were there before that at everybody their close like they register them like, like they're like this. They had the same number. Maybe the number didn't change but they just decided like, well everyone's looking at me, I'm in the hot seat. I better add something in here.KevinWhich. Okay, so that's your final clue. For those of you playing at home, when leads start being put in the system by onsite agents, after there has been five or six months of intense scrutiny of said onsite agents, what's happened is there is a new one. There is a new onsite agent who doesn't know the game to be played and silly, silly salesperson.KevinYou're putting all of your walk in leads in the system. They don't know better. It's like I always go back to when I first started playing golf. It was the best golf I've ever played in my life, in my life, because I was just playing. I wasn't overthinking it. And then you start overthinking it. You start doing all these adjustments that are wrong.KevinTypically when you're new, you start playing worse, you get in your head. And so new salesperson now in the online bucket, we went back and there were 36 online leads for July for this neighborhood. And and so then we went back to the onsite project and just ran only the walk ins and there was eight of them. And then I'm really bad at Mass.KevinIt took me about 45 seconds to figure out that the total lead count for this struggling neighborhood was 54 in a 30 day period.JulieWow. Well.KevinThe one thing I always like to remind everyone is the way that we approach marketing and advertising and do you convert means that we don't have to consider at all unless our builder partner has chosen to do something that we don't recommend. We never have to wonder to ourselves. I wonder if those 54 people are interested or qualified in any sense of the word.KevinWhy don't we have to do that? And again, this is a really big deal because every ad we ever run talks about the location, price point and type of products that you are selling. So when those leads come across, they're not just like, you know, trying to collect a $50 scratch off ticket by entering in their contact information or entering to win a car or whatever the like.KevinSo to bring it all back down to the now that I've told you that journey, it was just like, wow, we don't have a struggling community from an advertising problem. We don't have a struggling community from a lead problem. What we have is an appointment to sale conversion challenge and with 54 people in a 30 day period, someone needs to give the sales team permission to screw it up.KevinAnd what I mean by that is just start getting sales. You know, they were like, Well, this is a hiring neighborhood. And we always get the feedback that a lot of customers are concerned about selling their existing home. I go make up and make up an existing home sale package incentive. Hey, no problem. What will we'll create? What is that?KevinMake it up. Just say, Well, will partner with three agents that we know are great agents and they're they've promised to do an enhanced listing package on any referral that we send over so you can pick any of those three agents. And then as the builder, you might have to pay an extra couple hundred bucks to them to make sure you get the best photographer that they typically would use an on site or do a little bit more advertising, whatever it is.KevinBut just say, yeah, we're just putting together the finishing touches of our list. Your home VIP experience. Let's just sign contingent upon using the details of that program and feeling comfortable selling your house or whatever. But something there's too much like, yeah, it's price. Yeah, but it and I think I talked about this last time so I'm not going to go into it but that builder that had a 6% performance sell ratio really changed some things around and got to a 20% that 11 sales to 51 sales.AndrewThat's a lot of.KevinNew cumulative leads for that incentive for people that are already in their system. And I was on a call with Jesse Suggs, online sales coach for another builder this morning. She did analysis for a builder and something like 80% of their sales were to people who had been in the system for over three months. All of the friction that's preventing sales is coming from the middle and the bottom of the funnel right now.KevinAnd that's likely to continue through the end of the year. And so just wake up, smell the coffee smell and then start adjusting accordingly because you're not. I have not. Maybe one of you two have. I haven't seen any promotion that anyone has done. 80 different builders, almost every state in the country over the last three months. That has significantly increased their lead volume.KevinAnd again, the only aspects there would be qualified leads, not just leads that are from performance max campaigns and mostly spam.AndrewDon't do that.KevinYou're not you're not going to convince anyone that today is the first day that they should start thinking about buying a house or moving.AndrewNo. And we'll we definitely have some news lined up to really support that.KevinLet's just jump into that one. Oh, we got it. So from a Business insider, over 80% of Americans think it's a bad time to buy a house, which coincidentally also means that the majority of Americans also think it's a bad time to sell a house. So sellers are also buyers and so they don't want to sell if they think it's a bad time to buy because most of them are going to have to buy.KevinSo 82% think it's a bad time to buy a new home. Affordability has plunged. So unless there is a reason to move, like even this goes back to I mean, you're someone text me this right now and I'm just I'm overdoing this point because it is so important. For the second half of this year, someone said, hey, what's your thoughts about success and failures around special inventory events, i.e. showcase of homes, liquidation event, year end sales, event, everything must go, etc. It's like, well, let's not call it everything must go or liquidation sale.KevinBut even in a good market, doing that consistently once a year and then at Heartland, we just that was the only incentive we did all year. Everything else was adjusting pricing to market. But every year we did basically a December to remember sales event. It was the only sales event of the year and that trick will work once.KevinSo I was just saying, you know, maybe end of summer and fall is a better time to get your stuff sold before the end of the year when everyone else is panicking. I kind of I don't mind that, but I said, Hey, just remember 70% of the buyers are probably already in the system. So it's communicating to those people you already know.KevinAnd they said back, we were thinking of doing this event for 75 to 90 days. What's your reaction to that?AndrewI I'm trying to figure out what I want to say out loud, but it feels like it's not a real event. Then it's garbage. Like it like I'm I view it negatively. Like it's not a real deal. It's just a fake promotion.KevinIt's too long. I feel like it's too long, especially knowing that the majority of people who will take advantage of that opportunity will be people they already know. So I said, Hey, probably doesn't need to be that long, you know, just heads up and said, Well, I think we're going to have to do longer because we don't do well.KevinFostering leads long term too, which I just wanted to say that's, that's an unacceptable.AndrewThat I misunderstand that they need it longer because they're not good at fostering leads.KevinBecause they think that, yeah, they're not good at nurturing leads longer term.AndrewOkay?KevinAnd so they feel like the salesman has to go for 90 days so that new leads can come in, have time to absorb the opportunity.AndrewEtc.. So they lose people after that when they're all leads aren't useful anymore, right? And you're like, No, no, no, that's your mortgage sitting there. You have your revenue.KevinEver been right now?AndrewYeah. Yeah. Interesting.KevinYeah. Back to the article. I kind of like merging story time. Article time.AndrewYeah, that's one's perfect. Unplanned. So that's fun.KevinThe average 30 year fixed mortgage rate has risen from under 5% to nearly 7%, according to Freddie Mac. With the Federal Reserve's most aggressive interest rate hiking campaign since the 1980s. I was born in 81, so the it's been a while and everyone's still kind of pessimistic now. But that doesn't mean that but that does mean by default the people who have to are more urgent.AndrewRight?JulieYeah, they have to. And I think it's such a good opportunity to just agree with them. But yeah, it is a terrible time to buy an existing house like. Yes, absolutely. You are completely right. It is a terrible time to buy an existing house. It's a great time to buy a new house because look at this great thing.JulieWe can do to help you and look how our how they hold their value. And it just is a good opener to a conversation to talk through these things. So I don't think you're ever going to convince all these people that, oh, 80% of people are wrong. You know, everybody because they.KevinThink about the think about the psychology here of you think it's a bad time to buy and you see an ad that a builder runs that says 50, 75 grand off if you buy by the other month. I think I think your negativity bias is like, see, I told you it's bad time to buy. You don't think you're so much money.AndrewYeah, I.KevinWasn't going to buy, but now I can save 75 grant like again. It doesn't mean it doesn't work, but it doesn't work for the reason we tell ourselves. It works. When someone buys something that's on sale, that's because that's what they believe it's actually worth. Or they believe that there's some that like it's not the savings we justify that we tell our spouse, Hey, don't get mad at me.KevinI just saved us $100. But in our minds, we knew that that's not what we did.AndrewYeah, that's what it should be paid. I can see that reaction being like, oh, desperation. It's still overpriced. This as far as like if you're being kind of indoctrinated with like these articles like this where like 80% say it's bad time to buy, your reaction is to be correct with the rest of society. And so you're like, Well, I'll go along with that.AndrewI feel like they'll make me look smart. And like you said, Julie, like, well, the builders are the ones offering like these great incentives 5.25, five and a half, 4%, whatever. Like that's different than 7%, significantly different. So.KevinWell, and the other thing that's interesting about interest rates. Barbara Corcoran, you all know her from Shark Tank. Well, she's kind of got a thing that's going viral around the the U.S home industry right now because she's like everyone. You've got to buy a house now that rates are at 7% because when rates go down, the prices are going to go up.KevinSo what she's correlating to and it's not a crazy thought at all, is when rates were at four and a half and they went down to three. It took it took too long for most builders to figure this out. But builders are like, wait a minute, I can you know, I still remember people were like, how much should we raise prices by Kevin?KevinI mean, they just keep selling. What should we raise? And so I go, Just do the math of exactly what is the same payment and you can go there. Now it's the affordability around payment. You can just go to that price. You have to look at your cost, just go to that price. And so her argument is if you buy now and take that pain, you'll be better off because the rates go down, the prices of everything will go higher.KevinThat's not a guarantee, by the way, because if rates go down, it still means that there's bad things going on in the economy and the job market. It's earned.AndrewBut it's, I think to say kind of rudely my brain like that's like privilege problems, right? Like she's like I have X amount a bank account like I'm I'll deal with this and two years I'm out of the situation. But if you're stuck at 7% forever, you can't refi. Your financial situation doesn't change or drastically go up. Then you're kind of you could be stuck.AndrewSo for normal people, maybe not. But I, I definitely understand what she's what she's saying there. What's interesting is do we know anyone This is going way back. Remember Daw d0r the.KevinYork tracking the infrared tracking tool?AndrewYeah, I remember. They weren't that expensive to implement. And then, like, as we kind of got used to that and I'm not sure if there's any builders still using it, but there's a recommendation like put it, don't put it at the front door. But like in the primary bathroom or something or whatever, it'd be like, okay, real people and the model home will definitely go here versus someone going in and out, in and out deliveries, mail, etc., etc..AndrewInteresting. Having that data to kind of normalize like the salesperson. This is back to the first part of your story. Like leads went up. Now it's just a new you'll see a new sales agent on site. It's like, well, we've had 300 people come in, 200 people, a hundred people, whatever it is, that person has six, six. So that just kind of like normalize the data.AndrewBe interesting. So my little story is just like maybe it's it'll make you feel comfortable. J4 is still quirky. I don't, I don't like it. I don't get it. I was just on a call about an hour and a half ago. Really intelligent guy is like, Hey, we're seeing this like what is happening? And I'm sitting there like, Man, I wish I could be super smart right now and have the answer to this.AndrewI'm like, I have no idea. Like, let me just rebuild that report for you and maybe that will fix it. Like, I do not know, like essentially it was only charting one campaign, but the other campaigns were down here. The numbers were making sense. The ad and like, you know, everyone has the delay of the data. It seems like 24, 36, 48 hours.AndrewThere seems to be a little bit longer than that. It's a lot of fun and they have a lot of data. So it's not like we've seen some where like at the sampling a smaller is could be goofy, but it just seems to be inconsistent all over the place and it's not much fun. Thank you. Google it's not fun at all.KevinYeah it's well and the inconsistencies fortunately are not. It'd be one thing if it was just Google but it's implementation still up for on some web environments that you know it's yeah and that's where you can't I mean you will because you're human you'll get mad at the web developer but it's it's multiple web developers that are having this issue it's not just one.KevinAnd sometimes it's for a bit of code that really should have nothing to do with causing any interference with GFR. So I feel like I use this a lot. But you know, WordPress is a great format for a blog, but trying to build a website with WordPress, in fact, again, just this morning talked with a large organization, multistate organization that still uses WordPress for their and we were talking about they are having a spam issue.KevinAnd I said, well, a lot of times WordPress is something that doesn't help that and they're like, Oh really? Why go? Because you don't often update WordPress as often as you should when you've got 20 different plug ins that are connected to that. Yeah. So then we'll potentially break when you update it. Like, yeah, we're on a really old version.KevinI go, Yeah, you're going to get spammed.AndrewIt's been hacked.KevinSo it's that same kind of issue though that WordPress has where you're using the same website you always have go for said, Hey, no big deal, just put in this line of code and put it here exactly where we tell you and everything will be fine. But there's interaction with other lines of code that really shouldn't be affecting it, that that are for some people, thankfully, it's only about 5% that are still working through that issue.KevinAnd also, thankfully, I just saw an article posted yesterday like for 90% of people, UK is still alive and kicking and I.AndrewDidn't see it. I'm like, I want to use it. But then I. Principal Mike, I don't think I could be the one that says I.KevinFinally converted all of my little stars on Google Analytics over to Jay for accounts versus UK. But it is terrible.JulieI have to say I've gotten more use to die for than I thought because the other day I was in there and I was like, Oh shoot, I'm using you. Like just because it looked familiar to me. And I was like, Oh, I'm not. I'm just used to this now. So that's good. And Andrew, the most frustrating thing is when a piece of data is showing up in one place, like randomly, but it's showing up in the place it needs to show up.JulieYou're like, I know it's there, it exists, I just can't make it. So that was where it needs to show.AndrewI think that was Tuesday. Julie and I were troubleshooting Google Tag Manager and J4 and like everything was correct, it just wouldn't show up in both places. For certain events. We're setting up to support conversion tracking. Yeah, there's no certainty. Which by the way, I look above my head. The site added. You look right, that perfect.JulieWill.AndrewColor my room. It's stuff that's that's all my story is but I get the 5% of of all of it so like 90% of my world is it's it's broken J for I'm like are you kidding?KevinAndrew is our level five tech support. Yeah.AndrewSo it all rolls sideways and uphill and diagonally to me. It's great.KevinWe don't have a perfect tracker here to fixing everything, but we are, I think, nearly perfect on identifying the cause. Like if it's something that we can't touch, like a website or a server issue or whatever. But we can, we can usually help sometimes.JulieI'm actually happy when Andrew can't fix it out, so I feel like it was a dumb question. It was like, This might be stupid. Andrew And then when you can't and I'm like, Yes, it's a real.AndrewProblem and sometimes that's enough is like, okay, cool. I'm not going crazy anymore. Like we all agree this is just weird and quirky. We're not going to worry about it for a little bit. And then sure enough, I'll just fix itself on its own.KevinNext up, I guess we'll link to my tweet. We still call it that. I don't know. But Zillow is hiring over 100 photographers around the country like to continue to enhance their enhanced listings product. And so what's really cool about this is Zillow. If you've missed somewhere, been under a rock over the last six months or so, showing shown time plus which they purchased, which is like the centralized scheduling platform and then they've kind of built around that enhanced listing features, 3D tours, photos, basically everything you need to get your listing to look better.KevinYou get a better layer on the actual map as well. They're going all in on this and I think it's the right call for any syndication company to do so because, you know, Julie wrote a book and that's great, but content's still hard for builders, harder than it maybe should be. A lot of times it's just because they are still doing something really stupid, like connected TV advertising or billboards or whatever.KevinLike you have the money to solve this problem, but you're using it for for less efficient purposes. But I, I have a feeling this is going to be huge when they start to roll it out. And I have no idea when they'll be doing this. But the moment the builders can just say are already advertising on Zillow and it's like, yeah, for X amount more or I don't know if they're going to include it, but you want to just come take pictures of this house, like really good pictures and it's also a good box out move for home XCOM, which is trying to come in and disrupt.KevinAlthough I read an article that basically they even know they're not going to be Zillow, it's like where our goal is to be a really good number two and keep Zillow honest. But we're not going to we're not going to take over.AndrewI mean, there's there's being ads to Google ads. So there's always the number two. I wonder if they'll even have the photographers edit, Which would be.KevinI think so. I mean, basic basic edits. Yeah, basic cleanup.AndrewAnd that's like, imagine that.KevinBe really smart about this from a strategic perspective. And homes while Costar Homes parent company started this on the commercial side they can take these pictures and again I haven't seen any paperwork so I have no clue how this will work. But my hunch is it will work similar to Costar. And that Costar lets the commercial agents use the imagery that they shoot for anything except to send to other commercial real estate syndication portals.KevinSo this whole concept Inman Connect in Vegas has gone on this week, and one of the panels with Robert Rifkin, the CEO of Compass and someone from Redfin and the CEO of Next Next Home, I think is the name of the company. They're all talking about how like pocket listings or like listings that are unique to to a company are just so incredibly important right now because there's not enough of them.KevinAnd that's why we talked about Howard Hanna's move in the Cleveland area to be like, Nope, we're not sharing our listings with other offices in the same way we have been. This is just like, again, it's in the technology world. They call it like getting closer to the bare metal. You're talking about taking pictures of listings, You're getting closer to boxing out competitors in like the most bare metal approach, like here, like it's where the rubber meets the road.KevinLike you don't have pictures. Great. So you're listing on homes that com says that the house is 2000 square feet but it has no pictures.AndrewYeah, it's pretty simple.KevinNo one's going to care, Alison.AndrewEspecially the beat, I'm sure. Great pictures to like. They'll be standardized and like, that would be the look for real estate photography. Whatever Zillow decides, if they end up being like they set the mood, they set the tempo of it. So that's, that's pretty cool. Good for them.KevinYeah. I just think what good for everyone if it's done right and we don't know if it will be done right, but anything that helps a builder solve a problem at a reasonable price and help Zillow like that's doesn't happen often again. But win win wins are really good.AndrewYeah, I like it again.KevinAll right. Back to bad news that we're we're going. I think so.AndrewIt's like bad news I think it's bad.KevinFrom from Redfin dot com housing market Update The typical U.S. homebuyers monthly payment is up nearly 20% from a year ago as prices rise.AndrewThat's a big 20%.KevinThe average price of a home is only up 3.2%, but the average payment is up 20. Thank you. Interest rates?AndrewYeah. Interest rates, do you think? Obviously lower down payments, I would assume so. That's affecting it. Yes. Is it my mind on this goes to everything outside of housing like this does affect housing, but I'm like, so I'm in Florida right here by the water 5 minutes away. I'm thinking like, oh, like a lot of people on a boat.AndrewYou got a boat show. You do not see a price. You see a monthly payment on every boat. And you're like, yeah, boats 229 a month bring a boat warranty and include seats. So all this stuff here, like I'll be looking at Lindsay 229 month, like we just don't have to go to Chick-Fil-A six times. Like that's not bad.AndrewLet's sacrifice that. We could get a boat, bring boat. But as things like this go up, I'm like, Oh, that's not an option anymore. Let's not do that. And now the person that's selling the boat, they have less commission now they're making less money. That's kind of like a cascading effect of like if you're what's the phrase like house house for like eventually I feel like that long term, I don't have the data on this and not on The Economist info on this like you eventually that affects other industries and it's this full circle of like, that's not good.AndrewI'm sure there's like a perfect number to be at, right? That I don't know. Maybe there isn't where if it's too high, then it affects you spend less in other places. If it's too low, then there should be more spend and housing. You could afford more as that keeps prices lower, keeps demand lower, if that makes any sense in my head.AndrewThis makes perfect sense.KevinI think it makes it just like, I don't know, 2000 people who work for the Fed, who are trying to figure out like answer that question extremely complicated. That's why rates are moving around and I'm just I got a little bit distracted because I'm looking at this chart, which is on the video version on on YouTube. For those of you watching or on do, you can become yeah, home listings are down 21% year over year look at so 2022 the red line this is when everyone's like see I told you so the world is going to end because listing listings started reappearing and then June, July they fell off and they I mean, the yellowKevinline for 2023 is just I mean, it's it's in the range, let's just say, of 2020 COVID lows, like April, May, number of new homes that hit the market was at an all time low for April May. But we've kind of been hanging around there all of 20, 23. It's just incredible, like the amount of pain on the used home side of the world for these folks who don't have the number of transactions is crazy.KevinAnd I am hearing again, we got to get an agent or a broker on the program to talk about this because I'm getting more emails and texts as well from builders who are like, what is going on with real estate agents? They are losing their their mind. Every deal is like a huge there. I mean, some of the words they use to describe the behavior, I don't know if I can say on air, but.AndrewYou need a little sensor.KevinBut they're like, please tell us that you have something happen at the summit in September talking about how to handle agents and what to do because it's just it's but I mean, you have to understand the pain that a lot of them are going through here. It's not it might be irrational behavior, but it's irrational behavior caused by irrational source, if that makes.JulieSense. That's why I just had a conversation with a builder that I'm like, Why? What did you do? Why are your walk ins so much higher? And it's somebody who they have never wanted to bother with realtors. They never needed realtors. They were just a pain in their side. And she was like, What? Honestly, we've been Dylan more with realtors and open to working with them now just because they need they need listings and we've got the listings.JulieSo we're like, okay, so what's kind of even changing how some people are open to working with realtor.AndrewRealtors.JulieI'm sure.AndrewPursuing.JulieIt's going to make things more crazy for them for sure.KevinYeah. Interesting. All right. I don't think there's anything else really that I want to talk about from the news. It's more like we know that stuff. Elon Musk is trying to win back advertisers with brand safety technology. I mean, I'm I don't even want to think.AndrewAbout it for. That's my thought. I'm then I have this for this this new or old news I don't know.KevinFirst of all the whole the whole thing, I mean, maybe it settles down and in some ways it has because thread thread who like, what's that thing? All the users that I and the community is alive and well they're most of the people I interact with are not have not gone away or stopped actually on. Okay but like advertisers are so fact I do want to read this I pulled up another thing that we can't share the link to because it's a subscription to Digiday plus they called me in to like a $200 subscription for the year because I really wanted to read get you again a point for like great content wins.KevinBut advertisers are so fickle and right now they're such pressure to perform that experimentation on a platform that's been there, done that, and not much has changed. It's like now we all tried. Remember, everyone was going to boycott Instagram and Facebook and never used them again and they were going to go on LinkedIn and Twitter and Pinterest and all these other places.KevinWell, guess what? They're back because they need things that actually deliver qualified people in revenue. So this article is here's what ad and media execs really mean when they commented on their queue to earnings. This is hilarious to me. So and so far so good. I'll try to use different voices just for entertainment value. So these are all things that that high level executives said on their earnings call.KevinThe is Doug Horn, the CFO at Gannett. For those of you who are born in the last 35 years, that's a newspaper company who tries to do digital media as well. But here's what he said. Despite secular headwinds, the decrease in print advertising revenue was limited to 8.9% year over marking the smallest decline observed in the past year.KevinAnd then here's what he actually meant. That quarter could have been a lot worse, except for the fact that our print advertising sucked less than expected. I think people are still dumb enough to buy print ads. Spence Newman, the CFO at Netflix, said. Our overall ad arm subscription plus ads continue to be higher than basic ad free globally, same as the statement on standard Bore.KevinHere's what he meant. Advertising is not a major moneymaker for Netflix, yet we made all of our money by just not letting people share subscriptions. I'm not even going to say what they actually said, just what they meant, because it's it's to me, it's just a really good insight into the chaos that is the traditional advertising world. Zaslav Warner Brothers CEO said.KevinWho needs a massive subscriber base When you can focus on a handful of loyal customers and make millions, am I right? So basically it's like we're not even going to try to grow the number of subscribers we have there. Just charge them a heck of a lot of money for not a lot of content, and it's working just fine.KevinMichael CAVANAUGH Comcast president. There are too many moving parts that would need to align for a deal of the magnitude to come together of being sold or swapping business units. See, I think there's one other one in here that was really interesting. Bob Bakish, CEO of Paramount Global, talking about the whole writers strike and labor dispute. Basically, whoever has the goal tends to make the rules and we've got the gold.KevinAnd they also by the way, it's been interesting just hearing all of the AI generative AI discussions around like, could you pick a worse time to have a strike over something that.AndrewSo yeah.KevinIt just is really interesting. So I mean, Mark Zuckerberg, this is pretty good. Rails plays exceeded 200 billion per day across Facebook and Instagram. We're seeing good progress on real monetization as well with the annual revenue run rate across our apps now exceeding $10 billion up from 3 billion last fall. What he actually meant is we're about to make a whole crap ton of money from short form videos.KevinVery soon.AndrewYeah.KevinBut like people in the print industry, I mean, even TV again, I've hinted at a couple of times, but connected TV advertising sounds awesome. And like Disney Plus right now is pivoting their last call. Iger just said, You know what? We don't want people like we're going to up the price of Disney Plus because we will make way more money.KevinIf we can sell ads, then if we make people pay what they're willing to pay for the platform. So their goal is actually to grow the ad supported subscriptions more than anything else. And if if they and others convince more people to do that and you can start affordably, that's the key. Affordably targeting households with TV advertising on streaming services, that would be great for right now.KevinIt's the only way that people like Disney can make money. They can sell the that because the concept of it is so good in an actual performance it it's not worth the expense being paid except for those people who are making money from the ads being being bought.AndrewYeah, I mean, essentially it is Go ahead.JulieDoes it it feel weird that we're like subscriptions? No more ads. And then the pendulum is swinging other way, right? It's like our kids aren't going to understand. No, no, we're just going back to cable. Like, we already had this, and then we didn't have this, and now we have this again. It's just the way things cycle through is interesting to me.KevinWell, I think it's a cat and mouse game of we as advertisers. We want this ability to target at the household level. What screen streaming accounts allow that cable accounts didn't I used to do cable TV advertising at Heartland and you could pick a zip code. That was it like you could you can say target all of the Time Warner or Comcast subscribers in the zip code.KevinThat was the most you could target. Now that you can target accounts and you know who those accounts are, and that data gets blended with other data sources, it's the right thing that advertisers want. Whether consumers will put up with it is another thing, because it's it's hard to go back to like we use YouTube TV. Big brother is out.KevinMy wife loves Big brother. That's usually I get her the subscription to like the all access thing for Big Brother for her birthday. We missed the first two episodes, so we have to go back and watch YouTube, TV records, everything. But you have to. If you don't put it in your own DVR tool, you have to watch it with ads.KevinAnd I kid you not like every ad break is 8/32 commercials and they ad and like double it's like punitive. It's like you missed it haha we got you.AndrewYou want it.KevinAnd it's just painful to watch that stuff.AndrewPainful. I mean, at the end of the day, it's revenue per user, right? Just like you look at Facebook when they deliver their quarterlies, you read the PDFs and you're like, okay, okay. Like, all right, a average U.S. user is worth $23.54 per quarter. So you're like, Oh, well, I'll just pay $15 a month. I have no ads on my Facebook for them.AndrewYou know, they're not making that choice to do that. But that's what it is. That's at least that's why I interpret it like, right, we could go this way or this way. Revenue per user and then revenue at the end. But then they get into like, well, we need longevity, we need retention of these users. We can have attrition and dying off.AndrewSo they have to factor in all those things. But a fun, fun analysis for billions of dollars and and revenue to do. And like, here's what I'm presenting shaking your hands like I'm nervous to tell this to someone.KevinBut okay favorites.AndrewOh man. Oh man.KevinYeah. Andrews. Andrews again filling in for Beth last second. Let's see I think.AndrewFavorite.KevinAnd you can skip if you need to.AndrewActually you.KevinGot everything.JulieI got one. So my son just turned 15. He's starting high school, so for his birthday, he wanted us to take him shopping at the backpacker, which is like a it's more expensive than we're like usually for school clothes we would do like Target and all Navy because it's very everybody knows that I'm thrifty like that, so it's more expensive.JulieBut they had the they got the coolest school backpacks there to him out of the loop but they're there have an insulated pocket in the front for their lunches. So you know, you're 15 at high school. You don't want to carry a lunch bell. You must have like, built into the cool little backpack. So watch me cringe. Like it.JulieYes. Made me cringe a little bit when we.AndrewYeah, these are up there. I'm looking at them.JulieWhat we paid for all his clothes there. But, you know, he's getting older. He wanted the the cooler clothes.AndrewYeah. Yeah.KevinI'll just I'm wondering, I think your favorite should be the kids are back in school.AndrewThat is. That is my favorite. Yeah, that's great. It's my favorite. That's that. You want to do it this year. But yeah, I started This will be our next so like two weeks ago they started I time this is out I think or a week ago, whatever it may be. But yeah, I'm excited for that. But the fun challenge though is record 330 Eastern day at home.AndrewLike right now I want at 4:00 but I want to start is when they get home. So I'm like mute, unmute, mute because I have to walk through the door, which is, you know, 15 feet that way with my door shut and all that stuff is fine. But yeah, that was fun shopping for them. We have three so that you have to but you went to the backpacker, which Looks like a super sweet spot to go to.JulieFor a few things not have.AndrewYou think about.JulieEverything.AndrewBut it's yeah, our kids are in uniforms which is great, but you still like they got to get the dry fit ones otherwise, like the collared shirts shrink and then so they don't last long time. But yeah, so it's expensive starting back up school but I'm glad they're gone. It's quite the power bill will definitely go down because Fortnite and the Ps5, the Xbox and desktop are not running upstairs all day.AndrewRight. I'll take that. Forgot about that.KevinBut I am. I'm late to the game here. I feel like food shown up in boxes has come and gone for most people. They're like, Yeah, I tried Blue Apron, all that stuff. This is factor 75. I don't know if you've heard of this, but their refrigerated meals, they're all fully, fully prepared.AndrewOkay.KevinAnd the quality of the meat in particular is incredible. Like it is. It's like going to Cardinals, which is the premier butcher here in town. If you're going to make ribs or steak for special occasion, you're going to craft onions. All the meat is really, really good. It's not I guess some people use it for like dieting or whatever, but there's four or five categories like keto or like low calorie vegetarian, vegan or whatever.KevinIt's all really good. There is a pork chop thing that my wife had because she did it first and I was like, What are we doing? This is dumb. And I tried it. I thought it was filet mignon covered with like a cheese sauce. It was some pork chop thing. And I was like, okay, I'm sold. They can make pork chop tastes like filet mignon.KevinI'm in. I don't I'm sure it's expensive. But here's the thing. Everyone's going to school for the first time. No more home schooling for the Oakley's. And that means there's not lunches that are going to be downstairs and I won't eat anything. Like, I'll just eat a a a protein bar for lunch.AndrewKevin.KevinAnd it's way better for my body if I just eat actual meal.AndrewIt does a good and it's, yeah, we do some meal meal prep like this as well. It's definitely worth it. It's still cheaper than going to cheaper as in, if I do leave the office, I go pick up Chick-Fil-A, then I wait in line and then I drive back and then I sit at it like there's 45 minutes right there.AndrewEven though chick flies 10 minutes and this is maybe a dollar two because.KevinIt's all refrigerated, there's really no prep time for every single one of these entrees is 2 minutes.AndrewYes. And it's real food. Like, it's not like the ingredients are like chicken.KevinIn the bath. It does take up a little bit of fridge space. But yeah, that's some surprisingly because this is not really my thing.AndrewSecond fridge, I'm thinking that's well. Oh, have you had their blueberry buttermilk pancakes or.KevinIt's not done any breakfast. It's just purely a lunch thing. So Melanie doesn't have to mess with extra groceries for lunch for either of us. We just. And the portion sizes. I'm not. I'm not hungry.AndrewWith a smoky bacon and cheddar egg bites. Four of them looks pretty good.KevinFor those of you who may not be familiar, Andrews to all of the sessions are food and clothes.AndrewShorts, shopping for short.KevinOr shopping for shirts.JulieSpecifically shorts.AndrewIt's hot. It's hot and miserable. Yeah. I'll just move to like, not unlike the cold either. I'm stuck here.KevinAll right, That'll do it for this week. Thanks again for tuning in and joining us every week. We've got some fantastic guest episodes coming out shortly, one including Julie, talking a little bit more in-depth about her book. For those of you who haven't order in yet, you get a little bit of a preview. So check that out. We'll see you next time. The post Ep 299: One Stop Shop appeared first on Online Sales and Marketing for Home Builders - DYC.

Market Proof Marketing · Ep 297: Less is MoreIn this episode, Kevin Oakly, Andrew Peek and Julie Jarnagin discuss the lack of data being used by large corporations in regards to their marketing strategies as well as their frustrating experience with GA4 so far. They muse on the cascading effect on the economy of monthly mortgage payments being 20% higher than they were a year ago and how the low used homes inventory is causing realtors in a frenzy to reach out to builders for their listings.Story Time (04:41)Julie is being spammed by Hidden Valley Ranch emails.Kevin helped a builder problem solve: 6 leads to 54 (18 walk-ins + 36 online leads) Andrew finds that GA4 is still pretty clunky and has odds and ends to work out.News (31:10)Housing Market Update: The Typical U.S. Homebuyer's Monthly Payment Is Up Nearly 20% From a Year Ago As Prices Rise (https://www.redfin.com/news/housing-market-update-monthly-mortgage-payments-near-record-high/) Mortgage demand drops again after FHA loan interest rate hits 21-year high (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/09/mortgage-demand-drops-again-after-fha-loan-interest-rate-hits-21-year-high.html) Over 80% of Americans think it's a bad time to buy a house (https://www.businessinsider.com/house-price-outlook-homes-real-estate-investing-fannie-mae-survey-2023-8)Elon Musk's X aims to win back advertisers with new brand safety technology deal (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/08/elon-musks-x-aims-to-win-back-advertisers-signs-deal-with-ias.html)Favorites (48:45)Andrew's favorite is the kids are back to schoolKevin: Is loving his new refrigerated meals and especially is impressed with the quality of the meat.Julie loves the new backpack she got for her son to go back to school with that has an insulated pocket in the front for lunch.Questions? Comments? Email show@doyouconvert.com or call 404-369-2595 and we'll address them on the next episode. More insights, discussions, and opportunities can be found at Do You Convert All Access or on the Market Proof Marketing Facebook group.Subscribe on iTunesFollow on SpotifyListen On StitcherA weekly new home marketing podcast for home builders and developers. Each week Kevin Oakley, Andrew Peek, Jackie Lipinski, Julie Jarnagin, and other team members from Do You Convert will break down the headlines, share best practices and stories from the front line, and perform a deep dive on a relevant marketing topic. We're here to help you – not to sell you!Transcript: KevinWelcome to episode 297. I'm Kevin Oakley. And with me today is Julie Jarnagin and Andrew Peek, because Beth Russell went full on Miley Cyrus with her voice today. I didn't know thats a thing.AndrewAnd?KevinWe were conversing this morning. And I was like, huh, You're talking about you've gone for Miley Cyrus and she's like, Sorry, that was a mom joke, which I didn't realize mom jokes were a thing. So I just was happy that we have equal opportunity bashing adult jokes.AndrewI, I support it. Yeah. Miley has a pretty low voice, little boy raspy. It's not that. Well.JulieHer kid has been sick and so apparently it got passed down.AndrewIt's this is the beginning. Schools just started. So.JulieYeah, that's true. That's true. It's going to hit all of us.AndrewIt will only get worse.KevinNo one else in my family got an apology covered. That was shocking.JulieGood.AndrewGood.KevinTotally. Totally in the clear. All right, story time. Who's going first?JulieI can go.AndrewOh your first.JulieMine is kind of. Kind of random. So just randomly in my email, I got an email, like a marketing email from Hidden Valley Ranch. I was like, How in the world did I end up on this list? Is it a really, really old list I was on from like, maybe I got a recipe or maybe they sold it.JulieSomebody? I don't know. I just thought it was funny that I got it because I was like, That's random. Then I woke up the next morning. I had two from them overnight, so that was my third. Then within the span of like less than 48 hours, I had six different marketing emails from Hidden Valley Ranch, and I would try to and I would try to unsubscribe and I would keep getting them.JulieAnd so finally I just had to hit the like, this is spam button in my email, you know, quit sending them to me because it's just a reminder, not that you're Hidden Valley Ranch, but don't if you have a list and you haven't sent any emails and you just start spamming, don't do that. You need to send emails consistently on some kind of normal basis so people are expecting them.JulieAnd don't just send six in a day about Hidden Valley Ranch because.AndrewIt's like they're it's like a marketing automation just exploding.JulieCrazy.AndrewThe more, you know, thank me. What could they even promote? Like, do you get like a 36 pack of of all these.KevinOh no they they cross promote using recipes like sour cream or something. Yeah. Like you know you can ads you can add a ranch packet to sour cream and make them.JulieIt was a lot of recipes, I think. So I don't know how I ended up on it, but they were aggressive fun.KevinIs there a preferred email cadence like as well? I got this email today from someone said, Hey, my onsite team doesn't ever want marketing to send emails because they said, We don't want to overwhelm our customers with too much communication when it comes to too from marketing, what do what do we think?JulieI personally, I say twice a month from from marketing, maybe once a month. If you can't do two good once a month, do one good one a month, and probably no more than two a month. That's me. You all may have a different.KevinNumber two is my cap from marketing.AndrewLike and I like that I gave props to Opendoor a while ago where they gave a lot of value in their email. They're like, your new offer. Your new offer. I think it's every three weeks and it's there's value in there. They probably see that I open it. And so that's why they're giving me maybe I have an accelerated cadence compared to someone else.AndrewYeah, I think twice. And then maybe some type of like trigger that helps you slow down that cadence. Like, okay, now they're a purchased let's not give them all of the marketing emails, maybe they switch different list whatever maybe. But I think we all agree lean on less versus more from marketing.JulieWell, less as long as it's not non or randomly have a new just when we think that everybody needs some, I feel like it needs some kind of plan and strategy around it instead of when we get to it, because that usually means never until we're panicking. And then people get it and they're like, Wait, who is this?JulieWhat is this? If you do have a cadence, they at least are used to seeing you pop up in their inbox and it's not so insulting. I don't know if it's things are awkward, but with Hidden Valley Ranch Spammy.AndrewYeah.KevinYeah. It's one of those areas that as an industry we still don't use data properly, I think, to clearly find like, you know, from the time something becomes a lead to the time they decide to go on an appointment, I would argue that you you could if you to your point, if you had the great content, Julie, if you had, let's say, 15 amazing in-depth articles, slash blogs with photo galleries and or videos or virtual walkthroughs, about 15 different stories of customers who chose your homes and love them.KevinI think you could send one of those a month if they're good enough or sorry, one of those a week if they're good enough over 15 weeks. But the signal of once they once you go to an appointment, you're kind of transitioned to another phase. And while it might still be interesting to get those, you might then have to do the work of saying where are the best three that they haven't already seen and spacing them out more because there's now it's it's still going to be interesting just like people love watching issue TV even though they already know where they're going to move or you know, they just bought something.KevinThey still want to, but they don't need to be deluged with it in the same way. And of course, all those ideally would have the signal of go here in view more if you want, let the customer binge them, but then know not to send them because they've already seen them in an ideal world.AndrewSo maybe.KevinI'll write. Mine comes from a call early this week because I feel like this is happening a lot, not just with the builders that we work with, but but around the country where traffic is still high. In fact, the aggregate data set from homebuilder data, it's about the same as where it was in February, March in terms of traffic to homebuilder websites, lead volume depending on the price point an area some some places are down.KevinBut if you look at year over year, most people are still up tens. And so you're talking about a struggling neighborhood. And this last month in June, they had six leads in there. So this particular better uses lasso. When you use lasso and you're analyzing lead volume, a reminder that you typically have to go look in two places.KevinYou have to go look into the individual community project. And that's going to let you see all of the online leads that have transitioned to on site through an appointment as well as walk in traffic. And then you're going have to go to the online sales bucket project and look at the leads that have come in just for that neighbor.KevinThen you have to add the two together. So we started out looking in the project folder. First thing was that no one on the call immediately kind of already had their finger on the pulse of what the lead volume was for the community, which is marketers. We should always, especially the ones that are high focus, like this is a neighborhood that I taken over the call from Jacqui, the Penske issue on maternity leave, but they're like, Oh yeah, we talk about this one like every time.KevinSo cool, so many leads that we have. Last month. It's okay. Like, you know, they didn't know it, but we looked it up and they had 38 leads in the onsite project. And I was like, okay, cool. Well, we looked at where the lead sources were coming from, both in terms of like just phone call form submission as well as actual marketing source.KevinAnd then we go to June and there were six. It's like, Wow, that's a statistically significant difference. Like something changed what happened? And we go through the list and you want to guess what changed? Actually, I'm going to make a guess. You probably don't want to because you're like, I don't know, but.AndrewWhat's the number.KevinOf 6 to 38 leads just in the onsite project? What do you think.AndrewSix up to 38.JulieMM Oh, they increased more finished quick movements listed or I.KevinGuess.AndrewI think they just added them. They were there before that at everybody their close like they register them like, like they're like this. They had the same number. Maybe the number didn't change but they just decided like, well everyone's looking at me, I'm in the hot seat. I better add something in here.KevinWhich. Okay, so that's your final clue. For those of you playing at home, when leads start being put in the system by onsite agents, after there has been five or six months of intense scrutiny of said onsite agents, what's happened is there is a new one. There is a new onsite agent who doesn't know the game to be played and silly, silly salesperson.KevinYou're putting all of your walk in leads in the system. They don't know better. It's like I always go back to when I first started playing golf. It was the best golf I've ever played in my life, in my life, because I was just playing. I wasn't overthinking it. And then you start overthinking it. You start doing all these adjustments that are wrong.KevinTypically when you're new, you start playing worse, you get in your head. And so new salesperson now in the online bucket, we went back and there were 36 online leads for July for this neighborhood. And and so then we went back to the onsite project and just ran only the walk ins and there was eight of them. And then I'm really bad at Mass.KevinIt took me about 45 seconds to figure out that the total lead count for this struggling neighborhood was 54 in a 30 day period.JulieWow. Well.KevinThe one thing I always like to remind everyone is the way that we approach marketing and advertising and do you convert means that we don't have to consider at all unless our builder partner has chosen to do something that we don't recommend. We never have to wonder to ourselves. I wonder if those 54 people are interested or qualified in any sense of the word.KevinWhy don't we have to do that? And again, this is a really big deal because every ad we ever run talks about the location, price point and type of products that you are selling. So when those leads come across, they're not just like, you know, trying to collect a $50 scratch off ticket by entering in their contact information or entering to win a car or whatever the like.KevinSo to bring it all back down to the now that I've told you that journey, it was just like, wow, we don't have a struggling community from an advertising problem. We don't have a struggling community from a lead problem. What we have is an appointment to sale conversion challenge and with 54 people in a 30 day period, someone needs to give the sales team permission to screw it up.KevinAnd what I mean by that is just start getting sales. You know, they were like, Well, this is a hiring neighborhood. And we always get the feedback that a lot of customers are concerned about selling their existing home. I go make up and make up an existing home sale package incentive. Hey, no problem. What will we'll create? What is that?KevinMake it up. Just say, Well, will partner with three agents that we know are great agents and they're they've promised to do an enhanced listing package on any referral that we send over so you can pick any of those three agents. And then as the builder, you might have to pay an extra couple hundred bucks to them to make sure you get the best photographer that they typically would use an on site or do a little bit more advertising, whatever it is.KevinBut just say, yeah, we're just putting together the finishing touches of our list. Your home VIP experience. Let's just sign contingent upon using the details of that program and feeling comfortable selling your house or whatever. But something there's too much like, yeah, it's price. Yeah, but it and I think I talked about this last time so I'm not going to go into it but that builder that had a 6% performance sell ratio really changed some things around and got to a 20% that 11 sales to 51 sales.AndrewThat's a lot of.KevinNew cumulative leads for that incentive for people that are already in their system. And I was on a call with Jesse Suggs, online sales coach for another builder this morning. She did analysis for a builder and something like 80% of their sales were to people who had been in the system for over three months. All of the friction that's preventing sales is coming from the middle and the bottom of the funnel right now.KevinAnd that's likely to continue through the end of the year. And so just wake up, smell the coffee smell and then start adjusting accordingly because you're not. I have not. Maybe one of you two have. I haven't seen any promotion that anyone has done. 80 different builders, almost every state in the country over the last three months. That has significantly increased their lead volume.KevinAnd again, the only aspects there would be qualified leads, not just leads that are from performance max campaigns and mostly spam.AndrewDon't do that.KevinYou're not you're not going to convince anyone that today is the first day that they should start thinking about buying a house or moving.AndrewNo. And we'll we definitely have some news lined up to really support that.KevinLet's just jump into that one. Oh, we got it. So from a Business insider, over 80% of Americans think it's a bad time to buy a house, which coincidentally also means that the majority of Americans also think it's a bad time to sell a house. So sellers are also buyers and so they don't want to sell if they think it's a bad time to buy because most of them are going to have to buy.KevinSo 82% think it's a bad time to buy a new home. Affordability has plunged. So unless there is a reason to move, like even this goes back to I mean, you're someone text me this right now and I'm just I'm overdoing this point because it is so important. For the second half of this year, someone said, hey, what's your thoughts about success and failures around special inventory events, i.e. showcase of homes, liquidation event, year end sales, event, everything must go, etc. It's like, well, let's not call it everything must go or liquidation sale.KevinBut even in a good market, doing that consistently once a year and then at Heartland, we just that was the only incentive we did all year. Everything else was adjusting pricing to market. But every year we did basically a December to remember sales event. It was the only sales event of the year and that trick will work once.KevinSo I was just saying, you know, maybe end of summer and fall is a better time to get your stuff sold before the end of the year when everyone else is panicking. I kind of I don't mind that, but I said, Hey, just remember 70% of the buyers are probably already in the system. So it's communicating to those people you already know.KevinAnd they said back, we were thinking of doing this event for 75 to 90 days. What's your reaction to that?AndrewI I'm trying to figure out what I want to say out loud, but it feels like it's not a real event. Then it's garbage. Like it like I'm I view it negatively. Like it's not a real deal. It's just a fake promotion.KevinIt's too long. I feel like it's too long, especially knowing that the majority of people who will take advantage of that opportunity will be people they already know. So I said, Hey, probably doesn't need to be that long, you know, just heads up and said, Well, I think we're going to have to do longer because we don't do well.KevinFostering leads long term too, which I just wanted to say that's, that's an unacceptable.AndrewThat I misunderstand that they need it longer because they're not good at fostering leads.KevinBecause they think that, yeah, they're not good at nurturing leads longer term.AndrewOkay?KevinAnd so they feel like the salesman has to go for 90 days so that new leads can come in, have time to absorb the opportunity.AndrewEtc.. So they lose people after that when they're all leads aren't useful anymore, right? And you're like, No, no, no, that's your mortgage sitting there. You have your revenue.KevinEver been right now?AndrewYeah. Yeah. Interesting.KevinYeah. Back to the article. I kind of like merging story time. Article time.AndrewYeah, that's one's perfect. Unplanned. So that's fun.KevinThe average 30 year fixed mortgage rate has risen from under 5% to nearly 7%, according to Freddie Mac. With the Federal Reserve's most aggressive interest rate hiking campaign since the 1980s. I was born in 81, so the it's been a while and everyone's still kind of pessimistic now. But that doesn't mean that but that does mean by default the people who have to are more urgent.AndrewRight?JulieYeah, they have to. And I think it's such a good opportunity to just agree with them. But yeah, it is a terrible time to buy an existing house like. Yes, absolutely. You are completely right. It is a terrible time to buy an existing house. It's a great time to buy a new house because look at this great thing.JulieWe can do to help you and look how our how they hold their value. And it just is a good opener to a conversation to talk through these things. So I don't think you're ever going to convince all these people that, oh, 80% of people are wrong. You know, everybody because they.KevinThink about the think about the psychology here of you think it's a bad time to buy and you see an ad that a builder runs that says 50, 75 grand off if you buy by the other month. I think I think your negativity bias is like, see, I told you it's bad time to buy. You don't think you're so much money.AndrewYeah, I.KevinWasn't going to buy, but now I can save 75 grant like again. It doesn't mean it doesn't work, but it doesn't work for the reason we tell ourselves. It works. When someone buys something that's on sale, that's because that's what they believe it's actually worth. Or they believe that there's some that like it's not the savings we justify that we tell our spouse, Hey, don't get mad at me.KevinI just saved us $100. But in our minds, we knew that that's not what we did.AndrewYeah, that's what it should be paid. I can see that reaction being like, oh, desperation. It's still overpriced. This as far as like if you're being kind of indoctrinated with like these articles like this where like 80% say it's bad time to buy, your reaction is to be correct with the rest of society. And so you're like, Well, I'll go along with that.AndrewI feel like they'll make me look smart. And like you said, Julie, like, well, the builders are the ones offering like these great incentives 5.25, five and a half, 4%, whatever. Like that's different than 7%, significantly different. So.KevinWell, and the other thing that's interesting about interest rates. Barbara Corcoran, you all know her from Shark Tank. Well, she's kind of got a thing that's going viral around the the U.S home industry right now because she's like everyone. You've got to buy a house now that rates are at 7% because when rates go down, the prices are going to go up.KevinSo what she's correlating to and it's not a crazy thought at all, is when rates were at four and a half and they went down to three. It took it took too long for most builders to figure this out. But builders are like, wait a minute, I can you know, I still remember people were like, how much should we raise prices by Kevin?KevinI mean, they just keep selling. What should we raise? And so I go, Just do the math of exactly what is the same payment and you can go there. Now it's the affordability around payment. You can just go to that price. You have to look at your cost, just go to that price. And so her argument is if you buy now and take that pain, you'll be better off because the rates go down, the prices of everything will go higher.KevinThat's not a guarantee, by the way, because if rates go down, it still means that there's bad things going on in the economy and the job market. It's earned.AndrewBut it's, I think to say kind of rudely my brain like that's like privilege problems, right? Like she's like I have X amount a bank account like I'm I'll deal with this and two years I'm out of the situation. But if you're stuck at 7% forever, you can't refi. Your financial situation doesn't change or drastically go up. Then you're kind of you could be stuck.AndrewSo for normal people, maybe not. But I, I definitely understand what she's what she's saying there. What's interesting is do we know anyone This is going way back. Remember Daw d0r the.KevinYork tracking the infrared tracking tool?AndrewYeah, I remember. They weren't that expensive to implement. And then, like, as we kind of got used to that and I'm not sure if there's any builders still using it, but there's a recommendation like put it, don't put it at the front door. But like in the primary bathroom or something or whatever, it'd be like, okay, real people and the model home will definitely go here versus someone going in and out, in and out deliveries, mail, etc., etc..AndrewInteresting. Having that data to kind of normalize like the salesperson. This is back to the first part of your story. Like leads went up. Now it's just a new you'll see a new sales agent on site. It's like, well, we've had 300 people come in, 200 people, a hundred people, whatever it is, that person has six, six. So that just kind of like normalize the data.AndrewBe interesting. So my little story is just like maybe it's it'll make you feel comfortable. J4 is still quirky. I don't, I don't like it. I don't get it. I was just on a call about an hour and a half ago. Really intelligent guy is like, Hey, we're seeing this like what is happening? And I'm sitting there like, Man, I wish I could be super smart right now and have the answer to this.AndrewI'm like, I have no idea. Like, let me just rebuild that report for you and maybe that will fix it. Like, I do not know, like essentially it was only charting one campaign, but the other campaigns were down here. The numbers were making sense. The ad and like, you know, everyone has the delay of the data. It seems like 24, 36, 48 hours.AndrewThere seems to be a little bit longer than that. It's a lot of fun and they have a lot of data. So it's not like we've seen some where like at the sampling a smaller is could be goofy, but it just seems to be inconsistent all over the place and it's not much fun. Thank you. Google it's not fun at all.KevinYeah it's well and the inconsistencies fortunately are not. It'd be one thing if it was just Google but it's implementation still up for on some web environments that you know it's yeah and that's where you can't I mean you will because you're human you'll get mad at the web developer but it's it's multiple web developers that are having this issue it's not just one.KevinAnd sometimes it's for a bit of code that really should have nothing to do with causing any interference with GFR. So I feel like I use this a lot. But you know, WordPress is a great format for a blog, but trying to build a website with WordPress, in fact, again, just this morning talked with a large organization, multistate organization that still uses WordPress for their and we were talking about they are having a spam issue.KevinAnd I said, well, a lot of times WordPress is something that doesn't help that and they're like, Oh really? Why go? Because you don't often update WordPress as often as you should when you've got 20 different plug ins that are connected to that. Yeah. So then we'll potentially break when you update it. Like, yeah, we're on a really old version.KevinI go, Yeah, you're going to get spammed.AndrewIt's been hacked.KevinSo it's that same kind of issue though that WordPress has where you're using the same website you always have go for said, Hey, no big deal, just put in this line of code and put it here exactly where we tell you and everything will be fine. But there's interaction with other lines of code that really shouldn't be affecting it, that that are for some people, thankfully, it's only about 5% that are still working through that issue.KevinAnd also, thankfully, I just saw an article posted yesterday like for 90% of people, UK is still alive and kicking and I.AndrewDidn't see it. I'm like, I want to use it. But then I. Principal Mike, I don't think I could be the one that says I.KevinFinally converted all of my little stars on Google Analytics over to Jay for accounts versus UK. But it is terrible.JulieI have to say I've gotten more use to die for than I thought because the other day I was in there and I was like, Oh shoot, I'm using you. Like just because it looked familiar to me. And I was like, Oh, I'm not. I'm just used to this now. So that's good. And Andrew, the most frustrating thing is when a piece of data is showing up in one place, like randomly, but it's showing up in the place it needs to show up.JulieYou're like, I know it's there, it exists, I just can't make it. So that was where it needs to show.AndrewI think that was Tuesday. Julie and I were troubleshooting Google Tag Manager and J4 and like everything was correct, it just wouldn't show up in both places. For certain events. We're setting up to support conversion tracking. Yeah, there's no certainty. Which by the way, I look above my head. The site added. You look right, that perfect.JulieWill.AndrewColor my room. It's stuff that's that's all my story is but I get the 5% of of all of it so like 90% of my world is it's it's broken J for I'm like are you kidding?KevinAndrew is our level five tech support. Yeah.AndrewSo it all rolls sideways and uphill and diagonally to me. It's great.KevinWe don't have a perfect tracker here to fixing everything, but we are, I think, nearly perfect on identifying the cause. Like if it's something that we can't touch, like a website or a server issue or whatever. But we can, we can usually help sometimes.JulieI'm actually happy when Andrew can't fix it out, so I feel like it was a dumb question. It was like, This might be stupid. Andrew And then when you can't and I'm like, Yes, it's a real.AndrewProblem and sometimes that's enough is like, okay, cool. I'm not going crazy anymore. Like we all agree this is just weird and quirky. We're not going to worry about it for a little bit. And then sure enough, I'll just fix itself on its own.KevinNext up, I guess we'll link to my tweet. We still call it that. I don't know. But Zillow is hiring over 100 photographers around the country like to continue to enhance their enhanced listings product. And so what's really cool about this is Zillow. If you've missed somewhere, been under a rock over the last six months or so, showing shown time plus which they purchased, which is like the centralized scheduling platform and then they've kind of built around that enhanced listing features, 3D tours, photos, basically everything you need to get your listing to look better.KevinYou get a better layer on the actual map as well. They're going all in on this and I think it's the right call for any syndication company to do so because, you know, Julie wrote a book and that's great, but content's still hard for builders, harder than it maybe should be. A lot of times it's just because they are still doing something really stupid, like connected TV advertising or billboards or whatever.KevinLike you have the money to solve this problem, but you're using it for for less efficient purposes. But I, I have a feeling this is going to be huge when they start to roll it out. And I have no idea when they'll be doing this. But the moment the builders can just say are already advertising on Zillow and it's like, yeah, for X amount more or I don't know if they're going to include it, but you want to just come take pictures of this house, like really good pictures and it's also a good box out move for home XCOM, which is trying to come in and disrupt.KevinAlthough I read an article that basically they even know they're not going to be Zillow, it's like where our goal is to be a really good number two and keep Zillow honest. But we're not going to we're not going to take over.AndrewI mean, there's there's being ads to Google ads. So there's always the number two. I wonder if they'll even have the photographers edit, Which would be.KevinI think so. I mean, basic basic edits. Yeah, basic cleanup.AndrewAnd that's like, imagine that.KevinBe really smart about this from a strategic perspective. And homes while Costar Homes parent company started this on the commercial side they can take these pictures and again I haven't seen any paperwork so I have no clue how this will work. But my hunch is it will work similar to Costar. And that Costar lets the commercial agents use the imagery that they shoot for anything except to send to other commercial real estate syndication portals.KevinSo this whole concept Inman Connect in Vegas has gone on this week, and one of the panels with Robert Rifkin, the CEO of Compass and someone from Redfin and the CEO of Next Next Home, I think is the name of the company. They're all talking about how like pocket listings or like listings that are unique to to a company are just so incredibly important right now because there's not enough of them.KevinAnd that's why we talked about Howard Hanna's move in the Cleveland area to be like, Nope, we're not sharing our listings with other offices in the same way we have been. This is just like, again, it's in the technology world. They call it like getting closer to the bare metal. You're talking about taking pictures of listings, You're getting closer to boxing out competitors in like the most bare metal approach, like here, like it's where the rubber meets the road.KevinLike you don't have pictures. Great. So you're listing on homes that com says that the house is 2000 square feet but it has no pictures.AndrewYeah, it's pretty simple.KevinNo one's going to care, Alison.AndrewEspecially the beat, I'm sure. Great pictures to like. They'll be standardized and like, that would be the look for real estate photography. Whatever Zillow decides, if they end up being like they set the mood, they set the tempo of it. So that's, that's pretty cool. Good for them.KevinYeah. I just think what good for everyone if it's done right and we don't know if it will be done right, but anything that helps a builder solve a problem at a reasonable price and help Zillow like that's doesn't happen often again. But win win wins are really good.AndrewYeah, I like it again.KevinAll right. Back to bad news that we're we're going. I think so.AndrewIt's like bad news I think it's bad.KevinFrom from Redfin dot com housing market Update The typical U.S. homebuyers monthly payment is up nearly 20% from a year ago as prices rise.AndrewThat's a big 20%.KevinThe average price of a home is only up 3.2%, but the average payment is up 20. Thank you. Interest rates?AndrewYeah. Interest rates, do you think? Obviously lower down payments, I would assume so. That's affecting it. Yes. Is it my mind on this goes to everything outside of housing like this does affect housing, but I'm like, so I'm in Florida right here by the water 5 minutes away. I'm thinking like, oh, like a lot of people on a boat.AndrewYou got a boat show. You do not see a price. You see a monthly payment on every boat. And you're like, yeah, boats 229 a month bring a boat warranty and include seats. So all this stuff here, like I'll be looking at Lindsay 229 month, like we just don't have to go to Chick-Fil-A six times. Like that's not bad.AndrewLet's sacrifice that. We could get a boat, bring boat. But as things like this go up, I'm like, Oh, that's not an option anymore. Let's not do that. And now the person that's selling the boat, they have less commission now they're making less money. That's kind of like a cascading effect of like if you're what's the phrase like house house for like eventually I feel like that long term, I don't have the data on this and not on The Economist info on this like you eventually that affects other industries and it's this full circle of like, that's not good.AndrewI'm sure there's like a perfect number to be at, right? That I don't know. Maybe there isn't where if it's too high, then it affects you spend less in other places. If it's too low, then there should be more spend and housing. You could afford more as that keeps prices lower, keeps demand lower, if that makes any sense in my head.AndrewThis makes perfect sense.KevinI think it makes it just like, I don't know, 2000 people who work for the Fed, who are trying to figure out like answer that question extremely complicated. That's why rates are moving around and I'm just I got a little bit distracted because I'm looking at this chart, which is on the video version on on YouTube. For those of you watching or on do, you can become yeah, home listings are down 21% year over year look at so 2022 the red line this is when everyone's like see I told you so the world is going to end because listing listings started reappearing and then June, July they fell off and they I mean, the yellowKevinline for 2023 is just I mean, it's it's in the range, let's just say, of 2020 COVID lows, like April, May, number of new homes that hit the market was at an all time low for April May. But we've kind of been hanging around there all of 20, 23. It's just incredible, like the amount of pain on the used home side of the world for these folks who don't have the number of transactions is crazy.KevinAnd I am hearing again, we got to get an agent or a broker on the program to talk about this because I'm getting more emails and texts as well from builders who are like, what is going on with real estate agents? They are losing their their mind. Every deal is like a huge there. I mean, some of the words they use to describe the behavior, I don't know if I can say on air, but.AndrewYou need a little sensor.KevinBut they're like, please tell us that you have something happen at the summit in September talking about how to handle agents and what to do because it's just it's but I mean, you have to understand the pain that a lot of them are going through here. It's not it might be irrational behavior, but it's irrational behavior caused by irrational source, if that makes.JulieSense. That's why I just had a conversation with a builder that I'm like, Why? What did you do? Why are your walk ins so much higher? And it's somebody who they have never wanted to bother with realtors. They never needed realtors. They were just a pain in their side. And she was like, What? Honestly, we've been Dylan more with realtors and open to working with them now just because they need they need listings and we've got the listings.JulieSo we're like, okay, so what's kind of even changing how some people are open to working with realtor.AndrewRealtors.JulieI'm sure.AndrewPursuing.JulieIt's going to make things more crazy for them for sure.KevinYeah. Interesting. All right. I don't think there's anything else really that I want to talk about from the news. It's more like we know that stuff. Elon Musk is trying to win back advertisers with brand safety technology. I mean, I'm I don't even want to think.AndrewAbout it for. That's my thought. I'm then I have this for this this new or old news I don't know.KevinFirst of all the whole the whole thing, I mean, maybe it settles down and in some ways it has because thread thread who like, what's that thing? All the users that I and the community is alive and well they're most of the people I interact with are not have not gone away or stopped actually on. Okay but like advertisers are so fact I do want to read this I pulled up another thing that we can't share the link to because it's a subscription to Digiday plus they called me in to like a $200 subscription for the year because I really wanted to read get you again a point for like great content wins.KevinBut advertisers are so fickle and right now they're such pressure to perform that experimentation on a platform that's been there, done that, and not much has changed. It's like now we all tried. Remember, everyone was going to boycott Instagram and Facebook and never used them again and they were going to go on LinkedIn and Twitter and Pinterest and all these other places.KevinWell, guess what? They're back because they need things that actually deliver qualified people in revenue. So this article is here's what ad and media execs really mean when they commented on their queue to earnings. This is hilarious to me. So and so far so good. I'll try to use different voices just for entertainment value. So these are all things that that high level executives said on their earnings call.KevinThe is Doug Horn, the CFO at Gannett. For those of you who are born in the last 35 years, that's a newspaper company who tries to do digital media as well. But here's what he said. Despite secular headwinds, the decrease in print advertising revenue was limited to 8.9% year over marking the smallest decline observed in the past year.KevinAnd then here's what he actually meant. That quarter could have been a lot worse, except for the fact that our print advertising sucked less than expected. I think people are still dumb enough to buy print ads. Spence Newman, the CFO at Netflix, said. Our overall ad arm subscription plus ads continue to be higher than basic ad free globally, same as the statement on standard Bore.KevinHere's what he meant. Advertising is not a major moneymaker for Netflix, yet we made all of our money by just not letting people share subscriptions. I'm not even going to say what they actually said, just what they meant, because it's it's to me, it's just a really good insight into the chaos that is the traditional advertising world. Zaslav Warner Brothers CEO said.KevinWho needs a massive subscriber base When you can focus on a handful of loyal customers and make millions, am I right? So basically it's like we're not even going to try to grow the number of subscribers we have there. Just charge them a heck of a lot of money for not a lot of content, and it's working just fine.KevinMichael CAVANAUGH Comcast president. There are too many moving parts that would need to align for a deal of the magnitude to come together of being sold or swapping business units. See, I think there's one other one in here that was really interesting. Bob Bakish, CEO of Paramount Global, talking about the whole writers strike and labor dispute. Basically, whoever has the goal tends to make the rules and we've got the gold.KevinAnd they also by the way, it's been interesting just hearing all of the AI generative AI discussions around like, could you pick a worse time to have a strike over something that.AndrewSo yeah.KevinIt just is really interesting. So I mean, Mark Zuckerberg, this is pretty good. Rails plays exceeded 200 billion per day across Facebook and Instagram. We're seeing good progress on real monetization as well with the annual revenue run rate across our apps now exceeding $10 billion up from 3 billion last fall. What he actually meant is we're about to make a whole crap ton of money from short form videos.KevinVery soon.AndrewYeah.KevinBut like people in the print industry, I mean, even TV again, I've hinted at a couple of times, but connected TV advertising sounds awesome. And like Disney Plus right now is pivoting their last call. Iger just said, You know what? We don't want people like we're going to up the price of Disney Plus because we will make way more money.KevinIf we can sell ads, then if we make people pay what they're willing to pay for the platform. So their goal is actually to grow the ad supported subscriptions more than anything else. And if if they and others convince more people to do that and you can start affordably, that's the key. Affordably targeting households with TV advertising on streaming services, that would be great for right now.KevinIt's the only way that people like Disney can make money. They can sell the that because the concept of it is so good in an actual performance it it's not worth the expense being paid except for those people who are making money from the ads being being bought.AndrewYeah, I mean, essentially it is Go ahead.JulieDoes it it feel weird that we're like subscriptions? No more ads. And then the pendulum is swinging other way, right? It's like our kids aren't going to understand. No, no, we're just going back to cable. Like, we already had this, and then we didn't have this, and now we have this again. It's just the way things cycle through is interesting to me.KevinWell, I think it's a cat and mouse game of we as advertisers. We want this ability to target at the household level. What screen streaming accounts allow that cable accounts didn't I used to do cable TV advertising at Heartland and you could pick a zip code. That was it like you could you can say target all of the Time Warner or Comcast subscribers in the zip code.KevinThat was the most you could target. Now that you can target accounts and you know who those accounts are, and that data gets blended with other data sources, it's the right thing that advertisers want. Whether consumers will put up with it is another thing, because it's it's hard to go back to like we use YouTube TV. Big brother is out.KevinMy wife loves Big brother. That's usually I get her the subscription to like the all access thing for Big Brother for her birthday. We missed the first two episodes, so we have to go back and watch YouTube, TV records, everything. But you have to. If you don't put it in your own DVR tool, you have to watch it with ads.KevinAnd I kid you not like every ad break is 8/32 commercials and they ad and like double it's like punitive. It's like you missed it haha we got you.AndrewYou want it.KevinAnd it's just painful to watch that stuff.AndrewPainful. I mean, at the end of the day, it's revenue per user, right? Just like you look at Facebook when they deliver their quarterlies, you read the PDFs and you're like, okay, okay. Like, all right, a average U.S. user is worth $23.54 per quarter. So you're like, Oh, well, I'll just pay $15 a month. I have no ads on my Facebook for them.AndrewYou know, they're not making that choice to do that. But that's what it is. That's at least that's why I interpret it like, right, we could go this way or this way. Revenue per user and then revenue at the end. But then they get into like, well, we need longevity, we need retention of these users. We can have attrition and dying off.AndrewSo they have to factor in all those things. But a fun, fun analysis for billions of dollars and and revenue to do. And like, here's what I'm presenting shaking your hands like I'm nervous to tell this to someone.KevinBut okay favorites.AndrewOh man. Oh man.KevinYeah. Andrews. Andrews again filling in for Beth last second. Let's see I think.AndrewFavorite.KevinAnd you can skip if you need to.AndrewActually you.KevinGot everything.JulieI got one. So my son just turned 15. He's starting high school, so for his birthday, he wanted us to take him shopping at the backpacker, which is like a it's more expensive than we're like usually for school clothes we would do like Target and all Navy because it's very everybody knows that I'm thrifty like that, so it's more expensive.JulieBut they had the they got the coolest school backpacks there to him out of the loop but they're there have an insulated pocket in the front for their lunches. So you know, you're 15 at high school. You don't want to carry a lunch bell. You must have like, built into the cool little backpack. So watch me cringe. Like it.JulieYes. Made me cringe a little bit when we.AndrewYeah, these are up there. I'm looking at them.JulieWhat we paid for all his clothes there. But, you know, he's getting older. He wanted the the cooler clothes.AndrewYeah. Yeah.KevinI'll just I'm wondering, I think your favorite should be the kids are back in school.AndrewThat is. That is my favorite. Yeah, that's great. It's my favorite. That's that. You want to do it this year. But yeah, I started This will be our next so like two weeks ago they started I time this is out I think or a week ago, whatever it may be. But yeah, I'm excited for that. But the fun challenge though is record 330 Eastern day at home.AndrewLike right now I want at 4:00 but I want to start is when they get home. So I'm like mute, unmute, mute because I have to walk through the door, which is, you know, 15 feet that way with my door shut and all that stuff is fine. But yeah, that was fun shopping for them. We have three so that you have to but you went to the backpacker, which Looks like a super sweet spot to go to.JulieFor a few things not have.AndrewYou think about.JulieEverything.AndrewBut it's yeah, our kids are in uniforms which is great, but you still like they got to get the dry fit ones otherwise, like the collared shirts shrink and then so they don't last long time. But yeah, so it's expensive starting back up school but I'm glad they're gone. It's quite the power bill will definitely go down because Fortnite and the Ps5, the Xbox and desktop are not running upstairs all day.AndrewRight. I'll take that. Forgot about that.KevinBut I am. I'm late to the game here. I feel like food shown up in boxes has come and gone for most people. They're like, Yeah, I tried Blue Apron, all that stuff. This is factor 75. I don't know if you've heard of this, but their refrigerated meals, they're all fully, fully prepared.AndrewOkay.KevinAnd the quality of the meat in particular is incredible. Like it is. It's like going to Cardinals, which is the premier butcher here in town. If you're going to make ribs or steak for special occasion, you're going to craft onions. All the meat is really, really good. It's not I guess some people use it for like dieting or whatever, but there's four or five categories like keto or like low calorie vegetarian, vegan or whatever.KevinIt's all really good. There is a pork chop thing that my wife had because she did it first and I was like, What are we doing? This is dumb. And I tried it. I thought it was filet mignon covered with like a cheese sauce. It was some pork chop thing. And I was like, okay, I'm sold. They can make pork chop tastes like filet mignon.KevinI'm in. I don't I'm sure it's expensive. But here's the thing. Everyone's going to school for the first time. No more home schooling for the Oakley's. And that means there's not lunches that are going to be downstairs and I won't eat anything. Like, I'll just eat a a a protein bar for lunch.AndrewKevin.KevinAnd it's way better for my body if I just eat actual meal.AndrewIt does a good and it's, yeah, we do some meal meal prep like this as well. It's definitely worth it. It's still cheaper than going to cheaper as in, if I do leave the office, I go pick up Chick-Fil-A, then I wait in line and then I drive back and then I sit at it like there's 45 minutes right there.AndrewEven though chick flies 10 minutes and this is maybe a dollar two because.KevinIt's all refrigerated, there's really no prep time for every single one of these entrees is 2 minutes.AndrewYes. And it's real food. Like, it's not like the ingredients are like chicken.KevinIn the bath. It does take up a little bit of fridge space. But yeah, that's some surprisingly because this is not really my thing.AndrewSecond fridge, I'm thinking that's well. Oh, have you had their blueberry buttermilk pancakes or.KevinIt's not done any breakfast. It's just purely a lunch thing. So Melanie doesn't have to mess with extra groceries for lunch for either of us. We just. And the portion sizes. I'm not. I'm not hungry.AndrewWith a smoky bacon and cheddar egg bites. Four of them looks pretty good.KevinFor those of you who may not be familiar, Andrews to all of the sessions are food and clothes.AndrewShorts, shopping for short.KevinOr shopping for shirts.JulieSpecifically shorts.AndrewIt's hot. It's hot and miserable. Yeah. I'll just move to like, not unlike the cold either. I'm stuck here.KevinAll right, That'll do it for this week. Thanks again for tuning in and joining us every week. We've got some fantastic guest episodes coming out shortly, one including Julie, talking a little bit more in-depth about her book. For those of you who haven't order in yet, you get a little bit of a preview. So check that out. We'll see you next time. The post Ep 297: Less Is More appeared first on Online Sales and Marketing for Home Builders - DYC.

Bulletproof Dental Practice Podcast Episode 308 Hosts: Dr. Peter Boulden & Dr. Craig Spodak Guests: Dr. Trey Tippit & Dr. Dwight Peccora Key Takeaways:  Business owners and leaders should set a clear vision for their teams to follow Investing in team development should not be feared, as it leads to better outcomes Differentiation strategies for dental practices - using Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Google Search Console Understanding analytics and data migration is crucial for business success Personal runway and transparency in business negotiations The power of the multiple model EBITDA and its importance in dentistry Private equity's focus on cash flow and value impact Due diligence is crucial when buying a dental practice, focusing on patient numbers, tax returns, and economies of scale The significance of cash flow statements for tracking expenses and trends Leverage is a key factor in generating wealth, and financing depreciating assets should be considered carefully Reflecting on past financial mistakes is advised for better financial decisions Leverage can extend beyond debt and involves various types of balance sheets and financial analysis Arbitrage = the difference in prices for practices in different environment References: Bulletproof Mastermind Bulletproof Summit – Mighty Networks: Bulletproof Dental Practice

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Google Analytics Login Scroll Depth Tracking Time On Site Tracking Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript Does the mention of Google Analytics 4 send shivers through your bones as a LinkedIn advertiser? Never fear. I'm walking you through everything you need to know about GA4 on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn ads fanatics, Universal Analytics is now gone. And Google Analytics, or GA4 as we'll call it, is the new reality for us marketers, I don't want you to miss a beat during this transition. So we're going to go through everything that you need to set up and use in the new GA4 that will help you analyze your LinkedIn Ads traffic. So this isn't going to be a resource for setting it up. You should already have GA4 setup. So I'm not going to go through any of that. But my aim here is to give you all the tools to analyze your LinkedIn Ads specific traffic. We're gonna go over which reports to use to actually analyze your LinkedIn Ads traffic plus specific events that you'll create to show engagement from your ad audiences and how to create conversions from them. First, I want to highlight a review here, Vadim Aizenshtein left a review that says, "One of the most awesome professional marketing knowledge sources out there. As a performance marketer, I quite often find myself looking for inspiration and knowledge. The problem is the mass of bs and fluff, "experts" out there that help fill the airwaves with irrelevant and misleading content. AJ's blog and podcast is an oasis of amazing insights and guides for marketers who actually want actual results, and not just show that they're making noise out there. Thanks, AJ." Hey, Vadim, I really appreciate such an awesome review for us, we try extremely hard to make sure that there's no bs here. And that the information we're putting out is exactly what we wish someone would be able to share with us as we were learning. And please, everyone who's listening, do go leave us a review, it is by far the best way that you can say thank you, for us coming out with this content every week. And of course, I want to feature you here on the podcast as well. Alright, without further ado, let's hit it. As an advertiser on LinkedIn, you're likely not just sending all of your traffic to a form asking for a conversion, or at least I hope you're not. So in this case, you're paying high LinkedIn prices for traffic, but you won't have conversions to show for it, at least not yet. But how nice would it be if you have some proof that the traffic was actually working, they were engaged with your content, they were liking what you were putting out, I've got two great ways for you to do exactly that. The first is called a scroll depth event. We've linked down in the show notes to an article by datarivenu.com. And it walks you through exactly how to do this through Google's Tag Manager. Essentially, what you're doing is you're telling Google Tag Manager to watch and see what the user is doing. Once they scroll past a certain depth of the page, it can fire an event that then gets logged into Google Analytics. Now, it's important to know that by default, Google Analytics 4 has an event that is called scroll event, but it has some serious disadvantages. So I'm going to help show you how to customize yours so you can get past all these. The default Google Analytics for scroll event, it triggers only when visitors get to 90% of the web page. So almost the bottom, this is actually pretty good practice because many websites have footers that take up a little bit of room. So you don't actually expect people to make it to a full 100% Scroll if they have consumed all the content. So 90% is a good rule of thumb. But relying solely on a 90% scroll depth is pretty weak in my book. I would like to go and add another couple scroll depths that would help us understand how intensely people are engaging with our website. So go read the article on datadrivenu that will walk you exactly through how to do this, my recommendation would probably be to create one event that's at 50% scroll, and another one that's 70% scroll, and then the default GA for one is going to trigger at 90%. So now you have three ways of finding out how many people are scrolling past 50%. One little correction that I have for the data driven you article, as you're following it through, we tried to follow it. So about halfway down the article where it actually starts teaching you how to set this up. The headline here says how to set up scroll depth in Google Analytics for with Google Tag Manager. And it starts with a tip it says before you begin copy the measurement ID on the top of your Google Tag Manager account, you will need this in step four. And then when we got down to step four, we actually tried to create this event using the Google Tag Manager ID and it actually fired an error. So we figured out what it's actually asking for is the Google Tag measurement ID from Google Analytics 4. It starts with a G- but other than that, that article is perfectly helpful at helping you get this setup. As an overview, what you're going to do is go into your Google Tag Manager, you create a new tag called scroll depth and then you're going to define how deep that depth is. You have three different choices. You have a scroll depth threshold, so past a certain threshold, you have a certain number of pixels or percentage, and then you can also fire an event based off of scroll direction, if they're scrolling vertically or horizontally. So once you've created these scroll depths inside of Google Tag Manager, now you go into Google Analytics to set to recognize those events. And the cool thing about this is they're already there. That's right, you don't actually have to go into Google Analytics and do anything, these events are being pushed right into Google Analytics. And all you need to do is know where to see them so that you can make use of them in your reports. We'll get to that here in a little bit. And I decided to make my scroll depths based off of percentages, like I said, 50%, 70%, and 90%. But you can decide to do it however you want. You can even do a certain number of pixels down the page or anything like that. I just thought percentages were sure nice. Okay, so what if you don't really care about scroll depth. So scroll depth isn't the end all be all, because sometimes we want to measure how long they're spending on the site. So the next thing we want to do is create time on site events. In the shownotes, we linked to a really good YouTube video that walks you through exactly how to create these. Again, this is in Google Tag Manager. Similar to scroll down GA 4 already has a way of telling whether someone is engaged for a certain amount of time. GA 4 has an event that comes with it called engaged sessions. Now engaged sessions is anyone who stayed around longer than 10 seconds or converted or had two or more pageviews. So yeah, that's nice. But you know, me, I want a little bit more control here. I want to fire an event, anytime someone makes it to a one minute time on site, a three minute, and a five minute time on site. I feel like if someone spends five whole minutes on our website, they are probably super engaged. Alright, so what you do is you go and create an event inside of Google Tag Manager, and I called my first one web page timer one minute. And then for the trigger, I triggered it to fire at the interval of 60,000 milliseconds. So that equals one minute. So if you want to follow our lead here, you're going to make a three minute one, and that's going to be 180,000 milliseconds, and then a five minute one will be 300,000 milliseconds. Alright, so that's all the math that you're going to have to do here. So again, go follow that YouTube video, we've linked to it down below, it's super easy. And that's gonna get you as many of these page timers as you want to fire. So as you guess, now you have these scroll depth triggers that are firing and you have time on site triggers that are firing and Google Analytics 4 is waiting for these to come in and allowing you to just add them to your report willy nilly. It's great. 7:36 Alright, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into setting up conversions and letting you know which reports to use. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. Managing LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment Do you want your return consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked, the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest accounts over the past 12 years. And our unique scientific approach to ADS management combined with our proprietary tools allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency, in house team, or digital ads hire. Plus, we're official LinkedIn partners. To schedule a discovery call just go to B2Linkedlinkedin.com/apply and we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work together. Alright, let's jump back into it. We're going to be setting up conversions. So the way that GA 4 works is everything is an event. Every page view is an event. These scroll depth triggers and these page timers, all of them are events. Conversions or an event. You get the idea here, okay, so all conversions are in GA 4 is just an event that you've told LinkedIn. This is really serious to me, I want to call it a conversion. And that's really easy to do. What you do is you go into the cog, the admin cog inside of GA 4, and underneath property, you click on events. Now you'll see a list of all of the different events that GA 4 is tracking. If you've been following along, you might see here a scroll depth 50%, a scrolled up 70%, a scroll depth 90%, a web page timer for one minute, three minutes, and five minutes. Okay, that's great. Over in the right hand column, you'll see this toggle switch called mark as conversion. So let's say I wanted to mark a five minute page duration and a 90% scroll as a conversion for something that I'm monitoring, I can flip that little toggle switch or I can flip that little toggle switch to on. And now anytime I'm viewing my reports, and it shows conversions, I know I'm tracking one of those things. Or you can keep conversions for when someone fills out a form. This is totally customizable by you. Now, be aware that when you set up an event inside of Google Tag Manager, it's gonna take a little bit for Google Analytics 4 to recognize it and to start calculating data based off of it. So don't be upset if you've set this up inside of Tag Manager, and then you go inside of GA 4 and you don't see it as an event yet, don't worry, it'll happen. Give it a day or two. So if you had already set up conversions in Google Analytics, chances are all of those conversions that you had previously created got automatically added to your new GA 4 property. That happened with all of ours that we had set up, we didn't have to create a single conversion event. But what if you want to create a new conversion event, let's say you just came out with some new landing pages or a new thank you page and you want to create a new event inside of GA for that's pretty easy. We were already here, but click on the cog, the admin cog, and then go down to events under property. And here, you can click the button that says Create Event. Now it's a little bit tricky. This is very technical, the way they have things worded. So I actually had to look up some help for it. So for my event name, this one's easy, I just typed or whatever, like a thank you page. Then down below, you have three boxes, you have a parameter, operator, and a value. For parameter, you put page location. This is for if someone makes it to a thank you page, you want to call them a conversion. So that's a page location, then the operator we did contains, and then the value is what you actually have in your URL. So in this case, we just said any page that contains thank dash you, let's call that as a conversion. And that's nice and easy, you would just hit submit there. And we've now created a conversion event inside of GA 4. Very cool. Now what you do is go down in that list of existing events, go find your new one that you've created, and toggle that switch to mark as conversion. And now all of your reports are going to see that as a conversion. Very cool. Alright, so this is where rubber hits the road. Now we want to start talking about the kinds of reports that you can run and look at an actively managed inside of GA 4 in order to tell what your LinkedIn Ads traffic is doing. There are two ways that you can do this. You can either go into reports and look at the pre made reports and maybe even do some light customizations. Or you can go into the Explore menu and create Universal Analytics used to call a custom report. In full transparency here, what I wanted to do for you is I wanted to go and create an exploration, one of these custom reports that would be really easy for everyone to just be able to import right into their GA 4 accounts and use these right off the bat. I jumped into it though, and suddenly realized how difficult this was and how unhelpful this is going to be. The challenge that I found here is that in any report, whether it's one of the premade reports inside of GA 4, or whether you're creating an exploration, like if you're making a custom report, you're limited to being able to see only one event on the page at the same time. That's actually not true, you can either see all events, or you can filter down to a single event. So what I really want to do is I want to create an exploration, a custom report here, that shows me based off of my ad, or my campaign, how many one minute timers fired, how many three minutes, how many five minute timers fired, how many scrolls got down past 50%, 70%, and 90%, I want to see all of that on one page. Well, here's the big weakness in GTA 4, you can only really have one event on the page at the same time. So as much as I would love to have a single report that would be so easy for everyone to scroll through once and see exactly what their different ads were doing. I ended up giving up and going right back to the old prepackaged reports. The way that I do this is I go to reports in the left hand navigation. And then I click on acquisition under lifecycle and then traffic acquisition. This is the report that is going to tell you about where you're getting traffic from. And when you're advertising, this is the right option, we want to analyze where we're getting our traffic from. So there are a couple graphs at the top of the page. But as I scroll down to the table down below, which is where I'm going to spend most of my time, I noticed that everything that I see here are broad categories like organic social, organic search, direct email, etc. So right at the top in the header, it says session default channel group, I'm going to click down on that. And I want to go to session source/medium. So what this does is it breaks down all of my traffic by the source and the medium all in one column, which is very cool. And I can see source mediums here like Google organic, LinkedIn, organic, LinkedIn, paid, Bing, organic, etc. Now, if you've been listening for a while, we've talked pretty good length about reporting and UTM parameters. I'm a big fan of being able to break down all performance all the way down to the unique ad level. The way we do that is through the UTM content parameter. So every one of our ads, if you look at the UTM content parameter, it identifies the exact ad. And these are all 100% unique. So what I could do is right next to the header there that now says session source/medium, I can click the little down arrow and this is us adding a secondary dimension. And immediately you're on a search box. So I just searched for content and found session manual add content. So this is the UTM content parameter that was set manually by the URL that occurred at the beginning of the session. So now as I scroll down, I can see all of those individual unique UTM content parameters and how they performed during this time period. This is way awesome if you want to analyze any individual ad, but maybe that too much in depth for you. Okay, so you can go back up to where it says session manual ad content, and instead click on that and type in campaign and select session campaign. Okay, so now you're looking at each row, not just being a single ad, but you're looking at it being a campaign. For us, the way that we treat this inside of LinkedIn Ads is the campaign name on LinkedIn is what goes into our UTM campaign variable. So now looking down here, I can see my performance by individual campaign, which the way that we create campaigns describes the audience. It's very cool. I'm trying not to get too geeky out on you here. But this is really, really exciting. Once you have your table looking like you want it, scroll over to the right until you see a column called Event Count. Now, right underneath event count, you'll see all events. And that's tracking every single kind of event that you have set up. But as we've talked about in GA 4 everything is an event. So you'll see these giant numbers in the 1000s or 10s of 1000s. Depending on what you have set up. If I click that down arrow there, I can go and select which event that I want it to filter by. Alright, so let's say I want to filter by scroll 50% depth, now I can go and see which of my campaigns is driving the highest quality traffic because they tend to scroll most of the way down the page. I haven't found a sexier way to do this. So if any of you have, please let us know. And of course, you can always reach out to us at Podcast@B2inked.com. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to keep coming through and selecting a different event. If I want to go see a scroll at 90% or a webpage timer at three minutes, I can go and select those and analyze my traffic that way. And of course, I'm a huge Excel nerds, I want to export this into Excel as fast as I can. But boy, it's got me wishing that I could see all of this on a single page. So if any of you know how to do it, please do think to reach out. So once I got this to where I wanted it, I clicked on the little pencil to customize the report, I saved it as a report in my library. So I thought, hey, this will help me a little bit to just make sure that I don't have to set all this stuff up again in the future. Well, I came back after the weekend and went and clicked on my report that I'd created and sure enough, it had just all reset back to default. So I had to create it again anyway. I'll chalk this up to one of the weaknesses of it just being GA 4 and still being new. But I do hope this all gets fixed in the future. Alright, so there you have it. This should be everything that you need to make Google Analytics 4 seeing and work for you as a LinkedIn Ads expert. I've got the episode resources for you coming right up, so stick around. Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Alright here the resources we talked about. First off, there's a simple link to your Google Analytics login. I find every time I go in search for any sort of Google product, finding the login button is really annoying. So go hit this link, and then add this to your bookmarks. Next is the article by datadrivenu.com, all about how to set up scroll depth tracking. So go follow that one. It's excellent. Followed by the YouTube video that helps you set up your time on site tracking. So go follow those literally, we're talking 10 minutes here max, and you can have all these events set up and tracking to your heart's content. No matter where you are on your LinkedIn Ads journey. Come join the LinkedIn Fanatics Community at fanatics.B2inked.com. This is where you're going to find the community of other LinkedIn Ads experts, as well as all four of my courses taking you from beginner to expert with LinkedIn Ads. Plus, if you join the community, as a super fanatic, you'll get to join a weekly call with me where I can give you direct feedback on the campaigns you're running. Plus, if you sign up before August 1, you'll get grandfathered into our lowest pricing ever. So go join immediately and hop in either as a fanatic or a super fanatic and we're excited to see you there. If this is your first time listening to the podcast, make sure to hit that subscribe button. But if this is not your first time listening, if you're a loyal listener, please do go especially to Apple podcasts and rate and review us there. And of course I'd love to shout you out. Alright with any questions, suggestions, or corrections reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week and I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

In this episode of DTC POD, Blaine and Jordan talk about how to grow e-commerce brands through paid performance. They talk about Facebook's tracking methods, insight platforms, customer psychology, setting up tools for effective ads, combating ad fatigue, using images vs videos, alternative opportunities, Facebook groups, Performance Max, SEO strategies, Apple's privacy measures, AI tools, starting with ads, and engaging with customers.We cover:1. Tracking and Attribution2. Understanding Customer Psychology3. Tools and Platforms4. Creative Content5. Engaging with Online Communities6. Testing and Optimization7. SEO and Organic TrafficTimestamps01:35 - From video production to founding Suna.05:12 - Learn ads before hiring. Find customers on search platforms. Performance Max and Advantage Plus need data. Start with unpaid methods.08:53 - Essential Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Facebook Pixel setups.13:59 - Tracking customer behavior with various tools.16:56 - Understand customer psychology beyond price. Uncover barriers to purchasing.21:26 - YouTube for retargeting, Performance Max for Google.24:45 - Testing crucial for effective strategies.28:53 - Rank for buyer intent, blogs for expertise. SEO drives organic traffic.31:35 - Performance Max: untapped opportunity, perpetual creative engine. Image creative highly effective, ad fatigue.33:50 - Fresh and engaging ads, images convey more. Shownotes powered by CastmagicP.S. Get our pod highlights delivered directly to your inbox with the DTC Pod Newsletter! Past guests & brands on DTC Pod include Gilt, PopSugar, Glossier, MadeIN, Prose, Bala, P.volve, Ritual, Bite, Oura, Levels, General Mills, Mid Day Squares, Prose, Arrae, Olipop, Ghia, Rosaluna, Form, Uncle Studios & many more. Additional episodes you might like:• #175 Ariel Vaisbort - How OLIPOP Runs Influencer, Community, & Affiliate Growth• #184 Jake Karls, Midday Squares - Turning Your Brand Into The Influencer With Content• #205 Kasey Stewart: Suckerz- - Powering Your Launch With 300 Million Organic Views• #219 JT Barnett: The TikTok Masterclass For Brands• #223 Lauren Kleinman: The PR & Affiliate Marketing Playbook• ​​​​#243 Kian Golzari - Source & Develop Products Like The World's Best Brands-----Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Jordan West - upGrowth CommerceRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - Co-Founder of Seated

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Pixel Helper for LinkedIn AI for writing ad copy Thomas Veraar on LinkedIn Free LinkedIn Ads Startup Guide Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover or with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript Everything you need to set up and begin optimization of a LinkedIn Ads account in one podcast episode. That's right, you best buckle up, because it's gonna be a wild ride. We're covering the complete startup checklist for LinkedIn Ads on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! Years ago, we launched the LinkedIn Ads startup checklist. At the time, it was a one pager with nine checklist items that we created for the community and we gated it. It was helpful for those that were just getting started advertising on LinkedIn, and just needed a simple resource to get moving. We've kept improving it over time and it's now become an 11 page guide with not just checklist items, but detailed instructions on how to do the things that we recommend. Plus, we went beyond the nine necessary items and scaled it up to 14 that included the non-essentials, but highly recommended steps to getting success on the LinkedIn Ads platform. This guide is currently free and totally ungated. If you go to B2Linked.com/checklist. I think there's a ton of value there and I highly recommend it. So this episode kind of acts like an audio companion to that free guide. But I'll also get to expound quite a bit here and audio in ways that it wouldn't have made sense in the guide, it would have made it too verbose. First in the news, I have a whole bunch of things that have built up over time, so we're gonna cover all of them very quickly. The first is that Thomas Veraar, who's a LinkedIn rep out of Bulgaria, you've heard me mention him on the show before. He reached out after the recruiting episode, and gave our listeners a little bit of a tip. I mentioned that job title plus geography is one of the ways that we like to target for recruiting. And he chimed in and said, especially for recruiters, he loves the fields of study targeting facet. He said that fields of study are far more aligned worldwide than job titles are. And they are pretty general. He said, job titles for the same position can differ by region, which is especially important where he's from in Europe, because regions aren't very large. He said, another reason why I like the field of study for recruiting is because fields of study are added more to LinkedIn profiles than job titles. So even if someone didn't ever update their job, they're usually going to update their field of study. Sometimes he suggests using this as an option, because sometimes people end up working in areas that they didn't study in. But lots of times it lines up and make sense. Of course, it depends on the ICP, but for example, architects, lawyers, engineers, etc, are much easier to target with fields of study. Now, I really like this idea of using fields of study. But I do think we can layer on job function on top as a way of getting the best of both worlds. So we get field of study to make sure we're getting someone who studied what it is we're looking for, but then a job function on top that tells us whether they're doing it right now. So Thomas, thank you again, for taking me up on what I always suggest, which is, let us know give us feedback on the podcast episode. And I'd love to shout you out and share your advice as well. Thomas also mentioned something that I've actually been wondering about for a long time, the concept is when we install the LinkedIn pixel, sometimes it's really complex to know whether or not it was installed properly. And we pretty much have to just wait for retargeting audiences to build or some conversion starting to come through for us to tell whether or not it was set up properly. Sometimes it's pasted right into the code of a website and you can miss some pages. Sometimes it's dropped into a Tag Manager like Google Tag Manager, which is very convenient, but then it's hard to check, because then all of that JavaScript is running at the event layer. And because I'm not a JavaScript programmer, I don't understand where it is. So I found a really cool resource. It's actually a Chrome plugin, and it's called Pixel Helper for LinkedIn. You can see the link in the show notes that will take you right there. But it's basically a Chrome plugin, but it is really basic. It's a Chrome plugin that just tells you whether or not you have the pixel installed properly on any page that you visit. It works only for LinkedIn Ads. And then if you click on it, it will tell you your partner ID that you can very easily match up with the partner ID that's in your insight tag. So it makes it super, super simple. So Thomas Veraar actually reached out and said that he has a manual way that he does this, and I followed along and tried it out and it is really cool. The pixel helper Chrome plugin is a very simple way of doing this, but I thought this was fascinating to see exactly how to do this manually without a plugin. So what he suggested is, when you get to a page that you want to check this on on your website or a client website, you press F 12, and that gets you into the developer options. Then with developer options open, you want to refresh the page on PC that's Ctrl, R or F5. I like f5. But then you go into the network tab that you see there in your developer options, then you'll see a search bar and you want to search for ads.linkedin.com. And sure enough, it's going to show you this PID, it's the same as the partner ID in your LinkedIn insight tag. And what you want to do is you want to look for a status code that starts with a number two, because in webpages, a status code that starts with two means okay, and it loaded. If it starts with anything other than that, generally, there's an error, and it's not working properly. So Thomas, thank you for both resources that you've shared today. This was fantastic. I would highly recommend that everyone out there go follow Thomas Veraar, because he is absolutely one of the great ones. Next, someone at LinkedIn in Europe released a five slide deck, all about LinkedIn Ads, summer seasonality. And what was so interesting for me to see on this was that over the summer, LinkedIn Ads costs tend to drop, which is not what I would expect to happen. I would actually expect that fewer people are at their computers, which then drives costs higher for advertisers. And I would share this deck with you except whoever it was who posted it, didn't make the deck downloadable. I also knew that this was based off of European data. And so it probably wouldn't be valid for everyone who's listening. But certainly those of you who are in Europe, you'll probably appreciate higher click through rates and lower costs throughout all of the summer. Within the last month, I also saw a pop up within campaign manager that let me know that the LinkedIn Audience Network now publishes reports showing you the pages that you appeared on, which is super cool. I think this is a huge stride for the LinkedIn Audience Network to show transparency about where our ads are being shown. And if you follow the LinkedIn Ads page on LinkedIn, on June 7, they released a pulse article. It's just a LinkedIn article that used to be called pulse. And they announced that they're rolling out right now an AI helper for writing ad copy. So many of you may already have this by the time you're hearing it. And so when you go to actually write ad copy, you can have ChatGPT 4 probably because Microsoft is a huge investor in OpenAI that runs ChatGPT. And of course, Microsoft owns LinkedIn. So we're going to benefit from some of these AI plugins. I wanted to quickly highlight a review here on the podcast, this was left by Gareth Evans. He's the Director of Demand Generation at Workiva, based out of the UK. And he said, "Great practical tips, great content with a lot of really useful practical tips that are both explained, well, and actionable." Gareth, I really appreciate you going to leave that review, it helps so much. And please you if you have not left a review yet, but you're a regular listener, please do go and leave us a review. It is by far the best way that you can say thank you for this content. And you get to join the likes the amazing Gareth Evans, who left a killer review already. Alright, with that being said, let's hit it, we're gonna get down to the comprehensive LinkedIn ads startup checklist and guide. Company Page Very first off, the first thing you want to do is make sure that you get access to your company page, because the majority of your LinkedIn Ads actually live on the company page. If you're an in house marketer, you probably want to have super admin access to your company page. But if you're an agency, most likely, you're going to ask for a lower role called sponsored content poster. It's underneath paid media admins. All of your sponsored content, which are your newsfeed ads, and your follower ads that are a dynamic ad. These are all based off of your company page. And then now these new thought leader ads that have come out, they're based off of employees who have claimed your company. So again, it's based off the company page. So someone can give you access to a LinkedIn Ads account and not give you company page access. But all that means is you can boost existing content that the company page has posted. But you can't create new ads, which is obviously lame if you want to create ads. You can actually also give company page access through LinkedIn business manager, but you don't need to, which takes us to our next step which is access to the ads account. Ads Account Now this one can be a little bit different, because if you've ever set up business manager for your ad account, you are stuck with it, you can't divorce your account from business manager. So you'll have to do everything through business manager. But if you haven't already attached your ads account to business manager, great, keep it there because I don't think business manager brings a lot of value. Whoever has admin access to the LinkedIn ads account, what they do is they go to manage access, they go to account settings in the navigation, and then click on manage access. And there they get to add you. Account manager means that you can make any changes in an account. A campaign manager means you can't add or remove people, but you can do everything else. And of course, if you don't already have an ads account or a company page, you can go set those up for free. Set Up Billing The next step, and you will not be able to forget this because there is a red nag banner on every page, as you're setting up the ad account, they will want you to set up your billing. So you have to go in and register a credit card. It's really easy, you just click on the nag banner, it will take you right to a place to enter your credit card. If you're already spending pretty healthily and you have a track record of several months at least of advertising, you can contact LinkedIn and get set up on invoicing rather than an accrual credit card spend. Now the only person who can set up billing is the billing admin on the ads account. So if you're not the billing admin, you'll see the nag banner, but you've just got to go and tell whoever is the billing admin to go and click those links. Install the Insight Tag Alright, like we talked about in the news section about the LinkedIn insight tag, this is step number four in setting up your ad account. You do want to make sure you've installed the Insight tag that does three different things for you and all three are important. Number one, it acts as your conversion tracking so anytime you want to track conversions, this insight tag or pixel is the thing that's doing it. Next, it also creates your website retargeting audiences, which is super valuable. And finally, just the presence of this tag on your website enables LinkedIn to give you what I call LinkedIn analytics. But it's a free website demographics report that shows the business makeup of anyone who comes to visit your website, even if you didn't drive them from LinkedIn Ads. It's a very cool report. And it's totally free. You don't have to spend a dime on LinkedIn Ads. To get to your LinkedIn insight tag, you click on analyze, and then insight tag, and it will let you either generate one there, or it will even send one to a web developer that you want to email it to. LinkedIn suggests pasting this in your website's global footer. And that's all fine and good, but I actually like to load it in the header because that gives me a higher chance of the tag actually firing before someone leaves the page if the page is taking too long to load. Set up conversions Alright, with the LinkedIn insight tag setup, that enables you to start setting up your conversion tracking. Now occasionally, an advertiser will come to me and say, well, we're not tracking conversions, or we won't need to for a while. But I would still set this up ahead of time, even if you're not driving people towards a conversion event yet. And this is for the simple reason of being able to track view through conversions. So set up conversion tracking for any event across your website that you might eventually want to target with a conversion, or just any conversion event that's happening on your website. And then when your other channels, let's say you're running Google search, or Facebook Ads, or SEO, if anyone there ends up converting on your website, but they've also seen your ads, you'll start to see view through conversions tally up inside your ads account. We know that a buyers journey is not linear, they touch so many different channels at so many different times and so when I see view through conversions start to increment up, I know that my cohesive multi channel strategy is working. To create your conversions, it's also under analyze, and you click conversion tracking and set up your conversion events there. I can't overstate this enough. I highly recommend when you set up conversion tracking to ensure that you have a thank you page that you get redirected to whenever anyone fills out a form. Some web developers will push back on this and they'll say it's a bad experience. It's not modern, but I will tell you it is infinitely easier to troubleshoot and set up if you have a separate page that's your thank you page. Otherwise, the web developer is going to have to troubleshoot it when an if when someone clicks on a button, it doesn't fire as a conversion. Simplify your life and make sure that you have a thank you page rather than just firing a conversion based off of someone clicking a button. Consider target audience Alright next here is consider your target audience. Because after all, the reason that we come to LinkedIn and we pay a premium for this traffic is access to this premium audience. But you don't want to waste money. So put some thought into who actually is your ideal buyer? What sorts of companies do they represent? I really like to have a combined targeting where one element is targeting who the person is professionally. And then the other element is what type of company do they represent. So for instance, if I'm going to use job title targeting, maybe I target something like Salesforce administrator, and maybe that gets me the right person. But then it's still important to understand what type of company I'm going after. So for this, I might also layer on what industry the company is in, or what size it is, or maybe even company names, if you're going to do an account based marketing approach. By putting serious thought and research into who your ideal buyer is, your targeting is going to be a lot more effective. Set up campaigns the right way Next is when you actually go to set up your campaigns, setting them up the right way. We talked about this a little bit in Episode 100. But here are the basic procedures for creating a new campaign that you absolutely need to pay attention to. First off, as you create your first campaign, it will ask you to select an objective, you can really start here with whatever makes sense, but I highly recommend website visits if you're trying to send traffic to your landing page. And lead generation if you have a gated type of asset, or you're just trying to get someone to fill out a form that isn't on the landing page. The others you can kind of test into after that. After you do the targeting portion, you'll see a little checkbox that's usually checked for you, and it's called nnable audience expansion. I highly recommend always uncheck that box. We have not yet found a case where audience expansion was actually good for an account. It's usually very, very bad. I tell people, it's the COVID-19 Delta variant of LinkedIn Ads. Next, if you choose one of the ad formats, that is in the newsfeed, LinkedIn will automatically have you in a placement called LinkedIn Audience Network. There could be some use here later on as you test into it, but I would highly recommend avoid using this when you're very first starting, it tends to generate traffic that is much lower in quality than if you were getting them right from LinkedIn. So probably stay away from that one to begin with. Next, as you keep scrolling down the page, you'll get to the bidding and budgeting section. And this one is really important. The default bidding method that LinkedIn sticks you on is called maximum delivery. And it is the most expensive way to pay for LinkedIn traffic 90% of the time, the option that you want to start out with is manual bidding, and it's hidden, you have to click on show additional options, then click on manual CPC bidding. And this is going to allow you to set a bid and say LinkedIn, I'm not going to pay more than this amount anytime someone clicks on my ad. And LinkedIn is going to give you a crazy range that it recommends, it might say something like your competitors are bidding between $20 and $70. For this traffic. If you're just getting started and you have a low budget, don't listen to those at all, you can bid significantly lower than what LinkedIn is recommending, because the worst thing that can happen to you, if you bid too low, is you just won't get traffic and impressions. And you have to come in the next day and maybe incrementally increase your bid a little bit until it does start spending. If you do leave it on maximum delivery, you'll likely end up paying, depending on how well your ads perform, somewhere between about $20 to $50 per click, which is insane. You really shouldn't have to pay more than like 10 bucks a click, and that speaking specifically for targeting the US. Other areas of the world are significantly cheaper. And then finally, at the end of your campaign creation process, there will be an option to add a conversion to that campaign. And there's just no downside that I've found to attaching every possible conversion to every possible campaign. So don't get stuck here. Don't feel like you're out of your depth here. All right, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive right back into considering your offer. 19:27 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com. The LinkedIn Ads experts. Managing LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment. Do you want to return on it? Consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked, the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest accounts over the past 12 years and our unique scientific approach to ads management, combined with our proprietary tools, allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads faster and more efficiently than any other in house agency or digital ads hire can. Plus, we're official LinkedIn partners. Just navigate on over to B2Linked.com/apply and we'd absolutely love the chance to chat with you about your campaigns. Consider your offer Alright, let's jump back into your offer. So before you start running your ads, you really need to understand what it is that you're offering your audience in exchange for their attention. 95% of the time, a cold audience, which means someone who's never heard of you before, they're not willing to convert on something like a demo request, or talk to sales or buy something until they've been warmed up. So as part of this warming, we highly recommend launching an offer that teaches your audience something new, solves a major pain point, helps them do their jobs better in some way. We'd recommend doing this through ungated assets and content. Things that really have next to no friction, and just provide a lot of benefit. Free assets like ebooks, webinars, podcasts, online communities, etc. These all provide a ton of value and we'll get people really appreciating you and keeping you top of mind. Craft your message Next, once you understand what it is you're offering someone, the obvious next step is to start writing and crafting your message of what they're going to get out of it. You obviously want to identify what sort of struggles your audience has an offer significant solutions to those problems. And don't be afraid to issue a strong and clear call to action. And we highly recommend running two ads per campaign so that you can AB test and learn over time what people prefer, versus what they don't prefer. Gather imagery for your ads After you've crafted your message, the next step is to get imagery, visuals for your ads. And this is so important to tell you, your imagery is not meant to convert. So often I see advertisers who try to cram way too much into their image. They think, oh, this is what's getting their attention, so I have to jam a whole bunch of explanatory text in here. Oh, and I gotta get my logo and a button and a subtitle and their image just ends up looking so cluttered. Instead, I would highly recommend that your imagery follows the billboard rule. If you've ever bought billboard media, billboard companies will tell you don't put more than seven words on your billboard, because that's about what people can get just at a glance as they're driving without having to take their eyes off of the road. The same thing goes for LinkedIn Ads, keep your imagery very simple, because its whole job is just to get people to stop scrolling. We call this a thumb stopper. Your ad copy is going to do the converting and the convincing and the solving problems, but your imagery, its whole job is just to get someone's attention so that they'll read your ad copy. Now because LinkedIn is color palette is very blues, grays and whites, you want your imagery to really stand out. So if you look at a color wheel, this is what designers use, opposite of blue is orange. So it's helpful to include pops of orange, reds, greens, purples, anything that's going to help stand out against that blue and get attention. We find that imagery on LinkedIn that is square tends to perform much better than about any other dimensions. So in sponsored content, if you're going to do like a single image ad, we'd recommend 1200 by 1200 square. Launch your ads So now as a recap, you've created the account or you've gotten access to it, you have access to the company page, you've set up the insight tag and conversion tracking so you're all ready to go there. Now you've identified your audience, decided on an offer, and now you've crafted messaging and imagery to help support that. You are ready to launch your ads. LinkedIn makes it really easy as you're going through the campaign creation process to put you right on the spot where you can start actually creating the ads and then launch them so you won't need any extra help for me on this. That being said, I'm going to walk you through the next few steps that like I mentioned at the beginning are optional, but highly recommended. Plan a holistic LinkedIn Ads strategy full funnel Point number 12 here is called plan a holistic LinkedIn Ads strategy. And like we've already talked about, if this is someone's first time hearing about your company, it's highly unlikely that they want to buy your high ticket product or service just after seeing one or maybe two ads from you. So you'll need to plan this holistic strategy and make sure that you're providing value all along the way and walking this cold traffic through your sales process until they become warm, and eventually hot leads for you. What this means is you'll want to specifically think about the kinds of offers that are useful to someone who doesn't yet know you, like you, or trust you yet. I really like video content for helping people get to know me and like me, because it's totally possible for someone to read like five of my guides, but still not feel like they know me like me or trust me. Whereas if you watch a two minute video of me talking and sharing something of value, maybe you're already knowing me, liking me, and trusting me just from that. The same thing is gonna go for your audience. I also really like subscribable content as a way of getting people to know me, like me, and trust me, because it takes the same amount of work to get you to go and listen to a podcast and subscribe to it as it does to get you to go and download a guide. Well, the guide is a one hit. Once you're done reading the guide, you're kind of done with me. But if you come and listen to this podcast, you're now hearing me in your ears every week. And it sounds strange, but it builds a relationship with your prospect to where by the time they reach out to you, they feel like they already know you, you have a friendship. So content like newsletters, like weekly live streams, podcasts, a YouTube channel, all of these are subscribable and get you multiple shots on goal with your prospect getting to know you. Create matched audiences But of course, when you get someone introduced to your brand, now you need to follow up. And this is something called retargeting. On LinkedIn, we create retargeting through something that LinkedIn calls matched audiences. Inside your LinkedIn Ads account, if you go to plan in your navigation, and then go to audiences, then you can click create audience and LinkedIn will show you the bevy of options of all the different kinds of retargeting audiences that it can create. So think of it this way, your very first set of ads where you're just being helpful, and getting people to know you and hear of you, that's your audience have cold traffic, and then based off of them taking action on whatever your ads are asking them to do, you can graduate them to the next level of retargeting, and there's no limit to the number of layers that you can push people through. But just realize that every retargeting audience needs at least 300 people, even to serve. So I would recommend right at first, create more of like a two or a three step funnel, where they interact with your cold ads, and then you graduate them to a warm, and then graduate them to a hot. And the way that graduation works, when you create a retargeting audience, you can then exclude that retargeting audience from your original cold audience. And that makes it so once someone interacts with that level of ads, let's say your cold ads,, they now get removed from that audience and now they only qualify to be shown your ads at the, let's say, middle of funnel level. And this is how you create sequences. It's how you can walk people from the top of the funnel down to the bottom of the funnel, and to create a demand generating machine. Optimize and scale My very last tip here is optimizing and scaling because once your ads are live, you never know what your audience is going to like or what they're not going to like until you've actually tested it. So you've launched these ads, and you watch the progress as it happens. If something's not working, you can pause it, you can shut it off, or you can even bid it down so you're making LinkedIn less incentivized to show that. And the things that are working well, you can bid them up and give them more budget and do more of those things. Really, at this point, the world is your oyster, and you're about to learn a lot about who your audience is and what they like, while at the same time you're generating leads. It's a beautiful thing. And it does take work and it does take attention. And quite honestly, that's why we have a job here at B2Linked because we do all this for you. When you're just barely getting started on an ad channel, there are so many moving parts. And quite honestly, that learning phase is so expensive. Working with someone like us who have already mastered that learning curve, we can get you right to an optimized campaign of LinkedIn Ads. Who knows it could be up your alley. If you're in that situation, reach out to us at B2Linked.com/apply. Alright, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Like we mentioned in the news section, there's a link to the Pixel Helper Chrome extension that will help you understand whether your LinkedIn insight tag is installed properly or not. You'll also see a link to the pulse article from LinkedIn Ads where they introduced the new AI tool for helping you write ad copy, which I think is really cool. I do highly recommend that you go and download this checklist and guide that we went over today because then you don't have to listen to me and hit pause and then rewind, just in case you missed something. You'll have the whole checklist ready to go. And like we just announced on Episode 100, we just recently launched the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics Community, where you get access to our four courses that take you from absolute beginner to expert level LinkedIn Ads professional. And if you're listening to this within the first month, chances are you still have access to the founding members discount. You get grandfathered into the very lowest rate that this will ever be at either $59 a month for access to the community and courses, or $259 a month to be part of the super fanatics where you get to hop on a weekly call with me. If this is your first time listening, hit that subscribe button so you keep hearing content like this in the future. But if this is not your first episode, please do go and rate and review the podcast especially on Apple podcasts. It is by far the best way that you can say thank you for us constantly coming out with this great content every week, if I don't say so myself. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections on what we've talked about, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

(If you DO want to work with Crimson Media Group, be sure to mention this podcast/ episode!)Reach out to Crimson Media Group here: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/crimsonmediafree/Shane always gives all our listeners a: Free Marketing Analysis (just mention our podcast name)‍‍Hey guys, welcome back to our Monday Morning Marketing series! Today, Shane Simmons and I are lunging into the untapped potential of your online presence. In this episode, we explore the crucial importance of tracking where your patients are coming from, and the nuts and bolts of how to do it! Getting well versed in your patient traffic flow will help you to make informed decisions to optimize your digital marketing efforts. Nobody likes to question whether or not their website is actually doing anything, right? Well, let's discover how we can make yours a valuable tool for growth, guiding you towards a thriving practice in the digital age!‍Step into my conversation with Shane Simmons this week, and we'll learn the vital intricacies of websites together!‍You can reach out to Shane Simmons here:Website: https://www.crimsonmediagroup.com/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/crimsonmediamarketing/‍Other Mentions and Links:Google AnalyticsSite Map LookupSwellInstalling Conversions with Google Analytics VideoGoogle Tag Manager‍Episode Transcript (Auto-Generated - Please Excuse Errors)‍Michael: Hey Shane. So talk to us about websites. How can we utilize this, or what advice, suggestions, or methods can you give us that will help us actually attract new patients through Shane: websites? Yeah, Michael, I mean, our website, I think this is too many times. We look of it and we think of it as just kind of like a digital billboard for the practice, and we know it's there.It's a necessity, but. A lot of practices we talk with don't really know what they're getting from their website or how patients are finding them. And so that's really what I wanna focus on today and, and the first piece of advice, and probably the most critical piece of advice that I would give anyone when they're reviewing their website or building a website for their practice is, Make sure that you have the proper tracking set up and in place.And what I mean by that is there are things that you can set up in Google Analytics and uh, Google Tag Manager for anybody who's heard of that. Where if somebody fills out a form on the website, you can actually go into your Google Analytics account and you can set up what are called conversions, where Google will show you, you know, how many form submissions you had on your site in the last.30 days where those form submissions actually came from. So what was the first touchpoint? Did they go, uh, to a Google organic search and that's how they got to the site and filled out a form. Did they come from a Facebook ad? Did they come from an insurance referral? You can start collecting that data.So each and every month, like what we do at our agency is we review that data with our clients and say, you know, hey, we had 20. You know, form submissions from Google Organic. We had 15 from Facebook ads, 10 from Google Ads, so on and so forth. And so that's the first thing is make sure that you have conversion tracking set up so you know that your website is doing what it's supposed to be doing.And then if it's not, then that's when you can go in and start to make some changes in corrections. So that's number one. The second part about the tracking is, uh, call tracking. And so I make, tell everybody you have to have call tracking on your website, so you know, again, where are your patients coming from?Are they coming from Google? Are they coming from a referral or insurance, whatever the case is. Have some form of call tracking set up. That way you know where those patients are coming from and the, and the blowback that sometimes very few, but some people will give us on that is, well, if I change the number on my website to a call tracking number, I.Is that going to throw off my patients? And the answer to that question is we have dozens and dozens of accounts who have call tracking set up, and we have not heard one message about somebody saying, this isn't your phone number, or you had the wrong phone number on your site. Because in the world we live in on our mobile phones, people just click that call button and that's it.Right? They're, they're not memorizing their dentist's phone number anymore, so don't worry about that. It's imperative that you know where your. patient base is coming from. So that's number one is, is call tracking and form tracking on the site. Michael. Um, the second thing that I'll go into is your site structure and making sure that your structure is set up properly.So the way that I kind of put this in dental terms is if you were going to place an implant, uh, you had the tooth extracted and all of this, and you're ready to place that implant. You'd wanna make sure that the bone structure is there and is healthy for an implant. Same thing goes for your website. You need to make sure that the structure of that site is correct before you start sending traffic to it, doing SEO and all of these different things.And so, What site structure boils down to, in nerdy terms, is making sure that you have one H one header on your website. You can Google this, it'll, it's really clear, but it's basically the first biggest heading on your site. That's your H one header, and that's the most important header on the site because that tells Google what the page is about.Then under that H one header, like for your subsections on a page, Those would be your, what you call H two headings. And then you have H three. So it's like a bullet point system of prominence down to, you know, maybe the, the least prominent on the page. You need to make sure that that's set up correctly.Because if you have multiple H one headers on a site, which we've seen in many dental, uh, practice sites before, or, you know, uh, that structure is, is all over the place. It confuses Google at the end of the day, and anything that confuses Google is going to hurt your presence online. So make sure that you have the proper site settings, uh, set up.You can do a site map lookup. Um, it's a free tool online that you can use and see that you have that, uh, set up properly. And then the third thing that I'll touch on here, Michael, before we kind of open it up for questions for you is, you may wanna look into having a web chat on your site. And, and this is something that.Uh, we really like using with, um, some of the different vendors that, that we work with to have a web chat put on there. That way your team can get notified anytime. Somebody may have a quick question on there. Maybe they wanna know if you're a network with their insurance, whatever the case is. It's all about convenience for the patient at the end of the day.That's why we love having web chat, online scheduling, all of these tools where thinking about, you know, if you were the patient, what would be the most convenient way? For them to get an appointment, at your practice. And that's really what you need to do is put yourself in the, in the shoes of the patient.And if you do that, you have, you'll form, um, a web form chat on your site. If you have online scheduling on your site, you have that hierarchy set up properly, like we talked about in that site structure, and you have that call tracking and form tracking set in place. You're gonna notice a big difference in how your website is actually generating patients for you, rather than just feeling like your site's there just to be there.Michael: Mm-hmm. Gotcha. So these are three really, really key, uh, factors important. One thing I wanna rewind back on is where you talk about proper tracking needs to be set up in place. How do we even get started with this? So if you could, I guess, like. Walk us step by step. We're on Google Analytics now. We, we set it up or I'm pretty sure that's a lot of people have it set up or they ask their agency to, to see it.Now how do we kind of look into it? Shane: Yeah, so once you have Google Analytics installed on your site, which everybody listening to this should have Google Analytics on their site. It's a free tool and it's, it's a great tool to use to give you insights. Once you have Google Analytics set on your site, um, that's when you'll want to go to something that's called Google Tag Manager.And so, uh, Google Tag Manager basically allows you to put a snippet of code on your website. On certain areas where conversions would happen. So if somebody were to fill out a form on the site, once they fill out that form, Ideally they should go to what we call a thank you page, where a screen loads and it says, you know, thank you for filling out the form.We'll be contacting you soon. And on that thank you page within Google Tag Manager, you can copy and paste a piece of code that basically tells Google if somebody sees this page. They have filled out a form on the website, and that's a conversion. And what Google does is it installs cookies on that person's browser so it knows where that person came from, whether it was from a Google search or from Facebook or Instagram, whatever the case is, they know that.So then it's gonna give you that data back. That said, this form submission. Was through, uh, you know, a Google search. So that's the first thing and is in Google Tag Manager. The second thing that you can do, and I I think this is really underutilized in Google Tag Manager, is you could actually, uh, put uh, like a tag on a button on your page, um, and then take appropriate actions from there.So what I mean by that is, let's see, we have a video on the homepage of your site and you wanna track how many people watch that video. who interacted with it, these type of things. You can actually, within Google Tag Manager, just put a piece of code on that button where people click to watch the video, and it will give you direct feedback of, this is how many people in the last 30 days, watch the video, here's where they came from.And then what you can do is then use that to retarget them on Facebook or Instagram maybe, where if they saw your video on your page, you can then start to put, you know, patient reviews in front of them and things like that. So, There's so many things that you can do in Google Tag Manager, obviously, you know, our agency, uh, helps practices with that and we set that all up for all of our clients.But if you're, somebody who wants to try to do that on their own, um, go to YouTube, type in, um, installing conversions with Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager, and there are step-by-step, you know, walkthrough videos there. If you have some experience in, uh, backend web development, um, you may be able to do that yourself.Gotcha. Michael: Okay. So where do you recommend we put these Google tags? So you said specific conversion pages. So if you're making a website or somebody's looking at their website and they're like, man, I don't even know. I just asked my agency and they give me a report, or they tell me this, but I don't even know where would you recommend you put these tags on there?Shane: Yeah, great question. So first off, make sure that you've tagged any, if, if there's form submissions happening on that site or that landing page, make sure that you're tagging those form submissions and that's going to a thank you page. That way you, you know, that's the, the lowest hanging group. The easiest thing to tag right there, a new lead is anybody that fills out a web form.That's number one. Um, if you have online scheduling, which as we know, a lot of practices do have that now. You can tag the button there. in the online scheduling, so you can see how many people actually clicked to schedule online. We would recommend tagging that. We also tag anytime someone has clicked on the phone number on the site.Even though we have that call tracking in place, we still like to know how many people, actually clicked the number on the site and where they clicked it at. And then the fourth part there is if you have any video content on the site. Tag that as well, so you know how many people are actually watching those videos and engaging with it.Um, if anybody, because if you spend thousands of dollars to maybe get, you know, videos done and nobody's watching them, you're not really using that investment to your advantage. Maybe that video needs to be placed somewhere else on the site, or maybe it's not clear. Maybe there's like a small play button and it's not clear to the person that that's a video.So all of that data will allow you to see how can we get this video in front of people easily where they know, you know, it's a video that they should watch when they come to our site. And you can start to track that. So those are the areas, the thank you page or contact us page. Um, once they've filled out a form, online scheduling button, if they've clicked that phone number, tag your phone number and any video content that you may have on a webpage, those are four right there that if you start tagging those, it's gonna give you a great amount of feedback.Michael: Gotcha. And so if we ask our, let's just say our marketing agency or company, Hey, let me see the numbers for this, right? What are we looking for when it comes to like, oh man, nobody's filled out web forms. Or like, there hasn't been that many people clicking on phone numbers or onsite, or they don't even provide that.What are we looking for to ask when it comes to this particular question with analytics? Shane: Yep. Yeah. So the first thing you wanna look at is for any calls that we've had to the practice, um, you'd want to take a look at those calls. Where do those calls come from in your online marketing? So you'd like to, you know, get a report so you can see Google Organic calls versus, you know, if you're running Google Ads or Facebook ads, how do those calls break down?So that would be the first thing. Um, second thing that you would want to ask for is, For any of our contact form submissions on the site or online scheduling, what are the analytics like as far as where patients are coming from when they're filling out that information. So that would be, uh, an important aspect there because I.If you see that you're getting, you know, 80% of your form submissions are coming from referrals or existing patients, and you're spending thousands of dollars on online ads and you're not seeing, you know, very many conversions, then that's, you know, a red flag to know, okay, maybe we need to shift our focus or the campaign, whatever the case is there.So knowing where those, um, form submissions, contact form submissions. Actually came from is a great, you know, insight to ask your agency if you're working with someone. And then the easiest way is just be able to look at the site and say, okay, I see how many visitors we had that came to the site. I see how long, you know, the average person spent on the site, all of this data, but.What you really wanna look for is where's the acquisition, where are they coming from? And they should be able to provide you a report where you can see, where your patients are actually coming from, um, in the practice. And, and the rule that we have at Crimson Media is ideally if you're, you know, you want Google Organic to be your number one source of new patient traffic.Then any sort of digital ads you're running. And then third would be, um, referrals or existing patients who visit the site directly. That's kind of the hierarchy that we like to see, um, as far as where patients come from. Michael: Gotcha. That's a good rule, man. Okay. And then when it came to web chat on our site, which one would you recommend where you're like, we've seen fantastic results from this, and if you can let us know, which one would you say like, there's lots of kinks to Shane: work out.Yeah, we've, I mean we've seen a lot of them. Um, I would say our go-to and favorite one to use is through Swell. Um, so if you use swell for your online reviews, which is where most of our clients, we use them as well, full transparency there. but they have a, a web chat as well, and a lot of people don't really know that, I don't think.Mm-hmm. And so, We've had a lot of success with swells, web chat, um, very easy to install for your agency, and, uh, has some great prompts and things in there that you can build in. And I think it's just overall the smoothest, interaction for the patient too. Some of these web chats out there that I've tested and demoed have been just a little.Glitchy, uh, and they just aren't very user-friendly, whereas the one that we've used was swell. It's just very user-friendly, it's clean looking, and we've had a lot of success with, with those, but there are so many out there you can research and see what one is best for you. But that's been the, the one that's been most successful for us.Awesome. Michael: Shane, I appreciate your time and if anyone has further questions, you can definitely find 'em on the Dental Marketer Society Facebook group, or where can they reach out to you directly? Shane: Yeah, they can, as you mentioned, dental marketer Facebook group, we're always hanging out in there, but you can also go to our website, crimson media group.com.If you come in, if you book a, you know, a free marketing strategy, um, call with me. Uh, let me know that you came from the dental marketer, Michael, and, uh, we'll hook you up with a special surprise. Yeah, that's Michael: a cool thing. Everybody listening gets a very comprehensive strategy. When you book it with Crimson Media Group.So guys, go ahead and do that. It's gonna be in the show notes below. And Shane, thank you for being with me on this Monday morning marketing episode. Thanks, Michael.‍