Podcast appearances and mentions of ryan they

Google recently dropped all commission fees on their "Buy on Google" platform. On the surface-level this seems like a very intriguing offer. But Ryan here is to explain why "Buy on Google" may not be the best thing for your brand. TRANSCRIPT: Jon: Ryan, a few days ago, I sent you an article I read about Google's Buy on Google program and how they were dropping all commission fees for their sellers as part of the program. Now, to me, this seemed like a pretty good deal. Who doesn't like freeways to sell products and utilize a huge platform with lots of awareness like Google search? At least that was my take, but when I asked you about it, you said, and I'll quote, hopefully this is okay, "That product was dead in the water before this change. Some merchants will of course test it, but it will compete for ad presence with their regular Google ads." Honestly, this was not what I was expecting to hear from you at all. I was really interested in connecting with you a bit more about this and just seeing your thoughts on it and getting some more information about the program out and seeing where and when it makes sense for all of our eCommerce listeners to take advantage of it. I guess just to jump right in, Ryan, on a high level, just so we're on the same page, what exactly is Buy on Google? Ryan: Buy on Google is the little colorful shopping cart icon that shows up in Google shopping. When you start filtering and sorting, you actually transact on Google and then the merchant fulfills it. It's basically a Google trying to be this marketplace saying, "Oh, we can trust Google because I'm buying it here." It's a shopping ad set that you're able to get when you push your inventory into Google and say, "Yes, I'm willing to sell this on Google." Previously, there were commissioned tiers to sell different products. It ranged somewhere from five to, I think, 12%. It was a 12% number that Google [inaudible 00:02:07] because it was less than that Amazon 15%. That came out, man, I want to say maybe three, four years ago, maybe in an alpha-beta four years ago. I think it did cause some Amazon changes within their system on what they were going to be charging to try to have more parody with the Buy on Google scenario. Yeah. It was basically give Google the commission that you would maybe be paying Amazon and we'll push your product out there. There's no advertising costs. Google's the one putting it out there and then you just get the sale and give commission to Google. Jon: They're trying to create a marketplace without really holding any inventory or doing any fulfillment. They literally just take the money, take their cut and send everything over to the retailer? Ryan: Yeah. From a high level, it sounds like a great idea like, "Okay. I have all of this work. I'm spending all this money in Google ads and shopping and I've got agency fees or employee costs or my time in it. Now, I can just go to Google and you're just going to take a commission and it's a fixed cost, so I don't have to worry about what my return on Google shopping is." That theory sounds phenomenal. There's not many business owners are going to be like, "Yeah. Here, take my products. Sell them for me. I now know that I'm only going to be paying 12% of my revenue for my advertising cost." There's no scenario in which that doesn't sound like a good idea. Jon: That definitely makes sense. How does Buy on Google differ from Google Shopping? This is a complete novice asking that question. Ryan: It's part of Google Shopping. You only see the Buy on Google when you're in the Google Shopping tab within Google space. It used to be a little more prevalent on the first page of Google, but I believe it's only showing now in the Google Shopping tab. It's one of the filters you can put on there. Jon: Okay. Then, really Google Shopping is getting your listing of products up there. Some of them will take you to the retailer. Some of them will just take your money on Google. Ryan: Yes. It's always interesting. Google's, as we know, a for profit company. They want to make money. When they came out with this program, it obviously sounded great to business owners, but it immediately put up some flags on our team internally to say, "Okay. Google needs to reward shareholders for their investment and needs to make money to afford employees," and all the things they do around the world that are very good and positive, including paying people. If Google is going to take 12% of the revenue for a sale and not charge for any clicks to the merchant that's selling that, in theory, Google's not going to be willing to lose money by showing those products at 12% when they know from a click cost, they're getting a 20% or a five X return for the merchant. Jon: I see. Yeah. Ryan: Google's got a lot of very smart people and they do say that they are out for the good, and they will do things to just benefit people. Period. There is an opportunity maybe that they're willing to take less money, but that's not always the case. You just have to start investigating. That's why I challenge every merchant to do with any product in Google is test and measure and see if it does actually make sense for your brand. Jon: Spoken after my own heart there, test and measure. Ryan: Yes. Jon: I've had an impact, Ryan. I appreciate it. Let me ask you this then. If they're not doing any commission anymore, then how are they going to make any money and how could any brand really think that Google is going to list this above their ads? Ryan: It's a great question. That's why it's surprising that Google made this move, especially when they just released earnings when we're doing this podcast yesterday where they had the first time that their revenue dropped in a quarter. I don't know how long, if ever, that Google being willing to give up money. When that happens, it's telling us internally logical position that, "Okay. Something wasn't going the direction that Google thought it was going to be going." Either we're in the process potentially of just sunsetting this or moving it to a place where it's not going to be necessarily a focus of Google because if there's no revenue coming in, how are you going to support it internally? You can't dedicate a bunch of employees necessarily longterm to a product that makes no money. It's either a stepping stone into something different, or they're taking steps to buy some market share to a degree and try to get people using it in broad adoption so that they can monetize it later. We don't necessarily know where they're going because they won't necessarily tell us this despite our levels of... I actually asked the question. I was interviewing, I think the global partner strategy person for Shopping. He's a big guy in the Shopping space. We were talking about the free and fast program that's recently come out and I brought it up and he's like, "I answered something, but not how you want it. Then, we can't have this in the interview because I'm not authorized to speak on it." Awesome. Thanks. It's a big unknown. I know that if Google is not making money on it generally, it's not going to be something that I, as a brand, am going to get really excited about and try to push all of my eggs into that basket for my personal brand. I might test it. Again, test and measure, see what it does, but my hopes are not high. Also, my hopes are not high, but just because of the nature of the Buy on Google and the data we've seen in it. A logical position... One of the companies I talk about often, I won't mention them by name, but they started working with us in May of 2020 after they had not been doing any paid search with an agency. They had been using Buy on Google with another agency that recommended that this was the greatest thing for them. This sells B2B kind of like distributor cleaning products, just all things businesses need. They have something in the neighborhood of hundreds of thousands of skews. Most of their sales come from Walmart or Amazon, at least, they did at the time. We looked at Buy on Google and they did about $34,000 a month on average. That was over the previous six months, and they paid Google and this agency somewhere around between four and $5,000 for that batch of sales, $34,000 worth. Jon: It seems like a good [inaudible 00:08:20], if you will? Ryan: Yeah. It wasn't terrible by any means. I said, "Okay. Well, that's not bad, but based on what we see, I believe you're limiting yourself on the potential that our website only did, I believe $16,000 in revenue in the month of April." Their web sales, just if it evaporated tomorrow, not a big deal. I said, "Okay. Look, I think you're being limited here. Give us three months to test this and see what we can do." This was in the very end of April. They said, "Okay. Fine. We're going to fire the agency we've been working with, but it's going to take two weeks. You're going to actually officially be able to kick off mid-May. But in the meantime that first two weeks of May, we're going to just push all our products into the merchant center and flip a very basic shopping campaign on based on just... We don't know anything. We're just going to have the products in there. Just see what happens." I said, "Okay. Great. Can't hurt anything while we're building it out." The data, when we're on a test and measure here, Jon, the data in the month of May, half of this was just that are basic campaign. Half was us getting ramped up. Their sales went from the site in April, $16,000 to $192,000. Jon: Now, that's a return on investment. Ryan: They only spent 2,500 bucks in Shopping in the month of May to generate an additional... What is that? $176,000? The crazy thing we saw and it surprises a lot of companies, but shopping has an effect on lots of areas of your site, not just what you're going to see in analytics on Google Shopping. That $2,500 generated Google Analytics last non-direct attribution, $115,000. The organic traffic on the site went from $10,000 in April to $45,000 in May. They weren't even doing any SEO. There was a halo effect on other things that Google Shopping does because you click to a site on Google Shopping, go back and do more research. Then, you're going to come back through other channels. Direct traffic was way up. Email was way up. Social was even up and they don't even do much on social. The Buy on Google doesn't allow for that because you're buying on Google. You're not even going to the website. You don't have the ability to buy other products. We know as well, based on our research and expertise within the Google Shopping space, over 50% of the time, people click on our product to go to a site and they're going to buy something else entirely. You get to the site and you start shopping. You see the data when somebody interacts with product suggestions on a site, time on site goes up dramatically. Conversion rate goes up on dramatically by clicking that suggested product, or you might also like type products. Everything gets better. They've committed to shopping the site. Maybe you can challenge me in that in some other arena, but all you want is a traffic from Google Shopping to get to the site because everything looks better from an analytics perspective. When you don't have that because of the Buy on Google not sending people to the site, you lose all of that. When I'm seeing Google give something for free, red flags and lights and flashes of all kinds of go off in my head saying, "Okay. Either something wasn't working for Google on this. They just need to get it out there more for adoption to try to take a last gasp for effort, or are they going to try to get companies to forget about sending traffic to the site to try to convince them that Buy on Google is the only thing to be doing?" It's just interesting to say the least. Also, if you have the product in Buy on Google and also in Google Shopping, you don't get to show in both ad sets, so it's not giving you extra inventory. It's a replacement, which also tells me if it's now free, how... Yeah. Google's not bad by any means. I think Google's great company. I'm very honored to be partnered with them at the level we are. I know that they're not going to give up all their revenue from Google Shopping. Jon: Right? Well, there's something else they're getting there in terms of... It's like the old adage about Facebook. If you're not paying for it, you're the product. Ryan: Yeah. Jon: There's something here that makes me think that they're interested in the consumer data. Ryan: Yeah. They want some data, and how much are they willing to pay for that? If they have 100% of all merchants adopt that immediately because it's free, they're not willing to take a $10 billion hit in Q3 probably to see some data. Jon: Not after Q2. Ryan: Because Google already has more data than they know what do it through a degree. Again, interesting. You need to watch it, test and measure it, but often it does not make a lot of sense to utilize the Buy on Google for most eCommerce companies. Jon: Is there anything else you feel like eCommerce brands should know about Buy on Google? Ryan: If you put this on your site and you're also running Google Shopping, we've got some merchants that spend north of $10 million a year on Google. When they came to us, they're shopping... Overall, they were using Buy on Google and Google Shopping and their shopping traffic was down 40% year over year including Buy on Google. Then, they couldn't figure it out. They came to us that find out about this. They had some prior relationships with us from other companies, the eComm team that had started working with them. They brought us on and we were able to uncover that when they had flipped on Buy on Google, that's the key thing that happened to drive the volume down. They thought they were going to be adding ad sets, adding all this additional stuff, and it was going to fix their marketing costs because the numbers looked great. When they flipped it on, everything went down and the agency they had been working with just said, "Well, it's just because the market's down or your prices are too high," or they had all these excuses that just didn't necessarily hold water when we started looking at the data. It's not easy to analyze Buy on Google and what the impact on your business, because the transaction is not happening on your website. You don't see that in Google Analytics. There's a lot of matchup data. There's a lot of filtering and analysis you have to do that is very complex to actually see the impact. When I say test and measure, you're going to actually have to do a lot of work on that measuring to figure out what the impact actually is. You have to look at skew data to see, "Okay. This product, I started showing in Buy on Google. What was the impact of overall sales in taking some of my offline data?" Because the Buy on Google's not going to show up in Analytics. What does that look like? When we put it here, we started seeing what's the impressions of Google Shopping that I lost? If I lost again, easy math, a thousand impressions and 10 sales on Google Shopping when I flipped on the Buy on Google, did I get more than 10 purchases of that specific product? Probably need more than that because the halo effect of Google Shopping of my organic traffic getting more searches and clicks and purchases because of my shopping investment, that goes away. You got to take in the fact, the halo effect. Go in paranoid like I do with most things. I'll go in paranoid to start and say, "Okay. If my business is not going to go to the direction I want to, where am I going to see it? What levers am I going to need to push and pull quickly and uncover some changes?" Jon: Is that paranoid why you live on a farm and all that acreage? Ryan: No. I also have four small kids and you need room to run. We're very blessed in COVID time to have all that room. Jon: You had said at some point, as we were having this conversation a few days ago, that larger merchants will usually lose volume when they have both ads and shopping actions. Is that summarizing what you were talking about a second ago? Ryan: Generally, yeah. It's simply because you can't show both ad sets. Playing out the conspiracy theorist in me saying, "Okay. Google's... Previously, they were going to get 12% from your Buy on Google, but they knew they were getting 20% with people clicking on ads to your site, they're probably going to take the 20% margin that they were getting on click and not show the Buy on Google." Buy on Google, you don't get any search queries, so we don't actually know what you were showing for. What we were seeing often was that it was cannibalizing brand terms and taking some of the easy stuff that you were probably getting at less than 12% cost already. Not that it's bad, but even smart shopping to a degree, take some of those easy layup searches and shows a pretty strong ROI. But a lot of that was brand that maybe you could have been getting a better return on ad spend with a more complex shopping structure. That's where you can't see the data from a search query perspective, so you have to see it from a transaction perspective. You're never going to get really apples to apples, but when you're comparing it volume loss of sales or volume increase based on skew, you'll want to hopefully have a lot of that data you can be pulling. If you have smart campaigns running currently on Shopping, you're probably not a large merchant. If you are a large merchant, we should chat. Smart campaigns are quite limiting to your scale, but if you have smart shopping and then you do Buy on Google as well, you have zero data in both of those. You're just going to be able to measure total site sales and maybe they do increase, but could they have gone higher if you went just to a manual shopping campaign structure and didn't do either smart shopping or Buy on Google. It's a difficult analysis, but it's something that all brands spending over 10,000 a month on Google should probably be doing. If you're doing spending money on Google Shopping and also doing Buy on Google, you need to be doing some deep analysis of what that looks like because I would venture, I guess when you flipped Buy on Google on, you probably lost some volume because of that transit. People not being able to shop the site and add different complimentary products. Jon: Right. Ryan: Buy on Google doesn't do that. They don't know what the complimentary products would be, but if you work with Jon who's going to help you figure out some of those things that are going to help your conversion rate to help your AOV, you can only do that on your site. Jon: Right. Yeah. That's been my rub with Google Shopping and I guess Buy on Google, more specifically is that you have very little control and you lose the contact information for the buyer. This leads me to my next question, which was I had mentioned there was an article in Forbes that kick started this whole conversation. That article says something along the lines of Google just updates eCommerce game to attract more sellers, but it's still not enough to compete with Amazon. What stuck out there was not that it's not enough to compete with Amazon, but this has been viewed as a play to compete with Amazon. Do you agree that this is a play to compete with Amazon? Ryan: Well, Google and Amazon has been competing for over a decade. I don't think it's a new thing for Google to try to test waters to create more of a marketplace. It just makes sense. With over 50% of all eComm transactions happening on Amazon, there is a risk to Google on ads that people could be just moving stores to Amazon and not paying for traffic on Google. That is a potential that Google is probably well aware of, probably not giving them any insight they don't already have. Jon: But I was wondering with that approach also, they're willing to offer this for free almost as like gut punch to Amazon in that, "Hey, we'll keep the customer data and the sale. We'll give that commission up to increase the volume and steal basically the revenue away from Amazon," almost as a way as a retaliation. I'm sure Google would never say this, but for Amazon launching on platform ads, which kind of hurt... I'm sure hurt some volume on Google. Ryan: I don't necessarily think that if you are selling online, you're not aware of Google or this was what was going to all of a sudden, get you to start working with Google to a degree. I think that there is some of that there like, "Hey, we want to try to get more merchants and more data," but I don't think that that was necessarily the play for Google that they're trying to use this to be the marketplace or take down Amazon at all. Then, probably trying to get new data to see, "Oh, if it is free, what is that doing to our margin? What is that doing to the volume of people buying on Google? Does that give us the ability to push into a marketplace?" The fact that they're integrating with PayPal, the fact they're integrating with Shopify Pay is pretty big. Letting people pay with those things, so it does seem that there is a marketplace potential here and it may be if we play this out, I'm guessing that Google is taking some margin from PayPal and Shopify Pay if people are using those for the transaction. Jon: I see. Ryan: Google's Pay could be as a merchant processor at the end of the day because they already have Google Pay. If they're making enough money on the processing fees, maybe they don't need to charge for a marketplace listing. Jon: That's a great way. I hadn't thought about that, but that's a great way for them to increase the volume there, which probably makes their cost cheaper to process those overall because of the larger volumes. Yeah. That's a great idea there in terms of how this makes sense for them. That leads me to my next thought, which is that Google has really tried several ways to take a piece of the eCommerce pie in the past few years. Right? We talked about Google Pay for instance, right? But I don't see a whole lot of eCommerce brands taking advantage of it or really making it a priority to support all these things. Do you have a feeling that Google will ever become a really large player in the actual eCommerce space besides driving traffic? Ryan: I would never bet against Google. Jon: That's fair. Ryan: They have a tremendous amount of intelligent people and more data in the eCommerce space than almost any other company [inaudible 00:22:14] in Amazon just control it. I think there's so much value to owning the customer experience for brands that as a brand owner myself, I do have an Amazon storefront. I do advertise on Google. I do have my own website. I look at Amazon as a retailer because it's their customer. It's not a me customer. For me, the more people that I can get my product into their hands through Amazon, the more likely they are to become a loyal advocate brand fan for my brand and maybe they'll buy from my site. Maybe they'll follow me on social and I can get new products into them, but I know it's Amazon's customer and Google can send traffic to my site. I have a lot of affinity for that because they're willing to share all of that customer data with me and not own it. It's difficult for me to be able to give up my customer and sacrifice that data and potential relationship and experience that I know I want my customer to have on my site to ever be like, "Okay. I'll never drive traffic to my site. I'll just let the transaction happen all over the place with everybody else's system." Jon: Government antitrust interviewing aside with all these big tech companies recently. I've always wondered why Google didn't just buy Shopify before it went public or by big commerce before it goes public. I could see a massive antitrust issue there perhaps where they own the entire ecosystem, but I also think that for them to really get a piece of this pie in the longterm in terms of on the transaction side, I almost see that that's going to have to be a requirement and we'll see what happens, but it would be interesting for them to take a play there. Ryan: Yeah. I think it's going to be easier for a Shopify to move into a marketplace than it is for Google to move into a web ecosystem that you can't get out of, but there's potential that Amazon gets broken up. As big as it is, maybe they have to uncouple their fulfillment and let everybody on the planet use Amazon fulfillment or Amazon becomes just the marketplace. I foresee that as potential. I know that Shopify is moving into logistics. They're going to start fulfilling orders for their merchants. There's a lot of frenemies in the digital marketing space. You and I partner with companies that we technically can compete with on certain areas as well. It's not uncommon and it's going to be to fascinating next few years to see how a lot of this is going to shake out. Jon: Yeah. Not really on topic, but I do see that if Shopify starts fulfilling, that's a huge win for Amazon because they can go back and say, "Well, we're not on it. There's no antitrust issues here," that Shopify fulfills and they do two days. Walmart now does one day. What's the problem? You could definitely see that argument. Ryan: Yeah. I think Walmart, we need... I didn't mention. You brought up Walmart. I think they have more distribution than even Amazon. Amazon has for their FDA, I think something in the neighborhood of 77 locations around the country. Walmart's got, I don't know how many thousands of stores, but a lot of them and Shopify has all this data around all of these merchants that a lot of them sell the same thing. If you've got the same skew at Shopify system, they know where you're located. They know where you're shipping from. In theory, Shopify could start selling that particular product and saying, "Hey, merchant X, Y, Z, you have it listed for 50. We know that we can sell it for 45. Do you want to take 45 and ship it to somebody?" Yeah. Most merchants are going to be like, "Yeah. I'll take that. You're going to share this customer data with me." Kind of like the dealer network. Do you remember Shopatron? I think it's now Kibo or something like that. The dealer or the manufacturer sells it and the dealer fulfills it. That's for sure within the realm of possibility within the next couple of years. Jon: Yeah. Wow. This has been fascinating. Thank you once again for educating me on this. You're always so knowledgeable on what's happening in the Google ecosystem, not only because you guys are such great partners with them at that scale, but also that you dive really deep into this personally as a store owner and somebody who helps clients. I really appreciate your time on this today and looking forward to the next conversation, Ryan. Ryan: Yeah. Me too. Thanks, Jon. I appreciate the time and the good questions.

In the race limbo that we are living in these days, cyclists, runners and triathletes are all getting creative about how to stay motivated and engaged in their sport.  This week Bill's Strava-stalking pays off big with the notice of an epic 1 day ride by Clif Pro team cyclist Russell Finsterwald and Kalan Beisel.  We caught up with Russell and Kalan to talk about their 240 mile and 20K of climbing in a single day's ride.  As it turns out, we aren't the only ones Strava-stalking.  I was on my Thursday run with my buddy Aaron Monroe and I started to tell him about these two guys who did a 240 mile single day ride - he replied "you interviewed Kalan Beisel?"  For those of you who live in the front-range of Colorado, you'll find this route absolutely fascinating (and mind boggling).  For those of you not in the area, don't worry, we've got a lot of interesting information that you can apply to your riding or perhaps inspire you do an epic ride where you live! Thanks to last week's guest, 5x Ironman champ and Spartan Pro team member Heather Gollnick.  If you missed it, go back to episode #236 and hear about her crazy high racing volume and learn more about her role as head triathlon coach at Liberty University and IronEdge Coaching.   In Today's Show: Interview with Russell and Kalan Endurance News - Peak Cancelled, USAT Foundation ride with Rocky Harris Announcements: We are now on Spotify Please subscribe to 303 Endurance Sponsor UCAN: UCAN has kicked off our Father's Day Sale - 20% off all powders and bars - see below for the link and please share if you'd like.  Follow UCAN for all the great content too!  Last Tuesday they had a virtual event Tuesday 8pm ET with running legend, Ryan They also had their weekly Zwift Ride. UCAN gives you steady energy so you can finish stronger. UCAN Performance Energy and Bars are powered by SuperStarch®.  Use in your training to fuel the healthy way and recover quickly! Use code MHE2020 for 15% off at generationucan.com, or try the UCAN Tri Starter Pack - 50% off, limit 1 - https://www.generationucan.com/product/ucan-tri-starter-pack-50-off/      Interview with Russell Finsterwald and Kalan Beisel: Kalan's race resume includes: 3x U.S. 24 Hour National Champion (4-man) 2013 Rocky Mountain Endurance Series Champion 1st place 2013 Gunnison Growler (course record) 1st place 2014 Banana Belt (course record) 1st place 2015 1/2 Gunnison Growler 1st place 2015 Dawn til Dusk Duo 12 Hour Race (course record) 1st place 2015 5-person Co-ed Duo 24 Hours in the Old Pueblo Russell's resume includes: 1 million feet of climbing in 2018 5 x National champion Sponsor VENGA: VENGA Ultra Gels, gummies and the Recovery Balm use Nano Emulsion Technology to get up to 5x CBD in your Blood Stream.  It's 100% THC-Free, Works Fast and the Ultra Gels make sure you get a Precise dose.  Great reducing inflammation and helping you get great sleep. “Venga!” is a Spanish for “Come on! go!   What's New in the 303: Boulder Peak Cancelled In the case of Boulder Peak, Boulder County is extending their restriction of 100 maximum gathering size through July, thereby forcing us to cancel the July 12th, Boulder Sports Chiropractic Boulder Peak Triathlon. Since 1991, the Boulder Peak Triathlon has experienced its ups and downs, but has always found a way to survive. This season will be no different. All registered athletes, and those who elected to transfer from the Colorado Triathlon, will be receiving an additional email with special instructions regarding their entry.   The EPIC MINI Triathlon The name says it all! The “EPIC MINI” Triathlon. Taking place at a central venue located in Fort Collins Colorado, this race packs a punch of fun. Choose a sprint or supersprint distance course to race! Fort Collins boasts some of the best local breweries around, bike friendly paths at every turn (the Spring Creek Trail is next to the run course) and a ton of activities all within minutes of iconic downtown – also known as “Old Town”. Don’t take our word for it – make a weekend out of this event and plan to get a little extra sight seeing done!   Lachlan Morton breaks Everesting record - from Cyclingtips.com Lachlan Morton has set a new Everesting record in an official time of 7 hours, 32 minutes, and 54 seconds.  Morton took the record from pro mountain biker Keegan Swenson, who took it from Phil Gaimon with a time of seven hours, 40 minutes, and five seconds. Morton averaged 254 watts over the effort. His attempt took place on the backside of Rist Canyon, outside Fort Collins, Colorado. Morton completed 42 laps of the climb to reach the height of Mount Everest, 8,848m (29,029 feet). Each climb up took him roughly nine minutes. Endurance News: With dream deferred, Olympic hopefuls to bike across Colorado for charity The postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics was a necessary, but frustrating blow to athletes around the world. But with the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to take lives and leave millions jobless, some Americans are using their free time for a good cause.  Nine U.S. Olympic and Paralympic triathlete hopefuls are biking 483 miles across the state of Colorado in just 24 hours to raise money for charity. Named the "Operation CO>COVID," the team is hoping to raise more than $20,000 for the USA Triathlon Foundation COVID-19 Relief Fund and the Care and Share Food Bank for Southern Colorado.  "Instead of racing in Tokyo, we will be racing the sun to finish our ride before sundown and raising money to give back to the community for COVID-19 relief," triathlete and paralympic hopeful Melissa Stockwell said. "It's really just us wanting to give back. Just to help out a community that we're really passionate about."  The relay challenge will take place June 19, starting on the Utah-Colorado border heading east across the Rockies before ending in Kansas. The team will bike in groups of three, taking shifts while gaining a grueling 23,000 feet in elevation. Team USA did the math-- the bikers must maintain a average speed of 21 miles per hour to cross the state before a full day is up. Athletes will be divided into three teams of three, with each person covering up to four different segments ranging from 3-15 miles at a time. The first riders will begin cycling from the Utah-Colorado state line in the evening (exact time TBD) on Friday, June 19, with a goal to be at the Colorado-Kansas state line 24 hours later on Saturday, June 20. Toyota support vehicles will transport the rest of the athletes and their gear along the route, stopping to swap riders after each segment. The athletes must collectively maintain an average of 21 miles per hour in order to successfully cross the state within 24 hours. The participating athletes include: Kyle Coon, Tokyo Paralympic Hopeful Hailey Danz, Rio 2016 Paralympic Silver Medalist and Tokyo Paralympic Hopeful Kendall Gretsch, PyeongChang 2018 Paralympic Gold Medalist and Tokyo Paralympic Hopeful Kevin McDowell, Tokyo Olympic Hopeful Jack O'Neil, U.S. Paratriathlon Junior Development Team Member Allysa Seely, Rio 2016 Paralympic Gold Medalist and Tokyo Paralympic Hopeful Melissa Stockwell, Rio 2016 Paralympic Bronze Medalist and Tokyo Paralympic Hopeful, Team Toyota Athlete Renée Tomlin, Tokyo Olympic Hopeful Alex Libin, Elite Triathlete and Guide for Kyle Coon Rocky Harris, USA Triathlon Chief Executive Officer Video of the Week: 2019 USA Cycling Russell Finsterwald Marathon National Champion   Upcoming Interviews: Rocky Harris, CEO of USA Triathlon, will join us to talk about the bike across Colorado and updates on USAT. Closing: Thanks again for listening in this week.  Please be sure to follow us on social media including @303endurance and @triathlon and of course go to iTunes and give us a rating and a comment.  We'd really appreciate it! Stay tuned, train informed, and enjoy the endurance journey!

In the race limbo that we are living in these days, cyclists, runners and triathletes are all getting creative about how to stay motivated and engaged in their sport.  This week Bill's Strava-stalking pays off big with the notice of an epic 1 day ride by Clif Pro team cyclist Russell Finsterwald and Kalan Beisel.  We caught up with Russell and Kalan to talk about their 240 mile and 20K of climbing in a single day's ride.  As it turns out, we aren't the only ones Strava-stalking.  I was on my Thursday run with my buddy Aaron Monroe and I started to tell him about these two guys who did a 240 mile single day ride - he replied "you interviewed Kalan Beisel?"  For those of you who live in the front-range of Colorado, you'll find this route absolutely fascinating (and mind boggling).  For those of you not in the area, don't worry, we've got a lot of interesting information that you can apply to your riding or perhaps inspire you do an epic ride where you live! Thanks to last week's guest, 5x Ironman champ and Spartan Pro team member Heather Gollnick.  If you missed it, go back to episode #236 and hear about her crazy high racing volume and learn more about her role as head triathlon coach at Liberty University and IronEdge Coaching.   In Today's Show: Interview with Russell and Kalan Endurance News - Peak Cancelled, USAT Foundation ride with Rocky Harris Announcements: We are now on Spotify Please subscribe to 303 Endurance Sponsor UCAN: UCAN has kicked off our Father's Day Sale - 20% off all powders and bars - see below for the link and please share if you'd like.  Follow UCAN for all the great content too!  Last Tuesday they had a virtual event Tuesday 8pm ET with running legend, Ryan They also had their weekly Zwift Ride. UCAN gives you steady energy so you can finish stronger. UCAN Performance Energy and Bars are powered by SuperStarch®.  Use in your training to fuel the healthy way and recover quickly! Use code MHE2020 for 15% off at generationucan.com, or try the UCAN Tri Starter Pack - 50% off, limit 1 - https://www.generationucan.com/product/ucan-tri-starter-pack-50-off/      Interview with Russell Finsterwald and Kalan Beisel: Kalan's race resume includes: 3x U.S. 24 Hour National Champion (4-man) 2013 Rocky Mountain Endurance Series Champion 1st place 2013 Gunnison Growler (course record) 1st place 2014 Banana Belt (course record) 1st place 2015 1/2 Gunnison Growler 1st place 2015 Dawn til Dusk Duo 12 Hour Race (course record) 1st place 2015 5-person Co-ed Duo 24 Hours in the Old Pueblo Russell's resume includes: 1 million feet of climbing in 2018 5 x National champion Sponsor VENGA: VENGA Ultra Gels, gummies and the Recovery Balm use Nano Emulsion Technology to get up to 5x CBD in your Blood Stream.  It's 100% THC-Free, Works Fast and the Ultra Gels make sure you get a Precise dose.  Great reducing inflammation and helping you get great sleep. “Venga!” is a Spanish for “Come on! go!   What's New in the 303: Boulder Peak Cancelled In the case of Boulder Peak, Boulder County is extending their restriction of 100 maximum gathering size through July, thereby forcing us to cancel the July 12th, Boulder Sports Chiropractic Boulder Peak Triathlon. Since 1991, the Boulder Peak Triathlon has experienced its ups and downs, but has always found a way to survive. This season will be no different. All registered athletes, and those who elected to transfer from the Colorado Triathlon, will be receiving an additional email with special instructions regarding their entry.   The EPIC MINI Triathlon The name says it all! The “EPIC MINI” Triathlon. Taking place at a central venue located in Fort Collins Colorado, this race packs a punch of fun. Choose a sprint or supersprint distance course to race! Fort Collins boasts some of the best local breweries around, bike friendly paths at every turn (the Spring Creek Trail is next to the run course) and a ton of activities all within minutes of iconic downtown – also known as “Old Town”. Don’t take our word for it – make a weekend out of this event and plan to get a little extra sight seeing done!   Lachlan Morton breaks Everesting record - from Cyclingtips.com Lachlan Morton has set a new Everesting record in an official time of 7 hours, 32 minutes, and 54 seconds.  Morton took the record from pro mountain biker Keegan Swenson, who took it from Phil Gaimon with a time of seven hours, 40 minutes, and five seconds. Morton averaged 254 watts over the effort. His attempt took place on the backside of Rist Canyon, outside Fort Collins, Colorado. Morton completed 42 laps of the climb to reach the height of Mount Everest, 8,848m (29,029 feet). Each climb up took him roughly nine minutes. Endurance News: With dream deferred, Olympic hopefuls to bike across Colorado for charity The postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics was a necessary, but frustrating blow to athletes around the world. But with the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to take lives and leave millions jobless, some Americans are using their free time for a good cause.  Nine U.S. Olympic and Paralympic triathlete hopefuls are biking 483 miles across the state of Colorado in just 24 hours to raise money for charity. Named the "Operation CO>COVID," the team is hoping to raise more than $20,000 for the USA Triathlon Foundation COVID-19 Relief Fund and the Care and Share Food Bank for Southern Colorado.  "Instead of racing in Tokyo, we will be racing the sun to finish our ride before sundown and raising money to give back to the community for COVID-19 relief," triathlete and paralympic hopeful Melissa Stockwell said. "It's really just us wanting to give back. Just to help out a community that we're really passionate about."  The relay challenge will take place June 19, starting on the Utah-Colorado border heading east across the Rockies before ending in Kansas. The team will bike in groups of three, taking shifts while gaining a grueling 23,000 feet in elevation. Team USA did the math-- the bikers must maintain a average speed of 21 miles per hour to cross the state before a full day is up. Athletes will be divided into three teams of three, with each person covering up to four different segments ranging from 3-15 miles at a time. The first riders will begin cycling from the Utah-Colorado state line in the evening (exact time TBD) on Friday, June 19, with a goal to be at the Colorado-Kansas state line 24 hours later on Saturday, June 20. Toyota support vehicles will transport the rest of the athletes and their gear along the route, stopping to swap riders after each segment. The athletes must collectively maintain an average of 21 miles per hour in order to successfully cross the state within 24 hours. The participating athletes include: Kyle Coon, Tokyo Paralympic Hopeful Hailey Danz, Rio 2016 Paralympic Silver Medalist and Tokyo Paralympic Hopeful Kendall Gretsch, PyeongChang 2018 Paralympic Gold Medalist and Tokyo Paralympic Hopeful Kevin McDowell, Tokyo Olympic Hopeful Jack O'Neil, U.S. Paratriathlon Junior Development Team Member Allysa Seely, Rio 2016 Paralympic Gold Medalist and Tokyo Paralympic Hopeful Melissa Stockwell, Rio 2016 Paralympic Bronze Medalist and Tokyo Paralympic Hopeful, Team Toyota Athlete Renée Tomlin, Tokyo Olympic Hopeful Alex Libin, Elite Triathlete and Guide for Kyle Coon Rocky Harris, USA Triathlon Chief Executive Officer Video of the Week: 2019 USA Cycling Russell Finsterwald Marathon National Champion   Upcoming Interviews: Rocky Harris, CEO of USA Triathlon, will join us to talk about the bike across Colorado and updates on USAT. Closing: Thanks again for listening in this week.  Please be sure to follow us on social media including @303endurance and @triathlon and of course go to iTunes and give us a rating and a comment.  We'd really appreciate it! Stay tuned, train informed, and enjoy the endurance journey!

Ryan explores whether you should or shouldn’t use PPC automation tools to assist you in your paid search efforts. The answer isn’t so simple. For all your PPC needs check out: https://www.logicalposition.com/ What's covered today: What is PPC Automation? Should we use it? What are the benefits to Automation tools? What are the drawbacks to Automation tools? TRANSCRIPT Jon: All right, Ryan. Today we're going to talk about PPC automation, or pay-per-click automation. Now Ryan, I've been hearing a lot about pay-per-click automation tools. Now, this is mainly with brands who are doing one of two things. I see it when they're either trying to save a dollar by not working with an agency, and they think, "Hey, automation can help me do all of these things that my pay-per-click agency is doing for me." Or, they're just trying to scale their traffic up extremely quickly, and they see automation as the holy grail of them being able to do that. So, I'm really excited to learn about this, because I keep hearing about it, but I don't know much about it, and so I'm happy to have an expert to discuss this with. So let's just start by defining what PPC automation is exactly. Ryan: It's a big topic, and PPC automation can mean so many different things to different people. But high level, it generally means not touching certain pieces of an account, and having some type of computer system make decisions for you, within the Google or Microsoft Ads space, and it's even going into the social world as well. But basically, something gets done without a human touching it. Whatever that looks like, it's from high level computers. Jon: So, it's not an all or nothing. Because I was just looking at this as an all or nothing, like you're either using automation to run your PPC, or you're not. But you're telling me that just having some automation built in can actually be beneficial, as opposed to just going full automation. Ryan: Yeah. And there's different thoughts on that, just like everything online, even in CRO, I'm sure that it has to do with... Everybody's got an opinion, and it's different than everybody else's, on what works or what doesn't. It's based on their experiences or what they've seen, or what they've been told. And so, you've got extremes, where Google Smart Campaigns are an automation in Google Shopping, that will literally do everything. All you do is give it a budget, and what your return on ad spend wants to be, and it goes and does that. If it can be accomplished in the system, it will do it. If your return on ad spend goal was too high, for example, it's just going to sit there, and not really spend any money. If it's really low, it's going to spend a lot more money, and get you a lot more clients because the potential's there. Jon: So you're telling me automation can't solve all of my hopes and dreams. Ryan: I wish it could. There's some people that will promise you that, for sure, but if anybody is telling you that, they are lying, or they have an ulterior motive in place for you and your business. And on the other side, there are ways to use automation that help but don't necessarily do even the work in place of a human doing the work. And, as with most things, and my most common answer, which is also my least favorite answer in questions about digital marketing, is, it depends. Where should your business lie in that space around automation, specifically in the PPC realm? It's going to depend on where your business is at in the life cycle, what you're able to afford as far as agency or humans doing work, and what are the long-term goals of the business, or what are you trying to accomplish? Ryan: And so, let me take it in a few phases I guess, in kind of explaining what I believe in automation. You've got the full automation, where you're just going to either use a tool, or, for most businesses, use Google's Smart Campaigns in the e-commerce world to spend money for you in Google. I think in some spaces it does make sense, but it also comes with a very large asterisk, where you're having Google do all of this work for you to grow your business, but Google's goals, generally speaking, are different than yours. As a big, publicly traded company, they have responsibilities to their shareholders to grow their revenues and profits, just like you as a business owner have a responsibility to yourself or to your employees to grow revenues and profits. So for most businesses, Smart Campaigns and full automation in Google is not my recommendation, and it is mainly around understanding what's going on in your account and the ability to really scale. Ryan: But small advertisers, just starting up, you've never spent before, you really want to see if your business online has some legs to it if you start spending money, I do think Smart Campaigns within the Google space do have a place to play in that. And if I had to put a line in the sand, probably somewhere around $500 or less a month in ad spend to kind of prove a model. My wife, for example, would make me prove something to her before we actually jumped with both feet into a business and say, "Yeah, let's throw a bunch of money at it, and really see if it works." She'd say, "All right, let's kind of see what happens if you just kind of let Google do something on the side here to see what happens with 500 bucks over a couple months, 500 a month for a couple months." I think there's something there. Ryan: On the other spectrum, no automation, where you are 100% customized, doing everything either with an employee or an agency internally running an account on Google and Microsoft. That has a place to play, and I think that pool of companies where that makes sense is probably in more of a mid-tier type business model where you're spending a few thousand a month, maybe as high as 10,000 a month, where you're really just one person doing all the work for you, and you can do a lot of customization, because generally when you're at that spend level, you're not the biggest, you're not the smallest, but you're having to compete with some of those biggest, and you need some of that kind of surgical precision to find those specific keywords, or specific searches for specific products that really makes sense for your company, and you've seen the conversion rates that work. Ryan: And then, the vast majority of businesses fall kind of in the middle, where you do need some automation, and you do need some human strategy and somebody else, and some humans touching the account as well. And so, focusing on the middle is where it gets most complicated. So, for the majority of businesses out there, it's how much, or what parts of the account really make sense there. Is it an internal employee with some automation? Is it an agency using humans, and some automation? And what goes first? Is it the automation first, with a human checking on it, and making sure it's working? That's going to be a broad spectrum within the space. Jon: So, I'm hearing that it makes sense to prove out a business. So, prove out a new product perhaps, somewhere where you're just going to spend a little bit of money, and you want to start and see if there's a good product market fit there. And if so, then it would make sense to expand beyond just automation. But it does have its use cases, which is great to hear. So, okay. So, you've talked a lot about, there's three tiers to be thinking about, right? And that that kind of messy middle is where "it depends" is usually the answer, which makes sense. So, let's talk about some tools around this. What are the benefits to using pay-per-click automation tools? You mentioned one of them being to prove out a marketplace, but in terms of the tools themselves, can you talk a little bit about what the automation does in that sense? Ryan: Yeah, so there's a lot of different areas of PPC that you can actually automate. And a lot of PPC automation came about, let's say maybe 10 years ago it really started to get some traction, around bid management, and having some computer system actually automate the bid changes in the account, because it does get mundane. It does become difficult, in the middle of the night, for example, or around the clock, to be making changes in an account when you actually have humans working your account need some sleep. And so, bid management was really the beginning of the space. And so, that's constantly there. It's still there. Google even has automations built into their platform now around bids. They have enhanced CPC, which I believe, Jon, you had some fun with that setting when Google changed some settings around that. I believe you spent upwards of $200 per click on Google when we looked at your account together. Jon: Yes. That's where automation became dangerous. And again, I know nothing about this, right? And so, I thought, "Hey, I'll let Google handle it," and I clicked the box, and then ended up spending a lot of money. Ryan: Yep. Oops. And that, it happens. It's not, obviously, what happens all the time. But when automated systems get... be doing what they're told, I mean, they have to still have input from a human, they can do things that maybe aren't intended, and that is really the big thing you have to be aware of in using automation. They're really as good as the inputs you're giving them, or the person designing the algorithm. And so, heavy trading algorithms are really impacting stock markets all over. And so, big drops, big swings up and down can happen because of automation. So, you just need to be coming in with some concern or just awareness that that can happen, so you're watching it, no matter what level of automation you're using. Ryan: But there's bid management, there is automated campaign management. In fact, one of my competitors that's been around for even longer than us, and they actually have a really good name in the marketplace, they built some automated systems to take search queries that converted and build them into ad groups automatically, because that became some of the more mundane time-draining things that were happening, when you'd see a search for this specific product that you hadn't seen before, you're like, "Oh, that converted, that's great, let's make sure there's not more of that out there. Let's build a specific ad group for that search and capture all of it." Great strategies. And so, the main argument that a lot of agencies that are using automation and automated systems that are helping internal employees and agencies scale is you can spend more time strategizing on growth and let these automated systems do a lot of the stuff that are just sucking time away from maybe the things that are more mundane and you don't need to be spending high-powered talent on doing those things. Very logical. I mean, there's no scenario in which that sounds like a terrible idea. Ryan: What's happened with that, that I've seen over the last 10 years, is a lot of agencies have adopted this automation, and it's allowed for tremendous amounts of scale, without having to develop a bunch of humans to understand what's going on, or to know how to communicate with clients, which is in no way bad. But what's happening is as this scale is happening at a lot of agencies that I'm seeing their accounts is they're losing their touch with what's going on, and then how to strategize for actual growth because this tool is doing so much of the work, that they can't go in and say, this client may say, "I really want to start doing this," or, "I want to move my return on ad spend goal to this," or, "Should I be breaking into this market?" And because these tools are doing so much of the work, that question isn't as easily answered as if by somebody that was actually in the account all the time that saw the search queries, that was doing negative keyword reports, that was doing all these wonderful things, and bid management, that could actually respond very quickly and say, "Oh, here's what you need to be considering as a business owner or your marketing team when looking at this question." Ryan: And so, that's been one of my big concerns. I think about stupid, stupid movie, but Idiocracy, where you've got a guy that's been dead for so long, comes back and everybody's really dumb, and he was not smart back when he lived, but everybody got so much dumber because of automation and the world doing everything for them. I worry about that. I don't think it's happening across the board at agencies or internal teams, but I really have a lot of respect for groups of people, or agencies that have to be in the account regularly, and I see a lot better results, generally speaking, when somebody's in a Google Ads or Microsoft account making the changes, because they're seeing in real time what's happening in the market, and they have to have a lens where they're looking at things through and say, "Why is this happening? I have to go solve this problem or understand it a little bit more." Whereas, if a tool's doing all the work, they don't have to try to get in there and understand what's happening, or what is the competitor doing that's causing this to happen in this account. Jon: I heard you talk a lot about search and search ads and Google and, okay, so Google has some automation. Does Bing have automation? Microsoft Ads. Ryan: They do have some, and it's not as old as Google. So, I can't say that it works as good or has as many advancements because I also don't look under the hood and I don't understand all the engineers and what they're doing. Microsoft obviously has some very smart people and they're doing some great things in there. So, a lot of the same things you see in Google, Microsoft Ads also has a lot of that capability for automation, and I would use a lot of the same automation the same way depending on where you are in the business cycle and what is needed in your business. Jon: Okay. Now, what about social channels, because that falls under pay-per-click for me, right? Ryan: Yep. Jon: So, what about things like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter? Is there automation built into those platforms? Ryan: There is some level of automation built into almost every platform, and I look at it almost the same no matter who or what platform it's on. It's an old example, but it still rings true. I wouldn't give all my taxes to the IRS to have them do them for me and tell me how much I owe them. We're diametrically opposed to what should be happening in that scenario. Jon: Right, success is different for each of you, right? Ryan: Exactly. Jon: Okay. Ryan: Exactly. So, if Facebook is doing everything for me and I'm just giving them a credit card and hoping that it does well, there is a piece of Facebook that wants me to succeed, but Facebook's success is more important to Facebook than my business succeeding. They know that if my business fails, another one's going to come up. Same with Google, same with Microsoft, same with LinkedIn. It's all the same. So, I, having been in this for a decade, I step a little bit away from automation whenever possible and I say, "Okay, how can I understand this better? How can I try to beat what the automation is doing?" Because what I've seen a lot of times with the engineers that build automated tools, way smarter than I am, as far as coding, math. I mean, it's not even close. But we're coming up with a strategy of maybe why this should be bid up or bid down, or maybe why this keyword should or should not be in the account. Ryan: I've still seen the humans making better decisions on that, and I think the machines and the AI is a very popular term. Artificial intelligence, everybody wants to be able to say that they do have a lot of that in their agency or in their organization, because it sounds really good. Like, "I've got this artificial intelligence that's really pushing growth and doing a lot of my thinking for me." Again, not bad at all, and I actually recommend businesses step into that space to understand it more and to use it where it's appropriate. But I still think when you have human searching and the change is constantly happening, we know that something like 15% of all searches done on Google every 90 days have never been done before. So, what is an artificial intelligence going to do with a search term that's never been done before? It can gain some insights possibly, but as we're blending in search query reports now voice search with text search, like, I type it into my computer or I search for it on Alexa or Google Home. There's a lot of different intent behind that. I've seen better results from humans looking through that and being able to filter it. Jon: Right, right. Especially working with natural language and understanding the intent behind what people are searching versus just what they say, right? Ryan: Yeah. Yep. Jon: Okay. Ryan: And so, yes, companies need to be looking at automation and considering the opportunities available, and then how is that going to compliment what they currently are doing? I don't ever look at, long-term, replacing humans... I mean, again, in the next five years that will be my long-term view. You can't predict anything in the digital space beyond five years, and really, anything longer than a year is, you're throwing darts at a dartboard way far away. But I don't foresee any time soon where I would be comfortable with my money on full automation, no human looking into that or doing it, or having a serious play within that space. I spend a decent amount of my own money on all these platforms, and I see the automation. I know the biggest players in the space. I mean, if you're in the PPC world, Marin, Kenshoo, Adobe, Acquisio. Probably hundreds of others that are doing the same thing in bid automation, in addition to Google and Microsoft, including Facebook will do some bid automation based on goals. There's no shortage of those. There's no shortage of very, very smart people working to create the next best automation. Jon: I think you made a good point earlier, and that's something I think you just touched on right now even, but it's in the favor when you do bid automation of Facebook or whoever to have that bid go up and up and up, right? So, automating means that escalation seems to happen more quickly. Is that not true? Ryan: Yeah, I mean, we saw it in your account, right? Where you were averaging in your business $20 a click, which is reasonable, based on how you spend money and the returns you get. But then all of a sudden, if everybody is on automation and everybody's using Google's automation on Google, how does Google know who's going to win? Does Google play, you know, make it socialist where everybody gets 5% because there's 20 people advertising, so we're going to even it out and make everybody little? How do you grow beyond that? And that's where logic comes into my side and says, okay, we can't all be on automation or there's just, there's no win. There's only so many ways you can look at moving bids up or down, for example. They can only move up and down, they can't move sideways, they can't move diagonal. And so, it's understanding more about the user as we add layers in from a remarking perspective, from an RLSA perspective. The more information we have about this user allows us to get more aggressive or less aggressive than maybe a competitor that doesn't have that information. Ryan: And so, all of these layers we add on add complexity and give opportunity to people that have that data. So data is actually probably, in my opinion, more valuable than some automations. The more data layers you can get, and you can get lost in data, so don't get me wrong, the idea that "Oh, big data, all you need to do is look in all these thousands of Excel sheets to figure out where that one specific customer is that you want and go find them and bid on them." It's more about using that as you're making adjustments and using the understanding and strategy behind why you may or may not be making this move. Ryan: It's fascinating, when I look at all the people I've hired in the digital marketing space and the people that have really succeeded on the backend of making the moves in an account. It's really, from a human perspective, becoming an art form in how you look at a Google Ads account, and you're kind of, I joke with the guys and girls on the team, or ladies on the team, that it's kind of like the Matrix, where you're looking at just all of these digits flying around. And the really good paid search account managers in the account really see it in a much different light than somebody like myself that would go in and say, "Yeah, okay, I see it says $200 and it says conversion." They're seeing all these different layers because of their experience. I mean, some of our people have been doing this for over a decade, 15 years actually, in the accounts, doing it, and they're so efficient and so crazy of what they can do. Ryan: And we've matched that up with people that are very good at gaming, like, the strategy piece of gaming. And so, really, we're looking at almost the gamification of digital marketing, where we're looking at these and saying, "All right, you're trying to beat these other advertisers." I'm a hyper competitive individual, as you know, and you're pretty darn competitive as well, in your basketball and marketing world. I want to win. And we find people that really want to win, and then they add their ability to see all of these moving pieces and saying, "Hey, if that competitor of our client goes out of business, that's unfortunate for that company, but it's really good for us and our client." Ryan: It becomes fun but also interesting in how you're taking that human that is really good at paid search management, and what we're trying to do is kind of make, right now my best analogy is kind of the Terminators. How are we using technology and bolting it on to them to make them more effective at what they do? Rather than replacing it, how do we give them things they can look through with weird glasses or things they can add onto their mice? What are we doing to make them more efficient as a human, and that's how we look at technology and automation. Jon: So next time I visit Logical Position, I'm going to be interacting with a bunch of cyborgs basically. Ryan: I mean, hey, if my vision comes in place. I mean, maybe two years out on that one. Jon: Dart board, right? That's one of the darts. Ryan: Yeah, one of the darts. But it's... I think the best use of PPC automation, personally, and this is my lens I look through and how we're looking at automation internally at Logical Position is, for the majority of companies in the middle, it's, how are you supplementing the humans? Instead of replacing them, how are you making them able to do more? So, we use, scripts are a great automation that a lot of people don't think about. We're using scripts to say, "All right, this ad group had a hundred impressions by 6:00 AM yesterday and it has zero today. What just happened? Something is broken there. Let's go in and see that." Replacing some of that minutia or things that just get really bored or tedious, or we just don't have the scale of a human in a large account to get to all of those pieces efficiently. How can we say, "All right, I need this to go do that"? Maybe it's not going to go through the search query reports for us and find all the negative, but it can bubble up some opportunities. Ryan: I've talked to a phenomenal technology company, Metricstory. If you haven't checked out Metricstory I think they're really cool, and they're really, man, they have some smart engineers. They're doing some automation where they're able to bubble up new opportunities based on scraping a Shopping search query report and saying, "Hey, these converted and they're actually not showing in your text ad or search portion of your account, from a search query perspective. You should put this keyword in there because it's converting on Shopping." And it can, based on their algorithm, their really smart algorithm, it can even give you an estimated return on ad spend, saying, "Hey, this keyword we think is going to get this based on ad groups around it." Ryan: So we're really looking at leveraging some of that in our efficiencies. Say, "Okay, if we have that, can we make this person able to focus more on bids on text ads because we have this filtering a search query report on Shopping?" Or we're able to find losers in the search query report on the text ad side much quicker than we could if we had to comb through it by hand. Jon: Yeah, this is a really interesting point, adding on to what people, the strategy that a human person can bring to this, with a little bit of AI, helps them to push this even further. But you still have to have the insight that somebody is bringing to the table with that experience to really pull out the meaningful changes. And I thought it was really interesting, you said earlier that aligns with this, bids and these automated bid machines, they only can go up and down. They can't go sideways or diagonal or any other dimension, right? And that's what a human is able to do. Ryan: It's a frustrating answer, but every company should be looking at kind of a backstop. And then also, if you're a company that has one person managing your account internally, I always had the worry as an agency of the bus theory, like what if they get hit by a bus? I told my team, nobody could take the public transportation because you can not be hit by a bus. We don't have enough backups. But in that scenario it's like, okay, well, who else is going to be aware of that? And it can't just be an automated system that's going to be continued going if they evaporated tomorrow, because it's unencumbered, you know, what's going on. Ryan: So, having some automation helping them, but also documenting things too so that an automation doesn't need to take all of it, but that another human could come in and replace or augment as well if somebody needs time off or pregnancy or birth or sickness, all these other things that we, at scale, with 750 employees here, we can do that automatically but a lot of companies don't have that ability. And so, they need probably a little more automation just to protect themselves but also ensure that there are some humans looking at things. Jon: Well Ryan, this has been extremely educational for me. Thank you for sharing all the knowledge around this. I am really looking forward to the day that I walk into Logical Position and I'm interacting with some cyborgs and then having you bring that skillset over to The Good so that we can continue to do the same on the conversion side. Ryan: Oh yeah. That looks fun, huh? Jon: Yes. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for educating me today. Really looking forward to not spending $200 unnecessarily on my own ads by checking a box for automation in the future. So, thank you for saving me on that earlier on. Any last words on this? Ryan: Of course, you can just send me a $200 bottle of wine and it'll be just the same. Jon: Perfect, I know what you like. It's in the mail. Ryan: No, I think it's good just to always be careful with automation. Don't assume it's going to work for you always. Just have smart humans working with you. Jon: Awesome. All right, thanks Ryan. Have a wonderful afternoon. Ryan: Thanks Jon.

Are your marketing goals lining up with the goals you've set to grow your business overall? Many business owners or executive teams set goals for their online marketing to drive profit to the company. Unfortunately, the current digital marketing landscape makes it difficult to reach digital marketing goals that have a focus on profit: * Generally speaking, digital marketing has increased in competition and the real estate available for paid ads has shrunk (mainly on Google which controls a vast majority of search volume). * This has forced companies to further emphasize customer lifetime value activities (such as email and loyalty programs) to drive business profit. * Instead of driving profit from the first order on paid search, companies now may only break-even on that initial order (some companies even lose money on the first order-on purpose). The solution is to focus less on marketing ROI and focus more on the overall business objectives, like increasing market share: * Revisit the goal every two months to see how email and loyalty channels are impacted by the increase of new customers. * In theory, both of those channels will be driving much higher volumes of sales at extremely profitable levels. Even if profit doesn’t match up exactly, the sales volume will be making a noticeable dent in competitors. * Customers that buy from your website through non-brand search and shopping are customers that were likely going to purchase from a competitor if you didn’t get them. * They didn’t have any brand or site loyalty when making the search. * Over time, investing in non-brand search/shopping more aggressively will also have what we call, The Halo Effect. * Don’t let any changed goal continue for more than two months into the new year without analyzing the data to make sure that it is driving the intended outcome. * Having goals that don’t drive the business in the right direction aren’t necessarily bad, but can have unintended consequences when left unreviewed. LINKS "I Have Bad Goals, You Have Bad Goals, We ALL Have Bad Goals" by Ryan Garrow (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-have-bad-goals-you-we-all-part-1-ryan-garrow/) TRANSCRIPT JON MACDONALD: Ryan, I know you've spent a lot of time communicating with business owners and marketing teams about their goals with online marketing. To put these goals in perspective, we have to discuss overall business goals, and that's to me where things get really interesting, because their current marketing goals are not driving the online business towards an overall business goal. The business or individual usually has set a bad goal and the best time to review those I would think is at the beginning of a new budget year, which is typically the start of a calendar year. Ryan, today let's talk about setting more appropriate goals to online marketing and align that with business objectives. How does that sound? RYAN GARROW: Sounds awesome. It's one of my favorite topics actually. I get into this all year actually. I'll be talking to business owners as they're thinking about becoming a client or working with us. Or even if I'm just out having a beer after a conference, I always love talking about goals. It's been a big part of my life, and how I operate so I'm constantly setting goals, revisiting them, and business strategy and goal setting go so hand in hand that it just becomes a topic I naturally get to probably in almost every conversation with business owners or marketing teams. So often, I find that there are well intentioned people throughout an organization that set what seems to be an appropriate goal for their team, and then they get down the road 6 months to 12 months, and maybe they hit their goal, but it drove the business in a completely different direction then it actually been anticipated. Without all the stops in place, you really revisit that goal and decide, "Is this actually working and are we actually accomplishing what we're trying to accomplish?" It can be very fascinating conversation in that process. I'm excited about this topic for sure. JON: I recognize and maybe our listeners don't know, but you run several online businesses yourself, right? RYAN: Yes, my wife and I have probably more than our fair share [laughs] that we run. JON: I would think one is a fair share so the fact that you have more than that is awesome. That speaks to the fact that you put a lot of what you preach into practice, right? RYAN: Yes, there's actually not a scenario in which I will advise a business owner or marketing team to do something that I'm probably not already doing or I haven't learned from and therefore advise them correctly based on my own misgivings or wasted money. JON: I imagine in your day, you've probably set a bad goal or two. RYAN: The list is ongoing and my wife likes to remind me of those [laughs]. One funny one recently, I was so mad at myself for this one. We were launching a brand and we decided to launch it on Amazon. Partially for the education, but also because I had been built up as a digital marketer to fear Amazon, and that just made me mad that I was scared of Amazon. That's why I go, "Forget it. We're going to launch a brand on Amazon and see what happens. We have to understand the landscape." Our team was deciding to start up an Amazon ads department. I said, "All right, we'll launch on Amazon, you can have my money. I'll set a wonderfully appropriate goal to make sure we hit our objectives." Initially is like, "All right, I'm going to share the upside with this team and we're going to have a profit share." They know my margins because they need to know that to run the digital marketing through Amazon and help create the pages and all that. We had this wonderful goal that every dollar of profit we got from ads, they were going to get, I think it's something around 20% of that dollar, whatever that looked like. I can't remember exactly the goal. My goal as a business owner in launching this business was to dominate the competition. I was not in the game for profit. I want to spend down to break even to get customers, I want to understand the Amazon ecosystem, but my goal really in this is it's an organic fertilizer. I want to take down Monsanto. A pretty lofty goal considering how many billions of dollars they have. JON: Yes, no kidding. RYAN: Profit was secondary to me, it was like, let's get the product in the hands of people. I want to know their feedback as well as saying, "Hey, the more people that get it, the better my opportunities for repeat business, et cetera, et cetera." We get three months down the road, and I'm just frustrated with growth, like, hey, we went up aggressively. When we started the marketing it was exciting. My partners and I were looking at numbers daily. It was actually when the Apple Watch which we all had had the Amazon ping every time you got a sale, which was great. We'd have a glass of wine at the end of the day and our watch would go off and we're like, "Yes, we just got a sale. This is awesome." We were excited, but it flat-line so quick, and three months in I was talking to the team and I was like, there is way more search volume here on Amazon than what we're capturing. I could see our search rank and where we are ranking the competitors and their sales volume based on reviews and all these other metrics we had to look at. We were not moving the needle forward according to my overall business goal of becoming one of the largest houseplant fertilizers in the marketplace. The teams like, "Oh, the numbers are great. Look at we spent $5,000, regenerated 10 $12,000 of profit. You cut us a cheque on the side for $1,000. Isn't this great?" That is not my goal. Profits, not bad. The partners weren't upset about the profit, but the flat-line growth had to do with the fact that our marketing team that was pushing the levers, and pulling levers on the Amazon ads weren't actually able to accomplish my overall goal of market share and getting sales and new users because they were being conservative to protect that margin, which was their goal. I had to go back to the team and like, "Okay, I like the fact that we're able to pay you because you generate a profit. You nailed the goal. Awesome job. High fives all around, but as a business owner, I have to now change the goal because I don't really care about profit. I care about sales." We adjusted the goal to get on to percent of overall revenue, as long as we're not losing money. I said, "If there's a dollar in profit, I'm still paying you and I'll technically lose money as a brand, but that's the goal I want is aggressive sales growth, regardless of dollar profit from marketing, because that initial orders when I'm getting on Amazon, and we had some brand campaigns set up so we can avoid brand non brand stuff. It turns out, we started growing again, once we adjusted that goal and better aligned with my overall business vision, but that was frustrating for me, but it's also an example of how easy it is to get going on the wrong goal just because good intentions are not. I set a goal that just wasn't appropriate. JON: I think that aligns with the current digital marketing landscape, which has had a major shift over the last few years. Would you agree with that? RYAN: For sure. It's constantly changing. I think one of the reasons I still have a job in the digital marketing spaces is because it's constantly changing and the landscape is constantly in flux. Google, where the largest percentage of spend many times is for a company. In the last couple of years, we've gone from 11 text ads down to 7, and there's more companies competing. You can see you compressed the amount of available ad space, and then increased number of advertisers, logic dictates what's going to happen when that does, there's just an increase in cost per click and a real shift. Maybe five, six years ago, a lot of our e commerce clients would have said, "Set a goal around profit, and I need to get profit from ads because it's available." Now profit from that first ad isn't necessarily there for every company. In fact, many industries, it's you're losing money, no matter what happens on Google ads, or Microsoft ads, but you're moving the focus from that initial sale and what are you getting from that sale to, What's the lifetime value am I getting from that? And so it's extending out that return. We started doing this actually funny enough, probably about four or five years ago, with a company called Harry and David, where they did the math and actually understood how much money they should be losing on that first order to maximize their long term lifetime customer value, and how many companies they could get and how much market share could they capture. It was a real fascinating study, but we're finding that to be more than norm now than shooting for a 10X return on ads spend when your margin is 50%. JON: Yes, so they're basically looking to break even on that initial order. RYAN: A lot of companies should whether or not they are or not. My advice to a lot of companies is that first what we would considering a non brand acquisition, so somebody searching for your product or service and not your brand. That ordered in a perfect world right now should probably not have profit, it should be right about break-even and then having some lifetime value, being able to email them and bring them back into the brand through the same product again, another service, another product, having that future business coming in with your profit actually comes from. JON: Yes, because the cost of that second sale is so much cheaper. RYAN: Yes, and the more customers you can acquire on a non brand search, the less customers your competitors have, because that person is searching for product A unattached to a brand at this point. They're going to buy from somebody, it might as well be you because now you have that customer data, and that ends up becoming one of the most important things to a brand, regardless of whether you're a retailer or a brand. It's that customer data and knowing something about them that maybe your competitor doesn't know. JON: Is it safe to say that the number of levers that have impacted digital marketing return has just magnified tremendously over the past few years and maybe that's causing confusion with the goals? RYAN: I think so. I think you also have a lot of marketing teams and business owners that have goals that they have them and they don't necessarily know why. They've had them for years and it comes across to companies big and small that either their goal is, "We just take last year's numbers and add 10, 15% whatever we think the market's going to do and that's our goal." Or, "Hey, we have this profit goal from paid search and we look at it as a profit center and we always have, therefore why would we change that?" What I'm seeing from a broad stroke high level is most of those companies looking at profit goals from their marketing are shrinking as much for what their spend could be or what they actual new customers coming through that channel could be or it's causing them to focus more on just brand search in their paid channels, which has meaning they're capturing the same customers over and over and over again and are not actually growing their database. JON: Step one is to understand and acknowledge that we've had bad goals, right? Step two is to fix those goals and make sure that we've got marketing in alignment. I think we can all agree, at least in some part, we've all had bad goals. You had a great example of a bad goal earlier on and now that we've all agreed on that, let's talk about how we can fix those. Can you walk us through maybe an example conversation you've had with clients who have had bad goals and how you start to correct those? RYAN: One actually comes to mind. It's in the auto parts space. Generally speaking the margins are not extremely high. This particular brand though manufacturers and goes direct to consumer and so their margins are higher than most. In fact their margins I think are just below 50% but they're fairly large organization online. I think they are doing north of 50 million or so per year through their website. We took it over from another agency and magnified their sales phenomenally. I think they spent 1% last year over year, one of the months we looked at, before I was talking goals with them, spent 1% less and had 50% more revenue and their overall profit because they track profit outside of that for their marketing team, was that 57% on marketing even including agency fees because I think that was about a wash agency-to-agency. High level numbers looks phenomenal. They are really printing a lot of money on their paid search and they were beside themselves excited. The marketing team was in a great spot. They were super happy and one of our better references in the space. As we got into the numbers and started talking about overall business goals and what they could or should be doing, it became apparent that their marketing team had an incentive to create profit from paid search ads, which is one of the reasons they were so excited to be working with us at Logical Position because profit from paid search ads was up 57% and obviously their incentive was looking fairly solid. Diving into the numbers. They are a $50 million auto parts company that's part of a huge market. 50 million is one of the probably top five players in their specific segment, but it could be massive. They could probably be doing 100, 150 million a year online rather quickly, but they're being held back by some of their goals internally. Analyzing analytics and Google ads together uncovered some things where they only had about 20% of the impression share in shopping on some of their non-brand queries. Not that impression shares and end all be all because it can be manipulated within shopping to show almost whatever you want. This was fairly clean data that we knew that the market was fairly big for what they were doing and so despite their numbers being great, I had to talk to the CFO and talk to them about overall business goals and their goal is really become a big player and they do want to hit that 100, 150 million revenue number online and I had to talk to them about, "Okay, well, your marketing team is getting a 14X, spend a dollar, get $14 in revenue on non-brand terms," which is phenomenal in the auto space, especially in a place as competitive as theirs. There was a lot of room to run even with profit in the space and I put some numbers in front of them. I said, "Right now you're using a 15X as a barometer of success in non-brand search. What if you were able to say lower that goal to a 4X. You spend a dollar to get $4 in revenue, still technically profitable. What would that do to your spend to your overall sales to your new customers? Let's just play this out and see what happens?" It basically said, "If you tripled your budget on non-brand terms and we're talking about a six- figure budget so it's not inconsequential on a monthly basis, you are still able to get the same amount of end profit to the organization as you had before, but you were able to acquire a vast amount of new users. If you're manufacturing your fulfillment, all these things can keep pace with that. You should be pushing for a much lower return on ad spend on your non brand goals to take that market share," because they were covering such a small-- It was almost like the tip of the iceberg and they were being successful. There's no scenario in which they weren't happy, but the magnitude that they could move below that waterline and capture a massive amount of market share from competitors was for sure there and that's not the case with every company we look at or talk to. Some of them have really maximized their acquisition ability on non-brand terms, but most companies out there listening to this podcast, there for sure is the ability to push more aggressively. John: Let's talk about the different levers then that are involved in that equation. I heard you say that they got a few of those wrong and had to go back and correct them or that it's limiting them. Can you tell us about a handful of these levers that everyone should be considering when they're setting goals? RYAN: First you have to separate out brand and non-brand. People searching for your brand and your brand plus product or brand plus service, those are your earned customers. You've already done the work either in digital marketing or branding offline or social media. Those people are actually searching for you. That group of people searching, you're not going to be able to necessarily set a goal that you can stick to around that because it's going to depend on what are your competitors doing? What does the landscape look like on Google based on your brand? If you're Kleenex, your brand searches a little nebulous space on are they looking for you or are they looking for just your product because you've been branded so well for that particular product separating that out. You have to have very clean data in your account to say, that's one piece of the account that's just going to-- we want to maximize our coverage and that's really your goal there. Acquisition goals in the page search realm or digital marketing realm are around new customers to your brand. We call them new to file customers. They're new to file a new in your CRM, new in your email database. That's really where you have a lever to push and pull for your acquisition of new customers. That's where you take into account what are your margins? What’s your lifetime value? Those are numbers the brand has to be able to at least have a good understanding of margins fairly easy to capture that but usually we'll start with just a broad stroke. What's your average margin? If it's going to range between 40 and 50 depending on the product line they're buying, but to meet in the middle right now at least to start with goal setting at 45, great let's figure out your break-even is and then what's your lifetime value? How often do they come back and rebuy or how often should they? And most companies don't know this piece. This is where they're guessing and revisiting goals comes into play because you might not have a successful email campaign currently and you're going to start it right away and you're going to make an estimate that our product has a life span of six months, so we expect to be able to get in front of these people again in six months. Great, let's figure that then. How many customers should we be acquiring to get this test going? Some companies and actually I would say most companies don't start with the goal of losing money to acquire customers. Just break-even and figure out how hard can we push? This makes people really nervous by the way [chuckles]. JON: I can only imagine, especially that CFO, you always have to talk to. RYAN: Oh yes, the CFO and in my world the CFO is my wife [laughs]. I like if I could spend a 100 grand tomorrow on digital marketing and get 100,000 profit, that'd be great. That makes some CFO, like my wife, very nervous to see, oh, the potential to spend $100,000 tomorrow is there. What if we only brought in $80,000 of revenue or profit? That would be concerning to have the family at a deficit of 20 grand in one day. The wonderful thing about digital marketing, specifically, we'll focus on Google right now, for the purposes of this conversation, money comes back into the brand almost as quick as you're putting it out and depending on how Google is billing you, whether it's net 30 or whether it's every $500 and how quickly your merchant processor is bringing your payments into your bank account. Generally speaking, it's a very quick wash on that. Money goes out, money comes back in and because you can see in Google ads and fairly close to real time what sales are coming in, there's very little risk to the cash flow of the business. That's where most CFOs start coming at me within the cash flow like "Oh, we've got a byproduct. We've got to do all these other things." Yes, you have to do that but if money's coming back in as quick, in theory, it's not causing any issues. There can be issues with having the product in stock. If you are a manufacturer, do you have the bandwidth to create that volume? Do you have the ability to fulfill that? There's a lot of other questions that come into that based on what we think the volume could be. As you're going into this, the threshold may not be how much can you spend, but it could be how much can we produce, sell, et cetera, et cetera. Data considerations within the space. JON: Ryan, one thing I've heard you talk a lot about between conversations with the clients that we jointly work with is something called the halo effect, right? Over time if these brands are investing in that non-branded search or shopping more aggressively, they'll have that halo effect. Can you talk to that a little bit? RYAN: Yes. You're going to set a goal and for most of you listening, start with a goal around breaking-even on non-brand. That needs to be on search and shopping but shopping is the fun one on Google. That's where if you control your search terms well enough and this one isn't necessarily easy to control because shopping is not set up with keywords. It does take some manipulation of the campaigns and structure and hierarchy and negative keywords, all of that. Let's assume you have that together pushing aggressively in non-brand shopping. I'm staring at my computer screens now. Let's just say you're selling computer screens down to break-even by marketing aggressively and shopping and pushing for extra units there. Most people that go to Google Shopping, actually two things. They buy something different. What you're pushing and shopping as far as the click, over 50% of the time they're going to buy something entirely different. That's where it does become important to monitor what they're buying because if your margins are different, it can be problematic, but they also convert often through other channels. I personally, when I shop on Google Shopping, when I click it, I buy it. I don't do a tremendous amount of research or I've done it beforehand by the time I'm looking on Google Shopping, I click, I buy, there's not a huge attribution funnel for my personal purchases. It's unique for me when I look in the data and actually see that Google Shopping actually opens more sales than it actually closes. If you're clicking on computer screens on Google Shopping, on average, you're going to come back and buy through a different channel. If you're looking at Google analytics, you can see a city conversions. You're going to see that the halo effect of investing in Google Shopping on non-brand terms, your organic traffic generally will increase. Your email, will generally increase, your direct traffic, your referrals, your social media. All of these channels will be impacted by Google Shopping. It's fascinating to see the impact that Google Shopping can have across channel and it generally doesn't get the credit that it's due. JON: Do you mean the organic and direct traffic and these other brand channels are all going to have noticeable revenue increases as well? RYAN: They should. Again, it's not in a vacuum where it's perfect for every brand across the world, but generally speaking do it for three months and look at the numbers and you should see an increase. Now if you're doing SEO as well, you would expect organic to continue to increase as well, but using the Google analytics assisted conversions, you should be able to see where Google Shopping is having an impact and you can actually get down into conversion paths and all that fun data to tell you what is being impacted the most by your extra investment in Google Shopping. In fact, just had a conversation with the CFO, one of our clients a few days ago and they've been investing in non-brand shopping at a lower return on ad spend than they normally would because they've been seeing this halo effect. They've measured it and said, "Hey, we actually aren't there." It's a very competitive space where there's not a lot of profit, if any to be had in the digital marketing space because of the competition but for them they realized, "Hey, we've got this extra data showing that organic traffic is having an uptick and so is email and direct traffic based on what analytics is telling us about our investment in shopping. Therefore we can go down a little bit below break-even because of that halo effect and allows them to get a little more aggressive because they do have a pretty strong lifetime value where people are coming back into the brand after their first acquisition. JON: I heard you say, Ryan, a little bit about how often you should be looking at this data. How often do you feel people should be reviewing that data and then perhaps even revisiting their goals? RYAN: I'm probably a little more odd in that I'm always looking at data constantly in there and you want to be aware of it. You can also get caught in making knee jerk reactions too quickly. I caution most marketing teams or business owners to go in there daily and look at the data and want to make changes. You have to let the experts in marketing do their thing. I like to revisit goals quarterly. For my businesses, I want to say, "All right, I was shooting for this goal quarterly. Let's look at what happened and do I need to pivot the goal, adjust the goal based on what my business is trying to accomplish?" Like I did with organic fertilizer. I did revisit the goal quarterly and thankfully a day because I was able to adjust and make it a better goal to help me drive the business where I want it to go. In marketing, we always have the best intentions and the best hypothesis is going in and saying, "If we do this, we believe this is going to happen." There's always something that's going to go wrong. Always. You may not completely miss the goal. We may go in with one hypothesis saying, "Oh, there's this much search volume on this term, let's go get it and then there's more or less than, so we have to pivot a goal", and that's really where some experts can be valuable on your marketing team and seeing that because knowing that it's going to be different than what you expect, being able to pivot and adjust on the fly is very important for the minutia of working on account in the paid search realm. The marketing teams in the account constantly look at the data and make adjustments to help the account get to the goal and then higher level, I would be looking at your goals quarterly to see those goals are appropriate and they're heading in the direction that you really wanted them to go. JON: Who do you recommend is involved in that conversation then? Because I've heard you mentioned the CFO a few times and I've heard you mention the marketing teams and of course the marketing experts that they might be working with to help them drive traffic. Who all do you think should be involved in those goal setting conversations on a quarterly basis? RYAN: To a degree I say less is more. I don't like meetings in general. More people generally cause meetings to go longer. I like to keep it small. Depending on the size of your organization, you may not have a large marketing team, you may not have a CFO. Its business owner and marketing team. If there is a CFO in the organization, I highly recommend they're involved in the goal because they're going to have a general overview of what's going on in the organization and maybe the sales volume is not sustainable based on inventory levels or manufacturing capabilities or the ability to ship and distribute. The CFO should have some insight on that. I for sure think a CFO should be involved also from just a cash perspective. You need somebody that understands the digital marketing deep enough to be able to talk strategically, but also not the person actually pushing all the buttons necessarily and then the person leading marketing overall should probably be involved. JON: Just like all goals, there's value in discussing those goals with experts though, right? Would you suggest that they have a third party reviewed these goals as well? RYAN: I would probably bring a third party in, maybe not necessarily quarterly, but at least annually to look at your goals. Maybe biannually, somebody that you trust just to have an unobstructed view of what you could or should be doing. Audit of Google's a place where you're spending a lot of your money, maybe have an audit at least once a year. If you're working with Logical Position, I don't dissuade somebody from having an audit done by somebody just to see-- to help keep them accountable. Accountability is not a bad thing. You want to make sure that you as a business owner or head of marketing are really getting what you're paying for or that your goals are appropriate and driving the business in the direction that you need it to be going. JON: You're not missing those potential pitfalls of that goal, right? RYAN: Yes, there are pitfalls of all kinds of goals that if you're expecting lifetime value, but your email program is not generating it, maybe you can't be shooting for break-even on the first order because you need some of that profit to cover a retail store that maybe isn't as profitable as it should be. There's a lot of variables to every business on the planet that one size doesn't fit all as far as a digital marketing goal, but you can use guidelines, regard rails in place to help formulate the most appropriate goal. JON: Ryan, this has been an amazing topic. I know I can't wait to start refining some of my own goals here at The Good. Anything else you wanted to add to this conversation? RYAN: I think just the most important thing is just make sure you're having fun. I see too many business owners and marketing teams getting into the minutia of goal setting or digital marketing and that just becomes not fun and that's really why a lot of people are in business in the first place. Yes, it's a job. It pays the bills, but if diving into the details is not fun, find a way to make it more enjoyable. Enjoy the process of setting goals, analyzing them and really find ways to win. It should be fun talking to your goals. It should be fun talking to business strategy of how is your brand going to win in 2020 and in this new decade? The potential right now for every brand is huge. You've got a new decade to look at, have fun with it, set some goals, be aggressive, conservative goals aren't nearly as fun to accomplish as aggressive, big pioneer sky goals. JON: I would say most people would think that looking at numbers can't be fun, but you know what? If those numbers are going up into the right and they're trending positive and you've set the right goals that are helping you achieve success and revenue and profit, then things get a lot more fun, right? RYAN: They do and I like setting goals to like, "Hey, there's a bottle of champagne in place when we hit this micro-goal on the way to our big goal." JON: I love it. Most people listening probably don't know that Ryan lives out in Sherwood, Oregon which is in the heart of Oregon Pinot, so I'm surprised you used champagne instead of a bottle of fine Pinot Noir but we'll pop it either way and enjoy. [chuckles] All right, Ryan. Well, this has been a wonderful conversation. I can't wait to set my goals as I mentioned, and hopefully everyone else is going to do the same for a successful 2020 and decade. We'll chat soon. RYAN: Yes, and if anybody really out there wants to talk goals, reach out. I mean, it's fun. Jon and I do this constantly for brands all over the planet. For me-- I'm sure for you as well, Jon, it's just it's fun. Reach out because there's conversations-- Even if you're not working with us, I just enjoy the process and talking through and helping companies align their goals. JON: Great. Well, we'll look forward to hearing from everybody. Thanks, Ryan. RYAN: Thanks, Jon.

Hello this is Kelly Coughlin, I’m the CEO and a CPA with EVERYDAYCPA. We work with small business owners on strategy, tax, accounting, and risk management throughout the US. I personally like to work with soon-to-be or wanna-be new business owners. So, I am always on the lookout for innovative and cost-effective solutions to help business owners create, launch and manage a new business…and increase the likelihood of success. And that lead me my guest today, RYAN ASHE, the founder and creator of BIZBOOSTIO. Ryan are you there? Ryan how are you today? Ryan, I sent you an email when I heard about your group and said I would like to interview you and ask you five questions on your vision for BIZBOOSTIO. I gave you in advance the categories…but I did not pull CNN debate moderator trick and give you the questions in advance. Is that correct? Yes… So Ryan, since you are the brains and the idea guy behind BIZBOOSTIO. My first question is: KELLY: WHAT Any new business or new business idea, has to be filling a need or void in the market. Let me just ask it simply, WHAT is the need or void is BIZBOOSTIO filling. That's a great question Kelly. I could not agree with you more that any new business entity that is just starting up needs to fill a void - or in this case a need. A need that I don't feel is being addressed. For instance, in high school you weren't given a class to teach you the basics of personal finance well the same is true for small businesses and start-ups. In this great economy that we are having, there are more small businesses opening than ever before BUT how many of them have the business knowledge or networking connections to maximize their chance of success? That's where we AS A COMMUNITY…step in. We AS A COMMUNITY want to offer the know-how, knowledge, and experience they aren't finding other places…COST EFFECTIVELY. We want to offer this through our community of other business owners and expert advisors. Unlike other groups that focus on small businesses, we want to focus on the business itself and not totally what nonsense is happening in D.C. We are there for the business owners all the way not just when we want more MEMBERSHIP money from them.  KELLY: Is there any company or organization that’s doing this now? Or something similar the groups of business organizations that come to mind are ·        NFIB, ROTARY and LINKEDIN ·        Are these organization in your space, if no why not…if yes, why are you better ·        Lets start with ROTARY ·        NFIB ·        LINKEDIN RYAN: Let's take that one at a time because they may have SOME overlap they are very different in their approach and I would like to point those differences out. A.  Let's start Rotary I think that Rotary does a good job on a LOCAL community level but that is really the extent of it in practical terms. The simple truth is we don't live in the pre-digital world anymore. The world is now flat and we don't have to look at it like Pandora's box has been opened - on the contrary, it is a GREAT opportunity. For example, if you are opening a restaurant for example in Columbia, MO in the Rotary model  you can talk to other local businesses and that's great but how great would it be to be connected to other restaurants owners across the country to be able to innovate and share experience of what has proven to work and what has proven not to work - Your business will greatly be enhanced and you can provide your customer with a vastly better experience. This is true for not just the services but for ALL start-ups and small businesses. B. As for NFIB, they are really large but with an organization, their size and age comes bloat. We at BizBoostio want to stay lean and strong for the business owners and not have a top-heavy structure filled with fat cats eating up the money that should be used to benefit the members. Also, 80-90 of their focus is on legislation and although I will say they have supported good bills throughout the year they pay little to no attention to the business owner COMMUNITY. The most common thing I hear from former members of NFIB is "I only see them when they want more money". I also don't like the outdated high-pressure sales approach they use they have used the same script for over 50 years completely unchanged in a door to door model that is completely outdated and completely misses the modern digital business market completely. C. Linkedin is great in some ways but what it lacks in my eyes is the dedicated community of business owners not being constantly shilled to and having their data sold without their knowledge for profit. Linkedin started as a place to get a job…and has tried morph into a networking deal…but they really don’t want people connecting on the planet earth…they want to connecting virtually….we think nothing replaces human connection. Bizboostio is not primarily a digital marketplace but a vibrant, dedicated COMMUNITY who's sole purpose is to grow and educate business owners. We are kind of the synthesis of NFIB, Rotary, and Linkedin…with a little bit of social meetups and Facebook thrown in…we are taking out the bad elements from all those and leaving the good but adding some great things. KELLY: You mention Facebook…I want to talk a few minutes about FACEBOOK…a lot of business people are disgusted by the noise from the Facebook audience…and the bias and shadow banning going on by FACEBOOK content managers…Is there are an online social media component to this? Do you see this being a replacement to FACEBOOK for business owners? RYAN: That's exactly what it is. Facebook is so out of touch and bloated that it offers very little to help a budding business or any business for that matter. AND you don't want to get me started on the data-stealing issues they have going on at Facebook. Plus who needs all the scammers and trolls that fill the Facebook platform. It's a true shadow of its former self. KELLY: How will people use this…how do they CONNECT with other people. You say a business owner will be able to get help from other business owners…how do they actually go about that RYAN: They begin by listening to our podcast. Then they simply go to www.bizboostio.com where we have additional information. They simply sign up and then we integrate them into the bizbootio culture and give them the networking tools to connect with other business owners and BAM you are on your way to success. As we are still expanding out we are giving early adopter rates and will offer them exclusive specials in the future as we roll out more features. KELLY: My next question has to do with money…I know you are doing these podcasts and these are free, correct? What’s the revenue model for you and BIZBOOSTIO? 5. We expect to charge a reasonable monthly fee of $40 to $50 bucks to access the community. Although I don't see it as a "monetization" model but an instrument to improve the lives of as many small businesses as we can. Because unlike some of those other organizations I spoke about a few moments ago we realize it's not just about numbers on a balance sheet. It's about mothers and fathers, Sons and daughters - family, and at Bizboostio we want to help make your business life succeed because we know when it succeeds your family succeeds and when families succeeds America succeeds. KELLY: Well Ryan that’s sounds interesting…for me personally and professionally, if BIZBOOSTIO could be a noise free, troll free, shadow ban free version of FACEBOOK for business owners that would be great…and I personally thinking charging a membership fee is a start to doing that…free attracts everyboday and I would not be interested in this if it this included EVERYBOY. So, how do people find you…are taking members now…how can they join.

How much do you miss the NFL? As much as Wade & Ryan? They break down some of the top NFL news stories, including: -Juju vs AB -McCarthy vs Rodgers -why rugby players struggle in the NFL Subscribe, Share, & Listen.

Buying on a main road should be viewed with caution. This tends to apply to both capital cities and regional centres. Ryan: They know buying on a main road in Sydney makes it hard to sell but does the same rule apply to regional areas where a main road is like a semi-main road, two […] The post Does Buying On A Main Road in a Regional Centre Make It Harder To Sell? appeared first on On Property.

Heyang: Apparently, girls love shopping. But boys don't necessarily. Dragging a reluctant man with you can diminish the pleasure of shopping. It can be suffering for the man as well. A so-called "Husband storage" might be a solution to this dilemma as some shopping malls are offering the service right now here in China. Tell me a little bit more about storage of the man.Ryan: Absolutely, because we men are offended, ok? We are offended that you will store us and I am proposing girlfriends storage for when guys want to play video games with their buddies and the girlfriend doesn't want to play video games with the buddies, so you store your girlfriend somewhere.Bob: This is warfare. This is war of the sexes. You are breaking up before our eyes. Ryan: But let me talk about what is actually happening in the mall in Fuzhou that is getting famous online because a literally husband cloakroom. It's a place for men can sit down take a little rest, read books, look magazines, in charge mobile phone, free WiFi is available and so basically this is getting a lot of hype, some of the ladies really like this kind of romanticism of them being able to shop and not have their boyfriend trail behind me like "Are we done yet?" "Are we done?" And they can be as free as they want while the guy does his WiFi and whatever he wants to do in a room with other guys. Heyang: Yeah, Ryan, I cannot believe that you think this is girls just ditching their beloved significant other, and so she can enjoy her shopping. It's not about that at all. It's about thinking for your significant other. Do you honestly wanna be dragged around looking at shoes and dresses? We are sparing you time and honoring your wishes, so you can look at your phone which you really wanna do and not the pretty dress I'm right now.Ryan: You know what? I disagree. I would love to go around with my girlfriend in do shopping and tell her what I think looks good and have a say on maybe some of the wardrobes she picks. And at the same time, I'm realizing that guy at least in the relationship when you working the nine to five Monday through Friday. When you go out on the weekend, that's your time to spend time together, quality time and even when she's shopping and even when you are shopping, you can be talking and catching up on all these the gossip or whatever happening at work, just sharing those moments together that you don't get throughout the week. That's my personal view on it. I think it is kind of things promote and I was just talking to a friend about it the other day, promotes this kind of weird phenomenon that's happening now. You go to a restaurant, you see two, a couple sitting down and instead of enjoying each other's accompany, they are enjoying their mobile phone and they are doing things, they just eating in complete silence. When I see that, what I told my friends was why go out to dinner, why even being in a relationship. I feel like relationships are enjoying each other's accompany. I believe something like this promotes kind like "ok, I am done with you, I am gonna use like money and go buy stuff and when I need that, you can come to me and buy my stuff." Bob: I feel as I am intruding on a private argument, but going back to, I sort of want to know, do women really care what their husbands or boyfriends think of the dress that they are going to buy and do the men in those relationships, do they really have an opinion? I think this is the big problem. Is it worth having your husband or boyfriend with you while trying to buy something which is really crucial. Heyang: I'm so glad you ask that question, Bob.Ryan: Dang-it, Bob.Bob: I want more money, pay me!Heyang: I thought I was the one that's gonna get the extra cash after the show from Bob and now maybe the table has turned. Yes, that is a very valid question and look at the designers, there usually homosexual manner or women and these are the people understand what looks good on women. Bob: So you need to take your best gay friend with you.Heyang: If you have a gay bestie, then yeah, he is a god send gift to you and what about your straight boyfriend or husband? Do they understand fashion? Do they understand what looks good on woman? I have some serious doubts. So basically it depends on who you are dressing up for?Ryan: No, but we understand. I got chip in for my fellow guys out there. No, but we understand that we love you and we wanna spend time with you. Being a girlfriend and sometimes that means not with doing which you wanna do, in which case that could be the guy playing video games and the girl doing something like shopping. Relationship are give and takes and I think this kind promotes some weird compromises, spend time with your loved one, even when they are not doing something you necessarily are excited about. Suck it up!Bob: I think, can I put my psychology hat on here? Can I? Very serious. Do you think you like it? It's very me. I think that's, one of the problems here is why are people staying closely, so closely together? And it might be, because the lady in this relationship wants to keep on an eye on the man to make sure, you know, he may have gone to the husband cloakroom and he maybe playing video games, who knows? Ryan: They need had a camera system so you can watch your husband as you shop.Bob: You need to be able to monitor exactly where he is, because as soon as the lady goes to choose the dress, the husband's left the husband's cloakroom and he is going to do something more interesting.Ryan: That's enough out of you, Bob.Bob: I just know your secrets.Ryan: But might you know, one of the netizens say why would the boyfriends even, why would they just stay home and I take that step further. Why you are in a relationship? If you are not spending time together doing something she likes to do, then I think this is a serious problem in your relationship. She should be doing some of the things you're interested in, you should be doing somethings she is interested in. I think it's healthy compromise in a relationship. That's what I'm saying.Heyang: Yes, but you're sharing a life together, you're sharing a lifetime together, there's plenty of time to do stuff together.Bob: And choosing a dress can feel like a lifetime.Heyang: Says the man in the room and that's exactly why we wanna leave you in the storage or at home.Ryan: Jesus, low blow, low blow.Bob: That's it. You cross the line.Heyang: Oh, dear! Our wechat listeners have so much to say about this. There're a few guys that are saying I would love to be in that storage with wifi. And being dragged around when you need to tell the lady whether she looks good or not and they always look the same. Thank you guys for telling the truth.

Heyang: Students at Hubei University of Technology have been asked to complete an unusual summer vacation assignment that is to write a confession letter to evaluate your relationship status. The title goes as: "Why are you still single?" So, what's going on?Ryan: Well, let me tell you all about this summer vacation homework. The topic is: "Why you are single" and so basically what the homework request is a personal analysis with 300 words including 5 strengths and 5 weaknesses of yourself inviting someone to start a romantic relationship with you and a love letter with 500 words to your current girlfriend or boyfriend if you have one and on top of all this guys, they are to post it on Weibo when they finish and do like a @your school counselor. This is not a joke but a real summer vacation homework for more than 300 students from Hubei University of Technology. Some students jokingly say that it is absurd calling it really hard for single dogs. It's killing them! Some netizens agree that it is bad others are thinking it's okay. Personally guys for me, this is weird and I think kind of unacceptable for a school project and on top of that shaming yourself, I don't know, I would feel weird putting my information about this specific part of my life on Weibo. Why I'm single?Niu Honglin: Yeah and what I'm trying to say is well by asking the question about why you're single, it feels like its wrong to be single. What's wrong to be single?Ryan: Well putHeyang: That's so weird.Ryan: They use the words: "still single" as if it is a problem.Niu Honglin: It's not nice and also, isn't it kind of a violation of personal privacy? I mean, maybe I choose to. Maybe I didn't find someone that I like, maybe the one pursuing me does not come to certain standards. It has a lot of reasons. You can't just say: Why you're still single? like why you are failing a test？ Why don't you have a job? It's not a nice question.Heyang: It's not a nice question. It feels its naturally discriminating people who are not in a relationship and also for people who are freshmen that just have finished their first year of university and as you migrated into your next year becoming a sophomore, that's an interesting time point to publish this online. There's a few things going on that I think are kind of interesting.Ryan: Well, before we throw her under the bus, let's understand why she, in her opinion assigned this homework assignment. So, basically she came up with the idea during a taxi trip while the driver was complaining that college students nowadays always blame others rather than themselves. Yue thinks this topic is related to students' lives and may help them realize their own problems. Yue was born in the 1980s; all of her students were born after 1995, so they're young. She said the attitudes about love for the two different generations. People of the young generations are more direct. They will speak their love in public or in their dormitory and though this behavior is brave, on the other hand, it's kind of maybe centric on yourself. I will say that I do think the younger generations due to social media and a lot of other things are becoming somewhat narcissistic. They think they're always the victims of certain problems and I attribute this especially to my generation, back in the states. But I think this is a universal thing, maybe you guys can clarify this specifically here in China. But, kids nowadays are quicker to blame others rather than take responsibility which we talk about all the time, people not taking responsibility for themselves. I think we're seeing less and less of that in these newer generations. Niu Honglin: I agree, maybe she meant well. Maybe, she's trying to make university students think about their own strengths and weaknesses but also to remind you, students who have a boyfriend or girlfriend also have to finish the homework but they have to do the article with a theme of: "How did I manage to get a boyfriend or girlfriend?" "What's bad or good I've done in a relationship?" It's kind of like they're the winners of life. They're sharing their experiences. I don't like that attitude. It's like they have this idea that being in a relationship is some kind of winning. I don't think it's a good concept. Ryan: Right. I think this promotes that you should be in a relationship. Why aren't you in one? Your life is incomplete. When I was their age, relationship was the last thing on my mind. I just wanted to have fun with my friends and was living on my own. I was so excited! I mean, granted of course, relationships are always a nice thing but these kids are young and they need the time to be young. To be asking such questions like: "Why are you still single?" I mean A) you're promoting that being single is a bad thing. I don't think that's healthy at all for the mindset and B) they're sharing this with everybody. What if some guys says well, maybe I'm not athletic enough and maybe blah blah blah when he's listing his weaknesses and his peers make fun of him. I don't think this is a good thing to promote. There's no amenity here. These people are posting this personal stuff about them on weibo for everybody to see, right?Heyang: Yeah, so that's the part I cannot agree with. I guard my privacy like I'm guarding the holy land. That's the kind of importance it is for me and in this day and age, I think I'd advise everybody to do that actually. Your personal information getting online means you will not have a chance to get it back to you. So, that's the first thing I want to say and also our Wechat listeners have very personal insights regarding this topic and our Wechat listener Xue has left us a mini essay on this and I think it's really interesting what she says. Xue, I hope this is okay with you but you didn't send us a private message, so I'm assuming it's alright. I'll leave out the parts that I think might be a little bit too sensitive for her. So basically she's saying that in high school, the last year of high school, she was madly in love with this boy and her parents and his parents were like Romeo and Juliet, split them up and said: "No way can you guys have a relationship". You have more important things to do in life and that is the Gao Kao. They listened to parent's advice, broke up, and both of them got to different universities and life is supposed to be better now. But actually she says, she's never managed to find another guy that she really likes in university and now, just in a matter of like two years or so, her parents are pressuring her: "You're in university and how come you don't have a boyfriend." That's like the biggest irony of everything and she's totally upset about it. But, what do you say about this kind of mentality? Prior 18 having a relationship is like the monster in life, then after you're 18, it's like, What? Suddenly, everything has changed, you have to be in a relationship and get married as soon as possible.Niu Honglin: Well, I do feel like Chinese parents have this certain feeling that the age of 18 or the landmark of entering a college is sort of like changing everything. Before that, they say: "on't talk to boys", "Don't have a boyfriend", "Do not do anything", and after that it's like, "Bring back your husband." It's not a life-changing night, maybe it's a life-changing test, but it's not in terms of everything. You cannot decide what you should do or what is okay to be done just over a test. We have to admit it's another period of your life but growing up is a constant process. Ryan: You know, when I'm a father, I will be consistent in that: "No boyfriends ever for my daughter." And that's just how it's always going to be. That's how I'll always feel. But, you know what to this specific scenario, I think the parents are warranted and that is because when you're 18, trust me, cause I've been 18, that was 10 years ago. I was a dramatically different person. I had feelings I didn't understand. I was growing, you grow so much in college and god even after that. So, I think yes it's so sad that you didn't get to spend that proper amount of time with someone you really had feelings for but at the same time I want to tell you that you will find that person out there. Just keep looking, be patient. Realize you're growing, that person is also growing and in amount of time, I'm sure you will bump into each other and things will all make sense. But I'm sorry to hear about the fighting between the Capulets and Montagues, I believe those were the two families of Romeo and Juliet and I hope that you find love as soon as it's appropriate. Heyang: I think that's a life-pursuit for me, I don't know but for people who want to have a real and fulfilling relationship, I think you should never stop trying to look for it. You need to look for it. I don't think it's going to fall on your lap if you're just eating potato chips and playing video games at home. But also, I think it's a delicate balance in the mind that if you're too desperate, that just drives good people away. It's about growing yourself stronger inside, keep looking, and I can't think of anything else right now. Ryan: I want to point out something else too. Yes, I actually agree with you Heyang. I think most people, a big part of life is looking for someone to spend it with, to do those things with, to make memories. It's a beautiful and magical thought when you think of spending your life with another soul, another human being and sharing things nobody else will know about in the world except you and your best friend. But you know what, you need to have patience for that. You also need to be yourself and be okay with being by yourself. I think that person comes when you're independent and when you're happy being by yourself. Because, then it's not like you need them, it's they complement you. It's like you didn't need anyone, but suddenly there's this person in your life that complements you. That's how I've always thought of it. But I think it is always so healthy for you to be confident being by yourself. I think this assignment is promoting an ideology of saying that it's not okay and that's not what a young person should be learning in college. They should be learning that it is okay to be yourself and feel good being yourself. Heyang: Wow. I almost wanted to cry listening to that, Ryan.Niu Honglin: It's just so well-said. Also maybe to perfect the homework, we can instead ask students to write about what kind of quality you want in your future partner and what kind of quality you hope to grow on yourself to find them. Maybe that would be a better article to write aboutHeyang: Also, write a personal letter or don't put it online. I hate it when that stuff is put online.

【特别感谢热心听友“绿云扰-王佳云”帮忙听写本篇文稿】Ryan: Yeah, I’m just gonna go right back to Heyang here. I’m just saying…... (Heyang: Sure, I’m ready.) Okay, as you are talking from you know being a woman in her twenties and knowing so much about the world and what not. But you know I should honestly say that when I was seventeen to now I wouldn’t have known like maybe necessarily I would be like oh, someone is on my phone, it’s so cool. I like I need to answer them right away I want to be cool and popular. All these stupid things going through your head and eventually realized like popularity is just all superficial and you should just be yourself. But those realizations come later in life. These are kids so someone needs to snap them on the hand and say, hey, put the phone away so that’s my spiel. That’s my spiel but at the same time you know I do want to say that I do think this is a problem also as adults we don’t have specifically those numbers. But I mean today I was coming to work and I remember walking through the subway and seeing grown-ups walking up stairs and down stairs with their phones right in front of them and they are not even looking what’s to the left what’s to the right. If something happens they are definitely not gonna be able to respond. They are able to walk in one pattern comfortably but at the same time you know imagine if someone behind them falls they can’t respond and it’s just gonna create a chain effect. Come on, it’s dangerous and people there’s a time and a place.Heyang: Yeah, Ryan, although I don’t really want to admit it but you are right.Ryan: You all heard it~Niu Honglin: What she says is right. And I think what she meant is you have to teach your kids and by teaching them what to do instead of telling them. Maybe you can be a good example. You can stop watching your smartphones stop playing games when you are walking when you are driving and that will them a sense of what to do things.Heyang: Yes, and actually you kind of read my mind successfully, Niu Honglin. (Niu Honglin: Thank you, I have that ability.) You are a very smart girl and also Ryan I think you really did hit the nail in the head with saying that it actually the adults that haven’t really been setting the best example or being the role model and they don’t really realize themselves or they don’t have a stance to say that you should get off your digital device when you are mobile when they themselves are probably doing the same thing. So now it’s actually a bigger problem. It’s not just teenagers being a bit crazy and immature and those things. It is actually a bigger picture.Ryan: Yeah, you know I just wanna…you know it’s tough because these teenagers were dealing with new things that are happening and everything is changing, technology is growing. It seems like it’s grow in the trend of we are always plugged in. We are always in some way in communication with people. But you know I would just like to say that these kids I hope that their parents crackdown a little more on them using devices while they are walking. But you know you can be one of those perfect people that doesn’t use devices. What’s really scary is if there’s some adult behind a car or something like that. Because you can be the best driver in the world or the most protective walker in the world but when you believe like someone driving a car is being a responsible driver yet they bring out their phone and texting. That doesn’t matter how good of a person you are about your walking habits. That person is also just as dangerous as you also having that phone in texting. So I think what’s really important here to and something you definitely worth focusing on is that adults especially because they can do more things like driving and what not need to better about choosing the time and place to use these devices.Heyang: Yes, that is a very good point and also echoed by one of our WeChat listeners Mr.战神. He says: I avoid using my smartphone at home because I don’t my daughter to copy my behavior. (Niu Honglin: That’s good parenting.) Yes, and he also says actually I can live the weekend without it. And 战神 I can totally agree with you because I do that all the time. (Niu Honglin: You people are amazing!) And also he says while walking I don’t listen to this amazing show called RoundTable. I only do that when I am sitting down alone because when you are walking in the street and you’ve got the earphones in your ear sockets then it’s bad for your listening ability and you could be in danger when you don’t notice. Those are some really good tips.Ryan: They are some really good tips and awesome parenting showing by example I love it. But he mentioned the headphones you know I’m not gonna lie to our listeners because they are wonderful and I want to be very honest with them. I do listen to my headphones not necessarily when I am driving but almost never when I am driving. But like in a subway when I am walking around to transfer and what not. You know that’s I feel like I can handle that and I can respond to situations visually but at the same time I can understand where he is coming from and saying you are impaired without hearing. Niu Honglin: Yeah, and also one of the dangers we are not saying is dangerous places but some place you should not listen to music or whatever. You are crossing the street or at a street corner or you are in a driveway or a parking lot that’s the places that you need to watch out.Ryan: Niu Honglin nailed it on the head there I totally one hundred percent agree. I think like you said use your discretion but when it’s traffic related crossing streets especially you are driving those cars, guys, devices should not be the first thing on your mind, it should be you know should be safety and protecting those around you.Heyang: Yeah, very nicely said and also if you are really that desperate to stay in touch for those people that are just not worth it anybody, then just take a minute I think just stand still and move to a corner to a safe place in the street and finish your texting or whatever you are doing on your phone and then resume your walking after that, if you are really that desperate.Niu Honglin: And from a personal experience that will give you a high efficiency even though you are playing a game just stand there, stand in a safety place and play your game do whatever you want they will give you better experience.Heyang: Yes, that person can be stuck there for minutes if not in an hour I’ve seen that happened to. But that’s the safer way to do and everybody just stay safe alright? That’s what I want to say and before we move on to our last topic of discussion today, Ryan you are getting all the nice messages today. (Ryan: You guys are so sweet. Keep them coming.) You are just asking for more and our dear listeners seem to feed more into your ego.Ryan: Because we love each other, Heyang, that’s how it is. (Heyang: Alright, I get a little jealous sometimes.) They don’t understand guys, or she’s doesn’t understand our love guy, but that’s okay. Heyang: I understand a little bit, a little bit and there is Linka, maybe that’s your name, and she says, Ryan always has a nice point, smart guy. Being called smart, that must make your day, Mr. Ryan Price, right? And there is naxiaoning says I agree with Ryan, kids are kids, don’t hold them the standard of adults. I am crazy when I was at that age. So thank you for sharing that comment and agreeing with Ryan. When can someone agree with Heyang? There is 那朵小花 saying this is my first 弹幕 biu message, love you Heyang, your voice lights my day. OK, that’s so nice of you.Ryan: I also love Heyang, guys. She is awesome. So I’m right there way with you.Heyang: Oh my goodness, thank you for saying so much nice things to me. That is really cute of all of you.