Counting Clicks
Download MP3Hello, and welcome to the Service Based Business Society podcast. I am your host, Tiffany Ann Botcher. On our weekly episodes, we will dig into everything you need to know about scaling your service based business without losing sleep. With my experience in creating over 7 figures per month and a passion for marketing, finance, and automation, this show will provide tangible tips and techniques for scaling your business. Let's get started.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Welcome back to another episode. Today, we're diving into the intricate world of marketing metrics, advertising, and the art of tracking real impact, which is essential for every business looking to turn their marketing dollars into tangible growth. Our guest, Jeff Greenfield, is a recognized pioneer in the field of attribution and analytics. With decades of experience helping businesses maximize their marketing investment, Jeff began his journey as a creative with a strong focus on media buying only to discover a major gap in how results were measured and understood. Since then, he's founded multiple successful analytics businesses, including his latest venture, Provalytics, where he's taking a privacy focused statistical approach to marketing effectiveness.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:In today's episode, Jeff will focus and shed light on how businesses, big or small, can navigate today's complex advertising landscape, overcome challenges proposed by rising costs, and make sense of marketing data to grow with confidence. His insights on topics such as incrementality, the myth of clicks, and the power of impressions will be invaluable for any business owner. Welcome to the show.
Jeff Greenfield:Thank you so much, Tiffany. Excited to be here.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:It's one of these topics that we're gonna dive right into. But before we do, let's talk a little bit more about how did you get into this part of your business?
Jeff Greenfield:How did
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:you how did you find the passion?
Jeff Greenfield:Yeah. You know, if someone had told me 20 years ago, I would be spending this much time with numbers and stuff, I I would say that they're crazy Yeah. Because at heart, I'm a marketer. I'm a creative person. And the concept of of looking at numbers and analytics just I don't know.
Jeff Greenfield:You know? It's not sexy. It's not exciting. It seems kind of boring. Like, you know, not not that bookkeeping is boring, but I I don't like bookkeeping like most business owners.
Jeff Greenfield:It's boring. It is. Alright. People upset it. So this to me is is, you know, at at at first glance, it's boring.
Jeff Greenfield:But, you know, the way I got into it is to was to solve a problem. I had a client that I was, buying media for, and this is in the mid 2000s. And it was a publicly traded company, so a larger company. And a lot of times, you know, when you're running your business, you're spending dollars on marketing, it's more of a consistent thing. Whereas with public companies, you know, they have to hit like these quarterly numbers, which are sometimes arbitrary.
Jeff Greenfield:So you get these calls where it's like, hey, you have to cut spend by 90%. And it has to happen today because it's 3 weeks before the end of the quarter. And I got one of those calls. And so I looked at the things that weren't working, and I cut them. And I thought everything was fine.
Jeff Greenfield:And it was fine for about 2 weeks. And then after 2 weeks, the bottom dropped out. Like, all of a sudden, new customers stopped coming in. Now granted, we had cut spend, but based upon the numbers and the analytics we were using, it should not have had that much of an impact, but it turned out that it did because what I cut was taking a long time to have an impact, meaning it was filling our sales funnel. Mhmm.
Jeff Greenfield:And when I cut it, we didn't see it immediately, but we saw it 2 weeks later. And that led me down this long path of recognizing that what we were using as a source of truth, if you will, for building and scaling the business was, was wrong. That's really what it comes down to, and and we couldn't really, we couldn't really trust it. And so that led me down this path of finding a better source of truth, or what I always like to say, something that was less wrong. Because we really don't know.
Jeff Greenfield:We can't tap into side of people's brains. And I built and scaled a company, that specifically focused on analytics, for larger companies and, grew that company and exited it right before COVID, thinking I would never go back. And then when COVID came, one of the big things that happened is more and more people spent more and more time online. And also what came about was all the new privacy laws and regulations. And the platform that I built before was based on existing technology, and all of a sudden that was kinda go going away.
Jeff Greenfield:And so I saw an opportunity and also felt kind of a service that I needed to come back because I had a lot of existing customers and friends and colleagues that needed a solution. And so I built essentially something very similar, but it uses a totally different perspective, that respects privacy now. And and that's kinda how I got in there. Now, the way I look at it, the way the way I live with myself every day from a creativity standpoint of view and a sexiness standpoint of view with with these numbers is that I'm kind of in the middle of everything that's going on in terms of advertising and marketing. So I really kind of get to see inside the head of some of the best and the top marketers in the world.
Jeff Greenfield:So that's kind of sexy and that's kind of cool. And it's also to help people on their kind of transformation of making better decisions is is somewhat of a challenge, but it's also it's fun for me as well too. So that's kinda how I got to where I am.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Very interesting. It's, you know, and there are these these parts of the business that although are somewhat, you know, quote unquote boring. You know, it it really is can can be these huge difference thinkers in what is working and what isn't. And so often, we we either don't have access to the numbers that we need to make these informed decisions, or we have access and we don't look at them because we think, oh, I don't know. I don't know what it means or, you know, maybe I it's fine.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:It's I'm just going through. Oftentimes, business owners say, if I'm putting in advertising dollars, well, it must be it must be working. Of course, it's working. But oftentimes, that's not the case, and we really are just putting money in. And and the fact that we've hired someone to manage that isn't always a safeguard, unfortunately.
Jeff Greenfield:No. You're you're a 100% right, Tiffany. Because really what it comes out to be is it it has to do with this concept of what we call incrementality. Meaning that how many more dollars is is the advertising that I'm spending bringing in that I wouldn't have gotten anyway. And so it's kind of this concept that if you shut down all of your advertising and you stopped it all immediately, would all of your sales go away?
Jeff Greenfield:Probably not. If you're a business and you've got good word-of-mouth and people know you and you get referrals, if you stopped all your advertising, those referrals would still be there. Maybe the advertising is helping some of it. So it's important to know what that incremental impact is, because a lot of times, a lot of the advertising you're doing is just kinda jumping in and taking credit for something that would have happened anyway. Mhmm.
Jeff Greenfield:For example, a a great example is someone says, hey. You should go, like, if you're a photographer, for example, and somebody goes and says, hey. Check out this photographer. They're really great. They'll do a great job for your wedding.
Jeff Greenfield:So they go and they they Google you and they check you out. And then they're they're they're talking to their partner about it, and then they happen to see an ad that you're running on on Facebook because they came to your website. And then they go and they Google you again, and they click on that ad that you have there, your brand search ad, and then they fill out a form. Well, according to Google, they got you that customer. Well, Facebook is also gonna say they got you that customer.
Jeff Greenfield:But the reality is is that it's your referral that brought in that customer. Google just happened to be navigation. It showed them the way. And if it wasn't for that Google ad, you would have probably shown up anyway. And Facebook just happened to be kind of a reminder.
Jeff Greenfield:You can actually give a little bit of an assist, if you will, to Facebook. But it's important to understand the difference between someone jumping in and grabbing credit and someone who actually brought you a customer. And the way we tend to look at it and the way traditionally folks have looked at it is, it's this concept of this sales funnel. You you advertise. You reach a lot of people.
Jeff Greenfield:Not everyone is interested and in market right now, and then things kinda flow through. And then down at the bottom, trickle out your your new customers. And that kinda goes hand in hand with that saying from John Wanamaker, which is a famous marketer saying, which is half the advertising I spend is wasted. The only problem is I don't know which half. And that's the big issue.
Jeff Greenfield:And that kind of sums up that whole issue of incrementality that we were talking about, which is which half is is wasted. And that's a scary thing because once you start advertising, you know, I remember back in the early days, 23rd actually, 35 years ago, you know, I would run I always had a yellow pages ad for my business. So I had a yellow pages ad. I would be in a coupon book, and I would have a flyer in the paper. And so, you know, the question is, which of those could I stop?
Jeff Greenfield:I always knew when I ran a flyer that more people would come in, but it thank goodness digital wasn't around then because if digital was around, it would have really confused me.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Right. It
Jeff Greenfield:would have been very difficult. So you end up as a as a as a business owner, you end up continuously running advertising because it's very tough to tell what's working and what's not.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Yeah. We really see it from the, bookkeeping side. We're you know, and to take that step further, the advisory side is, you know, part of our advisory services to go through peep and and, you know, help set budgets and markers and KPIs and things, and then go through quarterly and say, you know, are we on track? And so I often say, you know, great advertising pays for itself. So, you know, if you're gonna do great advertising and you're at you know, people always look to the advertising to cut the budget, but the fact of the matter is
Jeff Greenfield:to kinda grow your business, rarely can you cut
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:the advertising budget, unless it was, you know, really in a effective advertising. Budget unless it was, you know, really in effective advertising, we wouldn't necessarily wanna cut. But the fact is so many people like you said, have no idea which is the effective and which isn't. So you end up with people who say, I wanna grow my business, maybe they're already investing in Google Ads, and they're spending, you know, oh, they started spending 500, then it was a 1,000. And before you know it, well, now we're spending $2,000 a month on Google Ads.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:But then they get that call from that, you know, directory that's specific to their industry and they say, you know, if you just add another $800 here, well, we're gonna provide you all these great leads. And then while someone else contacts them through cold email and says Facebook marketing, it's for you. I got this for and before you know it, the the advertising budget is so inflated and the sales, if we look at a trend from the last 3 years, they're they're on their same, you know, 30% year over year increase that they've been on for the before they invested in any of that advertising. But which do you cut? At this point, the business owner says, I I wanna grow.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:I can't cut any of this. I just wanna keep growing. Meanwhile, it's it's really just money flowing out with no actual tangible anything as to which it's it's it's exactly what you explained.
Jeff Greenfield:Right. And the scary thing is is that to contrast that, like, coupon book or the directory with the Facebook and the Google, that coupon book, you have a cost that's associated with it. You know, it's like $800 for the month, let's say. And the advantage of that is that when someone gets that and they open the envelope, and those those are actually opened a considerable amount, you have like a almost like a 1 on 1 audience. Mhmm.
Jeff Greenfield:Where can someone flips through them and they see your name and it's there. But the digital stuff, like the Google and the Facebook, these are real time live auctions that go on. Literally what happens is, is someone goes to their Facebook feed is essentially it's, it's, it's like you can imagine if someone is scrolling along and the next ad is coming up, there's an auctioneer in the background who's saying, I've got someone and they're coming, and it's a, you know, it's they live in Dayton, Ohio, their likes are cigars and Volvos. How much am I bid on this person? And then it's like in real time, based upon what you your settings were set, or they were set for you, whoever has the highest bid gets to show up in that person's feed.
Jeff Greenfield:And one of the issues with that that we've seen across for some of our larger advertisers is the cost for advertising has gone up considerably year over year. So in in Google in particular, if you're spending the same as you did last year, you're probably getting 35% less the amount of traffic than you were last year. That's how much costs have gone up. Now some folks have said, well, that's due to the political season. And I would say, yeah, that's just a little bit.
Jeff Greenfield:The there's less inventory and stuff, but unless you're advertising on television and you're in those states, it has that's not what it is. If you look at how well these companies continue to do, they are they're oozing profits every quarter and every year as a result of that. And that that is the hardest thing. And I think part of it is that one of the things that has digital advertising has done for most business owners is that it has moved the attention towards what we call the click. And so when we think about it, as a business owner, we think about, like, if we have a website, we want our lead form to get filled out, or we wanna get phone calls in.
Jeff Greenfield:And the way to do that is to get more people to the website. And so we hyperfocus on clicks. And so over the years, we tend to invest dollars where we get more clicks, but that like breaks like the number one rule of advertising, because the number one rule of advertising is that you're you're buying eyeballs. You're not buying clicks. And those eyeballs are what we call impressions.
Jeff Greenfield:And you buy these eyeballs, you buy these impressions and the job is to build awareness. It's not to build clicks. It's to build awareness. Now when awareness is built up enough, think about that funnel, you know, towards the smaller part, towards the bottom of that smaller part of the funnel, that's where the clicks come in. When there's enough awareness, that's what leads to clicks.
Jeff Greenfield:But what ends up happening is that when we're hyper focused on clicks, we end up focusing our dollars just where the clicks come from.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Mhmm. And
Jeff Greenfield:then with the result, we we defy this rule in advertising, which is called reach, which is we're now reaching a fewer number of people than we were before, which is great for Google. It's great for Facebook. It's great for every digital publisher because it puts us right in the realm of these real time digital auctions where we're hypercompetitive against our our competitors, the high cost per click amount, and and the small reach, if you will. And that's not good for advertisers at all.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:I find the clicks is very interesting, and and for two reasons. Number 1, obviously, I mean, you drive down any highway, and there's a lot of billboards down the side of the highway, and they've been there for a long time. People have spent a lot of money over the years to be on that sign, and there are no place. And people have still felt that there was value to pay for that money. I actually remember being a kid, and driving with my parents.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:I mean, I was probably pretty young and I remember my the the company my dad worked for was was on the billboard. And it was a thing. We took a family drive to go check it out on the billboard because it was like, we're on the board. And I just like and so such a different such I mean, a different time, but obviously, that very hard to measure any kind of clicks in in that older average, same with the newspaper, the directories, those types of things. But the other piece is and and so often people reach out anytime that, you know, you're running ads and stuff, you people reach out and say, I can get your cost per click lower.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:That's their whole they just wanna it's the race to the bottom on the cost of the click. And as someone who really opposes sales calls, I mean, I I enjoy a sales call with a business owner that actually could potentially purchase my services. You wanna talk about business and finances and metrics, I love it. This is great. But if I'm gonna talk to just any person who maybe wants to have a business one day or, you know, they they have $5 set aside for their year end like, these are not my people.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Those are the people that I'm like, I don't wanna spend time. I could spend time doing something else at that time. So I always say, you know, like, I actually wanna talk to the right people. I would rather spend a little more and reach the right audience. Can we make some adjustments and just get more people to click on things?
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Absolutely. That doesn't necessarily mean that that's that's the right thing for the end piece, whether, you know, it's we want more eyeballs or we want more calls or, you know, we want more sales. Just clicks. No business, doesn't matter what it is, runs on clicks.
Jeff Greenfield:No. But you you brought up a great point there, which is if we go back to before digital and we look at some of the brands that have been built, like Pepsi and Coke and Kellogg's, AT and T, if you will, at any auto manufacturer. Before digital, the campaigns that they ran were TV, radio, out of home, billboards, and print, and even direct mail. So there's nothing to click on there at all. So you sit back and you say to yourself, how did they how did they know what was working and what wasn't working?
Jeff Greenfield:And I'll tell you one of the things that they did back then is that when you had to set up campaigns, it was a lot of work. It's not like digital. We can go in and change something every day. So they would they would make sure they kinda set it and forget it, and then they would sit and wait 3 or 4 months. And what they used, back in the day before digital is they used math to determine the effectiveness, a technique called marketing mix modeling, a statistical technique that actually looks at correlation between how many eyeballs you're trying to reach and what your sales were.
Jeff Greenfield:And it was a lot of work to get all of that data together back in the day. But these models, if you will, are very sophisticated statistical models, and and they're able to prove that they actually work because what you end up doing is you end up asking the model on a certain day. You you hold back the data. You see, on this day, we tried to reach 11,000 eyeballs, if you will, predict what our sales will be. And you can actually see that the models are able to predict.
Jeff Greenfield:And so they learn, they get smarter over time. And so what happened when digital came in is those models sometimes would take 6 to 8 months to build out. It was a lot of work, a lot of people involved. You would also need, like, 3 years of data, which was ridiculous. So a technique started with digital called multi touch attribution, and that leveraged all of the digital data.
Jeff Greenfield:That was my first company. We would collect 100 of billions of data points every single day for our clients, and then we would use machine learning to figure out what worked and what didn't work. And but what happened after COVID is the ability to collect that data. It's it's not there anymore. You can't get that level of detail.
Jeff Greenfield:And so what we do now at our company, Provelytics, is we kinda go back to the future. We went back to that technique marketing mix modeling, and we said, hey. You know, there's things about it that aren't so bad, like the statistical part. It's very smart. But all of that data, do we really need to collect all that now with how fast computers are?
Jeff Greenfield:And can we do better? Can we do it faster? And can we get more granular? And so now we're using very old school techniques, but giving modern day results, but with a full predictable model. So for much for very, very large advertisers, they're able to figure out, you know, what's working, what's not working, find that missing half that's not working, stop spending there, and able to kinda redeploy their money in places that are actually working.
Jeff Greenfield:But the answer is you have to use math. You have to use statistics in order to get there because and you have to also trust, if you will, because you're using a what we call a probabilistic model. It's not deterministic. It's not a 100% because there's some data we can't get to. But the reality is, is what we've now learned over time is that when things were a 100%, it really wasn't a 100% because we can't get inside of people's heads and figure out what exact advertising actually made them make the decision.
Jeff Greenfield:In fact, the truth is, when you ask people, they really don't know themselves either because they can't remember all the times. Think about how many ads you see a day. It's very tough to tell. But what we're able to do is look at things in aggregate and then make a an educated guess, to help get to that best right answer, or I should say the less wrong answer is the best way to look at
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:it. It's interesting when we start to take things from before and really give them that modern facelift, but kinda cut out that middle section where, you know, it's there there's been so much development in some pieces, but we almost lose the art of some of these other things where, you know, there was there was a way of doing it before. Now when you're talking about this modeling, I'll be honest, my I go into the, like, I want to like, I need to know. I'm gonna we need to come over. We need to talk data.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:We need I need to dig into this model. But I know that that's not the I know. I'm I'm a little nerdy. I I figured that out a while ago, but I know that the, you know, the average business owner thinks I need to do math. I need statistics.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:You've lost me. I'm out. I can't do this. So how can the average business owner who doesn't wanna do math and doesn't wanna know about statistics, but they know that they wanna grow their business? They said, you know, I I have started growing this team and, you know, the the key thing the thing I hear over and over right now is the economy is not great and that I that that's it.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:That's it's like it's like a harsh stop there. And it's like there's a lot of businesses out there that are still doing really well. Are there certain industries that are suffering more than others? Absolutely. But at the end of the day, there's still a lot of successful businesses growing and carrying on right now.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:And I think that a lot of times when things stop working, we start to almost look for that. Well, it can be us. It can be something we're doing. We look to the external and it's like, oh, well, economy's not great right now. Everybody's saying it, so that's why it's not working.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:And we're just gonna try and, you know, bumble along until that fixes. But really, there's things that we could be doing. We could still be. And and so what what kind of advice do you give to someone like that?
Jeff Greenfield:I I would say my my big takeaway in terms of kind of the DIY, what could I do today to to do a better job to scale my advertising and understanding it, is I would open up right now your Google Sheet that you have of your ads. Everyone has it or your agency has it. Whoever's buying your ads has it. And what I mean by that is, on this sheet is a row typically for every single day, and there's a column for all the places where you've purchased. There's a column for how much you spent there.
Jeff Greenfield:There's a column for how many clicks they got. And then there's a column that adds up to total clicks, and then it there's another column that says cost per click. It tells you how many sales or leads you had, your cost per sale or your cost per lead. And that's pretty much it. And that goes along with what we talked about before, which is managing your marketing by clicks.
Jeff Greenfield:And what I would do with that Google Sheet is I would go up to the top and right next to the date field, which should be the one all the way to the left. You wanna add a new column and you wanna call it impressions, because that's your eyeballs, and that is actually what you're buying. And what you wanna do is go back for the last year, and you may say, oh, that's a lot of work. Trust me, it will be so worthwhile. You wanna add that total impression column.
Jeff Greenfield:Now let's say you're advertising on both Facebook and Google. You wanna go to each one of them, and you could probably download a report right now. And chances are, when you downloaded the report originally or whoever's buying your advertising did, that field impressions was there, but it constantly gets ignored. And what you want is you wanna make sure you have the number of impressions for every single day for every for the rest of the last year. And what you're going to notice is, if you scroll up to the top and then you start scrolling down, you're gonna notice some days your impressions are higher than others.
Jeff Greenfield:And you may not notice your clicks are higher, but you may notice a couple of days later or maybe a week or so later, all of a sudden, you have more clicks, and then you end up with more leads or sales. You wanna understand what that division is, what that time frame is. And also, you also can scroll and look at days or or time frames where you had a lot of leads or a lot of sales, and then go up from there to see when were impressions high, what campaigns were running that were unique. You wanna understand that relationship between how many impressions you had, to how many clicks, to how many sales, but there's a time delay. And that's that, what we call that, days to conversion or time to conversion.
Jeff Greenfield:Every campaign, every type of ad has a different days to conversion. Once you understand that, then you can start to set proper expert expectations for ads you buy. So, for example, if you start to notice, hey. We did something on Facebook that was unique, and all of a sudden about a week and a half later, we got more people visiting our website, which led to more leads and more sales, like maybe a month or so later. Okay.
Jeff Greenfield:Great. Well, now, you know, if you do something on Facebook, you probably need to wait 3 or 4 weeks and let it run before you say whether and that's the important thing. Because what we find with digital marketing is it's so easy to turn on, but it's also so easy to turn off. And what ends up happening is that business owners will try something new. They'll wait 2 or 3 days, and if they don't get the clicks, they'll shut it off.
Jeff Greenfield:And that is not being data driven. So take a look at what you've done over the last year and use it as a guide. And the best way to do that is add in those impressions and start planning your marketing around eyeballs and not clicks.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Such valuable advice. And I think that we see that often where whether it's, you know, any kind of advertising, whether it's SEO, whether it's some kind of ads, whatever, where it's we turn it on. We spend a little bit of money. And before it's even really had a chance to do anything, it's already been determined that it didn't work. It's on the shelf.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:It's a sore spot in the business history, and we're not talking about it again. And it's like, hold up. Like, it takes a little bit of time just like if you you know, anything in business. It's you know, whether you hire a brand new person, that person is not, you know, as valuable to you on day 1 as they are to you at the end of their 1st year. Anything takes a little bit of time to gain some traction, to fine tune.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:You know, it's it's okay. So we were getting impressions, but we weren't getting clicks. We weren't getting impressions, you know, with this other campaign. A lot of times, you know, it's these big swings. It's we try something new and then we turn it oh, there's there's so much value in fine tuning and minor adjustments.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:And, you know, oftentimes people will say that didn't work, and now they're they're changing everything. They've deleted a whole campaign. They're running a whole and and it's these big things and big changes. We changed, you know, everything about the page. We don't know which change worked.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:We don't know anything because it's too everything is in too big a grand scale. It's just small small adjustment.
Jeff Greenfield:That's no. You're you're you're a 100% right on. Years ago, eBay made the decision that they were going to change the color of their homepage from a 100% white to just having a slight minor pixel change with gray. So, so small of a change, you wouldn't even notice it. But they found that their home page was their most valuable page on their site, and they were so paranoid that making this change could have an impact on revenue.
Jeff Greenfield:They calculated out, figured out how to make just a minor change every day for 30 days. Because the truth is colors, like if you have an ad that is a blue background, I mean, how many different shades of blue are there? There's 100 of 1000 of different shades. And one of the things that we know about advertising and shopping is there's an emotional component that that we can't comprehend. We we don't really understand it, but we do know that certain things people react to certain things.
Jeff Greenfield:And so they spread out that change over the course of a month just to be a 100% certain it didn't have an impact, and it did not have an impact. So they were able to make the change. But you're you're a 100% right. Small changes can have huge, massive differences in revenue, and you have to really look at the numbers. And again, for business owners, it's like the bane of our existence.
Jeff Greenfield:We don't like to look at the numbers because we're entrepreneurs. We we always like to be positive. We don't wanna be pessimistic. We're always too optimistic, and sometimes the numbers force us to be pessimistic or look at the reality of things. But when it comes to spending your hard earned dollars on advertising, it's definitely something you wanna look at.
Jeff Greenfield:You you have to look at those numbers and focus in on the impressions.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Absolutely. I think that it's, you know, if you look at I mean, we build business budgets for businesses in all different sizes. I mean, businesses that are just starting out down to businesses who are trying to scale to a $1,000,000 a month and everything in between. And you look at it and the advertising section of a budget is I mean, it's gonna be less than your your human component and less than your materials. But outside of that, it's gonna be one of the bigger areas.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:And it's it's this piece that I think just often doesn't get enough love or enough knowledge, and business owners say, I don't really know enough about it. So they often hire someone who says they know a lot about it, and then they get going. But, you know, there there's always this piece where I said that per you know, that person, the longer you run the ads, the more spend and all of these things. That's their business too. And so the Internet has created a space where, you know, almost anyone can pretend that they're good at something.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:You know, you and I think that we are learning more and more about this online where someone has, you know, claimed to be, you know, someone that they in the end, it's like, wait a minute. No. They weren't that at all. And I I think that, you know, these people come and they seem very trustworthy. We see it in the bookkeeping space.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:We see it in any, you know, business coaching, advertising. All of these people are really great at selling their services. But then when they're not actually delivering, they've they don't haven't provided enough information to actually know. And and business owners think, I've got this great person. They're super nice.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:They get on the call with me, and I'm spending the money, and they tell me it's, you know, that it's coming. It's it's gonna be great. And I just it's it's this piece of educating yourself enough, even if it's not something you're passionate about, but educating yourself enough that you know that you're getting the value for what you're paying for.
Jeff Greenfield:No. Absolutely. And again, that goes back to that concept of incrementality. If you're spending a substantial advertising budget, you should see your business grow, especially from where it was before. Like, if you weren't doing advertising and then you do, you should be getting more business.
Jeff Greenfield:If you're not, then you start to question it. Now, obviously, you know, advertising is expensive. It does become a large line item, and it is one of the largest line items for a lot of publicly traded companies as well. It gets a lot of scrutiny, but there's still a lot of questions because the truth is most large companies are still using very unsophisticated metrics and analytics for determining what's working and what's not working. That's why that's saying half the advertising I do is wasted.
Jeff Greenfield:Problem is I don't know which half. That's not just for smaller service based businesses. It's also for some of the largest corporations in the world.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:One of the businesses that I find their advertising the most fascinating, and I would love to hear you weigh in, is Red Bull. So Red Bull has been around in for for that industry for a very long time. I mean, energy drinks come and go. You know, many have come and been super popular and have left in in very short order. Red Bull has been around since, I mean, I'm I remember my brother before he was old enough to drink energy drinks thinking Red Bull was the coolest thing ever.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:And I remember the first time he drank Red Bull, he was like, that was gross. And then all of a sudden over years, he became this it was like an acquired taste, but it was like they built this culture around the drink. And to this day, I mean, Red Bull you go on any kind of Red Bull social media, they don't talk about the energy drink at all. It is all just cool sport, like, amazing sports, different, you know, mountain biking off the top of the mountain in the clouds, the the high divers that are diving. Like, all of these pieces, they don't talk about their energy drink ever.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:And and so but they've gone on to, like, be super successful for a very sustained period of time. And I'm sure that all of those sports and things that they're filming are I mean, that is not cheap to put out. I'm sure like, I mean, those are super talented athletes and professionals that are being paid. And and so that's not an inexpensive advertising campaign, but the actual way to measure how successful that has been has been something that in my mind, I'm I I think that's people believing in a vision for an extended period of time.
Jeff Greenfield:Yeah. So, essentially, what Red Bull is doing, they're not doing any traditional buy this product type marketing. It's not ads that say, here's the benefits to Red Bull. Here's a discount. Here's the price.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Except the wings. That's the benefit. You get the wings.
Jeff Greenfield:Right. But primarily what they're doing is they're doing upper funnel branding. They're at that top of the funnel. They're trying to reach as many people as possible, and they're trying to say they're trying to create an emotional connection with their audience. So you will feel good about drinking and buying their product.
Jeff Greenfield:And that's typically what you see with a lot of the larger brands. They tend to do more branding. Now that's always been a question. How do you connect branding to actual sales? And we're able to do it with our statistics and our advanced math.
Jeff Greenfield:You can absolutely positively do it because they did it years ago before digital. So digital hasn't upset that process. You can absolutely positively connect it. Now with the type of advertising they're doing, there's no clicks, obviously, but their eye our eyeballs. They are buying eyeballs, and they they know.
Jeff Greenfield:You can know how many estimated eyeballs you're reaching, what the estimated number of our impressions that that are being had there, and you can add that into a mathematical model and figure it out. And what we're seeing now is that a lot of brands are moving more up funnel. 1 in particular Airbnb is doing more upper funnel branding marketing, primarily because that type of marketing, your reach is so much greater, so your return is also greater. Now there's a caveat there, and the caveat is is that if your message doesn't resonate with your audience, if your branding is wrong and there's not that emotional connection, it's not gonna work. But if you go through proper testing and do all of that, then you're in great shape.
Jeff Greenfield:And and Red Bull has proven time and time again that that daredevil type attitude is a great, if you will, advocate for their brand.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Mhmm. Yeah. They've done a they've done an exceptional job. I I saw someone online a few months ago and she said that she was part of their, you know, she was talking on I think it was TikTok about how she used to be part of their branding. And she was really promoting that same, you know, you'll notice that Red Bull doesn't talk about what they do, and and so you should be the same in your business.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:And I think that that key piece is the part that you mentioned there that the messaging has to land, that people still have to understand, you know, there's this people know what Red Bull does. And I think that at the beginning, they probably had to do a little now you just see their little logo in the corner of any you know exactly what it is. But that take that took time to establish as well. And so, you know, a business that is just getting started, you know, it's choosing the appropriate strategy for where you are in your business journey and not assuming that because it worked for someone else. You know, there's so many pieces that you're mentioning going on in the background, the eBay changing the color, like, so slowly.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:I mean, you have to you have to realize that that not every business phase is is at that same piece. So when you're talking about the math and being able to study that, at what point in someone's business journey should they be really, you know, there's the part where we're gonna get out there, we're gonna show it, we're gonna put the brand, and we're gonna build that. But but when can they start actually measuring that? What's the kind of milestone that should make someone go, now I have this. I I have some data coming in, and I wanna know what's working.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:How big do they need to be in order for that to make sense?
Jeff Greenfield:They don't have to be big at all. As long as they're spending even, like, 2 or $300 a month, you should be able to measure that, but you need to add those impressions to that Google Sheet. And the measurement is simply just looking at the relationship between how many impressions you're doing each day, and then that delay to clicks, and then leads or sales. That, I mean, even though that's kind of a DIY measurement, it is it is measurement. Now where someone goes from there is really dependent upon how many different places they're advertising.
Jeff Greenfield:And this is where things get a little bit difficult. Like, if you're advertising just on Facebook and you're only on Facebook, it's real simple. All you need to do is look at Facebook because you're not anywhere else. Facebook is gonna give you a good understanding of how Facebook is performing. But when you get to Google, now Google doesn't know about Facebook and Facebook doesn't know about Google, that's when things get complicated.
Jeff Greenfield:And as you continue to grow and your marketing mix gets more complicated because there's more players, if you will, on the field, what ends up happening is is that if you had a 100 sales in a day, let's say, and you have 8 different advertising things going on every single day, and you go to each one and you say, how many sales did you get me when you log in to their system? They'll probably all take credit for every single one. So even though you only have a 100 sales, you'll end up with a report that'll say you had 800 sales. And that's this deduplication problem that each one of them doesn't know about the others. And their their metrics are very good for measuring their impact, but they're not good for figuring out what else is going on in your universe.
Jeff Greenfield:And that's where you need to use that Google Sheet. But over time, as you continue to grow and you graduate into a, like, a larger advertising budget, so now we're talking in the tens of 1,000,000 of dollars per year. At that point, you're gonna need to bring in sophisticated modeling techniques that look at your business and that are able to use these statistical techniques to figure out what's actually working and what's not, because the Google Sheet is gonna get very wide, very deep, very quick, and you're not gonna be able to see those relationships, and that's where the math comes in.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Absolutely. So outside of adding that impressions column, which I think is super valuable and I know that a lot of people skip right over it and I mean we see a lot of different reports submitted and and whatnot for different clients as well and and see that that's not always a metric that's necessarily highlighted. So outside of that, what else can someone do right away? They could go do next week that that you feel like would make a big difference in their business.
Jeff Greenfield:Well, I think one of the things that people can also do is gain a better understanding of what's happening in terms of the digital landscape. Because the truth is is that digital advertising is not going anywhere. It's it's it's taking over. Television is now all digitized, if you will, what we call CTV connected television. Radio is no longer traditional radio.
Jeff Greenfield:It's satellite radio or or we now call it audio podcast advertising. And the problem with these, these are great places to be. And even as a small advertiser, you can now, like, buy connected television. So someone can be at home watching something on Peacock streaming and your ad shows up. It's very, very cool.
Jeff Greenfield:But the problem is there's no clicks there with this type of stuff. So that won't even show up as a click. They'll end up coming through your front door and you'll have no idea what's going on. So what's important to look at is to start looking at these other types of advertising that's also available. And one of the things that you can do is to understand this landscape better, and because things have changed a lot just over the last couple of years.
Jeff Greenfield:And and just over the last year or 2, we're now kind of going back to the future to how things were before digital advertising. So if the person running your advertising in your business is someone who's in their twenties or thirties, and they've only known digital advertising, they didn't know how things were beforehand, they're probably a little bit lost. So I would suggest then to start taking some courses on understanding what are all these privacy changes that are happening. I'm a big believer in educating ourselves and strengthening our digital foundation, if you will. We actually put together a free course.
Jeff Greenfield:It's an attribution certification course. So it helps people to understand what has happened in the past, kind of the past, present, and future of advertising. It's available for no cost on our website. It's about an hour and a half course. You get a great certificate that you can share on LinkedIn, which is great for some folks.
Jeff Greenfield:But it it I think strengthening that foundation you know, a lot of folks don't pay a lot of attention to education, but the biggest problem with digital advertising is that it's changing every couple of months. And if your foundation is not solid, you're gonna be lost very quickly. When you have a solid solid foundation of how we got to where we are, these changes won't rattle you so much, and you'll be better prepared to kind of see around the corner, if you will. So I I would say that besides the impressions, I I would say the next best thing is to, you know, get attribution certified, start taking some courses online, understand what's coming next, because that'll help for you to be a better marketer for your business.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Absolutely. Knowledge is power. And I think there's been you know, for a long time, there was a focus behind everybody needs to go to school, everyone needs to go to school. And then you saw this real shift away from, you know, post secondary education. And and, I mean, there's a million stories of people who dropped out of high school and went on to do absolutely incredible successful things.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:And I believe it can be done, 100%. I I chose the school route. I love school, but I think the key piece there is that there are specific things that you that you don't you can't learn just because you you have a great mind or you have a great vision and those types of things. And so either you need to go and learn them or you need to hire someone that you trust that does know them. But some of these pieces can be the real difference maker between having a successful business and a massively successful business.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Can you create success without knowing all these little fine sure. But are you actually stunting your success? And could it could be so much grander by just learning some specific pieces and and educating yourself enough to know who you can trust, who you can hire, and really the how to take it to the next level?
Jeff Greenfield:Absolutely. I I mean, that's really the key. Because once you educate yourself, your your your foundation is solid, and it's a great spot to kinda springboard to better success.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Absolutely. So where can people connect with you? Where do you like to hang out? And what is that website that they can find that course on?
Jeff Greenfield:They can go to probolytics.com. There is a link there that says attribution certification. And if they wanna connect, they can find me on LinkedIn as well too.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Perfect. Awesome. Thank you so much for being here, Jeff. I think it's such a valuable discussion that can really help people take that that advertising budget, make good use of it, and, grow their business. We're all out of time for today, but the fun doesn't stop here.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Make sure to subscribe to the Service Based Business Society podcast on your preferred podcast app. If you're hanging out over on YouTube, search for Tiffany Ann Botcher. Your likes, shares, and reviews really do help the show. Until next time. Have a great week.
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