Marketing CLARITY Podcast
Marketing CLARITY Podcast
Embracing GA4, Cookie-less Web, and Brand-Focused Marketing with Jeff Greenfield
In this episode of the Marketing CLARITY Podcast, I'm joined by Jeff Greenfield (Co-Founder and CEO of Provalytics), as we navigate the changing landscape of digital marketing. Get ready for a deep dive into Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and the decline of third-party cookies - how are these changes impacting the marketing industry, and what does it mean for your marketing strategies?
You'll hear expert insights on the potential challenges and opportunities that come with the shift to GA4 and the demise of third-party cookies. It's not all data doom and gloom—this episode will inspire both marketers and business owners to explore new creative ways to analyze and target audiences, with a renewed focus on storytelling and branding.
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IN THIS EPISODE:
0:00 - History + Evolution of Google Analytics
11:22 - Impact of GA4
16:12 - Why Digital Ads Are Not Effective
28:26 - The Attribution Problem
43:39 - The Impact of Safari's Major Privacy Update
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In this episode of The Marketing clarity podcast, I am joined by Jeff Greenfield. And he's the co founder and CEO of pro validox. And he's built a next generation of attribution, taking into account all of the new privacy regulations, and the upcoming cookie apocalypse. So we're going to be talking about how Google Analytics for is in third party cookies, they are out, are we entering a branding Renaissance? I kind of hope so. I'm looking forward to that one. And major Safari changes. They're good for privacy, but super scary for marketers. So without further ado, let's get peddling. Jeff, thank you so much for joining me, I'm excited because we've been trying to actually connect for a couple of weeks. And you know, what we're going to talk about in today's episode is stuff that I'm really excited about, you know, digital marketing is a world is an industry where things are constantly changing. And if that's something that as a as a small business marketer, as any size business marketer, you're not okay with this might not always be the best place for you, if you want to just always just keep doing the same thing and know that it's either gonna work or not, digital marketing can sometimes be a tough landscape. And to that point, one of the biggest things that's been coming up with my clients, and I just been seeing is all around G A, four. Okay, the panic, if you will, around g a four. So maybe you can help to clarify. What, why is GA for a thing? What Why is it in existence? Why is it replacing what was traditionally called Universal Analytics?
Jeff Greenfield:We, you know, I'm actually going to go back and talk a little bit about the word change. Oh, because that that was three
Ross Herosian:Dictionary defines change. I don't know, I'm just getting
Jeff Greenfield:that much. But I think there's an important lesson because, you know, it used to be back in the day, if I was an advertiser, I would buy coupons, I'd be in the yellow pages, I buy some, some print it in the newspaper, maybe if I was big enough, I would buy radio ads. And those, those folks, the business model was always the same, they didn't change. But the digital world is, is controlled by these companies that are drastically shifting and moving. And they're trying to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And as a result, their business models change. And I've been in this field for long enough that I've, I've had this lesson that I learned many years ago, which is that if you find something in the digital world that's working for you, and you find it's been working now for six months, you now have to understand that you are on borrowed time, because because they made it may last another year or so but you better find something else, because you can't count on it. Last thing, and I can't tell you how many times I've spoken to clients, I'm gonna like this was just working three months ago, it was working great. And now what happened? It's like, well, you know, the overlords Google or Facebook have had to change their business practices as a result. So and that goes along with what we were talking about earlier, Ross, which is is that this is something it's a constantly moving and shifting marketplace. And there's always new players. And it's unlike the days before digital where there weren't like new radio stations opening every month. But there are new sites, new players that are coming up that are gathering and garnering attention from eyeballs. And as a result, Facebook and others have to react to that. So I want to put that in place there. And then let's jump over to GA and GA four because it's important understand where to Google Analytics come from so early on. And I'm always a big history buff with this stuff, because I love it. There used to be this this program out there was a free program called urgent. And it was a web analytics program. And it was really good at tracking how people what they did when they showed up on your site, what pages were popular, how long they were there, and it was included for free and any server that you would get. You know, back in the day, you couldn't just set up a website, you had it. You had to get a service predated
Ross Herosian:Google Analytics by probably many moves like weh
Jeff Greenfield:weh. That's right. And then Google acquired urchin. And that's the history of it. This is what's funny about software is that when you buy a piece of software, sometimes it doesn't matter how big you are like Google, but the code is so embedded, you just don't change certain things. And so everyone who uses Google Analytics, they know about UTM source and UTM. Medium. And that UTM stands for urgent tracking module. So yeah, that's, that's where that's
Ross Herosian:why I had no idea because they, they just renamed it I mean, does they call it a universal tracking now maybe, but that's, that's what it was started with, wow,
Jeff Greenfield:I had no idea tracking module, because to change would be way too much work so years ago. So what they did is, is that they expanded the product. So it could do other things, it could give you more information about people on your site. And then as their ads products started to grow, like Google search, and Google Shopping, and Google Display, they made it very easy to integrate those. And then what's happened over the years as well, Google did a very good job as well of creating curriculums for colleges and analytics, which met people in colleges years ago who didn't know anything about digital, they got trained in web analytics with Google Analytics. And that's why now 98% of all companies use Google Analytics to measure their ad effectiveness. But there's a huge problem with that, which is, it's a web analytics product. It's designed to measure how people get to your website, and then what they do on your website. So let's talk about how people get to your website. Google Analytics does a good job of when someone clicks to make your way to the website, you know, where they clicked from. And anyone who opens up their Google Analytics will see that like, 80% of the people just show up organic Hello, Tony Hoare, or if you're spending a lot of money, they will come through your Google branded search term. But as a marketer, I don't want to know about people, what they clicked on. Because what Google Analytics is showing me that they just came to my homepage. How do those people find out about me? How did they know to search for me? How did they know to click on my brand search term? What ads Am I running out there that's doing that. And that's not in Google Analytics, because Google Analytics is not media effectiveness, it's just click tracking is all it is. So now, let's so this has been out there for a very long time, you know, 98%, of marketers utilize it. And now if we go back, just a couple of years ago, there was this thing called GDPR, which are these big changes for privacy that started in the EU, we now have CCPA, the California Consumer Protection Act. And then we've got one in Nevada, we've got one in Maryland, we've got one in just about every state, all of these privacy changes. And so Google has made a lot of changes over the last decade towards that in the final shift is shifting over to GA for. And so what that means is, is that you have to update your code, you have to do all of these things. Now, what a lot of sites have been doing is they've been running in parallel, because the problem is, is that starting in July, when we log in to Google Analytics for all we're going to have as data in there from the first time we put up the tags.
Ross Herosian:Yeah, that's the thing I always told the clients I worked with is even if they weren't ready to deal with at that time, Google Analytics, let's go through and still install the code, because some people are erroneously think that oh, Google just has this information. And then when I hit the button for Google Analytics, they get oh, then that gives it to me. But this none of these tools can start collecting data until you essentially install them and right and I gotta tell you, like this has been the big panic to Google's credit, but also discredit they are hammering you over the head right now that we are in the end game. Oh, you
Jeff Greenfield:got the lockdown cow exactly how
Ross Herosian:down the red banner, like the emails, everything. And you know, it's funny because as a marketer, sometimes some of the most effective work that you can do is literally when is heavy handed where you where you literally like pound people over the head with it. And then they're like, people complain about it, but then it's like, Oh, guess what? We had record sales. So I feel like Google is right there when it comes to this GA for transition. Because yeah, if you don't get this set up, they are kind of doing this thing where will will automatically set it up because they don't want to just leave people out in the lurch. But that could be an imperfect setup. But here's like,
Jeff Greenfield:is that for clients that I know, that had been running GA with GA for for like the last year, even, they are still only looking at GA? Yeah, haven't started using GA for. So what's gonna happen is that July 2023, is the first full month that people are going to be looking at GA for that they're not going to have GA data. So what that means is, is that August, when people look at the July data, they're gonna have this, oh, my God moment, like, what is going on? And then they're gonna be like, Thank God, our bosses aren't here. So that's,
Ross Herosian:yeah. So so because it is not, it is not the same product.
Jeff Greenfield:That's right, it's a completely different product completely
Ross Herosian:different. It is, I would not even argue, I would just say, it doesn't feel as accessible. As Google Analytics does. Now, that could be a function out of how long Google Analytics has been around. Right, that has been around for years, it's gone through many updates as GA for technically has been around for many years, too. But you know, it's been, it's been to the side, we haven't had to deal with it to your brain. But yeah, come July, in August, there's gonna be a lot of listings job listings. For I
Jeff Greenfield:think what happened is, is that in September, when people's boss has come back from the summer, and they look at the data, there's going to be a lot, hey, we need to find something else. But now we're in q4. So I think 2024 is going to be the year where a lot of companies are going to be looking for other things. This is this is a a major disruption in the world of analytics. And in the world of attribution, along with all the changes that are going on with the cookies, the recent announcements from Safari that are going to happen, there's all these changes, and they're all coming together at once. So this market is having a lot of disruption. And it's pretty exciting. And it's just, it's just one change after another after another all at the same time. It's really incredible.
Ross Herosian:And we're not going to talk about it in this part. I mean, well, we may end up talking about it, because it's it's the elephant, you know, where I'm going, he's already laughing. He knows where I'm going, the elephant in the room of AI, but you have all of these things. All of these changes, you have the analytics trends that began with a tool that 90 plus percent of the industry and all people use Google Analytics changing, right, right, people being confused, intimidated, or not getting the same type of data they need. And I think that's a great prediction that we're going to see in q4, q1, all of these new searches for new analytic tracking tools and things like that, that are going to either simplify or give better clarity on on what exactly your marketing is doing. You have the AI revolution, kind of on top of that at the same time, and then you have what you mentioned cookieless. So I think that's a great transition. Let's talk cookieless what does that mean, other than it sounds like we're gonna have a whole bunch of sad kids out there, or adults for that matter. Who are gonna go starving because they get no cookies?
Jeff Greenfield:Yeah, this is definitely going to hit the adults more than the kids because the backbone of Ad Tech has been these third party cookies, that allow folks to capture information so that when you're running a marketing campaign, you can know that someone got exposed to and even saw an ad of yours on the New York Times, and then clicked on something. So going back to what I was talking about, where you don't know how people are showing up at your site, using third party cookies and other platforms. Besides Google Analytics, you're actually able to tell which ads are actually driving awareness and making people eventually search for you. But when Google has this cookie collapse, or the cookie apocalypse, next year, and 2024. What that means is is is it means we're not gonna be able to tell anymore. And so now we have to step back and say, Okay, well Well, this is going to impact both measurement. And so it's gonna impact how we determine what was working and what wasn't working. And it also impacts targeting. And for those marketers that have been around for just a couple of years, they remember it wasn't that long ago and Facebook, you could you could target ford f 150 owners who least whose lease is going to expire?
Ross Herosian:Insanely deep, right? saying, yeah, one could argue may be criminally based on all of their fines,
Jeff Greenfield:right. But now, you can't do that. And so we have to think about, okay, well, what are we going to do, and for a lot of marketers who are primarily digital marketers, they're at a loss, they're like, you know, I'm used to having big data, I want to target people at a user level. But we have to go back to the future, we have to go back to the time before digital and think about, you know, how did brands actually grow back then? How were they able to make decisions, how were they able to target. And it turns out that brands actually, were able to grow really, really well, the difference was, is that instead of them being focused at a user level, where you're so deep, you can't see the forest for the trees, they panned back the camera, and they actually had a broader perspective on what was driving awareness. At the top of the funnel. There's a great book out there that I recommend for everyone who's a marketer. It's called lemon, how the advertising brain turned sour by Orlando wood, it's available on Amazon. It's like 60 bucks. For anyone, small, medium, or large business owner, this book will change your perspective on marketing overall. And what they found is that as digital marketing started to grow, and as marketers started to move money, from awareness type tactics like TV and radio, stuff that was all about brand building, and they moved it to the lower part of the funnel, where you could count clicks, what they found is as move, money moved over, and they call that a rise, in short term, as a meeting, you're focusing on the lower part of the funnel, you're trying to grab people who are already in market grab will already be ready to buy. And so you see that rise. And as they spent more money there, they saw a decrease in AD effectiveness. And the reason for that is that, as you know, it is a funnel, it's like there, and it's all about the reach, you want to spend more money at the top of the funnel, so that you build awareness and bring it on down. When you spend fewer dollars at the top of the funnel, your funnel is smaller, your reach is less, which means you're actually marketing to fewer people. Which means even if you're closing at an incredible rate, your ads have to work much harder. So ad effectiveness goes down. That's why I keep saying that branding is the new growth lane for marketers, and small business owners, all you have to do is you have to step back and say to yourself, Okay, I want a business. You know, I'm, I'm the chief bottle washer, I empty the trash and I make all the marketing decisions. And so instead of going to Marketing School, all you have to do is step back and maybe read a newspaper every now and then to see what are the big companies, the ones who are spending hundreds of millions of dollars, what are they doing, especially these like internet based companies like Airbnb? We know what Airbnb did, they stopped all of their lower funnel advertising and they moved to branding. And they found that their ad effectiveness went up through the roof. And we're starting to see more and more big brands do this. Now as a small business person, you say, Well, how does that How can I do something like that? Well, instead of focusing just on click ads, start thinking about content ads that you can do in your local area on Facebook, and read up on things like VSL is video sales letters, those are all content oriented and it's just as simple as sitting there with your iPhone and recording a video
Ross Herosian:isn't that nice though Jeff to like get back have this pendulum swing to get back to I say marketing as an art form. I think that's what how marketing bit me. I did not go to school for marketing. I went to school for communications, which that's essentially what marketing is. But the bug that really bit me was the content creation aspect. And that's what I work with a lot of my clients is being able to tell your story, being able to address your either prospective customers, your current customers, you know what I call FFPs fears, frustrations problems. Again, the art form, if you will, of telling stories, that's what always got me into marketing is the storytelling aspect. And so as we talk about potentially the decline slash collapse of this the cookie, I want to I want to ask you a question. Do you think that we have been in a? I don't know, if I call it the golden era, we may look back and not call it the golden there? But do you feel like we've been in an era with digital marketing? When we look back on we're gonna be like, Man, I cannot believe the unprecedented amount of data that we had during this time period? I mean, do you ever think we'll see this again? And is that? Is that a good or a bad thing?
Jeff Greenfield:Well, I think what we're going to realize is that this data actually lead us in the wrong directions, because we were so hyper focused on the details. And when you're hyper focused on the details, and that, because there's always errors and data, and you're never gonna have complete information. And the problem is, is that most of the models that were built, and I, I built models off of this data back in the mid 2000s. And you make a lot of assumptions. Yes. And those assumptions lead you in the wrong direction. Like, for example, the early attribution companies that were out in the early days of big data, they, they were able to tell which ads built awareness. But what they never really answered was which ads actually drove incremental sales, meaning, if I hadn't done this ad, how many sales would I have gotten anyway, from this ad, versus the incremental at the incremental sales, which is what people really want. And so now, we're entering this era where we're restricted in terms of the amount of data. But the advantage is that we can make better suggestions. And that's really what, and you're right about marketing being an art. It is an art and a science. And what's happened is, because there's so many complexities, so many different places, and variations of ads, the science part with the modeling and the machine learning and even a little AI, what it allows us to do is it allows the math and the computers to do the calculations that would take a group of like 100 human beings several weeks to do. And it can do it over the course of an hour or so. And it allows you to take your art, and then use the science to point you in the best direction and then combine those together. Because with the proper science, at least, you know directionally, you're heading in the right way. And that's really what this is about is, but but I'm telling you that all of this data, really, I think it's done marketers a disservice. And it's made a lot of us very lazy. And we've lost a lot of the creative juices that come out. If you look at the ads from the last Super Bowl. I mean, essentially, it's just like, it's these hypnotics really fast, tick tock ads, which which really kind of they don't they don't know, there's the emotional aspect that storytelling used to be all about, you know, used to be the brands would would would make ads, so that someone who's 18 would aspire to own that product in their 40s. I mean, that's long term thinking. Now, obviously, people today say there's no CFO that's going to support a campaign like that, Oh, it'll pay off in 25 years. But the idea is to build that type of storytelling into ADS is very, very powerful. And it works. You know,
Ross Herosian:I think maybe as a marketer, I always feel like, I like to reward good marketing. And I don't know, I always feel like if that is just because I am a marketer, I think it's like when you're in the service industry, and then you go out to eat, you probably tip the waitstaff more because it's like tip of the cap, like been there. Understand, I've been there. I've been in the trenches. So I feel the same way with good marketing. And to your point about the storytelling. You know, I was going through and I got served up $1 Shave Club ad the other day, and it legit made me laugh. It legit captured my attention. I was watching it on YouTube. I stayed for the whole ad, which How often can you say that right stick to the whole lot. And you know what I did the next day. I did by Dollar Shave Club. I did. And I think I'm maybe I am an outlier in that way. But I just feel like I always like to reward the ads that are interesting, the branding that I think is very creative and obviously resonates with me, it can't just, you know it up has made some sort of connection with me. But I just feel like there's so much less of that there has been so much less of that the last several years, and I, for one, kind of welcome the demise of the cookie. And, you know, I want to take a real quick break. When we come back, I want to talk a little bit about how all these things are directly impacting Facebook. So before we jump back into this episode, I just want to take a quick second and tell you about a tool that I've been using recently that I absolutely love. And it is called write blogger.com. It is by far the easiest way to create great content super fast. And it uses AI powered tools to really help you create tons and tons of SEO optimized content. They have an article writer, they have post ideas it has it can generate post outlines for you, it can also honestly just write the entire article for you. And it can include keywords, and links and images and all kinds of real time data, right? blogger.com is a game changer if you are a small business marketer. So there's a link in this episode's description, be sure to click it, go check it out. Again, I could not recommend this enough. It is a worth while investment, you will get your money's worth out of this in not even a month in conceivably a day, you'll be able to generate like a month's worth of content. It's amazing. Okay. Let's pop back in and catch back up with Jeff. So, Jeff, I have a question for you as someone who has been in this industry for a long, long time. And we're looking at talking about the demise of the cookie. Do you think that any there's any portion of Google's decision to eliminate the cookie was tied to basically crippling Facebook? Do you think that was in there at all? Do you think that was a factor? Well, my little does that not really there? I think
Jeff Greenfield:these large companies, they, you know, they make decisions that they're required to make under the guise of policies. So the cookie decision is towards privacy. It definitely cripples you know, Facebook, to a certain extent, but not so much. I think Apple's update in a couple of iOS is ago with the ITP and the ATP, where they, you know, we're now you the app, you have to get permission in order to track that was there by default? It's
Ross Herosian:so great to like, yeah, like now that you see that? Like, I don't know, who is clicking? Yes. It's very, it's
Jeff Greenfield:very, very few people. So that had a huge impact to Facebook. And, and really, what's, what's interesting is that when you when you kind of step back from this, and you look at analytics, if I'm a five and ecommerce store, and let's say I do 1000 sales a day. And you know, I'm running on Facebook, I'm running on Google, maybe I'm running on Criteo, and a couple of other sites. And I look at my Facebook orders, and Facebook says, You got 800 We got you 800 of the 1000. I look at Google and they say we got you 800 of the 1000. Well, now I have 1600 orders. So is as the as the VP of marketing, I need to somehow D dupe this because I can't turn in a report to my boss that says we got 1600 orders, but I don't know where the other 600 are.
Ross Herosian:Yeah, every everyone likes to report that kind of data.
Jeff Greenfield:So that's like, that's the big attribution problem is obviously there's, you know, and back in the early days, I used to say for every sale if you're running with five partners, every every sale is going to have five mothers or five fathers that are claiming this is my child pay me type of thing. And so, for a long time what marketers have been doing is they've been giving Facebook a haircut. So Facebook says 800 say okay, you know, my best guess is 400 Cut it in half. And that served marketers for A long time and that way, when they turn in the report to their boss, it actually says 1000 orders, it makes sense. And but then when Apple did the update, all of a sudden, Facebook was blind. Yeah, Facebook couldn't tell anymore. So same store, nothing's changed. But now all of a sudden, Facebook instead of reporting 800 orders is saying, we only got you 400 orders. And the problem is, is that the marketer is giving Facebook the same haircut cutting it from 400 to 200. And so what our data has shown is that when this update went through Apple, the people who are using Facebook or meta use Facebook and Instagram on a daily basis, they didn't all say, Oh, I'm going to leave Facebook for good. They're all still there. That same demographic, people like 45, especially 55. Plus fact, one of the most desirable demographics in the US, the ones who spend the most money, they are still members
Ross Herosian:of Facebook demise. Every year, they ring the bell, and every year it doesn't happen. That's not to say they're not struggling. But that's right. Yes, they've Yeah, they have a very desirable target market. And
Jeff Greenfield:they're, they're still there, and still being very responsive. But the key is that people have been cutting their metrics in half. Now, the way around that that can help that is you have to do this server to server integration, which is a back end integration. Some of the larger ecommerce sites have done that most of the smaller ones have not. But I can tell you that the those folks are still there. If all of a sudden you saw your numbers drop on Facebook, they didn't really drop. It's just there, they don't have the capability to be able to see through all the murkiness to figure out what's actually working anymore, because most of the people coming from Facebook are coming through mobile. And that's that's the issue like
Ross Herosian:any of this cookie, these cookie updates, or any of the other kind of I'll say revolutions or changes that are coming, are going to make any sort of improvement to attribution at all, or is that always going to be just an aspect of digital marketing that you continue to kind of that's that's that you work through?
Jeff Greenfield:I mean, that's a great question. I mean, all of these changes, and we even have more the new iOS update is reported to be stripping the any PII personally identifiable data, and any, anything that tells you where that person came from. So there's some belief out there that it may be that when someone from a Mac, or someone using Safari clicks through, you're not even gonna be able to tell where they can't, where they came from, and your Google Analytics, even if you're buying ads. So this is, this is pretty scary to marketer. So it's, things are really going backwards. So the answer to attribution today is that, you know, back in the days before digital, there was a technique called Marketing Mix modeling. And marketing mix modeling is a statistical technique that looks at correlations between how many impressions are in market, like how many people you're you're trying to reach how many people are seeing a TV ad, how many people are seeing your digital ads, directly to sales. And it looks at the contribution, which is essentially incrementality. But the problem is, is that it never went below that channel. So it could tell you how much your digital was doing. But it couldn't tell you search. And it couldn't tell you specifically keyword or which Facebook ad or which creative attribution has always been very granular. And once you hooked it up, it was always running, where his marketing mix modeling was always this project, that for most companies, is usually around a half a million to several million dollars. And they would typically do it once a year at the most because it was such a heavy lift. So the future of attribution is in the middle of those two, meaning we're not going to have user level data. But using the data from the platforms that we take out of Facebook that you use for your reporting, the data that we can take out of out of Google Analytics, the data that we can take out of Google and all these other providers, even though it's at a platform level, we can create very sophisticated models because the power of cloud computing the number of cycles that we can run. So think for example, like chat GPT AI, that type of stuff. We couldn't have done that five years ago because the computers weren't fast enough. And if they couldn't do it, it would not they wouldn't have been able to afford to do it. But now you can do is so much so much faster. So we can actually take. And this is where we're doing it in my company at pro validox. We're taking all of that platform level data, analyzing it. And we're able to output attribution like results very granular level. But on top of that, not only are we able to look at because when you think about attribution, attribution is always about what happened yesterday, meaning, hey, this is who's driving the most value. And most marketers, they use that to make decisions on where to spend their next dollar. So for example, if you look at a report, I'll give an example, we have a report on a client, and it said that greater than half of all the value was coming from their display ads, and TV wasn't that great? And they were like, we're spending so much money on TV, how can this be? How can this be because most marketers would look at that and say, let's double down, let's spend a lot more money on display. But at pro ballistics, what we do is, in order to plan where the next dollar goes, the models go crazy with this machine learning AI, they go in, and they do hundreds of 1000s of simulations to figure out where should you place your next bet. And what it turned out, is that when it comes to spending more money, we should not spend any more money and display, even though it's killing it, because display is maxed out, we need to spend all of our next dollars in TV to build that upper part of the funnel.
Ross Herosian:Yeah, I was just gonna say it plays right into what you were talking about earlier, is feeding the top of the funnel to grow the bottom of the funnel, I think exactly, again, to your point where we focus so much on the bottom of the funnel, that's it's, it's a lot more constricted than the top. Right, if you build the top, you will grow the top you will grow the bottom, and I will say this, I am I really love the the spark, the everything that AI is bringing in from a content perspective, obviously, you know, grain of salt, there's still all kinds of new workflows and SOPs that come with using AI for content generation. But I as far as training my clients training, my team talking to people about it is it is a tool, and you need to understand how to properly wield the tool. You know, a hammer can do many great things, but it also can't do some things. It's the same thing with AI, and it's gonna change over time. So my I'm wondering, you know, or I guess what I'm more excited about is AI as it relates to analytics, because analytics are always the hard stop with a lot of my small business clients, and a humongous beehive for large clients and large entities, where it's just like, we have so much data, the attribution becomes difficult, the trying to figure out where to spend money becomes difficult are we spending it the right place, and for the small business marketer, it just gets into, I don't know what this means, right? The big business, unfortunately, no good reads too much into it. Oftentimes, we have too much data, which is absolutely a thing. It's like too much data. And like, now we're gonna really overthink it, or the small business that may not have as much data, but doesn't know what to think of it. And I think AI and that cloud computing, can start to solve both of those problems. And that's really exciting, because the Gone are the days hopefully are coming soon, where you're spending a week, a month on a report. Right? I mean, if you take away that aspect of my job that would actually thank you, and you give me some learnings that I can chew on I'm not going to be I'm not complaining too much about that. You know, I tell you,
Jeff Greenfield:you know, there's for the small business person. There's, there's a lot of stuff to look at, but what I always focus people to look at and to do are a couple of things because there's a lot of levers that you pull when you're running a local business, and you're doing a lot of things like you're sponsoring a soccer tournament, you you spoke in an event at your local Toastmasters or some group. So what you want to do is you want to keep a log of anything you're doing where you're buying advertising where you think, Oh, I put a coupon in the Sunday mail or or write that down, keep a log. Keep a notebook of the dates. You'd do these things. Keep a notebook of the dates when you actually speak at events or you do anything like that in your local community. And then what you want to do is you want to look in your Google Analytics. And you want to look at that organic traffic. Now, if you're, if you're buying your Google brand search term, you can look at that as well. But because the nice thing about your if you're buying your Google brand search term, and there you can actually look at how many impressions each day are there for your business, meaning how many people each day are actually searching for you. Because remember, Google Analytics, you're only going to find out when they actually click through. So sometimes buying those Google brand search ads are great, because you actually get to see how many people are searching each day. So if you want to go in and look and track that every day, what you want to do is keep it in a spreadsheet every day, how many people are searching, how many people were searching? Whoa, all of a sudden, there were normally only 10 people a day searching. And now there's 100. Well, wait a second. I did speak at that Toastmasters event last week. I mean, it doesn't take a genius to figure out okay, well, maybe this is having an impact. So you put these things in notebooks and you track it. That way, you can actually tell what's moving the needle and what's actually not moving the needle. Obviously, sales is the is the end game. But really what we're looking for these leading indicators, what what is showing me how do people find out about me? How are people walking? How do they know to walk into my store, and tracking the dates of how many people search versus what I actually did? That's probably my best tip for that.
Ross Herosian:Alright, so one last digital marketing fire drill that I'm covering, with my guests, Jeff, Jeff, we're gonna talk about Safari. People are freaking out. I took my son to the animal kingdom, actually, this past weekend for Father's Day. And we went on the Safari animal kingdom. And he saw some giraffes didn't freak out. He did, however, freak out over some ducks that he saw at the animal kingdom, which we also have a pond, half a block away from our house. I bring all this up just to say he didn't freak out on Safari. But a lot of people are freaking out about Safari. Why are people and maybe more specifically digital marketers freaking out about Safari?
Jeff Greenfield:Well, because Safari and Apple are making even more rigid changes than they did before. We talked earlier about the changes that they made for the inept tracking, that really put the handcuffs on Facebook. Well, now what they're going to be doing is stripping the tracking links off of a URL. So what that means is, is that, you know, whenever you you put in tracking links, like the UTM links, or any information in there, and we're not sure exactly what they're going to be stripping out. But the worst case scenario would be is that this could actually kill Google Analytics and Google Analytics for if they strip away all of those tracking links, because then you won't even know how people come to your website. And when you think about that is kind of the ultimate and privacy, the fact that you can go from website to website and people won't know how you got there. And that does kind of go along with the whole apple mandate. But it is interesting that they're doing this right before Google was going to be getting rid of cookies. So it's kind of like saying, Hey, we're upping the game here for everyone. We're getting rid of these. And and there's even talk now. Because that's a function called Private relay, which not too many people subscribe to iCloud. It's in there, where folks can't even tell your IP address. So if you're, if you've been in Google Analytics, and you've been noticing that there's these private visitors, those are people on these relays. And even if you're digging in, if you have more sophisticated analytics, and you put on the relay, and you're in your town, and you would normally show up as being in Orlando, let's say it'll show you in Kansas, and and then you go back again, five minutes later, it'll show you in another state. It's this whole relay system. And so now the next thing that people are talking about is that the browser's eventually will be hiding IP addresses. So that's really scary, but it does from a privacy aspect. It really makes the whole web much more private, much more secure for folks. It doesn't really help much with the ad ecosystem. It does mean that this whole ad personalization that the marketplace is Build is going to have to shift. But you know, you kind of have to weigh it out, you know, do I want my privacy? Or do I want ads that really speak to me? How do
Ross Herosian:you tow this line? How do you how do you personally tow this line as a marketer, and an analytics person? Like, because I, I struggle with it, I do want more privacy. But like, it's like, I'm constantly taking one hat on and one hat off, where it's like, Oh, I like good privacy. It's like, oh, but that's okay. Like as a marketer? And I will say this as a responsible marketer. Right? You know, I don't feel like I've ever made abuse of any of that, that data, that kind of thing. But yeah, then you lose personalized ads. You know, it's like, Would I rather have personalized ads versus non personalized that? I mean, I think I always feel like I fall more on the line of personalized ads than not, I'd rather see an ad for something that's relevant than not, I guess. So how do you kind of wrestle with these kinds of competing concepts? Well, going back to
Jeff Greenfield:what we talked about earlier, where how this data has actually led us down a rabbit hole of less ad effectiveness. There's been a lot of research and in the concept of when you're reading content, and you know, each piece of content, and in fact, the research was originally done on TV ads, by a good friend of mine and a pioneer in the industry by the name of Bill Harvey. And what they found is that TV ads or TV programs, each program has a certain emotional state that you can determine, is it funny, is it scary. And what brands found years ago is that, you know, soda doesn't sell well and drama, but it sells really well in comedy. And they've been able to demonstrate that when your product, and the ad aligns with the emotional state of the content and TV that they're consuming, sales go up, and they go up dramatically. And they've also extended this study to the internet as well into news content. In fact, there's been companies out there that have used bills, they're called driver tags, these emotional driver tags, what drive us to do things. They've classified all of the top 1000 Plus news sites, and they, and they are able to determine the emotional state of articles. And advertisers are able to then buy ads not based on personalization, but based on the content, and sales go up. Wow. And this is the part that we talked about earlier, that's been forgotten and where marketers have gotten lazy, which is, you know, because we have all this data, we think we have all the information, we think we know everything. But we forgot about this concept called emotion, and how human beings are driven by emotion. And so we need to align the messaging with the state that people are in. And when we do that, we can sell more widgets, it's really simple. And that's really what it comes down to. And that's why this personalization is something, the problem we run into is that we have an entire working group, every working marketer today, who's under the age of 50, is addicted to this user level data. So we have to go through an entire reeducation process. In fact, I'm working now on a series of videos to help people understand all of the changes and challenges and what what the new world is going to look like, as we come through into 2024. Because it's going to be completely different. And what's going to happen is that without education, people are going to latch on to these cookie lists, supposedly cookie list solutions, which are going to get a lot of attention. They're going to get a lot of money. But then what's going to happen is the hammer is going to come down from Google and from Apple to stop these from happening. And then people are going to be like, what, what what, what am I going to do? I'm just and so we have to start this reeducation process now.
Ross Herosian:wagging the dog there, right? That's exactly right there mercy. Which, you know, playing in the I always say it's like playing in their playgrounds, you know, you they do have rules posted but they can also change the equipment at any time and that that's part of the ongoing change of digital. But I want to throw that back just as we wrap up here. You said something that rarely, rarely happens on the podcast. But you really blew my mind when you said marketers forgot about emotion. And that got me to think about the ads that I get served. And that I see that all of us see on a daily basis on Instagram, on Facebook, on YouTube. So many of them now are completely devoid of that aspect. They're all about I mean, it really just when you said that brought home, everything we've talked about, because they're all just about the, the Buy Now, here it is ready to buy, go, go go. So few of them are hitting on touching on doing the work to address the emotional connection, aspect solutions. You know, hitting the fears, frustrations, problems, the transformation that a product or service can have, and not everything needs to be a life changer, you know, a simple gardening tool that makes my life easier will transform me into a much better state than I was before. You know, it doesn't all have to be, you know, just completely massively life changing type thing. But it can be transformational and positive. And people buy off that. And Pete, that's how you make these solid connections. And I just wanted to stop and just I challenge you, as the listener, to just kind of be aware of that next time you're in these platforms, look at the ads that are coming up, you'll probably notice how few of them are hitting on any sort of emotional, I would even say again, we talked about little bit more brand centric type of ads. And there's so much more about that bottom funnel like hey, buy this, hey, buy this, buy this, buy this, buy this, buy this, buy this. And that's where it is. And so, again, I challenge you, that's your homework listeners. I want to just thank Jeff, thank you so much. Jeff Greenfield, this has been amazing. Before we go, Jeff, where can people find you? How can they connect with you? How, you know, who do you work with? How can they work with you fire away, plug away anything in anywhere people can find you?
Jeff Greenfield:Yeah, they can go to pro ballistics.com. That's my company's website. Go there, check it out. And the audio series or the video series that I'm working on, which will be live very soon is attribution. certified.com we're setting up a certification service for folks to go through and very quickly get up to speed on all of these changes and understand how to make the best decision. So that's attribution. certified.com.
Ross Herosian:Awesome. Yeah. And listen, I thank you for taking the time out. This has been such an amazing conversation. And for those of you out there with a, you know, whatever level of marketer you are, as we said at the beginning of the show, digital marketing is constantly changing. But as we sit here recording this June of 2023, we are really, I think, at the beginning of a lot of different revolutions transformations happening at once. And I'm excited by it. And, you know, I know Jeff is also and I think that's the beauty of digital marketing. And the thing that keeps me keeps me doing it is never have the same day twice. Right. Never experienced Groundhog Day in digital marketing. So again, I want to say thank you to Jeff, go check out his website. There will be links in the episode description. And also in the show notes. You can find that at marketing clarity podcast.com And until next time, as always, I encourage you to keep pedaling
