Measurement can sort of lead you to the place where there's never guarantees. But the idea is that we all have limited resources, time, effort, energy, money to invest in this stuff to try to make it work. Measurement will sort of dump you at the lever of your marketing machine. It sort of dumps you at that place that says this is more than likely if we tweak something around this area, this is the thing that's going to move the needle fastest for you.
Speaker 2:Hey, there, you're listening to the Missions to Movement podcast and I'm your host, dana Snyder, digital strategist for nonprofits and founder and CEO of Positive Equation. This show highlights the digital strategies of organizations making a positive impact in the world. Ready to learn the latest trends, actionable tips and the real stories from behind the feed, let's transform your mission into a movement. Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Missions to Movements. I am your host, dana Snyder, and here with me today I have Chris Mercer. Chris, we are talking about all things measurement and marketing, which is so, so important. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:You're for having me, dana. Yeah, stuff like that's getting more and more important every single day.
Speaker 2:Yes, and I think something that so on the show, we talked about this a little bit beforehand, but I talk a lot about marketing, case studies and there's a lot of creativity in that and innovation. But the really kind of like non-sexy but exciting part of marketing is data, and I know if I am like any of the listeners I love the brainstorm, I love the coming up with the creative concept, I love creating a cool event, but I feel like we don't spend enough time thinking about at the beginning what are we actually tracking? How are we going to track the right KPIs? Was it worth it? Right? Did what we just put all this time and energy into? Are we accurately measuring it? So you are the guru in this space. Please share a little bit about your backgrounds. Everybody can meet you.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, as you said, my name is Chris Mercer. Everybody typically calls me Mercer. I really do go by Mercer, because I always know that Chris is in the room most times and our company is called measurementmarketingio, so it's our job to help marketers, marketing teams and agencies essentially start to measure so they know what's working, what's not and what actions they can take. Next, and I think, going back to your point, it is the basics of measurement that gets skipped, which is why it becomes so confusing, because I think people jump into the world of data too fast and they're doing it unarmed, like they're not going in for a specific purpose, they're just sort of wanting to see what the numbers are, but they're not even sure what numbers they should be looking at, or what the numbers, to your point, what they should have been, and so they end up getting overloaded with a bunch of data tables right, whether that's a spreadsheet or something like Google Analytics 4 or just Facebook Ads Manager. It gives them all these numbers and they're like great, well, what do we do with that? I have no idea, and that's where people come to us. They try to figure that out, but I think, to your point, it is because they've skipped this planning stage, this thinking about it stage. So the way to sort of help people wrap their mindset around this is kind of why do we measure in the first place? The way that we think about it, just like you and I are having a conversation, right, I'm going to say certain things and you're listening, and then you're going to adjust what you say and then, vice versa, I'm doing the same thing for you. This is a normal human behavior. But digitally, I think most marketers forget that and they don't realize that there is still a conversation happening, except this time it's between the user and the website. And if they're not understanding the user's side of the conversation, how could they ever respond? How could they ever improve that conversation? And that's the beauty of measurement. Measurement is how we understand, it's how we listen in on the user's side of the conversation and we can tell that, based upon how they're interacting with the site, how they're going through those different user journeys, or if it's a nonprofit, maybe a donor journey or some volunteer journey, and you're trying to figure out, like, is this the conversation that the website is supposed to be having with the user and are they going the way we want them to go, or is it going south really fast and we don't know that? So we don't know to fix that Right. That's the sort of thing, so that's kind of. The big overall thing is like measurements all about listening to the conversation and that's how we sort of integrate it first into companies. Once they understand why they measure, then it becomes a little bit easier to put into strategy and move into that planning process.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I think kind of you nailed it was also interpreting the data and the measurement. So you're looking at all of these different graphs I just had an organization send me. Well, here's our audience and here's our reach. And I was like, oh, okay, oh insights Right. It's like we share these things at board meetings or in staff meetings, but what's the greater story that that's actually telling us when we're looking to drive, ideally, towards a business goal? So I wanted to ask you I love asking very tactical questions for the listeners on this show and most of the audience are nonprofits. So if we're thinking about setting up and let's think about it in a donor queue if we're trying to think about a proper measurement funnel for nonprofits, thinking about somebody going to our website, where would you start?
Speaker 1:So I would start with the plan. I wouldn't even worry about the tools, I wouldn't worry about anything. Yet I would list three columns out, and this is where they're on a spreadsheet, piece of paper, a whiteboard, a napkin, doesn't matter. Three columns, sort of write them down. First column lists out all the questions that you want to be able to answer about this journey, every step of that journey. So it might be well, how many people were even arrived to the page where we asked them to donate, how many of those actually ended up clicking to interact with that particular journey, maybe going to the donation cart, so to speak, to actually start that donate, and how many actually finished? Just kind of use a simple example of that. So you write down all the questions you're trying to answer. Then you're going to think about that middle column, which is what information do we need to collect in order to answer those questions? So for question one, it might be well. How many people are going to the page where they can even donate, Like, how many people are we asking to donate today? Well, that's going to be well, we've got these five different pages, or maybe there's just one page that we have where we ask for that. Okay, when they arrive, the number of users that are on that URL. That's how we're going to answer. How many people are we asking to donate today? Right? So that's an example of kind of connecting the dots. We can question information. And then this is the third column, this is the most important part. The other two are necessary, so they're not optional. You still have to do them. But the third one is the one that people skip, and this is what causes those problems that you mentioned about not being able to interpret and try to pull insights and everything else. And you think about the actions you're going to take based upon the answers you are about to get. But you do this, you roleplay this. Before you even start to set up your measurement, before you dive into that spreadsheet to go see what the number is, before you open up a tool like GA4 to go see what the answer is, you think about what am I going to do? And it has to be in a specific three ways. One, what am I going to do when the answer is lower than what I think it's going to be? Two, what am I going to do if the answer is substantially higher than what I think it's supposed to be. And three, what are we going to do if the answer is exactly in range, Because the answer is always typically in range. So, for example, we go back to that question how many people are we asking to donate? Maybe that's the problem we're not asking enough people to donate, so we want to measure that. Well, we should be asking between, based upon our traffic and whatever else. Maybe we expect between 100 and 150 a day that are going to that page that we're asking. Okay, we're going to collect the page views. That's how we're going to know. So if we know it's between 100 and 150 is the sweet spot. What will we do if the answer is lower than 100? So then you start going well, I don't know. We have to break it down by traffic source. As an example, Maybe there's a certain traffic source that was working, that's not. Maybe our social media is not working. Maybe everything's working except for a certain traffic source. How would we know that? But when we did that, when you think about the actions is why the actions step so important. We just changed the question, Because now we're not saying we just want to know how many people are we asking, we want to know how many people are we asking, broken down by traffic source. Which means now we need to collect the traffic source in addition to the number of page views and certain ways to do this and measurement. Now we can actually take our action and say, well, if it's lower, we're going to break it down by traffic source, then we're going to go fix the traffic source when we find that Right If there's a certain thing.
Speaker 2:Quick note, because this is so on point to what I just talked about in episode 77. I literally break down specific to social media, nga4, what Mercer is talking about. On how to do this, I tell you in episode 77, I tell you how to figure out which social media channels are generating the most traffic for your website. If you are a step-by-step tactical person, go back, listen to episode 77, and it's going to tell you how to do this. I think this is so important to be able to go through these tools and use them properly. Sorry, continue. I just want to make that.
Speaker 1:I'm glad you mentioned it because it's a perfect segue, right, with connecting the dots between the two. We have the lower, but what about if it's higher? What if it ends up being 150 or 500? All of a sudden we get You're probably going to be the same actions in that case, like, well, let's go figure out where that additional traffic is coming from. That was unexpected, right? So maybe somebody started sharing our behalf, or maybe one of those posts went viral, hopefully in a good way, right, that sort of thing. Then there's the middle. What are we going to do? If it's in the range, okay, well, we're going to continue to maybe add to budget. Or if we're non-profits, maybe we don't have a budget for paid ads as much as we would want, maybe it's okay. We know our organic social Facebook group is doing pretty well compared to the LinkedIn group. Maybe we were trying. We know then, okay, let's double down on Facebook and do more on Facebook, right? Or pick up the new social media, the new threads or whatever else is at the current moment that we can start to focus on. But that whole process, what we call keya, is the measurement planning. That's how you do your measurement planning. So we think about the questions we're going to answer. We list out all the information we need to collect in order to measure, to actually get answers to those, and then we think about again greater than if it's lower answers, lower than if the answer is higher than if the answer is just right? You think about what actions are we going to take. So that action step, the reason that is so important. One, it forces you to ask better questions. Two, it forces you to throw out questions that are for questions, and I'll give you an example of that. We had somebody we were training and they were like well, we want to know what email, what paragraph of every email Keep in mind thousands, of, tens of thousands of emails in their system that they have. They wanted to know what paragraph people were clicking on. Was it the first paragraph, the second paragraph, third paragraph? All the emails are different, right? So there was a randomness to this. So I asked them. I said, okay, let's go to the action step. They knew how they were going to collect it and I said okay, because it's possible to do that. But I said, well, let me ask you a question. In six months, you're looking at a report and Google Analytics tells you. Paragraph number three is amazing. What are you going to do with that? And they were just like, oh, actually made up, no idea. It's like exactly there is no action, right, it's a bad question. So they just avoided all that work because they want the actions that what everybody else does is, they put all the work in. They create these reports that nobody can use because they weren't particularly useful. But they eliminated that by just thinking what actions can we take If a question, specifically an answer to a question, does not lead to a natural action? What I mean? Obvious natural action? You do not need to ask that question Now. There could be like I'm not sure what I need to do. I need to go learn it, I need to figure something out. That's different, that's a training issue. But if it's like gee, I didn't even know what we would do with that. We're collecting information for information sake. You're collecting data just to collect the data, and a lot of people convince themselves that that's OK Because, like well, we're not asking questions about it now, but we might, so we're going to have to collect it. The problem with that is you're not collecting it to actually be used, right, Because we determine how we use it in the plan. So it's not being collected to answer any specific questions. So it's a bunch of ripped up pieces of data. You can't recall it, you can't bring it up into report easily.
Speaker 2:Something very interesting I think with that email question that I think this opens up our mind to the data elements that we can pull. So what Mercer is talking about, you could have a trackable link in that third paragraph and you could see if that's clicked on the most. I was actually talking with a colleague of mine where her PS at the very end of the email, the PS and then a link that is the most common, which is telling her not a lot of people are reading the body of the email.
Speaker 1:They go to the bottom. They're trained to look for that PS link. Yeah, absolutely Right.
Speaker 2:And so that she knows now, ok, this is where I'm going to put, like, my richest stuff is in the PS link. So that's an interesting test. So there's so many ways to break down data, but I think the big picture here is it will help you listener. Data will help you figure out where to spend your time, your money and your resources.
Speaker 1:It will tell you what to do next. That's exactly right, yeah, and it eliminates a lot of drama when it's used properly, right? Going back to something you said about interpreting, right, because a lot of people will come to us and say, well, we just want to learn how to analyze our reports and my first response to them is your reports are too complicated, then why do you need analysis? You shouldn't have to analyze anything. Nothing should need interpretation. That's the point. And people get confused over that because, like, that makes no sense. Ga4 looks like the matrix to me, right? I need to figure out the mission. Then becomes I have to figure out how to decode the matrix to get my marketing superpowers that it's going to give me. If I do that, that's a fallacy. It doesn't exist. What's happened instead is that these reports have collected a bunch of data. It's again, it's not organized in a particular way. So that's why it looks like the matrix. It is confusing. It's going to be, and I'll give you an example of that. If I give you a Goldilocks and Three Bears, like as a kid's book, you could probably read that to me just fine. But if I take that book out and rip up those pages, take them all out, rip them up into pieces, shove them all between the covers and give you the book. Could you read the book? No, you could. You could, but that's what people think, right. This is why, when people say I'm not a numbers person, I'm like, ok, let's go through this. Exactly, you are, I didn't change your ability to read, but you just told me you couldn't read me the book. You totally can, because I didn't change your ability to read. Right, just like numbers people and non numbers people, we all know 1 plus 1 equals 2, you're a numbers person. If you know that, done. Yeah, stop telling yourself that story. Right, that's not true. It's not particularly useful belief. You know 1 plus 1, you're fine. That's all you need. Then the rest of it is how you organize it. So if I give you that ripped up book, you have to dump it out. Yeah, you got to spread it all out and you're gonna have to jigsaw, try to put the pieces together. Some of them are gonna get blown away by the. Fans might gonna fall behind the desk. And then you got to make up stuff because you can't find them. So you like, I don't, I then something in here and then they did this and you make up stories. This is what GA, for data in general, is. For most organizations. It hasn't been collected put together. It's been collected in individual bits of ripped up pieces of data, not stitched together in the in the puzzle that it wants to be. So, of course, of Course, it's going to be hard for you to pull insights, to take action from your measurement systems. Whatever you use, whether it's Google Analytics for anything else, of course it's going to be here's a surprise. It will be for me too. You can't give me your thing and have me pull anything useful out of it because it wasn't set up properly. Right? It's not to say that I don't know different things about the reports. It might be able to pull something, but that's not the point. The point is you want the tool to. Just by you seeing it, you know what to do next, and this is what people go like. There's no way, mercer, like this J4. Stuff is so complicated Numbers I need to analyze, I need to think about it. So let me ask you a question. You're driving your car, you look at your dashboard. You see how fast you're going, immediately, immediately, you know what hit the gas or hit the break, right, immediately. Just the fact you knew the number, you already knew the action to take Right. That's how measurement should be. That's how it can be if you set it up properly. It's just most organizations haven't thought about it in that way, so they set it up like everybody else around them is. But remember, they're taking their lead from everybody else that also doesn't know how to do it, and everyone is always just comparing to each other. Going to you have this problem, like, yeah, we have this problem too, and now it's social proof in reverse, it's not helping elevate, it's helping keep everybody down because everyone goes. Well, true, no one seems to have figured it out. So I guess I'll just keep focusing on the next new funnel or the next new whatever, and they leave it alone thinking this is just how it is and it's just not true in specifics to GA4, just so we can understand what are the types of questions we could look to answer when we do have reports built out in the right way there are only ever two types of questions. So it's challenging to say, like to listen detail, because there's tens of thousands of questions you could ask that to, yeah, but they're really only ever two types of questions. I think people get caught up in that too, like am I asking the right questions? So they Google it right, what questions that a nonprofit be asking? And then you get a million blog posts that all say something like here's the seven questions to do or the 11 questions that never ask, and I just confuses everybody else. Your questions should be something for you, not what I asked. Even if I had a nonprofit, my questions don't have to be your questions. Right, I'm asking questions from my nonprofit, my user journeys. So the way we think about it is there's only ever two types. There's results questions and then there's how questions. The results questions are the ones that most people ask on their own, and when I say results question, I mean the result of the end of a user journey. Right, so they can. That donor journey, the volunteer journey, the brand journey for the nonprofit, whatever the journey is that you want your users to go through. What's the result of that journey? How many of X are we getting? Are we get? How many donations Did we get? What's the average donation? To give you some examples, that sort of thing and results. People, for the most part, measure that sort of natively, intuitively. What they forget is those how questions. Right, we need to have those how questions. So, how did that happen? Well, how many people had donated? What did they do right before that, when they had to go to the cart, that exchange system for the currency exchange? Well, they had to go there, okay. Well then, how many did that? Great, how do they get to the cart? Well, they had to go from the donation page. So, okay, let's, how many sewed up there? And then how many showed up? How did they get there? And you start realizing. Now you understand the journey right, which, again, this is just the conversation at the website or that particular user journey is having with the user. And we measure for that. Right, we're asking questions around it, we measure for it. We can start to understand where the drop-off is. So, if somebody's not going from, like, maybe donations are low, but are they low because everyone's giving five dollar donations when you thought they would give 50? Or are they low because no one's even trying to donate donations and I even go into the cart. Or are they low because the cart broke and for some reason discover card isn't taken anymore and it's something broke in the technical side. Well, you can't answer those questions if you aren't measuring for that sort of Drop-off, right and you would see a bunch people go into the cart but not making it through and be like, well, that's new, that's different, that didn't happen before. Now we at least know where to focus, and that's the idea that measurement can sort of lead you to the place where there's never guarantees. But the idea is that we all have limited resources time, effort, energy, money To invest in this stuff to try to make it work. Measurement will sort of dump you at the lever of your marketing machine. It sort of dumps you at that place that says this is more than likely if we tweak something around this area, this is the thing that's going to move the needle fastest for you.
Speaker 2:This is what I talk about a lot in comparison with GA4 to social ads. So if you're running a paid social ad campaign, I hear all the time my Facebook ads don't work and say, well, if we look at the data, is your ad not working. Or if you're sending people off Facebook, is your landing page or your conversion form not working. And so right, that's a quick look at data to say, okay, what's our click-through rate? If you're getting a really high click-through rate, your ad is working, it's doing its job, it's getting people to click on it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is sending the eyeballs over. Right, it's that the landing page doesn't match the expectation. Probably exactly, that's exactly exactly so same thing.
Speaker 2:You can figure out this information. I think, listener, if you have not done this on at least a quarterly Basis, monthly basis, to go into GA4 now to look at this journey, to see what's possible. And I want to ask you, mercer, what is built in to GA4 when we're talking about this kind of journey process versus what do we need to have customly done?
Speaker 1:great question. So the way that Google Analytics 4 works, it kind of has three levels to it's, kind of we think about it. This first level is what they call the automatic behaviors, right, what they call automatic events. So this tool, just sort of turning it on and activating it, it'll start recording things like which pages did they see which URLs are loading. It'll tell you if they left your site and what click that they left to go to some other site. It'll tell you if they are interacting with your forms, if you might have those on your site. Anybody uses YouTube. That's embedded videos. It'll start recording that sort of behavior. Maybe you got a YouTube on your blog or about an organization video that you want to see if people are interacting with. So it does a lot of those sort of behaviors on its own, but those are also generic to any website in the world. Ever All websites have these behaviors, which is why they're automatic. It knows that every website has that, so we can record those. The next level up are what they call these recommended events, and this is does require a little bit of know how to use the platform, but the idea is that the recommended events are more for your business model. Google doesn't know your business models. So it's summer, e-commerce stores, summer, more direct response. Right, a nonprofit can be both in e-commerce. They can have e-commerce with swag and things like that, and they they might have more of a direct response donor funnel. That's more like stage one, steps two, step three, you know, type of thing. So then you set it up for that. That might be like setting up the e-commerce as an example, because not all businesses have e-commerce. Some are just content marketing that are sending people for affiliate sites. They don't use e-commerce, so you would set that up. And then there's this highest level and this is the biggest mistake I've seen, specifically by taking advantage of Google Analytics 4, where people are missing out, and that is what they call custom events. So the custom event is literally you just typing in what the name is and saying like, for example, I might say ask to donate. I would call that ask the donate event, then I would have started to donate and that might be in the cart. When they see the cart, I say that event happens and then donated would be that final step. You can make a little funnel out of just using your language that you already use as a brand. That's how we think about that. Those custom events are your brand language. It won't make any sense at all to me because I don't know your brand Right, but if I'm part of your team I'll totally understand, because now of a sudden, google Analytics 4 is speaking the same language as the rest of the team. Finally, whereas the older versions of analytics could never do that, you're always looking at page URLs. That's why everyone's still stuck on thinking that's how they have to do it, but you really don't. This platform will tell you a story, but you have to set it up to do that. Love that, but again, automatically. It will at least pull the page views. If you do know your URLs, you could pull that up and it builds funnels. There's a whole funnel report that's in the section of Google Analytics 4 called the explore section, because you could explore the user journeys and you can build a little funnel and say I want to see people that were on this page and then went to this page and then went to this page so you can see where that drop-off is. It's pretty quick to build something like that. That's where you get your insights. People always wonder why not get the insights from. Obviously, I don't think insights are particularly useful. Actions are useful, so I always try to reference it as actions. But that's where you see your actions. It's to your point. What you do, naturally which is great, a lot of companies don't do this is you're already thinking how is this supposed to work? Now, when you look at your numbers, you're measuring against. Well, we thought 80 percent of the people would donate, that started, but it turns out only 5 percent of the people are donating. Maybe that's more realistic or maybe that's a sign that something's not working. But either way, you see that mismatch, you go okay, let's go figure out what's going on. How come we're not hitting what we expected it to do? That's what a tool like Google Analytics can do.
Speaker 2:If you're hearing Mercer in your just like what in the world, where am I supposed to start A? This is why companies like Mercer's exist to help you break this down. This is something where and I'll be honest too I am hiring out to have somebody set up my GA4 custom events, everything for me. I know where my skill set lies. Could I spend time searching on YouTube? Sure, but it is way better to hire professionals to get it set up right. I always say you know where your time is best spent. If this is going to take me which it would if this is going to take me like 15 hours to figure out where it could take somebody else an hour, it's way smarter to do that. This is something that I do find, and we're talking specifics right now about GA4 and website measurement, and that is so crucial. I believe your website is your home base for all things Social traffic, emails, everything you're sending to your website as your hub, right it's. I call it like your storefront. It's where most people find a first impression about who you are and what you do. But if you don't have the data properly set up, then what's the point? You can't actually create a proper social media strategy if you don't have this information set up. So, as this episode goes out, this is a perfect time before the craziness of end of year giving Tuesday. Your websites are about to skyrocket with website traffic. You're not going to want to miss being able to have this measurement set up and being able to go through like that three step process that you talked about, and I think it's actually interesting. You should set this up now because you're going to want time to take those actions with the insights that you have now, so that your site can be more properly set up and efficient when it comes time for end of year giving. That is the end of my soapbox on hiring out for something like this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it. It's because measurement really is a department now. It's not a project anymore. It changes too often, the text too different. Now it's not like the old days, right, the internet is just a lot more complex, with internet and things and everything else going on, so measurement is too. But the one caveat I would say is focus on the strategy, because a lot of organizations, even if you hire out somebody, if you don't understand measurement, you aren't going to get a good result, right, you're going to get your account, quote unquote, set up. Then you're going to get in there and be like I have no idea what this means. Yes, because you don't understand measurement, right, and so obviously not you individual, but that's the listener, right. So when the, a lot of people will jump into the tools and again, this is not their fault because all the tools are telling them that they can save everything. So people buy the tools thinking it's going to be the saving grace push button, simple, easy program. But what's happening is the tools are dictating their strategies. The tools are dictating what they can or cannot do with the tool, and that's a problem. So instead you come up with a strategy. First. The strategy should dictate which tool you use and how you use the tool. So you need that measurement strategy, and that plan part that we talked about is kind of the first step of a good strategy, but then you have to build it in a certain way, and then you have to use your measurement in a very unique, certain way, because when you do that, that's what jumps you out at that spot. Those three things together is what puts you at that spot. You're like, oh, this is the part you should optimize, this is the part that's not quite working the way it should be, and here's some stuff that you might want to do. And it just gives you those answers. And then it goes to the creative market. Or you'd be like, ah, when it changes a headline or the offer or the price or whatever. And that's sort of how that whole thing works. Strategy first, and even if you're hiring somebody especially if you're hiring somebody, you've got to have that strategy. The vendor, whoever you work with us or whoever else, doesn't matter. If that vendor doesn't have a proper strategy, they're just there to set it up. You're still going to get a bunch of data, but not in a way that's organized for action and usable for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly right, awesome. I do want to ask you about some fun tools and platforms when it comes to measuring and this can be. It doesn't have to be a website, it can be social. Are there tools that you are fond of that you think do a good job when it does come to measuring digital marketing efforts?
Speaker 1:I think one of the most underutilized tools. Hey, people aren't taking advantage of Google Analytics 4 yet, and that's just because it's so new, so that'll come with time. But the tool that I think people don't talk enough about, and especially for nonprofits, it would be crazy to not use this tool. It's called Microsoft Clarity. So Microsoft Clarity, this is Microsoft's answer to analytics, and it's just at claritymicrosoftcom, completely free, what it does. Those of you that might be maybe listeners familiar with Crazy Egg or Hot Jar or Lucky Orange or Mouse Flow these things are recording the heat maps and the scroll maps and where they're clicking and what they're doing video recordings, right? Well, this tool because this is from Microsoft is 100% GDPR compliant. It's all anonymized. They do an incredible job of that because they're Microsoft. It is completely free. It does all of that and my favorite part about it is you just put the code on the page. It requires practically no setup. It's not like GA4. Ga4 requires setup because it is so advanced. This is a little more general but incredibly useful. Put the code on the page. It'll just record all the pages. So when you're like oh, what's going on with the cart, our donations are down. It seems like not enough people are going from the cart to making it to the success page anymore. What's going on? Well, you can go to the recordings and you can watch them all and you can see how people are going through, maybe having a problem getting through the form Interesting, and it'll just be there because it's happening in the background, whereas tools like Hot Jar, you have to say I want a recording of this page and if you forget to do that ahead of time, you're out of luck. Microsoft just has it there, which is cool. The second thing that's a little pro for clarity is now they've integrated chat GPT, so now you can go in there and you can say tell me what's going on here, and it'll take that video and it'll tell you a story. Oh, the user. Looks like they came in from after searching for this on Google. Then they came in. Looks like they had some challenges when they were trying to do this, this and that Consider maybe trying and it's like exactly. So that's why I like what they're doing, like they're on the cutting edge of really like. Everybody will look at me wrong. Ga4 is going to have it. There won't be anything without AI in like within a couple of years, for sure. But that idea of clarity being it's an underutilized tool, it is completely perfect from a budget perspective for a nonprofit because it's free and there is no paid plan. You just get it all and it is made for more marketers, and so this is my third little pro for them, cause they really did a great job. I met one of the guys that worked on it. It seems amazing. So I was so happy with this product. They will send you an email, little digest, and it's like every week right, it's not in the way too much and it'll say things like oh, 24% of your things are rage clicks. What's a rage click? Well, a rage click is when they're clicking on the button trying to. They think it's supposed to be doing something, but it's not, so it's. Then it says well, would you like to go see the rage click pages? Would you like to watch those videos? We're like, yes, I would. So it does a substantially better job of helping you to see this stuff and it's very visual, so there's not a lot of data tables back. That's not what its job is. It's not. It doesn't do measurement the same way that GA4 does, right? It's a very different way of measuring. It's what they call qualitative, which basically just means like pictures, right? That's the idea. Instead of a bunch of numbers, you're seeing pictures. You're seeing those heat maps that show where the click charts are.
Speaker 2:And everything else, which is such a good story, if the two of them are combined together.
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely right, and that's exactly. Ultimately, you do get both. But for people that are sort of easing into measurement, I would start with clarity, because it is intuitively more, a lot simpler, completely on budget, and they do a good job of intuitive. Speaking the marketers language, not a data analyst language. Right, because it's not a tool for a data analyst. It's a tool for the marketer to understand the behaviors that are happening on the page, and are they the behaviors we want? In other words, is it the conversation that we want that particular step of the user journey to have with the user and if not, then how?
Speaker 2:do we just? I am totally about to go put this on my website.
Speaker 1:It's a cool tool. It's a cool tool. Highly recommend it. We use it ourselves. Yeah, it's great.
Speaker 2:Thank you for sharing that with us. I hope, listener, if this has got you excited about which I hope it has, to be able to answer some very cool questions and hopefully take some actions that can lead towards a positive change in your digital marketing. I just wanna be able to know real quick before we get to my last couple of questions, for Mercer is to connect with Mercer. You can go to measurementmarketingio backslashmissions. There's a free strategy course and amazing tools there. So again, measurementmarketingio backslashmissions with an S.
Speaker 1:I think forward slash technically. Forward slash, sorry, I always think that I've done the same thing for years. I was doing that. I remember, like is it falling backwards.
Speaker 2:It's falling forward, right. Why is that something that is always just said, but it's never actually backwards? Guess what you're saying. Wow, wow, learn something new and I will say that strategy course is not.
Speaker 1:I'm a big believer in you. Give away the stuff that's the most valuable. In terms of that will change how you think about the world. Specifically to measurement, but hopefully in other ways. But the idea is that it's about a three and a half hour course. It's a substantial course, but it just teaches you measurement strategy, how to think about it, how to use it in relation to different tools, sure, but it's not a tool training. It doesn't matter. It's if you understand the strategy. No matter what tool you're using, you're gonna get more from it. Even if it's a free tool like Microsoft Clarity, you could use it for that. That strategy course is definitely recommended for anybody that really wants to understand measurement and how to better do it.
Speaker 2:Worth your time. Amazing Mercer, I wanna know. We always like to ask what are you reading? What podcasts are you listening to?
Speaker 1:when it comes to your own professional development, I literally have my little podcast all pulled up here, so I was waiting for this. I've got, I mean, 30, 40 of them. I'm a big podcast listener so I do bounce around a little bit. But I'll tell you it from the business standpoint. I, like Scott Galloway, does a lot of good stuff. It's called the ProfG pod. It's a really good business acumen and he's like an older guy that has done quite well in business and he's sort of really dedicated himself to helping the younger generations to pull themselves up and to sort of make business an easier game to win right. And he's got some. It's called the ProfG pod, is his main podcast. Love that one. From a business standpoint. I guess from a marketing standpoint, perpetual traffic is really good for anybody trying to learn about marketing in general. That used to be by digital marketer and was recently taken over by the guys that run perpetual traffic, so they now own that, which has been really good. And then I will do another one that I just as a slightly different. But I like the mindset of psychology because I think so much of that is with marketing anyway and understanding psychology, human behavior, and there's a really, really good podcast called Hidden Brain. That is phenomenal for that. They go in deep dives, like Robert Chaldini, who wrote the Influence right, the Marketing Influence book and the Seven Ways Influence people. They did a two-part series where they were interviewing him and I'll tell you I've read that book for years and when I heard that the way he was interviewing him popped out more stuff of how Robert Chaldini thinks about it and it was not in the book and it was like this is a podcast for me and there's a lot of psychological stuff of how people move and what motivates them and all of that is very useful from a marketing standpoint and I like that. It's not for marketers, that's not why they're doing it. It's for people that like psychology. But that's the point is, you get to experience and learn from this other group and then you can apply it to your own craft in a different way. So those would be my three that I recommend ProfG having perpetual traffic for the business standpoint and then having Hidden Brain for the psychological.
Speaker 2:Fascinating. I love it. I'm gonna go subscribe. I just wrote down all of them.
Speaker 1:I will say, oh, this is a shameless plug, but business operations we just started. I should have said this in the first place. Business unfiltered is my podcast that I do with a guy named Jeff Sauer who runs Modulations, Profit billers, yeah, so we're early days getting into it. We are nowhere near as successful as you are with yours.
Speaker 2:I'll get out of here. It's so fun. It's honestly one of my favorite things to do is I selfishly get to learn so much from listening to experts like yourself and I get to selfishly put together the questions of what I wanna know. Oh, that's perfect. I love that. It's so fun. You get to connect with people all over the world and listeners. I hope you find this useful. If you do, I always like to ask drop a review, dm me on LinkedIn, let me know what you wanna learn about, and I try and come up with really creative topics that are gonna be useful to everybody. And what I always like to end on is a section that I call ask and support. So what is one thing that listeners can help you or provide you with support on and maybe it's what you just said and going as subscribing to your podcast?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean that would be a good one right now. So if you go to business unfilteredfm I think is where the domain is but just looking up business unfiltered as a podcast and you'll see my happy face on there along with Jeff Sauer. But that would be a good one, just to kind of. It is such early days in that podcast and we'd be subscribing, listening to a few episodes. Any feedback you have on that would be outstanding because it is so early. But the whole idea was just to talk about the business, of running a business and the organization and how do you manage a team and just have a couple of people coming at it from different perspectives. Because Jeff and I are both in very different worlds. We have some aspects that are the same and some that are very different and then we think about the world differently. And sometimes we'll be talking about a topic and I realize how badly I've screwed up stuff, cause he has such great ideas and I'm like ah man, I got it, I'm taking notes, man, like you're teaching me. And sometimes it's the opposite, and what we're hoping is that, as we are helping each other with that, that there's others that are there that can also get that. So but any feedback people have on that would be great.
Speaker 2:Amazing. If people want to get their GA4 set up to figure out custom reports, can they go to your team for that?
Speaker 1:Of course. Yeah, we definitely. We have do it yourself level training for the what we call the measurement marketing academy that we've got for anybody wants to learn this stuff. We have done with you services. We have done for you services, depending where you want to go, and I was mentioning earlier. We also have United Talking Melfind about Next After, which is a great agency. They have a Next After Institute that they specifically work with nonprofits and there's actually a course that we've produced for them around Google Analytics for for nonprofits. So that's something that you can get in Next After's training as well. So I would love it. If you do business like company, don't get me wrong, but the mission is to make sure that people know measurement is. When they understand measurement, they understand critical thinking, they understand how to improve the world and get their messaging out, and that's however you need to do that. However, we can help. That's what we're here for.
Speaker 2:Beautiful Marissa, you rock. Thank you for what you do and for being here with us today and sharing all your brilliance. Appreciate you, thank you.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Can you tell I love talking all things digital to make this show better. I'd be so grateful for your feedback. Leave a review, take a screenshot of this episode, share it on Instagram stories and tag positive equation with one E so I can reshare and connect with you.