#53 - Shooting the Bull: Drowning in Data (But Still Don't Know What's Working?)

Most business owners don’t have a data problem—they have a clarity problem.

In this episode of Shooting the Bull, we’re talking about why more tracking, more reports, and more “insight” isn’t actually helping you make better decisions… and in a lot of cases, it’s doing the opposite.

If you’ve ever looked at your marketing reports and still had no idea what’s working—or worse, felt like things should be working but aren’t—this episode is for you.

We break down:
•Why chasing perfect data is a losing game
•How overcomplication is costing you money
•What actually matters when evaluating marketing performance

Because at the end of the day, you don’t need more numbers…
you need better decisions.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut through marketing noise. Here's your host, Ken Carroll.

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Shooting the bull on this episode of Over the Bull. All right. So the last podcast that was completely unscripted. It was literally me reading questions that have crossed my desk for some time and trying to answer those questions in real time, perform better than literally just about any podcast we've had in the first week of its running. You told me something. You don't want polish, you don't want scripted, you want off the cuff, you want real, you want it to be me and you sitting here talking as friends and just kind of dropping all the facades. So that's what we're going to do today. We're going to do some more shooting the bull. Now, I don't know how this is going to go. You guys keep listening, we're going to keep this going. But I think I know what's going on here. You know, we are so inundated with sensationalism first. Man, I hate those YouTube videos, you know, where it's got the guy with the goofy face of the woman who looks surprised or whatever, and it's got this stupid clickbaity title that you know is not true. And they're doing it because they're getting views from it because people can't help. That's what clickbait is. Clickbait are incomplete sentences because they know in the human psychology that you can't help but the click. And that's why they do these things. It's not because it helps you. No one ever looked at one of those stupid goofy faces on YouTube and clicked on the video and says, oh my gosh, this solved every problem that I've had, or this solved a major problem. No, it didn't. They give you some little piddly thing that absolutely has nothing to do with it. And uh then if they couple that with talking about how much money they made in a month building websites or yeah, I don't know, it's just junk. And so I know what's going on. You're you're sick of that stuff. And then on the other side, you get the polished people, you know, the ones who uh appear to or claim to have the answers if you follow their processes, their steps, their subscriptions, their books, or whatever, and you can't find it applicable for your business. Because at some point you just want to go, just tell me what the real deal is. And ultimately, that's really what over the bull is supposed to be, is an opportunity for you to kind of hear the reality and kind of circumvent all of the uh the mental gymnastics that kind of go along with uh people trying to spread things, uh spread things out, and you know, just trying to play the game in order to sell more, do more, whatever may have you, but it leaves you hanging as a small business owner. So here we are. And you know, it's been a challenge. I'm not gonna lie to you. As I sat down here and started thinking about it, I'm like, okay, how do I do something that's unscripted, that's real, and not go from notes or anything like that? Because the first time I did this episode's recording, I was looking at my notes and I quickly started to drop back into trying to get the right cadence. Is that the right word? Cadence with the um uh the script in order to sound like I wasn't reading, but I was reading. I'm not lying to you. So I restarted and then I restarted again because I went on a tangent where it was just a dumb tangent. And so here we go. So, what I want to do today is I want to talk to you about something that by the way, used car salesmen. Okay, you won't you own me off. Uh marketing today, design today really is a bunch of used car salesmen for the most part. There's some good people out there, there's some really good people out there, and I've met them. There's also a lot of people who are selling junk, and they they they basically put in a box and market artificial intelligence or web development or answer this or answer that, and uh they stack the cards with bad data, and then um they sell that to you, and then and then you buy it, and then you get to, you know, where you're like, oh, this doesn't work, and then you leave them, but they've already made their money and they're on to the next person. And if you were to know the truth behind the scenes, a lot of these people know how long you're gonna stick with them before you give up. So they've already got that stuff planned out. Um this is also I don't blame you. Like when you get those emails, and those emails tell you that this person's got this great marketing idea or this latest and greatest thing, and then you click on it, and then you suspend the reality that this person is literally sending you a cold email because they don't know how to market their own business. So, how in the world can they help you? I get the idea why you why some people still click on it. I don't like it because what you're doing is telling the bad guys the using bad guy technique works, but I get why you do it, but it's not the right thing to do, and it really doesn't help you. It's just going to further send you down this idea that everything is hopeless and nothing works. Because here's the deal the internet does work, okay? It really truly does work. It just doesn't work as it's been sold to you. You know, you've been sold that this is Zeus from on high, you know, the God of gods, you know, and that it's going to solve all your problems if you just find the right guy who can mix the right magic solution up to make the darn thing work for you. And you're thinking ever no, everybody can't be wrong. And people are making money at it. But the idea is that it's not Zeus. The idea is it's a lot of work, it's a lot of refinement, it's a heavy investment to build the machine that works, and then guess what? When you build it, it changes, and you've got to have somebody that can help you along the path. It's a lot of work to get the internet to work for you. There is no magic button. So the idea is if you think that it's just because you've got the wrong person and that they just don't have the right secret hack that's going to get you over the goal, you're thinking in the wrong direction. You've got to find people that are really wanting to work and help you out. But the idea is that they've only got so much time, too. And so you've got to invest in the company, the organization, in order to get good data so that you can come out ahead. So you've got to invest in it. Now, imagine what happens if you invest in the wrong group. They're going to bait you till the cows come home, and then when you finally leave them, you've gotten nowhere. But on the other side, you find the right person, they're doing a lot of work for you, and they're building you a machine, but if you've been jaded and you leave them too early, guess what? You didn't give them a chance because you're looking for the magic recipe. So there's no magic recipe. There's no turn Google Ads on and it starts working for you the next day. There is no such thing that everything works the same way for the same people all the time. Period. Now, the idea is it does take time. I mean, we work hard for our clients, but we've seen them where they come in and they are so jaded and they're so used to thinking that if they just find the right person with the right thing, that's why we say if you're not planning on sticking with us for six months, then we're really not a good fit for you because we know they're looking for the magic solution or they're at that point of desperation. Either one's a bad place. So here's the thing, guys. Data. Okay, everybody talks about data. Data this, data that. I'm gonna tell you, I can tell you that I have seen countless agencies, big media groups, television companies, whatever may have you, they take the data and they just warp it and twist it and present it in ways that makes it look like it's unreal successful, and in reality, it's not doing jack. I mean, I can think of this one local media company, and for the last five years they've been serving up ads for this uh nonprofit. It averaged two seconds, they average two seconds per um per visitor to the website. Two seconds. What happens in two seconds? Nothing. But they've been selling it for years and years because they're a big name, and you think the big name means something's working. It's not. It's not in that case. It takes work. So when we come to metrics, data. So metrics just think metrics is data and data is KPIs, and it's all fancy words for well, what's going on. And the idea is that the data is not the goal. Clarity is what your goal is. You want to understand things. You wanna you wanna get a goal, understand how to reach that goal, look at the data to see if it's helping you get closer to that goal, and if not, the data needs to point to what you need to change in order to build the machine to make things work, and that takes time, effort, and money, and good people who are really trying to help you out. You can imagine you're missing one piece of that. You can imagine how bad that's going to explode on you. So, where this came from was a guy was asking me, uh, he's a newer client, and he was asking me about a certain data point, and it was not going to give him any more clarity to where he was than before he had it. He was just going to be like numbers on a piece of paper that he's never going to look at. And the reason I know it is because it's so granular, the data, that it doesn't make any sense and no one ever tracks it in that way. You see, you can drown in the data. You can be manipulated by the data. You could have it skewed in a way where you think that data is a good thing when it's really not a good thing. But if you have clarity and you can say these are the goals I'm trying to reach, then you can look at the data and you they can come to you with all the glorious data in the world and they say, well, how close are we to reaching the goal? And if we're not, what's going on with it? And what can we try different to try to reach the goals? And if we do something different, but we still have a little bit of momentum, how do we not lose the momentum that we got? You see, those are hard questions, but they're good questions. Those are a lot more difficult than just running Google Ads. And you see, this is where the rubber meets the road. This is why so many of you out there are completely disillusioned with marketing. Because you're just trying to find the alchemist that's going to spin gold out of nothing, who doesn't exist. But there's plenty of people. Like in that, there was a uh there was an old um fairy tale. Uh when I was uh young, one of my first jobs was uh I was a children's book illustrator and helped build curriculums for uh preschool kids and stuff like that. And one of one of the uh tales was the Emperor's New Clothes. And in the Emperor's New Clothes, it's basically a story of a couple con men, and what they do is they tell the king that they can spin him up uh this incredible outfit that's beautiful, but only a fool can't see it. Well, they they make nothing, but then they pretend how beautiful it is. Well, no one wants to admit that it's not beautiful, and so what happens? They all pretend to see clothes until the king, they they pretend to put the clothes on the king, he goes marching down uh on a horse or whatever, and then a kid cries out that the king was naked, and everybody realized that they were basically manipulated by these guys. You see, the emperor has no clothes. That still is applicable today. And the idea is you've got to get clarity with what you're doing, you've got to understand your goals, and you've got to ask the questions, you've got to get those points where you start to understand what needs to be done, and then you start to look at it, and then you start asking the hard questions, you can find out if they're doing it or not, because that's a lot easier than just sending you a report. Now, those reports, my goodness, those reports, the Good Samaritan reports, all those things you you get. Listen, guys, if you're not in my industry, the one thing you don't know is a lot of those reports, you push a button and you get the report. There are tools that will generate those reports and make you think that something is people are just over the top. They understand what they're doing. Big agencies use it, freelancers do it. Uh my my uh proposals are handwritten. And the thing is, is there may be a typo on that report, but it is my report, and it is done through thinking. It's not done through those little automated reports looking at whatever. They can still come in handy, but they have to be parsed by reality. So be careful with this. Know the gain the system can be gained, and it can absolutely mislead you to places you don't want to go. So here's the big shocker of the day. You probably need to trek less, track less, not trek less. I don't know where that came from. You want to track less and you want to understand more. You want to understand exactly what you're trying to achieve, and if you're getting there and look at less data, really fine-tune the data and get there first and then build upon that a little bit at a time. Also make sure your systems are clean too. Man, there are so many, so many problems in this industry. It's hard not to diverge into um to uh different places. So, you know, some of the big things that you really need to know. These are things that really matters to you. What it costs to get you a lead. What it costs to get you a customer. How many of those leads really turn into a customer, and how many of those leads are don't? And what is that customer worth over a lifetime? They're worth more than the first-time sale if they're repeat customers. So is it worth spending a little more money up front? Are you making any progress? Are you not making any progress? Are you getting closer? Are you trying things that are different? Are you trying to figure out what makes you more unique? Are things being done and adjusted? Those are the things that matter. Those are the things that are absolutely critical for your success. Most people completely skirt it because they just want it to be done. And the reality is it can't be done without you. I sit here um with a uh property um developer, and we've been working on his site now for a while. No, I say a while, but like 60 days, I guess. And as we're going through it and we're starting to talk about everything that's unique about his business and what makes his communities better than other people's, one of his comments was he says, you know, we've had a lot of websites developed and a lot of plans developed, but no one's ever stopped to really ask us these questions. And it's because we're trying to present his properties in a way that accurately presents what makes him stand out. And he's been in the game, I don't know how many decades, but he's not run across one company that cared about that. And now it doesn't matter. Okay, so next thing is you're thinking, well, how different am I? I'm an electrician, I offer electrical services. You're a lot different. There are things about your business that makes you stand out. And the thing is, if you don't really make those points stood out, no one's going to know it. And you know what the fallback is. The fallback is how much does it cost? People pay for certain qualities because they know the value of it. The price is the fallback. Okay. So these aren't really flashy ideas, and honestly, it's really not that complicated. I mean, from the the owner of a business, from your perspective, you can ask the questions and then you can start to see if they've got new ideas or whatever. Now, now here's the the tough part to this. The idea is that, all right, so let me let me go another place and we're gonna circle back around here. So um I met this company a couple weeks ago. I forget why I needed to talk to oh no, I don't. Uh it was about a Google business profile uh with one of our clients before he came on board with us. And this company, they offered one flat rate to optimize Google business for the lifetime of the account. And it was like three or four hundred bucks. No joke. They said Google Business, lifetime, three or four hundred bucks. I want to tell you something. That ain't happening, not in the real world. What's going to happen is they're going to give something that's not fully optimized, something that's when I hate that word optimized, not going to be something that's going to compete long term. It's just not because everything changes, and you can't keep up with it. I mean, no one can do$10,000 worth of work and charge$300 for it and stay in business. It's just a it's just an angle that they're playing to do some basic effort, and I guarantee you that their money is definitely better than it was. Okay, but they do that as a one-time cost. They're not heroes, guys. They're offering something that's insufficient. And so the idea is when you're working with your agency or your freelancer or whatever, there's a lot of work that goes into reading that data, parsing that data, understanding that data, and making recommendations. There's a lot that goes into, gosh, getting certifications, um, keeping up with the information, and then taking your data and then translating it into it. It's a lot. And the idea, if you think you can spend a few hundred dollars a month and then come out ahead and expect this kind of relationship, it's not going to happen. They're going to have to shortchange you. Now, they may give you something great for the price you're paying them, but it's probably going to be far less than what you really need in order to be successful. So one thing I would ask you to do is think about your marketing and design resource as an employee. I mean, you pay an employee how much a year. Now imagine you pay somebody really qualified, what you'd pay them a year. And the idea is this is more in line of what you should be paying your agency. Now, it doesn't mean you should be paying them$80,000 a year,$100,000, but it does mean you're not going to get by with three or four hundred bucks a month. Three or four hundred bucks a month is like when I was uh a kid back in the 90s. We had this big saying,$5 worth.$5 worth of gas would get me through the week, believe it or not, and it actually did that back in the day. Um, but it's kind of like that. So the idea is you're going to have to invest in the right group, and if you pick the wrong resource, you're going to be paying a lot of money for nothing. I think you can see why a lot of people are disillusioned with the internet now. Okay. So the idea is tracking everything. Yeah, that sounds good. Sure. I mean, it sells, right? We track every single thing. Well, what do you do with it? I mean, that's the means to the end. It's not the end. So now you got all the data. How are you gonna what are you gonna do to parse it? What are you gonna do to build something better? And if they use AI to build AI, to learn AI, to teach AI, to grow AI, whatever, it's just a loop. They're not really doing anything with it. Now, if you're getting all that data, it's just confusing you because you don't really know what to do with it either. Let's be real. But you do know what your goals are. You do know you're seeking clarity, and you do know that the data can point to it. So, how does this data help you get more clear on what you're trying to achieve? That's the question you need to be asking your agency or freelancer. And if they don't have good answers, and if they don't move you in a direction, and if you're not a participant in that decision-making process, if you're just getting the report, if you're just getting that website that's delivered to you that's based on some template or some do-it-yourself builder, this is why I talk about this, guys. It does not work. It just doesn't work. Okay. So again, um, clarity is not gonna come from tracking everything. It's from understanding what really matters. And um, I did read that line, by the way. I like that line. Uh, because clarity doesn't come from tracking everything, it comes from understanding the right things. Now I said what matters. But that's that's where it's at, that's where you're going to be successful. Um, video views with Direction. Who cares? Who cares? I mean, I can get you video views showing it to people that will never buy your product, but the number of views are going to be outstanding. Is that really what you want? Because that's what this other company got, and they get a whopping two seconds on their website for every person they actually brought to the website. Who cares? Okay. I've seen this thing play out over and over and over again. And the businesses that win are not the ones with the most data. They're the ones who understand their numbers on a very basic level. They understand their outcomes. They work with people that can help them parse the data to get to where they need to go and help them get there. It's that easy. Okay. So with that being said, um you probably got some some homework to do. I mean, are you getting this from your from your agency? Are you getting this from the the business coach that you may be talking to? Or is he just giving you things to do week in and week out? Is your is your creative? Is your website changing to meet the demands of what you're trying to achieve? How can you gauge if it's actually happening or not? And if you're not meeting those goals, are you at least learning, are you at least figuring out what's going on and with confidence you can say, you know what, we're not there, but I know the money that I am spending today is going to equal this. And if you're not there, you might want to pump the brakes. So this is where we have real high customer retention rate. I mean, I don't have high customer retention rate because I sit here and blow a bunch of smoke and tell them what all they're going to have and what all they're going to do. I mean, those are customers you can keep for a little while, but you can't keep them very long because eventually the fictitious story you sold never comes to fruition. Now, is fruition a word? I think it is a word. Anyway, it doesn't come to reality. And so the idea is that reality is not fun. Reality is not the big thing where you go, wow, that's just great. I get to, I get to have more work. I get to, I now I got to be involved. I can't just turn it over to somebody and let them do it. But that is how the game is won. And if you want to win, can you want to quit running in circles, quit wasting your money, quit being disillusioned, find yourself a good person, get involved, pay them a decent amount where they can actually take the time to do the work and not have to uh not shortchange you or try to cut corners and the data making process. Find people with experience, man. That's a huge one too. Okay, I think that's all I'm going to do for today. I am out of here. Until next time, this is Ken Carroll with Over the Bull. Thank you so much for listening. And guys, seriously, thank you for sharing this podcast and thank you for uh giving me the uh signal to do more stuff off the cuff. Uh again, you know, if uh structure becomes back in vogue and we see it through the numbers, then uh we'll go back to structure. But for now, we're going to do more of this style podcast. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 25:29

Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bowl. Brought to you by Integris Design, a full service design and marketing agency out of Asheville, North Carolina. Until next time.