Links Mentioned in Episode

• Scott Konopasek’s LinkedIn
• Mint Measure Website

Episode Transcript

Kevin Dieny: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the Close The Loop podcast. I’m your host, Kevin Dieny. And today we’re gonna be talking about making marketing analytics easier. And when we say easier, right? Are we talking like, oh, it’s gonna be done for you. It’s gonna be just, you know, one click away.

I think we’re really, after helping you understand it better. Helping you see the value easier helping you just get a better understanding and more confidence in yourself about yes, as a business leader, I think I can really take marketing analytics and do something about it. That’s gonna help my company grow!

So to help us dive into that exciting topic. I have a really special guest with us today. His name is Scott Konopasek and he is the CEO and founder of Mint Measure. Scott is a media planning, ad buying and measurement guru. Scott has built and led digital media departments at agencies for over 10 years.

So he is got a lot of experience here. He has worked with brands like the American Red Cross, Slack Bumble, and Jenny Craig, [00:01:00] some very big companies. Scott loves learning about almost anything, but particularly enjoys learning about ancient history. Scott moved to Utah during the pandemic and he spends the winter skiing and the summers camping.

So welcome and thank you so much for coming on Scott.

Scott Konopasek: Hey, Kevin. Thanks for having me.

Kevin Dieny: So we’ll go right into this. If you could, for the people who are like mark the heck is marketing analytics. can you maybe explain it like they’re five. Hah, what marketing analytics is and what it means for businesses? Just in simple terms. So they know, okay, what, this is what we’re gonna be talking about a lot more.

Scott Konopasek: Yeah, marketing analytics is about understanding all the different data points that are available to a market. And the end goal is to try and understand how did marketing drive sales for the business and how can I do things maybe a little bit differently? Or can I learn from this? So there’s certainly different levels to marketing analytics and the [00:02:00] depth that you go.

But all the analytics work that a marketer will do is going to be focused around what worked and how do I get.

Kevin Dieny: That’s great. That’s a good in, that’s a good overview. And for businesses thinking, well, I’ve heard of this, but. That’s a topic that makes me cringe. Right? So why is marketing analytics perceived as being such a difficult, maybe even cumbersome or annoying or diff like just a, just an emotionally charged thing for a business to figure out

Scott Konopasek: Yeah, if we think about data in general, the amount of data that we have today is so much more than we’ve ever had in history. And even in the last 20 years, most of the data in the history of planet earth has been generated. And so, relatively speaking data analysis is a very new skill. Being able to look at data sets, find connections, [00:03:00] and then understand what that means is only something that we’ve had to do realistically since like 2008, 2010, when it, at least in a marketing sense.

In 2012, when I was, uh, you know, my first years in my career, Facebook ads was like the newest, hottest thing. And so I remember sitting down with, the spreadsheet with hundreds of rows of data and trying to like, what am I supposed to do with this? And I think that most marketers feel that way, right?

They look at, you know, whether it’s their data inside of an ad platform like Google or Facebook, or it’s Google analytics, or maybe it’s even an export of like all this complex data from like a Shopify store. It’s just overwhelming, right? Like, oh, how do I do this? And from our business standpoint, we’ve done a lot of like research into this.

And what we found is that something like 70% of marketers struggle to understand the data and apply it to their [00:04:00] campaigns. And for one very simple reason, they’re not analysts they’re marketers. And so, you know, this marketing team of like three to five people, they’re someone who knows how to buy ads.

They’re someone who, is running email campaign. There’s someone else who’s like maybe working on creative and promotional materials, notably missing is a data analyst. And so if you leave, or if, if brands in general leave the data analysis to somebody who knows how to do it, well, chances are, there’s no one that knows how to do it.

So you’d have to be a weirdo like myself and just love the data and like figure out how to do it. Most brands need a little bit of help. And so I think, analytics can be really scary. And you know what we’ve also found, just through our experience is that most people start to care about data analytics when things are going sideways or when things are going bad, right.

As an early stage company, as a small and [00:05:00] medium business, you’re like, cool. I just learned how to use Google and Facebook ads. You just learned two brand new platforms. You set up your campaigns, you wrote your creative, like that’s already a ton of work. And so if you can just put a dollar into Facebook and $3 come out the other side, most brands don’t ask too many questions.

They’re like, it works. It keeps going well, if I add 50% more budget, does it keep going up? And so typically brands wait until something breaks. Uhoh I put a dollar in and only 90 cents came out no longer $3. Now it’s time to do some analysis. Now it’s time to like, figure out what went wrong.

And so, um, it’s, it’s really kind of funny to, to see these brands who are like, no, it’s fine. It’s fine. And then we’ll get a call back in a couple weeks, like, Hey, so it’s not fine. So I definitely think that there’s like that element of, of, you know, it’s scary, it’s a lot and it requires specialized knowledge.

Kevin Dieny: Yeah, I was looking up, you know, before we met here, what are some of the [00:06:00] problems people had with marketing analytics? And one of the one, one of the big ones I kept seeing was data overload. Just like you mentioned it. And when you just see red. Basically, I just see data everywhere. Well, okay. I don’t really quite know how to interpret it.

I don’t, I’m not seeing solutions. I’m not seeing dollar signs everywhere. I’m seeing just a lot of information and data out there. It feels overwhelming. And, and then that sort of leads you to like, well, okay, so there’s a lot of information just like you’ve mentioned. Maybe like I pick my corner of it that I’m gonna focus on and then just ignore everything else until it becomes a problem. Which is, taking bite size chunks out of it, sort of how people do learn and figure things out.

But just like you said, like, oh, oh, now I’ve got problems. Well, that sort of led me to like realize one of the second biggest things people had was like, well, I don’t really trust the data and where I don’t trust it, I don’t use it. I don’t wanna see it. And I start to use my intuition, [00:07:00] like my gut and, or I just ask, Hey, you know, look at what my competitors are doing and assume they’re doing it the perfect right way.

So how, how does marketing analytics help a business overcome, trust issues with data?

Scott Konopasek: Yeah, we hear from marketers all the time that trust in the data is the number one problem. So if you don’t believe the numbers that Facebook is giving you, you don’t think that those are accurate.

Are you gonna keep spending your money there? Maybe because you’re getting some results, but you’re gonna be really hesitant to increase your spend or, you know, let’s suppose that there’s, Some reporting from your email marketing platform.

And you’re like, mm, this, this kind of seems fishy to me. Well, you might make a pretty big adjustment and like, say I’m gonna turn off email for a period of time. And so not trusting the data leads people to, to your point, use their gut and to guess, and sometimes you can guess correctly and [00:08:00] those people are very lucky.

The first challenge is like how do I, as a marketer start to believe my data more. And so I think my, my advice, my first piece of advice is no data set is perfect. Even Google analytics, which is oftentimes heralded as the standard and web analytics. That’s sample data. It’s incomplete data.

It is a very good picture of what’s happening, but it’s not perfect. And so no data from any platform is gonna be perfect. So you just have to understand that, like there’s gonna be a small variance in there. And then beyond that, you just have to start to pay attention to the data. I think this is like one of the things that feels.

Very like low effort to do, but requires a lot of consistency. So how can I sniff bullshit in my data? If this is the first time I’ve looked at my data in six months, there’s no way, right. [00:09:00] If I’ve been spending a thousand dollars a week on Facebook and I’ve been consistently getting a hundred sales and all of a sudden, I go from a hundred sales to 40 sales in a three week period.

I can. Believe that like something happened in Facebook. I might not know what I might not like have the specific answers, but I’ve been paying enough attention to my data to know when something changed. And so, you know, Analytics in general is a journey. It’s not a silver bullet. You’re not gonna be like, Hey, I did data analytics this month.

And now my marketing is like, perfect. And now like, everything is delivering a five to one row as, analytics is about saying, here’s a snapshot in time. We see what’s working. We see what’s not working. And, or maybe we, we see some stuff, but we don’t know if it’s. Well, let’s make a change and let’s see how that change [00:10:00] like impacts my results.

And so you come back and you look at that data two or four weeks later. And so analytics is this really this process of looking at the data, making a change, monitoring how the trend is changing over time and being close enough to the data, to understand, or, or recognize when something has gotten significantly, right or significantly.

Kevin Dieny: Wow, yeah. In our business. And in my, you know, internal language here, of how I describe it to my colleagues. I tell ’em, this is the feedback loop. This is I’m gonna do something. And then I’m gonna see that impact of that change after and marketing is so dependent, like the, the activity parts of it are so dependent on getting good quality feedback so that we can say, Hey, this is working or this is not, maybe this is something we could change.

And have optimization apply to, or maybe it’s not, and it’s like a budget that’s move our resources somewhere else. So the, [00:11:00] the question that this leads me to, which is like, I think really fitting here is if you’re a smaller business and you look at this like, well, you know, I did some college. I maybe graduated, I, I have a business.

I’m wearing my business hat most of the time, other times, I’m putting on my hiring hat and I have a, a hat rack with a lot of hats on it and you know what I mean? So, I think I’ve heard that it’s like, well, man, putting on the marketing hat and the analytics hat it’s heavy.

So how does a business, who doesn’t have like dedicated people. Is there a way that they can make it easier or is there like what things make, can make it easier so that someone who’s got a lot of hats doing a lot, could still, just, as you described, still have a feel of what’s going on there?

So they would be clued in, okay, this is what’s working or not working, and they could still effectively do the marketing analytics without, [00:12:00] a whole marketing team without a whole marketing analytics position or role or department there. Still be effective at doing marketing, using, some bits of marketing analytics?

Scott Konopasek: Yeah, so there’s three options that a business would have. One is the owner where picks up another hat, puts on that hat and says, I’m gonna learn it. As a business owner myself, I can say that that is usually not the solution. The second option is to either hire for that role or to, you know, carve out the time with one of your existing marketing staff and get them trained up on it.

So you have that internal resource. And then the third option is to outsource it. And I know that a lot of business owners are very hesitant to outsource analytics or something that is like so sensitive to the business. But analytics is a very special set of knowledge. It’s a very special skill set and paying someone a thousand to $3,000 a [00:13:00] month to, do some analysis, provide a clear, concise report.

Let’s call it $2,000 a month. That $2,000 and the hour spent by that specialty person is going to deliver way more value and way more specific knowledge around your business than the owner learning it themselves or training somebody else. It’s like, could I spend, you know, a quarter and a few thousand dollars for my internal person to like, take an online course to do some stuff.

Yeah, but they’re gonna be operating, let’s call it at a 201 level. But an analyst, a specialty person that you pay a couple thousand dollars a month, they’re gonna be operating at a 401 level. And just the quality of work that you’re gonna get is gonna be a lot different. Every business needs to evaluate what makes the most sense.

I think an apt analogy is like, could a business owner build their own website? Probably they’re [00:14:00] tools like Wix, but like if you hire a web designer, the things that they’re going to build and the creativity that they’re gonna bring to that project is just far and away, more than, than you could do yourself.

And so it’s the same type of thing with analytics. And so it’s worth considering for businesses to, to outsource.

Kevin Dieny: I think that’s a really apt analogy there. A lot of times a business is serving a function where yeah. The, their customer could maybe do it themselves. It should be something that you could digest and be like, yeah, we do the same thing with our customers. They could probably try to do it themselves.

They could go to school for years and figure it out or become a doctor and try to, figure out their own diagnosis or become an attorney and then try to defend themselves. But there’s a reason why those things are specialized. Right. So in terms of marketing analytics, like what it, what it’s doing, what’s going on there, like the, the nuts and bolts of it.

The data, the information itself, right? So how is marketing analytics and the information that it [00:15:00] provides a business? How is it adding value to a business?

Scott Konopasek: That’s a really great question. There, there are a number of different ways to quantify value. And so oftentimes there’s just value in understanding what’s happening, right? If you are spending a money on three or four different ad channels, you might be profitable. You might be growing your business, but.

The value in understanding, for example, which of those channels are your growth driver and which of those channels is just capturing the demand in the marketplace. That’s hugely valuable because you can like adjust your marketing strategies in ways that you can’t, without that knowledge. So like sometimes just like having that information and that insight allows you to start thinking differently.

There’s so I would call that like, informational or strategic value. Then we spend a lot of time in our business talking about the practical value. And [00:16:00] so we, we like to say that analytics without action is just research and like, you’re not gonna commission tens of thousands of dollars and use our research.

So then like say thank you and put it off to the side. Like you wanna do something about it. And so we really pushed the practical value and the practical application of this. If I learn something about an ad channel or a marketing tactic that is, or isn’t working, I want to then adjust my ad spend, or maybe it’s my creative strategy, or maybe it’s, how much I’m spending in that channel.

We always try and push customers to like look at here’s the data that I have. How can I draw a line between this and a result or an action that I want to take. You wanna be able to know at a high level, this is what’s working. This is the role of this channel, but then more tangibly next month I’m gonna do these three things differently because this is what worked better last month.

[00:17:00] And so, you called it, this feedback loop. That’s exactly what it is. It’s the, okay, I understand strategically what’s happening now. I need to apply that practically to my ad spent. And so, you know, it’s this iterative process, right? You might learn something this month that you do something different and improves your results by let’s call it 3%.

Well, the next month you’re gonna do something else. That’s gonna improve your results by 5%. Wow. You got a really big month. You improve results by 5%. The next month is 2%. Well, your result isn’t just that two or 3%. It’s the 3% in month. One for every month thereafter. It’s the 5% every month thereafter.

And it’s the 2% every month thereafter. And so this is, you know, literally the exponential gains. If you are able to just improve a small amount, every. The results that that can have on a business over the course of 12 months is really astounding. And I think people [00:18:00] oftentimes underestimate what consistency can do.

You know, I tell brands all the time, you’d be better served, making a 1% improvement, 12 months outta the year than a 3% improvement once every quarter and, the ability of this, these results to compound and the learnings that you get, are gonna be so much more valuable in we’ll call it near real time.

Right, looking at data from like last month. So I could do something differently next month versus like, hey, it’s now summertime, let me look at my spring results. Don’t get me wrong. There’s value there. But having this more real time view of what’s happening and how your marketing is working, is always more.

Kevin Dieny: The other aspect of that too, is marketing spend is coming out of the cash and capital and it’s coming out of a place in the business. I mentioned this before, like it’s coming outta a place in the business. The business could literally do anything it wanted with it. It could, it could be doing something else with it.

And so [00:19:00] marketing analytics is base is proving to the business. Okay. The marketing dollars are helping. Here’s how they’re helping. But in addition, like you’ve mentioned it highlights learnings and improvements that the company could do to make it even more effecti. And the marginal, you know, 1% gain over time.

Is it compounds? It can be such a big deal, for a business. With our tools, we like to say, well, what if you just got one more customer? Added to your roles every month, one new client every month, what would that, well, how would that change your business? And if it’s just one, right?

That’s like the smallest marginal unit of, of growth there. Just one more, what would, what does that mean? And they’re like, okay, well it’s this much value. And so we like say, okay, so let’s wind back. Like how many, if you have one new customer, how many more leads do you need? How much more does your ad spend, would it need to increase?

Well, that’s maybe a thousand, couple thousand, maybe it’s triple [00:20:00] digits, it’s big numbers. And so we say, okay, well, if you just increase the effectiveness of your marketing, we’re not increasing ad spend a penny, but you’re getting more out of what you’re already doing.

So I like to look at it like marketing analytics is not adding to your marketing spend. It’s just like charging it, making it more effective, making it more efficient. And so in that way, it’s a lot more easier for some businesses to like swallow that, like that painful pill going down, like okay.

Because the other problem in marketing is there’s a lag effect. Like you’ve mentioned with the real time you spend money today, it might take a little while for that to wind up. How does marketing analytics, help a business plan and forecast and, and try to make decisions today that will impact the future?

Scott Konopasek: You touched on a couple of like really good things there. And, and I just wanna kind of add one of my favorite expressions from John Wannamaker the quintessential, I’m wasting half of my money on [00:21:00] advertising. I just don’t know which half.

And it’s like, well, like what if you could, just to your point, improve that by a tiny bit.

What does that do for your business? And what does that mean? And so, you know, that’s. That’s the approach that people should think about analytics. How do I look at everything that’s happening and look at the least effective things and do less of those and reallocate that spend to the most effective things.

a lot of people use year over year data, and I think that’s a really good place for, brands to get started. And just, what was I doing last? If I had a thousand daily website visitors at my plus or minus this year, you always have to kinda take that data with a grain of salt. Especially over the last two years, 2022 is nothing like 2021, which is nothing like 2020.

We spend a lot of time encouraging clients to, yes, look year over year as a general benchmark, but look at your last four. Eight weeks of [00:22:00] data, maybe even up to your last quarter, but the things that we’re trending in a good direction over the last four to six weeks are probably gonna keep going in that trend.

If something has been declining, it’s probably gonna keep going along that path. And so using the data over the last four to six weeks, is just a better way to evaluate. We work with a number of customers where every month we meet with them and we do two things for them. We bring them insights about the data that’s gathering in our platform and the analytics about their ad spend.

And then we provide them with specific recommendations. We’ll say we saw some inefficiencies here, or we saw some opportunities there. and so the customer is then able to take those. And this typically happens like, you know, it’s called like the 22nd of the month and we’re looking at the last six weeks.

And so they’re saying, great, I’m gonna plan my ad budget for the next month. Based on these learnings, these are the specific things I can do differently. Short term planning is probably the best use case for [00:23:00] analytics. Certainly you wanna be able to look at your annual plan or your annual budget.

And the data that, that you have over the course of a year and, forecast what you’re gonna spend or the channel. From a, a practical standpoint, going back to, you know, analytics needs action, looking at your last four to six weeks and, and saying, what can I do differently?

Or if I were to copy paste my plan from this month, what tweaks would I make? Would I add a little bit more here? Would I subtract a little bit more here? Would I, you know, focus this campaign on building a higher frequency with users? And so, from a planning standpoint, That’s that’s really where I think most brands should, should focus.

Kevin Dieny: Yeah, no, that’s really good. And you mentioned, something about data gathering that made me think of something. A business, it gets almost too many opportunities. Like marketing is an opportunity. Selling is an opportunity, maybe a business calls them and they, they take it, you know, 99% of the time it’s spam.

So they’re like, Ugh, you know, but maybe [00:24:00] 1% of those times there’s like a valuable opportunity in there. And that’s the reason why they may take those calls is it’s hard to sort through, I think for a business, all the possible opportunities and ways that that business could grow. They really have to simplify it down.

and that means, okay, well, how do I know? Like, there might be some clues, right? How am I gonna figure out that this is a really good opportunity for my business and how can I weed out the stuff that’s just not relevant. It’s not gonna help me. It’s not helping me get to the goal that I’ve set and really, you know, helping you focus.

And so it leads me to thinking like, well, a lot of times the business is like, look, I’m. My, my blinders are on my I’m really focused on, you know, my financial sheets right now. And I’m looking at my revenue, my expenses and my profit. And so it’s like, well, if, and if I look over across the way, way over, there is all this marketing data.

And so all that data feels disconnected from my financial [00:25:00] information. So how does a business make it easier? Gathering all that marketing data and actually connecting it to the business’ goals, aligning them with how a business wants to grow?

Scott Konopasek: Yeah, this is where the analysis paralysis or like, it can just feel really overwhelming, right? Like, There’s already so much to do. I’m a business owner. I have to focus on my P and L my unit economics. I have this giant expense for marketing. Like where do I even get started? How on earth do I tie these two things together?

And for every business owner out there, listening to this, hire an expert, like the. Look, this is, this is literally the role of, of outsourcing this to somebody. If you hire marketing analytics, you know, expert, whether that’s a platform that offers some tech and offers some consulting services, or this is just someone in your local city, town state, who’s able to do this type of work for you.

This is where that [00:26:00] specialty knowledge comes in. They’re gonna know exactly where to look. They’re gonna know exactly how to tie these two things together. Marketing is oftentimes seen as an expense, especially by a CFO or, or that type of a role. And so, the best way to, champion the value of marketing is to dig down into what’s working and what’s not working.

And so an unfortunate piece of news that a lot of people aren’t gonna want to hear is that trusting the data that comes out of Facebook and comes out of Google and that, you know, is. Aggregating and Google analytics. That’s a good first step, but it’s whole, it’s, it’s incomplete. It’s not the whole story.

And if that’s all the information that you are using to try and inform your marketing, analysis, and like how to optimize, you’re leaving a lot on the table. And so this is really where like a level or a layer of measurement technology can really make all the difference in the world.

Whether it is, [00:27:00] tracking your phone calls more accurately with like your service, whether it is like adding in a piece of technology that can help feed the data back into the ad platforms. You can improve the data quality that they have or whether it’s, a more full on piece of, of marketing analytics, tech that, can de-duplicate your ads and your channels and your results, and give you this whole unified view.

You know that this is really the place for marketing technology. So I’m sure that everyone is listening is saying, well, when do I need measurement technology? How do I know if this is the right time and the right place for me? There are a couple of criteria that, that we offer up to, to customers.

Probably the easiest one for most is if you’re spending in three or more ad channels, you should have a layer of marketing technology. So if you’re spending in Facebook in Google and maybe you’re doing some, like display remarketing, you could consider, a piece of measurement [00:28:00] technology. Now if you’re doing those three things and you’re only spending $20,000 a month, you probably don’t need it.

So the, the next kind of like level to this is if you’re spending about a hundred thousand dollars a month, so about a million dollars a year, $1.2 million a year, that’s generally the level where you’re spending a good amount on, on PPC and cost per click. You have some budget in Facebook and you’re really starting to wonder like, wow, a million dollars a year.

Like, what else could I be doing with this money? Like, and so that’s really where getting a 5%. Improvement in performance over the course of a year. Like if, if annually, all you got outta a piece of measurement, technology was 5% gains, right? Massive results for the business and like reallocating some of that less effective ad spend into other channels or ways of delivering that that’s more effective, can have some really big results.

So three ad channels, and then typically about a hundred thousand dollars a month in ad spend. If you’re below, you’re probably still in that [00:29:00] mode of a dollar into a machine spits, $3 out. And so, uh, if that’s working for you, then, Hey, you don’t need it quite yet. But as you start growing like that, that’ll really make a lot of sense.

I’ll add a second qualifier here. We were gonna a handful of brands that are really only spending in like Facebook and Google, but they’re spending like three to $5 million a year. That’s also a moment where you would say, Hey, like measurement technology could really help me out because again, if you could only improve a couple of percentage points on three to 5 million of ad spend, that’s huge downstream results in terms of new leads, new customers, top line revenue.

There’s different needs and you know, every business is gonna be a little bit different. But those are generally when you know, you’re gonna get the most value out of measurement technologies.

Kevin Dieny: I always picture like a, like a, the cartoon of a prison yard breakout. And if your fence has like a hole in it and well, everyone’s gonna escape, like in marketing analytics, if you’re tracking, [00:30:00] with a laser, how everything is coming in and how your marketing channels are interacting, engaging with your leads, turning them into, prospects, and then you hand it over and then suddenly there’s absolutely no data.

Well, that’s the hole in the prison yard and everyone busts out through there. So it. Your marketing analytics data is limited the way I always look at it is it’s always limited by the businesses and ability to track whatever really critical, important thing isn’t being tracked. I always like a first pass assessment, what are the biggest, most the biggest success points that are happening in the business?

And it’s usually, well, there’s the sale. There’s the lead, right? Just to start there. In between those points. There’s probably quite a bit before that there’s a lot. So is the business tracking those points where. It’s very clear. It’s very accurate that those are happening. The tracking or measurement is very accurate, when someone buys, hopefully you know, so yeah, so those are, those are really critical points.

And if you’re not measuring those [00:31:00] accurately, it makes all the effort you’ve put somewhere else in the marketing analytics. It, it’s not helping it. I would say it’s still that maybe valuable to improving how the marketing is doing within a channel or within a campaign. But when that marketing is still always trying to drive business results, if the business isn’t able to.

Connect the dots or put tracking in place for those points. There’s usually a fall through like our, our technology is with the phone. That’s, that’s just one piece of a very large generally customer journey of, you know, how a business interacts and has conversations and brings in customers and clients.

So how, how does a business though assess right where its gaps are using marketing analytics, where is like the hole in the fence, in the prison that, you know, all the everyone’s escaping through.

Scott Konopasek: Yeah. So I typically start by asking what are all the ways that a customer can send a signal [00:32:00] to your company that they want to give you their money? And so that could be a lead that you’re gonna follow up with. It could be a phone call. It could be that they walk into your brick and mortar location.

It could be that they are initiating a checkout online. And so the first step is to make sure that you have a way of accurately tracking all of the different signals. We recently started working with an automotive brand. They’re a smaller regional brand. They have 10 locations. And they use a call tracking service.

They have, some forms online and a big gap for them is they do these shows and they like take their vehicles and they have people show up and they, they spend a lot of money driving people to these events. They’re typically like short term events. Part of the reason why we started working is to fill in that gap.

They didn’t have a way of looking at the people who were arriving to those locations, understanding if they were influenced by [00:33:00] advertising and then ultimately being able to connect that to a vehicle sale. And so, if you think about all the different signals that a user can give you, that they want to give you their money, start by.

Measuring all of those and chances are, if you are anything besides eCommerce, you’re gonna have at least two or three different ways. There are free tools that can certainly help with some of this stuff. As your business starts to scale up and as you start spending, let’s say upwards of half, a million dollars a year in advertising, that’s really where like specialty data, specialty providers, measurement technology can, can really start to deliver, you know, strong value.

Kevin Dieny: Yeah, no, I that’s a huge example because just as an example from, something that happened to our client, our client was spending a huge amount of money in, in ads. I’d spend. They were, they were really being very efficient on that end. They were really optimizing it. What we found was they only had one [00:34:00] number, one line for people to call in on.

And we found that about 70% of the calls they got, just went into the abyss. And so it was painful for them to hear this because it was like, man, we’re doing so much marketing work on the front end. And people are busting, their time and effort, blood, sweat, and tears is bringing forward into the front end marketing optimization of this.

We’re passing everything over, but at one point there’s this critical phone call that has to be. and because there was nothing to tell them that they weren’t coming in. They just assumed, you know, there’s this huge drop off right there. And so the marketing was working with that and they were trying to optimize for that.

It turned out that if someone called between 11 and 12, when the person was on lunch, There, there was no, people weren’t getting through. It also turned out that if marketing sent a bunch of stuff all at once, the busy line came and then people weren’t calling back after trying two or three times.

So it didn’t have anything to do with marketing and marketing. Didn’t really want to look farther down [00:35:00] the funnel into the operational, you know, how is this going? But when we came in and showed them just a few things, they’re immediately like marketing is gonna be involved and seeing sort of the life cycle now.

Right? Like the whole. And for this client, it was like day two. They didn’t have hardly any, if any dropped missed calls. So like they were almost tripling doubling their leads to calls. So it, and it was just a like moment like, wow, this was happening.

And so that was a quick win type of scenario where we felt like, we’re, you know, saviors of the day, something I could like talk about, but, but generally speaking, marketing analytics can come in the form of.

Hey, here’s something that, may be a little off, you know, it might be harder to decipher harder to figure out. And so that expert, I think, does come, come into play. But at the end of the day, like whoever’s making the decision needs to have that [00:36:00] information.

So with all the charts, with all the data, with all the forms, all the marketing analytics takes, what is, what are some really good ways that marketing analytics can be communicated to the business?

In a way that leads to, you know, decisions being made that leads to it being acted upon that’s gonna lead to it. Being able to be improved, to get the, one to 5%, types of goals that a business wants to use, analytics for. So how does it, how does that, how does communication become more effective?

Scott Konopasek: Whenever a brand is picking up an analytics program for the first time, whether that’s with a piece of technology or whether that’s like an internal hire or, dedicated effort. There’s usually a lot of panic and there’s usually a lot of fear. And, people have been looking at a cost per click and suddenly saying, well, we’re not gonna measure a cost per click.

We’re gonna measure on a cost per lead, or we’ve been measuring on a cost per lead. But actually we have this new piece of technology that’s going to connect leads to paying customers, and we’re gonna evaluate on the cost of a customer. [00:37:00] You know, that just that disrupts workflows there’s new charts, new tables.

And so it’s, it tends to be a pretty big effort to like, get the department on board, executive leadership or, owners championing this and, and, showing enthusiasm, look, most people don’t care about analytics. Most people don’t like data, but it’s mission critical for the leadership, whether that’s a director or the owner or the founder.

To, show how important this is and to, help make this an organizational priority. That’s a really big part of the like, I’ll call it getting started phase. Part of this getting started phase is also. Laying out, what are the things that we are going to measure and what are the things that we’re going to care about?

So this is the cost per click to a lead, or instead of measuring the lead, or maybe we’re gonna measure a lead, but we’re really gonna evaluate everything on a cost of a customer acquisition, or maybe we’re gonna move [00:38:00] away from like average order value. And we’re gonna focus on profit, right? There’s like all kinds of different ways to level up.

And so developing an upfront measurement plan. Probably the best way to lay the table for everybody. I know this is probably not what other people want to hear again, but like, this is where an expert comes in, right? If you’re the owner and you’re trying to pick up the, the analytics hat, you can, based off of some suggestions and some articles, and listicals like, come up with a couple of ideas, but an analyst is gonna come in and, and be able to do some of this.

At a better level. So lay the foundation. I think once you begin a program and you have a measurement plan in place, um, the next thing that I like to do is start with the objective facts, right? People are gonna be a little bit nervous. Work is gonna be changing. The things that, you know, the marketer was graded on and they were like doing a good job.

Are going to be changing and things might [00:39:00] not look so good. So like let’s, let’s lay the facts, the objective facts on the table. And, it’s important that everybody, whether that’s the owner or the marketer, or, anybody else involved, is able to remove some of their emotion from this.

And so I really like to start with customer journeys and, I always ask the question. How do you know how to deliver your ads effectively? If you don’t know how long it takes to sell your product? Well, like if I have a two week sales cycle, that’s a very different way of delivering my ads than if I have a 30 day sales cycle or a 60 day sales cycle, if the needs of the business and the needs of the ads are fundamentally different in each of those scenarios.

And so that’s typically where I, I like to get started. Here’s how customers are currently coming into the website. It takes, uh, 15 ads on average over the course of nine days. Oh wow. Okay. And people, when they’re here, they [00:40:00] visit these number of pages and then here’s the percentage of people that convert on a first visit.

And then here’s how many people leave. Okay. Well, when the people leave, how long does it take them to come back? How many ads does it take to get them to come. And suddenly you begin to form this picture of like, oh, well, there’s two parts. I need to get people interested, bring them in. I’m gonna convert a small percentage of those of my first visit.

But then for everybody else, I now know how many more days it’s going to take. So you might get that first visit in nine days. People might come back in two days, right? You have an 11 day sales cycle on average, or it might take them an additional nine days and you have an 18 day sales cycle. But it’s gonna be really difficult to deliver your ad campaigns effectively if you don’t have that fundamental understanding of that buying cycle.

And, my experience with Google analytics and, and similar tools is that that data’s just not available. So. Again, this is [00:41:00] where I would, I would champion for a piece of technology to come in and give some of these insights. As you are beginning to lay the foundation and show some of these like empirical facts of like, this is how customers are currently interacting with things, then you can begin to say, great.

How can we optimize for this? And, I use the expression focus on what’s right. Not who’s right. So, okay, well maybe we find that 98% of people are leaving the website and they’re doing that within 30 seconds. Okay. Well, let’s figure out how to optimize that landing page a little bit. Maybe we drive them to a different page.

Maybe we make some content changes or we might find that we have, a ton of people coming into the site and they come back multiple times, but it takes, ’em a really long time to purchase. Maybe takes them four or five site visits before they’re ready to purchase. Okay. Well then, like how do we adjust the ad campaigns to, [00:42:00] account for this behavior?

Well, I would infer from something like that, that there’s probably a lot of research going on. This person is considering your brand, considering your product. They’re probably doing competitive research, probably have a tab open of your top five competitors. And they’re trying to understand why they should buy from you.

Great. Well, all of a sudden with that, you can begin to say, wow, well, what if we did some more educational content? What if we did a competitive comparison page? What if we did an FAQ that just told people why we’re the, you know, most awesome product on the market? And so, um, There’s certainly like the, the paid side of things and understanding what, how many ads over what time period what’s most effective and what’s not, but there’s so much more around this that begins to affect other parts of the business.

So, you know, to kind of bring this back to what you had asked earlier about like, You have your P and L and you’re looking at your profits and all those, those metrics and marketing analytics feel separate. This is a great way to bridge [00:43:00] that together. And so the marketing analytics, isn’t just about what the paid advertising is doing.

It’s about how users are engaging with the website, how paid advertising is influencing that and the arrest of the experience that goes into somebody being ready to purchase your product.

Kevin Dieny: Yeah, well, I’ve, I’ve got a great example for this, which was like, I had a room with sales support marketing leaders. I had financial, I had the whole leadership in there and we had presented quite a lot of data and I was like, Feeling. Mm. I don’t know if they’re translating this data into, you know, the business results that they’re all, accountable for.

And I don’t think it’s really hitting where like, as hard as I want it to. So I just summarized it into like a one liner. I was like, look, every time we get 11 visits to this page, we probably are gonna bring in a new lead. And so I was like, so I asked them, okay, and this is just very generalized saying this, but.

Okay. If we need 11 [00:44:00] visits to the site, how can all these, how can everyone here help us get 11? Like one per how can we bringing someone back or bring someone to the site 11 times? And the sales team was like, well, we could call them and we can send them an email. And support’s like, yeah, we could probably do that with current clients.

And marketing was like, well, we’re gonna do this, this and this. And we tallied it up and it was like nine. So we were like, why can we get two more and then everyone was working together. So I think sometimes. Like you’ve mentioned, like you you’ve identified the problem almost like present.

Here’s the problem. Here’s the question we’re trying to solve. Working analytics is so good at taking those questions and being able to give you so much insight. And then once you have that, if you can, again, frame it around. Okay, well, how can we work together to, solve this problem? It might be a marketing only world where marketing analytics is serving marketing and, that’s where the data’s ending up.

But if it’s also allowed to help the rest of the organization, there’s some learnings there. Sometimes it’s like, Hey, this page is seeing a lot of traffic and sales is like, wow, really? [00:45:00] That’s interesting. I’ve been telling everyone about that page and okay, well maybe that’s where it’s coming from.

And everyone gets that. It’s like a shared knowledge becomes so valuable. Was there anything else about this topic Scott, you wanted to mention, that we haven’t talked about yet or anything you wanted to reemphasize that was really important to you?

Scott Konopasek: Yeah, so I think to, to wrap things up, I, I wanna offer what I’m gonna call, like some, some really core things that the marketers, the business owners can do that can help set you on, on the right track. Probably the first thing is to. Evaluate do you need measurement technology? Are you at a place where you can benefit from it?

We talked about the criteria being roughly three ad channels and a hundred thousand dollars in spend a month or two ad channels. If you’re doing, north of two or $3 million a year, who’s gonna own that internally and, deciding [00:46:00] what level of priority is this? How are we going to, integrate this into our workflows, and getting really the, the support and the vocal support of leadership to the rest of the organization.

And then the last practical step is develop a plan, develop a measurement plan. And so if you are lacking the expertise and the knowledge yourself to do that, if your marketing team doesn’t feel very confident, being able to do that, this is a service that mint measure does. We do that for no cost, no obligation.

Feel free to send us a request on our website. We’ll develop this plan for you. And if you’re not in a place where you can benefit from our technology, that’s totally fine. We’ll, we’ll develop a marketing plan or a measurement plan for you anyways, and set you on your way. And so, you know, these are really the core things that I would suggest that every business really do.

And then your marketing plan or your measurement. Is gonna lay that foundation and [00:47:00] stay close to your data. It’s more important to review it once a month and really spend a couple of hours doing that than it is to, deep dive on it once a quarter. If you can do those things and, and have a plan of action, stay close to the data.

When you make those adjustments and something goes terribly well or terribly wrong, you’ll, you’ll be able to understand where that came from. Ultimately be able to get better and smarter over.

Kevin Dieny: That’s great. Those are some really cool, almost like quick steps you could take in the immediate future to assess okay. Where, where where’s my business at and how maybe what are some ideas for, buttoning up my tracking and measurement. So Scott, if anyone wants to reach out to you, connect with you, find more about and measure, or just anything else that you’re about, how can they.

Scott Konopasek: You can find us at mintmeasure.com. If you search Google for Mint Measure, we’re the top result.

Kevin Dieny: Okay, [00:48:00] that’s great. Thank you again, Scott, for coming on and talking about helping businesses. To help them understand, get more confident and ultimately to improve their marketing with some marketing analytics, making marketing analytics easier. So I really appreciate you, you taking the time and sharing everything you’ve got and telling us about, avenues your company has for helping businesses and just sharing all this wisdom.

So appreciate your time today.

Scott Konopasek: Yeah, absolutely. Uh, happy to do this.

Kevin Dieny: And thanks everybody for listening to the Close the Loop podcast.