Mercer. So good to have you on the show.
Thanks down push up here, man. Yeah, of course.
So your business is measurement marketing. Tell us more about why that name and what you're up to and your business? Oh, that
is a great question. So the kind of the origin story of why we ended up creating measurement marketing.io To teach this thing called measurement marketing was a shift in mindset for us as marketers, when we were learning these tools and for our own marketing and learning tools like Google Analytics, and Tag Manager and all the different measurement platforms that are out there. And it was a mindset shift to think like, why are we measuring? What's the point of it? Like, why are we doing this, because I've been talks about Roe as an ROI and CPA and a certain point, you know, the numbers blend together, your eyes start to glaze over, you know, there's a million different places you can get those numbers and none of them agree. And then you're just like, I have no idea what's going on. Let me just figure out what the headline should be. And then you do traditional marketing. So it was like, Well, how can measurement actually help us with that? So what we realized was, like you and I, right, now we're having a conversation, you're going to adjust what you're going to say, based upon what I say and vice versa, right? You're going to change your question, I'm going to change the answer, etc, etc, we're going to have a conversation to have hopefully, a really good podcast together, then that happens offline naturally, that's how humans work, then digitally, we kind of lose our minds as marketers. And we realize we never realized that the conversation actually is still happening. Except it's happening between the user and the website now, right? So like, if I had a store, you would come into my store, I'd ask you like, what type of stuff you're interested in. And I would take you that section, I would hopefully get you to buy maybe upsell you on the way out, get you to join the email list as you were leaving, right, here's a coupon to come back later. All that sort of stuff happens offline. Online, we're trying to do the same stuff. But we're essentially ignoring the conversation, because we're not listening for it. And that's when we realized like, that's what measurement does. measurement helps us listen to what the users are doing. Listen to all the different behaviors that are on the site, did they look at the product detail page? Did they stick around more than 10 seconds? Did they interact with all the different variations of our T shirt design or whatever the thing is that we're selling them. And as measurement professionals, we can measure for that, you can see that and imagine if you were at the marketer that was responsible for that company. And you did know that, hey, three of our products, two of them, people are interacting with all the images, and they're converting pretty well. But that third product, they're not even sticking more than 10 seconds, they look at the product and are gone. Well, now, you know, you have a different problem to solve than when they looked at the product of clicking on a bunch of images, but they're not adding to cart, right, because it might be an inventory issue, maybe you got to change, but you can now you have different actions, because you clearly understand what their side of the conversation is. So measurement is how we measure for their side of the conversation. Marketing is how we respond to keep the conversation going. And that's where measurement marketing to IO got its name from it's all about measuring and listening for the conversation.
Yeah, I love how you describe that. It was a perfect segue from the marketing to this, but so much of what you introduced with it was a focus on measurement. Because without measurement, then you couldn't mark it as effectively.
Yeah, that's exactly right. And going back to kind of what the latest trends are right now, that's the biggest trend is most companies are not most, many are starting to realize that measurement is a department. It's not a project anymore, like people used to think, Oh, I'm gonna set up goals in Google Analytics, and then bam, my measurements done, or I'm gonna get a dashboard from somebody, then bam measurements done. It's not like that measurement kind of starts to lead the organization when it's done properly. Because you can you can, if you're listening to the conversation, then you understand what your users want, then all you have to do is figure out how to get it to them. But you don't have to guess what they want anymore. And most marketers are doing this random acts of marketing stuff where they're just guessing all the time. Well, maybe we should change the headline, maybe we should change the offer. Maybe we should change the price. Maybe we should change whatever. Let's do a webinar funnel, because nowadays, mastermind said we should do webinars now. And everybody just starts spinning in circles. And there's a lot of unnecessary drama and wasted effort, I think, where if you used measurement properly, you can focus the very limited resources that we all have to actually optimize and improve things for your company.
Yeah, yeah. I love that one. One thing we were discussing a little bit before, is this idea of demystifying online marketing. And that when a lot of people hear these measurement and analytic, analytical analytic or to get it out, it's overwhelming. Write some words, you can't pronounce some acronyms. You don't know what they mean. Yes. How can we break it down in a simple way? That way, those who are new or just overwhelmed by marketing and measurement marketing, can approach it and start to see results?
That's a great question. Because most people probably started like, like I did. I know this, because I went through these exact steps where you open up a plot for like you, you create your WordPress site or something right to get up and run it. You throw a plugin on it that says, Oh, now you have Google Analytics, and you're like, cool. Now I'm gonna go to Google Analytics, and it's gonna tell me what to do next. Right. So then you jump into a platform like Google Analytics. And then you're like, you click around and like one report, you think says one thing but you look at the other report, it seems to say the complete opposite and you're like, Okay, clearly, this is The Matrix, and I don't know how to decode it. So I'm gonna go learn how to use Google Analytics. So I can decode the matrix, then you learn, you buy a program on Google Analytics and teaches you Oh, here's all the different reports, I mean, stuff you can find on YouTube, to be honest, right? Like, here's what this report does, and blah, blah, and then you, you kind of get that and you're still like, I had no idea what to do with this, like, I know what it says kind of, but it doesn't lead to any natural action. And so that's where you have a problem, because you've got all this data, but no story. And without a story, you're not going to have any action that comes through. So the challenge with this is, is a realizing that first thing we talked about, which is the mindset is everything of listening to the conversation, measurement has a purpose. And it's an incredible purpose, it can be the guiding light for your organization, if you allow it, if you know that it's a thing, that's a first step. Second step is then learning measurement requires you to use these tools a little bit differently. And when you start to learn measurement, you start to realize, like, actually, it wasn't your fault that Google was basically giving you a bunch of data, because by default, that's what it does. For example, if I give you a kid's book, let's say Goldilocks and three bears, I give you this child's book, and I say, Hey, can you read me the story, you probably could do a pretty good job and read me the story of Goldilocks and three bears. And I take that story back, I rip out the pages, I rip those into pieces. I push them between the covers, and I give you everything back and I say can go and read me the story. Could you read me the story? Now the answer is yes. Because I did not change your ability to read, you're still a good reader? The answer is yes. However, it's gonna take me a lot longer to figure it out. Because I dump out all those pieces of paper stitch them together, some of them are going to fall behind the couch, and I'm going to miss those. And I'm gonna have to make up some holes and sort of try to get through the general idea. And what you can still get the general idea of the story. The challenge with Google Analytics is people think, and I think this is partially just bad messaging on the fact of platforms like Google, to be honest, is they make it so easy to activate it, that people have confused activation with setup, it's not set up when it's turned on. It's just activated. And that's what everybody does. By default, they just turn it on, and then they start using it. And that's not great. Because when you turn it on, you start using it, what you are seeing is individual pieces of data, meaning individual ripped up pieces of paper. That's what you're seeing, you're not seeing a setup, because if you saw setup, you wouldn't see a story. The reason you're not seeing a story isn't because you're a bad reader set another way, it's not because you're not a numbers person. It's because the platform isn't set up properly to tell you a story. So what you do is you learn how to use that platform you use measurement tools to or measurement strategies to use this platform. And all of a sudden, it will start telling you a story. And it will say things like you know what? Google organic is incredible by making people aware of your brand, that Google Ads retargeting campaign is doing an incredible job of getting them to actually look at product detail pages, turns out your emails, what's really closing sales, though. So if you use Google organic, get the SEO content out there to bring in those people for awareness, you retarget them with Google ads, maybe you have a secondary backup with Facebook, and then you're closing them with email, right after getting them as a lead, you will be able to generate X, Y and Z when it comes to revenue. That's what measurement will do. That's what Google Analytics will do for you. But the reason that people don't naturally see that story is because they don't know that they have to customize it. They don't know that they have to configure it. So that it can it can it knows what to tell them. Right. That's that's the challenge with it. So once you realize like, oh, it's not me, it's not that I'm stupid. It's not that I'm not a numbers person. It's not that I don't get this. It's not that it's not my talent. It's that I didn't set up the tool, of course, it's not going to be able to tell me what somebody else's Well, once you learn to set it up, it becomes a lot easier because you'll see a story there.
Yeah, yeah, that's so impactful. And I love that you take analogies and practical ways to understand things, you know, complex concepts, and simplify it. I definitely think of the concept of activation versus implementation or setup. And it's that idea that a lot of us like, hey, we I know I need an online presence. But I online marketing starts oftentimes with a website or place where people learn about my business, but people just kind of do that. They put up a few photos, talk about their company, great, great, I can walk away, and I'm going to get all these leads all day long. But that's definitely not the case. You know, there's a lot more inner workings that do get complex around SEO and, you know, increasing your ranking and all that stuff. Domain Authority, you know, the list goes on, and then understanding Google Analytics and that nuances over there. So when it comes to what you do, and the solutions you provide, how can people work with you to really understand, hey, I want to take this complex, these complex tools that seemingly are complex, right, and it's simplifying for me. It's, ya know, you have a lot of resources for that,
for sure. It's a great question. Yeah, we, you know, at Metro market IO, our whole thing is that we teach normal people how to use these tools right where our market is not the data analysts are the data scientists, they already have that stuff covered. But regular everyday marketers, I mean, let's face it, we have all add, we have other things we're supposed to do in our organization to grow our companies who's got time for all this. So you want to speak to somebody in the room away, which is why we have all the different analogies. It's like, it's kind of like this, and you go, Oh, I get it now. Okay, cool. Now, I can take an action, get a result from the platform and be like, wow, I've moved my company forward. So the way that we actually teach it, is with a framework, alright. And that's, that's what's missing with a lot of organizations. So we'll go through basically three steps, we help people understand how to build a plan, we then help them deal with their with their bill, we show them how to build it, the actual measurement system that they need, and then they launch it and use it, and we show them how to use it. Because each of those steps, it's not just planned on launch. It's how you plan how you build and how you launch. So for example, when you go through the plan, we'll talk about this key model we have, which is you list out the questions that you want to get answers to, you list out next to that the information you're going to need to collect in order to get those answers. And then this is the most important part of a plan. You think about the actions you're going to take based upon the answers you're about to get. And you do that before you do any of the setup before you open up Google Analytics, or that spreadsheet or ads manager and Facebook or what Tik Tok, or whatever it is you're looking for. So what will happen if you go through that process as an example? You you think about the questions, and we talked about results and how questions that's only two types you could ever ask. So it might be like, how many leads are we getting? Or how many sales we making? But you also should immediately right after that ask questions about well, how did we get that sale? How many people added to cart? How many those shortens the checkout process? How many people actually saw the detail page? I mean, people actually got to the category pages before that, right you and now you start to understand how you're getting the results you're getting when you do that the information they collect, you know, based on whatever the questions you're answering maybe pageviews, or something simple stuff that's already default being collected. So you can figure out your different conversion rates of that customer journey. But then think about purchases for a second, we say well how much money we make, right? And then you collect obviously, when you collect the ecommerce sales, and then you go, Okay, well, actions, what, what will I do, let's say we have the goal where it said, Okay, we should do at least $10,000, this week, or 5000, whatever the number is, let's say 10. So well, if it's less than 10,000, we're going to do this. If it's between 10 and 12, we're going to do this, if it's higher than 12, we're going to do that because it's a, you know, maybe a bigger than expected boost to your revenue, we're going to we have to figure out why that happened. In the steps between what we're going to do when it's low, what we're going to do when it's high. That's where your insights are, that's where you're going to find the stuff that you go like, wow, why don't you Why did our revenue double unexpectedly, let's go find out, Oh, it's this one product, oh, a school purchased our product. And they did both? Interesting. We didn't have book as an option. I wonder if we can create a department that's for both corners that we can go after other schools. And maybe that's a whole other market we can open. That's an example of how a platform like Google Analytics can help you figure out stuff like that, because it can tell you like, here's this was unexpected. And here's an action you can now take because you know this number. So that's what the planning process is all about. It's thinking through all of that. Now imagine, whenever you've seen a dashboard in the past, maybe some of the listeners have gone through this where they they have a dashboard, they get a bunch of information that like I have no idea what this means, right? Worse, you email somebody in your team, you're like, hey, what's the blah, blah, blah? What are the questions you're trying to answer? And they say it's in the report I just sent you. You're like, yeah, no, but I have time to go through that. What's the actual answer, right. And that's what happens. The reason is because the chaotic reporting goes on, right? People have lots of data, no story. So when you have your proper plan, and you thought through the actions you're going to take right now when you see that number in a dashboard, you already know what to do with it. And this is what my favorite thing is, when it comes to marketing dashboards. I mean, we still have we still do we still have students come to us and say, Well, I'm trying to figure out, you know, the reason we're joining the measure Marketing Academy is because we need to figure out how to analyze reports better. My first answer to them is, you shouldn't be you should make your port simpler. Why do you have to analyze them, you're a marketer, you analyzation is not your skill, you don't need to analyze anything. As a marketer, you should make your marketing dashboard. And this is what our team does. For our for our own company, we do our own, obviously, we eat our own dog food, right? So we're doing our own reports. But we have a rule like if it takes more if you're in that dashboard for more than a minute as the if anybody from the marketing team is staring at a report for more than a minute, that report has to be simplified, because they're they don't need that what they need to do is look at the number and then take the action that number tells them to take and for those that are out there going well that's that's great for you to say, but there's no way that works in my company, but that's just not how it works. Okay. Think about your car dashboard. You're driving down the street, you look at your speedometer. That's very fact that you know what that number is, tells you do I hit the brake or hit the gas, and you do it without even thinking it's so routine, right? But it's phenomena I instantly know. Just because I know the number. I already know the answer of how fast I'm going. I already know what actions to take a marketer's dashboard can be created to do that, again, assuming you're following a certain system. So that's kind of how we teach it to the normal people out there about how to actually use these tools so they can actually get some usefulness from it.
Oh, yeah, that's amazing. You know, I love your teaching style, too is you're to the point. It's actionable. And you say Buy it down into, like you say, the average people, not that not the data scientists, not the marketing number crunchers out there, it's for those who are right now looking to dig deeper into knowing that it's there as a solution they need to implement Yeah,
because everybody has that gut reaction, right? When you look at your analytics, you're like, God, if I just hack through the jungle of data, that's there, I'm gonna find this jade statue that's gonna make me a millionaire marketer. And it's, it's a, it's a myth, it doesn't exist, the fact that you can't see it means it's not set up properly. So you go through the framework, you set everything up, and then all of a sudden, it just reveals itself to you. And it's like, oh, by the way, you should change your headline. But this other page down here, you need to work on your offer this other page, you should probably work on your body copy or that video, because they're just not interacting where you thought they were going to. And it just tells you what to do. And that's why I love measurement. Because I don't have time for drama. I just have time to constantly optimize things that make things better. But that's the rub. Where do we optimize as marketers, everybody typically just guesses, or they let a friend look at it, or they go to our mastermind group, and somebody's just randomly guessing about stuff. And you don't know if you're right, because honestly, the only people that know those answers is your market. And those are the people because you're not measuring that you're ignoring. So not not saying a survey, I'm not saying like, you know, email it out and tell me what you think. Because again, that's a that's not there's a famous Walkman example, I honestly don't know if it's true or not. But the myth is still useful. Is there as an example, where they say, Well, back in the days of the Walkman, Sony did a study where they were like, what color Walkman would you want? Everyone's like, I want orange. I want red. I want white. And they said, Cool. Thanks for the study, on the way out, take your free Walkman. And they all took black. You know, and it was like, well, here's, here's what people say. That's why that's tough with qualitative stuff. When you do surveys, here's what they'd say, but what are they actually doing? And measurement is what they're actually doing. Right? How much time they actual buyers spending the actual browsers? What are they actually doing? And when you know that, you go, Well, is this what we expected them to do? And or if we what the site was designed for them to do, if it is awesome, go get more eyeballs? That's it scale. It's working as expected. But if it's not, that's where you go, Okay, well, why are they falling? Why are they not sticking out more than 10 seconds, maybe there was an expectation mismatch, and then you move into the optimization step, which we teach. And then that sort of instantly leads you to here's what I need to do to improve the results. And it does like you to your point, it becomes a lot simpler when it is demystified like that.
Yeah. Well, that's incredible. Well, obviously, we know we can go to measurement marketing.io, to dive into your academy, ticket, all your resources, are there any parting insights and knowledge that you'd like to share? Mercer,
I'll give you a give you two. One is helping people. Because I, like you said, overwhelm frustration. That's what people react to. And they like Google Analytics, it's like, that's not the first day you wake up in the morning be like, Oh, I'm gonna learn Google Analytics, that's not exciting. The reason that happens is because sometimes you're learning too much. And you get exposed to a lot of information, but you haven't will be called ride the bike, right? You got to ride the bike. So for us, it's the the way to think about that as if you watch me do, right, literally riding a bike, and I describe to you what balance is. And I describe to you how to balance a bike and how to pedal and all that stuff, you will intellectually get it because you've been exposed to that information. But what happens when you jump on a bike, you're gonna fall over. And the reason you're gonna fall over it, because you don't understand balance until you experience balance, you have to practice it, right. One thing though, one thing at a time. So with Google Analytics, it's the same thing. You you learn a little bit and you practice it, make it a skill, then you come back and you learn one more thing. One more thing, one more thing. So we're constantly in the academy always talk about that one thing, what was your one thing, practice that come back, rewatch the workshop, you'll pick up another new one thing, because you've built some muscle, right? So that's the idea is that you practice one thing at a time, and give yourself permission to be good enough to get going. Don't worry about what everybody has out there. The way that we teach the academy, there's the level of the cave, which is I have no idea what's going on. So you just need to light it up light up stuff. Least you know how many visitors are on your site? That's awesome, right? That's more than a lot of marketers know. So you're out of the cave, and you're in the valley of visibility, when now your implementation might get a little bit more complex to answer some more difficult questions. But eventually, you will go to the summit, where it's really complex, a different data sources are coming together, what a lot of people do is they will look at really complicated stuff that maybe we're doing, and then they try to do that. But we have measurement muscle, we've been to the framework 1000s of times we know what we're doing. And so for you to try to mimic what we're doing is going to frustrate you, because you don't know measurement. Your culture isn't a measurement culture, you don't know the technical ways of working with the tools or what the tools are even capable of doing. So of course, you're not gonna be able to get our result, right, even though you want it. So start with where you are, and give yourself to be good enough to get going permission. And you can always come back and make it better later. That is exactly what we did. Right? Just to emphasize that my path. I'm on the same path everybody else is I'm just probably a little bit further ahead. But it's the same path and I've been standing where everybody else is standing. Right. So I've been through that. So that's kind of the The first big piece of advice is give yourself permission to just be okay. And you will make progress. And the more you make progress, the easier it gets, you start building momentum, you start realizing, hey, this isn't that the negative self talk goes away, you start realizing you really can do this, you get results, and it's great. The second thing is we have a ton of free tools. We have a free level of our academy called the toolbox membership, which comes with a tracking traffic tracking toolkits. There's weekly workshops that are back there to teach people, right because we realize not everybody's got budget for it yet. So we put there's something like 40 tools now that we give out, it's all for our members. And we give those out for free. So you know, tons of stuff back there. And if you go to measurement marketing.io forward slash visionaries. It'll take you to the academy page, you can scroll down, you can see how to actually create a free account so you can get access to that toolbox. Oh, help out every
weekend. That's so generous that Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah. If if it goes even deeper than what we talked about here, there's gonna be tons of value in store for others to go there.
Yeah, and it definitely will. Definitely well. Perfect. Well,
Mercer, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for sharing your insights, your knowledge. It's been incredible. Appreciate it.
Excellent. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it down.
