Using AI in Marketing

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Jeff Green – Provalytics

 

 

Podcast Overview:

00:00 “Misleading Digital Marketing Insights”
05:15 Branding vs. Search Advertising Debate
07:01 Limitations of TV Ad Metrics
12:53 Amazon Ads Affect Web Traffic
16:28 Pioneering User-Level Marketing Analytics
18:46 “Enhancing Click Data with AI”
23:40 Call Volume Prediction Origins
25:34 “Monty Hall Dilemma”
29:53 Facebook Ad Spending Insights
34:13 Real-Time Digital Ad Bidding
37:49 Personalized Ad Streaming Explained
41:30 Breaking Down Marketing Silos
43:12 Unified Marketing Integration Bridge
47:45 Top-Down Marketing Strategy Insights
49:40 Overspending Due to Google’s Analytics
53:00 Marketing Spend Tracking Misconceptions
56:32 Clicks vs. Branding Priority

Podcast Transcription:

Jeff Greenfield [00:00:00]:
James, if I were to give you an ax and ask you to chop down a small tree and you’d never chop down a tree before, before you In, I would say, how long do you think this is gonna take? And let’s say you’d never used an ax before. I and you’d say, I have no idea. And I’m like, you have to make a guess. So you would make a guess, and then you start chopping. And I would let you chop for a minute, and then I’d ask you to stop. And I’d say, okay. Revise your guess. And so you would revise it.

And if I did this, like, every minute and and then Adventures every five minutes and wrote down what your guesses were, we would find that at a certain point, your guesses would get closer and closer to what the actual number is.

James [00:00:39]:
You have found Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumph and successes of business owners across the land. Downloadable audio episodes can be found in the podcast link found at drawincustomers.com. We are locally underwritten by the Bank of Sun Prairie, calls on call extraordinary answering service, as well as the bold business book. And today, we’re welcoming slash preparing to learn from Jeff Greenfield of Provalytics. How is it going today?

Jeff Greenfield [00:01:07]:
Oh, it’s it’s going great, James. It’s, I’m excited to be here.

James [00:01:10]:
Yeah. Let’s just start Call right off the bat. What is Provalytics?

Jeff Greenfield [00:01:14]:
Provalytics is a marketing measurement platform. And it it essentially, there’s an old saying in marketing from a famous marketer from the Midwest by the name of John Wanamaker. And he’s attributed to saying half the money I spend in advertising is wasted. The only problem is I don’t know which half. And that has plagued marketers since the beginning of marketing. You know, if you do a bunch of things, it’s tough to figure out, especially at the same time. It’s tough to figure out what worked and what didn’t work. And our software solves that for very large advertisers.

Jeff Greenfield [00:01:51]:
And, so, yeah, it’s it’s it’s pretty cool. You know, it’s it’s numbers, it’s statistics. In, you know, it doesn’t sound sexy or exciting, but it really is because you get to be on the inside of what some of the largest advertisers in the world are doing. And so you you you get great insight as a marketer, which is really cool. Yeah. I like it.

James [00:02:12]:
I can tell you from a guy that spent what I consider to be at times too much on marketing On the digital side, I feel like we were either sold a lie or I believed something that didn’t come true when just as an example, with Google Analytics or something like that, where, like, Google Ads should be able to tell you everything you need to know about where to spend and all that jazz. And I feel like they keep enough hidden where they just, like, just throw some money at that and see what happens. So I’m interested to hear about the software because that may be the magic bullet that

Jeff Greenfield [00:02:45]:
a lot of people spend money

James [00:02:46]:
On marketing have been looking for.

Jeff Greenfield [00:02:48]:
It’s it’s interesting that you bring up Google Analytics and Google because and and you’re right. That you what you said is what most people believe. Google Analytics should be able to tell you the answer to things. But what people forget is that it’s called Google Analytics. You know, it’s now GA four, Google Analytics four. So it’s we we should really call it Google’s Analytics. It does a really good job of measuring how well Google’s products are doing for you, but a lousy job at measuring how everyone else is doing. So let me let me give you an example.

Jeff Greenfield [00:03:29]:
You know, most, You know, most marketers today, if they’re spending any bit of money, they typically start in like either Facebook or they start in Google. But let’s let’s say you’re a marketer and you’re In both places. Let’s say you own a flower shop. Okay? And you’ve got you’ve got the the pay per click going In Google. So when someone types in your name or they type in flowers near me and your location, it shows up. So your ad shows up there. And then you’re running a bunch of video ads and some really cool ads on Facebook. So here’s a real life scenario.

Jeff Greenfield [00:04:03]:
Someone is scrolling through content on Facebook and they see your ad and they kinda scroll past it, but maybe it catches Authentic, but they don’t do anything with it. And then, you know, the next Draw, they’re on Instagram and they see a little bit more, and they’re like, oh, that looks really good. And let’s say, Valentine’s Day is coming up. Oh, you know, I’m thinking maybe maybe I should do something with this. But then they get distracted just like everyone does. And then couple hours later, they’re like, oh my god. I gotta get those flowers. And what do they do? They Google, and they see the ad, and they click on it.

Jeff Greenfield [00:04:33]:
So the consumer ends up buying stuff. And we would say, now that we know all those steps, that it’s actually Facebook and Instagram that really got the customer. All Google did was just In be the last action. It was a navigation. And but and the flower shops Google Analytics, it gives a % of the credit for that sale to the Google pay per click. Doesn’t give anything to Facebook or Instagram at all. And so what ends up happening is that, you know, it ends up telling people where they look at the end of the month and, like, my god. I spent so much money on Facebook and didn’t really do anything.

Jeff Greenfield [00:05:15]:
Google’s where I should put my money at. But the problem is is that those ads, those particular ads that we’re talking about in Google, people are only searching for you once they already know who you are. And in this example, they didn’t know who you were. And that’s this is a small example of, like, a local flower shop. So now take that same problem and expand it across all of the very large advertisers and then pan the camera back like twenty years. And what we’ve seen happen in most marketing campaigns is twenty, twenty five years ago, most of marketing was what we would call branding. It was all about, I’m gonna put a message out there to everyone in my area or everyone in The US that’s feel good, that maybe has some comedy with it. Maybe it’s a little emotional to put a little hook in you so you’ll think about my brand when you’re ready to buy.

Jeff Greenfield [00:06:11]:
And what’s happened over the last twenty years is that marketers have started to put more and more dollars on that on that kind of that last action to be right there. And they’ve moved dollars off of that branding. And as a result, advertising costs have gone up for these marketers. The ads don’t work as well as they used to. And now they’re in this hyper competitive situation. And part of that reason is because Google Analytics, which everyone uses, even the largest marketers use them, it only measures clicks. It doesn’t measure the fact that someone saw an ad and then did an action later on. So another good example is one of the most popular things that people are doing is is connected television, CTV ads.

Jeff Greenfield [00:07:01]:
Now to the consumer, to us, we’re watching a game and we see an ad for, like, a local place, and we’re like, wow. That’s that’s an expensive ad. And it is, but the reality is there’s probably a chance that that ad was only seen by me and, like, five or six other people. You know, it it didn’t go out to everyone in the area or anyone in the country, but it it felt the same to me. But in Google Analytics, there’s no tab for CTV, and there’s nothing for me to click on on that TV ad. That TV just builds Business. And that and that’s part of the problem is that most of the ways that people are measuring their outcomes is based on that that last action, that last click. It it would be like if you gave credit, if you’re in if you sell Snickers bars and you gave credit to the supermarket checkout person because they were the ones who scanned it because they were the last one who touched it because it was right there in the candy aisle and you grabbed it as you were in line.

Jeff Greenfield [00:08:03]:
It Customers doesn’t make sense with the way that marketing works. But even the largest advertisers in The US get confused as well. And that’s that’s part of the problem was trying to figure out what’s working, what’s not working, and what half In is actually being wasted. And and what’s funny is that that statement from John Wanamaker, half half of the money, in advertising is wasted. I don’t know which half. It’s actually more like, for most marketers, like, 90%.

James [00:08:33]:
I was gonna say, yeah, ninety ten. Yeah.

Jeff Greenfield [00:08:36]:
Yeah. It’s it’s actually a lot more than that. And people marketers freak out when they actually look at the numbers, and they’re like, oh my god. I can’t believe this. It’s it’s because it’s really bad because things are so confusing.

James [00:08:50]:
Yeah. It’s interesting that you said that it’s getting worse. I guess, I was chatting with a buddy about this the other day, another On, that the channels that we have for marketing now are almost limitless compared to In you look at thirty years ago where you had, whatever, three, four channels on TV. You had newspaper In yellow pages. And yellow pages, if you didn’t do it that year, I guess you’re not in there. And newspapers, crazy money. I mean, outside of maybe magazines, the back of magazines or something like that or late night, what do they call those things where it’s an hour long advertisement?

Jeff Greenfield [00:09:24]:
An infomercial.

James [00:09:25]:
Infomercial. Yeah. So things like that. Like, you didn’t have all these different social media things. You didn’t have web search. You didn’t have all these thing, all these different channels. And it’s funny because we’re joking that, you know, you couldn’t measure how well your newspaper ad went. But then then you thought, well, you only had newspaper ad.

James [00:09:45]:
That was the only ad that you had.

Jeff Greenfield [00:09:46]:
So if

James [00:09:47]:
the phone rang, I guess it worked. If it didn’t ring, guess it didn’t work.

Jeff Greenfield [00:09:52]:
Well, back back before digital, the way that larger marketers did it because remember, all they had was, you know, newspapers. So we would call that print magazine, television, radio, and direct mail. They would use math and statistics to figure it out. They didn’t just guess. So you know, you think about a big brand like BMW, Okay? Or like an AT and T back in the day. They would constantly every day be in every newspaper, magazines, print, radio On. And yet they were able using math to figure out what was working and what wasn’t working. But what’s happened now is and as you said earlier, thirty years ago, we only had so many places.

Jeff Greenfield [00:10:41]:
And you don’t even have to go back that far. So think about like a a typical, like a, let’s say, like a health and beauty product. Okay? You go back five years ago and, you know, you’ve got a website where you sell directly to consumers and you’re in retail. K? So let’s say you’re in all the pharmacies and things like that. So all of a sudden, you know, Amazon has started to grow analytics started to really grow up. So and now you’re starting to notice that people are you’re not on Amazon, but people search for your product on there because people are getting used to buying there. And they’re finding competitive products. And you’re noticing over a year or so, your sales are starting to dwindle down in retail.

Jeff Greenfield [00:11:28]:
So now you have to put an Amazon store. So now you’re in Amazon. You have a store there, so when people search, they find you. But then Amazon starts to roll out very rapidly, they’re advertising. And so when people search your name, if you don’t advertise, a competitor will show up instead of you. So now you have to advertise there. Okay. Great.

Jeff Greenfield [00:11:48]:
Well, Walmart decides to roll out. You’re you’re in a Walmart. You’re already in every single Walmart, but they decide to roll out their Walmart online. And you go there In you search and you see competitors are there. So now you have to be available Walmart online. And then they roll out advertising. And then the same happens with Target and CVS and all of these places. And you have, like, In, you you have a team of, like, marketers and ad agencies that are used to handling the website and their regular retail, but now you have to hire all sorts of new people.

Jeff Greenfield [00:12:24]:
And and now they have to become you have to hire experts in Amazon and all these online marketplaces. And now your budget is more difficult to figure out. You have to go to the CFO finance and ask for more money. But more importantly than that, now it’s really confusing to figure out because your your Amazon people are saying, hey. We spent x amount of dollars, and we got x amount in return. Okay. Great. That’s real simple because it’s this closed environment.

Jeff Greenfield [00:12:53]:
But then you start thinking to yourself, well, wait a second. How do people know to go to Amazon? Like, maybe I’m running ads on radio or TV like an old school marketing. And I’m saying go to my website, but I see ads sometimes. And they say go to my website, but I’m used to buying on Amazon, so I go to Amazon. And then there’s sometimes people go to Amazon and they search for something and they go to the page and then they say, I wonder if they have a website. So what’s happening now is that ads that are specific, meaning it’s you’re in On. Those ads that are designed to drive sales In Amazon that are actually lifting sales outside of Amazon. And the ads that you’re buying that are to drive sales to your website are actually driving people to On.

Jeff Greenfield [00:13:40]:
Because consumers are what we would call omnichannel. They’re On buy wherever they wanna buy. And we’ve also trained consumers, especially in ecommerce, that everything is on sale anytime of the year. You just have to search for the coupon code or go to a different store, and you’re gonna find a better deal. That’s just what we’ve trained people to do. And so as a result, if somebody’s On your product and they’re on CVS and they’re like, I wonder if I get a better deal In On. They’ll go to Amazon. They’ll go to your website because they want the product now.

Jeff Greenfield [00:14:10]:
They’re gonna find the best deal for it. So it is now become so complicated to figure out where that missing half or that missing that that that wasted 90% is at. But the old school techniques were able to do that because they used math and statistics. But what happened with that old school technique is that it was a heavy lift. Meaning, these analysts would come in and they’d say, okay. We need three years worth of data. So, you know, nobody has like three years worth of data Call perfectly organized sitting in their Google Drive. So that became like a whole project to get all that data together.

Jeff Greenfield [00:14:55]:
And then they’d be asking for more and more data. And then In would be like usually a six month project. And the result of this project would be like a several hundred page PowerPoint presentation that would tell you if you On grow your brand x percent, this is where you need to move your dollars. And it would say, move, you know, 3% from TV over to print or something like that. But to say to a digital marketer today, well, based upon this statistical model and math, we’re gonna give you digital folks 3% more dollars. Take it away. And digital people are like, 3%? Okay. That’s great.

Jeff Greenfield [00:15:40]:
But in Google, if I increase it 3%, like what keywords? If it’s Facebook, what campaigns? What ad groups? What creatives? Which of my display campaigns and CTV, which creative, which this. In the digital realm, we’re all very tactical and very granular and that’s the type of output that we need. And so, those modeling techniques and math Call because they took so long, you know, I would get information back and it would be like a year old. It’s like, okay. Well, that doesn’t do me any good. My boss wants me to tell him how last month did. I I can’t wait for another year for that. Right.

James [00:16:24]:
Interesting. So what is the solution?

Jeff Greenfield [00:16:28]:
Well, the solution was back In, like, as digital started to grow in, like, 02/2008, was to leverage the big data movement, which was collect every bit of data that you could get and try to make sense of it. And so what I did back in those days, I created one of the first companies that measured the effectiveness of marketing, but did it at a user level where we would track every user anonymously. We wouldn’t know who you were. But every time you clicked on an ad to come to the site, we would track that just like Google Analytics. But what we would do different than Google Analytics is that every ad that was out there, every Facebook ad, every place that you saw an ad at would have a little piece of code in there that would let us know that user 1234 actually saw an ad. So that by the time you came along and actually purchased something, we would look into the database and line up this long line of every ad that you saw, every action you took Call the way through to purchase. And on its own, there wasn’t much to learn by looking at a single person. But when you aggregate up all the purchases that were made in a single day and then roll them up into a week, into a month, and you have thousands upon thousands of actions, now you can start to say, uh-huh, this ad seems to be starting people down a path In though they didn’t click.

Jeff Greenfield [00:18:04]:
And people that start with this ad, they tend to purchase faster than these other ads, and this one seems to be performing better. So using machine learning, we were able to determine what was working and what was not working. And that worked great until, like, one day Facebook said, you know, we’re not gonna let anybody have this data anymore. There it is. Nobody’s gonna have this data. And then YouTube came along and said, yeah, Us neither. We’re not gonna allow anybody to have this data. And then and then the whole kind of privacy movement came along right around with COVID, and that kind of stopped all of that.

Jeff Greenfield [00:18:46]:
So you can still get the click data. But as we talked about, the click data doesn’t tell you what they saw that led to that click, and that’s the most valuable thing. So now and this is a situation that I was in around, 2022 when I saw that all of these privacy changes were coming. And I said, you know, I think there’s an opportunity where we can use a little more involved machine learning, some of the early AI, and the faster computers. And we’re On take we’re gonna go back to the future. We’re gonna take the science from the past, that statistical modeling technique and math that they used before digital. And we’re gonna upgrade it for today’s standards. We’re going to upgrade it in a couple of ways.

Jeff Greenfield [00:19:35]:
One way is we’re going to get it so we can turn it around a lot faster than once every six to nine months. At least update it, you know, to be able to potentially update it daily. But most of our clients do it monthly or twice per month. And then the other thing is we’re going to be able to not only tell a marketer you have 3% more in digital. We’re On to be able to go to a very, very granular level. And like we could when we had all of that data. And for that, we leverage AI to say, okay, this is what we have. Fill in the gaps.

Jeff Greenfield [00:20:13]:
And of course, the question is, well, how do you know that it did

James [00:20:16]:
it from? Fair question. Yeah.

Jeff Greenfield [00:20:18]:
Yeah. So the way you do that is you you go back and you you validate. And what you do is is that you take a model and you train it with some data. And then you say, I’m gonna give you the marketing data, but I’m gonna hold back all of the sales. I know what the sales are, but I’m not gonna tell you what. I wanna see how well you predict. And so when you have a model that can predict better than 85 to 90%, which is what our models do, you’re like, Okay, this is something that I can bet with. Now, there’s an old saying in this business that Call models are wrong, some are useful because it’s not deterministic.

Jeff Greenfield [00:21:00]:
It’s not a %. It’s a probabilistic model, but it predicts really well. But I still like to tell marketers that this approach is it’s not right. It’s less wrong than what they’re doing today. It’s less wrong. And that’s so that’s the solution today In that we actually take techniques from the past and bring them forward. Interestingly enough, the On of the basis of our techniques, which is what’s driving a lot of the AI today, is a technique called Bayesian. And this formula was actually developed in the seventeen hundreds.

James [00:21:38]:
Woah.

Jeff Greenfield [00:21:38]:
And then we use another technique from the early sixties. So we use two things that we could have done ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, but the computers weren’t fast In. And now they are. So it’s it’s absolutely amazing.

James [00:21:53]:
I know that I’ve heard of Bayesian, but I can’t, for the life of me, place it.

Jeff Greenfield [00:21:57]:
It was used in in in in World War two to decrypt some of the codes, some of the submarine codes. It’s been used for years for all sorts of interesting mathematical problems. The reason it’s used is because it works very similar to how human beings think. So let me give you an example. James, if I were to give you an ax and ask you to chop down a small tree and you’d never chopped down a tree before, before you In, I would say, how long do you think this is gonna take? And let’s say you’d never used an ax before. I and you’d say, I have no idea. And I’m like, you have to make a guess. So you would make a guess, and then you start chopping.

Jeff Greenfield [00:22:42]:
And I would let you chop for a minute, and then I’d ask you to stop. And I’d say, okay. Revise your guess. And so you would revise it. And if I did this, like, every minute and and then eventually every five minutes and wrote down what your guesses were, we would find that at a certain point, your guesses would get closer and closer to what the actual number is. And that’s how Bayesian works. In It says, hey, this is the this is all the information I have. So I’m going to make my best guess.

Jeff Greenfield [00:23:08]:
And the reason that folks use it is because here was the last guess. Here’s new information. I don’t have to go all the way back through every single bit of data, historical data, I can update very rapidly. So when you think about something like a self driving car that’s constantly learning, it has to update its memory banks constantly as it’s learning. Bayesian is involved in that because of how frequently it can update.

James [00:23:36]:
Oh, interesting.

Jeff Greenfield [00:23:37]:
Yeah. 1,700, so isn’t that wild?

James [00:23:40]:
It is wild. I feel like I came across something. I can tell you what I was looking for where I ended up on this because I wasn’t smart enough to look look up Bayesian or something like that. So we call answering service, and we’re trying to figure out for number of Calls, how do we figure out the number of agents for those calls? And I’ve and I stumbled upon when, telephones were first invented and AT and T was putting them in people’s houses, and they had to know how many lines because they couldn’t have a line to everyone’s house individually. So they had to figure out essentially how many phone calls do people make simultaneously. And it was one of those, like, where’s the math that had explosion for me to figure this out? And so you stumble upon all these things that people way smarter than me have figured out. And then you then you figure out, like, hundreds of years ago that you figured this stuff out.

Jeff Greenfield [00:24:34]:
Well, there’s an interesting, and you just reminded me as you were thinking about that, that one of the interesting kind of math problems is what they call the Monty Hall problem.

James [00:24:46]:
Okay.

Jeff Greenfield [00:24:46]:
Yeah. You know, there was a TV show on in the seventies called Let’s Make a Deal. Yeah. And you get up there, and there’s three doors. And they tell you, behind one of the doors In, you know, there’s there’s three prizes. There’s a million dollars. There’s there’s a a kitchenette set, and, there’s there’s a million dollars. There’s nothing, and then there’s a goat.

Jeff Greenfield [00:25:15]:
And so you chore you choose door door number three. And, he opens the door and there’s there’s, you don’t want door number three. Actually, no. You choose door number one. You choose door number one. And he’s like, okay. I’m gonna show you what’s behind door number three. He opens up door number Green, and there’s nothing behind there.

Jeff Greenfield [00:25:34]:
And so then he asked, do you wanna change your mind? Because now you have between door number one and door number two. And the there’s a a great explanation. All you have to do is Google the money Call problem, and and it’ll explain all the math, which I’m not great at. But statistically, you are better off sticking with your first answer. Most people will switch, and they’ll say, no, I On move over to door number two. And that statistically ruins your odds. Your best odds are to stick with your first answer. But it’s a famous math problem called the money hall.

Jeff Greenfield [00:26:09]:
I think it was because somebody wrote a letter to the editor, and it was explained years ago. But it it there’s, I think, even a Wiki Wikipedia article about In. But that doesn’t

James [00:26:18]:
really this. Yeah. Yeah. Because, essentially, you’re looking at it as a fifty fifty shot. When in reality, it’s a sixty six thirty three shot. Yeah. You have 66% likelihood that what you want is behind door number one

Jeff Greenfield [00:26:29]:
That’s right.

James [00:26:30]:
If I remember correctly. Yeah.

Jeff Greenfield [00:26:31]:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s exactly it.

James [00:26:33]:
Yeah. And I still have a hard time wrapping my head around that.

Jeff Greenfield [00:26:37]:
I know. I me too. So I just remember stick with your first answer. It’s always

James [00:26:42]:
There you go. There you go.

Jeff Greenfield [00:26:43]:
Yeah. There’s there’s a gut feeling that drew you to that. Stay with it. Definitely. So tell me a

James [00:26:48]:
little bit about the when Facebook pulls the information or, prohibits access to the In. YouTube does the same thing, and they do it I don’t did they kinda hide behind the the privacy thing, or was the goal that they figured people are gonna have to spend more money to try to figure out what works? So it’s a win win for them.

Jeff Greenfield [00:27:09]:
Yeah. I mean, there’s a couple of things. One was In that both Facebook and YouTube at the time, their users were predominantly going more mobile. Okay. And that that’s when this was going on. And what they found is that, you know, they optimize the site so it loads quickly. But when you have all of these marketing research tags that are there, it slows things down. And it and it it inhibits the user experience.

James [00:27:42]:
Okay.

Jeff Greenfield [00:27:43]:
So that’s that was the reason. That was one reason. That was both Facebook and YouTube. YouTube, because at the time, they were bigger. They were owned by Google. Remember Facebook In the early days was still small. They are this, like, global big property. And privacy really took off in the European Union first with this thing called GDPR.

Jeff Greenfield [00:28:06]:
And essentially, what it said was to any company, including data companies, they said, listen. You you may have a list of people where you’ve got their profiles and all these things. Guess what? That list is gone. You you you can’t access it anymore. You now have to ask people if they On opt in. So that’s the option. People now have to opt in. And when that occurred, a lot of companies left the European Union, a lot of the ad tech companies.

Jeff Greenfield [00:28:38]:
Google saw this this coming along and so they made a decision across the board, across all of their properties to no longer allow people to target and get user level data across any of their ads products. So they were they were kind of first at this. But you did bring up a great question about, are they In of hiding behind things? And I think one of the things that’s important to understand is that most of the users on Facebook, most of the advertisers, I’d say probably 80.

James [00:29:13]:
Excuse me. No. You’re good. You’re good. I get the same thing going on. It’s ’tis the season. Right? As the seasons change, your body’s like, oh, what’s going On

Jeff Greenfield [00:29:25]:
and this time of Draw. With the sun. Alright. Hopefully, we’ll we’ll be able to edit that. Right?

James [00:29:33]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We can get that out. No worries. No worries. Thank you.

Jeff Greenfield [00:29:42]:
With Facebook, it’s important to understand that oh, let’s try that again.

James [00:29:47]:
No. It’s all

Jeff Greenfield [00:29:48]:
good. Let’s give

James [00:29:48]:
it a It’s all good. Yeah.

Jeff Greenfield [00:29:53]:
With Facebook, it’s important to understand that 80 to 85% of all of their advertisers are small business owners spending just a couple hundred dollars a month. So even if they allow that level of measurement, they’re not On invest thousands of dollars a month to measure if they’re only spending a couple hundred dollars. And if you’re just advertising on Facebook and Meta and you’re not elsewhere, Meta does a very good job of telling you what’s working and what’s not working. They they’re incentivized. They want you to spend more dollars with them. It’s only for larger advertisers where they start to send similar messages on different platforms that things get very, very difficult. So it was done to speed things up. It was also done under the guise of privacy, if you Call.

Jeff Greenfield [00:30:44]:
And just this whole global movement moving towards this concept that people don’t necessarily On be tracked. They want a good user experience. But I don’t want you to know everything about me, and then I don’t want you selling that information to other people. That’s the biggest concern.

James [00:31:01]:
Got it. Yeah. It’s interesting the the digital marketing landscape, I guess, as far as what information is Green. And this is coming from a guy I had advertised on Facebook. We’re talking years ago. And it was interesting because I learned this I’m certain that it’s changed now. I have no idea. But I I gave him some money, and I think back then you had to say what a lead was worth to you kinda thing.

James [00:31:29]:
Something like that. I think I remember a sliding scale. This is I mean, we’re talking probably approaching ten years ago. And you say, hey. Elite is worth whatever, $5 or something like that. And then, stuff happens, and you’re like, oh, this is good. Now Elite is worth more to me. And it seemed like the budget that I had as long as Facebook said, like, hey.

James [00:31:53]:
Your budget was $300. Now it’s $500. We ended up getting the same return, same, purchases, not necessarily a exponential return. Like, we didn’t get twice as much by spending 600 versus 300. We got the same thing we got at 600 as we got at 300. And it was one of those, like, ah, I feel like whatever number we put there, they’re just gonna give us these leads and be like, that’s what it was. So I pulled out of that game.

Jeff Greenfield [00:32:22]:
Well, there’s a couple of things that are going on there. One is the fact that, there’s a concept called, saturation or marginal return. So let’s say let’s say you’re going and you and and you’re spending along In your cost per sale or your cost per lead is $10. And as it turns out, you make a thousand dollars off of each lead on average. So you’re like, woah. I could afford to spend $500. Let me double my budget. So you double your budget expecting it to be still $10 per lead, and now it’s around 12.

Jeff Greenfield [00:32:59]:
And so what happens is is that there’s a curve. As you start to spend more, eventually, it curves around where your your cost to acquire a customer, tends to go up. And that’s that point of marginal return. So there’s only so much room that these things can grow. The other scenario that you have going on in Facebook and any other type of modern digital media is that it’s a In environment. So it used to be years ago, you know, you call up a magazine or In newspaper, the cost is the cost. That’s it. The cost for the TV ad is the cost for the TV ad.

Jeff Greenfield [00:33:38]:
You know? Super Bowl is a great example. This year was $8,000,000. Doesn’t matter how many people are watching. It’s $8,000,000. That’s it. Well, what actually happens in the digital world is it’s an auction. So, like, if you were to go to the New York Times and and you go to the newyorktimes.com, as that page is loading In near real time, there’s like an auctioneer in the background. Says, you know, we have we have a Call, age between 34 and 44, Draw a BMW, lives here, who likes cigars and boating.

Jeff Greenfield [00:34:13]:
How much am I bid on this person? And in real time, there’s a bid that happens and up, you won the bid and that’s the ad that’s shown. It I mean Well, that’s in real time. In real time across every single digital platform you’re On, same thing is happening on Facebook. So let’s say you come out with some innovative, really cool new service, and all of a sudden, you’re out there and you’re selling and things are going great. Well, the world that we live in today is is the size hasn’t changed, but the degree to which that information gets shared across the world is it’s it’s incredible. I mean, it’s really amazing that you could talk to someone on the other side of the world on on a Zoom call.

James [00:34:58]:
It is. It’s

Jeff Greenfield [00:34:58]:
incredible. It’s really amazing. And so what happens is is that there’s folks out there that are looking for business opportunities and looking for Business, and there’s there’s companies out there that will sell information on these new emerging businesses that are coming up. And so I can guarantee you that if you come up with some really cool thing and all of a sudden you’re killing it, it’s and you’re six months into it, You better be prepared your own borrowed time because someone is gonna find out about it. And then all of a sudden, when that auction happens, in the beginning, you’re pretty much the only person there. But now there’s gonna be competitors there, And they may be bidding on the same things you are. And so what does that mean? That means the price that you paid yesterday is now gonna go up to whatever their bid limit is. And so and then other people come on as well too.

Jeff Greenfield [00:35:51]:
We see this happen a lot with products that Call. And, you know, someone starts a Shopify store, and then they go to On, and then or or maybe they’re not even on Amazon, and then all of a sudden, they go and search on Amazon, and there’s their exact product from someone overseas selling.

James [00:36:07]:
Mhmm.

Jeff Greenfield [00:36:08]:
And they’re selling it at, you know, less than half the cost that they’re selling it at. So how do you compete against that? So this is but in the ad world, it’s this real time auction that happens. So as competitors start to come on, your cost to advertise goes up. You could double, triple your cost and get the same or less amount. We see this across all of our larger advertisers and all this bid type media. They may if you spend the same amount of money each year, year over year, you’re getting less attention, less number of people coming to your website. And now, TV, they used to be like a flat rate based upon the program and the estimated number of viewers. The reason why streaming and connected TV, why advertisers or marketers or the publishers themselves love it so much is because now it’s an auction basis.

Jeff Greenfield [00:37:02]:
So that same digitization of advertising with an auction has now moved over to when you’re sitting In the game. In those ads, people are bidding for your Authentic, and the highest bid wins.

James [00:37:16]:
And that’s in real time. So just thinking, for example, I have, whatever, Amazon Prime, and I’m gonna go watch a TV show or a movie or something like that on Amazon Prime. And In, they show this little I don’t know. It’s a bunch of pictures of samples of whatever. I imagine that’s what it’s using for processing time to figure out, like, here we got James. Here’s his purchase history. Here’s what he’s likely to buy. Let’s throw this ad at him kinda thing.

Jeff Greenfield [00:37:42]:
Well, the advantage there is they already know who you are, James, because you’re logged In to Amazon Prime.

James [00:37:46]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was just thinking that, oh my gosh. They’re following me.

Jeff Greenfield [00:37:49]:
But if you and I were to sit there with two TVs right next to each other and and different different households, because not only do they know us by our logged in information, but then there’s another data set that they know based upon the IP address of your house. They they know all your household information as well too because maybe there’s other Amazon buyers and purchasers there. But we could sit right next to each other, start to stream the same thing, and see completely different ads. Interesting. Now in the early days of Netflix, when they opened up their ads platform, it was all the same ads because it was just larger Adventures, and they were really testing the platform. But now we’re at the point where everything is an auction type basis. Now there’s also a quality assessment as well too, and Google does that as well In that you know, remember at the end of the day, if I’m Amazon Prime and an ad shows up that ruins your experience, you’re gonna watch less. There’s less revenue for me, and you’re gonna be upset, and that’s not good.

Jeff Greenfield [00:38:52]:
So they value that experience more than anything else, but but it’s primarily an option.

James [00:39:00]:
Interesting. That is bizarre. It’s always interesting to have a conversation with a marketing person, especially digital marketing, because I have this, it’s the person versus the business kinda thing. But on the personal side, I want my privacy. I just wanna use my phone and go online and read my email without somebody snooping or knowing that it’s being watched. But on the marketing side, I wanna know I want my marketing dollars to be as efficient as possible, and I wanna be able to target people that I know will buy instead of throwing up a billboard. Everyone sees it, and the majority of people seeing it aren’t even in a place to buy kind of thing.

Jeff Greenfield [00:39:40]:
Right. Well, that’s that’s always the thing. It’s interesting that most of the people who use ad blockers are typically in the advertising world. You know? They wanna use the technology, but I don’t want you to use it on me. But what’s funny is that when you put those barriers up and you say, don’t track me, when you think about a large dataset like every individual in a town, you actually make yourself more identifiable because you’re such an outlier. You’re so different than anyone else. And so there it it’s much easier to figure out who you are from a tracker standpoint of view. Sure.

Jeff Greenfield [00:40:20]:
Interesting.

James [00:40:21]:
Tell me, your software specifically, it sounds like you’re working with larger companies. Is that right?

Jeff Greenfield [00:40:29]:
That’s right. Alright.

James [00:40:30]:
And are you essentially a bridge between the ad platform, whatever it is, whatever whatever’s the hip and cool digital ad platform at the time, and the business that’s going to be advertising? Or who or I imagine at that point On that scale, there’s probably marketing companies you work for or work with. Tell me how that all works.

Jeff Greenfield [00:40:52]:
Yeah. So the way that larger brands tend to work, you’ve got the places where you Adventures, like Facebook, Hulu, Google. And In, at the brand, they typically have a team of in house marketers. So you think about, like, a chief marketing officer, and then there’s a team of people. There’s, like, a Google expert, a Facebook expert, a TV expert. And then they typically have different agencies, marketing agencies who actually do the buys. Okay? So the TV person will hire a TV agency to do the buys. A Google person will have a Google agency, so on and so forth.

Jeff Greenfield [00:41:30]:
So when you think about a large brand, they may have 10 people in house that are marketing, and they may be working with five or six different agencies that are doing all of these purchases. Everything from buying ads to doing public relations and all of those things. Where I come in and where Provalytics comes in is that all of those people all work in silos. The Google person lives in the Google world, so does the agency. And they do their best job that they can in order to figure out what’s working and what’s not working. But they’re not talking to the TV people. And, frankly, they don’t care about the TV people. And the TV people, they’re in their own silo.

Jeff Greenfield [00:42:12]:
And not only that, but at the company itself, the Google person doesn’t really like the TV person much because they’re both battling for that same budget. So you’ve got these conflicts with the agencies who all have their kind of view of what’s working and what’s not working. And then you’ve got the internal folks, and then you’ve got the boss’s boss, the chief marketing officer who’s trying to figure out what’s really working. How do I how do I get more growth, especially out of the same amount of money? Because all chief marketing officers, they all know there’s a lot of wasted money. But the way they grow really is to be able to get more money to spend. And for that, they have to have a conversation with finance, the chief financial officer. And the problem is is that the finance team looks over the marketing team’s numbers, and they’re like, these don’t make sense. These are not numbers I can get behind.

Jeff Greenfield [00:43:12]:
So we come in first as a bridge for that internal marketing team to have a different view of things, a unified view that’s holistic in nature. So that that TV person can still work on just TV, but their numbers that they look at, their final numbers in terms of how their TV is doing, also incorporates all of the Google, all of the Hulu, all of the public relations, everything altogether. So we get them working together more as a cohesive unit because they’re sharing the same numbers as opposed to trying to integrate different numbers. Then we work as a bridge with the agencies and get them to come On board as well too. So we give them a view into what’s actually happening with the brand. Once that happens, everyone has, like, this In of kumbaya moment, then we can present the unified numbers In this unified team to the chief marketing officer. And now there’s numbers that can actually be shared with finance so that it makes sense because now everything adds up. I mean, to give you an idea, let’s say I had a thousand sales today.

Jeff Greenfield [00:44:25]:
Okay? Whatever. I sold a thousand things. When I go and I pull my reports from Google, from Facebook, from all of these digital places, and I add up how many sales I had, it’ll actually say probably 4,500 sales. Alright. So the numbers never add up. And then you have TV that doesn’t have clicks or anything, and they’re gonna take credit too. So someone on that team has to take a haircut. Meaning, it’s like Google said that they actually got, you know, a thousand of the sales.

Jeff Greenfield [00:45:01]:
And someone else says, no. On said a thousand. So now there’s this infighting about, well, who’s gonna who’s gonna take less credit? And they don’t wanna do that. So someone has to come in and be like Switzerland and get everyone to kinda play nice with each other. But it is a battle. You know? The the the numbers work, but the the biggest part of our job with our team is helping people accept that there’s a different perspective and that there’s a different view. Human beings, we we tend to be one-sided on things. We have an opinion, and we can’t imagine anything else until it starts to impact us.

Jeff Greenfield [00:45:44]:
And what happens is is that I like the way things are going. I like the way Google’s performing. And then when we show them a different perspective that shows Google isn’t performing as well as they want, now there becomes a battle. And then and that’s where part of the kind of change management process comes in to help people see that in order for this brand to grow, we all have to work together towards the greater good. So we become a bridge for each member of that team, for the agencies, and, eventually, for the CMO for them to have better productive conversations with finance.

James [00:46:22]:
So you’re almost a mediator as well as the whole software numbers person.

Jeff Greenfield [00:46:26]:
Yeah. I mean, that’s you know, years ago, I always would say, you know, if it wasn’t for the people, this business would be easy to do.

James [00:46:33]:
I feel the same way about my business. Yeah.

Jeff Greenfield [00:46:35]:
Yeah. That’s any business. But, yeah, I mean, you have to you would think that, you know, if marketers are truly what they call data driven and they follow the numbers, you put a new set of numbers in front of them and you prove to them that these are the better numbers that they’re gonna follow them. But people don’t like change.

James [00:46:54]:
They Oh my gosh.

Jeff Greenfield [00:46:55]:
They’ll fight it in every possible way. They really will.

James [00:47:01]:
Tell me I wanna ask you something, I guess, as it relates to my business with what one of the challenges that we’re having

Jeff Greenfield [00:47:08]:
Yeah.

James [00:47:09]:
In, like, you mentioned this people fear change. And I’m trying to imagine if I was selling this product to a company, all the stars that I have to get to align at that company that I don’t necessarily have control over. How do you get buy in from people, even though I imagine it’s easy to get a few marketing people who are like, yeah, this rocks out. This makes complete sense. Other people are like, it’s different. No. How do you sell it to the people that aren’t sure or aren’t aware or just say no because it’s, as far as they’re concerned, different?

Jeff Greenfield [00:47:45]:
That’s a great question. So the way to sell in something like this is we don’t sell it In the people who they’re not gonna look as good as they do now. And we kinda know who those people are based upon how Google tends to look at things. And we start selling In, but we start from the top down. We start at the CEO or the chief marketing officer level. Because the number one frustration that a chief marketing officers and VPs of marketing have is I can’t I’m hearing that there’s these other channels that are working, things like connected television, podcast advertising, and things like digital out of home, these billboards. And I’m seeing my competitors spending more and more dollars on connected television, and I’m hearing that their sales are growing. And I tried In, and, anecdotally, I saw sales go up, but I didn’t actually I had nothing to prove that that was the cause of it.

Jeff Greenfield [00:48:53]:
So I can’t actually now get budget to invest in that. Finance won’t give me additional dollars. So in order for me to invest in it, I have to cut something. And it it would be silly of me to cut something that the numbers show are actually working. So I need there there there has to be another way to figure this out. So we come in where there’s frustration and problems, and that is at a higher level. That’s how we sell it in. We don’t sell it at like, for example, I cannot sell this into someone in Google.

Jeff Greenfield [00:49:25]:
So the person in charge of Google because my sales pitch to them is going to be, hey, you should bring this in because when we bring this in, your channel is not gonna look as good as it do does now.

James [00:49:38]:
No one would accept that. Sign up right now. Yeah.

Jeff Greenfield [00:49:40]:
No one’s gonna accept that because most of our clients when they come to us, they are spending way too much money On Google. And the reason for that is because how are they measuring? They are using Google’s analytics to measure their entire business, which is completely exactly what Google wants you to do. Yeah. So it it it works out for Google, but it doesn’t work out well for the brand. The brand is like, you know, just like you, we spend more money like Google tells us to do or like Facebook tells us to do. And sales aren’t going up. And it’s because when you think of a business and you think of In, like a funnel, you’re spending all of your dollars down at the bottom of the funnel, which is where people are bidding heaviest because we know people are in market. So everyone is trying to bid the most money for someone who’s ready to buy today.

James [00:50:34]:
Mhmm.

Jeff Greenfield [00:50:35]:
And they’re forgetting that you could spend less dollars at people who aren’t even in market yet but will be, but that’s tough to measure. We can measure it. So that’s where people tend to come to us. So we talk to the folks. You can’t sell something to someone who doesn’t have a problem, who thinks everything is perfect. Right? And the Google

James [00:50:56]:
Cloud thinks everything is perfect. So That is so true.

Jeff Greenfield [00:50:59]:
Yeah. So there’s a lot of frustration at that c level in terms of because their their their numbers are getting cut. Finance wants to cut marketing. They don’t see it as being efficient because they see that they’ve given more money In sales are not up. And and the marketers wanna invest dollars On more upper funnel branding type stuff, but they don’t have a way to measure and prove that it actually worked. So that’s where we solve a problem In at that level.

James [00:51:30]:
Got it. I love that you said that that you can’t sell anything to anyone that doesn’t have a problem. Right. Because that is something that I’ve taught my crew that we have to find even when the client reaches out to us, a potential client reaches out to us, that we have to find what the problem is that they’re trying to solve. And then we have to I call it twisting the knife. Like, find the knife stick sticking out of their back and just twist it to double check that they’re willing to pay for it to get taken taken out.

Jeff Greenfield [00:51:56]:
Well, that’s the thing In that, you know, any problem that can be fixed, you you know, there’s no quick fix to it. Not only do you have to spend the money, but there’s also you’re gonna have to devote resources and time, and it’s not gonna be overnight as well. Some people want a quick fix or they have unrealistic expectations. So true. And it’s just important to know who is the right, you know, the what do they call Call, the your ICP, your ideal customer profile. Who’s your

James [00:52:23]:
ideal customer?

Jeff Greenfield [00:52:25]:
Yeah. So true. Jeff, where can people find you? They can get Green information at probolytics.com if they wanna learn more, or hit me up on LinkedIn. I Call always love talking to other entrepreneurs. You know, it’s it’s it’s been an exciting journey for me, and I love I love speaking to folks and and hearing about theirs.

James [00:52:45]:
Yeah. Is there just for the audience, because this we’re generally geared toward smaller businesses, Call, quote, unquote. Right? Is there a minimum barrier to entry or a certain dollar spend in advertising where it makes sense for a company to reach out to you?

Jeff Greenfield [00:53:00]:
There is. You know, if you’re spending above 10,000,000 or more per year, it makes sense. But what I’ll leave people with is there’s a DIY approach for this, which is pretty straightforward. And that is the way that most smaller businesses manage their marketing spend is they have a Google Sheet. And every day or every week, they’ll take all the data from the previous seven days, and they’ll put on there how much they spent, where they spent, how many clicks they got, and how many leads or sales they got. And then they calculate, like, their cost per click and cost per sale. And they’re forgetting a fundamental component of marketing, and they’re buying into the myth of marketing. And the big marketing myth is that you invest dollars to buy clicks analytics lead to sales.

Jeff Greenfield [00:53:47]:
That’s not how marketing works. That’s a myth that Google wants you to believe. The way marketing works is you invest dollars to buy eyeballs, which are impressions. And you’re buying those eyeballs to get Authentic, to build awareness. And when awareness is built up enough, people Call walk into your store. And for most of us, our store is online. That’s translated into clicks, and then that leads to sales. And there’s a delay from that attention building to that click.

Jeff Greenfield [00:54:19]:
So the DIY method is to take that Google Sheet for the last twelve months for every day and add a new column right at the top, right after date Call impressions. And chances are when you downloaded these reports, you ignored the impression column. Everyone does because they’re like, what am I gonna do with this? That’s garbage.

James [00:54:38]:
Yeah. 50,000,000,000 impressions or something. It just seems like a number that you can’t really do anything with.

Jeff Greenfield [00:54:43]:
So go back for every day from the last year and add impressions. And now what I want you to do, now you got this big Google Sheet. Create a graph for daily impressions for the last year. Create a graph for daily clicks and then daily sales or daily leads. And start to look for okay. I saw clicks go up on this day. Now go back to impressions, and you’re gonna notice that impressions were pretty much the same. And you may have to go back a couple of days or maybe a week or two before, and you’re gonna notice that maybe there was a little blip or something, a little increase.

Jeff Greenfield [00:55:18]:
And then you wanna dig into that day. Maybe there was a certain ad that came out, and you wanna dig into it, and you wanna find out. So there’s that delay. You have to figure out what that time delay is on average. And then you also need to figure out what you did on that day or series of days and do it again. But you need to change your perspective from looking at clicks to driving sales to more of an attention based and awareness based, which means impressions. So you need to change your mindset away from clicks towards impressions. If you do that, you’re gonna win in this game.

James [00:55:52]:
So paying attention more to

Jeff Greenfield [00:55:54]:
the top of the funnel rather than the bottom. Exactly. Because when you’re at the top of the funnel, you’re not where everybody else is bidding. And that is what builds awareness, and that’s how you build a sustainable funnel. You always On you need to be down at the bottom. So when people are On market, you’re going after them. You’re reminding them. But now if you build awareness, as soon as they see their your ad, they’re gonna remember you and know who you are because you’re already in the consideration set.

Jeff Greenfield [00:56:22]:
So focus on impressions, not on clicks. Always look at the clicks, but you should focus your decisions and your and your measurement based on those impressions.

James [00:56:32]:
I love it. You know, it’s interesting that you say that now because I I believe the last time that I did Google Ads, I remember a question that it had right away, and it said, what is your goal? And it’s like clicks or branding. And from my point of view, I was like, this is a dumb question. I want people to buy. I don’t care if they know about what brand I am. As long as the money goes from their pocket to my pocket and I get them the product or service they want, we’re all good. Right. All good.

James [00:56:59]:
But it sounds like that’s not necessarily as cut and dry as

Jeff Greenfield [00:57:02]:
I was hoping it would be. You really need to have both types of campaigns going at the same time. But either way, you need to look at those impressions On a daily basis. That’s what’s important because when you graph it, that’s when you’ll start to see, oh, wow. There’s there’s some real differences here day to day.

James [00:57:19]:
Got it. I love it. Well, Jeff, thank you so much for your time here. This has been awesome. I love talking marketing here.

Jeff Greenfield [00:57:25]:
It’s same here, James. Thank you so much for having me.

James [00:57:28]:
Yeah. This has been Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and In and successes of business owners across the land. We are locally In by the Bank of Sun Prairie. If you’re listening to this on the web, if you could do us

Jeff Greenfield [00:57:42]:
a huge favor, give us a

James [00:57:43]:
big old thumbs up, subscribe, and of course, share it with your entrepreneurial friends. I should mention as well, this show is brought to you by Calls on Call Extraordinary Answering Service, offering call answering services to service businesses across across the country, as well as the Bold Business Book, a book the entrepreneur In all of us, available wherever fine books are sold. We’d like to thank your wonderful listeners as well as our guest, Jeff Greenfield of Provalytics. Jeff, what is that website one more time?

Jeff Greenfield [00:58:11]:
Provalytics.com, p r o v a l y t i c s dot Com.

James [00:58:17]:
It doesn’t get easier than that. I love it. Past episodes can be found morning, noon, and night at the podcast link found at drawincustomers.com. Thank you for joining us. We will see you next week. I want you to stay awesome. And if you do nothing your business.