Transcript
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Speaker: Hello and welcome to the Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abbasida and people who think outside the box about how work works, with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone.
Speaker: I am your host, Michael Millward. Today, i will be learning about and how businesses fail to use the correct data for their needs. From TJ Kelly, a digital sales and marketing practitioner from tier11.com.
Speaker: TJ is based in Boston, Massachusetts in the USA. It is not somewhere that I can say I have been, but I have been to Boston in Lincolnshire in the UK.
Speaker: When I go to either of them, I'll be making my travel arrangements with the Ultimate Travel Club, which gives me access to trade prices on flights, hotels, trains, as well as lots of other travel-related purchases.
Speaker: You can do the same, if you remember, so I organise the link in the description. Now that I've paid some bills, it is time to make an episode of The Independent Minds that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to.
Speaker: As with every episode of The Independent Minds, we won't be telling you what to think, but we are hoping to make you think. Hello, TJ. Michael, how are you? I am extremely well, thank you very much.
Speaker: Please could we start by you just explaining a little bit about how, well, your career and how you became a digital sales and marketing practitioner. My career path started in web design development, actually. After a while, I thought, you know, these are great websites, but what are they actually doing?
Speaker: And I started to zoom out a few levels to look at broader marketing. sort of hop, skip and a jump into using the marketing and and combining it with the sales efforts. And those, I've always sort of felt like those are two sides of the same coin, sales and marketing. And so now I'm lucky enough to be able to combine them in my current role. Great. So where does the name tier 11 come from?
Speaker: um It is a reference to a um a comedy, um a mockumentary, if you will, called This is Spinal Tap. There's a famous scene in the movie where the amplifiers go to 11, and the interviewer, I think, might have been Rob Reiner, says, well, why don't you just make 10 louder?
Speaker: The guitarist in the band says, but but they go to 11. He doesn't quite understand. so the next tier above 10 is tier 11, and that's ah you know paying homage to the famous movie. So 10 out of 10, but then one stage better would be...
Speaker: 11 out of 10, that's right. Listening to your description of your career and this interest in the so what the websites do and looking at the data made me think that an awful lot of what organizations do in terms of sales and marketing is more driven by the heart than the head.
Speaker: Well studied. This feels like the right thing to do rather than using the data to to identify what the right thing might be to do. That's right. And it's it's unfortunate and it's not through lack of trying. right I think every good marketer out there understands. In fact, there's a really famous quip about marketing, which is, I know I'm wasting 50% of my marketing budget. I just don't know which 50%. Only 50%? Right.
Speaker: but only fifty percent yeah right And it unfortunately is true. And especially in the age of digital, we are presented with so many data points. You would think that we could very easily track everything end to end. And there was a time when much of that was possible, but it's so fractured and fragmented and you know different levels of of privacy initiatives and different tech platform regulations and so on have just sort of chipped away at the ability to see everything connected top to bottom. yeah And you add to that the user journey
Speaker: right We all have multiple electronic devices that we split our our attention between. And we have work mode and scrolling mindlessly mode and you know dedicated research mode and you know all of these things. That's the same person, but they act and think and behave very differently at different points in the journey. And so if you were to be able to map that out, it would look more like a Jackson Pollock than a Picasso, if you know what I mean. And so we we try to make sense out of that chaos.
Speaker: I do know what you mean. but I don't think the analogy of Jackson Pollock and Picasso is is the best one. Maybe Jackson Pollock and ah Rembrandt or yes Michelangelo, but but yeah, I know what you mean.
Speaker: Maybe people assume... that the information they can get about activities online is very comprehensive, that it can be, it's complete. And what you're saying is that it's not.
Speaker: That's right. It's complete to you as the user, but it is not complete to the you know, the publisher, the, the, vendor, the store who's trying to figure you out, which in some regards is a good thing. We don't want to be giving away the farm you know with everything that we do. But if you are that business who is trying to understand your buyers and ultimately you know capitalize on that, right sell more and sell to more people and so on, that those are extremely important data points. And they're they're done in in you know, in good intent and good spirit most of the time, but it is still a fragmented journey. And if you take the big tech platforms into consideration here, of course, there's Apple with the devices and, you know, all the Android competitor devices, they handle data differently between those two platforms. But then there, of course, there's Google and Meta and now, of course, TikTok. And we have our own sort of contentious relationship here in the U.S. with with TikTok nowadays and every every platform down from there, right? Each of those
Speaker: devices and platforms is itself a commercial entity that wants to you know have a competitive advantage over its competitors. And so therefore, what you know Meta knows about for my browsing behavior on Instagram, for example, they don't necessarily want to give out those data points, especially not giving them out to Google or one of their primary competitors. And it's incumbent on us as you know as businesses and as marketers to try to work within those restrictions as best we can and compile the most accurate and thorough picture that we can based on what you know the information we're provided.
Speaker: The picture that you paint of availability of data doesn't so exactly fill me with confidence about any of the data. It does seem like a bit of a challenge.
Speaker: It very much is a challenge and there are a lot of companies out there working on this challenge because it is such an important one. right If I'm going to invest a hundred thousand or several million dollars over the the course of a year in trying to grow my business, I you know have a significant stake in trying to do that well and trying to do it accurately.
Speaker: So trying to compile these pictures these data points is a challenge. If you're trying to use the data that is provided and you haven't investigated the source of the data to work out what you've just described, it's like there are limitations on what they're allowed to provide. There is then the commercial their own commercial interest, which influence what it is that is provided. Unless you're aware of that and just take the information that you've got from your one or two sources as being 100% accurate, you are lining yourself up for some dodgy decision making.
Speaker: You are. It's all too easy to do. Everyone in the sort of marketing metric metrics and tracking world usually starts with something like Google Analytics.
Speaker: And it's understandable, it's free, it's easy to use, and it's well-established in the market. But it is incomplete and makes plenty of mistakes in its own right. So what's the solution?
Speaker: Well, we're working on that. I can tell you my company has a ah ah platform that we call our data suite, the Tier 11 data suite. What we've been able to do in some of our testing, for example, we put our clients on the data suite and we also have them using Google Analytics sort of side by side. And that gives us an apples to apples comparison of here's what Google can see and here's what we can see. For example, we have one client here in the U.S. which sells in an e-commerce environment. Their ticket price is something like $200 per purchase. So it's not... small items, but it's also not absolutely huge. So somewhere in that medium price range. And and we looked at the the data points for all of Q4 of last year, right? October, November, December. And Google Analytics showed us 1.1 million users visiting this client's website over the course of that three-month period.
Speaker: Our data suite, the tier 11 data suite, tracked 2.3 million visitors So right off the bat, we can see that Google Analytics is just 50% off. They are just missing half of the data points. If someone is using Google Analytics as their primary data reporting tool, right out out of the gate, you're you're you know halfway in inhibited, right? You're just missing half of the the point there. Yes. Of course, I have to say, because somebody is saying at the moment, listening to this, well, maybe you could double counted.
Speaker: Everything. Have you made sure that you haven't double counted it? Great question. So I would love to dive into the the tech and I'll keep it somewhat high level for podcast purposes. But ah Google Analytics and a number of these tracking tools use a browser tag. Right. It lives on the website.
Speaker: And every time you visit a page on that website, it listens for you to visit that and and what you're clicking on. And it sort of runs ah a function and it sends that information back to Google Analytics. And this is where the reporting comes from.
Speaker: That browser tag can easily be blocked by any of these privacy enhancers or certainly in Europe right with the GDPR regulations. If there's an accept cookies banner that almost nobody says yes to, there's a number of reasons why that information would just not be able to run. It would not be able to to do its job.
Speaker: The tier 11 data suite uses a browser tag, but that's secondary. The primary acquisition method is not even at the website server, but it's even above that, if you will. It's on something called a content distribution network, which basically means every time I type in the URL to this website and I hit go, I have to go through this little series of hops, skips, and jumps to reach that website server.
Speaker: And at the very last hop, skip, and jump before I get to the server, I can pull down the tracking information there, and then I can pass you on to the website. And now all the browser pixels will fire and things like that. So that is not blocked by any privacy you know blockers in the browser or you know things like that. So therefore, we have access to a significantly ah significantly greater amount of data because we're pulling it in earlier in that technical chain than the browser is able to to pull it in from.
Speaker: And so rather than us double counting, right we're we're catching every single visit to these yeah URLs as they come in across the network where the browsers are blocked you know for a number of different reasons.
Speaker: Right. And would I, as a user, notice that this is the process, all these hops, skips and jumps that you mentioned, that that was actually happening or does this happen in in the blink of an eye?
Speaker: It happens in the blink of an eye and it's happening every day with every website that you go to. All of these networks, right? I'm in the US and you're in in England. And so for us to connect, there has to be some you know server right here on Zencaster, for example, wherever their server is. I have to get there from Boston and you know maybe a server is in New York and I have to get from Boston to New York to do it. That is a handoff that happens when I direct my my browser to go to Zencaster.com. And it is that's just the way the internet works anyway. And we're just sort of leveraging that connection functionality and and you know pulling in these marketing data points as people are navigating. So it doesn't add anything to the the chain of events, if you will. doesn't add any extra time. And it's just ah you know a part of how all website navigation happens and and always has happened.
Speaker: Right. It's just, this is, like you say, this is something that is happening now, happens all the time, has always happened. It's just all that you've decided to do is to use that as the source of your data.
Speaker: That's right. Right. Sitting around doing nothing the type of moments that someone one had without, you didn't need a focus group or that heavy investigation. It's just one of those aha moments that somebody has whilst they're eating a burger or just about to fall asleep or or in the bath, that that sort of moment. How did it all come about?
Speaker: That is a great question. It predates me, the the discussion of how to get here. I know that we are partnering with some pretty big tech providers to to leverage their infrastructure. um Our partner here is a company called Cloudflare, which I'm sure many listeners have heard of. um Cloudflare, yeah, they they partner or they they drive a significant percentage of internet traffic anyway. They power the connections to the Abysseedah websites. Yeah. And so, you know, we just basically said, okay, let's let's put all of our clients on a Cloudflare CDN, a content distribution network, and that allows us to leverage Cloudflare's existing infrastructure and, you know, and take advantage of that. and again
Speaker: Nobody suffers from that. there's know Because Cloudflare is already very good at this, the website traffic is already fast and secure and gets where it needs to go. And so it allows us to to you know piggyback a little bit, build on what they've already done so successfully and add ah a bit more functionality to it.
Speaker: Okay, so this may be a silly question, but you mentioned that you've got a client who's now seeing a more accurate version of their data. There's twice what they were getting from other services.
Speaker: How will they use that information to impact the success of the business? Yeah, it's a great question. So in addition to getting more data points, we're also getting better data. And what I mean by that is in that same example, this client is seeing 96.9% of their data is being labeled inside of Google Analytics as as new users. And when we look in the tier 11 data suite, that number is actually more like 24% of their visits are coming from new visitors. And the difference there is twofold. One, Google can't see as much data as we can. And number two, their definition of new, believe it or not, is is not what you might expect new to truly mean. This is ah a fairly well-known thing. you you could go and look it up of what is how does Google Analytics define a new user.
Speaker: And it just kind of negates the whole purpose of calling it new. It really ought to be called one-time visitors, not new visitors. And so if we define that correctly, now I can see the true split of new versus return visitors to my website. And I know what I spent to drive that traffic, either through Google ads or meta ads or whatever might be, or money I've invested in organic search visibility, maybe email campaigns, whatever the acquisition path was, I know what I spent to do it. And I now know that 75, or in this case, 76% of users are brand new visitors,
Speaker: While I can do that math to say, great, now I know what it costs me to drive a new visitor to my website, as opposed to a return visitor, who's just as important. I want them to coming back. But by definition, my business can't grow unless I have new people coming to the table here. And I need to therefore focus my marketing efforts on acquiring new visitors and therefore new customers. So what we do with this information, we can plan better for how to acquire new customers.
Speaker: You mentioned that Google have their own definition of what a new customer would be or a new visitor would be. What's your definition of someone who is new? Yeah, someone who has never visited this website before. Right.
Speaker: And wouldn't you expect that to be everybody's definition of a new visitor? I'm an HR ah person and I still like to see.
Speaker: Someone who's never been to the website before is a new visitor to the website. That seems very logical, which ties in. What you're saying is that there are some of these analytical services which would...
Speaker: add other people in who have maybe visited before but not actually done very much would also be new. Yeah, whether they've done very much or not is not the part that that factors in here. It's when was their last visit and did it appear within the time frame that you're currently reporting on inside of the dashboard or did it occur outside of that time frame?
Speaker: So you're new within this 90 days that I'm reporting on right now. okay, great, you're going to show up in the new user list, but that's not the same as being truly new, right? If it's your second or third or 100th visit, but it's only one that occurred within this timeframe, that counts. you're going to show up on that list. And if I've showed up a hundred times versus my you know first time ever, it's a very different user who should receive a very different marketing message from you know from us, the publishers. Ah, right.
Speaker: So... New can mean new within the period that you're analyzing or new can mean new never been before. Yeah. And it is you know Google Analytics who is using that first definition you provided there, new within the window you're analyzing, you know which might be useful.
Speaker: and I don't want to say that they shouldn't have it there, but it is extremely confusing if you don't know that that's how they define new. Well, that gets to the real point, doesn't it? It's confusing if you don't know. And it appears from what you're saying that the biggest stumbling block that organizations have if they don't have this this level of knowledge is that they're making too many assumptions about the data that they are using, which might not actually be the correct assumptions to make.
Speaker: That's exactly right. And so the implication becomes you are marketing with bad data and making bad decisions. And therefore, you know, back to my anecdote earlier or or quip of wasting half of your budget. Well, we just found one of the significant sources of waste where you're making decisions based on faulty data. So that is why the tier 11 data suite exists so that we can remove that ambiguity and those bad decisions and marketers can start to rely on the data they see. And, you know, I'm i'm on your show and i'm I'm sort of shouting from the rooftops here because ultimately, of course, I want everyone to become our our client, but really it's the benefit.
Speaker: right we We want to get better at this job. We want to be more effective in in in our practitioner line of of duty here in sales and marketing. And so if we are relying on faulty tools to do it, then we're always at a disadvantage. So if I can be out here evangelizing a bit and explaining to folks that there there is a better way out there, you know that's why I want to you know repeat this message everywhere that I can.
Speaker: But it's important. You said faulty tools. I think it's important to emphasize that They're not faulty as in wrong, it's just that they operate in a particular way. And if you're going to use the various different things that are available, you have to make sure that you know and understand how it is collecting the data that you are then going to base your decisions on. They need some due diligence into the process to make sure that you're not just accepting what you're presented with. You understand the source of that data and therefore know how to consider it before you actually make a decision based on it.
Speaker: Yep, that's accurate. And I would add, you know we talked about Google's ability to collect. yeah you know And I don't want to sit here and badmouth just Google. There are a lot that do this. That's just the most common example out there.
Speaker: Their ability to collect data is inhibited by how their their browser-based functions work. But they also are modeling data, which basically says we have a you know statistically significant sample size. We're going to infer.
Speaker: that we can you know we can extrapolate from here and give you a ah modeled total number. And so even if they could accurately track every visit and not be 50% wrong, like we said they were, they would still change the actual total value reported because they are modeling the data.
Speaker: They're running these statistical models to provide you what they consider to be the most accurate computational number, but it is not the true number. It's the number their model came up with. And so there's another point of saying, listen, you need to understand that you know the accuracy is going to be changed a bit, if I don't call that inhibited, but you're you're getting a modeled number when you use those systems. So essentially you want the raw data, which will like help you to identify the types of visitors that you are having and therefore then be able to track that in relation to the marketing that you are spending money on. That's exactly Or maybe even organic marketing to be able to then identify how better to spend your budget and reduce the amount that you waste.
Speaker: That's exactly right. And in this line of work, it's often referred to as attribution. Where can i attribute these sales? Do they come from Google or Meta or something else? We tried to sort of shift that to go from attribution to contribution, not one channel. right we We talked about Jackson Pollock, right? Everyone's path has many, many touch points and it's chaotic and scattered all over. So therefore i can't attribute to one channel, right?
Speaker: Each of them may have contributed in their various ways. So how can our reporting better make the leap from attribution to contribution? And we have a number of ways to try to report on that. And you know nothing is ever perfect. We admit that nothing is 100%. Our accuracy is significantly improved, we believe, than than what the standard tools offer. But ultimately, it's the so that you can make better decisions and understand which campaigns, which touch points, you know which platforms are contributing to your users ultimately buying from you and coming back again and again to do so.
Speaker: So would it be true to say that what you've done is made it possible for people to see the various different touch points there might have been from different campaigns, but then the actual campaign, the advertisement, whatever it was, that per someone saw, which then prompted the contribution, the action, which led to the sale?
Speaker: That's right, and so we're able to report on a full customer journey, which is to say, here is the the acquisition path and campaign and thing that this person clicked on they first that first brought them to the website, and that's often referred to as the first click attribution. um but we'll then append new records to that particular customer every time they come back, whether they've bought bought from us yet or not. We don't know their name or identity.
Speaker: We just know that there is a person out there who has visited this website through three different channels four different times over the past week. When they ultimately do purchase, now we can put a name and a you know contact information on that record, and you can then investigate that customer and go back and look at how many times did they visit through which channels and in which order, which ultimately led to this particular sale or series of sales. And so how you want to assign credit and contribution value there is ultimately up to you as the the seller.
Speaker: But the point is we now are able to show what that path looked like for that user. So again, trying to go from Jackson Pollock, where it looks all scattered and everything, down into one straight line. I went from Meta to Google to YouTube to back to Google organic this time, and another Meta campaign, and finally an email sign up and now a purchase.
Speaker: Great. Who gets the credit for that? Well, everybody. But I need to at least be able to see which touch points led to this particular sale. many touch points as well, I suppose. That's right.
Speaker: That's right. and Length of time is important there, right? I know that my typical users are going to spend 30 days investigating before they actually buy. That's important to know. There's a number of different you know insights that can come out of there. And, you know, candidly, Tier 11 Data Suite is not the only tool on the market that is able to show that user journey. I want to be candid about that. We're very proud that it's in there. We believe that it's better than than our competitors out there because of this collection method we talked about on the network, the edge server. we are We are the only one who does that. So it allows us to be better and more accurate at this customer journey reporting. But again, the value for anyone is to be able to see which you know which campaigns and which platforms are contributing to your users coming in and buying from you. And one of the things that I think you've said is that you only know the identity of the person that you're tracking once that person has decided to make a purchase or to interact with you. By giving you their contact details, you don't know who they are until the user has decided to tell you who they are.
Speaker: That's correct. um It is anonymized tracking until such time as that user sort of reveals their own identity, right, by providing information. So people listening to this with as much technical knowledge as me, not very much, don't need to be worried about this is sort of some sort of big brother watching them and being able to know what they are doing. This is anonymous until we decide to tell you what it is that we want to do.
Speaker: That's right. And that's why we report on a customer basis, not a user basis, right? Not the visitor. We don't know who the visitors are. We can show aggregate data. You know you got this many clicks and this many visits and so on. But that you know amount of aggregated sort of pre-sale data is just showing you a sort of directional. This campaign is getting more clicks and visits than this other campaign. And then it's not until you have sales and and users or or, excuse me, customers to go and and report on that you can then retroactively say, oh, OK, let's go look at how Michael came in. And you can watch that path unfold. But it's because Michael has already given us his name and and told us what he wanted to buy. Right.
Speaker: Great. TJ, it is fascinating. But there's only so much that we can cover in the time that we have available. So if someone is as is as intrigued as me, where can they find more information?
Speaker: Great question. Thank you. So our website is tier11.com. That is the number 11 spelled out. So T-I-E-R-E-L-E-V-E-N.com. You can go to tier11.com, but we don't own that website. So you won you won't land in the right place. um if If you happen to know the person who does own that website, we'd love to have it. But no, it's T-I-E-R-E-L-E-V-E-N, tier11.com. Or of course, you could Google us. We wouldn't be very much of a marketing agency if we were hard to find.
Speaker: ah So we are out there on every social channel you could you could think of. And Michael, can I add one bit of of closing sentiment here? You know, we've been talking a bit about the technical and it is important, but ultimately the the value of this or any tracking system is for a marketing agency, a marketing department, a marketing person, right? A marketer to be able to understand their cost of customer acquisition.
Speaker: If you don't know how much it costs you to go out and get a new customer, ultimately you are you know pouring accelerant, you're pouring fuel onto a fire and it's going to drive you somewhere.
Speaker: Is it going to drive you toward profitability or away from profitability is an unknown. until you understand that hinge point of what is my allowable cost of new customer acquisition. I can afford to spend $50, whatever the number might be. And if it costs me more than that, I'm ultimately putting myself out of business with every sale that I make because they were I lost money on that on that purchase. right You need to know what your allowable, we call that an NCAC, right the new customer acquisition cost. So for any business owner, marketer, anybody listening, please, please, please do your best to find out what your allowable new customer acquisition target is. And it is the thing that will you know help you stay profitable with all of your marketing efforts.
Speaker: It gets even more interesting. You might be talking yourself into a return visit there, you know, TJ. But for today, i just have to say thank you very much. It has been a fascinating 30 minutes or so, and I really appreciate your time. Thank you.
Speaker: Thank you for having me on, Michael. it's been a pleasure. Thank you. I am Michael Millward, Managing Director of Apocida, and I have been having a conversation with the independent mind, TJ Kelly, the digital sales and marketing practitioner from tier11.com. You can find out more about both of us at apocida.co.uk.
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