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Below is the AI-powered transcript provided “as is.” We will be updating this with a human reviewed transcript soon!”
My name is John Paglio, I'm the digital marketing manager here at flyte new media, right here in Portland, Maine, right on Commercial Street. We have an ocean view, which is phenomenal. So if you're in Portland, if you're in the neighborhood, come on down, we'd love to chat and show you the office and show you the water and all the pretty boats that we can't afford.
So without further ado, we are bringing flyte school back. It was a brand that Rich Brooks, our present CEO, created back in the 2000s. We brought it up until about the 2017, 2018 mark, essentially with the pandemic, just a lot of things fizzled out. So in 2025, we are revitalizing the brand.
We have a new logo! Shout out to our creative director, Ryan Goan, for creating that for us. And then a few events coming down the pipeline that you should be aware of. We have a meta webinar hosted by Izzy Siedman, our digital marketer, who's actually moderating the chat for me today. So thank you, Izzy.
An AI webinar hosted by Rich in March, a Google Ads webinar hosted by Rachel Burgard, our Google Ads expert on staff in the spring. And then our newest hire, Roslyn Soper, will be doing Microsoft Clarity, which is a really cool tool, which I'll get into in a little bit in the summer at some point. And those are all webinars.
We are planning some in-person events as well here in Portland, just make sure you're on our email list – which you are because you signed up for this webinar, so thank you – so you'll get notified for all of those upcoming events. So without further ado, let's get into the webinar today.
After I put all this webinar together, I realized there were two big themes that are going to come out of today. Now, you don't need to get every single letter that I go through. I don't have all 26, I'm sorry. But the two big themes that I have through all of this is you're going to get better data accuracy, whether you take away from one, two or three letters or even more. And it's also going to help you understand your marketing spend better. Is it working? Is it not working? What questions should we be asking about our spend? What results should we be looking at based on our spend those types of themes?
So those are the two big core themes that I have today. And how we're going to get there is I’m going to try to provide you bite-sized information Some of this stuff may go over your head. Some of this stuff you may be like, “Ah, I already know it. It's fine.” My goal is that you can take away one or a couple letters, and I will be providing some real-world examples. My brain always works in metaphors. So hopefully I can bring in a few metaphors to help you understand some of the math equations that I have for you, or just some of the more technical marketing lingo that I have.
And lastly, it's just going to help eliminate uncertainty. You answer to your board, your bosses, maybe you report directly to a marketing manager. This is just going to help you eliminate uncertainty about where you're spending, what you're doing, and help and get more marketing dollars for what you're doing and what's working. Or, it might help you shift some data and have that confidence to shift.
All right. So without further ado, we’re going to get right into it. My plan is to go about 45 to 50 minutes. This may go a little longer, so I appreciate anyone who wants to stick with me. This is being recorded, so you will get the recording after if you have to hop off early. And I will stick around for any questions at the end. So let's dive right into it.
So “A” is for average cost per lead. And I believe this is a very monumental data point to have. Now everyone's cost per lead is going to be different. And every lead is going to be different to everybody, depending on your industry and the category or in the niche. It's all going to differ.
So the average cost per lead is the amount of money you spend to acquire a single lead. It could be someone filling out your contact form, signing up for a newsletter, or downloading a free guide. It helps you understand how efficiently you're using your budget to attract your customers.
And you can also have different dollar amounts to different leads or to different conversions that you have that are leads. So it's a pretty easy math equation. You're going to see my handy dandy chalkboard here a couple times throughout the presentation, but essentially what we're looking at is you spend $1,000 on Google ads, for example, and you get 40 leads out of it. It's essentially going to boil down to $25 a lead. I hope I did my math correctly. I'm in marketing, I'm not a mathematics genius, but I believe I did that correctly.
And then if from your 40 leads, you get down to 10 customers. You can then do your cost per customer, your average customer acquisition, which would be about a hundred dollars per customer. So are you comfortable spending your money on Google ads, on Meta ads, investing resources into your email marketing in which your average cost per lead is coming in the door?
And the three big takeaways from average cost per lead, one of them being budget management. So you can say, I know I need to put a right amount of dollar amounts towards my Google ads. I might take some away from my Meta ads because my cost per lead is much lower on Google versus Meta.
And then that leads right into performance comparison. This could be platform specific. This could be ad by ad specific. Or even campaign by campaign specific inside a platform. And then this also helps you with your target setting.
If you know your leads usually are converting into customers at a specific rate, you can then go forecast based on those numbers. Understanding your cost per lead helps you answer critical questions. The main one being, is your marketing efforts worth it? Should you just shut down your Meta ads completely because your cost per acquisition is so high, or cost per lead is so high, and your Google ad is doing so well that you're just going to funnel all your funds into the Google ads. Those are the questions you need to be asking and taking a deeper look into.
“B” is for bid strategy. I talked about there's a lot of data accuracy, but also there's this money aspect to these themes. So with bid strategy, I'm really talking specifically about Google ads here. There are bid strategies on other paid platforms, but Google ads is the one where you can really control it the most.
So if we're looking at bid strategies here, the first one I would say the top four in Google ads is maximize clicks, right? The goal of maximize clicks is to get infinity clicks. Like Google just is like, okay, I'm going to use your money and get as many clicks as possible. And the goal of that is to just drive traffic, right?
You might have a new service or a new product that you just want to get eyes on to see how people are performing on the site. You might have updated your copy. Maybe you have a new product, an instructional video. Whatever it may be, you're just promoting educational content or a new product or service in which to get the data back.
So then you can turn your bid strategy into maximize conversions. Okay, I know this landing page works. I've started to see conversions come from it. So I'm going to switch my bid strategy to max conversions. And I'm telling Google, go spend all my money and get as many conversions as possible, but I don't care about the cost. I don't care what the acquisition cost is, just get me as many people as possible.
And that really works best with webinars. It works best with downloadable guides. It's a very low barrier of entry for maximize conversions because you're not really concerned about the cost at what cost target return on ad spend. Spoiler alert, “R” is my return on ad spend, so we will get to that once we get to “R”. I know it seems really far away, but we'll get there, I promise.
But in Google Ads, you can say, “I want to set a 200 percent return on investment. That means that I can spend $10 to get someone to buy for $20. My revenue is $20, right? So we're trying to get a specific return on ad spend, and this is a greater way for you to control your budget.
But if you really want to control your budget and you're worried about every single penny being used, that's where manual cost per click comes into play. And I'm not saying that anyone has the time to do manual cost per click unless you're bidding on a couple keywords when it comes to your branded keywords or very specific niche set of keywords. But you're controlling the budget 110%, not even a hundred percent, 110%. Because you're saying Google, I only want to spend a $1.23 on this keyword. I don't want to go any higher than that. And you do that for all of your keywords, and you have the utmost control when you are running manual CPC bid strategy. I recommend that out of the gate. But if you definitely 6 months, 12 months, 18 months down the road, think that you want to take that on, all the power to you. You can do it.
Moving on, “C” is for channel groupings. Inside Google analytics it gives you the ability to group data together by a channel grouping. Now channel groupings are direct traffic, organic search traffic, organic social traffic, paid search traffic, paid social traffic. So Google gives you, I think, 15 to 18 out of the box, but that doesn't mean you can't create your own channel groupings. You have the ability to bundle similar traffic sources together from a higher level.
So in the example we're seeing here, it's about testing URL traffic. If I'm creating UTM codes – another spoiler alert, “U” is for UTMs. If we're creating UTMs for testing URLs, we want to group that traffic together. So down the road, we can either filter out that channel or we can, if we want to report specific about that channel grouping as well, or if you're running paid ads, it's one campaign. But you're running paid ads on TV and you're doing three different TV stations and you want that traffic to be specific, you can do a paid TV ad channel group. You can create those channel groupings to then give you a better insight on how that platform or how that data going to that platforms is performing.
Now I am one to use source medium report almost religiously. There is a place where channel groupings work. If you answer to a board right and they don't care what the breakdown is from Instagram, Pinterest, to any other social media network, and they just want to know how's our social media traffic to it, that's where channel groupings come into play.
Remember, when you are presenting data you have to understand who you're presenting it to. If you're presenting it to a board, chances are they don't need to know the nitty gritty of the data, they just want some high-level numbers. And that's where channel group has been coming to play.
Moving on to “D”, data driven attribution. With all the uncertainty with cookies and anonymity and everything else that's coming into play, Google is moving to a different attribution model. What they're doing is they're essentially giving channels pieces of the pie, and it uses machine learning to do that.
You can see in my example, and you can only get this in the attribution report if your Google Ads account is connected and you're running Google Ads. I'm not sure why they do this, but that's the only way that you can get this report in GA4. But you can see in the last click attribution model where last click . As marketers, we like to know the last place they came from before they converted or they purchased. With data driven attribution, did they see a display ad and then they clicked on the display ad, then they went back and clicked on organic search, and then they saw a Facebook ad and then they did Facebook ads.
But you can really understand how Google is starting to calculate each touch point. It's not that big of a difference, typically, but some of them are a little more eye opening than others. But you can see the changes are like 3 percent and 2 percent in the revenue stream. And this only works with revenue right now, so if you are a B2B or lead gen business with no revenue on your website, you're not going to be able to see this report, and this report won't help. But down the road, I assume they're going to open that back up for more non- revenue driving websites
The way my brain works with data driven attribution is, and we're trying to equate this to sports. So in hockey, when you score, there are two other players who are eligible to get assists. And that's really how data driven attribution works. There's more than two, obviously, but you can see here that this guy passes it up top to the defenseman. Defenseman then swings it over to the other guy, and then the other guy scores. So they all get credit. They all get a point in the NHL sense. But that's essentially how data driven attribution works.
To bring back my chalkboard to bring it back into marketing. I broke down an example. Someone saw a Facebook ad and they clicked it. Someone then searches Google. They then sign up your newsletter. They didn't click on that email and then they purchase. So you can see how that progression goes.
These percentages are created by machine learning. I wish I could tell you how they're created or give you a definition on how they are done, but I can't. We’re almost just essentially giving Google the wheel and saying, take us to the promised land and tell us what step of the process is exciting and where we really need to focus on.
So that is data driven attribution. It's still, I wouldn't call it being in beta, but it's still new. We're still trying to figure it out. Google ads, you do have the option to by default. Actually, in Google ads, it is set up as data driven attribution. You can switch it back to last click if you'd like. But really, our stance at flyte is we're just going to let data driven attribution do its thing. Because if we go back a couple slides. We can see the discrepancies aren't very large.
So moving on to “E”. “E” is for engagement rates. So if we go back to universal analytics that we're all super comfortable with, we've been trained to look at bounce rate and see how low we can go in bounce rate. That's not what we're doing anymore, right? We're shifting our focus to engagement rate.
Yes, you can still find the bounce rate number in GA4. You have to do a little digging, but engagement rate is something that I like to focus on much more because GA4 is set up to be more about how the users engage with my website. The bounce rate is how low can I go without being too spammy, right?
So like average, 20 to 40 percent was a good bounce rate. Reverse that thinking with engagement rate is, how high can I get my engagement rate on a page-by-page level. Now on it, obviously you don't want 100 percent engagement rate because that could be really good, but it also could just mean there's really nothing to do on the page. It's going to vary page by page as well, right?
So a blog post could have 85 percent engagement rate because the user is doing something on that blog post. They're spending 10 seconds or more. I'm going to 2 or more pages during my session or I'm triggering a conversion event, I'm downloading that guide, I'm filling out a contact form, I'm clicking on the phone number. I'm doing something on the page. So this is where you really take into consideration how your product pages are doing, how your service pages are doing. What's the engagement rate on that page? And then how can you understand how to make it better?
And I have some tools for you to do that. And really just the calculation that Google provides you on how to calculate engage rate if you really just wanted to do it yourself and didn't want Google to do it. It's just engaged sessions divided by total sessions, multiply that by 100, and that's your percentage.
So forecasting. Forecasting is this term that can just get thrown around and it's Whose Line is it Anyways, right? There's no rules, right? There's no winner. There's no rules. There's no right answer. So it's a very ambiguous thing. If you look up forecasting, my Meta ads are forecasting your SEO or Google ads or whatever it may be. You're going to get 10 articles with 10 different answers, because it's all about forecasting and how you want to portray it.
But let's step out of the marketing realm for a minute and talk about you're hosting a Memorial Day barbecue that 25 people are coming and another 25 gave you a maybe, how do you go about planning food, drink, lawn games, any other types of entertainment for this many people? Whatever you're thinking right now is how forecasting works.
So in marketing, forecasting is about predicting future outcomes, whether it's sales, leads, traffic, and you're using a mix of historical data, current trends, and strategic assumptions. Again, there's no right answer to forecasting in general. Forecasting helps set realistic goals for you.
Whereas I remember running a Meta campaign client. Oh, I didn't do it, Izzy did. She was running a Meta ad campaign for email signups, and we had forecasted just two or three new email signups every month, realistically. We understood that this was a cold audience using our historical knowledge of the account and just how emails trickled in. We were able to set those realistic expectations for our clients and were then able to allocate our resources effectively.
So we're forecasting a big jump in my example here. We're forecasting an increased spend with increased leads. Therefore, I need to pay more attention to it. I need to allocate myself or another team member to be more on that account. We can also help identify opportunities and challenges ahead. So after Izzy ran this campaign for a month, we actually identified an opportunity to have more ad spend because we were getting 15, 20, 25 more email signups a month. So we were able to identify an opportunity to shift budget to get more email signups based on our forecasting model.
And at the end of the day, it helps build confidence as a marketer to say, look at what I did. Look at how I provided this. It's one of the ways to bring something back to your boss, to your board, whoever you answer to and say, I forecasted based on historical trend, historical data, based on current trends, this is where we should be. If we send X and then you shoot for it, you might fail, you might succeed, but at least you're shooting for something. And really at the end of the day, that's what you're trying to build is you're trying to build, a formula and a sustainable campaign to last.
So forecasting, again, it's a thing that’s all over the map. You can call it what you want to call it, but really, it's just one of those terms that you should at least be putting some thought into. It doesn't have to be this full-on forecasting model in Excel spreadsheet that has formulas on formulas and macros and all of that. It can be very simple just as I laid out here.
So GS for Google products, I couldn't just fit Google Analytics and GTM and all of that into, I could just choose one. So I decided to shoot all of them. There is no way for you to build a good data profile without using all of Google's mostly free products that they have. GA4 is going to get that data for you, and you're going to be able to tell a better data story.
But how do you tell that better data story if you don't have the right tags firing with your conversions and your events, etc.? So it's this trickle-down effect. You’ve got to be using Google Ads. You don't have to be, but again, the Google app, the Google suite of products, there's more than I have here, but all of the Google suite of products help to make those decisions because you're setting yourself up to succeed.
And then lastly, Google business profile. This is another free tool. If you're a local business, highly recommend using it. It's just going to help you get found. And then there's other ways that you can optimize this to be better from a local search standpoint.
“H” is for heat maps. I don't get any royalties for Microsoft Clarity. I don't get any kickbacks. I get nothing. I just know how much I love Microsoft Clarity, and this is how I'm going to persuade you to love Microsoft Clarity.
Microsoft Clarity is a free heat map tool, free click tracking tool, free screen recording tool. If this is the only letter that you take out of this presentation, I'll be happy. It's free. Crazy Egg, Hotjar, there's other screen recording tools out there that are expensive, that are based on how many users you get back to your site on any given time. It's completely free. Does not matter. And it's also a light load on your website. Crazy Egg and Hotjar, all the other ones actually slow your site down because it's waiting for these scripts to run when people are using your site, whereas Clarity is a super light load and users don't even recognize a low difference with the website.
It's GA4 compatible. You can actually connect your Google analytics, I'm sure you can get other tools too, but that's the point. You can connect your GA4 directly to the platform in Clarity, and you can start to see your GA4 data flow back into Clarity, and then you can watch screen recordings, heat maps click maps, based on those users that you've built in GA4.
And just Monday, they came out with a Google Ads compatibility as well. I haven't dove much into it yet, but that's awesome that they're able to bring in other sources. Who knows, they might be bringing in Meta next, or they could bring in your Instagram ad campaigns. So who knows what they're doing from a compatibility standpoint, but it's great. Engaging on steroids.
We were talking about engagement earlier, and how we can better engage a rate. This is the tool to better your engagement rate. Your engagement rate is 30 percent on a blog post because they're not staying on it for 10 seconds or they're not watching the video at the bottom. Move the video up, make something much more actionable at the top of a blog post or service page to get people to do something with it. This tool will help you do that. There's click and scroll, I mentioned that, and screen recordings.
If you've got all this time on your hands, you just want to be super creepy and make sure to put your tinfoil hat on, but you can actually just watch people use your website. You can either watch them use it live like TV, or you can go back through your historical data and watch it as well.
Just a few screenshots of our contact form on our website and how Microsoft Clarity provides that data. These are PDFs. You can actually get PDFs. I'm sorry, not PDFs, JPEGs. So if you wanted to share this with somebody, you could just share this right out with somebody. You could also give people access, they can use it as well, but you can see the scroll and how in depth the click tracking is. Obviously, on the contact form, people are clicking on all of the different boxes to fill out because they're trying to contact us, but you can also see people at the top of the ‘about’. They're going to ‘about’, some people are for whatever reason, go back to the contact form.
It also makes you question how people use your website as well. You're like, why are people clicking this when the answer is right here. We've had a lot of head scratching moments as well, but that could also help lead to more conversions on your end if you're recognizing user error from screen recordings or heat maps or quick maps.
So again, I get no kickbacks or royalties from Microsoft Clarity, but you should go sign up for Microsoft Clarity right now. I just wrote a blog post about it, I think I did. If not, I can get you instructions on how to set it up. Wow, my brain is not there. But I can get that to you if you need the instructions on how to set it up, how to connect it to GA4. I’m happy to do that for you. So yeah, let's move on. But I am super, super excited about Microsoft Clarity. Super tool.
“I” is for impressions. It's all about how many eyes are on any given campaign. It's all about how people see your social content or your Google ads, your Google search results, etc. It's one of the common metrics that are in every single ad campaign or every single data campaign.
A big mistake that we see is people interchanging impressions and reach. When looking at specifically any social ad campaigns, reach is actually the unique users, whereas impressions is the total number. So like me, myself, John, if I saw an ad three times, that's three impressions, but my reach is one. So that's just where those two terms are. So I just wanted to clear that up. That impressions is the total number of times something has been looked at, whereas reach is unique.
I know that impressions are a vanity metric, and if you were to put a bug in my office, I'm sure I've said “don't report on impressions” about a thousand to a million times in the last couple of years. But I'm actually here to verbally change my stance in front of you all that I do think impressions belong in marketing. I do think we should be reporting on impressions because they do have a place. I think impressions do matter, and here's why. It helps you understand the customer journey. Impressions are at the starting point of your customer's journey. You can't have clicks or engagements or conversions without someone seeing the ad first. So it is important of how many eyes see that ad or that social post or that organic result. It helps boost your brand.
If you're running campaigns that are focused on brand awareness, impressions are one of the most relevant metrics to track. Impressions indicate how visible your brand is to your audience. And then I talk about visible. So we just move right into visibility again. It helps if you're even attracting the right audience back to your ads and your impressions, if your audience that you built in Meta is 5,000 to 15,000 range, but your impressions are super low, there's something happening there. There's a disconnect typically in probably your targeting or your budget. But that just gives you an indicator of, is my ad being seen and then how effective is it? If you're generating impressions, the impressions will help show the effectiveness, right?
Going back to the visibility. They all are interchangeable words here of how important impressions are. So I am officially changing my stance and that we should be reporting on impressions when necessary. Not all the time. If we're running a sales campaign, I'm not going to report on impressions. But if we're running an engagement campaign to a cold audience on Meta, for example, impressions do matter because you need to understand how many people are at least seeing the ad before they can engage.
Moving on to “J”. “J” is for journey maps. And this is a very high level journey map that we're talking through, so I need to bring my chalkboard back. There are five key points to any good journey map. The first one being awareness.
Let's say I'm selling a backpack. The user sees the ad on Instagram for the backpack and they start to do their research. So they move into that consideration phase. So the customer does research on the backpack. So I saw it on Instagram, going back to that data driven attribution. I saw it on Instagram, now I'm going to go to Google and do some organic searching about this backpack and other backpacks that are similar to it. I then am going to make a decision to buy a backpack. I'm going to buy this one. I'm going to buy that one retention uses and considers buying again, right? So that's that nurturing phase. The nurturing phase could be in consideration, but there's also a nurturing phase in retention as well.
And then lastly, there's the advocacy. Where it's that the user's creating user generated content or their word of mouth, or they become a referral program for you as marketers for what we're talking about today. I only like to focus on the top three of the journey map, the awareness, the consideration, the decision.
There's marketing to be done within retention and the advocacy piece of the journey map. But when you're a marketer, the journey maps help you focus. It helps you focus on what’s the task at hand. You're focusing on your customer's needs rather than pushing the product. That's why the focus is so important when building these journey maps.
Journey maps also help you take a step back to see the bigger picture. We're trying to sell a backpack, but what's that journey map look like from a Facebook ad versus a Google ad versus email marketing campaign? Those journeys are going to look totally different. Messaging is going to look totally different. The assets you use are probably going to be totally different. So it allows you to take that step back to see what the returning looks like. And it allows you to be meaningful and effective when building these journey maps and understanding the steps that each one of the campaigns are going to take, and these are going to be different lengths as well.
Your email campaign from users who have already bought with you could be a four to five to six drip campaign. It could also just be a quarterly sales that they get sent versus a Meta campaign could be two steps, right? They click the ad, they buy it. It just helps you focus, see the bigger picture, and to be meaningful in your marketing.
“K” is for KPIs. This is a big one because I think when we're spending dollars for marketing, it's all about sales. If I'm income, it's all about, leads. If I'm region but there are other KPIs that need to be recognized and they can be and they can vary campaign by campaign. We need to set realistic expectations and have open and honest conversations with our clients, with our board, our CEO, whoever we're reporting to. We need to have those conversations and convey what KPIs we're trying to hit with those campaigns.
I'll be honest, before Izzy started when we were running Meta campaigns, I was like, we need sales. We need leads. That's all these campaigns are about. Until she started to sink her teeth into Meta ads – and this is me hyping up her webinar next month – until she started really sinking her teeth into Meta ads, I started to understand why.
KPIs for an engagement campaign are now different than the KPIs for a sales campaign. You can't have a sales campaign with a completely cold audience who's never heard of you. They don't know your brand. They don't know what your product is about. That's why your KPIs for an engagement campaign are clicks back to the website, or engaging on a post, commenting, liking, et cetera. You then move them into a different campaign, into a warm audience campaign, where then those KPIs then become sales. So understanding what KPIs are for what you're doing is very important.
So with that mini story in mind, your overarching KPIs can be the sales or can be the leads, but you really need to understand, you really have to drill down and say, okay, the KPI for this specific campaign on this specific platform is X.
And you would just go from there and you can then link that back into your journey map when you're planning it all out.
So “L” is for landing pages. Again, pre-pandemic landing pages could have been your service pages. They could have been your homepage. We still see quite a few people out there who are sending paid traffic back to a homepage, and it's just not the case anymore. Or at least from a conversion rate standpoint, landing pages need to be specific and have one idea.
If you're a personal injury lawyer, when I click on a personal injury ad, I need to go directly to a page that has personal injury all about it. And you can see here from an example of how that would look. There are tools out there, lead pages, OptinMonster, and there's a plethora of landing pages out there, or landing page builders out there. But what we found is that when you maintain the brand of who you are, they convert better.
So I'm going to go to a website that is takeflyte.com/landingpage versus leadpages.net/takeflite/ insert 12 foreign characters in that URL. You're building trust and you're maintaining your brand.
There's argument in this office alone about whether we should be removing the navigation or not. I think it just works. It's a case-by-case basis. There are times where if you remove the navigation, the user can feel trapped and they leave right away. And then other times, it helps them really focus in on what they're looking for. So I would strongly suggest doing some A/B testing on if a navigation works or doesn't work for you.
Just like SEO copy, the copy on your landing page should be very exact to the point talking to the audience that who you think are clicking those ads. And then in the example, you can see the CTA and the former are prominent in a prominent position. Don't put it at the bottom. Don't make the button go to your contact form that's on the website. Make the form right up at the top, whether it's right adjusted or right in the middle or whatever. Make sure the user understands what they're coming to do when they click on that.
“N” is for new users. New users are the lifeblood of any growing brand. We like returning users because we know they're going to buy with us. We know that they're going to convert with us in some fashion. But I do believe that the new users help us grow our business and they help us build relationships. So the new users are of the utmost importance to us.
When tracking data, if I'm looking at Microsoft Clarity, I'm almost always looking at new users who are using the website. I want to see how users are using the service pages when they've never been here before. Are they clicking on the right things? Are they watching the right videos? Are they downloading the right PDFs? If they're not, then we need to start to optimize better for our new users. We're nurturing the loyalty with our returning customers. But at the same time, they know our website already. They know how to use it.
We really need to pay close attention to the new users and how they interact, not only with the ads or with anything, it's about how they interact with the website as a whole so we can drive long term success. And just learn from them. And this is the best way to learn will be from new users. It's almost like a focus group, right? It's a microcosm of a focus group. Every three days, seven days, depending on how much traffic you get, continuously watching the new users come to your site and continuously build that site better to convert more new users.
It's no surprise that always for optimize, because everything we're talking about today is about optimizing. So for the last 14 letters for the next 11 letters or so all these terms, metrics, tools are going to provide you in a way that you can help optimize your website, your ads, whatever you're trying to do digitally.
So three quick ways you can optimize SEO optimization. So that's making sure the title tags, your meta descriptions have the right keywords. Quick optimizations from a keyword standpoint, right? So if we're looking at our data and we're seeing certain keywords being searched for a specific service or product, then we need to ensure that those keywords that we think are our target keywords are being shown in the right places.
There's ad optimizations, square, rectangular, button, no button, look and feel different. How many people should we have in it? This all comes back to when we're looking at the data, we're looking at the impressions, we're looking at the engagement, we're looking at the conversions, what ads are working, what's not, and we optimize from there.
And then lastly, landing page optimizations. I already talked about it with navigation versus no navigation. Or for the conference specifically, we were really trying to get more people to sign up for the workshops. And when we're on the conference page, we're noticing that people aren't clicking on the workshops menu navigation item. So how do we encourage people to go over to the workshops and sign up for the workshops? So that's how we can optimize for pages.
And this is a screenshot of Clarity. You can also use tag manager to track clicks from one place to another. But you have these tools that I've given you. There are a million other tools and resources out there that you can provide. But this is one of those ones where it can really help you optimize for SEO, for ads, and for landing pages, and then the website in general
“P” is for plugins. If I were to show you my Google Chrome right now, my search bar is like this big and my Chrome plugin toolbars, like this big. But in terms of this presentation today, I figured I would just highlight a beginner plugin and a more intermediate plugin for Google tag manager.
If you're using Google tag manager, tag assistant is a quick validation tool that will show you Google tags firing. They actually just completely revamped this tool and actually shows on a sidebar now of your Chrome window. I don't overly love it. I don't overly love the way it looks, but if you're just trying to understand, is my GTM code or if my GA4 code is on the site, this tag assistant will quickly show you, is it on a page-by-page basis, which can be incredibly helpful.
And the other one, the one on the right is called tag out. So if you're looking to level up your tag assistant skills, this is something that I highly recommend. One of the best features that I like is what we're looking at right here on this screenshot. It actually shows you up to 16 different ad platform tags that are firing on any given page. If I were to click that carrot next to Facebook, for example, where the 2 is, it will actually show me all of the custom events I'm firing on that page. That's going into my Facebook pixel that I can see in my report as well. So it just gives you a better inside look of what tags are firing when, or are the tags not firing and they should be firing. There's a lot of other features that TagHound has, but admittedly this is probably the only one I use it for.
“Q” is for questions. So if we go back to our journey map, and we go back to some of the other things, forecasting, there needs to be questions that need to be asked. This can be done in a Word doc, an Excel template, whatever it may be, but I highly recommend planning before you actually put anything into action.
Like when we're thinking about our data and our reporting, we need to ask these specific questions. How many leads am I getting by a traffic source? That's the question I have. That might be a question your CEO or the board members have. So how do I collect that info? I can break it down by thank you page used by traffic. What are the actions I might need to take in terms of building or visualization? I'm going to break down that conversions in a chart, and then I'm going to start tracking conversion rate and what that priority level is, to me, is high.
Every priority level is going to be different, but this is a good way for you to sketch out all the questions you might have and then attach priority levels to them. Here's a priority level low, building your Facebook brand. How am I going to what info do I want to collect and then how am I going to track that? And then lastly, just a medium one as well. I don't know why I didn't put these like high, medium, low. I don't know why I didn't do that in order, but that's just how my brain worked was high, low, medium.
So those, I would just recommend, I don't have a template for you, but I would recommend just following some prompts here and to build out your data accuracy in your data reporting.
I told you we're going to get here return, on ad spend and ROI return on investment. I sometimes think that these two get mixed up and sometimes we get fixated on one or not the other or not even any of them. Return on ad spend measures how much revenue you are in for every dollar spent on advertising.
So it's usually the better number of the two, right? It's very specific to your ad performance. It helps you see if your ads are performing well, but again, it doesn't tell the full story. So for example, I own a bakery. I spend $1,000 on my Google Ads campaigns for two months. And over those two months, I generate $4,000 in revenue. So therefore, I have a four to one ratio, for every dollar I spend, I make four. Sounds great, right?
Where ROI comes into play is it takes all costs into consideration. Do you have agency fees to spend? Obviously in my bakery scenario, I have ingredients. I have labor. I have packaging. I have delivery costs. So that all makes up. And that's where the net profit comes into play in this formula. So now I have my net profit is now I made $4,000, but now I spent $1,000 on ads, but I also spent another $800 on labor, ingredients, packaging, delivery, et cetera.
You can see in the formula that I'm going to multiply by a hundred because it's a percentage. So still my return on investment is still 122%. So I made 22% more than what I put into it, which is great, right? The ROI helps tell the overall business success.
That's something that we're starting to include in all of our reporting. I admit that we were a little behind the ball for a while, but I think we're starting to bring more ROI into everything, including our agency fees for our clients and starting to help show, it was great, you made 10x what you spent on Google, but you still made 8x after paying us, for example. So ROI is something that we are really starting to report on better so we can tell that better story and the full story, because it's all about the full story and not pieces of the story.
“S” is for session duration. Again, it's a vanity metric, but I do think that it helps tell the story with journeys and journey optimizations. So just by showing what the average session duration is when a user lands on a specific page, now you've got to set up tags and a few cookies and tag manager to help show the progression of everything, but by showing what the journey is like when they land on a specific page.
Our blogs, our old blogs from like the early 2000s just do super well, which is why some of these are like, why are you even blogging about this? It's because Rich wrote about them 15 years ago. Not the case here. Or, besides the point. But what you could see here is if you had a blog post that was like 30 seconds average session duration. Typically, that's going to mean that users aren't going anywhere else on your website. Thirty seconds is typically a little longer than to use a website. But when they're reading a blog post, it's typically probably just reading the blog post and then leaving.
So if you have blog posts or service pages that have small session durations, take a look at them with Microsoft Clarity. What are people doing? What are people not doing? How can you better optimize that page, that blog post?
Sorry, I'm speeding up here because I know we're getting to the top of the hour, and trend is a big one. This isn't a scare tactic, and I don't mean it to be a scare tactic, but we're slowly moving into a digital measurement period of time where exact data gets thrown out the window, and I was just talking about the full story right to pieces, but with increased privacy, more anonymity and tools that are handcuffing you to only some of the data.
Google Search Console is classic for that. They actually only show you about 40 – 45 percent of the search terms and traffic that you get. That's why your Search Console and your GA4 organic numbers never align. But a couple trends that you might want to start putting into your toolbox would be increasing first party data.
So third party data is just in limbo, right? I feel like Google keeps threatening to take it away. And all these other social platforms were like, we might take it away, we might not. The more you can emphasize your first party data, the better. So that's like your email list, for example, that's data that you, the user, has said, take my data, I want to buy your product. I want to opt into your newsletter. Here's my information that you require. Get more first party data, especially with where we're moving to.
Predictive analytics. This kind of goes hand in hand with forecasting that we talked about for “F”, right? So using historical data and machine learning to predict future customer behavior is going to be your best foot forward. Which then brings in AI. I haven't talked about AI in this. I wanted to steer away from AI because I knew Rich was talking about it soon, but I also just think that one of the good ways to use AI when it comes to data is by putting large amounts of data into ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, wherever you want to put it in so you can get some quick insights that you can build off of. Don't put revenue numbers, don't put personal information. I feel like that's a given at this point, but I feel like I need to say it.
But those are the things that we are starting to use AI for is by putting large sums of data of pages with session duration. And then we ask AI what do you see? What are some trends that you see with the pages that have low session duration or high? So that's the piece that I'm taking away with and how we're using AI.
Marketing measurement trends are all about becoming more efficient and more accurate and more customer focused. We need to embrace the trends and we'll help make you smarter. It'll help make smarter decisions. It'll help you optimize your campaigns better and deliver better results.
The goal of measurement is clarity and confidence and understanding how your efforts are doing, whether that's success or failure. But that is the goal. That is the overarching goal that my team works on. And that's the overarching goal that we are striving towards with measurement is clarity and confidence.
“U” is you for UTMs. We're running low on time, so I'm not going to get on my full soapbox when it comes to UTMs. But if you're not using UTMs, you should be. UTMs is short for Urkin Tracking Module, which allows you to add specific parameters to a URL to help measure your campaign better. If you just Google a URL builder, it will bring you to this site that you can see here as a screenshot.
Essentially, anything that's asterisked is required, so your source, medium, and your campaign name all need to be added here. It helps you tell, again, a better data story. So with a bunch of data privacy laws going into play and people are hiding their identities, UTMs might become the central point of all of your marketing.
And I'll show you why in a second, but just a few quick pointers on how to use them. GA4 is moving into this lowercase trend where everything's lowercase. You can use caps. My brain works better by just seeing everything uniform, so keeping everything lowercase, the better. Stay away from special characters, money signs, question marks, ampersands, etc. Just because those are typically used in other ways with URLs, so it's best just to stay away from them. Dashes over underlines, I can go back and forth, I can be persuaded one way or the other. Tag manager prefers underscores, even though it has nothing to do with UTM. So I'm starting to lean more heavily on the underlines or underscores versus dashes, but whatever works best for you.
Be clear with your naming. Just don't put a date that no one's going to know, especially if you have a team of marketers with you. You need to make sure that something is universally known. The length is important. Don't make it 50 to 100 characters. If you can keep it short and sweet, the better. Sometimes they are going to be long, but the shorter, the better, just because they're a little bit more digestible.
UTM term and UTM content are not required, but you can use those if you want, to drill into your data a little deeper. And I'll show you that in the example coming up here. And this is where your consistency matters.
Shout out to my entire marketing team, Rosalyn, Rachel, Izzy, for this past Agents of Change conference. We were able to use one UTM campaign for everything we did digitally. So kudos to my entire team. This is the screenshot I use anytime I talk about UTMs because it's just so beautiful. And if that makes me weird and nerdy, then make me weird and nerdy.
These numbers are also fabricated, so that's why it says AOCC85. That's just because I just randomized these numbers because we wanted to keep the anonymity of all of our revenue numbers. But anyways, we were able to use the same campaign name, AOC24, and you can see that highlighted in the first column.
We were then, in this screenshot, I am then being able to break everything down. MailChimp email. So anytime we sent out a MailChimp email, it got that source medium. Anytime, I believe, Rich sent a DM on LinkedIn, I gave him a specific URL for all of that. Anytime that we did any Meta ads or LinkedIn ads or any organic social, you can see that we followed the same format.
So now when we're looking at a revenue breakdown, we can accurately see where our revenue came from accurately. Now this isn't going to tell me the customers specifically, but it's going to tell me what traffic sources are sending the most traffic. And I told you that content and term are not required. But you can see here that we were using contact and content in term to drill down even deeper. Anytime you see inline or CTA in that column, it refers to our MailChimp data. And then the term was typically surrounded by our sale that we had going on at that time.
All right, we're going to finish off with “V” because the rest of the letters I had to cut for time purposes. So “V” is for visualizations. I want everyone to start moving away from Word docs and PDFs and Excel spreadsheets, and I want to move into Google Looker Studio. It is a free tool for all Google products. So if you wanted to bring in your Google Ads, your Google Search Console, your Google Analytics 4 data into a visualization platform, you're able to do that. And you'll be able to manipulate the data.
The percentages that you see here on the blue funnel are all manually generated, but they automatically update when the GA4 data updates in the actual funnel. So we're able to better show results, failures, successes, in different ways. It's going to help bring your data to another level and you're going to be able to tell better stories because the data is much more digestible and easier to look at versus just a spreadsheet with data 50 cells across and 50 cells down, and I need to try to pinpoint by color, what worked and what didn't.
And it's a much easier way to automate things as well with all the automations coming in from GA4 and all the other Google products. You're able to bring this in and not have to worry about updating it every month. You can just come in here at the 1st of the month, every month, and the data is going to be updated because your date ranges sent to previous month.
It's also super interactive as well. So if we go back to my last example quickly, I could come into any of these tables, and then the whole thing would change. If I just wanted to see Visit Portland, for example as our campaign name, I could click ‘visit’ in my source, my media, my content, my term would all change based on that campaign.
It's very interactive as well. If you want to build a report that's high level for the people you're answering to, but you also want to drill deeper for yourself, that's where Looker Studio can come into play for you. So just going through again, this works with Ecom, this works with SEO. You can use Supermetrics or PowerMyAnalytics, those are a couple tools where you can connect your Facebook, your Instagram, your Pinterest, your MailChimp, etc. They've got a bunch of plugins for it. But if you were looking from a free perspective, all the Google products are free to pull into Looker Studio.
And just like that, almost at the top of our hour we did it. I was able to get through not all the letters, but most of the letters.
So quickly, I haven't looked, there might be questions or haven't been but I do just want to quickly plug Izzy's webinar here. It's coming up on February 12th, go ahead and scan that QR code, it will take you right to the signup page for her webinar about Cooking Up Successful Meta Ads.