356: The Right Way To Setup Your Website Analytics With Chris Mercer

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You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today, I my friend Chris Mercer on the show, and Chris is the founder of MeasurementMarketing.io, and he’s a master of website analytics. Now, this topic isn’t sexy, but I do know that many businesses are doing it wrong, and today Chris is gonna teach us the right way to collect stats for an online store. But before I begin, I wanna thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider

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that I use for ecommerce and it is crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10x bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for ecommerce and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

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I also want to thank Klaviyo who is also a sponsor of show. Now if you’re working around the clock to build the business you’ve always imagined, you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business. Now do you ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies. Well they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers needs change. Now these companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their information,

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and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now, Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing to any business, the relationship between you and your customer and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. Now, to learn more about how Klaviyo can help you with your own growth, visit klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. And finally, I want to mention a brand new podcast that I recently released with my partner, Tony.

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And unlike this podcast where I interviewed successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

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Today I have got my friend Chris Mercer on the show. And Chris is someone who I met at social media marketing world where we both spoke and I was really impressed by his talk. Now Chris is the founder of measurementmarketing.io and he specializes in website analytics. Now analytics may not sound like the sexiest of topics, but I do know for a fact that most people are doing it wrong. Most people don’t know how to use Google analytics and most shop owners have no idea what metrics to focus on in their reports. So today,

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I asked Chris to teach us the right way to gather and analyze your data for your e-commerce store. And he promised to make it sexy at the same time. with that, welcome to show, Chris. How are doing today? I will do my best, man. See, appreciate you having me. And you know what? One day you will start calling me Mercer as all my friends do. I can’t, you know, it’s yeah, maybe once we’re tighter, I’ll call you Mercer. How’s that? Done. It’s a deal. We haven’t hung out enough yet. Then you can call me too. There you go. There you go. Looking forward to it. So Chris, I,

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Mercer, I’ll call you Mercer here in this podcast. How does one decide to make a living teaching measurement and marketing? Like what’s your background? The origin story. Yes. Oh yeah. So the way we started, I actually started teaching people how to develop WordPress sites with a, just a membership site that showed people how to use WordPress. That led into very quickly, as you might imagine people saying, Hey, this is a lot of work. How much for you to build sites? So I started building sites and you building a little agency that that did that. We wanted to differentiate ourselves because everybody was doing that.

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So we said, oh, we’re gonna do websites, but then we’ll help you optimize those websites, right? Make them perform better. So in order to optimize something, you must first measure something. And that’s where we started learning Google Analytics because we thought that’s what everybody else was doing. So we learned Google Analytics really well and then started, know, experimenting with other tools. We started showing clients of ours like, oh, here’s what your goal is in Google Analytics. And what was funny is really quickly.

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the client conversations changed from, let’s talk about the split test and what the website looks like to, okay, go back to the analytics thing and show me where the goals are again. And how do I pull this information? Oh, you can do that. I you could track a button click. And it was like all this stuff. And then we would start getting referrals from our clients, sending us other people who wanted to talk about not websites, because they had website development, but they didn’t have measurement. And so that’s when we realized as a company, okay, we’re going to pivot into helping people understand these tools.

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because there’s just a lot of misconceptions with them that make things a little more complicated than they need to be. So let’s say I have an e-commerce store. I know for a fact, so I teach a class on e-commerce, and I know for a fact that people just open up their analytics and they look at how many visits they have, and that’s pretty much it, right? Right, right. So what should people be looking at? What needs to be set up, actually? Set up is probably the hardest part. It is, because it’s such a great point, because that’s the part that is the fastest thing that is skipped over.

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because there’s a misconception that when you put the code on your pages or when you turn on that Shopify integration or whatever the thing is that lights up Google Analytics, that that is the setup, but that’s not that literally just turning it on. Then you have to actually set it up to get some real usefulness out of it. And that’s where, you know, in the terms of Google Analytics, you would do things like creating. They have the thing called views back there where you can do multiple views and you see different, different, uh, you know, e-commerce settings and all of that stuff. You have to get your goals set up.

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and you basically tell Google Analytics what you want it to be able to report back for you. All so let’s start from the beginning here. So I started a Shopify store and I’ve enabled e-commerce analytics and everything is set up so that Shopify can tell me what people have bought and when people have made a purchase and track all the revenue and that sort of thing. What else needs to be set up? Is there like a list you can provide us? You know what? I am, but I’m gonna give you a formula if I had to think about it. Okay.

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The letters to write down, we always call this QIA, but it’s Q-I-A. And this is the first thing that everybody should be doing. First thing is you go, what questions am I wanting to get answers to? Questions about my store. So questions, for example, might be how many people are purchasing, right? How many transactions am I making? What’s the average dollars per transaction? How many people are seeing my product detail pages? How many people are starting to check out? How many of those people?

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don’t check out, right? Those are examples of questions where you’re just trying to figure out is the site working like it’s supposed to, right? So write down all these questions. Next to those, kind think this in three different columns. The first question, first column is all the questions you want to know. In the beginning, don’t worry about right questions or wrong questions, just any question. You will get better at this. It’s a skill. Like you build a muscle in the gym and you don’t get a big muscle right away after a couple of reps, you got to do that consistently. Same thing with this. So write down

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any question that comes to mind, there are no bad ones. So what if my question is, why aren’t people buying? Perfectly, perfectly fine question to ask. Okay, perfectly fine. Write it down. Write down all questions, right? Next to that, there’s another column, that column is going to be the I column. So QIA, the I stands for information. And here you’re going, okay, what information do I need to be able to measure, right, to collect, to be able to answer that question? So if we go back to the example of, oh, well, how many transactions, one of how many

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many sales I’m making per day, the obvious answer is, okay, I need to be able to measure the number of transactions that are coming. If I need to know the average dollars per cart or how much I’m selling per transaction, I need to know my total revenue that I’m making that day and then how many sales I had that day and I can divide those two out to figure out that answer. So the information is kind of like the how I’m going to get my answer is what you’re doing, but it’s always the behavior, the thing that you’re trying to measure for. So if you go back to your question, you said, okay, well, why aren’t people buying?

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what information would you need to collect in order to do that? And at a certain point you might go like, I’m not sure what I would need. At that point, that’s okay. Leave that question off to the side right now. Go answer the ones you do know how to do first, right? Because that one, what’ll happen is you’re just not quite ready for it yet. It’s kind of like building a house with a foundation. have the foundation first, then you put up the walls, then you do the drywall, right? That sort of concept is what’ll happen with these questions. Because not all questions can be answered immediately.

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because you might need to do some a little bit of homework, right? And and some, understanding more of the foundational levels of how your store operates before you can answer the more advanced questions like that. Does that make sense? Yeah. So given that, mean, that, that’s like the million dollar question I asked, right? How do you, how do you get to that point? So let’s continue the process. So we have the question, we have the information, and then this is the most important part of this Kia process, this QIA model. You have your question, you have your information, you have action. What

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action will I take based upon the answer I get? And all of this happens before you dive into analytics, before you go into your store, before you take it, you’re just doing this on a piece of paper, a whiteboard spreadsheet, notes, docs, whatever, QIA, question information action. So let’s go back to that transaction. Could we say, okay, I’m gonna have the X amount of transactions coming through. I need to know if I’m, or what my number of transactions are. I’m gonna be able to measure that because I’m recording number of transactions through e-commerce or whatever else it is.

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the actions I will take if it’s less than 10 sales a day, I’m going to do this. If it’s more than 10 sales a day, I’m going to do that. And it’s always in that format where there is a number associated to it, some sort of action that’s associated to that number. Okay. So given our store, how do you come up with that number? I guess let’s say typically on average, I get three orders per day or let’s let’s use round numbers, 10, 10 orders per day. So would that number be 10 then? Yeah, exactly. Right. Keep it simple, right?

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Now, as you decide and we’ll kind of walk through the process to get to like your million dollar question. As we decide, we’re like, okay, 10 a day. If it’s less than 10 a day, I’m going to look at my traffic sources and figure out if there’s a particular traffic source that’s not working properly. Maybe my Facebook campaign that I thought was going to bring in those sales didn’t bring in the sales. Maybe my email didn’t go out like I thought it was supposed to go out that morning. It didn’t go out. Right. That sort of stuff. And we look back and we go, okay, here’s why that didn’t happen.

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Now I’m going to go take a different action, you know, and to make it happen tomorrow. So it’ll be there. Right. Now, eventually you get to a point where you say, okay, 10, we’re hitting 10. Cool. Now I know we can hit 10. I know that’s sort of our baseline, our benchmark to your point, the average of what you can expect. Now I want it to be 12 or 13 or 14. And the reason it’s going to be 12, 13 or 14 is because I brought on a new affiliate and they’re going to mail for me, or I have this new traffic source that we’re opening up with Google ads and we’re going to send Google ads. Google ads is going to kick in a few sales. And so.

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Now what’s starting to happen is, and remember you’re doing this before you really look at everything, you’re of planning out in your head. It’s like a role play. Right. But you’re understanding how you’re going to use your Google Analytics and how you’re going to use any analytics platform, Google Analytics or otherwise could be just the reports in your e-commerce platform. But now you understand how to start using them. have context now, they have usefulness. So instead of just jumping into them and kind of like seeing what you can see, which is what a lot of people do initially.

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which is what we call going into analytics unarmed, right? Because it’s just going to batch you around, right? And so you’re going to be frustrated and overwhelmed and be like, okay, I’ll come back to this in a few years. But if you go in with a question, right? You go in armed with a question with this KIA model. You have your question, you know the information that you’re looking for to get the answer. You even know what actions you’re going to take based upon the answers that the platform gives you. It’s a lot easier to use the platforms. And pretty soon, if you can imagine doing that process with transactions, you can imagine doing that process with average order volume.

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Okay, well, my average cart value should be, you hundred bucks. Well, now we just did an order bump. I want it to be 125 bucks. And I want to make sure the upsells that we just put in place, so the related products, which is that I just added should make it so it’s $125. If it’s not, I’m gonna go back and see if that widget’s working. If it is, then I’m gonna, you know, figure out some maybe other related products that might be higher ticket that I can do to make it even go and hire, right? And you just keep rinse and repeat this whole process. When you keep doing that,

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Think about that question. Imagine if you’ve done that for a week or two even, right? Just on a consistent basis for a week or two. Now, when you ask that question of what do I do? Like, why aren’t people buying? You already kind of know that answer because you did all the bricks, right? So that question of like, why aren’t people buying? It’s kind of like looking at the wall or the whole house and like, why isn’t it working? But because you’re in these other questions, right? These questions that are sort of below that question, underneath that question, you’ll know why. Cause you’ll say, oh, that

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that related widgets thing didn’t work or the related products thing didn’t work or the email didn’t go out or the ads, Google ads campaign that we thought was going to do this, didn’t do that. You’re going know exactly what it was that was causing. I want to bring this up real quick. I was going to save this for later, but these days, you know, people might take multiple paths to a purchase. Like they might click on a Facebook ad and then later on kick on a Google ad and then maybe find you via search before making a purchase. How do you distribute all the credit?

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for all those things like you mentioned before, like what if Facebook ads aren’t converting as much for that given week, right? So how does the attribution work? So I’m gonna go in a little bit in marketing heresy. Okay. But I think honestly, I’m just a truth teller when it comes to this. And the short answer is you can’t. So stop trying. Because everybody has this multi-touch attribution question, right? But if you think back and if you Google,

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If you watch videos from the 1840s, like everyone’s been asking this question for a long, long, long, long time, which implies it does not have an answer. Right. No one’s figured this thing out because it’s not able to be figured out. And the reason that it’s not able to be figured out, right. And don’t get me wrong. There was multi-touch attribution models where I could say, Oh, Facebook is first touch. They get all the credit or Facebook is last touch. So they only get the credit if they’re the last traffic source before the thing.

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problem is time. so if Facebook, if I click on your ad on Monday, and then I become a lead on Wednesday from after doing a Google search and coming to your site, and then on Friday, the email closes the deal, right? Was it Facebook that caused that direct purchase? Right? It’s not, it’s the email that caused the purchase, right? Whatever that messaging was. Did Facebook have something to play in it? Absolutely.

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But if Facebook’s job, and this is where you have to get brutal with your ads, if Facebook’s job was to sell me on that day, it did not do a good job, right? It didn’t do a good job. Just like if you think about it when you manage it, if you have a sales team, if you have three different salespeople, and I’ve got Facebook as a salesperson, I have Google ads as a salesperson, and I’ve got email as a salesperson, if email’s constantly closing the deal, and I’m measuring purely for revenue.

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say and then and then we’ll back it up in a little bit because there is there is other place for these sales these other traffic sources but let’s pretend we’re just judging against revenue if email is closing the deal left and right do i pay facebook commission right as a salesperson would that be well i well i also talk to them that’s what would happen and as i say there’s no sales manager in the world that would pay them on that because like no you didn’t you didn’t close the sale your job was to close the sale and this is the key point if that was the job to close the sale there are campaigns and this is this is how

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how we recommend you do it. You definitely need to have multiple touches, right? The whole sexy term is now omnichannel. So you wanna have different traffic sources. You need to have different touch points of different ways that somebody can come and find your store, your presence online. You have to have that, right? Email and Google ads and Facebook and Google organic and everything else that’s out there. So now that we know we need to have that, but not everything.

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in reality. And I know this is hard to think about because everyone’s like, I want to get the sale, I want to get the sale. And you’re right, you want to make sure your store is making sales. But not every interaction with a customer has to be a request to buy something right this second. Sure, right? Not every interaction has to be that. So for example, if you’re doing content marketing and your sort of customer journey for your store might be, oh, we sent them to our blog, which educates them about how to get this product solved, this product, but with natural ingredients and why natural ingredients are so important. And then it’s sort of

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warms them up to the idea that we’ve already done all the hard work in our product formulation. And so then they can buy the thing that they want to buy. And maybe some of them do. But that Facebook ad, its job is not really to sell the product. Its job is to get them exposed to the brand. And that’s how you judge it. And you don’t say like, yes, it might accidentally sell some at the same time. And that’s awesome. But that’s not the point of it. The point of it is to get people to be aware of whatever the product or service is. Maybe, right? Again, depends upon your customer journey.

17:07
But when you’re trying to measure the effectiveness of that though, how’s that done? Because you think about it in terms of a sales pipeline. when, whenever you’re managing a sales team and I always go back to the, managing a sales team, cause that’s my, my experience kind of in corporate world is that for sure. Managing sales teams and getting performance out of sales teams. So the way that you do that is you look at the pipeline and the pipeline is literally just what some people call sales pedal. All people will call it customer journey. It’s the same thing, right? How many phone calls are made? How many appointments are set? How many of those?

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do you show up to? How many of those do you ask? How many are qualified? And how many of those buy, right? It’s just the general idea of that pipeline, of those stages of the journey. So what you do is you measure Facebook for you and you create ads for specific stages of the journey. And the reason we do this is because there’s less time involved. So it’s easier to measure. Less time has passed between the thing that we’re trying, the result we’re trying to get from that ad and them actually interacting with the ad. So for example, if I wanted to measure Facebook,

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and say, okay, I want Facebook to send to a blog post to educate somebody about my content. That’s my conversion. That’s what I’m trying to get it to. And yes, some people will buy and that’s fine, but I just need people aware first, right? And to sort of mirror that with a sales management, it might be like, I got to get appointment dials. I need you to pick up the phone and set appointments. That’s what I need you to do, right? Set those appointments. And that’s what the job is. So Facebook is like, cool, set appointments. I’m going to do that. That’s all it does. Now, if somebody on that appointment says, hey, listen, I don’t need you to show up. I just want to buy your stuff right now.

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awesome, right? But that’s not the point of Facebook. Facebook is to set appointments. That’s what it does. And that’s how I measure it, right? Against that. Then maybe again, Google ads are organic, whatever else, you know, gets them to, to, you know, show up to the ad or show up to the appointments, so to speak. And then email closes the deal, right? Whatever these, these things are, will measure those traffic sources against, are they doing these specific things? Now, remember, I’m not saying just Facebook is setting appointments. I’m saying this set of Facebook ads sets appointments. Then there’s another set of Facebook ads.

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that can get people to come back to the store or to see a product detail page or something. You actually get them to buy. Maybe there’s another set of ads that then comes back and says, hey, listen, you didn’t buy. You had information in the checkout. So why not purchase today? Here’s a 10 % off coupon. So you can use Facebook at all these different stages, but you should also use all the traffic sources at those different stages. So let me just summarize what you just said. So you are trying to pick the shortest time frame.

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because that provides the most accurate measurement. you’re breaking down each of your different campaigns into specific purposes. So that Facebook campaign for eyeballs onto your content, that’s a very quick and easy way to measure that. And so you should have metrics of conversion just for that little thing. Whereas a separate campaign will be responsible for maybe getting leads or getting conversions. Exactly Exactly right. So you’re shortening the timeframe. That’s exactly right. So it’s easier to measure, which makes it more useful because there’s less time.

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Right? Exactly right. And remember, you’re not just doing Facebook to try to, you know, get, let’s say to the content pages or to become a lead. Google is also trying to do that. Organic is also trying to do that. Your, you know, email or whatever is trying to do that. You have all the other traffic sources trying to do that. But so what starts happening is you start to realize when you’re, you’re, because it’s easy to measure, you can now truly compare traffic sources and say, what’s the best at getting people to become leads? What’s the best at getting people to become aware of us in the first place? What’s the best at getting people to actually

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close and purchase things or to repurchase things or to share our stuff on social media or whatever the thing is you’re trying to get done. At that point, then you can take a step back and you’ll see the entire story start to unfold of like, well actually it turns out Google organic is where they are really aware of us the most. We should keep doing SEO because that gets people to be aware, puts them in our pipeline. From there, it’s a combination of Google Ads and Facebook that really gets them to become a lead. Roughly from what we can sell for every 100 people that are becoming aware of us,

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let’s say 30 % become leads, right? And then you can start to say, okay, well, then of those email, once they’re leads, email is really what’s responsible for closing the deal. So email closes 10 % of those. And now you can start to have a kind of a forecast of how your store operates. you will spell out, again, this is a little bit of practice to get there, but this is sort of the Holy grail where you can start to say, hey, next week, I’m gonna have a hundred people come into my store. Of those 30 of them are gonna add to cart of those.

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10 of them are going to complete a checkout for at least 100 bucks a piece. And that’s how I’m to make X amount of dollars next week. And you’ll be able to measure against it to see if you were right. Did the store operate the way it was supposed to operate? And that’s sort of where, but you level up to that as you get these sort of beginning stages down of numbers.

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If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

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Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

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And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a $100 discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show.

22:51
But at a higher level, something needs to put it all together, right? So for example, let’s say I gather all these leads super cheap for one of my campaigns, but those leads don’t convert to sales. So whose fault is it? Is it the second stage to the conversion or the types of leads that I’m getting? It could be either. It depends how, again, going, think about it, like get out of it. If you can, the best way that I have found it to answer these questions is get out of the digital world because people make up things that don’t exist in the real world, but they, for some reason,

23:19
They think they work in digital world. They never do. It has to work in the offline world too. So pulled out in the offline world and say, okay, I’ve got a sales person who’s getting a lot of appointments set, but none of these appointments are closing. Okay. Is it because the sales person is getting the appointment set saying, no, no, there’s never going to be anybody that shows up for the appointments. So don’t worry about it. You can just set it up because I get paid a quarter per appointment. Right. Meaning they’re setting up the expectation wrong. Right. Or is it, they’re just faking it. Right.

23:49
AKA bot traffic, right? There’s nothing real there, right? Or is it they’re targeting people who are totally happy to feel like appointments, love the product, just don’t have any money, so it’s targeting, right? It could be any of those, but you would test it. And that’s what you would say, yeah, okay, I’m getting a lot of appointments. I’m not moving appointments into shown appointments, right? Or sales or whatever it is. So I’m getting a lot of leads, going back to digital marketing. I’m getting a lot of leads, but I’m not getting enough of those leads to convert. It’s either.

24:17
Because those people coming in as leads are just not our target audience, but they were willing to take our free stuff, right? Or whatever the thing was that you got to become a lead for. Or there was an expectation that wasn’t matched, right? They were coming in for one thing, but not, something didn’t get fulfilled in that journey. So they didn’t naturally progress forward. And that’s, it’s going to be one of those two things. That’s what I would so what you’re trying to say here, I think, is if the data indicates that this one step is in converting, then that A step in your QIA framework,

24:47
is where you run additional tests to find out what the heck’s going on. Yeah. Cause I would say, if we don’t convert, let’s say I let’s think of opt-in, right? Just, just getting leads, right? Where I want to say an average opt-in rate is let’s say for cold traffic, 25 to 35 % of the people that come to the page should opt in for whatever the thing is, right? That’s generally speaking, what it’s going to be. If it’s less than 25%, I go back to the ad and say, is the ad setting the expectation? So when they come to that opt-in page,

25:15
they are ready to opt in or they’re at least intrigued, right? So for example, if that ad says, hey, get 10 % off during our summer sale, click here to get your coupon. And it comes to that page and that thing says, winter sale going on now, there’s a disconnect, right? And that’s gonna hurt my opt-in rates, because it did not match the expectation. So I would go back to the ad and that would change it, or I would change the landing page to make sure it better matches the ad. Because that expectation, that’s something we call the expectation engine.

25:43
at measurementmarketing.io, we’re always like, you gotta have the expectation engine. The expectation that’s set by step A has to be met by step B. And then it in turn sets the expectation for the next step. And if something’s not working, there’s just not a natural progression that you would expect to be there, it’s probably because the expectation is off somewhere and there’s a mismatch. And when you look at your customer journey through that lens, you see sometimes

26:10
laringly obvious things. And I’ll give you an example of that. We expect roughly 10 % of the people that come to one of our landers, and we’re more of a direct response model in our courses, right? So people come to the membership page and then of those, X amount go to cart. We expect 10 % of the people roughly to go from the offer page to the cart page. We expect roughly 35 % of those people to make it through and actually purchase, okay?

26:37
So 10 % and 35 % are the numbers that I judge that journey on. That’s what I expect to happen. So one day we’re making changes and, you know, thinking we’re trying to improve things as everybody should do, as good marketers would do. And we see the numbers, we measure the numbers. And again, we’re not looking at the pages, we’re just looking at, I’m looking at the numbers. And I see that there is a drop in carts, the people that were completing the cart. So it goes from, say 35 % down to, it was something really low, like 10 % of the people making it through.

27:06
which means 90 % are abandoning. Like that was really high. like, okay, this is, looked at the number instantly. I’m like, this is not what we expect. It’s certainly not how this is supposed to be working. Something’s off. So I go to the previous step. And what I see is instead of 10 % of the people that are going from the offer page to the cart page, it’s something like 30 % of the people that are going from the offer page to the cart page, but a whole lot less of those are completing the purchase, right? So I look at this and I say, okay.

27:36
There are people, so what’s happening in a customer journey, I can look at this and tell you the story just by the numbers. What’s happening is the offer page is not quite doing its job. It is sending people to the cart before they are ready to purchase. So they’re not coming to the cart to purchase. They’re coming to the cart for some other reason, because there’s just too many of them doing it. That’s above that number. So there’s too many people going to the cart. They’re coming there a little premature. And because of that, they’re not purchasing.

28:05
Obviously, because they’re not coming with the intent to purchase to the cart as you would expect. Right. So we go to the offer page. Somebody forgot to put the price on the page on the button. So, of course, that’s what was happening. People were going by now, by now, go and get started. Get started. You click on get started because you can’t figure out how much it is until you go to the cart. Then the cart says, oh, it’s, you know, 100 bucks a month, whatever. Then they go, OK. And they would loop back to the sales page to figure out, OK, now that I know how much it is, how much, you know, how do I do this? And then we instantly saw that in the numbers.

28:34
which led us to look at the offer page with that in mind. How is this offer page? It wasn’t like, how do we improve things? That wasn’t the general, we were asking a very specific question, go back to Kia now, right? We went through this process, we said, okay, if this is lower, the action is we’re gonna go to the offer page and figure out how is the offer page setting the expectations so poorly that they have to go to the cart page to find out something else that the offer page isn’t providing? What could that be? We look, oh, price.

29:03
And was a five minute fix. And then all the numbers come back in line. 10 % go to the cart. 35 % of those complete. We net out more buyers that way. And then we can predictably scale our traffic now because we know how our machinery works. I think in the example that you just gave though, the purchases is what matters. I’m, I’m guessing that the purchases weren’t affected as much by this change, right? Important. What I said at the end, exactly net net, had more purchases doing it that way.

29:31
Right. If it was the other way, you could make a use case for that. But, know, because maybe, maybe that’s the thing is like, but at that point, if I wanted to net that out, I would say, okay, well, that means the cart has to understand and be designed to operate in a way where it realizes there are two types of people coming to this car page. One, people ready to buy at whatever cost because they don’t care. Or maybe they already know the price because they’d been to the car previously. Two, people who are seeing the car for the first time because they’re trying to figure out the price.

30:00
So now the cart has to both sell again, resell, right? And collect payment. So I would design the cart differently to do that. But our cart wasn’t designed to do that. It was designed with the expectation that the, the offer page is doing its job. It’s promoting the value. People understand what the next steps are. They understand what they’re about to do. They know how much it is. They know all that stuff. And now it’s just, let’s facilitate payment and go to the checkout stage, right? Just like you would in an offline store where it’s okay, I’m ready to purchase. And I walk up.

30:29
It makes it harder to measure when you have that one page serving multiple functions to right. 100 % 100 % So Chris, I know you’ve worked with a lot of ecommerce stores. What I’m trying to get out now is what are some of the common questions that you feel like ecommerce stores should be asking? And then how do you set things up initially for like a brand new store? So I’ll give you again, I’ll give you another formula. I frameworks are important. People try to get and we’ll go into some specific specific questions too. But the tendency is

30:59
Because you can Google like, you know, questions every ecommerce store should be asking. You’ll see millions of blog posts that are like seven questions every 12 reports, every ecommerce stores. heard those by the way. Yeah, yeah. Horrible. It’s horrible. Partially because mostly because those all of that stuff was designed by somebody else to answer their questions, right? Not necessarily yours. So that’s why I’m a big believer in frameworks. You have to get your hands in the business and you have to think about your stuff, not copycat somebody else’s.

31:28
But the way to do that, you at the same time, you don’t want to be like left alone in the frigid cold to try to figure it out on your own. So the way to get from point A to point B there is you a framework. So the framework for this is very simple. You need to ask questions about what results you’re getting. And then this is the most important one. You need to then ask questions about how you’re getting those results. And that’s how you come up with your questions. And they will be very basic in the beginning. And that’s okay. So the basic question might be like, how much am I selling?

31:58
Okay, great. How many sales am I making? And then it’s how I’m making those sales. Well, X amount of people are going to the checkout and of those X amount actually make it through the checkout. Well, how are they getting to the checkout? Well, X amount of people are seeing the product detail pages or clicking at the card. Well, how are they clicking the card? X amount of people seeing product detail pages. And you start to see a story unfold that is that sales pipeline, that is that customer journey of how your store operates. And at that point, that’s where you can, you

32:26
go and look at it and say, well, based upon my store, I’m happy with this number and I’m happy with how it’s operating. Now it’s, I got to scale traffic, get more people into the store. If you’re not happy with how it’s operating and you think there’s a step that needs some help, like maybe again, the lead step or whatever you have, if it’s part of your customer journey, if less than 25 % of people are becoming leads, you might say, okay, well, I’m going to focus on that step a little bit before we start scaling out traffic, you know? And then you can move into the next thing. But it’s always led by that results and how.

32:55
framework. You gotta know what your results are. You gotta know how you’re getting those results. How does one know whether they’re doing well or not? That’s a really great question. And it’s a lot easier in you have to essentially you compare yourself to what benchmarks are from other businesses. But the e-commerce can be a little tricky though. So specifically we have there’s stores that are very kind of like a mono product where it’s like we sell rings, for example, and they have 45 different variations of rings.

33:25
but it’s just rings that they sell. And they’ve got lots of different variations of that. They’re going to have very different numbers than somebody who is like pet supplies. And they sell like three different dog collars and two different, you know, styles of dog treats and something else, because there’s more variety in those products. And so the browsing behavior is going to be different. But that said, when you, when you’re, when you’re trying to figure out what your numbers are, the first thing you will do is just measure what you’ve got, right? Figure out what you’ve got. If you

33:51
happen to have a network or group or something like that with a store that’s similar to yours, I think it’s worth benchmarking that a little bit. But benchmark everything. Don’t just say, their product detail pages were 47 % converting and mine were only 10 % because you might find there’s 47 % converts, but only 2 % of the people buy. So you have to look at the entire thing. And that’s where a lot of people don’t do that. People will come up to me and say, oh, well, was that a mastermind or was that a group?

34:18
know, such and such said their checkout, they get 80 % of the people to check out. I’m like, I’m positive they do that because it’s returning visitors are coming with a coup. There’s some reason for that because that’s way obnoxiously high, right? And it probably probably isn’t scaling because the number tells me that. So that’s me because I’ve been doing this for so long. I can just tell. But somebody else would look at their checkout doing 40 % and feel bad. Like they’re not doing a good job, but they’re doing a great job, right? And you can, and you can tweak it. So that’s why you have to look at

34:47
everything in a system. And so yes, I think it’s useful to kind of look at what other stores are. But at the end of the day, that’ll just give you an idea of everything. And to be honest, most stores don’t know all those numbers, right? So it’s kind of hard to benchmark against those. So get your own, and then sort of, I would judge it for yourself in the beginning, especially if you don’t have a group, which a lot of people may not, right? Start with where you are. I do know that there are some basic benchmarks of, you’ll say, roughly speaking, at the end of the day, you say,

35:16
1 to 3 % will close. That’s kind of where the overall is. So however that customer journey is, I would expect 1 to 3 % ish to close if it’s less than 1%. There’s something in the customer journey that’s not quite working well. And that’s where I would look at my numbers and say, okay, well, there’s not a lot people seeing product detail pages. Does that make sense for me? Maybe it does. If you have a million variations of the one thing, that’s okay. But maybe that’s something where you’re like, hmm, I need to…

35:41
Take out some these product detail pages. Maybe I don’t need all these variations. I want just 10 variations instead of 50 variations. That’ll give me more variations because there’s less to browse and get confused on, right? But you’ll see that sort of stuff in the numbers. That’s what I mean, but you have to get your hands dirty. There’s not gonna be a simple 30 second solution to create a million dollar company. That never exists. But you do have to understand the results that you’re getting and how you’re getting the results. And to your point, when you talked about earlier, like at the end of the day, what really matters is sales and you’re right.

36:09
That’s where I judge that overall conversion rate. might say, okay, if I’m getting one to 3%, it’s probably working the way I need it to. I just need to understand how it’s working, kind of what we call trust but verify, but TBV, what that process is and is it working in the way that I expect it to? And again, if it is, now I scale traffic. If it’s not, then I tweak the gears a little bit and try to adjust the pages or the ads or whatever else to get the step operating the way I want it to, then I scale traffic.

36:36
I like what you’re saying here. So with my store, I always think of each page having a single action associated with it. So for example, like a product page, I’m looking at the add to cart, right? On the home page, I’m looking at a product view, and then from add to cart, I’m looking at checkout. So what you’re saying here is try to make the conversion as tight as possible, do the measurements, and then just make the adjustments accordingly on a micro level. And the macro level should just kind of work out.

37:03
That’s exactly right. And it’s eerily scary how oftentimes it does because people question all the time, like, really? It’s you do the numbers and it happens all the time. So but that’s exactly right. Your product detail page, depending upon the format, obviously, but most cases, it’s add to cart is the next step. It cannot sell anything because you cannot give it a credit card. Right. So you click on add to cart. That’s what its job is to do. Everything that it’s there for is to get you to add to cart. At that point, your site has to get them into checkout.

37:32
And at that point, checkouts got to facilitate the process. And that’s exactly, that’s how you judge them. You don’t say, oh, my product detail pages aren’t selling anything because again, they can’t sell. They can influence for sure, but they signal that they’re doing their job by those add to cards. And to your point, it’s a lot easier to measure for that. Right. And ultimately, as you get really good at this, you can start measuring. And again, I do not, you’re not going to, no one starts here, right? But eventually just let you know what’s possible in the world of measurement. You can go to the product detail page and say, Hey,

38:02
know, your job is to get at the cards, but I’m noticing you’re not getting at the cards. What’s going on in my head? And I’m gonna use this example a lot, because this is literally what I do in my head. I treat it like a salesperson that I’m trying to coach, right? Like, okay, what exactly you telling people? Right? And I look, and I’ll, I’ll do this through measurement. And what I’ll do is on this page, I’ll look at it and it’ll tell me, well, no one’s actually looking at the images. No one’s looking at reviews. No one’s scrolling down to get into the details of the product.

38:31
That’s why add to cart’s not happening. In fact, they’re only here for about five seconds and then they leave. And I go, okay. Now I have some specific information that leads me to take very specific actions. Cause I got people coming to this page who are not ready to interact where this page is for some reason, not meeting the expectation, right? Could be the wrong product, could be the headlines off or something like that, that I might want to change. Now, if the page says, well, I got people looking at the pages, they’re…

38:57
They’re looking at the images, they’re checking out reviews, they’re spending like three minutes on reviews, they’re scrolling down, but they’re still not clicking on add to cart. Now I’m looking at the design of the page going, am I accidentally hiding this add to cart button? Oh, look, all my, and I’ve seen this on carts, all there’s like four different buttons and they’re all red and they all do different stuff, right? It’s just hard to figure out where the add to cart is. And we’re making people think too hard. So maybe we change the design a little bit because clearly they’re trying, they’re interacting with the page. They’re just not making it to the next step. So I’m going to help build that bridge again.

39:27
very completely different actions based on the same problem of add to cart’s not happening, but because you measure and you can see the behaviors that are happening on the page, you can take those different actions now. That’s why measurement is so important. So let’s take a step back here and talk about setup here. So we talked about a lot of things. So let’s even take the product page to the add to cart. Out of the box, do you need to do anything to measure the things that you might want to measure? So out of the box, you turn on your,

39:56
The way I’m gonna describe this is the measurement journey, right? It’s how we teach it over at Measure Market IO. It’s all about the measurement journey. When you first start out, and this is important, this is incredibly important. When you first start out, you don’t know anything. You don’t know the numbers. If you do know some numbers, you probably don’t trust the numbers all that much, because you’re not quite sure what anything means or how to use anything. The first job that you have is light things up, right? It’s what we call walking around in the cave. You just bounce around in the cave and you just wanna get a flashlight and get the heck out. That’s your job, light stuff up.

40:24
And if that’s where you are right now, where you don’t have analytics turned on or you have it turned on, but you haven’t opened it in a year and a half, just start getting used to it. That’s it. Start getting used to it. Light things up. After that, you will get into what we call the valley of visibility, where you start to interact with these reports a little bit. You start to see some things a little bit. And then at that point, you level up the implementation. That’s when you make it better. So at that point is where you’re going, Oh, I need to set up some goals in Google Analytics. I need to measure for clicks of add to cart.

40:53
because maybe that’s not being measured right now, right? Some platforms will automatically report something like that, some won’t. So, you know, that’s one of those things where you go, okay, now I have clicks being measured that I can see the add to cart. Cause maybe that was one of those key questions you asked, like how many people are adding, you know, clicking on add to cart, the information you need clicks on that button, but you don’t have it. So you have to raise your implementation level up and you get better at those skills. And then after that, maybe it’s, you know, average card or measuring the value of a customer over a certain period of days. And you constantly sort of,

41:23
you know, change the implementation so that it can answer the questions, the bigger questions that you will ask. If you ask a really big question in the beginning that you cannot get the answer to, it’s just because your implementation skills aren’t there yet. And that’s okay. Just leave that there for now. You’ll come back to it, but answer easier questions, because the easier questions to answer build upon that. So back to your QIA framework, what if you don’t even know what…

41:48
questions to ask, like you can’t get granular. What are some of the common ones that you’ve experienced working with the e-commerce people that you work with? So again, I’d say don’t overcomplicate it because the tendency is there is such a thing as a right question to ask and there’s not. So you start with results and how and everybody can do this. What’s an obvious one? It’s how many sales, how many transactions? Start with the basics. It really is. Like it is that simple. You start with the basics and you go.

42:12
you know, what are the results I’m looking for? It’s this, how many people are going, I want to know how that’s happening. Well, how many people go to the checkout? Okay, I need to write that down. How would I know they’re going to checkout? I wonder how many people are clicking on the add to cart button? Well, I’m not measuring that yet. Maybe I could, I don’t know how to right now, so that’s fine. I’ll put that on a someday maybe to-do list, but at least I can measure product detail views or collection page views if it’s like a Shopify site, because the URLs are all sort of structured the same way. that’s, and that’s, and you will naturally, if you just rinse and repeat that process, you will naturally get to that point. Now,

42:41
key metrics, right? That, that, cause that’s again, everybody wants to kind of shortcut it. The problem is when you give somebody the question, they just try to go out and get the answer, but they haven’t done the setup to get the answer. So they get frustrated. Cause like, I don’t know where to find that. So yes, you want to know transactions. You want to know average cart value, right? You need to, you need to know that stuff. I think it’s important to know the difference between the types of buyers that you’re targeting. That were new, it depends upon your business model, but people that are brand new to your brand.

43:10
versus the returning customers, right? And making sure like, hey, can we send another email to returning customers and just net out a whole lot more if we take care of the people who already buying from us versus going out and trying to constantly acquire new customers, right? That sort of model. So looking at that sort of stuff I think is important. But the big thing that I would suggest for everybody is that they sort of pencil out, here’s how they think their store should be working. And it’s what we call forecasting.

43:38
five pillars of sort of learning to measure market. The first one’s planning. That’s that key out process, right? Question, information, action. Then you do your build outs where you’re setting up the integrations and Google analytics or, you know, other tools like Google Tag Manager or something like that. Then you look at the reports to kind of get an idea of how things are operating. Then you start to forecast and you say, here’s how it should be working. In the beginning, everybody, there’s this huge, massive tendency that they have to be right. You do not have to be right in the beginning. In fact, I bet money you’re going to be wrong in the beginning.

44:07
that’s okay. You need to guess. And then what will happen is you’ll guess at how the store is working and you’ll be wrong. And that’s okay. Cause you’re going to have data. have information coming back saying here, well, now that you’re asking the question about how the store’s operating, here are the answers and you’re to get better at asking questions because you’re going to have now it’ll be based on real data. You’ll get better at making forecasts because it’ll be based on real information. And you’ll, and you’ll feel more like your hands are on the steering wheel finally, because you’ll, you’ll tell by the numbers how things are supposed to operate. And you can tell

44:37
what your actions are gonna be based upon the numbers coming back. It takes practice. It’s not a 30 second solution for sure. But it’s that idea of getting your hands in the business, so to speak, through the numbers that will help to guide all of those actions. Does that make sense? Yeah. So how often are you looking at your analytics? Constantly. mean, I look at it. So here’s how I do it. That’s a trite answer, I guess, like all the time.

45:01
But, but I do, I look, so I have like our marketing team. I have them look at our numbers. I look at my level every week. I will look at all of our funnels. So we track all of our different customer journeys. And I’ve got a thing that shows how many people were aware of that product. How many people engaged with that product journey? How many people actually completed the journey for however, what amount is right. But that is literally, as I’m telling you those numbers, it’s literally because I went, what are my results? How am getting my results? That’s how I came up with those, right? It’s results and how, and I do that across our

45:31
across our different product lines. Then I’ll work with my marketing team and I’ll have them go through and show me, okay, here are the traffic sources that we’re running. And then here’s what we expect. Here’s how we’re measuring this traffic source. So for example, for us, we have offsite brand awareness. So for example, you and I are doing this podcast right now. When this podcast goes live, we will send traffic to it because that makes people aware of our brand, but they’re not on our site, right? They’re on your site. So.

46:00
It’s offsite brand awareness. So we create, have campaigns that are measured by that, right? In that case, by the ad platform, right? Facebook tells us all the, they clicked on the ad to go offsite. Great. That’s how we measure it. And did that campaign do its job? It’s got to get X amount of people a week offsite brand aware. At that point, the audience then moves in through the conversation. There’s another set of ads that comes on and says, okay, now we need to get them on site brand aware, which is coming to the measurement marketing to IO pages, looking at our blog posts.

46:25
interacting with free content we have or something else, because that tells us they are engaging more with us as a brand. Now they’re onsite aware. Once they trigger that conversion, then Facebook adds Switch. And all the apps technically platform Switch, all the messages Switch. To now, it’s, OK, let’s go ahead and see if they’re interested enough in our brand to become a lead. So it might be like the free ToolWox membership or something along those lines that they’ll come through. So that’s the sort of process that

46:52
that we follow. what I’ll work with my marketing team is they will show me the numbers to show me what they’re hitting with that. And did it hit their expectations of how they thought that ad should perform looking at, you know, in our case, CPMs and, and cost per action, whatever the action is we’re trying to measure for. So that kind of gives you an example of how we’re doing it again. We’re, we’re a hundred percent more sophisticated than most people. So I don’t think you start here. We didn’t start here. When I looked at it, I might’ve looked at numbers once a week, cause that’s all I had. Didn’t have a lot of traffic. There wasn’t a whole lot of numbers to check.

47:20
Right? So you start with where you are, but, but what’ll happen, you will naturally evolve into other things. I can’t say if there’s, if there’s somebody looking for good dashboarding software, Google data studio is amazing, completely free. And we have lots of data reports that are built out to show us how our funnels perform so that our marketing people whose job it is to, you know, every day they will look at the numbers and say, okay, well, here’s what happened yesterday. Is that a blip? Cause it was just a weird traffic day or is that a new trend? there something that broke? Was there a change to the site that caused this number?

47:50
you know, if it’s not something that met expectations. And of course, if it is something that met expectations, the goal is always get more eyeballs, right? Let’s figure out how we get more people to do that. Let me ask you this, it seems like a lot some of this can be automated, right? So if there’s like a blip, for example, it seems like software would be able to detect that blip and tell you about it, right? So how much of your stuff is automated versus like you have to actually go in and look? Most of it is automated collection. So once we set up the collections, it’s automated. So

48:17
That’s automated, right? So I look at my reports, the reports are automated, they’re built. They are just there. So I have all of those, but the manual part of this is me going to the reports. And for me, I’m a little more comfortable with numbers than the average bear probably. So some of mine are spreadsheets, because I’m just comfortable in that format. But a lot of mine are dashboards that are just data studio dashboards that are literally cool little funnels that are highly graphical driven.

48:42
just show me, here’s how many people made it through and here’s what the percentages are. And they light up of red, yellow, green, if I’m hitting the mark or not at the different percentages that I want. So it’s like, going back to that journey, we talked about the offer page to the cart. Well, if we expect 10%, but it shows 30%, well, that will be lit up in red. Because it’s like, hey, pay attention to this, this is off. This is a little higher than we thought it should be. Let’s go look at that step and see if… And that’s the part that’s manual, is looking at the reports. But the actual collecting…

49:09
Once you set it up, it is automated. takes a little bit of time in the beginning, but it’s worth the investment for sure. It seems like it’s so you do this for a living. So I would imagine it takes a lot of time for someone like me who’s who has less of a smaller team. I just want to be alerted when something’s an anomaly, right? I don’t want to have to look at the report all the time. Is that that are you just used to looking at it or I, so yes. And I think

49:37
I would recommend that you get more involved with the numbers because you start to see trends and patterns that you wouldn’t otherwise see. You start to find other insights that you didn’t know to look for because you were exposed to that information. I would encourage multiple touch points with numbers, right? As opposed to, just bother me. Now, that said, it depends on the role in the company, right? As the investor in the company, if I’m in the investor role, do I need to be bugged every time a funnel isn’t performing properly? Nope, because that’s not my job.

50:06
But the marketing team sure does. They need to know all the time. So they’re in it a lot more than the investor role of these, right? So based upon the role that you have in the organization. So if your role really is like, man, I just send traffic, that’s all I do, then you just got to make sure that the traffic’s getting into the funnel, it’s going into the next step, and then it’s somebody else’s job to fix it. They are the ones that have to be in the numbers more often, right? And they would only come to you if they can’t figure it out and they can’t make it.

50:34
they can’t make it move. It’s whoever’s job it is to make the number move. That’s the person who should have seen that numbers a lot. that makes a lot of sense. So my final question for you is different platforms will report different things, right? So if I’m running Facebook ads, Facebook always tries to claim credit for sales. Yes. is there some central way that you do things to measure everything? And it really goes back to what we talked about earlier, where we have, we require specific conversions, specific objectives.

51:03
from every campaign. And those objectives are very rarely purchase. They are the micro conversions along the way that results in how. So I can tell again, if offsite brand awareness campaign for us throughout it, whether it’s Facebook or Google ads or whatever the thing is that we’re doing for paid media for that, that campaign is judged solely on offsite brand awareness clicks. How many people interact with the ad and went to the place we wanted them to go? That’s it. That’s all I care about.

51:33
Now, if it eventually comes back and says, hey, by the way, I sold 10 things. go, that’s awesome. That’s not what you’re paid for. You’re paid for offsite brand, where it clicks. What I, what I start to notice is I’ll go, Oh, and it turns out 0.005 % of those people will buy right away. Right. Now I start understanding what should happen next week. So if I have X amount of brand offsite brand, where it clicks next week by the campaigns, 0.005 % probably will also buy. Now I can start predicting out sales from that.

52:02
But again, that’s not the point. This is to get them in the pipeline because I have other ads and other marketing, which again, it doesn’t always have to be paid media. It could be email, right? We have an email that is a re-engagement campaign when people have been on list for a while, but they’re not interacting with the brand anymore. They go into re-engagement. Guess what re-engagement’s job is? Re-engagement’s job is offsite brand. So it gets them re-engaged by saying, hey, all these other people are interested in this brand. You are already kind of here. You might want to get re-engaged, right? So it also, we just measure that by clicks on those emails.

52:31
So we have a very specific way of how our machinery, what our marketing machinery is supposed to do. And because that time element, right? We’re not all, yes, the purchase is the ultimate symptom, right? The results are just the symptom of a system. That’s it. So the sales will come based upon how the machinery operates, which is why you focus so much on the machinery, not on the result. Because that machinery is what’s really important for us. So when I know, when I make a sale,

53:00
I know where that sale came from. know how it happened, whether it’s good or bad, right? Whatever that result is, I know how it happened. So I can do something about it. So I can fix it. The worst thing in the world is what I call a curse of a good offer. It’s those business owners that are out there. They’re like, I don’t care. As long as I’m making money, I’m good. That will work until the day it doesn’t. And normally that’s at a point where you scaled so high that now all of a sudden, for whatever reason, now you’re making, you you, you $50,000 day on Facebook and then Facebook just takes the money one day and doesn’t spit out results.

53:30
And then you go, whoa, what just happened? And you look around the company and everyone’s like, I don’t know, cause no one knew how anything was working. That’s a dangerous spot to be in. Cause in reality you’re in the cave. You just have no idea you’re in the cave, right? Cause you didn’t have to go look. So, you know, it’s almost like people that don’t have offers that are working or in a better spot. Cause they are more likely to really understand their numbers, but everybody should. No, that makes sense to just get a lot more granular is the key takeaway. I think from talking to you today, it’s understanding me, Sherry.

53:59
Yeah, because then you can tweak it. It’s literally putting your hands on the steering wheel versus like, I’m gonna sit in the back seat. Let me know when we’re off the road. Right. Like, well, why do that? Like, why don’t you just, you know, keep your hands on the steering wheel and it’d be better. Or again, find somebody that does. It doesn’t have to be like, cause I get it that not everybody is a numbers person, quote unquote, right? But numbers are just telling you a story of the behaviors happening within the store or on your site. That’s all it is. It’s just a story of behaviors. And you can learn to understand those behaviors and learn to read.

54:28
dashboards and reports, you can learn to read those like a storybook, like a kid’s storybook, where you sort of just understand, oh, this is the journey. This is the tale of how my customers make it through my land of e-commerce, you know, and produce this result. And you will just understand that. And it is a lot easier to do than people think because they check out and they see a number and they freak out. But just remember, the number doesn’t mean anything. It’s the behaviors that that number represents, how people are clicking on your ad to cart, how they’re interacting with your checkout system.

54:58
Right? The amount of things that are adding to the cart, all of that stuff is just behavior. It’s just a story. And if you get really good at understanding that story, you can find people who will help fill in those numbers for you. Right? You can find that stuff, but you have to be good at reading the story. And that’s just the skill just takes a little bit. see this as a process, right? Exactly. Right. It’s a journey. Yeah. You build it up a little bit over time, what you measure and, take action on. then get a little bit better because every, cause you know, would you get an initial question? What’s the next thing you do? You ask a bigger question, right?

55:27
And then you just change implementation. Exactly right. So journey. So Mercer, where can people find you if they want to learn more about this sexy topic of measure and marketing? Yeah. The sexy topic. I would, uh, so obviously, you know, shameless plug over at measurement marketing.io, we’ve got a ton of training and services, um, over there. So, and if you just go to measurement marketing.io forward slash my wife quit her job, we have a, an entire, what we call the toolbox membership.

55:56
that has weekly training videos that are free. So you get a new video each week there. And there’s a ton of tools that will help you get started. So things like how to figure out what a goal should even be that you should measure for. So they would call the ACE model. So we have that back there. There’s a whole traffic tracking toolkit. There’s a dashboard building toolkit. All that stuff is completely free. So just measure marketing to IO for slash my wife quit her job and you’ll see it all there. And for those people who just want to throw it over the wall, like you guys offer those services too, right?

56:24
We do we have different different levels of service. We have do it yourself level training where you can just kind of join the membership programs or take advantage of the free training we have back there. We’ve got done with you training for those that need a little more accountability for their teams. Like if there’s an owners like I want my marketing team trained in this. have instructors that are dedicated that will help get their company trained so they have that measurement marketing culture. And then there’s the done for you where we’ll work with some of our certified measure marketers and help you get things measured if you need it. Right. Well, awesome. Hey, really appreciate your time.

56:53
I learned, I gained a new perspective on measurement and marketing and thanks a lot for your time. Yeah. Happy to help. And thanks for having me. Yep. You made it sexy, man.

57:06
Hope you enjoyed that episode and got a lot out of it because the worst thing that you can do with your site is to draw conclusions based on incorrect data. more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 356. And once again, I want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO.

57:35
Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform, and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-O-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

58:03
head on over to mywifecoderjob.com and sign up for my free six day meeting course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.