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In episode 73, I talk sales tracking and conversion optimisation with Scott Desgrosseilliers, from Wicked Reports. I love Wicked's tag line. “Half Your Marketing Is Wasted. Do You Know Which Half?” Wicked reports lets you track sales back to where they originated.
Scott has seen lots online sales and lots of online marketers and he shares how to optimise your marketing spend to generate the most sales. He also shares the tactics that are working now.
Bullet Points We Chat About:
- Tracking
- How to get better conversions
- Case studies
- What is working now
- UTM tracking
If you want to give ActiveCampaign a try, you can set up a free trial account here.
If you want to take your sales funnel and marketing automation skills to the next level, join us at The Active Marketer Academy my private mastermind and coaching community where we share all the good stuff!
Links Mentioned In The Show
- ActiveCampaign
- The Active Marketer Academy
- WickedReports.com
- Also check out our huge list of online marketing tools
Listening options:
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- On Stitcher Radio
- Go to the top of the page and use the on-site player.
Barry: I'd like to welcome Scott Desgrosseilliers to the show. Welcome, Scott.
Scott: Welcome Barry. Psyched to be on. Thanks for having me.
Barry: Now I've been hearing a lot of good thing about Wicked Reports from some of my colleagues and I haven't had a chance to play with it yet but I wanted to get you on to talk about one, what it can do for us, and two, since you see so many marketers doing so many campaigns and so much tracking, I'd love it if you could share some kind of consolidated insights from all those people as to about what works, how to do it the right way and how to do the wrong way. That sound good?
Scott: I'd love to.
Barry : Ah, cool.
Scott: I'd love to.
Barry : First of all, for the listeners who aren't familiar with Wicked Reports, can you give us a little bit of a rundown on what that is and what it does?
Scott: Sure. Wicked Reports, we transform data into action and answers. We're strictly focused on the small and medium business market. People that are at Facebook, spending anywhere between $1000 and some customers go up to $200,000 a month, but once you're spending $1000 a month, we can tell you what's working and not working in your marketing and save you at least half of that each month, just by showing you things that never turn into customers, if nothing else.
Barry : What kind of stuff are you tracking?
Scott: We're wired into a couple of things, AdWords and Facebook. We automatically are pulling cost at the ad level, so there's that. Then we are wired into CRMs and sales systems, such as ActiveCampaign and Stripe and Shopify, so that we can base your data on actual real leads and sales, not based on pixels fire, because there's a lot of issues with pixels and Facebook agrees with us. We've met with them three times already. They've been very keen on what we're up to already, even though we're somewhat small in their eyes, I'm sure, but they've recognised the problem enough to work with us, so it's been exciting.
Barry : You're saying, for example, you can attribute a sale to a particular Facebook Ad or a particular click on a Google AdWord or something like that.
Scott: Yeah, so we've wired into the systems, then we add our click tracking and the combination of your ad accounts, your email accounts, and your sales in the clicks that we've seen, we combined that all together, because my background's in data warehousing, to figure out what's important or not important in your customer's journey in attributing ROI based on actual sales, so you can then up the spend, or up the effort on things that are working where the message is matching the market for customers and stop doing things that are just getting leads that don't do anything or things that are unprofitable.
Barry : You can do the same thing with, say, links in outbound emails, for example. This email went out. It generated x number of sales based on-
Scott: That was the original two things I did back in 2014. This used to be a pivot table. It's like a jet engine now. It was a pivot table people would pay me for. It was get leads in from Facebook somehow and then email them until they buy, and that alone made my friend's lobster business tonnes of money just doing that. It was really fun to be able to show. He sells lobsters. Ships them online. You go to his website and you order live lobsters to eat and then they show up whenever you pick in the future. We were able to show that women 45 to 55, who don't live in this area of the States known as New England, but like one of the sports teams from that area, were his best customers over time and that was pretty cool to see.
Barry : Wow, that's pretty granular.
Scott: Yeah, it was because then you knew how to talk to them. Also, it was a cool, psychographic thing. No one would like a team from that region unless you lived there at one time and then maybe you would miss the food, so it was really cool to see.
Barry : So there's someone living in Scottsdale that likes the New England Patriots and they're buying lobster from this guy.
Scott: Yep. Exactly. California and Florida are the most expensive places to ship. They're also where he does his most sales and he was real worried about $40 to ship the food. No one cared. They bought.
Barry : Anything else in particular about Wicked that you're super excited about?
Scott: The issues with a lot of analytics tools out there, there's tonnes of gorgeous, analytic tools. They just make data look very beautiful. I like to think ours is beautiful but there are definitely some that make it more beautiful. Then there's other ones out there that rely on something called event tracking, where you have to tell the analytics programme that something occurred in your business and that fails small businesses. I consulted for another CRM for a long time, over 100 businesses of theirs and saw that no one could get this set up right. I was like, you know, it's not the business' fault. It's the process.
When I set out to create Wicked, it was like I need to have full proof attribution that doesn't rely on someone doing a bunch of work in order to tell the statistics that are gonna run your business that something happened. That's a big thing that we spent a lot of time on and we have all this help built into the app now so that when you're looking at data, you know what action to take based on what you're looking at because you can actually pick real world English questions and then the data will reformat and philtre itself to give you the answer. You don't have to remember how to use all of our reports anymore.
Not that they're that hard, but now you don't even have to worry about it. You just come in and pick a question. Which of my emails performed the best and we'll just resort everything for you. Which of my Facebook Ads are best for cold traffic lead gen? Well, that's a totally different ad than the one you're gonna use for retargeting and so we'll repick all the necessarily things to give you that answer.
Barry : You also track the customer lifetime value over time. Is that right?
Scott: The big driver we're doing is what's the customer lifetime value over time and how does it relate to what it cost to get them? What's that mean on the ROI? If the ROI is high, you should keep doing it and if it's not, you may ne shouldn't. We've got another one that shows how long until someone's valuable. It could be that you're gonna break even during the ad but you're gonna really make out in 90 days so that's good to know so you don't kill the ad. We've got that type of stuff in there as well.
Barry : All kinds of cool stuff like buying time, time of day, which day's better.
Scott: Buying time's a fun one. I learned this from a guy, Craig Jacobson, who's a marketing whiz and I said, “Hey, can I build this in as a tool, as a report?” He said, “Have at it.” I always like to give intellectual attribution. The concept here, and this is one we can do without any tracking, we take all the customer info and we figure out what time and day it was for the customer in their time zone when they bought, which is key for any internet business that's selling information. Your customer is everywhere. To figure out when you should send your email because it's never 8 a.m. All the CRMs usually pick 8 a.m. because they had to pick sometime or they pick, the time they opted in is always the time we're gonna send the email.
What the theory is which holds up is, you should send when people actually buy because that's when they're thinking about the problem that you solve the most and it really holds up well. To change your emails to that time, you make more money and it's brainless. Just change the time, that's it. Where's the bar highest? What time is it? Okay. I'm gonna change my emails, send then, and you just made more money right away. That's always a big hit because it's easy. Easy and makes money.
Barry : Love it. Just before the call, we were talking about some of the other stuff that you've seen that people do well and then people do incorrectly or not so well. Maybe we can talk a little bit about some of that stuff. When it comes to Facebook advertising or AdWords or tracking the ROI, what's the best way to go about it?
Scott: There's a big thing to explain about a problem. It's not gonna take a long time but there's a big problem. Facebook's had a couple issues with their metrics which they're dealing with. The big thing is they're using something called last click tracking for their conversion tracking. You go in there and you see you had a bunch of sales in Facebook but they may not match how many sales you actually had in your Shopify or your Stripe or what have you, and the more channels you're advertising in, the more each channel's claiming all kinds of credit for your success and that's because they all say, “Hey, if you clicked in my platform within 30 days, and then you bought, we were the converting factor,” when it's very likely to have been email, or it depends on how sophisticated your Facebook advertising is, but it causes people a lot of confusion because it's always showing an inaccurate performance measure.
The other factor battling the small business is, it's gonna take time usually, to acquire and convert a customer from a prospect to a recurring customer, and that value can't always be measured in the time that the ad was running. If you're getting a brand new cold lead in, they might need to know a lot about you before they're gonna buy your $2000 coaching or join your $100 a month SaaS or whatever it is you're doing. They're not likely to just, “Hey, here's a brand new business. I clicked on an ad. Here's my credit card.” Wonderful if you can do that but that's not gonna happen enough to show that the ads are valuable.
What we find that works best for people and why we designed the app this way around different attribution models is, your campaign should have a different intent behind them, rather than just spring and pray and I want everyone to buy or everyone to do something from this one set of ads. You should have a campaign that's for branding. That's like you're just trying to get your brand out there and show your best content, or your best videos. Your best whatever you have related to what you solve. Then you want a campaign based on, okay, you've seen my content. Here's your best way to get them on your list. Lead gen. Some people can get away with just doing a lead gen right away. You want to find out to cold traffic but often you need to brand yourself first.
Then there's a separate retargeting which you're gonna do which should be a separate campaign. Then there's the, you already know about me, you've already seen my stuff, you've already maybe opted in a couple times, I just want you to buy my stuff, campaign. Why you separate it that way is because each one of the success of each of those intentions of advertising, the measurement of each of them should be based on sales attribution of the goal of that campaign. If you're just doing cold branding of content to someone that's never heard of you, you just want them to click over and read and hear about you. Then what we measure is the first click ROI. Show me all the first clicks that ever turned into customers and calculate did they spend more than it cost to get the clicks?
When you're doing lead gen, it's like I got all these cold leads. Did they spend money with me? Did they spend more than what they cost? If so, this is good lead gen. You should keep doing this and if not, you shouldn't. Then if it's retargeting, it's of course, what was the last thing they opted into before they bought? That's the best retargeting we should do and then if all of a sudden, they get in my recurring programme and spend thousands with me, well, hey now I know this is the type of campaign to run only once they've already been on my list for a little while. Then I hit them with this lead [inaudible 00:11:37].
Last click for converting is, this is when they're warmed up and I know they're ready to buy. This is what I should show when they're at that point in time. Not right away. Hey, buy my stuff. Buy my stuff.
Barry : You're saying like you can have in the middle of that, in a lead gen to sales, retargeting stuff. You could say you've got three lead magnets on our side, three opt-in opportunities on our side but opt-in opportunity, lead magnet number two, is the one that converts to sales more.
Scott: Exactly. It's the one that attracts the buyers. You could do a survey or a contest. Get a tonne of crappy leads. Everyone wants to win stuff and the idea is no one wins and then I'm gonna have all these cheap leads and I'm gonna offer a discount to buy what my contest was. I haven't see that work yet. It may. I'm sure probably there's gonna be five example of “Oh, it works all the time” but I've never seen it and we've dealt with a fair amount of people so I'm confident saying not your best strategy.
Barry : While we're on that subject, what have you seen that works the best for turning an opt-in cold, not necessarily cold, but a semi-cold opt-in warm up into a sale?
Scott: That's tricky. I'll give you some example of what worked for certain people but saying, “Hey, this works all the time,” I get nervous about doing that because it's that market at that point in time and based on-
Barry : That problem and that-
Scott: How that person speaks and how they speak to their customer. That's why you gotta have these campaigns set up right and you got to test them because you just download. I mean, digital marketer has killer stuff. You have some great stuff and just because it worked for you guys, doesn't mean it's gonna work for the other person because they way they apply it, the way they're priced, the way they're positioned, that's why I can't say, “Hey, go do this and it's gonna make you rich.” What I will say-
Barry : Let me rephrase that. What have you seen that works well?
Scott: Here was one that worked well and what lends itself to how we had to track it to know it worked well. The lobster guy let's me share his data and I know this one well because I've given this example before. He did a 52% off coupon and he thought he was gonna get a tonne of sales because it was gonna expire in a certain time frame. He ran it. He spent $5500 over a month, which a big spend for him, and during the timeframe, he made 3700 bucks revenue. He lost $1800 on the campaign which sounds like that wasn't a good idea. But over time, those leads ended up spending almost $40,000 with him. He actually made 8 to 1.
What he found then, for him, was an expiring coupon attracts people who maybe if they don't bite on that, they're the type of people that are willing to pull the trigger and buy some food from him. Then you can dig into the campaign and the 80/20 of which message to which market. It was specifically to two lookalikes they had from his Christmas customers 2014's lookalike audience that 9 to 1. He made money 9 to 1, so he goes, “If I need to go shake the money tree, I show expiring coupons to this audience and it's gonna attract leads that eventually buy. It was down to that one precise level, and it was “likes Dean & DeLuca Foods,” some upscale food seller here targeted.
Then some of the other ones, the ROI was okay. He still doubled his money but [inaudible 00:14:59] still great but this fantastic ROI was really like this supersonic ROI. The more you dig in, the more he can really leverage it the next time.
Barry : Did he do that? Did he go back to that lookalike audience a couple more times?
Scott: Oh, yeah. [inaudible 00:15:17] lookalike audience is cold and then a Facebook consultant came on from Facebook and said, “You should really update this lookalike audience to refresh it because it's December 2014.”
Barry : Don't touch it. Don't touch it. Don't touch it.
Scott: At that point, the guy probably had other interesting things to say but I was just like, “Okay. We can't listen to this guy. This is the golden goose audience of all time. We made him $100,000 on one audience over time. We're not touching that thing. I don't know what you guys are doing but this is the greatest algorithm on earth, this one lookalike.”
I would recommend that as well. Take your best customers. Throw them in and have a lookalike. Depending on your level of Facebook, maybe that's Facebook Targeting 101. I don't know but lookalikes crop up as a top audience a lot of the time for customers of ours. As long as the lookalike population is, we looked at his. he had a couple thousand. He probably had around 10,000 customers at the time. We took his top 1000 and threw them in as a lookalike and then we took his Christmas 2014, when he had the greatest month of his life, and threw that up as a separate lookalike and those two continually make money. They just make money all the time.
Barry : It's interesting. You come across that stuff you wouldn't necessarily, intuitively think is what's gonna happen.
Scott: Or how straightforward it is. It's not like super rocket science. Just take your best customers, Facebook and you find some of this. I could have some other real interesting Jedi stat tricks but that just works really well. That one. Just go do that would be my personal opinion.
Barry : Any other stuff you've seen work really well that you were maybe surprised about?
Scott: Let me think. What else? Oh. Yes. Personal emails with a discount that aren't actually even related to the product. Email, my little speech on email is, I think open rates, it's great if you can get an email open but you should start from, does the email sell, and work your way back. Then, does it get clicked on? Then worry about opens because you might get a lot of opens because you have witty subject lines and no one really takes any action that you want, or they might just be opening because they're in their phone. Open rates, not an accurate metric anyway because they gotta be downloading the pixel, so I wouldn't worry about open rates.
A guy send an email about he did the marathon and then he says, “Oh, by the way, buy my stuff. Here's a discount. Marathon. 54% off,” and I got it and I was like, “Who cares that you ran the marathon?” I was like, “Great but this emails gonna be a dud,” and it did. It had point, I'm just creating a course on this right now, it had .6% click rate. No one's gonna say, “Look at my .6% click rate,” but he made three and a half times his normal average revenue on an email. Then he did another one which was even bigger, some other awful thing. Not the marathon but some other … oh, his birthday. “It's my birthday. I want to offer you a gift.” I was like, “How cheesy is that?” It's not copyrighted.
This guy actually [inaudible 00:18:28] can really write. “Hey, it's my birthday. I'm so grateful for my business so save money on my stuff,” instead of just saying, “Save money on my stuff,” right? He did nice times. His average email is a little over two grand an email. He does well on email. That's two grand an email. That's great. He did $18,000 on an email and it was the exact same crappy, not crap, but exact same strategy emails each time. “I have a deal.” It was the same thing but “It's my birthday and I have a deal,” and it's a picture of him when he was eight with his brother or whatever and the click rate was, yeah that's what I was thinking and he's a friend of mine and I was like, “Oh, Jesus.” That was a 1.5% click rate. 120,000 people got it but only 1100 clicked and he made 18 grand and it wasn't because the price was super high. It was his normal price. $100 ticket. Just people, I don't know, it doesn't make sense to me. I would offer that up as personal stories.
I tried it when I was doing the course. My wife and I just had our third baby. We said, “Save money on the Kickstarter Wicked Report. Put in code [ADELINE 00:19:41],” for her name. My email list was tiny at the time, a couple thousand people. Boom. I had like five or six sales on an email. Normally our sales process is people need to see a webinar. They want to see the product in action. Well, boom. I had a list and I don't know who had seen it or not. I just emailed it out. You know what? It grabbed me out of six sales and we don't have a lot of [inaudible 00:20:04] and out lifetime value's really high so that was a great email.
Barry : I know what I'm doing tomorrow.
Scott: It's shocking. It shocked me.
Barry : When I started talking, I was like, “Oh, I sent out an email about a marathon. I wonder if that was my email he was talking about.”
Scott: This guy's a friend of mine and it wasn't like, “You're so annoying,” I just was like, “I don't think this is a good idea, man. Who wants to know about your life?” I was wrong and that's why I like data because everyone has opinions in the board room where you're on your Skype call. Do this and don't do that but data settles it. Customers settle everything. Not “See? I told you. I have way more clickthrough rates so I had a better idea.” No, you don't. It might just have been some people clicking because you had an attractive member of the opposite sex or same sex, depending on your persuasion, it might have just been that and that's why you got the clicks. That didn't prove anything. If people turn into customers from what you do, then you know what? You get the bragging rights. That's why I love it. I love data. It helps businesses grow. Then they know. They actually know what the heck's going on in their business. It's fun.
Barry : Or the pixels fired a dozen times for some reason on their email.
Scott: All the time.
Barry : Huge tracking anomaly.
Scott: Yep.
Barry : All right. Let's look at the opposite side of that coin. What are some things that you thought was gonna work well on a campaign, or something that was gonna work well and ended up just tanking?
Scott: I've seen sweepstakes not work or contests. I've seen contests not work often in terms of customers. someone would get a tonne of leads who would get so excited behind them. You always see them bragging about how cheap their actually traffic was but never how many customers they got because they don't get a lot. It doesn't attract the people to buy for whatever reason. Not enough. A lot of the ones I've seen, I should preface it, I haven't seen anyone have any luck with it.
What else? Refer a friends. Hey we're gonna go viral because everyone's gonna refer everyone because they get points, yada yada. I have this theory about a couple of those type of things. You hear them and people get excited and think they're gonna work because it's newsworthy when they actually do work so it becomes news and then people talk about it. “Look at that thing that worked.” It's like everyone's starting a SaaS business now because Uber and Airbnb and like five other companies are worth a lot of money so now everyone says, “Oh, it's so easy. I'll start a SaaS and I'll be rich.” Because it's newsworthy that ten of them did out of the millions that have tried it, so I feel that with contests and with refer a friend, there are examples. “Look how I grew my email list to 100,000 in five months.” That doesn't happen very often. It doesn't.
Barry : Who cares how big your email list is if it doesn't make you money, right?
Scott: Yeah. Exactly.
Barry : That's like say, “I'm gonna go become an actor because Brad Pitt makes 20 million dollars a movie.” Yeah, there's two guys making that much money.
Scott: Yeah, so those are the ones that I would not say invest your money in gadgets. You're really just focused on what's your core message funnel and getting that to work and then the world's your oyster. If you got a product market fit with a funnel that converts, you just obsess about that, then you can get in on all the gamification and cool, fun, different, unique ways of promoting your business. Just get your core, “I have something. You need it. Please buy it.” If that works, then you're in business.
Barry : I think as entrepreneurs, the example I use is entrepreneurs orange juice, where you got a bag of oranges and you go to grab a fresh orange. You squeeze like 10% of the juice out of it and then you're kind of bored and you grab another orange and you end up squeezing like 10% of the juice out of 20 oranges instead of just taking that one orange and squeezing 90% out of it before you move on. Optimise what's working before you go for the next shiny thing.
Scott: We've seen people optimise a certain funnel and just take it to way further than I ever thought they could get. They make some success. Make 20 grand a month and I'm like, “Wow. They did a good job there.” Then months later, they stick with it and they're six figures a month. I don't see this happen on a daily basis but it's consistent enough. You get something that's working. Then you just pour gasoline because people can get traffic for you. If you can convert people, then they sky's the limit. Just worry about that. Worry about what makes people become customers and then once you have that down, then you can always find people to buy your traffic, send you traffic, affiliate you traffic, something.
Barry : For those listeners out there who maybe aren't doing much or any of this conversion tracking and sales attribution stuff, where's a good place for them to get started? How do they take their first steps?
Scott: Whatever you're gonna do, you need to find out if it works or not. If you aren't going to be ready for a solution like Wicked Reports, let's say you're just starting out, at the minimum, read up on Google UTM tags. UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module which just happens to be some weird name that the company that Google bought, branded it but it stuck. It's UTMs. At a minimum, put UTMs on the things your doing to just see if anyone cared enough to click, so rather than doing stuff and then seeing, “Oh, look. I have 100 more hits today. I wonder where that came from,” you actually have some visibility in the canned Google reports. Based on your UTMs, you can use Google Analytics to at least see what are those people doing.
It's not easy to get the deep level of stuff, in terms of attribution, you're not gonna get any of that, but you can at least see do people care enough to click. That's the first start. At least you're seeing there's some interest here. The other thing then, when you're prowling around, your Google Analytics at that point, just use the 80/20 principle of just say, “What's the top two or three things out of what I've been doing that's actually working?” Then you can test all your content that way. Just use different tags and if you're posting it on Facebook, you could tag it if you have a following there, or if you've got an email list of some kind or whatever. Then you can see, okay. I've tried these ten things and here are two things that people actually seem to have at least responded to somewhat, and then if that excites you, whatever they responded to, at least you have a data lead into something you can exploit for benefit for everyone.
Barry : For those listeners out there who might not necessarily know what we're talking about with UTMs and what they can track, you've all seen them. They're those big, long URLs that have a whole bunch of stuff in there. Can you explain, perhaps, what are the things that a URL UTM parameters can actually track?
Scott: Yeah, sure. What it is, you're putting tracking on anything outside of your site or web property, I should say, your click funnels, or your wordpress site or your sales page or what have you. You're putting stuff, oh. I guess that wouldn't be for this audience.
Barry : That's all right.
Scott: Edit that one out. Sorry. You're trying to figure out … with … lemme start this over again. Let me think about this. The purpose of UTMs is to say, where are people coming from? If nothing else, so what you can do, whenever you're posting a link about your site or your landing page or whatever you are sending them to that's yours, you can add string of text on the end of the link which Google Analytics will grab and then keep track of for you. Then that will give you a basis of figuring out why did this person come to my site?
There's five variables they use. One being source, which would be at a very high level, meaning I posted this on Facebook or I posted this on Twitter or this was from my email system. That would be how you would use the source parameter. What it is, is you have a parameter called source and the value if whatever you type in. What you should type in is whatever is going to make sense for you on the report. That's really the only driving factor of it.
I find that putting at a high level, Google or Facebook or email is best, because you want to use source to just see at a high level, what channel is bringing me traffic? That's not enough to scale but it at least gives you a clue. Medium's the second. That's the medium that delivered the link. They clicked on a link from somewhere. What was it that delivered the link to them? On Facebook, if you're doing a post, a medium is a post. Email, you're sending an email, so the medium is email, and so on and so forth. Twitter would be Tweet. Pinterest'd be Pin. It's a delivery mechanism. You may find my posts are getting more than my blogs or vice versa.
Then campaign. Campaign, if you're sending it from your email, you want it to match the name of your campaign in your active campaign. Then it's very brainless. You say, “I did this campaign, an active campaign, and here it is in Google Analytics,” so you want it to be clear so you know where to go in your email system. If you're doing a Facebook advertisement, you want it to match Facebook campaign name. If you're doing, just lead gen on social randomly, just call it social lead gen because that's all you're really doing. Then you don't have to get caught up in naming each campaign differently because then if you don't have a lot of clicks, you're gonna have a hodge podge of small click counts. Whenever you're doing it on social, just call it social lead gen. The other two are not talked about a lot, particularly term. I call term neglected child [inaudible 00:30:16].
Barry : The neglected urchin.
Scott: Yeah, yeah. Neglected urchin. Content should be whatever it is that's gonna remind you of whatever you were posting about. If you're linking to your new blog post about UTMs, if I was, I'd call my content blog about UTMs, because then I know that was what got them over there. Or if it's an ad, you want to know what the ad it is. When I'm emailing out, “Go listen to Barry's podcast,” on my list, it's gonna be Barry's podcast, then I know, Barry will know they came from the podcast about Wicked Reports. That's what I would do for that. By the way, that medium would be podcasts, is what I would use.
Then for term, which no one really used it a lot, and Wicked Reports was a heavy driver back in the old days. Now we do a lot of auto-tracking for people. They don't need to even think about this stuff but term is audience. When you're looking at a big pile of data, you want to know was this my Twitter fans? Was this a particular search term in Google if you're doing AdWords? Was it a particular Facebook audience or was it my email list? It's really slick to be able to compare those. Term was just meant to just be for search term but then Google started hiding search term. If you're doing AdWords, they put the keyword in there that was searched so you can grab that if you use Wicked Reports. I don't know if you'd be able to do it now if you're just starting out.
With term for email, you put existing list or existing email list, so when you're prowling around you know that was my email list that did that. For Twitter, you'd say Twitter fans or Twitter followers and same with Facebook, Facebook fans, Instagram followers. We're able to track someone's Instagram. It makes them 30k a month. It's unbelievable, just from that link in their profile. They have a pretty large following. They had no idea. They're like, “You're the first person to tell us,” and it was just a UTM string that made sense that they could understand, was really the key. It's simple but it's easy to get lost in the complexity. Really whenever you're setting those values, again, I'm gonna repeat myself here, just make sure they make sense to you, whatever you pick, because you're the one that has to be able to make a decision off what you're looking at.
Barry : You can always put those in a spreadsheet somewhere so you can go back to them later.
Scott: We get people off Spreadsheet Builder just so if they wanna freelance on their own, they can at least have some insights. That's the easiest way. Then it's clean so it's a good idea.
Barry : All right, Scott, I know you got some cool things coming down the pike in Wicked Reports. You want to talk a little bit about that?
Scott: Yeah, we got some real cool stuff coming. We haven't tracked organic that well. We have made people build links for organic and now we're gonna be actually tracking organic coming in January so if you have a big, heavy site that's referring you traffic, you'll know, or if all your traffic's from a search, you'll know. We have organic tracking coming. We've got a couple of new slick integrations. Our Shopify app will be in the App Store in a couple weeks. It's already working but it'll be officially blessed by Shopify here. We have row level data quality alerts, which is a mouthful to says.
Barry : It sounds impressive. I have no idea what you're talking about but I was really impressed there for a second.
Scott: Oh, okay. Let's see. I was thinking, “Oh, man. I need to make this easy.” What it means, is when you're looking at data, if for some reason, it needs your attention, either because you really crushed it or because it's doing quite badly or because it's doing so bad that it's probably we detect that you didn't out tracking on a link or something. You have a little visual indicator of different colour or simple. Then when you click on it, the page slides out and actually instructs you on how to fix it.
Small businesses, medium-sized business, you got so much going on, you might forget to track something or you might not notice, I'm losing a tonne of money here, and so we're doing more aggressive alerting and triaging the data for you to give you the actions you need to take on it. That one's been a long time coming and it's finally ready. That combined with our questions, where you can just pick a question and we give you the answer, and even further, if you're not happy with your performance, we have something called the Wicked Academy, which actually is up already. We'll lead you to the specific lesson that can help for that particular situation. It could be, “Hey, your email stinks.”
One of them's personal email stories and one of them's countdown timers. Here's some stats. Here's how to measure it. Here's how to do it. Here's where to get a timer because those are easy things to do but people just get caught up working and you forget. Oh Jeez, maybe I should just do a timer. Just make your money. Throw a timer on there. People always buy more. That's all coming up the chute.
There's more too. We love innovating the products. What we do is we talk to the customers a lot. We talk to about 20, 30 customers a month to say, “What are you using? What are you not using? What do you need? What would make your life easier?” That's how we have all the product now is based on what the customers need to grow their business. It's what we do. It's got us this far.
Barry : Well, thank you so much Scott. We might wrap it up there. If people want to find out more, it's just wickedreports.com. There's nice little demos, nice little walkthrough there that demonstrate how the product works and what it can track. I want to thank you for your time. Thanks for coming on and if somebody wants to reach out to you for a little bit more information, how's the best way to do that?
Scott: There's a couple ways. Off the web site's probably best because we have live chat on there. It's staffed by my brother. He's one of the people who will then Gchat me if need be and he knows everything about the product himself so I would say live chat off the site's always best. The other thing is we have on demand webinars there so you can learn a lot about the product immediately if you're more interested.
Barry : Awesome. Well, thanks so much Scott and I look forward to seeing you online.
Scott: Awesome. Take it easy Barry. Thanks for having me.