SaaS Stories
SaaS Stories is my not-so-secret quest to learn what it truly takes to succeed in the world of SaaS—and I’m inviting you along for the ride! I have the pleasure of sitting down with brilliant minds and industry trailblazers to explore their journeys, uncovering the secrets behind their growth, the gaps they spotted in the market, and what really drives them.
It’s not all smooth sailing—there are challenges, unexpected turns, and moments of reflection where they share what they’d love to change about their journey. Think of it as a candid, insider’s look into the world of SaaS, with just the right amount of curiosity, empathy, and wit.
Join me as I dive deep, selfishly soak up all the insights, and hopefully share a little inspiration with you along the way—one SaaS story at a time.
SaaS Stories
Which Half of Your Advertising Budget Works? Cracking the Attribution Code with Jeff Greenfield
On this episode, we hear from marketing visionary Jeff Greenfield, the mastermind behind Provalytics, as he tackles one of the industry’s biggest mysteries: which half of your advertising budget is actually working?
Join us on a journey to redefine marketing attribution, especially in the intricate worlds of B2B and e-commerce. Jeff's insights reveal how understanding impressions and the time it takes to convert them into actions can empower marketers to make smarter decisions, especially when budgets are tight.
Forget clicks; it's time to focus on impressions and creativity. This episode challenges conventional wisdom by highlighting how creative, emotional storytelling in B2B marketing can have a transformative impact. Discover the power of personalisation and how embracing consumer-like strategies can help B2B brands stand out. We also dive into the internal challenges companies face when adopting new technologies and the career-shaping decisions that follow.
Tune in for strategies that not only boost business success but also nurture personal well-being and happiness.
Welcome everybody to another episode of SaaS Stories. Today I'm joined by Jeff Greenfield from Probalytics. Welcome, jeff, glad to have you on the show.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you, Joanna, I'm excited to be here.
Speaker 1:I'm very excited to hear your story and your journey today. Tell us first, what mission are you on? What's the journey that you took on when you launched Probalytics? What's?
Speaker 2:the journey that you took on when you launched Provalytics. Well, you know, it's interesting because, as I, as I look over my career, the journey that I'm on with Provalytics is. You know, as a company, we solve that kind of old problem that marketers have. There's this old adage which is, half the money I spend in advertising is wasted. The only problem is I don't know which half. And so at ProPolitics we solve that. We tell you what's wasted and then you've got this extra bundle of money. What do you do with it? We show you where to redeploy it and then, when you're lucky enough to have a larger budget, we show you where that should go. So that solves a huge problem for marketers.
Speaker 2:And and but really, when you think about it, when you look at that problem, it's, it causes marketers a lot of stress.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's, that's really the thing is that folks get into marketing because, like we want to be like the person with the big idea, like we're creatives, we want to walk into a room and there's a brand that's suffering and you spout out a bunch of ideas, draw them out on a whiteboard and people go nuts for them and they start filming the TV commercial right there and it saves the brand, and you walk home and they send you like a $20 million check and you just wait for the next call to solve some other big problem, and that's why most of us got into this field. But then, as it turns out, marketing has gotten so complicated this whole advertising business and we end up, as marketers, spending more time in spreadsheets than our friends that are accountants. It's crazy so. And for creative people that's like a big mistake because we're not really good with numbers, even though we say I'm a data-driven marketer. It's just not. It's not what we love and and we should really stick to the creative stuff, but there's so much math involved. So really we solve that problem, but I kind of see it as we provide stress reduction services on a SaaS basis for marketers to solve their biggest hassles.
Speaker 2:That's what it is in a nutshell.
Speaker 1:I love that You're basically bringing up marketers to do what they're good at. I'm a marketer and I have this exact problem, I think, with attribution. And I have this exact problem, I think, with attribution. It's so hard because the customer journey goes through like 20 different parts before they turn into a customer. So you know, five of those could be something you set up. But then if one of them is like oh, it looks like he came to our webinar two years ago, so we're going to attribute it to that. You're not allowed to take this one, it can be really frustrating.
Speaker 2:It really is, especially in like B2B, because in B2B everyone lives in the CRM and every customer, every account. There's that one space in the CRM which says source, like where did they come from?
Speaker 2:And so you have all these different divisions in a company. You've got marketing that wants to put their UTM code there. You've got inside sales that wants to take credit. You've got the events person who wants to take credit. And I have never, ever seen like an inside salesperson say hey, you know, I think this person was at an event last year they're not going to give credit to somebody else. They want to put in what's going to give them credit. And then it gets even worse. In like e-commerce and direct to consumer, because there's so many possible, like you said, paths. And now with the world of the omni-channel consumer where they can buy the same thing at all these new marketplaces, from Amazon to Walmart to your own website, to walk in a brick and mortar store, it's almost impossible to figure out what's working and what's not working. That's why that old adage is still true.
Speaker 1:Absolutely For people that are not into marketing their founders, for example, can we spend just a minute to define what attribution actually is and, really, why is it critical for companies to be mindful of this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, you know back. You know, the best way to understand attribution is to kind of go back to the future, before we had digital marketing, Because all we had before digital marketing is we had television, radio, print and direct mail. That was pretty much it. And so big brands. The way they would figure out how things worked is they would use these statistical techniques called media mix modeling and they would look at the correlation between how many impressions you had in market, meaning how many eyeballs you had to your sales and they came up with some really good formulas. And that's how these huge multinational brands have grown throughout the years is through this media mix modeling, is through this media mix modeling.
Speaker 2:And then all of a sudden but of course the problem back then as a marketer was that I would launch a campaign and there was nothing to track directly the effectiveness. So I would launch a TV campaign. We'd kind of have to sit and wait three to four months, sometimes even a year, for the next media mix model to be done, to see what was actually effective. And then around the mid 2000s this thing called digital marketing came along and people started testing it. It was really cool because I could actually spend money and at the end of the month I would get a report that would tell me how many clicks I got, so I could actually see something was actually happening. And so that kind of grew and brands started spending more and more money on this new digital marketing. So then what would happen is is that these clicks were very close to the sale and they tended to be very lower funnel. You know, like when somebody types in a brand and they click and they go to a website and they buy, and so attribution was trying to figure out where was the source of the sale or what was the source of the lead. And so what ended up happening is digital started to grow.
Speaker 2:Attribution became primarily last action, so last click was the main mode, and what that meant is whoever or whatever the last click source was, ended up getting all of the credit. And that's kind of like giving credit for you buying like a six pack of beer to the person at the checkout stand who checks out your beer at the supermarket, like giving them credit because they scanned it they were the last person to check it and then you pay. That's pretty close to the sale, and so what ends up happening in that scenario is you end up measuring based upon that last action. You put all your money way down very close to the sale, which means that your sales funnel. The number of people you're trying to reach gets less and less.
Speaker 2:So attribution is for founders who aren't you know and I know I gave a really long explanation there but attribution is essentially what is the source of the sale? Where did that sale come from? So if you have a small business, for example, and you run a coupon and a a coupon book, and there's a code associated with it, and somebody calls up and says, yeah, I want that discount to clean my vacuum, and here's my code, you know, oh, that was that coupon book that got the sale, and so you attribute that, and so that's essentially what attribution is, and what happened over time? That's essentially what attribution is, and what happened over time, though, is that marketers realized, as they started using this last click, they would put more and more money down to the bottom, and the number of people they're reaching was less and less. So less reach, and the advertising wasn't as effective.
Speaker 1:And that became kind of the big issue, Absolutely. I've also seen exactly the same thing happen with first click attribution. So it's like well, they discovered us with this one first click, never mind the 10 actions they took after that. We're going to spend all our money in this one. And I always tell the story. I had one client that was getting lots and lots of leads from Facebook, for example, versus not so many from LinkedIn. But then when you studied who actually turned into a customer at the end of that journey, LinkedIn was delivering them way more customers than Facebook, but because of the leads they were spending way more money on Facebook. So I think it's a very common market and mistake.
Speaker 2:No, absolutely. And just as you mentioned, first click, that's what led to the different types of approaches. So for some businesses, when click-based attribution was all the rage like if you have a business like, let's say, you're a mortgage broker and so you give mortgages for homes so here in the US the average person looks to get a new mortgage it used to be like every five to seven years. So what does that mean? That means that if a person is not aware of you, if you don't get them in your funnel and they go with someone else, you don't have a chance at them for another five to seven years. So in that type of model, if all you had was click-based attribution, you would definitely want to give the first click or the first touch most of the credit. But what ended up happening over time is that what we found is that the most effective way to determine attribution in the source is to do what we call multi-touch attribution. Now, in order to do that, you have to collect lots of big data. You have to collect all of the data from your website, all of the clicks from there, but then also you have to collect all of the impressions because, like you said in that example with Facebook and LinkedIn. People were becoming aware on LinkedIn. They saw the ad on LinkedIn, but then they people were becoming aware on LinkedIn. They saw the ad on LinkedIn, but then they may have clicked through on Facebook. So those impressions are important. So that means you have to put these ad tags everywhere.
Speaker 2:It was a lot of setup, collecting billions of data points every day, and that was my former company. We built one of the first multi-touch attribution companies, and what we did with that is that, instead of going with last click or first click or all these other types of things, we designed an algorithm that would actually determine how much credit each touch point should receive based upon this algorithm, and that worked out really well. So we were then giving credit to all different parts of the funnel and it worked great for brands. Brands were able to grow. We primarily worked with large enterprise brands and multi-touch attribution became all the rage from like 2010, all the way up to right around the pandemic time, and then right around the pandemic, the bottom kind of dropped out of things.
Speaker 2:In the EU, we had this privacy movement with the GDPR and then that spread over to the US, and then we had changes where iOS updated, where it stopped apps from tracking Mobile Safari. You couldn't track on Mobile Safari and then Google kept concerning people that they were going to go, they were going to get rid of the third party cookie. They never did, but there was all that fear. But what it led to is it led to the point that and then we also had all the walled gardens, so all of the places where people market, like the marketplaces, like Walmart and Amazon, and even Meta, facebook and YouTube all of these places put up the walls and they said well, you can get click data, because if someone clicks from an ad and they go to your website, you're going to know that, but you're no longer going to be able to get the user impression data because of privacy. So, when you think about that formula that was necessary in order to do that really cool algorithm, we have all the clicks, but we don't now have the impressions because of privacy.
Speaker 2:And so and we've all noticed as marketers that when we start to go in and we start to target new ads, we can't go as deep as we used to at the user level. It's much broader than it used to be, and so that we're now kind of living in a world where it's very similar to how things were before digital, so you can't get the user level data unless the user you know them, unless they're a customer, and you can't track people around the web anymore. That really doesn't work as well as it used to, and so what we did is that we what we built before at my former company with multi-touch attribution and built kind of this middle ground between media mix modeling and multi-touch attribution that provides marketers what they need, but does it in a privacy, safe manner and without the need to collect all of that detailed data as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's pretty amazing. I was going to ask how do you get around the privacy laws now? So I guess it's all based on you know, previous experience and what you've seen. You know a good metrics to kind of the marketers to focus on. And, on that topic, what other metrics would you consider most important for evaluating campaign success? Because I know everyone's kind of focused on the sale, but what are some other metrics that marketers, especially in the world of B2B, should be mindful of that lead up to that sale so they can use that for forecasting, for example?
Speaker 2:Well, I think one of the first things for marketers is all of us have a Google sheet that has daily history of everything that's happened. I've seen these, we've all had them. It's got every day. It's how much I spent, how many clicks came in, my cost per click, my cost per sale, my cost per lead, all of that stuff. But I have found that there's one important metric that's missing from this Google Sheet and that's impressions. That's what's missing, and this is kind of what's happened.
Speaker 2:If we go back to what I talked about before how we had this kind of growth of digital marketing, starting with the click, and how we've gotten addicted to clicks, marketers have been trained that clicks are the thing, and so most marketers today believe you invest dollars to buy clicks and then clicks lead to leads and leads lead to sales or clicks lead to sales. But the reality is the way that marketing actually functions is we invest dollars to buy eyeballs, people and those eyeballs are what we call impressions, media impressions and we do that. Yes, we want clicks, but we actually do that to build awareness, and when awareness is built enough, that will then lead people to walk into our store. If we're B2B, our store is probably our website. If we're direct to consumer, our store could be our website, it could be brick and mortar, it could be our product on Amazon or some other marketplace, and so we have forgotten that first, most important metric, which is impression. And so what ends up happening is that the way most marketers evaluate campaigns is they look at how many clicks they got, and then they make buying decisions on a daily basis. What they need to do is take that sheet out right now and add an extra column, and a column should be right after the date. The date should be first. The next column should be impressions, because that's what comes first, that's what you're buying, and it should go back for a year and tally up all the impressions and you will start to notice a relationship between impressions today and then clicks and actions a couple of days later, maybe several weeks later, and you want to start to understand that relationship. And that leads to probably the second most important metric for marketers, which is what we call time to conversion, and I'm not talking about like when someone fills out a lead form and then time to calculate till you get a contract and close the sale that we all have in Salesforce and stuff like that. What I'm talking about is that every campaign that you have when you think about a campaign, creative channel combination has a unique timeframe, that when people are first exposed to that, that that's how long it takes them to actually, you know, do something, do the desired action that you want.
Speaker 2:Back at my former company, when we had all of this data, we had every bit of data. What we could do is like, let's say, we wanted to see about Facebook, and so what our database would do is, for a specific client, it would query everyone who converted in the last 30 days, and then it would find everyone whose first impression was Facebook, because, remember, we're collecting the entire journey. Some of these journeys were like hundreds of steps long, and then it would go through and it would, in real time, measure how long each of those journeys were and create both a medium and an average. So then I could look and see okay, how long is it taking Facebook to have an impact? This is important because it lets me know if we're going to add a new Facebook campaign. And, let's say, the average days to conversion is 20. If I add a new campaign, I need to give it at least a minimum of 20 days. More likely, I probably need to wait 40 days to really see it come through.
Speaker 2:Now, in today's world, we don't have access to that impression data, so we can't query a database because we don't live at Provalytics.
Speaker 2:In the world of user level data, we deal in aggregated data, but there is a technique called advertising ad stock, and ad stock is about the indirect effect of marketing, the idea being that when you run a TV campaign this is a great example you run a TV campaign for one day.
Speaker 2:That day, anyone who's ever run TV before will see a huge number of people come to their website that day. In fact, sometimes it'll crash a website, so the next day there's no more TV and yet your traffic to your website is elevated not at the same level, but it's above what it would normally be at and it will stay like that. Depending upon the strength of the campaign, it could stay like that for a couple of days. Every campaign, even digital campaigns, have the same kind of secondary curve, if you will, and we can use that curve to determine the average and the medium to determine how long it takes campaigns to have an impact. Where it's really important is that you know, in a perfect world of marketing, I have a marketing budget and I can do what I want finance and my CEO doesn't bother me. In the real world, I get a call, it's two weeks before the end of the quarter and my CEO says hey, we're cutting your budget for the rest of the quarter which is like only two weeks left by 90%.
Speaker 2:I need you to have it all figured out by 5pm and oh, by the way it cannot affect sales or leads this quarter.
Speaker 2:Wow. So the way you use that is you look at your campaign, your time to conversion to figure out what is actually going to have an impact like in the next two weeks. So in that example, if paid social Facebook is taking 20 to 40 days, cut it 100 percent because you have to, and so this helps a real world situation. So I would say impressions and I would say time to conversion are the two things for all marketers to be thinking about.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. You must look at a lot of data on a daily basis. Having an amazing tool such as this one, I have to selfishly ask you know, in saying the world of B2B, saas and tech, are there any campaigns channels? You know types of content that you find always work better than others, or is it completely different by client?
Speaker 2:No, I would say that the B2B tech, saas space is. There's something that always works that most folks completely forget about, and that is that most marketers for B2B they put on their hat and they open up their playbook for B2B and they do all the B2B stuff. We're going to go to events, we're going to have the white papers, we're going to put stuff on LinkedIn, but we're not going to do consumer style marketing, because we're not a consumer brand, we're B2B Huge mistake, because B2B is a group purchase. There's a series of people that influence the sale. There's the first person who becomes aware and then they have to build up consensus within their organization. So they're talking about you, but when they go home at night or when they work from home whatever they're a consumer and they're sitting down, they're watching their game, they're chilling out, they're relaxing, they're watching Netflix, maybe they're watching a prime video or something, and it's so easy in today's world to throw up some CTV ads for a B2B brand that's highly targeted. In fact, now LinkedIn is doing amazing stuff because and they were piloting it for about a year but you can actually buy CTV using your LinkedIn. You know your LinkedIn targets, which is absolutely amazing. So imagine I'm done working and I'm your I'm the person you have to influence and I'm sitting down and I'm watching the game or I'm watching a movie on prime and there comes an ad up. There's still something so powerful at watching a professionally done ad on a huge screen. It really impresses folks.
Speaker 2:So you have to think and in the US there was a huge campaign, netsuite by Oracle. That was really one of the first ones that did this. They started advertising heavily on satellite radio and the only brands that were being advertised there besides them was an underwear brand and a sheets brand. So consumer brands and the NetSuite by Oracle. And people thought that they were crazy for doing it, but it blew them up big time. And in the US now we're starting to see a couple of more like B2B brands, but they tend to only buy things like CNBC and Business News, which I think is a huge mistake. You just want to go where people are. So you're not in B2B, you're not limited. You actually have. You can do so much more. So you need to think more like a consumer brand, without a doubt.
Speaker 1:So much more. So you need to think more like a consumer brand, without a doubt. I love that you said that. I completely agree. There's one pet peeve I have in the world of B2B is that people are just so afraid to be creative. They're like no, we just need to deliver rational messages about our features and you know what they solve. But they forget like you're dealing with the same person. It's a human, you know they're a consumer. It's a crowded marketplace as well. They're exposed to so much content. So really, if you can create a more emotional, creative message, kind of you know, thinking more in the B2C lines of creativity, I think you outperform your competitors that way.
Speaker 2:A thousand percent and people tend to forget, as marketers, about that emotional component.
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:it's so important and we we've seen it. Now brands are starting to realize that. You know we saw this trend a couple of years ago where brands were doing these, that you know we saw this trend a couple of years ago where brands were doing these, you know, trying to, you know, be like TikTok ads with these really fast things. We saw it in the Super Bowl a couple of years ago and those just did not deliver. But now we're starting to see more storytelling and that's what people want, that's what hooks people in. But the practical stuff yeah, practical is great, but emotion is what sells people, without a doubt.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and I think on that topic I'd also love to touch on personalization, because that's, I think, very much necessary in the age that we live in today. Consumers very much expect it. I get really frustrated with one particular brand that delivers me holidays and they're like the type of holidays that are for honeymoons, but I've got two children now and I've had that for 10 years, so I'm like where are the family holidays like? This is frustrating, but I think if you're not collecting data and researching your customers and then delivering personalization, you're really I always want to say you're kind of pissing them off because they're now expecting that. What's your take on personalization and your experience with it? How far do you think marketers should take it?
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's so easy today. We have all the tools that we need. And when you think about it, if you go back here, I am aging myself again going back before digital, the direct mailers. They had it all figured out. The concept of these CRMs have been around for ages.
Speaker 2:And you think about the old catalogs. They were personalized and some brands had five or six different catalogs and you would get different versions of it based upon how much you spent with them, what you had ordered. So it's so simple to do. And in the B2B space it's really simple to do. Even handwritten notes. You don't even have to write it. There's, there's tools out there. You can send them in your handwriting. It'll be in your handwriting, they'll even mail the card for you. You just have to think about it.
Speaker 2:I just think it's one of these things that marketers sometimes, dare I say, we get of like. Sometimes it's like in the dating world, where men get a little overwhelmed and they forget that all I need to do for someone's birthday is a card and some flowers, and so we tend to over plan and we can't execute on the plan, we won't do anything, and it's really the basic stuff that needs to be taken care of. Another big thing on B2B, where we see a lot of B2B fails, even though the marketing campaign could be performing really well. There is a fear inside of organizations when they're bringing on a new piece of technology. It's a huge investment and if I'm the person who's bringing it in investment, and if I'm the person who's bringing it in, you know, if a call doesn't go well with a vendor, that reflects on me and my career within the organization.
Speaker 2:And so what I'm going to do is is that I may do a call first or I may check them out. Like, let's say, I find out about them on LinkedIn, so now I'm going to just do a check. So now I'm going to google them, and when I go to their so now I'm going to Google them, and when I go to their page on LinkedIn and they have a quote in terms of what they do, and when I go to their website, it says something completely different. And then I go to social media and it says something completely different feel uneasy and uncomfortable. So there needs to be consistency across all of these different places. You can't say, well, we're only up to date on LinkedIn. That doesn't work in today's world, because maybe I want to check you out elsewhere. So consistency is really the key in terms of making sure that your messaging is good and kind of doesn't get in the way of the sale, and that's the other thing that can also turn people off too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I absolutely agree with consistency. I've seen it as well. It's really frustrating. It's almost like the LinkedIn page on the website were written by completely different people, and you're right. You kind of go what's going on here? You know they haven't quite got it right. Coming back to what you said earlier, I think there's so many tools that exist now that I think marketers do get the whole paralysis by analysis um thing, and I, you're right, they kind of veer away from the basics, such as a handwritten note, which can go a long way because not many people are doing it and it's such a personalized thing that you know it's quite nice. I think it could definitely start a conversation. Not sure about it copying my handwriting because my handwriting is already hard to understand, but definitely a better version on that would be nice.
Speaker 2:Definitely. I mean, it's really, you know, it's really starting to. You know, think outside the box as well, because in today's world, people are so distracted and we were talking about this earlier you want to find a way to capture attention, that you want to be able to get that attention. And that's really the job of marketing today, and advertising is to get people to stop and say, oh wow, that you know. And it's not always about trying to sell. Here are the features, here's our call to action. It's more about getting attention. And what's funny is that one of the things that is huge right now in my world, in the marketing world, is everyone is very upset, very upset over this Jaguar rebranding. I don't know if you've heard about it over there. They've changed the logo and everyone is upset. No, oh, my God, everyone's up in arms with it and they think it's the worst thing for the brand. And I'm saying to myself I think the laugh is on everyone else, because, guess what, I haven't thought about Jaguar in years.
Speaker 2:They got me articles about them now.
Speaker 2:I wanted to know what the new brand looked like. And you know the old saying is you know, I don't care what you say about me, just spell my name right. I mean now this is on the tip of the tongue for a lot of people and you know, attention is that first thing that you could say. Well, it's negative attention. It's like, well, you know it's negative attention, but for some people a jaguar would have never come into their consideration set, and now it's there, so it's. It'll be interesting to see how, or if they're able to turn the tide on this and turn it into some positive attention and sales as well.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I was not aware of this, but you're right, I hadn't thought of Jaguar. I mean, if you had asked me right now, what car would you buy if you had all the money in the world? It's not even in the top 10. So I think it's a good move, and people are always outraged by any change that happens. I remember every time Facebook updated its you know its design everyone was like oh, what have they done? But eventually you get used to it and then now you've interacted with that brand and you remember it better as well.
Speaker 2:No, absolutely right. And I think for them, you know, maybe right now people would say what's a car you wouldn't buy? Oh, I wouldn't buy a Jaguar, I don't like the new logo, which sounds so silly. Yeah, but they at least got you saying the name and thinking about it. I mean, that's the first step, is the awareness. You know, they used to say at BMW that their ads were not designed for people to buy a car. Today, their ads were designed for 15 and 16 year old boys so that when they're in their late thirties and early forties, they could, when they could afford to buy a BMW, they would. So it was an aspiration type ad.
Speaker 2:So I mean that that's really thinking long-term. Aspiration type ad. So I mean that's really thinking long-term, which doesn't work in today's quarter-by-quarter driven world. But that's really the job of marketing is to build that awareness over time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I think people forget that they're so much more focused on sales activation campaigns rather than branding. It's really it's branding that delivers the sales over time, whereas sales activation this is actually research from LinkedIn. It's really it's branding that delivers the sales over time, whereas sales activation this is actually research from LinkedIn. It was showing overtime sales, and so sales activation was just kind of plateaued the whole time, whereas branding kind of took an uplift like this. So I think BMW has the right approach and I see them everywhere, so they must be doing well. Let's talk about AI. We've talked about before digital. We've talked about some amazing attribution tracking strategies that we need to be mindful of. How do you leverage AI at Probalytics? How do you use it? What are your thoughts on?
Speaker 2:it. Yeah, so we trained a model internally that we use. We don't use ChatGPT or any of those, and we use it. We have a four-part machine learning process, so it's four different steps that go on that before we were able to leverage the AI, it would complete one step and then a human would come in and evaluate and do a couple of things and it would go on to the next step. So now it's no human has to touch it. It's able to observe, follow through with the entire process. So that's how we use it.
Speaker 2:The promise of AI kind of in the future for this stuff is to be able to take all of this data. This is the promise is put it up in a large language model, not into something like a chat GPT, but put it up into something that the client owns, because this has all of their confidential data, and then a marketer can go in and ask specific questions like hey, I have an extra million dollars to deploy this quarter. Where should I put it at? That type of thing. But what's interesting, though, is that we find marketers tend to ask questions sometimes that aren't very practical. Like marketers say, I want it to be able to tell me if I put an extra million dollars in Facebook. What will I get from that? And what I explain to marketers is well, wouldn't you rather say to the model and to this, because it's really like a genie in the bottle Okay, it's done. All of this analysis in anything.
Speaker 2:Wouldn't it be smarter to say to the genie in the bottle I have an extra million dollars to spend next month, Tell me where to put it at? Why would you tell it to put it all into Facebook? Because it wouldn't make sense, because everything happens today like in a network effect, so you don't want to force it. And this is one of the issues with marketers is that we've we've tend to kind of force like a square peg into a round hole, Whereas really we want to be able to to ask this system and this gets back to that creativity. It's like hey, you have a budget, ask the genie where to spend it at, It'll give you line item by line item where to put at. Don't say, hey, if I do this what am I going to get?
Speaker 1:Because you're not going to do that. You know? Yeah, exactly, use its intelligence, absolutely. That's exactly right. What are some other common mistakes you find marketers make in SaaS companies?
Speaker 2:Well, probably the biggest one is this idea about. You know, and this tends to happen, it's not their fault, they're following the numbers that they have, they're data-driven marketers they're all using like a GA4. And it shows, based in the CRM, that paid search is what's driving the results and paid search tends to be lower funnel and google's revenue continues to rise because the pay-per-click rates keep going up and, in fact, if you look, you're over here this month compared to last year, if you're spending the exact same as you were last year, you're getting less numbers of clicks because the costs are going up.
Speaker 1:Inflation right.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right. But also, especially if you're in a competitive market, people are going to outbid you, and so it's a great world for Google to live in. It's not a great world for you to live in, because you are now putting all your eggs into one basket, and so what ends up happening is that you've reached that point of saturation. Marginal return, the return you've way over invested in paid search and it really stinks because it looks like it's working. But once you start to add impressions into the mix and you look at how many impressions you're generating, you'll realize that you're maybe generating more impressions as you spend more, but your leads aren't going up, your sales aren't going up, and what that tells you is you need to redeploy money to other places.
Speaker 2:And the thing is, as marketers, we know where to redeploy. We know that we need to move up funnel, and up funnel in the B2B space is what are our folks when they're not working? Well, they're on Facebook, they're on Instagram, so spend money there, and I know that Facebook doesn't show that it generates leads. But I will guarantee you, if you take 10% of your search spend and you redeploy it to Facebook, within six to eight weeks you're going to have more leads, guarantee and move it even more up funnel, move it up to YouTube and places like that. Spend more on retargeting and things like that. But when you follow the numbers it is all heavily down funnel and that's. That's not a winning proposition for a company at all.
Speaker 1:It's so true, isn't it? I mean, just as you were saying that I was thinking of just in the last week, the people that I spend my time with. A lot of them are in B2B decision making roles. A lot of them are in B2B decision-making roles and in their downtime I constantly see them on Facebook and YouTube and Reddit, but again, it's the channels that you wouldn't normally use for B2B, but that's where all their attention goes Right, but they're not going to click on those.
Speaker 2:They're going to see the ad, they're going to remember it and then they'll Google you. So what ends up happening is you spend money there and Google looks like it continues to work better, but the reality is is that it's not Google and because people don't want to leave those apps, people don't want to leave Reddit, they don't want to leave Facebook or Instagram, they'll see the ad. Trust me, it actually works. It works really really well, but it's nervous sometimes to go against the numbers, but you have to trust your gut. I mean, nine times out of 10, when we bring on a new client, they bring us on because they know that the test that they ran a couple of months ago actually worked, but they can't prove it.
Speaker 1:They need us to prove it.
Speaker 2:And then they need us to build out a new source of truth so they can go to their CFO and say give me a bigger budget. And that's really the key with this is building out that single source of truth. You want your CFO and you looking at the same data set. And this is something really important is that you know what ends up happening for a lot of organizations is that you're the marketer, you live in GA4, you live in Salesforce, so does finance. So now you bring on someone outside like us and you're logging in. You got your agency logging in. Everyone's toeing the line. It's great.
Speaker 2:When you go to finance say, hey, I got something to show you. They're going to be like even if they come to look at what we have, as soon as they get off the call, they're going to go back to GA4. So you have to like, you have to replace GA4. That's why, for us, we output for all of our clients these csv flat files so, like the whole, all of your data can become a series of excel files so it can easily go into looker or datorama. Because you need to get everyone in your organization on this new source of truth, because then you can go and get more money and that's really what it comes because?
Speaker 2:Because if they're looking at a different source of truth, it just won't happen.
Speaker 1:Very true. The future of attribution I think a lot of things have happened. I mean, you mentioned, you know, the privacy laws during the pandemic. Now, with AI exploding, where do you see the future of marketing attribution evolving? If you had a you know a glass ball that you can consult, what do you think is going to happen?
Speaker 2:last call that you can consult. What do you think is going to happen? I think that we're going to combine a lot of these pieces together, you know, because what ends up happening is that you've got our aspect, which is we're able to do the analysis and push out, you know, campaign ad set, creative level recommendations, increase your bid here by this, decrease it by that. Getting the people to execute on it is the hardest part, because if I'm a search marketer and you're telling me to spend less on these campaigns and spend more on these others or on social, and I don't see it, I don't understand it. Maybe I wasn't part of the big meeting, but I don't understand it. So maybe I only do 5% of the recommendation, so the client's not going to get the biggest bang for their buck. So I think the ultimate where this will head to is that, as these models continue to improve and the accuracy of the models are ridiculous, they're all predictive models. So we're able to demonstrate that because we hold back sales and we say to the model hey, last week I spent this, this, this and this on this day. What would my sales have been if I did that? And it predicts it like within 90% accuracy. It's incredible how powerful these are. So it would make sense that the machine that's predicting would also be the machine that eventually executes the buys.
Speaker 2:And it's kind of like I was listening to a podcast the other day talking about where is AI going in planes, especially in for defense of countries and because you know, you think about like dog fights and stuff like that with planes. And well, once you put an AI bot in there, the time for it to make decisions is so much faster than a human, even though pilots are so fast and you don't have to worry about the G forces or anything because there's not a human in the plane, so it can do all these crazy spends and stuff like that. So imagine if the humans got out of the way. Now Google and Facebook have tried to do this with their AI driven campaigns.
Speaker 2:There was a lot of excitement behind it, but here's the problem Google only knows about Google. They don't know what else you're doing. Facebook only knows about Facebook. Facebook and Google don't know about your events. They don't know about your inside Salesforce. They don't know about your CTV ads. They don't know about any of that. If you're a consumer brand, they don't know about your ads that you have on.
Speaker 2:Amazon, but an AI driven attribution platform like ours knows about all that stuff, so it can execute those buys with a much better holistic manner than Google and Facebook can, with complete transparency as well, too. So we're not there yet, but I think that's eventually where we'll go, because if I'm a brand, I want my buys to be executed. You know perfectly, and it makes sense to have the machine that's measuring it do it. Now, where you run into an issue is the incentives, because we always get brought in, typically by the brand, but sometimes the agency brings us in and the brand doesn't want the agency having the contract, because the agency is incentivized by spending more money, and so we're kind of like Switzerland we sit in the middle. So there's a lot of politics, if you will, that have to happen, and a lot of technology, but I think eventually that's where it will go.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I also like the single source of truth. No bias towards a particular channel. You know, like you said, Google is going to want you to spend more on Google. Facebook is going to want you to spend more on Google. Facebook is going to want you to spend more on Facebook. The agency might have its own biases as well, so I think having that non-biased attribution overall report I think would really help. Jeff, my last question for you If you could go back in time, I think you have already a few times, but if you could go back again, what would you do differently in your business?
Speaker 2:Well, if I could go back, I'll go back to my previous business, when I first got into attribution in 2008 with my former company, Because with this business, which I started in 2022, about two and a half years ago I've made a concerted effort to chill a bit more, take the weekends off, shut out Friday afternoons as early as possible and enjoy life a little bit, sleep a little bit more, take better care of myself. At my former company it was a 24 hour a day, seven day a week job. I never took a break and I just didn't chill enough. I'll never forget my wife and I. We took a.
Speaker 2:It was my birthday, we were gonna take a weekend to go up to Maine and this was a big deal because it was the first time ever that I was going to turn my phone off. I had never turned my phone off since the founding of this company and everyone it didn't matter Everybody had my wife's phone number in case of an emergency or anything like that. But I remember it was in my wife's car. I was driving. I took my phone. It was like a ceremony. I'm turning it off and my wife watched. It was like a two and a half hour drive. She said that I yawned probably 10,000 times on the drive. It was just such a relief and that first day I slept like 16 hours because I wasn't worried about it. I couldn't be worried. So now I turn my phone off, I take the weekends off, I relax.
Speaker 2:It's a hard thing for a founder to do, but what I find is I'm a much more effective leader, I can gain more perspective about the business, and we talked about this earlier, about being able to take a walk and just think without distraction. Because in business, as a founder, we're dealing every day with problems, so we have to come up with solutions, and the two things we want around us is we want diversity of thought. You want different types of people that are surrounding you. So when there's a problem, because I already know my solution, I can come up with solutions day in and day out, but my solution is not always the right solution. I want someone else to give me ideas, because that expands my consciousness and it helps me come up with better ideas. But then we also need time alone to just chill and not think, because that's sometimes when the best solutions come up, is they just appear, which is wonderful. So I'm giving myself space to do that. So that's what I would change is to give myself more space to chill.
Speaker 1:Can I ask Dan, because there's a great debate between founders on the work-life balance aspect and I'm actually on the side that thinks that you do need a balance, you do need to take that time, you do need to take better care of yourself, but a lot of founders say you know, if you're not working 24 hours a day, you're not going to be successful. Now that you've taken a bit more downtime, do you find that the business has suffered or is it exactly the same as when you were working 24 hours a day?
Speaker 2:No, it's better. But I tell you the founders, though, who burn the candle at both ends I know I've been blessed that, you know my relationships, especially with my wife and my family, stayed intact. But I know so many founders who have gotten to that win, that point, and they look around and they've got one goal They've got money, but their family isn't there, the people they care about aren't there, and they're now alone. And then I see a spiral where they're lost and they start to go downhill very quickly.
Speaker 2:So I'm a big believer that what good is the journey if you get there and you're alone and you're unhealthy, and I mean, that's the other thing is you have to take care of your body as well. There's a lot of time spent sitting, uh, which is not good for you, so you have to get up and move your body every day. You got to make sure the fuel you put in your body is correct, and you have to get enough sleep, at least eight or nine hours a night. I know that younger folks say, oh, I can, I can live on four hours of sleep a night, and I'm like. Good luck with that and multitasking. You can't do it, you think you can. That's the crazy thing about our bodies and our minds is that we think we can do something and we really believe it, and then we deceive ourselves into thinking it.
Speaker 2:And so I would say my business is better off, but, more importantly, I'm better off for it, and the people around me are better off for it too. My team is better off, and my family is better off as well, and so are my customers too. That's the most important thing, is is is they're better off as well?
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, happiness and positivity are contagious, so I think I'm really relieved and happy. You said that because I wanted that to be the answer. Jeff, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. I've learned so much. There's so many things I now want to go and try in the world of attribution. I'll definitely be checking out your platform. We can even keep talking but thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Joanne, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.
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