The Google Dashboard Genius with JJ Reynolds

Have you ever thought about the actions you should take on your marketing data? JJ Reynolds (@JJReynoldsjr) helps to eliminate the guesswork by using Google Marketing Cloud. JJ shows how his team can increase MMR while measuring the customer’s journey. He describes how you can take your data from your CRM, Google Analytics, and cart platform and turn it into a real-time data dashboard for you to take action on. This is exciting stuff for both B2B and DTC marketers.

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Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this episode of talk commerce today. I have JJ Reynolds JJ, no relation to aluminum foil, but still a great last name. JJ is a marketing and analytics expert. JJ, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us what you do day to day and maybe one of your passions in. Hey 

JJ: thanks so much for having me the first off, my name is JJ Reynolds.

JJ: Again, no relation to Reynolds rap at all. But I run media authentic, which is we’re a small, nimble team of data analytics marketers. So basically we help marketing teams report on their numbers from everything from customer acquisition costs to stick and churn to how well your Facebook ads are doing and everything 

Brent: in.

Brent: that’s great. Thanks. So today we are gonna talk about customer acquisition. I would like to talk a little bit about the difference between D to C and B2B in an acquisition cost. And, but I’ll kinda let you drive some of that, some of those topics maybe just tell us what are some of the misconceptions on acquisition costs, especially from a 

JJ: merchant point of.

JJ: Yeah, definitely the biggest I guess misnomer around customer acquisition costs it comes on both of those customer side and the cost side. So in order to have customer acquisition costs, you have your happy customers and you have to have your costs and you have to divide the two. Just for everybody listening that didn’t know what we’re talking about.

JJ: The both of those things can be defined differently. At every level of an organization, whether you’re a small, nimble team or a big like hundred person team is a customer, a free subscription. If you’re a SAS company or a $7 makeup brush, if you’re a, an e-commerce company. And on the flip side so like basically to start off, is that a customer, right?

JJ: Is that defined as a customer, to everybody in your entire team? And you need to get everyone on board with that because I’ve seen big tuffle and curve ruffles and all types of things happen about defining what that customer. Is so once you can define that, I’d say, write out on piece paper, then you need to define costs, right?

JJ: So is cost your ad spend? Is it your marketing team? Is it the agency running it? What is the definition of cost? Because the agency or your marketing team. if you’re running ads, which is the most, the simplest customer acquisition cost you can have is the ad spend divided by customers. Once you define what a customer is that’s the easiest thing, right?

JJ: And so if you can define what your costs are, if you’re gonna use ad spend, if you’re gonna use marketing costs, because in theory, marketing if you’re having a person running your ads, that’s a cost. If you could define that next, then you have a great baseline because someone just asks what’s a better what’s the good customer acquisition cost and for market eCommerce or make or SAS.

JJ: The answer to that question is better than it was yesterday. That’s the answer to the question because everyone’s trying to get a lower customer acquisition cost. And so that, that’s my thoughts in broad strokes about. How to simply go about it and have the least amount of confrontations at your organization company, or even like small business, depending on the size.

Brent: Yeah. So we’re talking here, we’re talking, maybe a D to C customer where you’re trying to get as many people to, to to purchase something. And what does it cost to get that customer? I think if you, if, then if we dig in a little deeper it’s, if they’re gonna buy something else, that’s. Average customer value or average average customer length. Tho those things also play in to that initial cost. And then if they’re buying a subscription or if they’re just buying a hairbrush. I don’t buy a lot of hair brushes and I don’t really need a subscription for one, but I would imagine there’s people that buy hair brushes, I’ve never bought one.

Brent: But having said that it is PO there’s a different once you’ve acquired them, they’re worth, every customer could be worth different. So you also should define how much you should be spending potentially, cause if you have a subscription that, that the acquisition cost could be higher, but.

Brent: Total customer value would be higher. 

JJ: Exactly. And my favorite metric to have on a dashboard for that exact question is what is the like cycle you expect? And what’s your What’s your not like a stick rate, but what’s your rebuy rate or repurchase or reengage rate. So for example, if you’re a pool company selling chlorine it’s gonna be a year, right?

JJ: Every summer people are gonna buy it. So you should say, Hey, we acquired a thousand customers this summer or in the month of June or whatever it might be. When did they buy next? Probably next June. They’re not gonna buy in July cuz they just bought like three months of pool supplies. And so what you need to do is you need to look at the next buy. So the next June, how many of those customers that you acquired in June, 2020 bought in. June or summer 2021. And then if you say, oh, 60% bought again. Now we got something to go off of. If we can say every year, 60% is who reengage with us, rebuy, repurchase, re give us money.

JJ: You have a much better way of saying projecting the future of what’s gonna happen when you acquire today. It’s a very loose metric, right? We’re not like looking exactly this percentage, this number like from a SAS, like standpoint people. Do that. But that’s usually really the most helpful and I guess actionable.

JJ: Oh I cannot hear you 

Brent: most important thing. There is to get the number of staff, establish a baseline and then see where you’re improving. So you’re right. That number is flexible and it’s not a set number it’s different in every industry. I think that you’ve mentioned gauge a few times.

Brent: The most important thing then how do you get them to engage on something? 

JJ: Yeah. I, again, I would love to, to play with definitions of what is, what does engaged mean to different people? Because marketers I love us all. Like we all love to make up new terms of what different things mean. So at your what, whether you’re trying to engage someone to do a bajillion different things, right?

JJ: You could have them engage with a blog post, which is. The blog post, and you should measure for that is Hey, let’s see how hit 90% scroll on our blogs. And then you can measure, there are people who are reading your blogs. There are page views of your blogs, because page views just means someone clicks on something and need a good title.

JJ: Doesn’t mean your content was actually helpful. From a reporting standpoint and from. A measurement to then action, right? Because reporting is only useful. If you take an action on it, at the end of the day, doesn’t matter. How pretty the reports look, how bold the numbers are.

JJ: You need have an action. So whatever the engagement metric are, whether it’s reengage with a product to say you, you sold a, an RC car and you wanna sell the upgraded wheels. Like you could have them reengage and buy. Set of wheels or to just have your content marketing, be like, we’re gonna try and get our entire email list to at least read one blog post to the end, the, to the end of it.

Brent: Yeah. And I think you’ve brought up a really good point about engagement and how that is different from taking the action. I can remember a client that we had that had a huge amount of volume on their site, like a million views. and their orders were 400 or something like that. They were just using their site to display information and they’re driving people to retail where they could be taking advantage of action items on that to make them buy something.

Brent: And I think what you’re saying, and what I hear you saying is that the engagement part of it is important, but then during that engagement, we want to take, we want them to take some actions, right? So maybe you could go into what are some of those actions? Typical merchant could do or entice them in that engagement to take those actions.

JJ: Yeah. Like I love breaking it down to a customer journey that you can actually measure. And then ultimately that you can like, again, action on it. And so the biggest fail point I see in most eCommerce, like every business, every single online is just. The default metrics that are given to you by any platform of conversion rate, right?

JJ: That’s a big thing everyone talks about. What is a conversion rate? Is that number of people who you hit your site to purchase, or is it number of page used to purchase number of sessions to purchase number of product detailed views to purchase, there’s so many ways to slice and dice that, that we wanna make it.

JJ: Sure. It’s hyper focused. You like the action taker, can actually dive into it and say, Hey, this is the problem. So what I personally love to do is take every page of a website and define what the goal is of this page of your website. So for example, a blog post, what is the purpose of this blog post?

JJ: And it might be different. Everyone has I just wanna have like epic content that people read that could be the goal of the blog post. And to have people understand who the brand voice is. Some people write blog posts to have call to actions like every 300 pixels. And so if you wrote that thing, okay.

JJ: Let’s start at the top. You have, remember who saw blog post, like page used. Page loaded. You might wanna do 20 seconds on page people who stuck around. They’re now aware that you even offered a blog post, you even had that to be there. I usually use engage as a 50% scroll, so Hey, they engage with our content.

JJ: We know they actually like. did not just leave immediately. They investigated usually to say, Hey, they saw a call to action or whatever the goal was for at least five seconds. So if you see your call to action, you’ll blurb there. Boom, five seconds. Now they’re like in they’re investigating what the heck is happening.

JJ: And then initiate is, took the action that I wanted them to do. So click the button. So now. If something is broken, safe, for example, your content sucks. You’ll see impression to engage terrible dropoff rate, right? You they’ll just be like, oh yeah, 90% of people didn’t scroll 50%. Doesn’t matter how great your call to action is at the bottom of your blog post.

JJ: No one saw it. So that’s like my actionable journey, for lack of better terms that you can really start to dive into immediate. Yeah. 

Brent: Just a sidebar. If you’ve ever looked at a recipe and you’ve looked it on your mobile phone the content layout shift, cumulative layout.

Brent: It takes into that account horribly when you’re going through your recipe. And you’re getting a popup ad, that’s changing every 10 seconds. And that’s a negative on that, but I love this four step process. So page views. Amount of time. So you said 50% scroll investigating. So where are they going?

Brent: And then and then action in initiating an action. That’s they, I think that just really boils it down in a nutshell. Yeah. And then how do you, so you help, you would help them determine where that drop off is. And so it, maybe if it’s under investigate, how would you help somebody to increase that, that percentage?

Brent: Yeah, like the 

JJ: easiest. We’ll help people like set this up, cause by default, none of this is being collected aside from like page views, right? Like most of the time, not all the information is being collected. So that’s of step one is defining all these terms for them, for a client of ours or even talking with somebody over the phone.

JJ: But what the goal is that these numbers jump off the page. And so if you go say for impression to aware. and we normally see like a 90, like 95% continue, 90 to 95%. If you’re at 80%, there’s a problem with your above the fold content. Like plain and simple that’s it like above the fold, something’s wrong with the expectation of what someone was expecting to see.

JJ: And then each step, we have some kind of like benchmarks depending on the industry and also just like intuition where you’re like if we make it into a funnel chart, you’re like, it let’s see a nice, beautiful tape or fall off. And if you’re like, whoa, that thing got really like skinny, fast.

JJ: Let’s go see what, like, why is that the case? Was it the fact that. We had a YouTube video that no one’s watching, that’s taken a half the screen. Was there a popup that’s happening at 15 seconds that makes everyone leave, seeing that happen? Not a fan of popups personally. And yeah, that, that’s where the actions come into play.

JJ: You see these percentages and then if they’re not what you would expect then you have to go in and hop and make, hopefully make a change that is very easily tied to those percentage. 

Brent: Yeah. And I like that. I just to, for the listeners who don’t, I think above the fold and below the fold is pretty obvious.

Brent: So you’re saying 80%, if they drop below, you’re talking about a bounce rate, right? So that first time they land, if they pop off of it without doing anything within and 80% of those people are popping off that, or more than 80%, that there’s something that’s wrong with the visible section that somebody sees, as soon as they land on that page.

JJ: Yeah, exactly. That and bounce rate is like my least favorite, like thing, because by big default, just for everyone listening, who’s seen bounce rate, right? Like it’s a metric that a lot of platforms will give you. Bounce rate is normally calculated by people who load a page and then do not continue. There’s no other events on a page.

JJ: So what that means is someone could read the whole blog post, sit there for 30 seconds. but they didn’t do anything. They didn’t click on anything. They didn’t go anywhere. So to Google analytics or whatever your platform is, they were, they bounced, they read the article and left. They didn’t click anything, but that was great.

JJ: Like they read the whole article. So that’s something to just consider is how define bounce rate for how you like the listener. Want to determine it? Like we use 10 seconds, that’s it like 10 seconds. And we have an event that fires that then. This person didn’t bounce. So you could say 30 seconds, you could say they have to scroll 10%.

JJ: You can define it. However you’d like to, by default, I’d say it’s not the most useful metric, because a lot of people probably are engaging with their content. 

Brent: that’s interesting. So are you saying then, oh, so if I’m the merchant, I have access to my Google analytics. I’m seeing my bounce right on this landing page.

Brent: That’s super high. Does Google analytics have the ability to tell you, are we looking then at how much time they’re looking at each page as compared to the bounce rate, then you can still get that out of Google analytics. 

JJ: It. Yeah. So by default and we’re getting it into technical technicalities now.

JJ: Universal analytics, which is like the current Google load platform. Doesn’t how, like, how they calculate time is basically the distance between two different events. So event one happens of page view loads, and then event two happens of clicks to product. And then it calculates the time between those two event.

JJ: if there’s no second event, they never click to a page. The time is zero. And so which, for example, if you have a blog post that was saying like how to fix your sync, right? If you have a very hyper specific problem of like you are a plumber and you’re wrote an article of how to fix your sink in five minutes and your article is the best, it just says it clearly, like this is your problem. This is how you fix. And there’s no action. They’re just awesome contents. People who load the page, look at it, read it, and then leave bounced. They read the whole articles stood there for five minutes. , but then there’s no second event for Google analytics, universal analytics to define the time.

JJ: So that’s like a very technical thing. Just wanted to make sure everyone knew that Google a looks for, which is the new version coming out soon. Or it’s already here, but the new it’s gonna be launching the next like into production, I’d say in the next little bit does it solve that problem, but just wanna let you know for.

JJ: The current state of affairs, that’s how it is defined. 

Brent: no, I think that’s really interesting. And I think there’s so many I know that there’s so many merchants that are probably looking at their Google analytics and saying, wow, this page is terrible. It’s bouncing right away. But people are really only looking at just one page they’re not looking around.

Brent: So maybe some. Some tips on how to get around on, I’m assuming first thing is to have some called actions at the top of the page to get some, to push to the bottom of the page and just get some to engage 

JJ: on the site. Yeah. I’d say the number one thing is define. the purpose of every page of your website, right?

JJ: What’s the purpose of this? Because for example, you could have a blog, like the plumber example I just gave that’s like all these things. And the goal of that, the purpose of that article is to rank number one in Google and to build retargeting audiences for your ads. All those people are having plumbing problems and you wanna build lookalike audiences of these people.

JJ: Because you know that they have problems, that could be your purpose of the page. Is that, so define the purpose of your page if it’s a product detail page, if you’re like for all the eCommerce people, where it’s like, Hey, buy this water bottle, what’s the purpose of this page to get them to fricking hit the buy button, or add the cart button. And so you wanna make sure that you’re measur. For that, but then every step before, like they engage with their carousel. So define the purpose of your page. If it’s a blog, if it’s a piece of content, some blogs are very much more call to actiony where it’s like, Hey, here’s how.

JJ: If you’re a plumber, here’s how to do this thing, buy this part, right? This part will solve your problems. This is how you solve the like world piece, right? Click this button. Then you wanna measure for that button click and if people saw the button to begin with so that’s probably the most actionable piece of advice that like everyone can do.

JJ: Just audit your, every page of your site to be like, what’s the purpose of this page. And is it achieving that if it’s not, let’s delete it or let’s fix it right. 

Brent: I like that. I, I think deleting it I suppose deleting, it would have some organic search that somebody would land there and then they’re like, this makes no sense to me and I’m gonna leave.

Brent: Would it be better to have it still and, but updated or make it try. Try I guess the point of where we’re really making here is we always wanna measure, we wanna create a baseline and then continue to measure and investigate always. We don’t wanna just stop. We don’t wanna leave something stagnant and there so you know, I’m interested in the second part of your journey, the 50% scroll.

Brent: Does Google analytics measure that the current version, the G GA universal, or do I FDA have a different, does the consumer have to have a different tool or the merchant have to have a different tool to do that part of it? 

JJ: Yeah so there’s kind of two tools that work hand in hand with each other Google analytics, which I like to say is like the.

JJ: Data storage, right? It’s like your warehouse of where all the information that you stored live, but then there’s another tool called Google tag manager, which is what tells Google analytics, Hey, store this piece of information, right? By default, it collects a few things like page views, some platforms like Shopify will add some extra pieces to that.

JJ: But at the end of the day, you have to explicitly tell Google, Hey, I wanna store this information and you do that via Google tag manager. And it. Like impressive as far as what you’re able to do. I just mentioned all these metrics. So you probably have never even thought were possible. But you can measure for example, did someone see something like what we do call to actions, right?

JJ: If there’s a call to action box, we want to say how many people saw this call to action for at least five seconds. And then how many people clicked the call to action . So then now. You have a much more actionable thing of saying let’s change this call to action box to then improve that.

JJ: But by default, no, not many of these metrics are collected out of the box for nearly all analytics platforms, right? Whether Google analytics, Adobe analytics any of the other platforms, not usually collecting that. 

Brent: Yeah. And I just we won’t get into technically again, but the Google analytics free version, doesn’t actually.

Brent: Report all the data reports, a subset of the data. Is that correct? Still like it’s doing 60% of your data. There’s a certain amount that it doesn’t report. 

JJ: Yes. And it depends on how many events that you’re storing. Most of the time you’re pretty much good to go. Like I’d say unless you’re like.

JJ: Doing significant volumes of like 10 million hits per month. You’re gonna have pretty much the, like all of it there, and then you’d want to use a tool to make sure you have the action, of like, how do you wanna visualize this information? That makes sense to you? That’s the, like the last piece, like the top of the iceberg, right?

JJ: Is how do you wanna actually visualize this? Because row and columns are only. For some things at the end of the day, you might want to have a nice little funnel that says, whoa, how did people view this content for each stage? And what’s the dropoff rate. 

Brent: Yeah. That, that brings up a really good point is like, how do you report to your boss what’s happening on the website?

Brent: And then maybe how do you get your boss to actually read it? 

JJ: Yeah. And for that, like I am data studio is my go-to. Like we use that power users of data studio even have an entire free blog with nothing to ask of data studio.vip. Which is, there’s not even a, you can’t even give money if you want to.

JJ: Data studio.vip is what we like. I basically, I just post about how to visualize things for your boss and for clients. Though, number one thing, just hot tip. If you’re visualizing any information is what is the one takeaway from that report? And what is the action you’re gonna take from that take.

JJ: So that’s it. If you can define those two things your boss will be like, oh, I understand this because you are gonna be very tempted to be like, look at this really cool thing about Hey, you want mobile? We actually do X, Y, and Z. If there’s no action, it’s useless. Like you can collect information out the Wazo, but if there’s no action might as well just delete the report.

JJ: And I’m like genuine on that part. Like I’ve deleted pages of reports that we have, because there’s no action behind it. So we need to rebuild that to make it action. . 

Brent: Yeah. And, I think the boss is always gonna look for what, how does this affect my, the bottom line? So those actions are gonna lead into something.

Brent: And I think that you’ve brought up a great point about how you present that data. And maybe you could come up. Maybe you could just share maybe the five top points that somebody should be looking at when building out a report. There’s always something they should do. Like they should be looking at actions.

Brent: but what are some other data that we should be seeing in a report? And then when is too much data, is it possible to have too much data for a boss? 

JJ: It, yeah, it depends who the stakeholder is. And I like to define this as far as I’m gonna call it C-suite but like the highest level of reporting who they’re not like actually practicing the thing, but there’s a, C-suite, there’s a manager, of like person who’s over that. Then there’s the practitioner, those three levels, you can define them. Like I use Csuite just for clarification, but the highest level, a mid-level and then the practitioner. And so the practitioner’s gonna want all the nitty gritty details, because they’re gonna say.

JJ: For example, Facebook ads. What’s our clickthrough rate of each individual ad. They’re gonna wanna know that so that they can tweak each individual ad to improve those clickthrough rates. The C suite does not care about each individual ad at all. They want to know how are we doing overall as far as clickthrough rate, as far as Even just rev, spend to returns.

JJ: And so define who your stakeholder is first and then take the one takeaway that they should have. So for example, if it is a practitioner maybe like, how are we trending overall? Month over month because they usually don’t look at that. So that might be useful report for them to be like, Hey, we’re trending upwards.

JJ: And then they can go to their manager and be like, look at this guys. We’re fricking crushing it. Whereas a manager might wanna say, how are we doing on each individual platform by broken down. And then the C-suite the top level might wanna say. How are we doing it as a company, as a whole, for all ad networks or whatever it might be.

JJ: So define the stakeholder is number one, priority. Number two priority. Define the simple the easiest answer. That is to the question. So define the question first, then the answer. And then if you can pull the action into that that’s gonna be ideal the higher up that ladder. You go though, the less.

JJ: The actions to be less defined right at the C-suite like the action is whatever they, the C the CEO or the C-suite wants to do. We’re trending downwards. How are we gonna fix that? That’s not me as the dashboard builders problem. That’s the C-suites to figure out how 

Brent: to fix that. . Yeah, so visualization, it could be a pyramid, right?

Brent: The less data at the top with the most important data. And I guess it’s, just like it’s important to get what is success in a, in a software project you want to get what success from your user at the end of every sprint you wanna know what’s successful for your boss. What do you deem as success?

Brent: and then just give them that data. And if you start giving them a whole bunch of data, then some of that success gets watered down. So if you look at a, if we’re looking at this as a pyramid the the highest level, the C-suite is gonna wanna see that boil down data at as they define it.

Brent: And then I suppose it’s step to the middle management or somebody to tell them. This data’s also important. We should look at that. There’s some education involved. Maybe you could talk about how to educate people as. yeah, 

JJ: I education’s gonna be the big piece of this. Cause a lot of people, whatever you reporting on, whether it’s your CRM information, your eCommerce information, even your like your warehouse, if you have a warehouse as far as shipping, as like, how are we doing as far as stock to like capacity. Are we like running outta products or are, is our, all of our warehouses full, right. That could be a very useful report for somebody to know Hey, we can actually add more products to this warehouse. It has capacity. So at the end of the day, you have to define what are we actually looking at?

JJ: Are we looking at e-commerce stats? Are we looking at warehouse stats? Like a number I tell you 823,000. That means nothing to everyone listening. You’re like that’s a lot. I’m like 823,000 pixels, like on my entire website. Ah, not that much. You to define what it is that you’re talking about to whoever it is you, because if you build this information to you, it’s intuitive.

JJ: You’re like, oh yeah, of course this is good. You got 823,000 pixels. Awesome. But to somebody else, they’re like, I got no idea what this means. So the more you can do to either in your, if you’re building a dashboard or if you’re building something report, a PDF, whatever it might be try your best to simplify the explanation of what every metric is and how it’s defined.

JJ: You like I mentioned, engage, engage. What does that mean? What is engage? So you can define that for the end user. So hopefully it allows you to hop on less calls, as you as the data dashboard builder collection reporter. 

Brent: Yeah. And I think going back to a developer conundrum, getting you as the practitioner, sometimes you get caught into what you’re doing.

Brent: And you forget that all this granular things you’re doing, maybe they’re not that granular when it’s put together makes a nice pyramid, but sometimes nobody cares about the little tiny piece that’s at the bottom. What they care about is how does that piece affect the top and then explaining that.

Brent: And then that’s, where the middle level comes in to help boil down what really needs to go upstairs? Yeah, go ahead. 

JJ: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That my favorite analogy is it’s a bunch of. In order to have a beautiful report for that’s super actionable for somebody, whether that’s a practitioner or that’s a manager, or that’s a C-suite level, that’s gonna be the last domino to fall over.

JJ: Is that beautiful dashboard. The first is building a website, right? That’s like your first thing. You’re gonna have to have a, or building the data collection system of however, you’re collecting all this information that we’re talking about. And then you’re gonna have to have a way to report on it, to store it, all these pieces action.

JJ: So each domino is gonna push the next domino down that hopefully if you can line all those dominoes up to begin with, then you have a really streamlined way to get point a to point Z really fast, but it’s knocking that first domino down. So that’s the way I can most easily define this entire process.

Brent: Yeah. So I wanna just talk a re just briefly. I know that you’re a videographer, correct? This this idea of adding video to content and adding content or video content to products, and then having that as part of your content action where are you seeing that going? Is that it’s been around, but a lot of, I, I’m just gonna say a lot of merchants Haven, an adopted video, like you would think they should.

Brent: How important is that? . 

JJ: Yeah. Just for everybody listening, like I used to I shoot, I shot videos for production for a while. So I’m very familiar with the video process as far as on a site, it can do both pros and cons and that’s where the biggest thing is to say, define what we’re trying to do.

JJ: And the biggest, if you’re trying to educate really quickly and there’s a video. It might be a great use case, right? It might be an awesome use case to define who you are, introduce your team, introduce what’s happening. How’s what’s about to go down by your next action. I’m a big fan of that personally.

JJ: But if everyone’s on mobile say for example, you’re a lower A ticket product or maybe it’s a less investment right. To do. And someone’s a soccer at a soccer game watching their kid play a game. They’re not gonna watch your video scrolling through during halftime. There’s not.

JJ: So if that’s the use, if that’s like where people find it, like not a great case for a video. But if it’s like, Hey, everyone’s always browsing on desktop because they’re trying to solve this problem because they need to do X, Y, and Z. a video might be an awesome use case. So I just defined where the user is in that journey of like, where would they physically be?

JJ: Is usually my biggest tell. And are they on a desktop? Because mobile’s usually not the best. And then a video might be an awesome. Use case. 

Brent: Yeah. And it would be good as supplemental information. And would you, maybe in a stacking and a responsive version, you could push the video to the bottom of a blog post if you want to have it on there, but still want to have your main content for people to read through.

JJ: exactly. Yeah. And I love to measure you can measure via tag manager, people who play your video. So then you can say, Hey, here’s people who saw the page, right? People who played the video, people who watched 50% of the video, and then you can say, is it worth it for us to invest in video? We actually had a client that was like, we’re going all in on video.

JJ: But we were gonna test it with, I think, five production, like high production videos education content, and. I was like, cool. Let’s define what success looks like first. So for these first five videos, you’re gonna invest a lot of the time money effort into what they’re like. Okay. If 50% of the people that hit this page watch 50% of the video success.

JJ: Awesome. We’re gonna do basically and success, like we’re gonna do double down on this. We’ll make 10 next month. It was like 90% of people watched 70% of the video. like just knocked their benchmark out of the fricking park. And so if they didn’t define that up front of what are we trying to do?

JJ: It’d be super hard to take an action on that because we did, because we’re measuring it because we had all these dominoes lined up. Now they’re like we’re doubling down next month and we’re gonna even have more content people to en engage with. And we’re just gonna keep measuring it to say, Hey, if we ever drop down to our 50%, 50%, we’re gonna either slow down or reevaluate it.

JJ: So that’s a very actionable, hopefully actionable, or at least real life use case of video. 

Brent: Yeah. And I think at least YouTube anyways people sometimes get stuck on YouTube and then they, instead of going back to Google to search for something, they’re just searching for more videos on YouTube because they’re enjoying it.

Brent: And I know that some of the merchants have put up content just to drive traffic from YouTube to their site. And then you could also embed that video with your product. So anyways, exactly. Yeah, so we have, couple minutes left here. If you were to have some insights on marketing trends for a D TOC right now, what would you, what would be a nugget you could give a merchant going into the last half or the second quarter of of 20, 22.

JJ: I’d say defining what you’re trying to do is gonna be really important moving forward. It used to be super, super easy to do just about anything online. There was no competition. There, mark, the, there was a blue ocean of for everyone who’s read the blue ocean book would reti really recommend.

JJ: So it was super easy to do anything. You could basically throw money. And make money back and you’re like, oh cool. This is gonna be awesome. So the biggest thing I’d say is define what you’re trying to do and what success looks like to know if you’re gonna keep doing more of that, or if you need to shift paths and what the minimum amount of effort required to get an actionable result is because a lot of people entered online in the past 18.

JJ: That’s a fact so you have more competition online. Whether that is also good, because now consumers are much more understanding of the online process. So you have to define what is the good enough for us and how do we improve that so that we know that we’re improving. And then how can we All the metrics that we’re trying to increase because that’s gonna be key in the net, like moving forward.

JJ: You’re just gonna have to be on top of your game as far as knowing your numbers so that, if you swung and you missed to not do that again, because you can swing and miss that’s. Totally. Okay. Just don’t keep swinging and missing. . 

Brent: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I like that defined success. And again, in, in in the software world, defining your success at the end of every deliverable or what is the deliverable I think is a great way to look at it.

Brent: What is the success out of this is is really good. And then I like that minimum effort. What is, what can we do at a minimum to get to what our success is? And then what is overdoing it? I think you, you said Briefly got a video again, you could spend $20,000 on a one minute video. Would that be worth it?

Brent: Or should you just go out and get yourself a GoPro and make some fun, fun video on the road that would get you the same effort for very little cost? That’s good. JJ, as we finish out, I always give everybody an opportunity to do a shameless plug about whatever you’d like to plug. What would you like to plug.

JJ: Yes. If anybody has would like to build out more visualizations for what you’re doing. Data studio.vip is tons of free resources on how you can do this for yourself. We’re building that out as we speak lots of awesome content. If you want this done for you, anything that I’ve spoken about media authentic.com.

JJ: Sure. There’ll be like a link in whatever bio we’re talking about here. And we can figure that out for you, but W feel free to connect any way. You’d find. 

Brent: Yeah, and I’ll put those I’ll put those URLs and contact information in the show notes. And I’m a big fan of data studio. So data, studio.vip, I think is great.

Brent: Thanks for that. JJ Reynolds thanks so much for being here today. It’s been a great conversation. We didn’t even get to B2B. But I think this is super valuable content for any merchant that wants to do. I I think you’ve made it easy to understand, and I think this, that four step journey for a client or for a merchant to understand what their clients are doing, what their users are doing are really important.

JJ: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me Brent. And if we ever need to talk about B2B, let me know, because we’ve got lots of examples on that as well. 

Brent: great. Thank you so much. Thank you.

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