925: Better Than Data: Turn Raw Data Into Actionable Storytelling with JJ Reynolds

Robert Plank 0:00 Hey, and welcome back to the podcast. We're here with JJ Reynolds from better than data.com. And he has a very excellent YouTube channel as well called Better Ben data. And JJ started his journey into digital marketing with running ads for content. And he created a small agency with quickly learned that most organizations didn't use numbers to guide decisions. So we're going to learn today that we don't want to be like them. We want to improve your sales and your lead pages by looking at the numbers and know what to do next, using your analytics data, instead of just guessing and still leaving it to chance. So JJ, glad to be talking to you.

Speaker 2 0:38 Hey, thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to go down these rabbit holes.

Robert Plank 0:42 Yeah, and it's like with the with the tech side, we have to be careful, right? Because then you get too far in the details. And then it's not evergreen, and then someone watches up months later, and it's added eight. So we have to talk about the strategy, which is actually good, because I don't know about you, JJ. But there's that idea of, there's the tool. And then there's like your mental game around that tool. And especially with website stats, and Google Tag Manager and things like that, like it hurts my brain, I feel like my brain is is not compatible with these things. And I also feel like a little bit of a dummy, because sometimes people talk about, you know, having their Google Tag Manager and having all these stats, and like claiming their web properties and all these things. And I feel like, Man, I have all these holes in my knowledge. And I don't know what I don't know. And I'm also afraid to ask and we're afraid of looking stupid. So am I alone? Like when companies come to you? And they say, I want to get my numbers more dialed in? I need help. Do they say similar things like this? Like, they don't know what they don't know. And they also feel dumb?

Speaker 2 1:44 Oh, absolutely. And that's like, really common. And that's the whole reason we created like, the better than data site. So if you want to learn those things, that's like the exact reason we have better than data.com is like teaching people how to start from nowhere, like you know nothing about this stuff. And then go from that basics to like, basically being able to navigate, very, very prolific proficiently through this entire world. And so the majority of our clients come to us and they either have a problem of like saying, hey, this number isn't correct, right? That's usually like one of the reasons or they don't know what to do with any of that information. They're like, we have this entire thing called, like, web analytics, and we don't know what to do. Right? Like, how do we improve? We running ads, we're doing things and usually it's either it stopped working, right? Like when like the iOS kind of updates happened with Facebook and things like that. Or if like something that used to work doesn't work anymore? And you're like, well, we don't know what stopped working. Was it the ad? Was it the email? Was it the image? Was it the like, what was it? And so we can kind of help with that as well. So that's the quick, quick overview, synopsis of that.

Robert Plank 2:59 And so they come to you with some of these problems. And is there like a common thing that they asked like, do they say these things like, we need to know like, what our top 10 websites are? Or do they say like the number of daily visitors? We don't believe that number, like, what's the usual problem they're coming to you with?

Speaker 2 3:18 Usually, it's like a combination of traffic of like, where are we getting traffic from? And which traffic is being converted into sales or leads, depending on kind of the business vertical? And so we try to like, a lot of what we do as an agency is we coach people we coach the companies through of asking a better questions like, because you can start with a question of like, how many sales that we have? Right? That's like a really basic question. But you shouldn't really be asking that of your web analytics, you should look at your bank account, because that's going to tell you how many sales you had, but will be a better question is like, how many sales we had broken down by the traffic channel. So you can say how many sales were generated by email, pool, how many sessions were generated by email? Now we have a little bit of a conversion rate of sessions by email and transactions by email. Now, what was the intention of those emails? Let's go one level deeper and see, for example, how many different email automations are those so you can start to have layer in a little bit deeper of a question, to have a more actionable outcome. And that's like the whole point of better than data is like action is better than data, meaning you want to look at the data, you want to derive an insight. And then ultimately, you want to take an action because looking at the number going down, is not helpful. Like knowing it's going in the wrong direction is like, okay, cool, but like, what are we going to do about it?

Robert Plank 4:51 I love that and we and I think we've all at some point, been guilty of that. And also known friends that have that problem as well. of seeing the data and not taking action of like checking your stats every day or taking some numbers and putting it in some spreadsheet, which is fine. But unless you're going to make decisions and take action based on the data, then what's the point. And so I love that kind of thought process you have there of as one of your examples of saying, well, which of our traffic sources leads the sales, because you always hear about 8020, or there's the joke of the I know that half of my ad spend is a waste, I just don't know which half. And when you combine those things, you think that maybe the idea should be that there are all these marketing channels and all these things that you're doing and more things that you should be doing. And so you should just be always doing this activity, but also analyzing that way, you can cut the fat, and then kind of add more randomness and just kind of always be like growing and evolving. And especially like when I was clicking through your site earlier, I found there was blog posts for years, it was all about, like looking at, like how your your specific blog posts lead to a sale, right? Like which paths someone takes like this blog post or that blog post. And my immediately the gears in my brain, were saying things like, you know, you hear about when someone has an email sequence, and they walk you through different blog posts, or they like have like an ad campaign and they say, send them this blog post and cookie them retarget them send another ad to blog post number two, and many times when, when someone like makes a funnel, it's a lot of guesswork, right. They're like, I've got this master plan. And it's you think like, Okay, that's a lot of work that might or might not pan out. But then if you look at the data, and then kind of make the educated guesses, that seems like a less scary way to go about it, and a way that's more based in reality, and less likely to fail. And you can kind of make some tweaks and all that. But it seems like it avoids this problem of having this beautiful Grand Master Plan, it doesn't go exactly right, you say nothing worked, at least now you're doing better than data basing it on action.

Speaker 2 6:57 Exactly. And that's at the end of the day, you only have kind of two things to measure, like and I say that as we measure hundreds of things on our own sites, and our own sales funnels and all that jazz, but you have intentionality. And then you have outcomes. And so what you want to try and do, like the best marketers in the world, can match the intention to the outcome, meaning I intend for us to have a sale on January 1, or whatever, July 1 Doesn't make a difference. And I expect 100 sales to occur, because we're going to email 1000 people and 10% of them are going to buy. And so if that intention is matched with the outcome of meaning, I intended for us to send emails, and then do all these things and hopefully get 100 sales, and then the outcome matches exactly. You like you're the perfect marketer go pay this person a lot of money because they can do that, like do the thing that they're going to do again and again. But what you want to try and do is like we're usually will miss like, almost every time you're going to miss. So what do you do when you miss? Like, what how do you know what didn't work? And that's the problem that most people have is that you have this intention of like, I'm going to send an email, or I'm going to run an ad or do anything like that. And the outcome is I'm going to drive sales. Well, obviously not every click is trying to drive a sale. If it works, let me know. And I will pay you lots of money to do that. And so that's what you have to do is you've met your intentions to your outcomes, and then see where things went wrong and adjust. And then if you get better and better and better at that as time goes on. And that's what we do with our clients we teach that's all those pieces, like intentions and outcomes.

Robert Plank 8:44 That's cool to think about where if, if it if and when your marketing action failed, then instead of just saying, Oh, if nothing worked, I need to give up and start over. Then you say well, why did it fail? Or like what's the what's the easy fix low hanging fruit bottleneck, whatever. And also, it seems like built in there is like knowing what's a good and a bad number, right? Because like sometimes you hear about when someone's like, say filling out webinar registrations and they say, Oh, why didn't get 800 registrations and guys like you, me or like, she's about 800 Like that might that might be a pretty good size for like your list and your traffic and all that kind of stuff. Or if someone says, Yes, I got 22 clicks on my website, you mean will say a lot that's in any context, that's a low number. So it's even like kind of like kind of being like intimate with the data. Try a better way to say that. But like, you know, knowing the numbers that well of like, what's good and what's bad. And that way you can say, well, here's what I should focus on. And here's what I should improve. And so you're saying that like you have all these, these cool clients and all these different industries that come to you with these problems. And because you and your team, you're like data geeks, and you love looking at crunching numbers taking action. I'm sure you have like some a cool story in your back pocket about some Some company that came to you with a problem. And he figured out that those intentionality is in those outcomes. So you can share one of these quick stories with us about you doing what you do best.

Speaker 2 10:10 Yeah, so one of our clients that's still with us is an E commerce client. And they basically had all these custom sales pages that were meant to sell their products. And they had like no idea of what was actually happening on the page, they use all these really advanced, expensive tools that were supposed to like, attribute things back to Facebook ads, and do all this crazy modeling and things like that. But the end of the day, they had no action to take, because they had no idea of like, what was taking place on the page. And so we hopped in, and we were able to reconfigure a bunch of technical stuff as far as getting the correct measurement, and then also strategic stuff as far as what's supposed to happen on this page. And they were able to lift, I think it was like 15%, the increase of the actual people adding to cart and ultimately, the revenue generating. And so it was a huge win. And it was one that was easy. Like I say, easy as relative, like, obviously, some things are easy for some people and others. But it was a huge win right off the bat. We're like we like this company was like we don't know, like they were big, like they're probably $25 million company like that's a fairly sizable, like, mid, medium sized business, depending on what you think of medium. And we were able to increase help increase that conversion rate by just measuring and like giving those benchmarks of saying, This is what we expect to happen. Here's what's actually happening, hey, it didn't line up, let's adjust something. Okay, here's what to expect to happen. Here's what actually happened. And then I keep going and going and going. So that's, that's one of the most recent, I'd say successes, but we've got a lot of those different types of stories around a variety of verticals, from direct response to ecommerce to, like, multi, multi, multi country kind of companies as well. So there's a lot of stories, but that's the one that comes to mind when you asked.

Robert Plank 12:13 And like hearing that story. Like what comes to mind for me, as far as like me digesting what you said is it seems like maybe a common problem is a lot of these companies just having a mess on their hands. And like we've mentioned a couple of times of you just kind of going back to the basics, the fundamentals and saying, Okay, did do they have all these old weird pages? Are they using these weird tools? Are they doing their their tracking correctly, it seems like maybe we're a lot of these companies out there are stuck and maybe they don't even realize it is they just kind of over the years set up a little bit of this little bit of that. And just like if someone were to beat out the cobwebs and look at what was set up, they'd be like completely confused. So there's something to be said about you and your company, just like going from scratch and taking inventory and looking at what they've kind of done and just cleaning it up making it nice and tidy. That way you can clearly see okay, here's where we're at, here's what we want, how here's how we can get there.

Speaker 2 13:12 Yeah, exactly. It's a combination of like, so many different disciplines that we bring into one engagement. Like we look at all the technologies you're using, are you using custom page builders? Are you using a quiz for thing? Are you using like a custom blog tight? Like, what are all the different pieces that you're doing? Because over time, right, it's easy to add on another product? You're like, oh, yeah, let me add on this. Let me add on this, let me add on this. And then you look back and you're like what's working, you're like, Well, I don't know, we got like 30 things that are going at the same time. Let's bring it back to basics and then start leveling up from there. So most all of our clients over at the agency, we start with like a really the basics and then start leveling up over time so that we're not a overwhelming anybody with too much data, and be making sure that everything that we're doing is actionable.

Robert Plank 14:05 And so along those lines, like when you when you go in and kind of you know, keep it simple and add over time is there like maybe like a go to or favorite thing that you like as far as either like analytics or testing or adding something to your web page, like some people love heat maps, or some people love like, you know, abandoned cart, Mark campaigns, things like that. It's just something that just like really excites you as far as tuning up a website.

Speaker 2 14:33 My favorite is my favorite metric is I've coined it as the site efficiency, which is basically of total number of sessions of your site. How many of the people saw the thing that you're trying to actually sell? And so you can do that a number of ways. If you're like a lead gen company, like say, say let's just say you're a software company style, you maybe have to apply or book a demo, right. So A total site sessions divided by book a demo sessions, or sessions, you get the idea of gives you a percentage. And that number is so interesting to me because it can, you can dramatically increase the number of sessions to your site by like SEO or ads or anything else. And you can dramatically decrease that site efficiency because people are not going to the thing that you want them to go to. And so that's one of my favorite metrics to kind of like, look at, just so that you can see, hey, how are we doing? In the sense of we have this website that is a bunch of blog posts or a bunch of articles or whatever you might have, that's supposed to drive revenue, right? Usually, it's the goal of doing most things in business. But what's actually occurring is people are just consuming the article and leaving, right, you might have a little brand lift over time, like if you have enough articles, people might share it and do those types of things. But at the end of the day, you want those people to turn into dollars. And so that side efficiencies are my favorite pieces. But as far as technologies, we keep it super simple. Like we usually try to try to do Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics. heat mapping is kind of like a secondary thought. Usually, heat mapping is not that helpful, unless you have a really good marketing muscle in your head, to be able to say, Hey, this is what's happening. Let's fix it. Let's keep going. Oftentimes, it could get really confusing.

Robert Plank 16:23 Yeah, like I was thinking about, like, maybe like 12, or 13 years ago, when heat mapping tools were new, I put one on my site just for fun. And like, if there was an image on a page, so many people clicked it, and it was just an image that it was just on a blog post didn't go anywhere. It like, so much clicks of just like it happened to be an image on a page like our people we really that board and I mean, sadly, sometimes? Yes, they are. And so that's cool to think about because, you know, people always talk about like conversion rate, but that's like, super efficient, right? That's like someone lands on a page. Did they click the button on that page? But you're saying like, overall, throughout the whole site? Did they get from that path? of did that blog post pay off? And maybe do we have like a top 10% of blog posts where many times someone will end up from that blog post to a buying page and then book a demo, but then there's all these other blog posts that are just like dead ends? And like, if someone lands on that blog post is never anything they get excited about? That's, that's cool to think, right? That like, are you building a website that's making you more money over time, or as the adding to your website kind of watering that down more? That's, that's cool and interesting to to think about. And so, as we were beginning to wind on our conversation here, JJ, is there a common mistake Do you see on with, with businesses, there's something that just pisses you off, people make this mistake all the time, you can't believe that missing an agent still happens?

Speaker 2 17:47 I think the amount of give you two things a bonus wouldn't be the core. And then a bonus one is the first one is lifetime value. Everyone's chasing lifetime value, which is like the most superficial, non helpful metric on the face of this earth. And for example, like say, Listen, this podcast and you're like, what's my lifetime value for a customer? And if I told you is $500? What difference would that make? Like, just like pick a number and say, This is my lifetime value? And like, obviously, don't go like sell your house to like, take action on that. But I would bet you're gonna do almost nothing with the sense if I tell you your lifetime value is $500. You didn't know yesterday. Like, cool, great. And so it's this thing that like a lot of marketing, like salespeople will, like preach it like you know, your lifetime value of your customer. So you can bid ads, and you can do XY and Z towards it. But most of the time, it's like not actually helpful. The second one is tracking metrics that like you don't do anything with, like number of sessions, number of like, there's a whole bunch of like, number of menu clicks, like who, if I told you that, like, it's 150. And yes, last week, it was 20. Like, does it make a difference in your life? Or does it? What are you gonna do remove the menu from your navigation, like, a people clicking like, yes, you could but like, then we're going to leave because they don't want to deal with your BS. So like, that's, those are my two lifetime value, which is a bigger one, and then tracking things that you don't know what to do with.

Robert Plank 19:18 And, you know, when when some of these stats began about things, like, you know, time spent on a page, or how far down the scroll past the fold, things like that, it was like, that's interesting. But then, when Facebook took off, and people were geeking, out about, like, number of likes or number of fans and things like that, then it kind of brought to light like, oh, yeah, there's some of these vanity metrics that people chase. And they, they look at a number because it makes them feel good. And maybe they try to increase it, but then then someone like you wonders, yeah, but is that going to make any more money? Are you going to take different actions based on that? And so looking at it from that lens, that seems super silly, so we want to be set? Right? Right. We want to avoid the distractions and the all the wrong path and get on the right path. So if someone out there in podcast land says a lot of what JJ said makes sense, and I want to check out better than data, I want to check out his his content his website, how do they know if they're a good fit for what you provide? And where do they go? What do they do?

Speaker 2 20:19 Yeah, if you're if you're a company, and you're a company, probably doing 2 million plus in revenue, media authentic.com, because Google me, and it's media and authentic smash together as our agency there. If you're like a service provider, if you do run ads, website development, any of those types of things, and you're like, Man, I wish I could add this on as a service because it sounds really sweet. Or you just or you just want to be able to like have a better grasp on it go to better than data.com. There's like a cheat sheet with a bunch of conversion rates that you can get, there's a whole bunch of free resources, and we open up enrollment for that about once a quarter. So you can hop in the next enrollment and ask questions via email on any of those email lists our business, we respond to Sakana, my Stockman who helps with better than data, he and I respond to every single one of the questions. So if you hit reply to any email, you're not going to get a VA, you're a real person. So hit hit, reply to those and ask your questions. And during the next enrollment are better than data.

Robert Plank 21:19 Fantastic before the next big change, and then you'll be behind again. So it's time to finally after all these years of talking about it in our business, look at the numbers and get excited about the statistics and make educated decisions. That way. You're not just rolling the dice, or looking at what competitors are doing or waking up on the wrong side of the bed one morning and saying, Oh, I think I'll spend $2.20 on my google ad clicks. Well, that's a seems like a ridiculous way to do business. Right? It's like, Would you would you drive a car without even knowing how much gas you had it and saying, maybe there's two drops of gas in the tank? Well, we'll know. But it seems crazy to run your business and not know what your numbers are. So those web addresses we mentioned are media authentic.com. But with one a so media authentic, smashed together and better than data.com. And so. So JJ, as we completely wrap up our conversation here, we've talked about all kinds of different insights, and Aha, so you've had, but it's always good to end with a soundbite, right? It's good to end with like a favorite quote, or a lesson or just advice that you wish you'd gotten 10 or 20 years ago, so it's time for them. So what do you wish your present self could have told your past self way back in 2000? Whenever, and what, you know, what could you pass on to us podcast listeners,

Speaker 2 22:38 I think if you have no data, currently, meaning you're not tracking anything, and you're not, maybe you don't even have a business, or you don't have any traffic onto a specific offer, or specific page is doing something is going to result in better, because you're doing nothing. And so nine times out of 10, pushing posts on a new blog post or upload a new video or publish or generate a new product is going to be more helpful than wallowing in the sense that you don't have anything. And so if others help myself, or just tell you or whomever else if you don't have that data currently, because you don't have the traffic or don't mean anything. It's just push forward, like hit publish, do more, and just try to be better as you progress. And once you have that data, then you can use that to inform your decisions.

Robert Plank 23:34 You mentioned earlier about leveling up. So it's a continuous process. And there's some maybe it's like confused or so there's some quote that says like, if someone's taking action, person A is taking action, and person B is not taking action, then Person B should not interrupt Person A right. Don't interrupt the person taking action, as long as you're doing something as long as you're doing their best. So I love that advice to just do something. Don't think that you need to have all this data before you do anything and get there and level up. And so you out there in podcast land, the place for you to level up is media authentic.com and better than data.com. We will see you there. And JJ Reynolds super glad to talk to you and thank you for all your advice.

Unknown Speaker 24:16 Yeah, thanks so much.