Scott Reid  0:00  

On today’s episode, we have a fantastic guest, someone who’s helping marketers crack the code on one of the hardest challenges in marketing, and that’s understanding where their budget is truly making an impact. His name is Jeff Greenfield. Jeff is the CEO of Provalytics. We talk about how his platform goes beyond just measuring clicks, focusing also on impressions and upper funnel activities to drive more meaningful ROI Now, Jeff also shares throughout the episode how Provalytics. uses cutting edge AI and marketing mix modeling to give a full view of how various channels contribute to sales, even as we move away from traditional tracking like third party cookies. Now if you want to optimize your marketing spend and learn all about the future of attribution, this one is definitely for you. 

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All right, on today’s show, we have Jeff Greenfield, and he is the CEO and co founder of a marketing attribution firm by the name of Provalytics. Jeff, thanks very much for joining me on the show today.

Jeff Greenfield  1:53  

Scott, thank you so much for having me here today. It’s an exciting time that we’re living in, as always, the the world of digital marketing, advertising is shifting and changing. So excited to be here to talk about it.

Scott Reid  2:05  

Yeah, it certainly is. Jeff and I met a couple weeks ago. We actually live pretty close to each other in the beautiful state of New Hampshire, coincidentally, so we were just lamenting about the about the humidity and how we’re not fans of it at this point in time, in the year. So Jeff, why don’t you tell us about Provalytics and what you do, and your perspective on on marketing going forward? Yeah, well,

Unknown Speaker  2:31  

you know, attribution and Provalytics is all about that old question that’s been around for many years, that old statement, which is, half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The problem is I don’t know which half. And the the job of attribution, of marketing attribution is to figure out which half is wasted, or at least which pieces are being wasted, so that all of a sudden you get an increase in budget, and you have more money to spend on the same budget. Which is which is really cool, because when that happens, you’ve got all of a sudden more ROI, and when you’ve got more ROI with the same budget, then you can go to your CFO and say, give me more money. Your budgets grows businesses faster. And that’s that’s really what it’s all about. But Provalytics is kind of the new world answer of being able to solve for this. We saw for this before, historically, at the beginning of digital marketing, by utilizing cookies and stringing together identities, if you will. So the same techniques that were used for targeting and building of digital marketing is how measurement was done, which makes sense, because if you target one way, you should measure the same way that way, you know, hey, this targeting is not working. We should try this other source of targeting, but now we’re living in a world where we’re no longer in the digital realm. Going to be able to track users unless they’ve authenticated and unless they’re already our customer. So in the world of new customer acquisition, we’re not going to know who people are till we actually get them in and we’re not going to actually know how they found out about us. And so we’re targeting differently. So we need to measure differently, and that’s what Provalytics is all about, being able to measure and target in the same way, and utilizing techniques that have been around for many, many years, but most digital marketers are unaware of them.

Scott Reid  4:20  

Yeah, it’s it is really interesting to see how the landscape is changing. Ad costs increasing. Maybe there’s a certain level of hesitation or nervousness on the behalf of many marketers, in terms of, as cookies incrementally go away over time, how’s that going to affect things? And your solution is really intriguing. You use math to solve the problem. That was one of the one of the big things that that I learned from this, and you approach it, the whole attribution issue from a unique perspective of the the focus on clicks. Versus impressions that really happened, has happened over time, and your position is, is that impressions are incredibly important, and that the the way in which marketers allocate their ad spend is it can be just very challenging, especially when they are using what the ad platforms are telling them. So can you talk about clicks and impressions and and how that, how your solution kind of changes the game in terms of being able to allocate marketing dollars effectively?

Jeff Greenfield  5:32  

Yeah. I mean, I think the best way to do that is to kind of go back a bit before the time of digital marketing and what was happening then. So, you know, all of us have probably seen or think about that TV show Mad Men that talks about kind of the world of advertising, course, you know. And back in those days, before there was digital, all we had was TV, print, radio, out of home, direct mail. But you spent a lot of time coming up with ideas, creative ideas messaging, and then that messaging would go out across all these platforms. So the ad that was in and the newspaper was the same ad that was in the billboard, similar messaging on TV and radio. So there was this consistency. And when the ads ran, and everybody sat back and they just waited a couple months, because it really wasn’t much else to do. And then we use math. Then this concept of marketing mix modeling, which was to look at how many ad impressions we had had out there, how many people we reached, and we had to use estimates back in the day. And then we would look to correlate that with sales, to see, hey, when we did more of this type of messaging, did sales go up, and then in the mid 2000s when digital marketing came around, it was very intriguing to marketers, because we could finally allocate dollars, and at the end of the month, instead of three or six months, we gotta actually get a report that show, hey, we we spent x and We got X number of whatever, which was essentially clicks. And people were very excited about that, and more and more money started shifting. But what ends up happening is that as you move money towards digital, especially today in the traditional digital sense, like pay per click and stuff like that, you’re moving, you’re moving those dollars lower funnel, and you have this capability to target, because it’s very exciting to be able to target people and zone in on, hey, you know, my demographic is males, 34 to 44 who who smoke cigars and drive trucks, let’s say, and I can go and find those people used to be able to so now I’m really honing In on them. But the problem is, is that we’re directly competing with everyone else who’s selling to those men, 3444 who drive trucks and smoke cigars, and there’s lots of companies who want to target that. And in the previous world, before digital were an ad cost, what an ad cost? Rates would go up. But we’re now living in a world where everything is an auction, real time auction. So the more targeted I am, the more costs go up. And the problem is, is that, since I’m so targeted, I’m very lower funnel. I’m not doing much awareness building. I’m more going after people that are already in market for a purchase. So what you end up with is you end up where most marketers today have a Google sheet that probably goes back two or three years, and it’s got every.of the line for every single day, and it’s got every every ad that they purchased, how much they spent that day, how many clicks they got, how many sales they got their cost per click, their click through rate, and their total cost per sale.

Scott Reid  8:45  

But it’s clicking, it’s clicks, it’s click focused. Is the key one of the cats,

Jeff Greenfield  8:50  

that’s right, it’s it’s 100% click focus. So in in Google Analytics, which is what 99% of marketers utilize, is 100% click focused as well. And those of us who have spent a lot of money on Facebook or today meta, we know that meta has one version of of people that purchase from us, and Google Analytics has another. And we know the truth is somewhere in between there, because we know there’s a lot of people who actually will get exposed to an ad. Maybe they’ll interact with it. Maybe they’ll play a video, but don’t click from Facebook to come and purchase immediately. They’ll come back later. Maybe they’ll come through brand search. Maybe they’ll come through another ad. So we know that there’s something else going on and that something else is this concept of impressions, and impressions are the number of people who were exposed or who saw our ad, and that’s why every single person is sitting right now. I urge you to go to that Google Sheet and just add another column right before clicks and call it impressions and you. Go back historically, at least a year, to add an impression count by day, because the way that marketing works through your mind right now is that you invest money and you buy clicks, and clicks lead to sales. That is the view that the platforms. That is the view that Google wants you to have the reality of how, of how marketing and advertising actually works, is that you invest dollars to buy impressions which are, which are people’s part of their mind for them to be exposed, and those exposures lead to awareness, and awareness leads to clicks or people walking into your store, and that’s what actually leads to sales. And there’s all, there’s all to go along with this. There’s another impact from ads, and everyone knows about this, that when you buy ads, even if you’re click focused, you know that the day you buy the ad, you have an impact that day. We call that the immediate effect. But you also know, if you do a big ad by one week and then you don’t do anything the next week, there is this trickle or a halo effect that comes over in the following weeks. Well, that’s from the awareness that you built in that first week. And I urge everyone to read a Wikipedia article on what’s called advertising, ad stock. And that ad stock is that long term lag and impact. It’s where somebody gets exposed to an ad, they see it so you register that impression. It builds awareness, and then they don’t do anything yet. Maybe they need another impression or two, or maybe they just need time. But eventually they make their way down. That’s that concept of the sales funnel. Maybe they drop out, but maybe they come back in and another time. So that’s why a better understanding and a better concept of how your ads are working is to look at how many impressions are in market, every single day, every single month, every single year, and then look at the correlation between that and your clicks and your sales and everything else that’s going on. Because sometimes you do an ad buy and there’s no impact, but maybe two or three months later, there is that’s that’s how the mind works, Jeff,

Scott Reid  12:22  

your position on the importance of impressions is really intriguing, because so many people are just off of that, right? They’re not looking at the impressions. They’re not looking at the fact that you actually have to start with an impression before you can have a click that’s always going to precede clicks, and so you’re underscoring the importance of impressions as it relates to optimizing your marketing, and you have a very unique way of doing that so that marketers can better allocate their advertising dollars throughout the entire funnel, not just The bottom of the funnel. So could you talk about how you deliver and what you actually deliver to your clients?

Jeff Greenfield  13:07  

Yeah, I think the biggest thing that marketers get from Provalytics is a new source of truth, because the problem that marketers have when they rely upon Google Analytics, GA, four, Adobe, or any click based methodology, is that finance is also utilizing that source of truth. All their vendors, their agencies, all are focused on it. And what ends up happening is that, since we know that in a last click or a click based model, clicks are the only thing that are going to get credit, everyone wants to get their budget renewed the next month. Everybody wants to get a larger share of credit. So everyone is focusing dollars down at the bottom of the funnel, and when you do that, you’re actually reaching fewer people. We talked earlier about how there’s more competition, so your cost goes up as a result. And so as a marketer, the only way you really win in an organization is to have is to build a kingdom. And the way you build a kingdom as a marketer, a VP of growth, VP of Marketing, Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Marketing Officer is you grow your budget and you do big stuff with it. You grow sales, you grow the organization. The only way you can do that is you need to move away from that bottom of the funnel, and in order to do that, you have to have a new source of proof. Now that is not something that comes easy. It’s not like we just come in and plug our platform in and we say, Here it is. I mean, the truth is, here it is. It’s here. But when you have people that have been looking at something for a very long period of time and that that is been the source of truth in an organization, and that’s how budget. Have been set behaviors

Scott Reid  15:01  

are incentivized around that. I mean, that’s

Jeff Greenfield  15:04  

exactly right. It it becomes a very difficult it becomes a religion within an organization, and people have become addicted to this deterministic way of looking at things, which I totally get. But the problem is, is that that deterministic way of looking at things is going away because of privacy. It’s not going to be here anymore. Very soon, the train has officially left the station, and by the way, everyone’s like, Oh, cookies aren’t going to go away. Let’s say the third party cookies stay forever. Let’s just assume, if you’re a marketer, if someone were to ask you what percentage of people who buy from you are Safari users, like mobile Safari users, you would say probably a certain percentage. All marketers like to think they sell the mobile Safari Well, the ability to target mobile Safari has been gone for a very long time. Yeah, several companies have not worked. The Maids have not worked. All of those IDs, those have not worked in a long time. Apple IOF, they got rid of all that stuff a long time ago. But what did most ad buyers do? They just switched over to areas they could target better. So the train has already left the station. In terms of mobile Safari users, regular Safari users, it’s on its way out for everybody else. And so a new source of truth is needed, and for smart marketers. When someone in the organization Who’s your boss or your boss’s boss comes to you and says, Hey, I’m hearing about all this cookie stuff going on in the news? Are we impacted? The Wrong answer is to say no, because when someone above you comes and asks you, is this going to be a problem, the right answer is to say, I need to do a little bit more investigating. I know it’s an issue, and I’ll be back with you, because that’s an invitation to start an initiative internally. And what’s the initiative you need to do? Well, you need to focus on, how are we going to target and, more importantly, how are we going to measure effectiveness? And that can lead you down the path of having a new source of truth that looks at the entire funnel so that you can actually do upper funnel. Dare I say branding, which we’re now saying branding is the new growth lane, because it is. There’s fewer people at the top of the funnel because it’s more broad, right? You’re not going to be able to target as well, but you can do a great job of getting your message out to lots of people, a lot less expensively than you can down in the bottom of the funnel. Yes, there is waste, but I’ll guarantee you there’s less waste at the top of the funnel than at the bottom, especially when you can connect those branding impressions to actually branding revenue, which is very, very exciting. So the key is that source of truth, and it’s a whole process that you need to give time for your organization to be able to allow it to move forward. And it takes time. It can take a year to year and a half realistically,

Scott Reid  18:11  

yeah, and there is risk with with cookies going away to every company, and it just takes them to look at it through a different lens, assess the way that they are measuring the effect of this effective, effectiveness of their marketing in a different way that takes that into account, and it also brings them back to basics. It brings them back to a more holistic view in turn, or approach in terms of their marketing strategy to accommodate all stages of the funnel, or to really more clearly understand all stages of the funnel and their role in generating sales and growing the business. And that’s exactly what your platform does correct. It allows them that broader perspective, so that they can see the correlation between impressions and conversions. Would you be able to talk about about that in terms of how your model works to help marketers business owners make better decisions around their top of funnel and really throughout their entire funnel?

Jeff Greenfield  19:15  

Yeah, absolutely. And what I’ll add to that as well is that you know, for folks who are hyper focused on clicks and they don’t get why we’re talking right now about impressions, there’s these new digital channels that we’re calling no click digital channels, CTV connected television, which is digitized television. There’s nothing to click on. And a CTV ad, unless you’re watching it on your phone, fairly

Scott Reid  19:44  

impression based.

Jeff Greenfield  19:45  

It’s impression based. So there’s no tab, and Google Analytics four that says CTV, right? There’s no tag. And Google Analytics four for podcast advertising, right? So. There’s no tag and Google Analytics four for a digital out of home advertising, there’s nothing to click on. So if you want to be able to look at and investigate and test these new forms of advertising, you have to be able to look at impressions, because otherwise you’re never going to be able to be able to demonstrate what is actually working. But going back to your question in terms of how we’re able to look at those things, it all comes down to this concept of incremental impact, or incrementality. And incrementality is the idea where, when I go out and I do some advertising, and I get sales, and I’m a business that’s been around for a while, let’s say I had 100 sales today. Well, I would have gotten some of those sales anyway, if the ads weren’t running. But, you know, I got GA for that, showing me that the 100 ads came in from X, Y and Z, and so all of the ads are getting credit for something. The question is, what is what ads would I what sales would I gotten? If there was no ads one, I want to know what the incremental impact is meaning, if I spend $1 on this ad, how many sales is it going to give me that I would not have gotten that are incremental? And so that’s really what this is about, is being able and the way we do that is we go through with a bunch of math, figure out all of the equations and everything, and then we run hundreds of 1000s of simulations for every single day. And we look at what would have happened. You’ve got all of these ads that are running at a very granular level, and we go in and we remove one campaign, and we run these simulations for the platform to tell us what would the sales have been if this ad was removed, and and, and then we see what, what was the actual was for that day, and then we’re able to see those correlations. So this is all about the incremental impact, and the way that we’re able to get there is that when we talked earlier, we talked about the concept of marketing mix modeling, the marketing mix modeling was all about the correlation between the ads that were in market, the impressions and sales, but what it does is their math is all based about contribution. What is the incremental contribution that these ads made? So marketing mix modeling was the original incrementality provider, if you will. Now is it the scientific method of doing AB testing? Absolutely positively, not does it? Does AB testing have its place? It sure does, without a doubt, if you’re doing a million dollars a month running ads and you want to test something in order to really get a play on it and to impact your mix, you probably would need to do 100 to $150,000 test. Nobody’s going to do that. You shouldn’t be doing that right. Not be spending 10% of your monthly spend something new. You should be doing maybe 10 or 20,000 and the only way to get a real play on that when you’re doing this early testing is to do like a geo holdout an AV test, where in one Geo, that’s the only thing that’s different, is you’re running ads just in that location, which is, which is great. But overall marketing mix modeling was the original incrementality provider, because it’s based on this concept of contribution, meaning, what would what, what did this ad contribute? The only way, you know, is by taking that ad away, and that’s what our platform does, is it removes every single campaign for every single day at a very granular level. It essentially when it comes to paid search like campaign, ad group, keyword match time, very, very granular, and then puts it back in so that we can actually determine the incremental impact for every single day that we’re accurately measuring. And then it also looks at both the immediate impact and that advertising, ad stock, which we talked about before, which is that ferry own effect. And the example that I always give with that is, I call it the motorboat effect. And you know about Lake Winnipesaukee Scott a lot of people don’t know this, but in New Hampshire, we have this big lake in the White Mountains called Lake Winnipesaukee. And if I had my boat, and I went high speed, as fast as I could from one side of the lake, and I get to the middle of the lake, and I cut the engine. Ad stock is, as soon as the engine is cut, which is correlated to you turning off the ad, how far the boat is actually going to move without the engine running? What is the impact of that momentum? And that’s what ad stock is. Is when your ads are off, they’re still working. The messaging is still in people’s brains, and there’s math to figure this all out that’s been proven. That’s been around for many, many years. But the reason it took a while for it to catch up is because, when we had the cookies and we were at that granular level, having that deterministic data, why? Why do all the heavy map? Because the map is as much work, if not more, work, than collecting all the hundreds of billions of data points, right? And the math takes a long time to figure out. The only reason we can do it now is the computers are moving at a much faster rate than they were even just a couple years ago, that concept of Moore’s law. So we can do so much more. And the best evidence of that is all of a sudden, boom, we’ve got the chat gpts and the AI, and for us, what we’re able to do is we’ve integrated AI, not in the sense of being able to talk to it. Where we’re using AI is that there’s a lot of steps that normally humans would have to intervene with. Does this look right? And to be able to take from step a and carry it over to step B, and to be able to talk in between the different machine learning processes. And our AI is able to go in and do that without human intervention at all. And so what that means is what would normally be a two or a three day process with multiple human intervention, we can let the computers do all the work in just several hours. And so now it’s at a time where we can get very quick turnaround on this data, where it’s useful at a very granular level for digital marketers. And yet, even though it looks like it’s GA for like data, even though the results are your typical row ads and your cost per click that you would expect in an MTA style report. It is impression based, and it is full funnel based. So stuff that you’re doing, like CTV, your traditional digital advertising, banner ads, retargeting, things like that that normally would not generate a lot of clicks. You’re going to see those showing up and showing up and performing the way you would expect them to perform.

Scott Reid  27:09  

So at the end of the day, what your platform does is it tells people, if we’re to boil it right down, it tells them where they should invest their dollars moving forward, because it’s forecasting out in the future correct what will or will not, or what would be the ideal marketing mix.

Jeff Greenfield  27:29  

That’s exactly right, because there’s two aspects that marketers need from reports. They they have to know what just happened. Because everyone has a boss. Even the CEO has a boss. You know, you put together a report on how we did last month, and it goes up to your CMO. Your cmo distills it down to be a single slide for the CEO, and then the CEO has to go the board of directors. And that single slide, which was your original 30 page deck, is now one bullet point on the CEO slide. So we all have bosses, and we all have to report on what happened yesterday, meaning those dollars that we spent, how did they perform? Yeah, but really, your job as a marketer is to figure out, how do I take those same dollars and reallocate them? How should I switch the mix around, since we’re coming into a new month with holidays or vacation time or whatever, how do I do a better job this month than we did last month? Or, as I like to say, How can I be less wrong than I was yesterday? That’s really what this is about. So what it does is that same simulation process that we just discussed about how we figure out the contribution, we tell the system, hey, for next month, my budget is going to be x like, maybe it’s maybe it’s 10% more, maybe it’s 10% less, and I’m willing to cut anything, let’s say, by 35% so what it will do is go through that same simulation process where it cuts everything by a certain percentage to look for the proper best mix. Because what’s happened is this to the job of marketers, is that we all got into this because we’re creative types, we’re artists, and we want to be like in those the aspect of the Mad Men days, where you come up with big ideas and they get put on billboards and they get put out in ads, and it’s the creative time to create. But what’s happened is that we now spend more time in spreadsheets than our friends who were in counting programs in college. So the folks that are CPAs, we spend as much time and excel as they do. It’s ridiculous. There’s so much math, it’s become so complicated because we have to report, and then we also have to plan. So what our platform does is the reporting is done for you, and then to figure out the math on where you should allocate. Right? Our platform does that for you as well, because it does that forecast, as you said, it looks forward, tells you where to spend more and where to spend less in order to get more sales, more leads a better return, whatever your KPIs are, and that enables you to chill a bit more and be a little bit more creative, which is what we all want as marketers, yeah,

Scott Reid  30:23  

and really, to focus on the things that got you into marketing in the first place. More than likely, most marketers are not going to be data analysis geeks, correct? I mean, is that, is that your experience? Yeah.

Jeff Greenfield  30:33  

I mean, this concept of being a data driven marketer, what is that all about? I mean, I think that’s just, that’s like saying, you know, I mean, artists are into math. We’re not. It’s just, it’s just not true. It’s, it’s, it’s craziness. That’s why we have analytics people to help us with things. But the reality is, we do have to understand how to follow numbers, meaning we need to be creative, but we also need to trust what the numbers are telling us. We tend sometimes, as marketers, to trust our gut more and not follow along where where the numbers are pouring. So data driven means that we we we may trust but verify. We should always verify and validate things which our model does automatically, is it validates how it’s performing, shows you how well it’s predicting the future, which is pretty cool, but we need to be able to say, Okay, well, if I move this here and move that there, I’m going to get more. Well, do that. The worst thing you could do is have a model that’s telling you, Hey, do this and you don’t do it right. So make sure, if you’re going to invest the dollars and proper measurement that you actually follow it, because otherwise why you doing it?

Scott Reid  31:54  

Jeff, do you see companies after they’ve worked with you for a while shift more of their marketing budget towards top of funnel, impression base. I mean, like, can you quantify that in some way? If it’s possible to

Jeff Greenfield  32:07  

Yeah. I mean, I would say the biggest issue that all of our customers who come to us initially are is that 80 to 90% of the mix is way down at the bottom of the funnel. Okay, they’re way over invested in paid search 1,000% and it it is freakish, how large the the cost per click numbers actually are, and how low the ROI actually is to where, when we show them what the actual ROI is, they are in a complete state of denial. It’s it because the numbers are so different than what Google is showing them, because Google and the reporting that you get out of Google ads, which is pretty much the same you get as in GA four is only showing you what they see, and they don’t see impressions,

Scott Reid  33:06  

and they’re only showing you what’s going to benefit their business model as well. Yes, yeah, that’s maybe not 100% but it’s definitely going to be weighted towards a certain you know, towards a certain side.

Jeff Greenfield  33:19  

Without a doubt it is and so, but I it’s not their fault that the other thing is a marketer is that the way you know you’re a data driven marketer is you’ve been if you’re way over invested in Google Search, well, you you’re data driven because you’ve been following the numbers. So now a new source of truth is going to come along that’s going to show you a different perspective of the world, a it’s definitely different. It’s it’s a broader, bigger perspective. It’s what I call panning back the camera, because you’re, you’re so into the weeds, you really can’t see what’s going on. So when you pan back that camera and you look at it, you actually are able to see the impact that these other channels are having. Meaning for a lot of marketers, they know that Facebook is working really well, but it’s not showing up. Google seems to be the strongest player, so they cut back on Facebook. So the numbers make sense to their CFO, but inside their gut tells them, you know, I know it’s working. I just don’t know why it’s not showing up well people.

Scott Reid  34:23  

And the reality is people have to, have to be aware of something first, and then they become engaged, and then they convert. So it’s like awareness, engagement, conversion. And so if you’re just focused on the conversions, and that’s where all the numbers are pointing towards, right? That is where you can that’s where your brain is going to focus. That’s where management’s going to management’s going to focus, but engagement, and you can’t have conversions without engagement, and you can’t have engagement without awareness. So really, you are providing a very holistic understanding of how different marketing channel channels work together to create that. Dired result, whereas it’s it’s just so focused in the advertising platforms on that bottom of the funnel, that last click attribution, and we’re only going to invest in things that are creating those conversions, but with while at the same time, kind of like ignoring or not being as aware that engagement is required in order to get that conversion and awareness is required. And so the wider that you can make that, and the more that you can hone your craft, more in the middle and the top of the funnel that’s going to really allow your business to flourish in ways that it hasn’t been able to due to that focus on bottom of a funnel. Is that a correct way to say that, no,

Jeff Greenfield  35:42  

1,000% and of course, the argument that we hear from a lot of digital marketers is is, you know, let’s just pick, we’ll pick a we’ll pick a brand category out there, hair, long, big, huge category, big issue for both men and women, lots of brands in this space, yeah, and there seems to be just constant numbers of people searching for hair loss solutions for both men and women. So I might have, since there’s already people that are searching, it makes sense for me to just go in and grab those people, because I, you know, I can grab a percentage of the market share by spending enough. But the problem is, is that as there’s more entries into this space, your ability to grab more and more market share is going to get more and more expensive over time. If you look at the cost per click rates that Google are showing and the CPM rates are starting to rise up. But what we do know is that for those people that are in market, if you go and just do a geo test, go do a test, buy, take those same video ads you have running on, on on YouTube, and go and buy CTV and like a town like Dayton, Ohio or Memphis, Tennessee or Colorado Springs, Colorado, and go and blanket that area with CTV for just a week, and then look what happens and that specific city for those same people, where you’re going in and grabbing people that are already searching, just because that brand awareness that you do at the top of the funnel, they will have brand preference, and you’ll be able to grab more of them, and it will be less expensive for you, because they won’t have to click so many times. Our research, back in the days from my previous company, where we captured all of that data with cookies, we found that people would click sometimes, 5678, 10 times. Think about when you’re in market for something. How many clicks you go through? You don’t care that this costs the company money at all. It doesn’t matter to you. You’re just shopping. It’s monetizing for Google, which is great for them, not so good for the brand. But you’re gonna find that because of that brand preference at the top of the funnel, by that awareness that preference is in and people will be faster to buy, and they won’t take so many clicks for them to buy, so your overall cost per click will be less, and your cost, your CAC, will go down as well too.

Scott Reid  38:17  

And just being able to have a much more clear understanding of that top of funnel effectiveness, because there is just so much guessing that goes on at this stage of the game. I mean, it is. I mean, what is it like? I mean, really, unless you have a model or a platform like yours, which correlates everything and makes it really easy to understand, right? I mean, I went through the demo with you, and it’s really easy to understand once you, once you feed it the numbers, I mean, and it forecasts it all out, and it tells you what you should, you know, adjust either up or down. And it will tell you what the what the expected result is. So your your platform really, really demystifies that top of funnel, and it shows what you should be doing. It makes it, it makes it, makes it easy. Makes it a lot easier than it currently is, because guessing is fraught with stress, anxiety, poor results, and you’re just making it that much easier. And at the end of the day, somebody’s going to invest with you, because it’s more profitable for them, right? Like at the that’s the ultimate test is, does it make your clients more money? And the answer to that is resounding yes. Oh, it’s,

Jeff Greenfield  39:31  

it’s, it’s incredible the returns that folks get. They just need to follow the results. But ultimately, at the end of the day, it puts you in a position as a marketer where you can start to think more about your business, from a messaging and a creative aspect, which is really, the end of the day, is 60 to 70% of the effectiveness of all ads is about your messaging. And what we found, as marketing has become more complicated, is we have found less attention. Paid to creative than ever before. Think about how commoditized creative has been. People just kind of outsource it. We find a lot of our clients when we ask about creative, it’s the same creative they’ve used for several years. I mean, it defies all logic of marketing and advertising. You know, used to be years ago, folks would sit down and start to say, you know, our customer is Julie. She is 23 years old. She lives in Minneapolis. She has a dog whose name is so and so he had these personas, yeah, and agencies and and brand managers would spend hours and weeks on coming up with these personas and building up scrapbooks of of what is important to these personas, and that would be where the creative ideas would come from. I haven’t seen people do that in a long time. We need to get back to that, especially because the number of advertising messages that messages that people are are hit by these days, has gone up dramatically. So we have to do more and more to capture people’s attention. And the answer is not these, these very fast moving, tick tock style ads. It’s about telling stories, and it’s about that emotional hook, but that’s all about building awareness and wanting people to participate in that story, right? Yeah, and that’s what, that’s what Provalytics allows you to do it. It is you just said it perfectly, Scott, it demystifies the math. It tells you where to invest. You can spend time on the important stuff, which is, how do I improve the messaging? How do I improve the creative so that the ad dollars I’m spending can do even a better job?

Scott Reid  41:35  

Yeah, it’s really exciting, what you’ve built. And in terms of how the platform works, I know that from our prior discussion that your clients will feed you with with certain data points. And it’s, it’s not that extensive. I mean, it’s, it’s not like this huge lift that they would have to do when they’re working with you. It’s basically they’re sending over a handful of data points, and then you’re running it through the model, then they have access to that, and that’s, that’s the extent of it, correct? I mean, just from a customer facing perspective, it’s not, doesn’t require all sorts of time and energy on their behalf, once they’ve engaged with you, to start really getting those results.

Jeff Greenfield  42:15  

Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s very, very straightforward. It’s really three sources of data, first is the marketing data, which is readily available. You know, Facebook, you can set up automated reports for Facebook and Google. Sometimes there’s app platforms that don’t have automated reporting, but typically you’re working with agencies, so with the matter of like, an email to your agency, and then our team deals with them directly to get the data that we need from there. So that’s your marketing stimulus, if you will. That’s where you’re spending the dollars. And then then there’s another data source, what we call engagement, and because once awareness is built, people are going to come and visit your website if you have a website. So and that typically comes from like Google Analytics, which is also automated. Reporting, very straightforward. And then finally, is your KPIs. What are your conversion events, leads, maybe you look at add to carts, maybe sales, maybe offline sales, retail sales, in store sales, whatever those numbers are, the larger the organization there’s teams that handle that. You know, there’s a data warehouse team, and they get the they get the sales from all the stores every Monday, and so we were, our team works with them to get the automated reports. But all of this stuff gets sent to our team, and then our team takes it from there. It goes in the platform, and then we have, we put the data into whatever type of internal BI system that you have, whether it’s Looker or Power BI or Tableau, we will build out external dashboards for the marketing team to utilize initially, so that we can get it to have the order of things that they want it to be in to tell the story that they need to tell. But eventually, in order for this to be a big success, it needs to live internally, because your CFO, your CEO, all of the folks that are the decision makers, need to be able to have access to this, to be able to look at it. So everyone is sharing the same numbers. That’s how you get a new source of truth, and that’s how you really win as a marketer is is to you know, be transparent about the numbers, but now you have a source of truth that allows you to do really cool stuff and to build your budget and build your own internal kingdom, which is what we all want. That’s

Scott Reid  44:34  

awesome. Yeah, it’s really exciting what you’ve created. And I know that you offer a demo to prospective clients that have an interest. Can you talk about that and that whole process? And the best way for people to get in touch with you?

Jeff Greenfield  44:46  

Yeah, the best way for people to get in touch is they can reach out to me directly on LinkedIn, or they can go to Provalytics.com there’s a link on there to get a demo. Find the time that works for you. We’ll set that up and. Give you a walk through the platform, talk about your situation, your needs, you’re not quite ready for that, and you you want to learn a little bit more. We actually put together an attribution certification course, because there’s been so many changes that have happened and the world of both digital and traditional marketing, and this whole cookie thing is, is is still fresh to everyone. You know, there’s gonna be a lot of changes that are coming ahead, and the best way to deal with those is to really have a solid foundation. That’s what we find that’s lacking for most marketers today, especially folks that have only been in this for, like, maybe 15 years, they don’t understand how things used to be or how we got to where we are, right? And so taking this course, it’ll take you a couple of hours. There’s no cost for it. You actually get a great certificate to put on your LinkedIn, and as a result, that’s a good way to build a foundation. If we’ve piqued your interest at all, I think those of you who may may not, be ready for a demo would definitely be ready for the certification course.

Scott Reid  46:04  

Yeah, because knowledge is power, and in today’s world, it is so incredibly hard to keep up with everything. It’s changing so rapidly. So the fact that you’ve put together a learning opportunity for people to educate themselves further, that’s a good representation of your focus on just empowering people and helping them, whether they’re working with you directly or not. So that’s awesome. I always love that.

Jeff Greenfield  46:29  

Thank you. Yeah, I mean, because otherwise, it’s tough to make decisions in this changing world if you don’t have any foundation to rely upon to know what’s coming next, right? Sometimes, as digital marketers, you feel like you’re getting beaten up every couple of months, you you start to do something, and then all of a sudden, things change. And you know, back in the early days, I used to always say in the world of digital marketing that if you found something that’s working, and you’re in your into your sixth month, and it’s still working, you’re on borrowed time, because this world moves so quickly. This world is controlled by publicly traded companies that are focused on quarterly earnings and their stock price, right? And they’re going to move not based upon your individual needs, but they’re going to move based on the needs of their company. So what that means is, in order to stay ahead, you always have to be making changes every couple of months, otherwise you’re going to be surprised one day, and the best way to do that, get attribution certified. Get a stronger foundation that’ll help you stay caught up and be ahead of the game.

Scott Reid  47:50  

Well, thanks very much for being on the show today, Jeff. I really appreciate it. It was a great episode. I learned a ton, and I’m very sure that anybody listening to this episode learned a ton as well. Attribution is never going to be easy, but you are definitely making it very, very easy for your clients, and that’s that’s the most important thing. When you make something easier to understand so that they can take action on that data, that is a huge unlock for any marketer, being able to confidently take action on their marketing data and how all their marketing is working together. That is a gift that keeps on giving. So thanks again, Jeff. I really appreciate it, and we will talk to you soon.

Jeff Greenfield  48:31  

Thank you, Scott.