Scott Reid 0:00
On today’s Ecommerce optimizers podcast episode, we have a great guest. Her name is Nikki Lindgren. Nikki is the founder and CEO of Pennock, a performance marketing agency that specializes in customer acquisition for beauty and lifestyle brands. And we dive into some really valuable insights. Today, we talk about machine learning driven ad strategies, everything from meta advantage plus to Google Performance Max, and how brands can optimize their return on ad spend. So whether you’re in the early stages of scaling an E comm brand, or you’re a seasoned marketer, you’re going to pick up some what I would consider some really great, insightful and highly unique tips on managing these platforms more effectively through data and strategy. So let’s get into it. This episode is sponsored by Ecommerce optimizers. Are you an Ecommerce marketer feeling overwhelmed by the layers of complexity involved in converting website visitors into customers. At Ecommerce optimizers, we believe that the straightest path to reaching this goal is by improving the conversation you’re having with your visitors from the initial marketing interaction all the way to purchase and beyond. By optimizing every touch point across your marketing strategy, we make it easier for your visitors to become enthusiastic, long term customers who stick with your brand for the long haul. If you’d like to learn more about our unique approach to ecommerce marketing optimization, head on over to our website at EcommerceOptimizers.com All right, on today’s show, we have Nikki Lindgren of pennock.co Nikki, thanks very much for joining me today. Welcome to the show,

Nikki Lindgren 1:47
Scott. I’m excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Scott Reid 1:49
Yeah. Thank you very much. So we were just talking before we started recording here, and Nikki has a a performance marketing agency that’s focused on customer acquisition, specifically around and she works around with beauty and lifestyle brands. Why don’t you tell me about the company? What, how long it’s been in business? I know you have a group of eight women, including yourself. There might be more, I’m not sure, but it’s a perfectly sized team, not too big, not too small, at least from my perspective. Can you tell me about the company, how you started it and and we’ll take it from there. Perfect. Yeah.

Nikki Lindgren 2:30
So I formed Pennock in 2020, right? As a pandemic was hitting just perfect timing, right? And people often ask, what is Pennock like? How did that name come in into existence? And to me, it’s, it’s intended to be an empty vessel name, which means you put your own meaning to it, but it’s actually the name of this really small town of about 300 people where I’m from in rural Minnesota, so no longer living there, but just the idea of starting a boutique agency that was very small and kind of try and keep a culture and kind of vibe alive. Felt very natural to then call it the name of this small town I’m from. So that’s where panak is from and formulated out of. And the reason I started this agency is because I was doing direct to consumer marketing for emerging e commerce brands in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is where I live now, is actually on the founding team of cost plus world market, now known as just markets, their e commerce team. So there were, like, six of us who were trying to stack up e commerce and, like, make it work after the brick and mortar store had been around for like eons, it was really fun to be involved in something of that size at infancy and after that meant agency side and more direct to consumer side, just doing performance marketing and growth tactics less than right. And so when a moment came up where I had some holes in my schedule and like, let’s set up this agency. And that’s exactly what we did, where, as you mentioned, the team of eight women today. Everyone’s a full time staff member, working decentralized from their offices. And it’s important to us to have a bunch of women on the team, because we’re marketing brands that are mainly focused on this, you know, consumer. So that’s kind of how he’s kept that ethos going, in terms of, well, we are the customer, so let’s put together a team that represents our brands, customers,

Scott Reid 4:22
that’s great. It’s a dispersed team as well throughout the country, exactly.

Nikki Lindgren 4:24
Yep, we’re mainly at Mountain Time to Pacific. So we are kind of, you know, on one side of the country more or less. But we are all working from our remote homes.

Scott Reid 4:35
Excellent. I know you’ve worked, you know, looking at your website, which is, which is a quite, it’s a quite well done site, by the way. You have a lot of fantastic brands that you’ve worked that you’ve worked with over the years. You know names of companies that if you go to the site, which, again, is pennock.co you would invariably recognize many of them, as I did now. The one of the things that we’re going to talk about today. So why don’t we just dive in talking about machine learning as it relates to meta advantage, plus shopping ads and performance max on on Google paid ads? Why don’t we? I’ll let you lead the charge on that, and we’ll take it from there, because this is one of those areas that I have not had a guest on the show speak about it. My knowledge on those areas is, it’s certainly not as detailed as yours or as knowledgeable as yours. I have a high level understanding, but I’m really, personally, selfishly, really looking forward to hearing what you have to say. So why don’t we? Why don’t we kick it off?

Nikki Lindgren 5:39
Wonderful, and I hope I do the area in Festus. Then the reason that this has kind of come up so much in this moment in time, the year we’re in et cetera, is obviously there have been a ton of advancements in campaigns that are built more on machine learning. And you mentioned the two that I think are the most ubiquitous in the industry, and that is performance max on Google, which is the 2.0 version of shopping, in my opinion. So basically, it’s taking in your Google Merchant product feed. It’s taking in assets that you share from YouTube, and it’s taking in any display assets you have as well. You’re putting an ad copy like you’re kind of throwing all the stuff out there and saying, Google, I’ll give you some signal. I’ll maybe, like, put this down to be just about the brand’s tops and not their pants, but you kind of let the machine learning take over. And the reason that people love this is out of the gate so simple, and out of the gate performance was den busters. This product has been around for about two years now, and the ways in which you kind of tweak this threat up for the best results have been ebbed and flowed like two times over. So initially, just build one, one stamp, pain all of your products, no signals. Call it a day. Great return on ad spend. Then the next tactic was because that wasn’t working anymore. Now build out granular components. So this would be your tops collection versus your bottoms collection. If your apparel, this would be your, you know, 25 best seller, SKUs, etc. And so we pivoted there, and then that’s working, and then we pivoted back to General. And so we’re just kind of playing catch up with the best practices of machine learning, but we’re at this moment in time where performance Max works best when you feed it the granular in intake, so we’re building these out much more granularly than we did in the past. And I just think this is an important thing to share with the community of listeners, because, you know, we don’t always have to settle for DevRel as we’re getting today. There’s always ways in which you can figure out how to crank more efficiencies out of it. And so I would just ask anyone listening who’s running digital to think through how their performance mix looks today and testing out these strategies that are a little bit more complex in granular but give you so much more control on how much you’re spending in each grouping, etc. So it really helps not only drive the ROAs, but like, think about your profit mark or gross margin for each of these collections of stews and so so many smart ways to stack it up that benefit the business’s bottom line, and not just a good ROAs for the brand you’re working on.

Scott Reid 8:25
So when you said it ebbs and flows, what are you using to measure that? What? What metric or metrics are using to gage when it’s becoming less less effective? Yeah, so

Nikki Lindgren 8:39
because we’re working with E commerce brands, and they’re mainly interested in high as possible, which are announced and if we’re first looking there, right? So if you know the ROAs usually is going to stay stagnant for some time, but as soon as it starts to creep down, we kind of flagged ourselves to say, like, Hey, keep an eye on this campaign and have a plan in place of the strategy you’ll deploy next. So it’s usually simply based on efficiencies. Now in fashion, that gets hard because there’s seasonal drops, and not all can’t not all seasons are created equal. So sometimes there are things that are a little bit out of your control, but that doesn’t mean you just kind of give up and you’re like, general p max, Google will figure it out. I’ve resigned. So that’s where we kind of like dig deeper. And, you know, working with so many fashion brands, we have seen this challenge over and over, where some collections just aren’t as strong, and we still have to figure out how to like move mountains with the the types of assets in front of us in terms of new pieces of clothing,

Scott Reid 9:39
okay? And in terms of, in terms of ROAs, is there a target that you look at across all brands, or is it brand specific? It’s that benchmark,

Nikki Lindgren 9:51
yeah, it’s brand specific. And that’s a good thing you called out, because you can actually, you know, build these campaigns against an objective so you can save us. A row as a Forex or whatever it might be, but gate, you know, this is where we kind of want to get in with understanding the business and not just being an outside vendor who’s put in a corner in a box. We want to understand the gross margin. We want to understand, like the efficiency of pushing all these products hard, understanding the inventory levels and so on. And then we’ll build the right strategy and the right return on ads fund for each of these individual components, once we’re more invested in understanding the overall health of the business and the pieces of the business.

Scott Reid 10:30
So you’re really drilling in going several levels to even peeling that onion, to really understand the business. You’re not just in quotes, running traffic right exactly, you’re really matching those campaigns with the objectives, with the business goals and objectives, and the overall in the overall strategies, from a marketing standpoint that the inventory standpoint that the company has. So how long you know when you start working with a client, if we’re just talking about Pmax and you know Pmax campaigns, how long does it take, like, if I was to, let’s just say I have, I own a women’s clothing brand as a, for instance, how long after I initiate an engagement with you? Do you does it take to start running, actively running that those, those ads?

Nikki Lindgren 11:21
Yeah, we try to move really quickly. So I can’t, you know, make any specific promises here on the conversation today, but generally, we’re live at the three week mark, and that will change. It will become shorter if everything’s like readily available and like the client approves things quite quickly. It will move more slowly if we’re waiting on sets. But like at the at the most basic formula, like you can run performance campaigns as soon as you have the Google Merchant Center catalog integration. So like, you are really needing to wait for creative in this one, and it can be deployed quite quickly. The reason why we’re a couple weeks delayed is, like, we want to do a proper audit. We want to understand their audiences. We need to have some cold with the clients to, like, really, you know, get the ins and outs of their business before we just kind of go, go wild with some of our assumptions from a different

Scott Reid 12:14
Yeah, that that’s, uh, that’s great, because you’re kind of speeding up by slowing down at the beginning and doing your due diligence so that you can right or them in the long run,

Nikki Lindgren 12:24
exactly

Scott Reid 12:27
in terms of meta, the advantage plus shopping, talk to me about that.

Nikki Lindgren 12:37
Yes, so advantage plus shopping is was we, some say that it came out of a response to Google Performance max. So came out, it basically didn’t let you do any types of targeting, aside from you could control what percentage of the people they would show ads to would be in your marketing pool and what would not be, but that was all you could control. And that kind of, again, speaks to everyone jumped on board, and they were like, oh my god, this is the coolest, easiest thing, and also it have the best robots like, this is the future of marketing. Why would we not do this? And, you know, they basically claim that you small brands that we’ve, you know, been pitching to, they’re like, well, we don’t need anyone to you anymore, because all we do is we build one and a social shipping campaign. We load assets in there, and then as soon as they forming the amounts. And you know, there were moments and times where it felt like that’s what we were doing for client, Michael. How do we add value? But as the months have come by, meta has introduced more targeting capabilities in this campaigns, and I think that kind of is a point at which many digital marketers are looking into strategies and 2025 plans with more granularity, again. So I think we as marketers want to control who’s seeing campaigns more so than just reliant on machine learning. Olga being I just got off a call with a client we’re pitching to, and they are wanting more Gen Z customers. 24% of their budget this year has been spent on 65 plus year olds, and 5% of their revenues coming from them in like a 2x return, which is pennies compared to the rest of their return on ad spends. So that’s because whomever is running the advert now is spending so much time in machine learning that they’re spending the learning efficiently. And we see instances like that over and over again that we do think it’s a time to have more control in campaigns for both big and small brands, because in when your small, every dollar counts and you have to make sure the audience was the one you wanted to hit. And when you’re big, you also want to make sure that your planning is sophisticated enough that you’re pulling people through a journey and with the default settings of both of these campaigns we just talked about on Google. And on meta, there’s just not that many controls that people are employing right now. They could do a lot more than just scratch the surface. So I think we’re gonna see a big switch again, over to more granular builds. Yeah,

Scott Reid 15:13
and how long has the advantage plus shopping been out now?

Nikki Lindgren 15:17
I think that’s been maybe two years as well. So maybe I’m off on my years performance and three and advantage plus, has been two, but it’s been a little bit, I wouldn’t

Scott Reid 15:27
say that that p max was about two too. When you said two, that’s what I was. That’s that was thinking in the back of my head. I’m not a they don’t,

Nikki Lindgren 15:34
don’t even quote me. I don’t, I don’t know for either. But, um, you know, some of the years go by so quickly, and some of the day for so long? Yeah,

Scott Reid 15:41
exactly. But that is interesting in terms of the the it’s it’s the the audience targeting, that is that one of the biggest opportunities right now in terms of really focusing on that and working with the machine learning to make it to amplify the results through the via the audience targeting Is that, am I understanding you correctly? Yeah,

Nikki Lindgren 16:04
I think that’s huge. And the reason why I’m feeling confident talking with you about that today is because I think we’ve talked about creative and creative needs till we’re blue in the faces in industry, right? Like everybody knows it has to be video, everybody knows some level creator generated content is going to work, and that what we’re really gaming the system for is the highest attention rate, which is three second view divided by impressions, and highest click rate. Therefore that will get, you know, the best opportunity for Roz so that’s in the world where we assume that we’ve got to create a formula in place, and we know now that the next you know opportunities within the targeting. And you know, quite honestly, even though I just said, we all know this, and like Brandon should know too, there are still many brands, especially emerging brands, that are figuring out their creative. And so if that’s where you are, they haven’t like really limited creative that works for you, sure, maybe it’s still an okay time to be running these more machine learning based campaigns while you find your footing, and then you can go out from there. So that’s yeah, that was to my rationale for speaking about this today.

Scott Reid 17:12
And let me just ask you another question around broader strategy so you’re using the you the machine learning functionality of meta and Google. Are you also, if we’re going to talk about meta and Facebook specifically, are you also using in quotes, conventional campaigns to generate traffic for their sites? Yeah, generally,

Nikki Lindgren 17:39
we are, and I say like, generally, because if you think about a build any the most granular level, so on Google, an ad group, and on meta ad sets. And actually can control ad groups on Google anyway, but now I’m getting in the weeds. You don’t want to be spending less than, like, $60 a day against an initiative. So the reasons by which you maybe won’t run many campaigns at once is because your daily budget is just so, you know, it’s splitting hairs to those. But for brands that are spending, I’d say above, like, 30k a month. So they brought this house cap on there, where we’re saying to this system, like, hey, if we can’t get a row as of x, like, you know, down the spend, we don’t want to spend there, and didn’t get that efficiency, so we put some controls in. But in those instances and larger spends, were able to run more things at once, pretty, pretty wealth. And

Scott Reid 18:33
one of the things, because I’ve looked in the back angle of reference, time to time for different clients. And one of the things that I have noticed on the advantage bus, shopping and performance Max is that they have a number of slots for headlines and different copy and that type of thing. Do you recommend using all of those slots? Because a lot of times I see that the slots, they’re not being maximized in terms of the use, what are your thoughts on that?

Nikki Lindgren 19:01
Yes, well, if you’re kind of like a newbie to the industry, the Google recommendations are always going to be like, use all of them. You’ll have a better match score if you use all of them. And so as best we can, we would truly want to use all of them. But there are instances where it’s like, you just can’t say something 15 different ways, right, and then then it is what it is, right? So we do try to exploit them until they start to sound pretty ridiculous and brand but that being said, like, for the newbie, a lot of the recommendations you get in Google when you just log in and there’s, like, that recommendation second section that you got, you’ve got to, like, really know some stuff, to just auto apply all of them, because you could be doing things that really flip the business and not the best way. This is where Google really still wants you money and is very quick to tell you things to do. On the contrary, what I think is interesting about Tiktok, I know this is like a brand new channel. There is Tiktok. Is really good at telling brands not to start marketing until they have 15,000 followers. And I just think it’s such a unique point of view, because we’ve never heard an Amazon say, Don’t do this yet.

Scott Reid 20:12
No kidding, yeah. I

Nikki Lindgren 20:14
mean, we still don’t recommend it be followed like we wouldn’t say you have one follower. Let’s get going. But we’ve definitely helped brands with zero and 15 followers, 15,000 followers, and then successful.

Scott Reid 20:27
That’s, that’s, that’s quite intriguing, because usually they just want every last cent that they can possibly get. Yeah,

Nikki Lindgren 20:34
and it’s interesting because the small brands are so, you know, willing to follow that advice, and they’re like, Well, how do I get sufficient 1000 followers? We don’t start until then, because that’s what Tiktok says. So, you know, it’s good. It’s good. There people are listening to what

Scott Reid 20:48
do you think about the Tiktok platform? We love it advertising perspective.

Nikki Lindgren 20:54
Yeah. We love it for advertising. To me, it is still very efficient for awareness. So you’re going to get the lowest cost per video view, the lowest ckeam there, when we say full funnel, and really efficiencies of spending in sakaka, ROAs, not so great still, but it’s definitely getting better, like the remarketing pool on meta versus Tiktok can look very similar in terms of ROAs. So that’s promising, but we use it kind of with brands that are bigger, like already a couple million in size, and have a little bit larger budgets. We use it for that true awareness play in getting new eyeballs to learn about brands, and the things we deploy there a little bit more of the spark ads, or the boosted ads called on meta, where we’re leveraging Creator content with the brand, and so it’s very platform endemic. It’s just what people expect to see there.

Scott Reid 21:48
Excellent. What I’d love to talk to you about, attribution, on, move on, in terms of, in terms of these platforms, we just talk about meta and Google ads. Are you game for that?

Nikki Lindgren 22:00
Yeah, absolutely cool. So

Scott Reid 22:02
what do you what are your just Broad Thoughts? I’m going to give you a real, open ended question you can do with what you want. What are your Broad Thoughts on attribution, in terms of the in quotes, accuracy of it as it relates to each one of those platforms,

Nikki Lindgren 22:20
Edge strategy,

Scott Reid 22:24
let me qualify that as measured by their platforms,

Nikki Lindgren 22:28
lovely. Thank you for that qualification. Let’s see. How do I answer that? Everything’s inflated a baseline, right? But I think, the idea of, first of all, we’ve been doing a lot of GA four attribution and reporting on that in comparison to platform, and Google appreciates Google, so Google adds some good in GA four.

Scott Reid 22:56
And are you looking at, are you flipping the switch for last click attribution to GA for or are you doing it with a data model? The

Nikki Lindgren 23:04
data model, and then there’s another toggle to like, make sure it’s not just Google ads. So we’re doing the data model. And, you know, meta just looks terrible in there. So our brands, as soon as they see that, they’re like, let’s not spend anything on meta. I’m like, Okay, well, do you want to kill your business. So I think that’s like the hard conversation to have, because, like, we don’t sound very strategic there, because we’re like, well, Google’s number, Google Analytics four, their number’s not right. But we do know meta is number is high. So I think you know, what do we recommend people do who can afford, like, a North beam or triple will for the time being, and like meta coming out with our own attribution you know, solutions and like improvements. So CBD on how great those end up being. But what we would recommend brands do is just get all their platforms, including Klaviyo and anything else they’re using, to the same attribution windows. So whether that’s one day, seven day, whatever, let’s try to at least Apple tools, then in platforms, so that we can now look at the efficiencies of them. And then I think, like, what we have to remind brands all the time is like, well, we want the conversion, like, we have to get the person to be familiar with the brands. So like, if you want if, because we have seen this, like just last month where meta ROAs and GA four is under a 2x and the brands are freaking out because that’s not a break even point for some of them rights. And we’re like, but if we don’t do this, you don’t have enough organic social SEO to make up this awareness play. That’s a situation we’re in, and we don’t want to sound like creaky or thick headed, but, you know, it’s just a hard conversation to have.

Scott Reid 24:45
I mean, people have to be aware of a product before they buy it. It’s impossible to purchase something until you’re aware of it. And there is in most least, this is, this is my opinion, with most, most people’s buying process is usually. Some type of a decision making process in there, and there’s a gap in time. So, you know, you really got to look at the purpose of pain of that ad, like, what do you want it to achieve, and then match that over to what the results are from that. And it doesn’t always have to be the conversion. So, and what you’re saying, correct? Yeah,

Nikki Lindgren 25:21
correct. And I think, like, where we’re doing more granular weekly touch points, because we’ve got a fashion brands where, like, budgets change and initiative changes sometimes week over week, just with drops, is we’ll look at that lag time in GA four and path length in GA four, just to, like, make sure it’s still looking the same. There are any like, funky changes in like, how long people are taking to decide, or how many touch points. So that’s some data, like, we’ll just kind of monitor and be able to speak to in terms of, like, how we’re shifting strategy. But yeah, it’s, I think there’s so much data to look at. It’s overwhelming. It’s like, how do you make a decision? And I think working with a lot of younger people throughout my career who are new to marketing, it’s been challenging to kind of weave the story together when you’ve got, like, data overload. There’s so many different ways you can slice and dice what’s going on that sometimes it’s it’s hard for people to kind of make sense of it all and build a strategy.

Scott Reid 26:15
And at the end of the day, I gotta believe that you’re crafting an overall traffic strategy, so that all these different platforms and ads and campaigns are working together to create transactions, right? Yeah, it’s, it’s, you’re not just working in one platform and saying, This is it. You have the knowledge and experience and depth of experience so that you can piece this strategy together in order to create the ideal outcome for your clients. If,

Nikki Lindgren 26:47
yeah, 100% I mean, unless we’re doing a bad job, like, that’s what, what we’re in trying to fight, yeah, yeah. And I think, like, that’s where we get to talk about the fun channels, like a tick tock, or even to some extent, like programmatic will do native buys on for placements and topics that are make sense of our brands. We’ve got, like, higher end high AOV price points clients, and they’re more considered in showing up on the right domains. And the right type of placements about send content are really important. And so while we are very clear to imply like that won’t drive your return on adspend, like it’s just a really important place to make sure to be for that first touch of awareness. These are people who want to learn more about things that you sell.

Scott Reid 27:32
Yeah, absolutely. And I gotta say, too, I was, I was surprised and impressed at the same time when I looked at your site, which, again, it’s great, but you have these wonderful resources. And I’m saying surprise and impressed, because I rarely see a agency similar to yours that has calculators on their site that are thoughtful and and and as as, as broad as you have them as well. So I’m just gonna, I’m looking at the at the site right now, and I would urge you to go to the resources. So it’s penoff.co/resources, and you can click on it, on the on the on the website as well. You have a CPM calculator, a cat calculator, the customer acquisition cost calculator, CAC, the acronym for that, the ROAs Return on Ad Spend calculator. And then you actually have a UTM builder as well. So I just looked at that and, and I’m a big data guy, and, you know, a power user, if you, if you, if you will, of g4 so I saw that in my eyes lit up. But it’s really unique. And in speaking with you too, it’s, it’s really clear to me that you are in the weeds with the data, and you’re really trying to make sense of figuring out what’s working what’s not. You’re looking and you’re triangulating using all these different data points, as challenging as it is, in order to make better decisions. So that really came through to me. And then when I saw it on as I’m thinking back our research, I was like, oh, okay, this all makes sense. Oh, good. They’re definitely focused on the data, and you have to be. But so few in my experience, because I talk to a lot of different agencies, and I work with a lot of E commerce brands that work with agencies, and so many of them are so unhappy. And I think a lot of it, it comes down to people are just kind of like throwing darts and not backing it up and really thinking and doing the hard work, which is analyzing and validating what is, what you’re doing, actually delivering to the bottom line. So I give you the big, the big clap on this

Nikki Lindgren 29:43
from another, from a data guy, that makes things feel really good. So thank you. Yeah,

Scott Reid 29:47
no, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s wonderful to and it is. It’s changing all the time. And I also love the fact that you have a UTM builder. And I did want to ask you a little bit about your use of UTM parameters, because I was looking at that. And you know, being a GA for focused analyst, UTMs are something that you just have to do. So I’m curious how you use UTMs in your business to measure that traffic, and especially with Google Ads too. If you could just kind of broadly talk about UTMs, but also drill down into Google ads and what your position is on, do you just do what Google says, or do you customize the UTM settings?

Nikki Lindgren 30:33
So yeah, and this is actually a fun topic, because we did, we have to update our calculator. We just went through and, you know, each platform has their own like dynamic field to pull in, so we definitely use those to simplify the manual inputs and make sure they’re error proof. And so we just went through an overhaul in nature. All of our clients are following them perfectly, and that included overriding Google Ads the default, no, I don’t think their default UTMs are necessarily bad. Look like I’m not sure I’m the best person to speak to about their you their default UTM structure, but because we were doing it for everything else, we just started doing it here. So I think by default, what they pull in is all the way down to the keyword, etc. It’s not like you’re missing data with the default. And so I think unless you’re, yeah, I’ve

Scott Reid 31:26
found it to be satisfactory just to be able to measure different campaigns and things. But is there anything? That’s why I’m so interested, right?

Nikki Lindgren 31:35
And I think this is where like, because Google does such a good job in Google Analytics, we kind of forget about it everywhere else, and especially when brands and agencies aren’t taking GA for that seriously and they’re like, cool, we look at Platform data anyway. It’s easy to just be like, yeah, yeah, that’s that’s fun. I mean, we’ve taken over so many pounds that we’re using meta UTMs in Tiktok and like, the dynamic inputs of meta don’t translate to Tiktok, so we’re just pulling in like garbage data or these agencies were. So I do think it’s really important to set up your UTMs correctly, for the reason you just mentioned with what you can see in Google Analytics for Google ads is like, all the way down to the most granular level. And when you are using UTMs appropriately. On the other platforms, you get maybe campaign, maybe ad set, but you’re not getting the creative so we just did the pull through to get all of those sets of data. How often do we use it? Not that often, but at least it’s available and it’s clean and we can refer to it when we’re really trying to understand something that’s going on with the business. Yeah.

Scott Reid 32:39
Excellent. So it is something that you’re when you’re rolling out a campaign, you’re using the UTM parameters, which Exactly, yeah, and we

Nikki Lindgren 32:47
just rated our internal QA, so everyone has to check all the way down to UTMs. We have to put them in our ads tracker so the clients knows, asset by asset, what UTM we’re using. Like, we’re very templated and transparent with everything. Okay,

Scott Reid 33:02
you guys are dialed in. Clearly, that’s awesome here. Great. So we’ve spoken about machine learning, we talked about Tiktok. We kind of diverted quite a bit from what we said we’re going to talk about at the beginning. If you could talk a little bit about, say, like your ideal client, yeah, sure. I think that would be good, a good thing to touch on, and then we can, you know, maybe wrap it up after that and talk about how people can get in

Nikki Lindgren 33:29
touch with you. Yeah, awesome. Well, we have loved working with those emerging brands in lifestyle and beauty are really the main areas we focus on, drive to consumer, obviously, and the brands are coming to us when they’re quite small, so just a couple million in revenue, and we like to latch on, build these amazing strategies to be with them for some time. I would say most of our brands are leaving us to take the marketing in house, rather than leave for a different agency. So that feels really good, that we’ve shown them the path and then also given them the tools to figure out how to stack up a team appropriately in house. So that’s sort of our sweet spot in terms of where we find brands, is when they’re between one and 5 million in ARR, excellent.

Scott Reid 34:14
And how about what’s the best way for somebody? If they’re interested, they’ve listened to you to speak, and they’re like, I need to take the next step. What is that next step? And how do they how do they initiate that, that initial contact with you? Yes, my

Nikki Lindgren 34:30
favorite first step is having someone open to spend some time with me. Under the hood, so signing the NDA, getting into their accounts in real time with them, screen sharing with me. So I can give them some quick tips and observations. And so the best way to get in touch with us, to have that conversation is to go to our website, hanok.co, P, E, N, N, O, C, k.co, and there’s a FORM FILL there, so if someone just leaves the information, I’ll get in touch to schedule discovery conversation, where we’ll do a lot. Live audit of their accounts with me, personally.

Scott Reid 35:02
Excellent. Well, that sounds absolutely fantastic. We will have all the links to your LinkedIn, to the website in the show notes. Thank you very much. Nikki, this is a wonderful episode. I learned a ton as I, as I, as I knew I was going to but it was a pleasure speaking with you, and we’d love to have you come back again in the future. Would love it. Thank

Nikki Lindgren 35:24
you so much for the time to say. Scott,

Scott Reid 35:25
thanks a lot, Nikki. Talk to you later. Bye, bye, bye.