Funnel Reboot Podcast

There are websites and then there are websites. Some give User Experience short shrift, slapping together generic templates that look pretty... generic. Others use experts to make interfaces that are optimized for mobile and PC environments, and anticipate what users want and present their content in engaging ways.  Some with so little security, they’re susceptible to cyber threats. Others invest heavily in cybersecurity - protecting not only themselves, but visitors as well.  Some sites have clung to technology that’s become atrophied and prone to crashing. Others are kept up to date, and are upgradable as the company’s needs change. Some have a backend that craters when traffic spikes,while others keep humming because of their scalable infrastructure. Some expect visitors will come back on their own initiative, others use email smartly to coax visitors back. Our guest is going to show us how to see the difference that well-developed websites can make. He knows how the value of our online presence can be unl

Today, we’re talking about the future of data with Google Analytics 4.   It’s been about 6 months since we all had Universal Analytics. It’s good to talk to others who use GA4 to do their jobs, to compare notes. Although GA4 is here to stay, it still has gaps that need bridging.  That’s why I spoke with Jason Hackenberry, Head of Partnerships from web development agency Arctic Leaf. Prior to Arctic Leaf, he held Digital Marketing and operations roles at Weatherby and Save Khaki United, along with roles in Merchandising.  What you’ll hear is from a virtual event he and I did in December 2023, on topics including How Google is migrating users of its free version differently from its 360 version  How to capitalize on the information provided by GA4 The data  you actually need vs. what you THINK you need Tips on finding insights, reporting, conversion tracking and data retention New GA4 features that can help your lead generation or e-commerce website.  

GA4 is now our de facto analytics tool. Regardless of how familiar we were with the previous  tool, GA4 is here to stay so we may as well get good at using it.  I’ve got just the person to make the transition relatively painless for us.  Our guest’s love for analytics was a happy accident after she worked in a company where the sales director was making a move to take my budget and remove people from my department to fund new sales people. The work we were doing was having an impact, and she needed to prove it, show the evidence, and going into a board meeting with a warm fuzzy feeling in your tummy won’t cut it. You need to show our craft in all its creative beauty, but we also need to show the numbers to justify it and continue with our work. As head consultant at The Colouring In Department, she has completed close to 230 audits now, and has trained thousands of people on GA.  Joining from London England - here is Jill Quick Links to all things mentioned in episode 172 can be found on its shownotes page at

AI won’t end up being one thing, it will be present in many little applications - hopefully that will help us in our marketing. But what kind of AIs do we want? Are we looking at the ingredients that go into them?  Those are the kinds of questions innovations our guest considers as he makes AI models for healthcare and the retail marketing sectors. Yash Gad is a data scientist, education advocate, and foodie. Founder and CEO of RingerSciences and Chief Data Scientist of Next Practices Group. He earned his PhD from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Computational Biology, Neuroscience &, Biophysics and received his undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins. He joins me from Austin TX.  Links to all things mentioned can be found in Episode 171's shownotes page on the Funnel Reboot site.

Whenever your marketing is being assessed by an analyst, they will use one of two approaches.  The first is called Multi-touch attribution, which takes a customer who’s made a purchase decision, then puts weights on the touchpoints they had on various channels (Google calls their model ‘Data-driven attribution”) on the way to that point, to say which touchpoints were most influential.  The other approach they may use is Media Mix Modeling. From what previous podcast guest Kevin Hartman told me about MMM, it’s a ‘tremendous undertaking.’  It involves collecting and analyzing historical data in different geographies at different times of the year: sales figures, both legacy and digital marketing channels, and external factors like economic indicators and even weather. It has its own jargon: Incrementality, ratios, betas, impact on objectives. Then there’s the math. It uses regression methods, both linear and non-linear, Frequentist vs Bayesian statistics.  I get so overwhelmed with these modeling solutio

You did everything just the way you were told.  You took the tags the free tools gave you and installed them on your site, you configured platforms and poured over their reports, you connected the systems and even hired developers to hook everything up to a database. And yet, you have little value to show for all the work you’ve put into your company’s analytics  You feel the analytics platforms are backing away from their responsibility to streamline all this. Instead, the answer from the largest of the bunch, Google, is they’ll hold onto your data if you use their newest tool, BigQuery, and pay them money to store your data …or is it their data… on it.  The bad news is summed up in a 2023 book whose euphemistic name is “You’re data is flawed”- don’t want to get an explicit rating for using the actual name  It was written by someone who empathizes with our situation and who lays out in the book the steps needed to generate positive financial returns for our analytics investment.     Our guest Mark McKenzie s

Memes act as our collective memory’s transportation system. The instant they are seen or heard, our minds hop to whatever emotion the meme conveys. The use of this brain-hack is as scary as it is impressive. Memes rarely come to us via broadcast media. Instead, they spread organically online. Most of the original uses for these have faded, while the internet has collectively assigned them new meanings.  Our guest was so interested in memes that he came out with a book in 2023 called Marketing Memetics  to explain all that marketers must consider when using them.  Mike Taylor shares content on wider marketing topics, such as AI & prompt engineering, which O'Reilly has commissioned him to write a book that’s due to come out in 2024. Experimentation is also a passion; he’s run over 8,000 CRO experiments, and he shares the insights he gets on his social channels, and  in courses he has on LinkedIn Learning and udemy.  His love of learning & teaching can be traced back to his studies at Anglia Ruskin Unive

A trend that’s currently having its day in the sun is Product-Led Growth. According to our guest, it’s a fine model, but our companies need growth that’s based on a more foundational element - advocating for Customer-Led Growth. CLG begins with creating organization-wide understanding around what experience is most appropriate for the company's best customers. Value to customers is then delivered — whenever, wherever, and however they need it — throughout their relationship with the company.  Our guest pioneered customer experience mapping while she was leading marketing for the Vancouver-based SaaS company Unbounce. She has been a brand builder since 2000. In 2009, she embraced tech startups and SaaS, recognizing marketing's pivotal role in SaaS success. In 2023 she co-authored Forget the Funnel and with her co-founder Claire Suellentrop has a consultancy that goes by the same name.  Let’s talk to Georgiana Laudi. All persons and topics mentioned are linked in the show's notes page on FunnelReboot.com

Darryl Praill is the CMO at Agorapulse where he leads a global team of 40. Prior to that, he held executive roles with companies like SAP, IBM, Kinaxis, Airbus and VanillaSoft. He has consulted for AC Nielsen, Salesforce.com, UBM and Tweed. He is also a speaker at keynotes and on podcasts (which at last count runs into the hundreds).  You become convinced after hearing Darryl, he has a commanding grasp of how the social media game is played. He got onto social platforms earlier than anyone I know. He was posting audio & video content as soon as they'd let him, and his posts were from eyebrow-raising locales such as on top of parking garages, to the middle of a golf course fairway to the Arc de Triomph in Paris. The comments and engagement he generates must be seen to be believed. Where did he get this sixth sense on using social media? I think he learned to think strategically growing up in Chatham Ontario, where he played chess and became one of the highest-ranked high school students in his region.

If you've listened to this show, you know that I believe we can base all the marketing decisions we make on data. Janet Driscoll-Miller brings over twenty years of search engine marketing experience to Marketing Mojo and is considered a leading expert in her field. Janet has spoken at search engine and marketing conferences including Digital Summit, SMX Advanced, MarketingProfs B2B and Pubcon. Janet is also a frequent guest lecturer at colleges and universities including the University of Virginia and James Madison University. In 2020, she co-authored Data-First Marketing with Julia Lim People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show Janet's Agency, Marketing Mojo Janet Driscoll Miller's LinkedIn profile and Twitter profile The book's site: Data-firstmarketing.com Episode Reboot.  Go to the special Page on Marketing Mojo created for Funnel Reboot listeners. For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-103-data-first-marketing-with-janet-driscoll-miller/

What needs to be done with marketing data to make it usable?.   Essentially, it must be taken from its original source, formatted cleanly, and put into your database to be analyzed. This is handled by a process called ETL, Extract, Transform & Load. This process was done manually in olden days, but AI is now facilitating this task to be almost entirely done by technology.  Our guest can help us get familiar with how this works because he approaches it more from a marketer's perspective than a technical one. JD Prater has a background in the world of paid media marketing, probably the niche that's most famous for doing detailed analysis on large amounts of data. He has recently become Marketing Lead at Osmos, the maker of a tool that uses AI to help companies with ETL work. Besides that, JD has done marketing in-house at Amazon and Quora, and worked on brands while with a PPC agency. Besides that, he's well known for speaking on digital marketing and being involved with several podcasts, and when he's not

In this episode, I talked with Farhad Khan, an Ottawa-based expert on UX. He started out working as a software engineer for high tech companies and then formed a Web development agency called Grype Solutions in 2009. Listen for his description of how design impacts a site’s marketing effectiveness, what jobs your website has, using your analytics tool to see how visitors flow through your site, making each page on your site interesting, and where sites are going when it comes to personalization. For complete Show Notes, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/episode-16-role-of-ux-in-a-sites-marketing-effectiveness/

This episode looks at the impact of fraudulent traffic on digital marketing. We’ll talk about how big a problem it is for publishers, ad platforms and advertisers. We will step through what advertisers can do to make their campaigns less vulnerable to attacks by fraudsters, and give thoughts on how to give your non-marketing colleagues reasons why it’s still good business to advertise, in spite of problems with ad fraud. For complete Show Notes, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/episode-15-ad-fraud-and-what-you-can-do-about-it/

This episode takes us through the case of a company that seized the chance to market their product using content, tailored to each buyer’s vertical and funnel stage.  Hear how they: Implemented the email communications and marketing content into their Marketing Automation tool. What kind of marketing resources they needed to build and maintain the platform How to customize content for different audiences, without making too much work for yourself  How to present dashboard data such that management understands how you use the budget to create content and what business-related numbers that influence. For complete Show Notes, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/episode-14-the-role-of-content-throughout-the-funnel/

This is the fifth in our five-part series on Making the Whole Funnel Work. An experience is created with the content you write; but content alone does not an experience make. You can’t just throw together a collection of words and expect it to do anything. Here I talk with a web copy expert on how to craft content that provides a positive experience for the user. In my interview with James Taylor of Samurai Marketing, you’ll hear the 12 steps he follows for creating content that measurably improves the number of users who engage and become leads. Show Notes:  People/Things mentioned in the show. James Taylor, Samurai Marketing War & Peace, by Leo Tolstoy Ernest Hemingway WordPress SEO All-in-One Plugin Pixabay Apple Notes (similar to: Evernote, OneNote, Google Keep) Episode Reboot:  Here is James’ 12-step checklist for Creating WebPage and Blog Post content

This is the fourth in our five-part series on Making the Whole Funnel Work. In this episode, we talk about traffic; not the automotive type but the web visitor type. This solocast talks about all the ways web analytics tools classify traffic to your site. Then I focus on four of those channels that you can affect for getting more traffic to your site. For complete Show Notes, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/episode-12-how-traffic-make-the-whole-funnel-work/  

In this episode, we look at both sides of a website interaction. We discuss how visitors progress through a website and how marketers make conversion offers for the visitors to complete. Marketers make a critical choice when deciding the conversion actions they use, so we go through the most common actions used on leading-edge websites. Listen in for answers to these topics: Why do we have conversions? How to optimize your conversions How to choose what call-to-action to put on your webpage How to effectively use chatbots, contact form, call buttons, questionnaires, etc For all the links and the reboot mentioned in this episode, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/episode-11-how-conversions-make-the-whole-funnel-work

This episode covers what needs to be in place to know everything about people's interactions with your website. We talk about how to track conversions in your analytics, how to add Tags, run A/B testing and more. For all the links and the reboot mentioned in this episode, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/episode-10-how-a-tracking-infrastructure-makes-the-whole-funnel-work  

This episode walks through a 7-step process for building a marketing dashboard: Interview stakeholders Review Technology Select KPIs Group requirements Select Charts Prototyping/Wireframing Launch For the People, Ideas and Products mentioned in this episode, visit the shownotes at http://FunnelReboot.com