Simplify Your Analytics Using an All-In-One Tool with Iris Shoor

Hey, as we're diving into today's episode of Agency Journey, let me tell you real quickly about our sponsor, Aribi. Aribi is a super cool, all in one marketing analytics tool. They've got Google Analytics squarely in their sites right now. And I can remember setting up Google Analytics as a sophomore in college and thinking this was just the coolest platform. And as it's matured, it's still super powerful, but it's become so complex to deal with. And Aribi has a value prop totally aside from this. But what I absolutely love about my experience plugging Aribi into zenpilot.com is I didn't have to mess around with setting up what events I wanted to capture and tracking all my changes. And if I messed up a view, then it would, it would delete all the data that I had. I just plugged it in, it crawled, it captured all our, all of our events, made it super easy to see our funnel. And it just works at Living. You'll see, for example, how many people read the definitive guide to click up for agencies, a blog post that I wrote, I don't know, six months ago. See where those folks come from, how that influences the buying process, the funnel, the way that it works out. So super excited to have Aribi as a sponsor. You check it out. Go to aribi IO/actionjourney. It's all one word. If you spin up a free trial there, use the coupon code Agency Journey, same thing, all one word. That'll give you 20% off any plan, which is super generous of them. And remember, they can track all of our conversions, so check them out. That's Aribi IO. We appreciate their sponsorship. Let's get on with the episode. All right, welcome everybody. Gray here. And today I've got the pleasure of having Iris Shore from Aribi on this. Iris, thanks for jumping on to talk through Aribi and the mission that you guys are fighting for.

Hi, Gray. Great to be here.

So can you give us maybe the one line or it can go more than one line, but kind of the short, abbreviated version of what Aribi is.

Okay, so the one liner is marketing analytics without developers and without analysts, and a bit more about the product. It came after lots of frustration that I experienced and other marketers I knew as well from using Google Analytics and having to customize it a lot, having to use developers in order to collect data and not having enough proper competition. So I guess today most of the market is either Google Analytics or very heavy tools like BI Tools or Mixpanel and so on and that require lots of integration. So we're really trying to simplify this experience and to give simple answers to the question that all of us ask.

Right. So we've played around pretty heavily inside the tool so far and I was really impressed with the interface. It was I went super deep because of a background in SEO on Google Analytics back in 2011, 2013. I just remember how cool it was seeing here's the dots of where the individual visitors were and I'm like, oh, that's Harrisburg, Penn. I know which friend that is, what location people were in. But a combination of things happened as the business grew. I became a lot less technical and a lot less skilled in Google Analytics and at the same time the complexity of Google Analytics grew and grew and so now trying to sort my way around and you know I've got the handful, I've got the five or six things that I know how to go in and grab, but it still is a bunch of clicks to go get the info that I need and that so that's the space that I thought, thought oribi. You know there's a cool space in the marketplace, but what. And I want to get into the tool itself. But what prompted you to say this is a problem that I want to tackle? Because Google Analytics, I mean that's the de facto, that's just the standard that everyone knows you have to put up with it. So it's a hard market to break into and I feel like it takes a lot of courage to go after that market. Was there, was it your background personally or where did the idea come from and what prompted you to take them on?

So this is actually my third company after two successful startups and I really love the world of flow touch self serve tools and I really felt like there is a huge opportunity around it. Today all of the advanced marketing tools are as I mentioned, rely on heavy integrations. You needed to set it up for a few weeks or months and they really identified a very interesting opportunity around there. I would also add that you mentioned before that Google Analytics became more sophisticated but mainly the market became more sophisticated. So if five or ten years ago people used to work with less channels, less touch points. Today measuring the marketing results is. Is so complex and we all want to be data driven and most of us don't have enough resources to do.

It well yeah, that makes sense. So to help folks who haven't looked at it yet, try and comprehend what are the main. So you get into a reb, what's the experience like that's so fundamentally different from the current attribution tools or analytics tools to grab it that how. I guess how do. Or there might be one key point that you're focused on in terms of activation, getting people to that first point of value as quickly as possible. What's the main distinction or difference in terms of the setup process and then what people are getting out of it that maybe they're not accessing right now?

Yeah. So the way I see analytics tools for them, the main barrier is around collecting all the data. If you want to ask different questions, like you want to know the impact of the last newsletter you stand on, how much, how many people are using a coupon code and how many of them purchased and which product and so on. You need to have all the data points in place. So you need to collect all the data about all the events that happen on the website, user behavior. And in most cases, most companies collect only the final event like a purchase or they have very few events. And then it's much harder to ask, to ask different questions. What we do very differently to Ruby is to try to handle this data layer in a very different, in a very different way. And we collect all of the data without using code and make sense of it. So it's not just like a button click. We managed to understand that this button is a sign up button and these are all the users that requested the demo. Actually, in about a week from now, we're going to launch a new version where we create automatically all the suggestions according to your website and then you can just click, for example, like I want to track all the people that requested the demo, signed up, purchased, decided to cancel and so on. And everything is collected in a dynamic way. So creating this layer is the main differentiation from other tools. And you have everything, you have everything retroactively. So if you want to question something that you've done a few weeks or a few months ago, you can easily do it. And on top of it, we've built a very friendly and simple interface. And there's a combination of having all the data and having a friendly interface. There is something that really helps the marketers that work with ORIBI to understand the results, know how to allocate their budget and which activities to invest more in.

Right. That makes sense. So in. I thought the. One of the cool things is we were playing with it super early on was we go in and look at what buttons got clicked and it didn't have to set up. I mean it was just all there. Like you can sort through every single button and there were things that we didn't realize were buttons that are us picking up as all clicks or what are people clicking on inside the tool right now and then obviously pick and choose. Here's the ones that we want to measure most easily and build reporting off of that. In terms of who it's for, who what was the because this has a ton of application, every site could potentially use a review. But who's the primary market and has that shifted since starting?

Yeah, actually I'll share with you the tweets. With my previous companies I always like the low touch approach and more of inbound and with my two less companies it was more about putting it out there and then seeing who are the best customers and it didn't really happen with Ruby. So I think that because marketing analytics is so wide and they really feel it's a blue ocean because Google Analytics is the only player for for most companies we see a variety of users coming to ruby. So about 40% of the customers are e commerce and 25% of the customers are marketing agencies. And we see technology companies and education and entertainment and finance and medical, you name it. Right.

E commerce makes a ton of sense for what you guys are doing. So that's a natural fit. So I mentioned Aribi in our agency Facebook group and there are a couple of people who everyone was there were a lot of people who obviously hadn't seen it and then a bunch of folks had seen it or played with it and there were a couple agencies and there's a wide mix of agencies in our group of folks who are very early on in their journey to folks who are running eight figure agencies and a couple of folks who had signed up early on under a different pricing model and then came back and canceled it because they were like we're not using that much. Maybe we're too small. Came back and the pricing had increased. So could you talk a little bit And I know pricing is always strange to get into on a podcast because there's one point in time today where pricing model is this and it can all change down the road. But tell me a little about the way that you approach pricing right now and maybe just general range and to timestamp it here we're in May of 2021.

Yeah. So really about the reason I think that like many startup companies we've matured, the product is more mature and we went through a natural process of increasing the pricing. Today we start at around $400 a month. It depends on the traffic. So if you manage customers with high traffic, you are going to pay more. Maybe around like $1,000 a month. It has lots of ROI. So that's something that we always highlight. And most customers see immediate ROI by optimizing Facebook ad campaigns, by sending more accurate Data. Now with iOS 14, it's even a stronger FE and understanding, better understanding of how visitors behave on the website, what to change and so on.

So that's what I'm trying to get to. Hey, here's the pricing. It's a big jump from Google's free. It's two totally separate products and two different value props. So how do as an agency, I think that frame of reference, because the context is Google Analytics, the price tag to a lot of people is going to seem like, whoa, this is like that's a, that's a lot to pay for a different Google Analytics, which is not really the value prop. And so trying to figure out then how do what types of agencies should be looking to sell to either sell this through or add this to clients or you know, whatever the model is that you have there. And then also internally are there points where you've seen maybe internal agency success stories? But let's tell, let's start I guess with client or with agencies pitching a reb as a tool in their tech stack that client should purchase and that they should use to help optimize campaigns. And is that normally how you see it done is they're just asking their clients to go sign up for it rather than buying it and then using it on client accounts, I would assume.

Yeah. So one quick note about competition with Google and with free product. When I started Ruby, it sounded crazy to go head to head with Google with the free products of Google and I've done lots and lots of research around this issue. Today Google Analytics serves mainly as the analytics tool for Google Ads and that's the reason it doesn't change a lot. It won't give you enough information about different channels. So it's a great tool to analyze Google Ads, but it doesn't do such a good work with website optimizations, funnels, attributions and other channels about this. And that exactly was the reason that we add more value today. Most of the customers then usually start by paying about rebates themselves. Some of them do charge the customer. It really varies. They can say that there is one way it's usually being used. In many cases they use Ruby. So they want me to use developers on the customer side so they can track new events, send them to Facebook, define them on Ruby, explore them without having to, without requesting access to the company website and redeploying the website.

So what I'm trying to get to is if I'm helping to explain this to agencies, what's the best way? Just because you've seen this way more times than I've seen it, what's the best way to explain that value proposal to the client? And that sounds like it's probably the key point is because I'm used to, if we're Facebook campaigns, we need you to go have somebody set up this event and this event and this event. Or we need to whatever the situation is, we have somebody on their side do it. And the alternative is you can hire somebody internally on your side, get access to their CMS or their site or whatever and go try and build it. Or often have clients ask for from clients. So is that the main. Are there other ways that you've seen a pitch or is that the main pitch to clients is hey, you could pay somebody for $80 an hour, you could pay them five hours or you can just have a review and all the data is there. We don't need to ask for anything else. It's just going to be there ongoing.

Yeah, that's one pitch. Another pitch is having them having the clients access or even as well and they'll be able to view all of the data. It's much more easier to consume than Google Analytics. Another angle, and it's just about more value around the customer experience and the visitor behavior and seeing more steps of usage within the funnel, analyzing it better.

Do you have any? Because there's all these dashboard or BI tools out there that do and especially in the agency space, a ton of agency reporting, whether it's agency analytics or Data Box or Google Data Studio or any of these tools and a lot of them have automated reporting features or where you can not just have a dashboard which you have access here in any of those tools, but you also can pull a report which is a feature that you guys have where you can have a scheduled report and say like we've got every Monday, here's a report that gets pushed into Slack with what the results.

Yeah, definitely. So one of the most popular features is auto generated reports, highly customized so you can decide which data to show and if you like to, you can show only positive trends. You can customize the designs, the logos, the colors and and you can set automation so you can decide to send it every Monday. And so that's something that really saves lots of Time.

How tempted are you to keep going deeper in that space? Is that a struggle for you? Because I would assume, I mean you've got all the traffic info, you got all the site information but you're not pulling all the rest of the information that a client might want to see from other totally other sources. Is that either on the roadmap or a temptation to keep building that out? Because if you do that then there's a competitive aspect here where you may also replace an agency analytics or not to pick on them but a tool like that where you can where agencies might be tempted to plug in and there's the value pitch is not just but it's combining and eliminating multiple other tools.

Yeah. So it's very tempting. I think that there's so much to do around marketing analytics, so many cool features that can be developed. I would say that we decided to go with a different approach and then I think pulling lots of data from other resources bring us back to the start point in which you need the developers integration, someone who knows what is doing. And we decided to focus more on the other side of exporting more codeless data to other platforms. So today we offer options to export any codeless data, any event on the website to Facebook and Google and mailchimp. And this year we're going to extend it to about 20 other platforms. So you'll be able to send to your dashboard or BI tool all the events and all the clicks that users performed on your website. And so yeah, this is the direction that we're taking.

Well that's probably the right way to go. Right. Because you're rather than building two completely separate products, take all your data in and make it available to push through. That makes a lot of sense. So when you think of agencies who've had success stories, are there any big success stories for agencies? And this is kind of the chance to brag more about what this means, what this looked like translated into real life. Any big success stories that you've seen from agencies who are.

Yeah. Not sure I can share the names because interest before but I would say that the main, the main success stories are around optimization of the current traffic. I think that's something that marketers neglect many times is just optimizing the website and the channels and the right campaigns. We're so obsessed with getting more traffic but in many cases getting the conversion rate from let's say 1% to 1.5% means 50% more sales. And in order to do it you need to know which content converts which newsletters are the right one, which pages on the website you need to. You need to change. So there are lots of success stories around it. So optimizes the content and the campaigns and the website itself and also run the reports and people hate investing a few hours a week just creating reports. Mainly marketers that want to be more on the creative side. So the entire process of automating the reports and creating an automatic way reports that look very professional.

Yep. Yeah, that makes sense. From a so one thing that we try to do in our I mentioned this to you when we are working with agencies, one thing we give every agency is a rebuilt and process library. We're helping agencies streamline their operations in ClickUp primarily but because that's such a fundamental piece, their processes and project management kind of touches their whole tech stack. So we've got a handful of kind of pre built recommendations around common agency tech stack pieces and one thing that is a big push for us this year is giving them more enablement around. Here's the specific tool and here's the playbook that we build around how you might implement that or how we've seen agencies successfully do that. So I would imagine if I had to make a recommendation right now to an agency, I'd probably not pitch that they are the ones paying for a review. But that's part of the value prop they give you the client. Say you own the relationship directly with your vendor and we're just there to service it and set it up for you and run the playbook. And then as part of how you pitch it, here's the value method. So you got all the data, you can have automatic reports out of there. Nobody ever has to go in and design it all. If the site changes, Reb's going to pick it up. You don't have to go remember to build this stuff out, whatever. There's the value props. And then on an ongoing basis, how should this get used? So if we can give people recommendations on here's how frequently you should set up a report or here's the types of reports that you should run and what they should look like and the pieces you should do, that all speeds up the adoption of any new tool. And it's one thing that we want to give folks to the degree that we're able to support that for the different tools. So in terms of the agency setup process, a new agency getting in, who's using this for a client, they just sold it to a client. Are there some key points in that journey that you'd recommend and say, hey, here's the playbook for how you want to get success or the main the main things that you need to take care of and in what order do those fall as you're getting onboarded with a reb.

Yeah. So I would say that the first step that unlike other tools really takes a few minutes, is setting all the main events that you want to follow and creating the main funnels. And the next step is measuring everything that you've done during the last week. So the way we see the usage for Ruby is every change that you made, every new campaign, newsletter you sent, social media activity, new posts that you published, you should go to Rebi and see how it really impacted the business results. So stop measuring open rate visitors and other metrics that are still far from the ad conversion and start to really understand how each one of your activities really contribute to sales or leads. And that's the way I see people use oribi. So every marketing activity that you perform a few days later, go to oribi, understand how the audience that interacted with this experience activity converted and then you're able to tell if you want to invest more in it, should you create a similar newsletter, change it, add more budget to this campaign, and so on.

Even as you were saying that, this brought up a marketing question in my mind where from the outside it looks a little bit like you're taking and I kind of like that angle. I'm curious if you if that's an intentional move to try to push into that. It makes a lot of sense. So I'm not discrediting at all the logic of what you're saying, but one thing I like in marketing is when someone who's trying to enter a new a market that's already existing and everyone knows who the competitor is that you go in, even though if you logged into a review and you logged into Google Analytics, I mean the tool interfaces are totally separate things and, but, but you've gone in and you've said we're Google Analytics, but we're way better than they are. And it sounds so I like that kind of positioning against the context of what people already know. And then here's the main differences that we have and it sounds almost like you could do the same thing from an email side of don't pay attention to the stats that HubSpot, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign are giving you because those don't really mean anything. What's the bottom line? And so you're the bridge between here's the email that you sent and here's the Shopify data on the back end or what the dollars are that actually come out. Is that an unintentional push or is that an angle that you're trying to take intentionally from a marketing perspective as you try and disrupt the market or has that just been a byproduct of kind of here's the anchor that people need in their mind.

Yeah. So actually I've never dreamed of going with this type of marketing for Ruby versus Google Analytics from different reasons I didn't want to trash on another product, they didn't want to be compared to Google. And probably like most of the listeners we've tried out so many different messaging and ads on Facebook and to find out what's working best. And the first time we tried something that mentioned Google Analytics we got like tons of comments from people that are frustrated by Google Analytics. They hate Google Analytics, they're overwhelmed by how much emotion people have around Google Analytics and their experience with it. And we see over time it usually this is like the best, best messaging. People understand what we do and they have so much to say about Google Analytics that they try out already.

Right. I think that, I mean it is a little bit more controversial but positioning against an established player, it just tends to. The emotional attachment is definitely higher on both sides. You'll have a lot of people who are frustrated with it say I don't like it. And you'll have people who live in Google Analytics all day and they'll be like how could you possibly, how could you possibly both sides of it. But it's, that's what, that's what you're trying to drive is yeah, you want more attention. That's the whole part of the whole goal of marketing. So I think it is an effective, an effective marketing but definitely gets people's attention which is cool. Awesome. Okay, so we've covered a lot. Anything that would be helpful for agencies to know a two part question, anything that else that would be helpful for agencies to know about Aribi roadmap feature. Second one is where should people go to sign up or to learn more about Aribi?

Okay, so to learn more about Ruby just go to Ruby I.O. and sign up for free trial. And something that we always advise to agencies is to add the Ruby script. It's super simple and if you're using like Shopify or WordPress it's just a plugin. But add it to real website because sometimes agencies, they edit on their website and they hardly have visitors or different channels. So they're unable to really explore the tool. So try. Use a free trial to try it on. On a real website that you really need to optimize. And as for what was the first question?

Yeah, so then the other one is in terms of a roadmap or anything else that people should know, what does that look like?

Yeah, so I can check. Right now we're working on more integrations, sending codeless data to different email automation marketing Automation tools and HubSpot and Salesforce and Zapier and Segment and then so on. And we're also working lots of cool features around paid campaigns analysis and email marketing analysis. The for example, one thing that we're working on right now is Super Funnels, in which we automatically compare funnels coming from different channels. We tell you where you lose customers, but we automatically do all the filtering work and we can identify which visitors are more likely to drop. Another cool feature is comparing segments. So, for example, you can take all the visitors coming from a certain campaign in which the conversion rate is lower than average, and to compare it to all other campaigns and they're able to see what's different about this audience and where they're coming from. Or maybe identify that they're using like a different entry page to the website. Something that really helped you to shorten all the investigation. That usually takes you days and usually most marketers don't do.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. There is a whole element where in any tool, we see this all the time as we're implementing ClickUp. There's all these features, people want, all the features. The reality is there's a lot of features out there that a lot of people are excited to have and there's a sense of confidence because they have the feature but so rarely get used. And so making those accessible is a huge value as well. Awesome. Well, Iris, I appreciate you coming on and sharing with us today. Thanks for your time.

Thank you, Sam.