Chris Mercer — Here's A Better Way To Use Google Analytics

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flow Chart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

Yo, again, this is Joe Fear, and Matt Wolf is over there from the what? The Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

Joe forgot the name of the show.

Yeah, I don't know what my name is half the time, but it's presented by evergreenprofits.com. that would be our company, and it's pretty awesome. It has a lot of good free training if you go there. But you know what? That's not what we're gonna talk about today. We're talking to Mr. Chris Mercer. He goes by Mercer.

Yep.

Not Chris, because there's too many Chris's.

There's too many Chris's.

Too many Joes.

That's true. So I'm gonna start calling you Fear.

You're Wolfie.

Fear and Wolfie.

Cool.

All right, so the Fear. Today on the Fear and Wolfie show, we're gonna be talking to Chris about Mercer. Oh, sorry. We're gonna be talking. I already screwed that up. We're gonna be talking to Mercer about the most exciting topic on Earth.

I was excited at the end of it when my head was actually going crazy, but I was actually sorry, that was a bad way to intro.

I didn't get excited until it was over.

No, I was excited during the end of it. You'll hear me virtually, my head is exploding during one point of this episode. So that means actually I was distilling information because I'm not the metrics guy of this group. Matt is. So Matt loved this episode.

Oh, yeah. I was nerding out. So Chris Mercer is the actual ninja of Google Analytics, tracking Google Tag Manager UTM codes. And I know this doesn't necessarily sound super sexy when I say it, but Chris has a knack for making it sound simple and actually making these concepts easy to grasp. So if your business you're kind of trying to figure out how to track, where are my sales coming from? Where's my traffic coming from? Which traffic is converting into sales? Trust me, every business has those same questions. And Chris Mercer helps us clarify how to figure out that information.

And just to clarify, when I said my head exploding, that was in a good way. So I basically like the way my brain works. Is Matt nerds out on all these details and stuff? I kind of take that. But then I'd be like, holy crap, you could do all of this stuff with that. Now I can go list about 100 ideas now of what we can do based off of this episode.

So Joe loved this stuff.

I did. It just took me, my brain a bit to click and be like.

So that's all. Let's get into it.

Awesome stuff. Let's go. Hey, Chris, thanks so much for hanging out today. How are you doing?

I am doing well. No complaints so far. It's been a nice, fun day here in Austin, Texas.

Now, do you like to go by Chris or do you like to go by Mercer? Because I definitely hear people refer to you in both ways.

Yes, that is true. But actually I actually go by Mercer. That's the preferred method. Only because there's so many other Chris's in the world and it's easier. This is a true story. I was at an airport actually here in Austin, going someplace else, totally unrelated. Some dude just screams out Mercer. I know you're talking about me. So that's. It just makes the whole thing a thousand times easier.

Yeah. Called Matt Wolfie.

Yeah, No, I like that. I actually answered a Wolfie. That was a nickname of mine in high school, but it seemed to have sort of disappeared after high school.

Well, you didn't.

You know, Mercer and Wolfie. Sounds like a 70s TV show.

Mercer and Wolfie.

Yeah, I like it. I like it with weird staches. Matt already has a beard.

I can have a weird stache. You just won't be able to tell because it'll just blend into the beard.

Right.

But yeah, I think. I think when Joe and I actually had our very first YouTube channel ever. This is probably going back to like 07 or something. I think we called it like Fear the Wolf or something, didn't we?

Something dumb like that. But it was fun. As it should be.

But anyway, let's. Let's go ahead and dive in and people could. So people don't just have to listen to us banter all day. Although that's pretty much what we do on this podcast.

Right?

Let's talk about.

What. How you got into what you're doing now. Because I think when we first met, and this is funny because I think I said these exact same words to Orey when we interviewed Orey a little while back was when we first met. We were fierce competitors. We absolutely hated each other because we were. We both. We. I think we got into fisticuffs, fought over it because we both had courses on WordPress at one time.

Yep, you did too. Yeah.

We were frenemies.

The three of you. Wow.

No, in fact, funny story. Me and Joe and Mercer and Ori and David. Gonzalez. We all went and got, I think it was like Thai food or something in Austin and David Gonzalez made a comment about, like, I feel like I'm in the middle of the WordPress Megamind group right now because we got Ori.

Remember that at three in the morning.

Or whatever it was.

Yeah, yeah.

Thai food at two in the morning. What could be better?

That's what it was. Yeah.

It was the night of one of the Internet marketing parties, which I believe you're still involved in, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we're kind of like, I always, I always reference this as like a supporter. Right. We're not quite a sponsor, but, you know, kind of an unofficial part of the team where we can sort of help support them along the way. They've done such a incredible job with that throughout the years. It's going on like 10 years now that he's been doing that. And I just like, it's like our give back. Right. Like, sort of helping with that community and helping bring people. Like, when I first entered the Internet marketing party, I knew nothing, you know, I knew I was going to create the site about how to train WordPress, you know, but that was it. Like, I didn't really have anything else built and. And through the I Am party and the people I've met there and the network of which. You were one of those people. Right. Like, it's all come from that. So I like being able to give back and help the next person that's, you know, a little, maybe a little lower in the ladder than we are right now.

Yeah, well, let's talk about that, man. Like, talk about how you came or. I had no clue. You knew nothing at that time or when it started.

Yeah. So I guess, you know, the origin story. I'll go back to the original. Like, how did you enter into this whole line of online marketing and everything that it now is? So I was in Long Island, New York, and it's a series of happy accidents. Like I think most things are, right. You look back and you're like, man, that was just meant to be. Right. The dominoes couldn't have fallen in any other way. But I was in Long island and I was in a job which I liked but was rapidly declining. Right. Things were changing. It was a big Fortune 500 company. Things were changing pretty rapidly where I wasn't giving control. Right. And entrepreneurs, we like control. And so it was kind of like, all right, I'm sort of unhappy in this position, doing my best to keep it going, but I know that There's a timeline on it. I got to figure out my next move. I've been there for a number of years at this point. And then I. And so I look at this online marketing stuff through this young upstart called Tony Robbins. I don't know if you guys have heard of him or not. And he creates this Money Masters program, right? And so initially, I'm like, everybody else on the world, I'm like, Internet marketing scam, right? And then Tony Robbins instantly legitimizes it with this Money Masters thing. And I'm. And I meet this guy called Frank Kern and all these other people. I'm like, okay, well, that's interesting. You know, like, maybe there is something to it. So I actually suspend my disbelief, and I start Googling with the intention of learning something as opposed to just being cynical about the whole thing all the time. And I find John Chow, and I find Shoe Money, right? All those guys back in the day, and they start, you know, the big affiliate marketers. And so then all of a sudden, they're promoting this thing called affiliate.com, which is the original, original launch. And I meet this guy, Mike Philsaim and Chris Farrell, at least online at this point. Well, I'm looking, and I'm part of this launch and seeing the stuff, and I'm super excited, right? Like everybody else is, and learning this whole thing about Internet marketing and affiliate.com and what it has to offer. And then I noticed in the bottom of the email, it's like Ronkonkoma in New York, which is 10 minutes, I kid you not, 10 minutes from where I live.

That's right.

And I'm like, that's weird. So I drive by to see if it's like a real space. It's actually a real office. It's not like a UPS store or something, right? It's like a real office. And I'm like, man, I wonder if, like. So they did this little live broadcast where they were doing, like, Q and A during the launch with him and him and Ferrell and Mike, Phil, Sam and Ferrell. And so they. They were, you know, answering questions, whatever. I answered a question, you know, kind of participating. They're like, oh, hey, we're going to mail you this pen as a gift. And I said, well, I'm only 10 minutes away. I'll come by and pick it up. Mike's like, yeah, come by and pick it up. So I actually hang out. I meet with them, I buy them McDonald's, which was my big claim to fame back, so. And I still have to this day. I have that pen and that McDonald's receipt special little spot. Because I'm like, that's where it started. And here's what happened. I walk in there after work and I've had one of those days at work, right? And I'm thinking, you know, corporate job at this point. So I'm trying to figure out how.

To get out of it.

I'm like, ah, Internet marketing is even a thing. And I go into his office, they're in the middle of day one of the launch, and they're tracking all the results on the whiteboard. And I look at it and I'm like, that's not right. They added a zero or something. Hang on, let me get my calculator out. And I recalculate what the launch is doing. At that point, it was something like $2.2 million. They started at zero the day before. Now they have $2 million. And I'm like.

It was just that mind. It was like, you know those things that you see and you can never unsee?

Oh, yeah.

That was that moment for me where I was like, oh, my God, this is a thing, right? And I'm like, I'm going to figure this thing out. So that's what launched me, you know, pardon the pun, into doing this was affiliate.com, mike, Phil, same, Chris Farrell, you know, we got to be friends. And, you know, Mike has since moved to San Diego, kind of where you are, Matt. But it's like, you know, it became this thing where it's like I, you know, I occasionally went by the offices, hung out with them, kind of get an idea of what it is. But that's where I got this idea to eventually start what is. What was WP training videos, which was that WordPress training course. And it was just a WordPress site. Just teach people how to do WordPress, right? Kind of similar to what you were doing. And I thought that was good and it worked. And we were doing some things and it was awesome. But that quickly led into people saying, love the videos. Seems like an awful lot of work. How much for you to do this, right?

And so I was like, okay, well, you know, I don't know, 500 bucks. I told you this earlier. Like, my first site I ever did was $500 for complete membership site. Wow. Like 500 bucks. And I was so happy because I was like, it took me about two and a half hours because, you know, WordPress is not that hard when you have it all templated out. Took me about two and a half hours. And I was like, fastest money ever made. This thing is awesome. But then I realized value, right? But, but it got us started. And so we move forward. And you know that, that leads into outsourcing, building teams, charging higher rates, getting a little, you know, a little more into it. And so we started having this development house. And then, you know, something occurs to me, like, okay, this is kind of a commodity, right? Like, I'm getting outsources from the Philippines. I know how much this stuff costs. It's not going to take. You know, other people do this, they do it better. We're probably not going to be the best in the world at this. It's not something I'm particularly passionate about. It's something I can do, right? But not something that I really even want to do on a daily basis, right? So it's not even that I'm looking for passion. It's just I want something. I want to do something that I enjoy doing. And it wasn't at that level for me. So I'm like, I like improving, I like tweaking stuff. That's my thing. I love that. And so I was like, okay, well, let's look at this new thing called conversion rate optimization, which was starting to hit the States, and it was coming in from basically Europe, and it's been around for a while, but it was coming in from Europe because Europe was way ahead of us in terms of CRO, because they have smaller audiences, they don't have the ability to just buy more traffic. And in the States it was like, just buy more. So they ran out earlier. So they had to figure out how to optimize earlier than we did. And so people were starting to see what they were doing in Europe and then applying a lot of the systems and processes here. So we started getting into conversion rate optimization, what they call CRO. And that led us into measuring stuff because we're like, well, if we're going to optimize a conversion rate, we need to know what the conversion rate is. So I started learning Google Analytics because I'm like, okay, that's a free tool. We'll go ahead and do that. So we pop into GA and when we're learning Google Analytics, and then I realized like, oh, wait, this is even set up right? You have to do this other thing to make it do what you need it to do and give us a useful truth, not just its version of what's going on, but actually something we can do something with. And. And we got good at that. And we started showing other people what we were doing. And in terms of tracking traffic or in terms of the setup and something called cross domain tracking and. And all the other things that go into a proper implementation of that particular platform. And then people started just referring back to us and say, okay. All of a sudden it's like the conversation switched from improve my conversions to show me again how you set that goal in Google Analytics. Show me again how you're using Tag Managers to do that thing again, right? Like, all of that stuff. And then it was like, well, can you show my friend? And I realized, like in an instant, it was another one of those little lightning moments where you're like, this is the direction we need to go. Because nobody's talking about how to measure your site. Nobody's talking about how to use tools like Tag Manager at the time, which is brand new back in 2012, and analytics properly. And not just knowing the numbers, but actually knowing that you can trust the numbers and what to do with the numbers, right? Like, nobody's really talking about that. Everybody knows they need to, but nobody's really saying, this is how you do it. So we decided through iterating the company, we made a shift into what is now MeasurementMarketing IO. And MeasurementMarketing IO was our way of saying, hey, this is just a different way of marketing. We're going to market by the numbers, right? We're going to measure our way to better and better results and helping the measurements and that basically the language of the market is coming through these numbers, right? We're learning to speak the market's language and we're basically asking them over and over, what do you like, what do you not like? Where do I need to start focusing on should I improve my offer or should I improve the lead on the sales page? Right? That sort of stuff. And being able to do that through measurement marketing was. Was kind of where we brought us down to where we are now.

I love it. No, that's. That's super cool. Because that's hitting the vein, as you know, in our business, you know, just tracking in general. I mean, I feel like that's everyone, even if they don't think about it, which they should.

Yeah. No, and your story, it's funny how, how sort of how many parallel parallels there are to sort of our story. I think, you know, you talked about Traffic and Conversion Summit. I think Joe and I have actually been to all of them, including all the early ones in Austin, back when There was like 200 people there and they were teaching all the black hat strategies that really nobody should ever be talking about from stage, but they were, you know, what I'm talking about.

And affiliate.com was actually one of the first launches that I ever participated in. I partnered with Josh Bartlett to help promote that, and I think we actually hit number two on the leaderboard. So that's actually a launch that.

Oh, that's fascinating.

Stands out in my mind, is like one of the defining moments in my journey as well. Well, that's when I actually, right after.

That launch, I was doing video production and then started working with Chris Farrell and a little bit with Mike Phil. Same as well. So it's like, got to meet those guys. So. Wow. Right around that world, man.

That's what it's really. I love this business because it is such a small world with things like that, a lot of crisscross and everybody is so uniquely different. Oh, yeah, right. There's not. There's. There's never like two of the same people. You know, it's. Man, I love that. That's awesome.

And like you said, you know, Joe and I are both in San Diego here, and in the beginning, you know, Butterfly Marketing was an ebook that Mike Filsane put out, and there was a little script attached to it that you could buy as well. And that was actually a pivotal point in my career when I read that stuff, the. The concepts of viral marketing that he was teaching inside of his butterfly marketing course. And so Joe and I, we had, like, a great, great respect for Mike Phil Same and what he taught really, really early on. And now Mike Phil Sames a buddy of ours down the street in San Diego that, you know, we'll go and have a drink with from time to time. So it's just, you know, it's just been this amazing journey and that came full circle, and it's just. It's so cool to see. And, you know, you were right there along. Along those same lines with us. So it's, you know, I love those stories.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I'll tell you, man, that this is. This is. This is for the person who's listening to this podcast going, man, I missed my. My, you know, missed the timing. It's like that happens every day in this market, in this world, right? There's always like. I mean, for Mike, it was somebody else. Right? Like, so there's always that. Exactly. Right. Yep.

I love it, man.

Yeah. I mean, I don't know how many times I look at people that are. That I'm like, man, this person's only Been in the industry for two years and you know, look how far they've skyrocketed in those two years, you know, so you're right, it's, it's, there's, there's new Mike, Phil Sames, new Frank Kearns, new Jeff Walker's, you know, popping up every single day, new Mercers, which is dangerous.

I don't know if we want that. No, I'm just kidding.

I mean, that's one of the reasons, like when it, when it comes to networking in our podcast and you know, going to events and stuff, we just try to meet and get to know as many people as possible, you know, because a lot of those people are going to be the next Mike Filsaim, Frank Kern, you know, one of those big name gurus in the industry. So, you know, I've always found it very, very important to somebody who's just starting out today versus somebody who's been doing this for 15 years to sort of talk to them and treat them in the same way that, you know, they've got stuff that they can teach me, I've got stuff that they can teach them. And it's just so important to treat everybody in that similar way.

Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely true. Yeah, absolutely true.

So let's, let's get into the nerdy stuff. Well, I'm curious, and this is just for those listening who might not feel that they're ready to start tracking or they just don't know where the hell to start. What would you recommend? You recommend as someone like that, like from step one, they have a product offer, website traffic, all that fun stuff.

So if you're just, if you're just starting out, I think number one, use analytics. Like that's a given. Use Google Analytics. Make sure that's on your, on your page. There are, you know, there are lots of measurement tools, but everything always comes back to analytics, right? It's the original, it's the one that's the largest, it's the one that's got the biggest amount of resources behind it. Right. Google's pretty committed to this product, so I would definitely use it and it consistently gets better and better and better over time.

Now go ahead.

Sorry, I was gonna say. So, so that's, that's the first thing. But if you are, and a lot of people kind of do that either to a plugin or something else that has it, but if you are, maybe you're just, you know, you're starting out, you have analytics and the question becomes like, okay, what do I do with all that stuff, right? If you're at that stage, the biggest advice, the biggest thing I have learned about Google Analytics and how to use it is this. It is. Everybody goes back initially, and I did too, I did too when I first started. You always go back into the Google Analytics reports and you start poking around like you're hacking through the jungle, all of your data, you're hacking through your data, hoping you're gonna find this little jade statue of a monkey that's gonna give you superpowers as a marketer. You're gonna find that one little thing that's gonna make all the difference and it's buried because you heard somebody do that at a mastermind, and they found that, you know, people that show up on Wednesdays at 3 o' clock are twice as likely to become buyers and you want to find whatever that is for you. And when you do that, you've already lost the battle with analytics. You, I, you will almost guaranteed you will come back frustrated and overwhelmed from that because you're going to leave with, you're going to poke through all the reports. You're not actually sure what you're looking for. You're hoping somebody's going to slap. Something's going to slap you in the face. But how can Google Analytics answer you when you ask such a general question, like, okay, what will make me do better? Right? Like, it doesn't know how to answer that. What Google Analytics is really. And this is the thing that I, that I, the biggest shift I made mentally to really start taking advantage of this tool. Google Analytics cannot answer general questions like that. It cannot do that. What it can do is answer specific questions. So if I said, hey, Google, Google Analytics, I would like to know what causes more leads? Is it my Facebook ads with puppies as images, or is it the Facebook ads with ads with kittens that are images? Which one causes more leads to happen? Which one is, you know, the probability is going to be higher. Google Analytics can answer that. If I, if I teach you that information, Google Analytics can answer things like, what is the top blog post last month? Right? Very specific question. It can answer that. So from a mental sort of shift, which I think is where you get the most leverage, right? Especially when you're starting out, is making these mental mind shifts. This mindset is going into Google Analytics with a specific question in mind. And the way that, you know it's specific is you think about, okay, if I go to analytics and I say, what's my top blog post from last month? What am I going to do with that, right? And this is before you even open analytics. Then you think, okay, what am I going to do with that? Let's say it says that, you know, the one about that I did about T shirts is the best one. Okay, well, if I know it's the best one, then I'm going to go back to that blog post and I'm going to look for different ways to optimize for the traffic that's coming through there so I can get a better result. Right? And now I already, I basically, I've built my plan. I've gone, I know I'm gonna go to analytics, I'm gonna ask a specific question, it's going to return with a specific answer. I'm going to take that answer and I already know what I'm gonna do with it, which is I'm gonna go optimize that blog post to so I can get a better result from it. So that's what I go. And I go back to analytics. Hey, what's my top blog post from last month that says it's the one you did about T shirts? I'm like, great, now I'm gonna go back to my T shirts and optimize I further and say, well, okay, of my top 10 blog posts, which one brought me the most leads or which one caused the most affiliate links, right. To go out or whatever it is I'm tracking. And then again, analytics will tell me that now I can go and say, okay, great. What's different about those blog posts versus the ones that are lower on the list? Maybe it's just, oh, wow, you know what? Most of the ones that are doing well, they have above the fold links. Maybe that's what's causing it. And so I can start optimizing and I can learn how the markets interact with my site and improve things. And that's how you use analytics. I think that's from the beginner base level. Even experienced people sometimes make that mistake of just diving into the data because it feels good to be covered in data, right? Because you feel like you're doing something, but it's just, it's nothing. It doesn't actually help you. It's asking the specific questions, getting specific answers, and then knowing what you're going to do with those answers ahead of time.

I love it, man. And then I really love that, hey, what's different with this thing that's working really well? And then use that as like an SOP going further, like you said, you know, you have various amounts of Variables that you're seeing commonalities with and you're like, all right, cool. That's what I got to do. That's my template moving forward.

Exactly.

Love it.

Now, can you give a quick overview of what Google Tag Manager is and why it's beneficial to use that?

Yeah, that's a great question. So, so this is one of those things where it's like, you know, okay, yeah, I've got analytics set up and I've used it. You know, I've heard about Tag Manager. You know, what's the point? You know, A, use it. We're going to start there, use Tag Manager. Then B, here's why. So we're going to start with the origins of what a tag manager is. So if you think, if you think about enterprise level, like it was original, solving an enterprise level problem. So let's say you're Best Buy and you've got a marketing department and you have an IT department, right? So these two teams, you know, big giant, hundreds of people in each one. And then you've got this little young upstart called Facebook that has these things called Pixels Marketing, super excited about these things and they want to put these pixels all over the page. Well, marketing doesn't actually do anything with the pages. That's your web dev, right? That's the it. So what starts happening is marketing started sending all these different help desk tickets to get basically a copy and paste of a pixel. It's flooded. It can't do what they need to do because they're too busy copying and pasting stuff. They can't work on the brand new cart redesign or whatever the next 2.0 version of the site's going to be because they're gummed up. Marketing's frustrated because things are taking too long. And by the time the pixels are even placed, campaigns are over. That they wanted to do, right? These platforms are frustrated because they want people to spend money, right? And the faster you can adjust your campaigns, the more money you're going to spend typically. So nobody's happy. And then enter Tag Manager. So it became a paid product. Initially, where they were, they was programmed. Now I think it's owned by Adobe, I might be wrong with that. But a program called Telium back in the day, that was super expensive for enterprise, but you know, you would buy this and say, okay, I'm going to do a Tag Manager. And what that did is it gave marketing, it was made for the marketing team and it would give marketers the ability to manage the tracking that was happening. On the site. So that was kind of what it was made for. So instead of having to go to the dev all the time, you say, hey, here's your Tag Manager. You fire your pixels whenever you want to fire your pixels, like, do your thing. Then all of a sudden, dev you don't have to rely on. You're not gumming them up. They can focus on bigger and better things, and you can take care of the simpler stuff. That was the overall thing that it solved.

Right, right. So essentially, it's like you're putting one piece of code on the website one time, and then that one code. Now somebody else can control what sits inside of that code.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. And that's. And that's where so, you know, it was really paid. And then in 2012, that's where Google came out with theirs. And that was the free version. Right. So Google came out with Google Tag Manager. And that's exactly it. You put a piece of script on the page, just like you do with analytics or, you know, anything else that you. That you put in for tracking. But instead of putting in analytics and Facebook and everything else on your page, you just put Tag Manager on your Page, and then you put Facebook analytics and whatever else you're tracking in Tag Manager in Google Tag Manager. And then you tell Tag Manager basically what to do and when to do it. That's really it. And it's a pretty simple interface. It's something called tags and triggers. And the tag is, here's what I want you to do. So, for example, the tag might be, I want you to go report to Facebook that a lead just occurred. Go tell Facebook this person is now a lead or that this person just purchased something for $27. Right. That would be the tag part. And the trigger part is when they hit my thank you page. And so you can tell Tag Manager whenever somebody hits my thank you page, then go tell them that, go tell Facebook a lead just happened. Or whenever they make a purchase, go tell Facebook what the amount was that they purchased total. Oh, and by the way, go tell Google Analytics all the details of the purchase so I can see my e commerce reports. And that's what Tag Manager does really, really well. So it doesn't store anything. And it's very different from Google Analytics. That's a popular question we get is like, you know, so I do. I go to Tag Manager to go see my reports. Like, it doesn't do any storage. What it does is it monitors the situation. Right. It's like the Gatekeeper so witnesses all the behaviors that are happening on your page and then based on your instructions, it tells the platforms behind it what they're supposed to store. So it'll tell Google Analytics certain things, it'll tell Facebook certain things, it'll tell AdWords certain things. And it's open to anything. So I, you know, we have in FutonSoft, so we have it telling FusionSoft certain things. We use PayPal. So we have, we have it tell PayPal certain things. So Tag Manager becomes the, that gatekeeper. You know, if you've ever watched like, who hasn't, right? But the, the Lord of the Rings right where that dragon dude is coming down, he said, you shall not pass. That's how I think about Tag Manager. I can see that it's like this information is not going to go to Facebook because I don't want it to go to Facebook. But I will tell Google Analytics, case in point. I'll give you kind of an interesting use case that we ran into Facebook. I don't know if you knew this or not, but Facebook is incredibly aggressive when it comes to claiming credit for stuff, right? And this is where you go back to Ads Manager and it says, oh, this ad generated $14,000 worth of sales. And you're like, you know, Google says that you generated $300 of sales. What's up? And what sometimes happens is let's say you have a strong emailing email traffic with your own internal list. So what'll happen is, you know, they saw the ad, maybe you have an aggressive Facebook ad where you're hitting the exact right audience and they see the ad in their news stream. And I say, see the ad in quotes. So it's like viewed ad, right? And then you send an email later that day that says, hey, go buy this thing. And they all do and they buy from your email. Well, Facebook's gonna claim view through credit if it's within that 24 hour period and say, oh no, look how much money we just made you. And it's like, well, no, it's probably not that. It's probably the email that caused that sale, right? And analytics will say that it'll say the email caused the sale. So what we did is with Tag Manager we can control when Facebook gets told a purchase happened. And what we did is we broke it into two different purchases. So we said, hey, Facebook, if you cause the session to happen, if you cause the visit to occur, and in that visit they buy, then great, count that as a purchase. If however, they're Just exposed to Facebook and some other traffic source actually causes the visit and the thing to occur, in this case the purchase, then we're going to still give you credit, but we're going to call that a brand assist. And so we fire back a pixel says brand assist, so that we can see in Facebook and say, okay, well how many purchases, which we know are kind of that last click attribution. And then we can say, okay, well how many did you actually assist in? Where the, you know, maybe you helped us out with a little brand boosting or recognition or, you know, feature impressions or anything like that. And so we can break out a little better of how Facebook is actually helping or not helping a particular campaign. And it's entirely because of Tag Manager.

Wow. And all that data is pretty much what you're looking at mainly then is Google Analytics. Right. So that's where everything's pretty much stored.

Yeah, because you can go in. Exactly right. Because you can go to Google Analytics. And what's really cool is analytics starts matching, at least better matching, closer matches what Ads Manager tells you. Right. Because that's the trick is getting all the platforms to agree because they're all going to be slightly off. That's just a normal thing because they measure differently, but they should be within the same neighborhood. And that's what we're looking for. So we try to get them to that particular point. And that tool helps you an awful lot in doing that because everybody gets told the same information at the same period of time.

Yeah. No, that's interesting. I think with Google Tag Manager for us, I think we're just barely even scratching the surface of what you could use it for, because we essentially just use it as a container so that I don't have to get into the back end code to add new pixels. I basically just go to Tag Manager, add a new pixel to Tag Manager. Cool. Now it's deployed across my entire site, right?

Yep. That alone is a huge benefit. Like, I can't, you know, I can't tell you much time saving. Just the amount of time you can save doing that is a huge benefit. You're absolutely right to start there.

Absolutely. Now, one thing you and I were talking about when we chatted a few days back was.

Like sort of attribution tracking. You know, I was kind of giving you an example of how somebody might find our site through SEO and then they click over to our blog post and then they click away and then maybe they see one of our retargeting ads and then they click back to our site and then that second touch point they buy, right. And I was trying to figure out is there any way to track this, is there any way to see that entire sort of path that and sort of try to find like a commonality of like okay, most people find us by SEO, the first touch point and then the second touch point is a retargeting ad and then they finally buy. Is there any way to sort of track that and visualize it. And you gave me sort of a, an analogy of like a sales pipeline and I was wondering if you could kind of re explain that again both because A, I sort of lost little intricacies of that explanation, but B, for our audience.

Yeah, definitely. So.

First there is something in Google Analytics called the multi channel funnel reports that most people don't use but is powerful. So number one, in order for any of this to be useful, you have to be tagging all of your sources of traffic. Have to right. Something called utms. You can Google those, lots of blog posts out there on how to do that stuff, but you have to be tagging all your traffic sources so that Google analyzes what you mean by your email or by Facebook paid ads or by AdWords or LinkedIn or whatever. So you want to make sure you control all that. Then in the multi channel funnel reports, it's actually built to show you exactly what you're just asking for, which is, okay, show me the path that somebody followed in terms of traffic touches the different sources they touched along the way from point A to of initiation when they first came to the site to becoming a goal achieved or a purchase, right? Some sort of E commerce transaction. But what happens is you end up having this. You don't see like here's the path to do you see, here's this single path. Basically it's like, and I think this is the analogy we talked about before was we were going if you're looking at a bunch of fish going down the river, right, Some of them generally, you know, each individual fish is going to really have its own path, right? And what that that report does is it shows you each individual fish. It shows you all the different users and all the different visitors that are coming through and all the different paths are going through. And it's like, okay, let's say you had 400 different users on your page in that particular date range. You're looking at, you're going to see 400 different paths. Generally speaking, you don't see like, oh, 98% of people just do this. In other words, you don't get your simple answer that you're looking for. All you get is overwhelmed and confused because you're like, well, this doesn't tell me anything, right? This tells me a lot of people did a lot of stuff that eventually got them to a purchase. So it's not useful. So the way around that was, you know, and really that's a challenge because everyone's trying to solve what you just asked. Everybody is. And so my thinking is maybe, just maybe we're asking the wrong question. So instead of what's causing the sale, the question is how do we define a sale? And we associate it to what I would do if I was kind of like offline again, back in the corporate world, if I was, you know, I was a sales manager. So we lived off pipelines. And so you'd have to have a prospect pipeline. And the way we would track that is we wouldn't necessarily. We have lots of different traffic sources pushing people into the pipeline and different touches, whether it be phone calls or emails or visits or, you know, ads, Right. Whatever else is trying to get them through the pipeline. But what we would do is we'd measure in stages. So essentially the sale, instead of the sale kind of quote unquote becoming the purchase of a product, maybe we think about it in terms of the different sales that have to happen to go from somebody who doesn't know you at all to purchasing, right? So we could say, well, the first sale that I'm going to make is awareness, and that's my sale. And that could be a goal that you set up in Google Analytics, an awareness goal. And again, Tag Manager helps with this stuff to really get that done. And I could say I could define awareness as somebody who came to my site. Doesn't really matter for how long. They just showed up, right? Page view done. Maybe they bounced off, whatever. At least they were aware. Then the next stage, the next sale might be engagement, right? So let's say engaged with my messaging. So let's say I'm sending them to a sales page. I've got awareness. People who come to the page, then I've got Engagement, which is my next sale. And then engagement is the people who are actually literally engaging with my, with my message. They're maybe scrolling down about halfway through and they've spent at least 30 seconds on the page, right? We're going to trigger a pixel called Engagement using Tag Manager. It's actually easy to do. So then we're going to trigger that little pixel to fire back to Facebook. Let's say, as an example to say, okay, great. Now I want to tell Facebook and actually all my ad platforms that now they are an engaged person, right? So I record that in Google Analytics. Great. Now they're engaged. So let's just stay with those two stages. So you've got awareness and you've got engagement. Well, it's a lot easier now because there's not 75 different traffic sources between point A and engagement, and there's not 75 different traffic sources between point A and awareness. It's easier to tell what's moving the needle when it comes to making people aware, right? Because there's less steps in between. So now I can say, oh, well, you know what? SEO makes them aware. I get most of my awareness through SEO. My engagement tends to come through Facebook because I remarket those people now because again, you can create custom audiences, right? So I can fire an awareness group of people. I can go to Facebook and say, and AdWords, right? And say, let's remarket back to those people who are now aware of me and get them to engage. And then once they engage, that's the whole point, I'm sending blog posts and content and see what they engage with. I'm gonna get them to engage. Once they engage, they go to the next stage, which might be become lead. So then all of a sudden, when they, when they engage and I hit that sale, now all my marketing messages switch to not trying to get them to buy anything. It gets them to become a lead. And so then you target all of your marketing around different products or white papers or checklists or whatever else, mini courses, something to get that email address and get them to really become on your list or however you're defining a lead and you continue the process up through ultimately purchase and promoting and whatever else. But the trick is with that is instead of asking, okay, what caused the lead to happen, you're actually, you already know what is your best traffic source for awareness, you know your best traffic source. Now for engagement, you know your best traffic source to move them to a lead. And so what happens is that sort of ends up building that path that you're looking for. And it might be, I'm going to start with SEO, because SEO gets them aware. Then I'm going to use Facebook because it remarkets them really well for engagement. Then I'm going to use AdWords, because that thing converts them to leads. Then I'm going to come back, you know, with some other remarketing campaign or something else that converts. Maybe it's SEO or whatever that comes back to get them to buy, you know, and then you start. You actually do spell out where the majority of the fish are kind of running through. Again, if we're going to kind of look at it, if you imagine the stream with a bunch of fish going through it, you're never gonna be able to say, what will this one fish do? But you can, you know, put a bucket of fish on the stream. You'll know where most of them are kind of going. They're gonna follow the current. Right. And you're kind of measuring your current of how your current traffic sources are flowing. Does that help explain that?

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, Joe does that.

Well, yeah, I was just about to say, like, it seems like it paints a better picture of every single stage. You can see what bottlenecks there are. You can see if. If something's really crushing it. Maybe something keeps growing month after month. So you're like, oh, shit, okay, cool, I'm onto something there. Maybe with the engagement level on Facebook or something like that.

Yeah, exactly. And what's, you know, you take it to the next level when you have your basics down of that. Of that particular path, right? That pipeline, you can measure it and you can say, well, of a thousand people, last week I had a thousand people that were aware, and I ended up converting 800 of those to engaged, and of those, 400 became leads. Right? And now you have conversion steps. You have percentages. Well, with that, now it gets fun. Because now you can say, well, based on what's happened last week, here's what I think I can do. Next week, I want to send. I want 5,000 people to be aware of those 500, you know, of those 5,000, 80% to move on to engagement. Of those, I want half of those become leads. How am I going to do that? That right now you can start having all your traffic sources. You've got a specific thing that you're trying to get done. There's a purpose, and it's measurable. So then you can measure against it and see, did I achieve that? Did Facebook convert as many people as I thought it was going to? Did my AdWords campaign do it? And now you know where to optimize, because you're going to see where you messed up, where you. Where you missed the mark. Right? You might say, oh, you know, based on last week, 50% were maybe converting to leads from Facebook. Next week, 50% are going to do that too. And I'm going to scale my campaign. I'm going to put $10,000 a day instead of $1,000 a day. And then all of a sudden, Facebook just comes back with nothing. It's a dud. And you might see that in the leads. Be like, okay, that's optimization. Point. What happened? And then you start asking better now, you know the question. You at least maybe not even the questions asked, but you know where to start asking questions around, right? So you say, man, did something change with the audience? Right. Was it because you tried to scale and we freaked out the algorithm? Was it that they're just not scrolling down like we thought they were? Maybe they're spending time, but they're not scrolling down? And that, you know, the engagement level wasn't where we thought it was, but it allows you. The numbers will guide you at that point. And remember, the numbers are coming from your own market's behaviors. Right. You're just tracking those behaviors. So those behaviors that your market is taking, they're guiding you. So you can just basically observe the market, see what they do or don't do, and then that will tell you where to optimize next and ideally give you clues as to what you should optimize so you get better results.

Yeah, no, I love that. I love that. And, you know, I think so. The struggle that we tend to have, and I think you and I chatted about this a little bit in the past, is.

You know, we've got. We've got the people that. So. So right now we will generate a bunch of sales on, like, an affiliate product. So we do a lot of affiliate promotions. You and I talked about that last time. And with our affiliate promotions, we have a really hard time knowing exactly what thing moved the needle the most because we're pointing everything to a sales page. But we've got SEO to a sales page, we've got Google Ads to a sales page, We've got Facebook ads to a sales page. And for whatever reason, we can never totally make the numbers. Just tell us that story. You know what I mean? We can never make the numbers say, okay, Facebook ads are what are really working for you, or Google Ads or SEO or, you know, pick your traffic source. We always have a hard time really figuring out which is the traffic source that's working. So we pretty much just split our time making sure we're optimizing all of them.

Yeah.

You know, so I don't know if there's, you know, the pipeline thing helps us quite a bit. But, you know, being affiliates, one of the struggles that we always run into is we don't necessarily Always have access to put a Google Tag Manager container on the success page or that type of thing. And, you know, I don't really know if there is an answer to that or if there is a solution to 100% solve that. Because everybody uses different affiliate platforms, et cetera, et cetera.

And that's the challenge because it's so fractured. Right. There is no one way to do something. There is something that's a lot more advanced, but in Google Analytics, it's called measurement protocol. And you can fire back hits to Google to tell you if a sale happened, but only certain affiliates are going to allow that. And I like coming up with a solution as much as I can that will be global. Right. So in that particular case, if I'm in your situation, I'm gonna break it down by, I would go by awareness, I would go by engagement, and then I would go by click. So engaging, just experiencing the message that you're trying to do doesn't mean they clicked. And the click would be my sale to as far as I could track it. So. And there might be a different type of click. I could, you know, again, using Tag Manager and fire, okay, if they clicked on my Amazon links or people that click on this particular product, right. Hosting links or whatever else, whatever the affiliate thing is, and you could group them into categories even. So what I would do then is say, okay, I'm going to measure my awareness to my engagement level. I'm going to measure my engagement to my. To my click level, broken down by those different categories of affiliate for different products. So I can see if there's a difference there that maybe I want to. And then, and then this is be separate. This is kind of a separate component. I would go to my affiliate program, you know, the platforms and my big spreadsheet. I have to use a spreadsheet at this point, but, you know, bring in the results and say, okay, I know I sent 100 clicks last week and they sold 20. Great. So 20% on average, is that about right? Yeah, it's about 20%. Cool. I'm going to say that one converts to 20% and then so forth and so on. Do that with all the different affiliate programs that you've got, or at least affiliate categories, even if you wanted to. Because again, you're not looking for accuracy. That's another dangerous thing people look for is accuracy. It's got to be right. It's never going to be right. Don't worry about accuracy. Worry about the useful truth, right? And that. That truth is in the Trend, it's in the patterns. That's what you're looking for. The truth is in the trend. The power is in the pattern. So what you look for is you say, cool. Basically 20% are going to convert it for this affiliate. And I know generally speaking on this category, I'm going to convert 2%. Maybe on Amazon it's 0.5%, whatever. And so you have those. So now what you can do, if you have that laid out, you will basically have a pipeline that shows number of people aware, number of people who engage, number of people who then actually click and of those who will convert and you can predict out that stuff. Then your job is pixel. All of those people. Especially with Facebook, I would do custom audiences, AdWords. In Google Analytics, you can create segments and pipe those into AdWords. So now you can say, I want to go target people who are likely to click on Amazon ads, right? Or Amazon links or this particular, you know, hosting links, right? I want to go retarget those people. And so now Tag Manager sees them. That's what its job is. Its job is to be this gatekeeper, this witness, and it monitors everything. It will be able to group and say, okay, well, these people click on hosting links. So I'm going to tell Facebook, these are now hosting link people. I'm also going to tell AdWords that. So then those two platforms, kind of think of them as remote salespeople in the offline world, right? So they, they are now salespeople whose sole job at it is, is to take your leads kind of quote unquote of people who click on hosting and close them, right? So now you can go focus on other. Other offers, getting them to click on other, you know, hosting companies, whatever else, for five days or whatever you think that window is where they're either going to buy or die, right? And knowing that, hey, every click I send to that affiliate, I'm gonna close one out of one out of 10 or whatever. It's gonna be measuring all of that. You measure it, you put in the spreadsheet and then you. Because if you can predict it, right, you can forecast it, you can measure against it, and then you'll see if you're right or not. And it'll take you a few cycles, but eventually you're gonna get your patterns down where you can, you can replicate that and say, okay, you know what, I'm gonna ramp up a ton of ads to our, let's say our hosting blog post, the one we review, the seven top hosting companies, because that one I know I'm about talking convert one out of every 10 people that's gonna go through there. My job now scale that. How do I get more of the right people to that? And if the ad platforms know the perfect audience, because you're targeting people who engage with that type of content. Right. Then you're gonna get the same people. You're gonna get the right people.

I love it. Yeah, we need to map that out, Matt, because I'm like, okay, we have a lot to work with there.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely. It's making my head spin a little bit because it all makes sense. But the actual implementation of that all and actually building it all out is a little less straightforward in my mind.

And you know what? To your point, it is. It totally is. This is the part where you're like, oh, no, it's easier than said that, yeah, totally. Like, you're going to get confused and overwhelmed initially. Here's why. Because it's the same thing as if you were watching me on YouTube ride a bike, and I do this cool backflip, 360 degree turn, whatever. And you're like, man, I get that in theory, but if you put me on a bike, there's no way I could do that. Right. Like, I have no idea how to do that. Yep. And that's what's happening right now. Right. I'm talking about all this cool stuff that you can do, because I know how to do it. I'm practiced. I know, right? And you're kind of like, man, I get it. Like, it's cool and it sounds awesome. I have no idea how to build it out. That's exactly where you're supposed to be, you know, with. With this stuff. So. So don't feel bad. Like, that's. That's perfect. The goal is to. To never be able to unsee what we just talked about and go, man, I can track a pipeline. I just got to figure out how to do it. Now. Step one, use Tag Manager from that already. Step two, how do I tell Tag Manager, an engaged page view just happened versus a regular page view. And you play with a timer trigger, right? And then you. And then you get good, then better. Good, then better. Good, then better, then better. And a year and a half from now, you're doing backflips.

Yeah, no, I didn't even. You just mentioned that the timer trigger, and that's something that I didn't even know existed in Google.

Tag Manager, dude, all this stuff, I'm like, I just thought it just Passed data to something, you know, Google.

I'll give you like a high level stuff people don't know Tag Manager can do. Number one is timers where you can spend, you know, based on the amount of time spent on the page from the second that page loads to whenever you can do timers. You can do scroll deck. So that's a built in trigger now. Didn't used to be, but this came out in November of last year of November of 2017. So it's relatively new. It's another thing Tag Manager constantly changes, it always grows. I love it. So it's a fantastic tool. But now you can do scroll depth. So pay 10% of the way, 50% of the way, 100% of the way. Right. And YouTube videos built in. If you have a YouTube video that you're embedding on your site, you can say, did they click play, did they pause, did they complete the video? Did they watch two minutes of it? Did they watch 50% of it?

Dear God.

And you can trigger stuff based on that. Imagine what you could do if you had an affiliate video that was sitting on your page. You embedded it was on YouTube and you could target people who just like came to the page and left and said, cool, they're junk. But the people who watched half that video maybe and didn't see the offer, I'm going to retarget them with the offer. People who did see the offer and didn't buy, I'm going to retarget them with a bonus that I'm going to give them if they take advantage of this.

All within the realm of possibility for Tag Manager. And if all that just happened is your, your mini mind explosion, like, oh my God, I can never unsee that, that my job is done. Right. That's make making you aware of what's possible. Because then you get curious and you're like, I know it's there, I just got to figure it out.

Yeah, you literally, you must have a camera in our office or something because I did that with my hands. Like, what the fuck?

You can't see Joe, but his head literally exploded.

That is awesome.

Yes.

And I'm not the metrics guy, but go ahead.

So when it comes to engagement, you mentioned both scroll depth and time on page. Have you found that one might be a better metric for this person is engaged?

No. So I do a combination typically.

Okay.

And define it. So I'll say something like they have to be, you know, again, let's say it's a long form sales copy or something. You might say 50% of the way down, and has spent 30 seconds time on page.

You can do a bunch of stuff. I could say 50% of the way, 30 seconds on page, and watch my initial intro video. 25% of the way.

Right.

You can do a bunch of different stuff.

And that makes sense too, because, I mean, how many people will go and open a link and it will be open in a new tab, but they don't look at it for 20 minutes? So that makes a ton of sense. And if you were just to do time, you might think that's an engaged person, but all they did was open it in a new tab.

Yep.

Okay, got it. So actually, unless Joe has more you want to ask on this topic, I want to sort of shift topics real quick on one last little rabbit hole.

No, you're good. I'm just. My mind's spinning. I'm just like, okay, we got a lot of shit we can do here, but go ahead.

So the one last little thing I want to talk about was you did mention UTM codes. And I don't want to dive too deep into UTM codes, but what I did want to ask and get your opinion advice on is how to effectively use UTM codes. Because, like, I obviously know when I send an email to my list, I could plug a UTM code onto it. When I run a Facebook ad or a Google Ad, I will attach a UTM code to it. However, on social media, if somebody just shares one of my blog posts, there's obviously no UTM code attached to it. Typically, let's say I am posting a video on YouTube and I want to put a URL below my video. I don't want to attach the whole UTM code to it because it kind of looks ugly. So I might use like a bitly link or a pretty link or something like that. You know what, what are some of your best practices for UTM codes? I guess is where I'm kind of going with that.

Gotcha. Yeah. So number one, I'll start with like the meta rules of tagging your traffic. So one always tag external sources of traffic only. So if they are not currently being tracked by your site or your properties, right. Then they are external traffic. So email is a perfect example of that. I'm not on your site. I'm an email. So I click on an email. I am external, then I'm coming to your site. Now I'm internal. Once I'm being tracked, if I'm on Facebook, right. If I'm on a webinar I'm external. If I'm on your blog post, though, you would never use UTMs to click on an ad to see if that ad was working or something like that, because it messes with the analytics reporting and actually breaks stuff in the back end. So your numbers aren't useful anymore. So that's one thing. So always external traffic, number one. And everything that you can possibly do, put your hands on to track, you do everything. So email, like I said, webinars, live events, YouTube, like you're saying YouTube in the description links, right? Anything you can do, you do. Number two is come up with a structure, like a formula. And I'll give you the one that we use, because people tend to think about the way they use the name, the naming. They come up with UTMs. They'll say, okay, well, I've got a Facebook ad. How am I going to tag that Facebook ad? And like, two weeks later, they're like, okay, I'm gonna send this email. How am I gonna tag this email? And they're not coming at it from this. Overall, how do we do this as a company? How do I tag my traffic sources? They're creating UTMs that are specific to different traffic sources. And then what ends up happening is you've got this rabbit's nest of sort of this hodgepodge of stuff back in Google Analytics, where nothing really communicates with one another because there was no structure, right? So as an example, the source, there's five different things you can tag. So the first thing is the source. We use the branded source of traffic. So if they're Facebook, it's Facebook. If it's YouTube, YouTube. If it's webinar jam, then it's webinar jam, right? The second is the way the traffic is coming through, the type of traffic. So that's called the medium, so the UTM medium. And so we might say CPC is paid. We recommend that because Google automatically comes through as cpc. So if I was doing paid traffic on Facebook, I would do Facebook as the source. CPC would be the medium. If I was doing email, we use infusionsoft as my email. So I'd say infusionsoft as the source, email as the medium. But then if I was doing webinar jam and I had a webinar that people registered for, and then they were in that webinar jam email coming through, then that would be webinar jam as the source, email as the medium. Now what that allows me to do is I can then say, how my email. How does my email Traffic perform. And it will show me both face both webinar jam and infusionsoft, right? So I can start seeing. I'm kind of grouping already just with those two things. Then there's the campaign. The campaign is the product or service that you do. So in my case, if I was selling the measurement marketing Academy, we call that Academy. Every bit of traffic or content that we're, that we're pushing people toward all those. If it's there to push them into Academy in any shape or way or form, it has Academy as the campaign tag. Because then in analytics there's a report called campaigns. I can click on my campaigns report, I can go to Academy, and it will show me all my different sources of traffic that are pushing toward Academy, and I can drill down and find out what specific details are working or not in order to sell more of my measure marketing Academy. So that's why we keep it like that. We don't do stuff like 20% off or, you know, this is the spring sale, like, because that stuff fractures everything. Then there's, there's term and content, and that's where you can put in differentiators. So, like, if it was an email I could put in the subject line of the emails is typically what I do in the, in the term section. And the content is the differentiators. So going back to that question we asked way back in the beginning, if I went to analytics and I said, how well, you know, puppies versus kittens. I've got two different ad sets. Everything's the same. Same offer, same headline, same content. One's images of puppies, one's images of kittens. Which one is better for me to create a lead? If I went to analytics to ask that, I would put img right for short for image img-kitten or img dash puppies in the content section of that traffic T for those two different assets based on whatever they were, puppies would get tagged with img puppies. Kittens gets tagged with IMG kittens. I tell analytics, and here's how you know the difference between the two. One will have group of, you know, show me all the people that are coming in through this kitten images. Show me all the group of people coming in through puppy images. Now show me the goals that were achieved to become a lead and it will tell me instantly which group is better. Right? So right there is sort of your utms. Now to take it a step further. Now that's the stuff you can control, like ads manage, right? Ad manager. You definitely want to do email dead giveaway, right? Anything you can hyperlink and kind of where they're kind of somewhat not cloaked, but kind of right where you can't quite see it. They don't look as ugly. Absolutely do that. The rest of the stuff we use either to your, to your point, Pretty Link Pro. So we use that a lot as a plugin in WordPress. And so we'll do, you know, measuremarketing, IO, whatever. So here's a case in point. So when we do guest blog posts. So if we're working with Digital Marketer, and I want to know that Digital Marketer sent me traffic, the about the author link goes to the website Slash dm. That is a pretty link which redirects to the page. I actually want them to go to with UTMs that tell me, okay, they came from Digital Marketer. It was, it was. We call it Outreach. Anything we do for free. Kind of like that. I would do the same thing with this podcast. I would say, you know, where can we find out more about you? I can say, well, go to measuremarking IO, you know, forward slash Hustle. And so anybody goes to measurementmarketing IO, Hustle gets redirected to the page that says, hey, thanks for listening to my podcast on, you know, Hustle and Flowchart or the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. You know, happy to help with any questions you have. In the meantime, there's a few articles you might want to be interested in finding out more information on. Or here's my thing that you came to sign up for. And it would have UTMs that would say the name of the podcast. So we put Hustle and Flow, the medium, I put podcast, I might call it outreach. Right? But I can define that the traffic came from this podcast in that, in that particular instance, same thing with YouTube. Now if I did, you know, outside of Pretty Link, we do vanity URLs for link shorteners. So we have measure Tips. And so I might create on the YouTube video, I'll say measure tips, slash set, goal setting or whatever, right? I don't know that one already exists. But I'd say measure tips, goal setting. If I did a YouTube video on goals and then I'd have you go there. Now we do it for Facebook. So I have a Facebook Live that we do with this Facebook group called Measurement Marketing Essentials. It's like free Facebook training, right? And so on there I'll give a little five minute lesson. Then at the end of that, I'm like, hey, if you're interested in the academy, go to measure tips academy info. Well, that link goes and actually is UTM to the sales page, but it's UTM that shows me they came from the Facebook group. Now of course that's gonna totally mess up if everybody on this podcast does that. But that's, you know, that's okay. Do it so you can see what I'm talking about. But you'll see the UTMs up there say Facebook and it'll say share. And the reason it says share is the medium is because I'm not paying for it, right? So now I can see my shared Facebook traffic versus my paid Facebook traffic. And is it causing sales or not? Should I keep doing this or not? So there's that. And then finally, this is the holy grail, right? Like if you guys said, hey, I just got off the phone, you got to go check out this site, and you just took my site and shared it, right? Without UTMs, what would happen is it would come through as Facebook referral in Google Analytics. It wouldn't be UTM to show as a referral source, which is kind of analytics way of saying, hey, they came from this third party site. I don't know exactly who did it or what, but I know they came from Facebook. And that's like the best case, worst scenario, right? Where it's like, okay, well, at least I know they came from Facebook and there is going to be an element of that. But I think about that in terms of my almost like my viral component. Like the more people that are talking about me, hopefully through that channel, that's how I read that traffic source. So if that starts going up higher and higher and higher, awesome. But there are things you can do. Like with a plugin, maybe you've got a video of some sort underneath, you know, say a sales page video, some sort, and it says like, oh, click in the Facebook comments below and then share this page, right? And you could set that up sometimes to share the page with UTMs that show that the page is being shared by that particular plugin. So there's lots of things you can do. Again, part of it, the first part is just knowing you can, knowing that it's a thing that you can do, then it's good then better good than better. So get the basics in place and then be like, hey, can we do this? And you start talking to people, right? You know, reaching out to people in different groups or whatever, but just sort of saying, okay, how do you guys do this? How do you guys handle that? Question of Tracking, you know, a Facebook share or something. And you'll find people have come up with nice, cool, creative ways. And there's stuff that we do today that we may not do tomorrow because it doesn't work as well and we iterate it right? So, so that happens too. But that's, that's why I like it because I get to constantly tweak and play. And I think very much to your point, Matt, for sure. You know, we're both teachers. We like teaching stuff, right? We like learning and we like teaching. And so you know that this is kind of where I like. This is my sweet spot. I get to tweak and play all the time, come up with new ways of doing stuff and constantly like learn and teach. So it's like, you know, effective for me.

That's exactly why we have our business model. Now I. So I have a couple quick questions. So first of all, here's a pro tip that I learned the hard way is that your UTM codes are actually case sensitive because when I get inside my Google Analytics now, I have traffic from both Facebook capitalized and Facebook lowercase. So just.

Can I give you the fix for that?

Sure, that'd be great.

So in. So yes, absolutely. Big, big giant. So I get meta rules on utms. Everything's lowercase. Just teach your everybody that keeps it easy. Do dashes where there's spaces, right? So if there's a space that somebody's trying to UTM and then just do a dash or something, they'll do underscores because they kind of look like spaces sometimes in the Google Analytics reports and never use punctuation, right? So make sure that that's not in there. But then in analytics. And I like sort of like planning for the inevitable failure of humanity when they go to UTM stuff that's going to happen, or maybe it's a plugin that just capitalizes it and you can't change that. So what you do is there's something called filters in Google Analytics. Now this is something I would say definitely Google, if you're just starting out with it, because they are the most useful, most powerful feature of analytics. They're the most dangerous though, because they permanently alter the data in your analytics for the view that you're looking at. But you go into your back end of analytics and into your view section in the admin section, you will see something called filters you can create. If you go to the advanced section, I believe it is, you can go and create something called a lowercase filter and you can Say whenever source comes through campaign source, push it lowercase and you say, then you create another one. Whenever medium comes through, push it lowercase. Whenever campaign name comes through, push it lowercase. Whenever term comes through, make it lowercase. And whatever the content is, make it lowercase. And then even if they did do title, case or all caps or whatever accidentally, it would still come into your view as lowercase. And everything starts getting combined going forward. So it doesn't fix the data that's already in there, but it does, at least going forward, keep that from happening.

Yeah, yeah.

And the other thing to do that with is your search term. Because if people are searching on your site for stuff, you can track that in analytics too, something called site search. And so people would look for Matt Wolf with a capital M, capital W. Other people are going to look with Matt Wolf with a lowercase M, lowercase w. Right. And so you want those to be the same thing, so you push those all lowercase. And that way your searches come through with a little more useful version of the truth.

Very cool, very cool. Last question about UTMs and then we can wrap up now. Do you always use all five UTM variables?

Yes.

Okay.

And really the reason I do that is because I'm a big believer in systems. And the most dangerous thing to a system is the exception, right? Because that becomes the slippery slope and you start going like, well, you know what, in this case, like, so, for example, I have personal emails. So let's say you and I were going to do business and you were buying one of our higher level consulting packages. At this point in time, it's you and I talking. I will send you a link and the official, official link gets delivered by my personal email. I UTM that as the brand, which is Mercer at that point. So the source is Mercer. The medium is still email because it's coming through email. The campaign would be whatever the product is, like private guided training or certification or whatever the high level thing was. Then I would put in term and content. Like at that point I know, I know everything I need to know, right? Because there's not that many of them. So it's easy. I get it. It's just I just need those three. But if I practice to not use them, I will eventually not use them someplace else. It's like a slippery soap for me. So I believe in the discipline of just putting in term and content. And I'll just put like personal email. Personal email because it takes an extra two seconds and for me it's like an insurance policy. Because then I never have to hear one of my team members say, well, yeah, but that other time you didn't use them. So I thought that was kind of the same thing. And I'm like, well, no, it's not, because this shade of gray is different than your shade of gray. And now the whole thing falls apart.

Sure.

So keep it very black and white and just, yes, use all five now for anything like, that's the. That literally would be the closest thing I can get to an exception. And I still use all five. I'll just duplicate the names of them or something. But for everything else, for like Facebook, for email, absolutely do that. And that's why I define to say, okay, term. In the term section, I'm either going to put the headline of the ad, if that's what I'm putting in there, the headline, or I'm going to put in the subject line if it's an email. And that that references, you know, I can. Tells me what to put there. And in the content is my differentiators. What is going to separate this thing out from another ad that might be identical in every way except for, again, puppies versus kittens. Or maybe it's two different audiences. Or maybe in an email. I've got three links and one of them is a text link in the first paragraph. One of them is a image link. Right. Just an image of like a play button on video or something. And one of them is a PS link. And maybe I want to ask the question I want the answer of, do image links really work? Are PS links even getting clicks like, do they do? I ended up just getting curiosity clicks where it sends me people, but they haven't really read the email, so they're not ready for the message. Right. Which one's more likely to close? People that click on images or click on text links? Well, with utms in the content, I would put that. I would put text or image and I could tell. I could pull a report in Google Analytics that shows me the results of both of those clicks. And you might say, yeah, you know what? Images bring you a ton of people, but none of them have read the email, so they are less likely to close.

I love it.

You're like, wow, now you know how to start really optimizing your emails a little bit based on what your market behaviors are. What the behaviors of your market are.

Right.

No, that's. That's perfect. I love that.

There's so many ways you could. You could take the tracking and then start to see a better picture. I mean, that's.

And that's why again, I'm going to emphasize good, then better. Because that's the fastest thing to do is you start realizing what this world is and then you can instantly get paralyzed because of all the stuff and you get overwhelmed and you get, and you get like, I got to do it all. Like, I don't know, I don't even know where to start. Start. Start, like, start at the first thing that's, you know, use utms. If you're not using utms, then start that. If you're not doing all five, start using all five. Use them incorrectly in the beginning. That's fine. At least you're using them, right? Then get better. And then go back and be like, how can I use these better? Because you'll go back to analytics and you'll ask yourself a question that it will not be able to tell you. Like, again, go back to puppies versus kittens. I might, and I probably did back in the day. It's probably how it happened. As I said, how's my Facebook traffic doing? I said, here's how your Facebook traffic's doing. Doing, because it knew that. And then I said, well, yeah, but how are the ads, you know, puppies versus kittens doing? And it's like, I have no idea what you're talking about. And I'm like, oh, I never told it the difference, so I need to use UTMs to tell it the difference. And that made me better. Right. So jump on the bike. And if you're, and if you're, if you, if you do too much thinking about it, you will get overwhelmed. It's like a recipe, right? Do just think about this all day long. You will end up overwhelmed. But jump on the bike, practice this stuff, do baby steps and then go back and just, you know, if you can't answer a question, figure out what information is missing. How would GA be able to answer that question? And then how can I get that information in Google Analytics? Sometimes it might be through a utm, sometimes it might be through Tag Manager, but. But either way, that's it. That's all you got to do.

Good, then better. Good than better. Cool. I think. Do you have anything else, Matt?

No. I mean, I honestly could talk about this stuff for two more hours, but I know we don't have that amount of time.

So yeah, I think now is probably a good time to ask our little wrap up questions.

So what kind of resource. And I think you said you had a blog post or what book. What is something you Kind of refer to often that you see is just massive value to you whenever you feel stuck or you just need to.

I want to give credit where credit is due for sure. To the. There's lots of people who have come before me and it's always that thing of like you stand on the shoulders of giants. And this is absolutely one of those things. There's a gentleman out there that many people probably in our industry are not familiar with. And his name is Simo Ahava. So it's S I M O A H A V A so Simo Ahava. Google him. Go to his blog. Now he's very, very technical in the types of stuff that he writes, but he is by far one of the most generous people when it comes to Tag Manager and helping people learn this tool. And he does a lot of advanced stuff, so he'll help basic stuff for sure, but he's really, really good at. And this is why I just love this guy and the stuff he puts out there because he also likes making Tag Manager do backflips. Right? Like he likes taking this tool to the next level and showing people what it's possible, what is possible with it. And he's always out there defining what the limits are for guys like me. And so I think going there and understand, like that's where I learned initial click tracking, right. Like that's where I learned the baby steps. And now he's way doing, you know, way higher level stuff that's beyond my skill set. Right. Currently for what. But I don't need to answer those questions quite yet that he's, that he's helping, but I know that it's out there and I like going to his blog because he'll show the new stuff that's coming out, he'll play with it, he'll help you practice with it and it will force you to become better at using those tools. And so, you know, that's again, that's credit where credit's due. That's where I learned a ton of my stuff. And he's kind of in the Google Tag Manager community. He is absolutely known. So the faster that you know that guy, the better you are when it comes to using that tool. For sure.

Yeah. We'll make sure to link up his blog in the show notes as well so that anybody listening could get easy access to it.

Very cool.

All right, so the last question. Where can people go learn more about you and what you do? Where would you want to send them after this show?

Well, you know, we talked about earlier so why not just do this? We're going to do measurement marketing IO.

Perfect.

How's that? So measurement marketing IO. Hustle will take you right to the page and, and you'll actually be able to see UTMS in action. So you'll see exactly how all that tracking is happening and how we're tagging the traffic coming into the site and then you know, you'll be remarketed on Facebook.

Perfect.

I love it.

As you should be.

Hey, the best way to learn marketing is to see the best in action.

It's exactly, you know, that's. And you know, it's another pro tip about UTMs now that you know they're a thing because they show up in the URLs. For those who are not used to where they are. You can look in URLs. You'll see them utm_ medium, utm_ source. Click on your emails and see how people are using them. And a lot of times you're gonna be like, wow, that's never gonna work for them. Especially as you get good at this. You'll be like, they're, they have no idea what's going on. The way they're tagging stuff tells me they have no idea. But, but yeah, you learn, you definitely learn stuff that way.

Have you ever actually looked around at some people, maybe some marketers out there?

All the time.

I love it. Yeah, because you can't all the time.

I'm the guy that's going back there and viewing the source to see if they're using Tag Manager and how they're using it. And you can kind of get in the back end of GA and see what's actually being sent to their Google Analytics to see if they're tracking scroll or anything like that. And I'll tell you man, 90% of the people more than that are not doing those advanced things. One final point on this, this stuff, if you haven't started with a website and you don't have your book ad and all this, this is not going to save you, right? This is not your holy grail. The offer. Nothing beats an offer. You craft that offer, you make a great offer to the marketplace. It doesn't matter if you have a stick built website, they're going to find you, right? You can use wix, they're going to find you. But this stuff makes you better. It gets you to the next level. It allows you to know how you are being successful so that you can then predict scale. So first thing is, you know, get it out there, make sure the offers are great, get a good offer to the market and serve. But then once you're doing that and you've nailed it, this is where this stuff gets laid on top of that so that you can then predictably scale because it will tell you, like, this is how your black box is working.

Yeah. Love it. Love it. Well, we gotta go ahead and end it here, but it was measurementmarketing IO hustle. Was that correct?

Correct to me.

Awesome. And we're definitely going to make sure that's linked up in the show notes. Notes as well. So anybody listening could find easy access to that inside the show notes. Chris Mercer. I mean, Mercer. I'm not gonna call you Chris Mercer. Thanks so much for joining us and sharing this. You've been super generous with your time and your knowledge and, you know, it's been super helpful to us. You should see the pages of notes that Joe and I have from this episode.

So thanks, guys. I appreciate it.

Been really beneficial. And yeah, thanks for spending the time with us today.

Happy to help.

Have a good one, dude. Thank you. All right. Thank you. And I hope you just enjoyed this episode you just listened to. Now, right now, before we sign off, I have a few things I would love for you to do. So, the very first thing is to go find our guest on Facebook and tell them that you loved their episode with us. That's going to help them just feel good about themselves, but also it's going to spread the word a little bit more for us. So go find them on Facebook. Everybody's on Facebook. And go say that you love their episode and maybe one cool thing that you learned there. The second thing is to go to itunes and subscribe to our podcast. Just look up Hustle and flowchart and hit the subscribe button. And the very last thing, the third thing, is to leave us a review on itunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and help us spread the word more. That's how more people are going to get this awesome knowledge, this, this cool podcast training, and a whole bunch of other cool, free training that. That we give out at evergreenprofits. Com. So that's about it. Go find them on Facebook, go subscribe on itunes and leave us a review. You would be amazing if you did that, but you're always amazing. So thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.