Modern Marketers with Blake Beus and Greg Marshall

Blake Beus  0:00  All right, so I sent you a text while you were vacationing,

Greg Marshall  0:03  I was at my mountains, I

Blake Beus  0:04  didn't even I didn't even know you were up in the mountains. But it was just a random text that I sent you about a thing that which

Greg Marshall  0:10  is why my response was so delayed. I got it. Like, I remember getting like, at a random time when I had searched for like two seconds.

Blake Beus  0:19  But I thought it was super, super, super interesting. And it was about tick tock and an internal practice they have called heating, like heating something up, right, bringing the heat, bringing the heat and, and my initial thoughts of this is, and we talked about this all the time. But my initial thoughts were this is why you shouldn't try to go viral. Yep. You shouldn't even put any effort into that. Because you may have literally zero control over you could be have, you could create the best content, most entertaining, whatever. And you just might not be one of the chosen few who gets slow, who was allowed to go viral.

Greg Marshall  1:02  When you sent me this. And I took a look at the article. I was like interesting that they actually do a practice like this. Because I feel like off camera, we've discussed how these algorithms seems it's like there's it's almost like no rhyme or reason, in a way and organically to like, go viral member and we've done a podcast we were talking about going viral. And it's like, why going viral doesn't automatically increase business. And if you think about it, if platforms, I'm sure tick tock is not the only platform guaranteed, that does heating, right. And if you think about it, they're not going to pick stuff to go viral that has anything to do with selling anything, right? They're gonna pick stuff that gets more visibility, that can drive more behavior for the audience that they want to stay on the platform longer. Right. And so that's why going viral doesn't automatically translate into sales. And that's why if they do heating up, what do you think they do about sales type videos that are promoting Friday holding them down? Probably?

Blake Beus  2:09  Right? Probably cold. Yeah, cold. So let's talk specifically about what heating up is, and this particular article, and this article was all about tick tock, but I'm sure there's something similar, maybe not so blatant in the others, but essentially, internally inside tick tock. They would have meetings where they would choose which content and which creators, they wanted to heat up, aka, go viral. Yeah. And they made those decisions purely based on how it would benefit the platform itself, and how it would benefit the growth of their own platform. In general. Now, if we take a big step back, and we talk about algorithms, right, a lot of people talk about algorithms as this like, cold calculated computer software, whatever algorithms are built and tuned by humans for the benefit of the parent company. Yeah, like, that's the whole point of them, it's not to benefit you and me, is to love us. Right? And I'm not. I mean, there's a lot of things we can say negative or positive about social media companies or large businesses, whatever. And I have a lot of strong feelings on that on that subject. But the point is, is having a good understanding of the incentives, why they're doing what they're doing whatever can help you in your marketing efforts play in their sandbox, because for the benefit of you know, you and your your business, but essentially, they would choose which content which content, they wanted to go viral. Yep. And so you could create great content, and it might even be better than the content that's going viral. But if you weren't noticed by the heating up team, and you weren't one of the Chosen of the heating up team, your content can fall flat could just never go anywhere. It could never get

Greg Marshall  4:03  anywhere. Well, you want to know some interesting is? Do you list

Blake Beus  0:00  Alright, how do we start this one off?

Greg Marshall  0:02  We're talking about micro lead generate. Right,

Blake Beus  0:05  right, right.

Greg Marshall  0:06  And maybe I don't even know if that's a name that someone has come up, you know, somewhere else, we're or you want to take credit for it, because technically you call it, which is micro lead generation is, well, why don't you explain kind of what we're talking about with micro lead generation? And how you came up with that name? Yeah, yeah. So

Blake Beus  0:25  I mean, everybody in their dog talks about lead generation, getting them, you know, off of social media or off of wherever and onto your email list or your text messaging list. And all of that is great, everybody thinks about that talks about that, always putting effort into that. But there's like a little mini step before that, that you can do that works really well, under certain circumstances, that that should be considered. And it's this micro step, where you're basically basically generating leads that you don't know much about them yet, you don't know their name, you don't know, their email address you met may not even know exactly how many people are on that list. Yeah, but you're putting, you're putting concerted effort into building that list of leads, that you can then follow up with an offer for either, you know, a solid lead generation, or a product purchase offer or something like that. And so essentially, what we're talking about here is building audiences via whatever means that you can, that are much, much, much more likely to be interested in what your next offer is, that you can then target with traffic or with paid ads. Yep. So you're building a list of leads, but you don't know anything about them, other than they got on the list through whatever you were doing to get him on the list. So yeah, that's that's the concept there?

Greg Marshall  1:54  Well, here's, here's a question. And you can actually do this both organically and paid. You can, you can utilize content and put money behind it to build this micro audience. But I'd like to get your opinion on. Why do you think not as many people talk about this audience? Proactively building right?

Blake Beus  2:13  I think it's because it's it, it's hard to conceptualize what's happening there. It's not necessarily tangible, like an email list, I can go in there. And I can see oh, hey, we got x more leads on the list. My list is now you know, 15,000 people big Yeah, I spent this money to get there. I have all that information about them. And oftentimes, like business owners, whatever they want the hard numbers, well, they should want the hard numbers. Yeah. But sometimes there's these more intangible things you have to think about. And frankly, this used to be way more common. Back in the mail marketing days, the all of that stuff 50 years ago, because you just didn't have access to the data. Yep. But I felt my gut is telling me, that's why we don't have people talking about or not talking about it in this this way, per se.

Greg Marshall  3:10  Yeah. And I think with these types of audiences, too, I think you're right, with the tangible, right, you don't have a tangible name, phone number email, to kind of control the, where the direction of the nurturing goes. But the tools that we have available now are, you can actually retarget or run ads towards people who have watched your videos who have liked your posts, or commented, and those people, in my opinion, if you were to define, like, you know, when you have this conversation, should I do paid? Or should I do organic, and there's always like one side, that's like, it's all about pay the others, it's all organic? Well, on the organic side, if, if you're willing to invest the time, effort and energy to build this organic following to grow your business, then that would mean that would mean that you believe that these audiences are valuable. Right? Or else you wouldn'

Blake Beus  0:00  So we talked a lot about split tests. Yep. And we've talked about it a lot in the past and everything. And I was listening to a Freakonomics podcast episode recently called, is Google Search getting worse? And in there, they talked with some actual representatives from Google, about some of the things and I wanted to bring up because I thought it was relevant in the fact that the interpretation of the test results is incorrect. And even Google did this. Yeah. And so I kind of wanted to point this pointed out. So it's, it's I don't know if you feel this way. But I literally feel that Google search is getting

Greg Marshall  0:40  worse. As far as being accurate. Yeah, what

Blake Beus  0:43  you're looking at feels harder for me to find what I want. I don't know. Have you noticed? Is that been similar to you or your, your good,

Greg Marshall  0:51  we know what I'm not. When it comes to Google search, and like, maybe I'm looking for somewhere to eat or products or something like that. I don't use it a ton outside of like researching marketing stuff. But it does feel a little bit less like integrated. Like, it does feel like I do have to, like, look a little bit deeper for what I want. Part of it could be the ads above six or eight or 12. Yeah, search ads before he can even get to the camera. And so yeah, you know, I probably haven't been paying attention as close because I'll just keep scrolling. So I find when I look, right. But if you're talking about immediacy, like I'm typing something, and it's not right there, I would say yes, it has gotten worse, because I'm not, I didn't notice I am scrolling more on Google. Yeah, what's the cause of that? So

Blake Beus  1:41  there's, there's a lot of different causes for that. One of the things I do for a lot of my clients as I help find solutions for them, right, so, so, right now I have quite a few clients where we have data integration issues, right. So they want to bring their marketing and advertising data, and pair that and merge that with their email marketing CRM, like HubSpot, or or any of those and merge those things together. So they can actually have actionable data. And so, so I deal with a lot of these kinds of data integration things, but I have to do a lot of searching to find, maybe they need a tool or something like that. So I'll search for a tool or an integration system or whatever. And I would say over 50% of the articles that I find these days, are something along the lines of, you know, the top 10 tools for this. Yeah, and it's just regurgitated content. And then at the end, the paragraph is almost identical on all of them, it says something like, so as you can tell, no matter what you choose, you're gonna find a good solution. And it really depends on your needs. And I'm like, I want an opinion. Yeah, I want you to and you could tell that whoever danced, take a stance, and you can tell it, whoever wrote the article, didn't write the article to actually help you make a decision, they probably haven't even used any of the software, they're just kind of regurgitating things. And you're getting a lot more of that content on Google. In addition, you're getting Google adding things like they have, they have, depending on what you're searching, they'll have like a box along the top with some information, or they'll have the sidebar box, like a little widget on there. You see that if I search for like a movie star or something like a little box, there, they'll have like, if you're searching for a restaurant or something, they'll have like a widget with placements and things like that. So what kind of the end result is that when you search for something, you could have widgets, ads, another widget, a thing on the side, and then your organic search results, you literally have to scroll down under everything. Now, I don't hate ads. So obviously, we talk about ads all the time. I think ads are a very, very important part of running a business an

Blake Beus  0:00  All right, leads like you were you're talking about, I don't know, a new way to do leads or leads or a new way to at least look at leads. Yeah, so

Greg Marshall  0:09  I actually got the inspiration from listen to a podcast yesterday, which I respect, so shout out to perpetual traffic. But basically what they were discussing a case study that they did where I was like, that makes sense, because lead generation, sometimes can be challenging to do for companies, because of the quality of the lead. Okay, right. So you can get a whole bunch of leads, but then they're like, well, these leads aren't very qualified, or they're just kind of looky loos. And that's like, the nightmare of every business owner is to just generate a bunch of like, people that actually are not qualified. And so what they had discussed was because they were in a highly competitive industry, and everyone is offering the same thing, right, like a free consultation, or a free, whatever. Uh, huh. What it was doing was it was attracting and training the audience to get this free offer, it's kind of like not really commit. So what they did is they changed it to where they renamed the offer, and actually added more to it. So instead of just like a free consultation, they gave it a name where it was like a, I think they call it an integrative wellness plan, okay. And what it was was a multitude of things to give them a full plan, right? Not just like, we'll just take a look at you and see what's wrong.

Blake Beus  1:31  So it was a free consultation, right? Yep. But now, it's which the consultation, to be honest, is almost always some sort of a sales call it which is fine doesn't mean like, it's a high pressure sales type thing. But it's like, hey, we want to make we want to see if we're a good fit for one another. And here's what here's whatever. But everybody calls that a consultation. Yep. So that still that still exists. And, but this is the consultation called plus, which is more than a plan, it actually maps out like, we're gonna look at this, this, this and that, versus coming for a free consultation, and they gave it a name like, they named it the packet.

Greg Marshall  2:10  And I don't think it's 100% Prep, I think they said something like the integrative wellness plan or something like that, right. But then they went one step further, what they did was actually charged for it. And they said, instead of it being free, it's $9, to get to get it going now, to actually do it. And they actually found, they tested the free consultation to that, they actually noticed they had an uptake of like phone calls and actions on the site, people purchasing. And the type of person that was actually coming in, was more like ready to go. So they're just like, well, here's my $99. And we'll go ahead and, you know, move forward. And let's see what this plan is about. And then they were more open to purchasing. Right, right, versus the other one, they said they kept running into the problem of the show rate was really bad with the free consultation, right? Because there's no commitment, right? $100, you will show up. And then the other thing was the person that came in for the free consultation versus the integrative approach, they typically had a bad taste in their mouth, because they just felt like they've come in for this free consultation, and they would do a bait and switch.

Blake Beus  3:20  Right. So they felt bait and switch. And honestly, it's like, kind of keeping a finger on the pulse of people out there, your your customers out there. And And if people are starting to feel like these free consultation calls are just a bait and switch. They're starting to look at you or even the industry as a whole kind of like used car salesmen that I was just driving down the road and it said, you know, get into your car for 77 cents. Yep. You know, and everybody knows. That's stupid. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So so they started charging for it, they charg

Blake Beus  0:00  What was our lead off on this one?

Greg Marshall  0:01  What was the true value?

Blake Beus  0:03  Oh, yeah, the true value of social media. I was like, What did you wrap it up really nice. Yeah. Think of what that was?

Greg Marshall  0:10  Well, we were talking about what the true value of social media is and what that means for businesses, because you were talking about how some businesses feel jaded with social media, like God doesn't work, or it's overly hyped or the use of Word, or even

Blake Beus  0:27  just people. I mean, you hear all of these crazy stories about social media, Elon Musk kicking over Twitter, that's been this roller coaster ride out of news, meta, Facebook, their stock prices are down right now. And so you, you have this kind of attitude with, especially with advertisers that were or businesses that were maybe a little lukewarm about, about being on social media Anyway, you've seen this attitude from them saying things like, you know, it's not worth it. Yeah. Why even play this this game or whatever. But whatever your stance is, on social media being a net negative or net positive for society, and all that stuff. It's still worthwhile showing up on social media and marketing on social media, for many reasons. Yeah. And yeah, so dive into dive into that, because you were talking about some of the reach out to you. Yeah,

Greg Marshall  1:26  someone had reached out to me. And they were discussing, and then there's someone who, they do a lot of advertising and other channels outside of social media. And they had mentioned their struggle with trying to kind of wrap their heads around the true value of is it worth investing in social media? Because he sees other people in his industry, not succeeding? But I told them, I think it's because they're doing it the wrong way.

Blake Beus  1:54  And you said, this is a service based business? Yes. What industry was the real estate? Real estate? Yep.

Greg Marshall  2:00  So with, like, I know exactly talking about because in real estate, the number one challenge, right is always it's highly competitive. And then, really, what you're selling is the same. So it's everyone is selling the exact same product,

Blake Beus  2:17  and the exact same houses even right, like, it doesn't matter which Realtor you are, I mean, that might be your listing. But if I'm representing somebody, any 1000 actors could sell

Greg Marshall  2:26  that house. And that's kind of the the challenge that they all run to. So they all kind of are trying to figure out ways to market themselves. And I know what he was referring to. So he's referring to, we were kind of speaking about video. And he's jaded because he's like, Yeah, I've worked with some people who do a lot of video. And it's like, they're spending all day doing video, but they're not making very much money. And this guy makes a lot of money. Yeah. Okay, so he, so he's viewing that light, from an ROI standpoint, what he's doing is working better. What I tried to tell him, which I think he kind of intuitively knows is, it's just another media channel. So you almost have to remove like, the way someone uses something, is the difference on the success of it. Right? Right. So socially, when I say like, they're most likely using it wrong, in my opinion, if you want to reach a lot of people, you have two different ways to do it. If you do organic, you have to fully commit to organic and do it every day, you need to have strategy, you need to invest money, and time and energy into that it's not free, you still need to invest in it. Or the second one is you need to commit to paid ads. But you need to commit to one of the one of those options and preferably both, right if you want the maximal results. And so that's what I told them is what most people do is they are tiptoeing on, both of these are putting their toe in the water for organic, or putting their toe in the water on pain. Yeah, but they're never putting th

Blake Beus  0:00  You were talking about hustlers mentality marketing plan. Yeah. All of that, like, yeah. Well tell me what you're thinking. Yeah. So

Greg Marshall  0:08  I think having a marketing strategy is important and kind of knowing how to get your messaging out there. And one of the things I was saying is, even if you don't have a large budget, I think the overall idea is you have to have a huge budget, in order to make marketing work. And that's not based that's not the case, that's not the full story, you either have more time, or more money, if you can do both. That's the optimal. But if you have less money, put more of your time. And if you have more time, he's more money, right? So you try to do a good trade off, and what you're doing but hustlers mentality, I was saying, a strong strategy that works really well from a tactical side is manual outreach, if you're trying to promote an event, or a service, right, and this manual outreach, I actually use this in the beginning of my couple of businesses, and it works like a charm, what you want to do is you want to find people who have the audience you already want, and you just start reaching out every day, you create a spreadsheet, put their name, phone, numbers, emails, and you essentially start working that list. And you want to have an offer that makes sure that the person you're talking to gets a huge benefit. In exchange for sharing the product serves that you have to their particular audience, one of the best ways to do that is to demonstrate how by them maybe donating a product, or a service, or sharing this their audience, they're also going to get in front of the audience you have right or will be going after it right. And it could be kind of have a joint promotion, and everyone wins there. Because every business is lead generating, trying to get more people to write their business. So it allows it allows you to add more resources to a marketing plan on both ends,

Blake Beus  2:00  right? Yeah, that's, uh, yeah, that's, I mean, I've participated in some of these, you know, business, lead groups and some, some things like that. And I think that's, that's one of the ways a lot of businesses are trying to do that. But the reality is, is you doing something like that for yourself, or like, owning that whole process, instead of just showing up to a lead generation group is going to be much more beneficial to you and everyone else? But I do, I do want to jump back to what you said, you know, you got either money or time if you have both. It's great. My observation, though, is that there are quite a few times when an organization or a person has money, yep. And then they go out and market because they're like, Well, I've got some money, well, let's do this. But they're not being smart with that. And they burn through a ton of cash, because that's the asset that they have a lot of Yep. And they end up getting kind of poor and miserable results. And honestly, if it's if someone had a stack of cash, and they're just starting out with a business or something, or a new venture, or a new pivot, say they made money in this business over here, starting out with the hustle mentality is still probably a better way to go. Yes. Then it is to drain your reserves upfront.

Greg Marshall  3:19  Yeah. And I think, you know, one of the things that I think about is a story Daymond John shared where he said, like, he made all his money and FUBU. He was a multimillionaire, he financed that new project through only through money into it thought of no marketing strategy. And he said, he blew it off. And he said, he thought, because he had the money, that that would solve the problem. We all deal with speed up the failure, right? So I like to take that lesson that he shared and think like, even if you have millions of dollars in reserves, you still should have the hustle mentality of test quickly, and in small steps, where you're not risking it. All right, so you're saying, w

Blake Beus  0:00  q4 advertising like Black Friday just happened. Everybody's gearing up for q4. And you you were saying? You're getting asked a lot of questions about how to plan and prepare for the holiday season?

Greg Marshall  0:15  Well, you know, in a lot of ways we all of us adults never quite fully grow up. Now, let me explain to you how I remember in school when you had a paper and you knew that paper was going to be due months in advance, but then you wait to the last minute to do it. Similar to the advertising strategies, and q4. If you're trying to do it in q4, it's too late and too expensive. No. And I actually recommend if you're going to do you should be planning your q4 advertising. Now for next year, yeah, right. So I usually advise my clients, they should be investing the most money possible in the month of January to about June to July. And the reason why I advise that is because that's when ad costs are the lowest. And ad costs are the most expensive, and q4. So what you want to do is you want to invest heavy early on, build up a big email list text messages, customer base, retargeting audiences. And then when q4 comes, you can keep your ad spent either the same, or even drop it and invest more into sending out the texts and emails. That's how you'll get fantastic returns.

Blake Beus  1:28  Right? So and a lot of people don't don't think about this and don't think about what you're how our ad costs calculated. And so I always tell people, it's kind of like the stock market if you're bidding on on sets of eyeballs. Yep. Right. And so the more people that want those sets of eyeballs, the higher the cost is because you have to bid more. Yep. To get that attention. And so if you understand that concept, then you can plan based on seasonal thing. Yeah. But so yeah, you're you're saying spend more, put your dial in your strategy. Do all of that from July, with January, sorry, January to July ish. So you have everything down? Exactly. build your email list, because email, email marketing is cheap. Yeah, this is why it has such a high ROI. Yep.

Greg Marshall  2:17  And email, text message, all that stuff, drives the most repeat purchases the most sales and and you pay the lowest amount. And you have to look at as you're investing for q4 early on. Yeah. And if you wait too long, your list will be too small. Your retargeting audiences will be too small, and you won't be able to capitalize on q4. And this is when most people want to really make things happen. So I feel like investing heavy, January especially, is a good idea. So yeah, I personally think January investing in January is the most important simply because that's almost a hangover, all the spin of q4, everyone leaves the market. And so then this your CPMs your ad costs will go down. You're just not competing with as many people as you are, right now the month of November and this specially November, right? Because of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Blake Beus  3:23  So what do you like? Like, because the other thing I talked with people about? And I want to get your thoughts on this? Because I don't think we've talked about this specifically. But should should part of your planning process include what offers you're going to offer in q4, and then also in q1 next year or whatever. And yeah, what do you recommend people? How do you recommend people think about those offers? Everybody's looking for a deal on Friday? What like How should people structure

Greg Marshall  3:49  those? Well, I still think you should come up with your offers, and then that will actually drive who you want to advertise to anyways, right? Because you want to make sure you have the list of people that would be attracted to those offers. And then when you think about offers, you have to think like, you know, let's say you're in retail, right? Or you're you're you're selling clothing or products, physical products, you have to think like Okay, can I get shipments in on time?

Blake Beus  0:00  book a call funnels. You said you want to talk about that. But you didn't want to tell me before the phone before we turned the podcast? Yes. What? What? What about book or call funnels? We want to talk about Yeah, I

Greg Marshall  0:10  didn't want to forget, because Because fresh off my mind, I was just talking with a client. And I was like we I feel like we always talk about, there's always like value before we hit the record button. We probably share that too. Yeah, so with the book a call funnel, essentially, if you're in the service industry, and you're trying to get more sales, right? You're gonna have people book a call. Now, the question I always get asked, and what I recommend, is, Well, should I just put a phone number on my ad? And I typically say no. Because if you have, because you're making yourself subject to having the customer call you, which is the last place you want to be in the sales process. Instead, I recommend, of course, you can have the phone number available, but I wouldn't make that your number one objective, I actually would make the objective, have them fill out a form name, phone number email, so that you can control the sales process so that you actually have their lead information. And you can reach out to them versus hoping that they call you or let's say they click your call button, and no one answers. Well, there you go. You lost them, right? Like there's no other I mean, you can't follow a retargeting. But to me, the best for retargeting is having their actual phone number and email to reach out to them. And so with the book a call funnel, there's several things that are important when it comes to this. So I was speaking with a client and I was explaining how the assumption is, you run an ad and the ad kind of does all the work for you. Yeah. And then they buy, but it's actually not, there's actually several steps to measure. And this is how you know, the journey of your success to your book, a call funnel is working. So number one, you have to obviously, and these might seem like not important, but they're extremely important. Okay. All right. Number one is, first, you have to get people to actually click your ad. Right? Yeah. So so if you're getting people to click your ad, that's step one of success, right? And I recommend you break it down in stages. Step two, is, once they click your ad, can you get them to fill out a form? Okay, so until then, if you're getting people to click your app and not filling out your form, work on getting the form better, right? Step three would be once they fill out the form, can I get them to respond in any way back to me via email or text? Right? Okay, that's step three, then you go step four, which is, and to me, this is the most important part of the process is step four. Getting them from responding back to actually on the phone. Yeah, that is the most important part of the process. Because everything else you can fine tune. But if you cannot get them on the phone, nothing's gonna happen. Right. And so that's, that's the next success. And then obviously, the next stage would be get them on the phone, have your sales process. And then after your sales process, what are you trying to move them to next? So a true book a call funnel? Although it seems like it's just add to book a call is a lot more steps than just that. What are your thoughts? I

Blake Beus  3:31  think you covered it we're good.

With with any sort of a sales process, so many people, and I'm guilty of this, too, we take too big of logical leaps, right? We think our customer is going to do this, and then they're going to enter, they're going to book the call. Yep. There's it the smaller the incremental steps you can make it, the easier it is. And see, I would me personally, I would recommend, most people, if you're paying for ad traffic, don't put the phone number there anywhere until after you've already collected their information. And which is pretty similar

Blake Beus  0:00  Google Analytics. So I've been getting a ton of emails about me to the changes on this. And I've actually converted a few sites already, from Universal Analytics to GA for Yep. is what they're calling it. But you had some questions about that.

Greg Marshall  0:14  Yeah. So actually, I had a client asked me about it last week. And I said, I'm not really the professional and this particular aspect. So I knew I wanted to ask you. So I'm going to literally ask you, because I don't even know what the differences are between, you know, the Google Analytics, and then g4. Yeah. So what is the main difference? Why, why is this shift happening?

Blake Beus  0:39  Because Google sets up

Greg Marshall  0:42  the Google gods. Google said,

Blake Beus  0:44  so I mean, every This is, I mean, it's called G a four. So this is the fourth iteration of Google Analytics. And Google Analytics first came out in probably the late 90s, early 2000s. And so in that time, we've we've had four iterations. And this is the fourth one. As far as why Google decided the way they were doing analytics needed to change. And so they

Greg Marshall  1:11  think this has anything to do with privacy.

Blake Beus  1:13  I mean, probably, it probably, I mean, you're seeing a lot more things. So the initial way back when Google Analytics use relied heavily on third party cookies, right, and as new privacy standards, get updated, and things third party cookies aren't a thing. So the last version of Google Analytics, which was I believe, they called it Universal Analytics, relied on first party cookies. And essentially, I mean, for most people, third party first party doesn't really matter, most users, but essentially, first party cookies mean that Google Analytics is installed on my site. And when I set a cookie, which stores some information about my session, that cookie is stored based on a domain name. So it would be that Google Analytics cookie would be stored based on my Blake beus.com domain. And as I browse to other sites, those sites don't have permission to read that cookie. Whereas third party cookies, Google would set those cookies based on the google.com domain, and then as a third party cookie, and then as you browse around, all the other websites would be able to see the data stored, or at least some of the data stored in that cookie. That's a very big generalization. But we're starting to see, we've talked about this too, we're starting to see cookieless the future right? Oh, cookies go away. And again, we're moving to a different type of technology that that offers more privacy and offers better isolation of data. Yep. You know, probably, you'll probably see more data being stored in an in an encrypted state, on your computer instead of just in a plain text state. Yep. And this is this is I haven't read their specific why. But if I were to guess these are all the things that you're starting to see.

Greg Marshall  3:05  Got it. So essentially, for a business owner, what is it I know, I've gotten those emails? What do they basically need to do in order to switch over? Does it automatically happen? Or do they need to go through a step by step process? Yeah,

Blake Beus  3:18  it does not automatically happen. If you have a very simple Google Analytics install, all you really need to do is swap out the tracking code. And it's not just a pixel ID, you actually because Google Analytics will give you some code to copy and pasted some JavaScript code, you need to swap out that code entirely. And you're, you're good to go. You can actually run them in parallel. So the site's I've converted, we just put both on there. Okay. So to start gathering data in one or the other, any cons to that to running both? Yes, you might have a slight decrease in site speed, but we're talking about that significant 10th of a second, maybe not Not, not a big deal. Okay. The other problem you're you're going to bump into is, if you have a complicated Google An

Blake Beus  0:00  So I don't even know what we're talking about today. You wouldn't even talk with me about it before we started. Yeah, that's

Greg Marshall  0:05  because that's because I wanted to make sure we didn't miss out on some of the Golden topics. So, today I had mentioned to you just last week, and in fact, it might already be active, because in a couple ad accounts yesterday, I saw, so Google has decided to remove on Youtube Keyword targeting, over asking me yeah, all really are content targeting. So you can't you can't do placements, keywords or topics for conversion campaigns. What's just weird? Yeah, they just removed that. So like everyone, and like, the Google ads, YouTube faces like, This is unbelievable. Like, how are you supposed to actually target if you can't target the content, you know, contextual targeting? And I thought, well, that's interesting. I wonder why they would do that. I have a couple of guesses. I mean, my guess would be probably that, if they're trying to increase revenue, and you take away like, high performing, you know, campaigns, then you have to spend more to get the same result. Right. And so that's my guess, I mean, and it's probably accurate. And so yeah, there's no incentive for, if you think about it, if you own that business, there's no incentive and having campaigns where you could get like, $2 conversions, because then you never spend more, right, you know, your budgets really low. But if you have to spend to get, you know, $100, get a conversion, then you have to keep spending over and over again. And I think that's kind of the same thing that they did with forcing Display Network ads, on the video campaigns, I think it's the same concept, like just, it's a way to get more advertising. And in addition to that, I had noticed Facebook has this new feature that says, Would you like your ads to be a multi multi advertiser channels or something like that, what that means is, if you don't uncheck that box, they'll put your ads like on Instagram next to other people's ads. So it's just like an ad feed. It's not actually a feed. So it's like you're competing against other ads, it's like a, I was thinking about it, it's like, like a swap meet. It's like, everyone's kind of selling the same thing. And you're all in the same area. So it can devalue your ad, but it can make it seem like it's being seen by a lot. And I thought this is interesting that they're making a lot of these changes. And then another change that I saw on Facebook was they changed, at least on my on all the My Accounts, which is a lot. They changed the default setting, to instead of like, especially on conversion campaigns, instead of showing costs or conversion, or leads or whatever. The default setting is reach impressions and engagements. And you actually have to like, search out how to put the conversion as the default setting to see your performance. That tells me multiple things. Either clients are starting to like fall off, because they're not seeing the conversions that they want. So it's almost like they're trying to convince you of something else. Yeah. But having that as the default. Yeah. And so yeah, so quite a few changes happening. And I know a lot of advertisers are like, What is going on? Like you're essentially taking away all targeting, but in my opinion, I think the entire time targeting is going to go away anyways. Yeah, like, if you think about it, the trend is maybe six years ago, five, six years ago, you can get ultra targeted, right. And then each year, they've removed more and more, you know, due to privacy. And really, it's just, I think it's a money grab. Yeah, but at the end of the day, you're gonna have to play by these rules anyway, so you have to get good at it. No matter what, it's not like advertising is gonna go away. You just gonna have to play by those rules and adjust. And I think I have seen quite a few comments with people online. Right, saying like, this is, you kn