Ep. 12 - Shopify Conversion Tips With Guest Brad Redding from Elevar

Speaker A: Welcome to Conversion Path, a Martech podcast about data and growth for your online and mobile business by Digital Danes. We gather here every week to talk about how to amplify your product, service or message. I'm Jacqueline Haughton.

Speaker B: And I'm Moni o'. Brien. In this episode, we have our very first podcast guest. We are excited to welcome founder and CEO of, uh, Elevar, Brad Redding. Hi Brad, thanks so much for being here.

Speaker C: First podcast guest. That's, that's a tall. I got tall order to live up

Speaker B: to lots of pressure, right? Well, the bar is low. Brad, we're so excited to have you. We feel like we know you, um, to introduce you to our podcast listeners. Brad has specialized in e commerce and analytics since 2008 when he launched his first SaaS company, which was a marketplace matching shoppers and independent local retailers. Through dynamic personalization, he helped build analytics and tracking foundations for brands like Rothy's, Rebecca Minkoff and Autodesk. Very, very impressive. Um, in 2017, Brad founded Elevar, which is a tool we love here at Digital Dames. Elevar helps automate data collection and server side conversion tracking for thousands of Shopify brands. You can find Brad, uh, sharing his knowledge on YouTube and the Elevar blog, which is on getelivar.com and Brad also has a conversion, uh, podcast, uh, called Conversion Tracking Playbook.

Speaker C: This is just like an interesting and boring podcast ever. Who wants to listen to a podcast talking about tracking?

Speaker B: Oh my gosh, we do. Yeah. Um, this is like such a great matchup. Um, we're huge fans of, um, your product, Brad, and also the, um, Conversion Tracking Playbook. We even have matching brand colors on our pods. So I hope our listeners probably have some overlap.

Speaker C: Yeah, uh, well, that our podcast cover was really deep. Research went to Canva, found a template, swapped out, you know, one picture and it was done. So although the color. Do we have crossover brand colors as well, like our actual company brand colors?

Speaker B: Oh, maybe. We have a lot of, well, the

Speaker A: purple is similar, but we also have green in ours, so there is a differential.

Speaker B: Mhm. Yeah. So we're so excited to talk to you, Brad. Um, so the focus of our podcast is helping customers grow their online and mobile business conversion, um, optimizations at the core of our services. We knew you'd be such a wonderful resource, not only having so much experience specifically around e commerce, but also, course, the owner and founder of a SaaS company. Um, but we've never really focused on Shopify, so we're so excited to have you um, now to start, we thought we'd ask you just a little bit about your background first. I saw that you went to college for kinesiology. So here you are in data tracking. Tell us a little bit about that journey, um, in your career.

Speaker C: Oh, going back to college. I just turned 40 so I'm having a little complex with my age.

Speaker B: I mean I have to take it all the way back. But you have such an interesting background, um, in retail and E commerce and the blending. So just curious a little bit about your career.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's a couple years out of college. Honestly. I had a couple friends that started a business, a SaaS business. And it was really uh, exhilarating to see them just always thinking about, talking about that problem. And uh, I don't think I've ever shared the story, but I had a dream in the middle of the night one night and it was about a business and I woke up in the middle of the night and just started writing down notes because I knew I would forget about it.

Speaker B: Oh my gosh.

Speaker C: Literally, yeah, started, I went down, continued down that path and started that business. And I learned a lot of learning lessons through, I learned through failing personally. Uh, versus reading a book. Man, I love reading books. I read a ton of books. But that was a start and in short that was, that was in retail. So I, my current wife, but back then, you know, once loved to shop. And knowing that there's all these different boutiques around the world and country that if you live, we lived in Washington D.C. at that time. In order to go visit those boutiques in New York you have to go take the train or drive or go to Chicago or LA or whatever it might be. Uh, so the, the concept was bringing, this is 2008, 2009, so bringing boutique, independent brand boutiques, retailers, et cetera, bringing their merchandise online and then having shoppers that could sign up. And we asked a few questions to personalize what boutiques we'd match them to. And then they had their own curated custom feed of products and boutiques from around the world that they could shop from. And that was about five years white labeled it to one company and ultimately I think uh, that was shut down at some point. I won't remember the years but five or so years after that. And then I moved to Charleston and worked at a small e comm dev agency, uh, where I am currently. And we designed, built and optimized sites for mid scale brands. So it was primarily Magento Magento Enterprise back then. Demandware. Um, that's where I got exposed to Rebecca Minkoff and worked with them for many years and Alex and Ani and so many amazing brands. And m. I found a different problem at that point where we. Part of our value proposition back then was we don't just design and dev so very much. What y' all are experts at is focus on optimization as well. So pull optimization into your design and dev services. And part of that requires doing data analysis and putting together reports and presenting them to brands and ideating on and strategizing. By the time you go through that process, the data is old. You're making decisions 30 days later. So I felt like there was a better, uh, way to solve that. That was the initial start of Elevar was all, uh, right. There's got to be a way to automate running the same reports and analytics and looking for the same things. So we built a small prototype, charged 50 bucks, where we just ingest the data from the GA API and had a bunch of algorithms looking for. It was like a pass fail, report card type style. And what, um, I learned from that was okay. We would hear from customers, this is great, but we don't trust our data. We know it has issues. So I really can't trust the insights that you're spitting out, even though it looks amazing. And I think it could be helpful. And that led us down the path of, okay, well, we need to solve. If this product is ever going to work, we need to solve the data. Um, accuracy. So we actually had a separate Shopify app at that time, which was just. It was a GTM data layer install. And it was just literally meant to just solve this problem so people like this product better, like our core product better. And as, uh, the world of tracking continues to get more crazy is we would just hear customers just say, hey, I will literally pay you $500 every month for the rest of my life if my tracking never breaks. And that's essentially, that's the core value prop that we have today, is we obsess over ensuring that tracking is accurate. And that's not easy. We certainly aren't perfect and things change. But that's really the only problem that we focus on is we want to ensure that data collection is accurate, channels can perform and are optimized ultimately, so customers have more time to spend on CRO, strategy, design, innovation, et cetera, versus worrying about pixels and everything like that. Uh, that's the background and summary. And it brings me to 2022.

Speaker A: Quite a journey.

Speaker B: That's actually really great. Um, I feel like that Your original app would do really well today even. It's like as the landscape changes and everyone's kind of sick of being over emailed from retailers and so social ads are sort of, you know, taking a hit.

Speaker C: It exists. Yeah. Shoptiques.com and the ultimate irony, I think about last year at uh, the agency here that I worked at in Charleston. The last year Shoptiques actually was in the sales pipeline to become a customer. And I was like, you got. You have to be kidding me.

Speaker B: Oh my gosh. Full circle.

Speaker C: But yeah, they've been around. They, they've been around for quite a while. But yeah, they, uh, they do pretty much exactly, exactly. That is they can you as a boutique, you create a store, upload your products, and then customers can shop and buy across the world.

Speaker B: Wow. Um, and this was your dream. Divine.

Speaker C: Yeah, that evolved too. That was another one where I somewhat stumbled into just focusing on the brand and retail experience. It started out as, uh, something a little bit different or all encompassing. But yeah, that was, that was the evolution of listening to your customers and demand and it was a two side, two sided marketplace. But what do people want and what are people reacting to? And then just continue doing more of that, similar to how I described Elevar.

Speaker B: Nice. That's cool. It's really exciting. I feel like you mentioned being 40, we're around the same age and it's like I have loved being the age we are. Just the technology just like the bunny trail for a second. It's like just such an exciting time to have had the opportun we've had and to come up in the age that we have where we've got, um, we're really at the forefront of how technology can be used. And um, Jacqueline and I always kind of spitball on that. So it's cool hearing your story. Thank you. Um, cool. So, yeah, we absolutely love Elevar. Um, thank you for that background. Um, so wanted to know a little bit about your day to day right now. Um, how do you, uh, what does your day to day look like when it comes to interacting directly with your Shopify customers? And what problems do you generally, um, try to solve for your customers?

Speaker C: Day to day from Elevar or day to day personal? Just in general.

Speaker B: I want to know both actually. I mean, you're a SaaS owner, you have a remote team. So we're living in this pandemic life, Remote, um, work life. So it's. Yeah. Just curious what your day to day looks like just as a founder.

Speaker C: Yeah, fully, fully remote team almost on every continent. And um, I have two, two young boys, a two year old and three year old. So my, I typically start my day 5am M ish. Sometimes a little bit earlier, sometimes a little bit later. Typically uh, five out of seven days a week I'm going to get a workout in the workout and get a couple hours of work in before it gets a little bit noisier in my house because I also work at home being remote. Um, from there I would say in the day to day with Elevar. So I, I tend to default focusing more of my time on being close with customers. So we were joking around before like was it really you? And responding to HubSpot email tickets and it is, it is really me because I, I know that our business is going to not to be too harsh but live or die based on customers and part of our flywheel in our company that we have in our strategic plan is word of mouth is very critical to us and delivering six star customer experiences is very critical to us and building a world class team. So yeah, my day to day is obviously I have structured days where certain days I'll focus on marketing or uh, operations, things like that. But usually beginning and end. At the end of the day I am um, trying to insert myself where I can without my team getting frustrated with me but trying to insert myself to be backup and help assist for tickets that need escalation that might be complex problems or just trying to help backfill where we might be overloaded. But yeah in general it's I want uh, to support, support the people on a team, support our partners like you all and support uh, our customers. So can't do that at 40 hours a week or eight hours a day. But I certainly try to spend a lot, as much, as much time as I can there and that's how you get honestly the other thing that I think most, most business owners know this but that's how you, that's is going to drive your, your product. That's going to drive your business. If you, the way I look at it it's a blessing and I'm grateful if somebody that is paying us money wants to take time out of their day to share feedback on what's going well or what's not going well or what their pain is. So m. If they want to share what their pain is then that's like that's gold to me because that's going to tell us where to focus our time and our energy and our product. So that's, that's a little bit of a different perspective on how I look at being in that. In the weeds, so to speak, on customers.

Speaker B: That's so powerful. Not all business owners do that. It's very easy to get disconnected from your core customers. I think that's wonderful that you do that. Um, that has definitely been our experience working with Elevar. Um, sometimes we're like, oh, really? Brad? Hello, Brad, Founder's replying. But I think it gives so much credibility to your product. And then obviously you stay close to, as you were saying, what the customers really, really need. So.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And that's one of the reasons that obviously we continue to work with your product. Like, I know I personally have sent, um, lots and lots of tickets through your system and maybe too many, but you, you guys were always so patient with me and really took the time to break the issue down. Um, like it was obvious how much energy you were putting into that, how much care you were putting into that. We felt that and appreciated it. So, yeah, you guys are doing it right. Thank you.

Speaker B: All right, so let's talk about, um, so let's talk about more, uh, the actual problems that you help solve for customers. Brad, I know it's hard to cover everything in a single, um, podcast, but you serve Shopify customers primarily serving e commerce brands. So what would you say are some of the top issues that business owners are facing in 2022 when it comes to data and tracking?

Speaker C: The two, our two primary value propositions are, number one, we maximize the amount of data that is sent to every single channel or analytics platform, in our case Google Analytics, 99% of the time. And number two is that data has the maximum amount of product data, order data, customer data, attribution based data. So by that I mean cookie values, UTM parameters, click ID parameters, et cetera. Those two things combined. That if we can do that for every customer and every channel that they have connected through Elevar, then we're doing our job in helping solve the problems that brings customers to us, which is they don't trust their data. They are lacking conversions in their different platforms. So let's use Google Ads, where they're spending $10,000 a day and they feel like they're missing 30% of their conversions. And they know that that is not only going to impact their ability to trust, to keep scaling that campaign or set of campaigns, but it's also going to limit the platform from being able to go find more customers to show ads to. This is more, maybe more Facebook and, and things like that. But usually that's what it boils down to. There's nuances of people are on recharge or other third party checkouts or they just want the Facebook conversion API or they're headless and they need help getting that set up. Or they need GA4 because Google dropped that surprise on everyone that they're shutting down UA in a year. So there are some nuances but again, at the end of the day they all boil down to those two main problems. It's they every platform needs all the data and they need all that data to have all the things associated with it. Uh, like product IDs and customer emails, et cetera.

Speaker B: Yep. Sounds a lot easier than. It's so easy to say.

Speaker C: That's why there's an entire podcast just dedicated to sharing. This is all the change and pain and everything that's going on and tracking. So yeah, it's not as easy as, as uh, maybe we make it sound in other areas on our own marketing, messaging.

Speaker B: Sure. Well, go ahead, Jacqueline.

Speaker A: I have a quick question on the GA4 transition. So I haven't actually um, looked into this in depth yet, but do you know what Shopify's plan is for rolling out, um, new analytics infrastructure to prepare for GA4 transition and how that will affect you guys?

Speaker C: I, uh, I don't know other than I know they're, they're going to roll something. Actually, I don't know for certain. They may not but they, it's not as easy of a change, especially if they want to run in parallel. Um, so I don't, Yeah, I don't. I'm just going to assume they're, they'll have to have their own GA4 property setup. Yeah, yeah, I don't know when that time is going to be, how it impacts us. It's going to be. Shopify obviously has universal analytics where you plug in the ID and that works amazing for 90% of companies on Shopify. You don't really need, you don't need Elevar, you don't need other apps. Just plug it in, you're done.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: But for brands that doesn't solve an issue like they want to have control over the data because they're pulling that data into a data warehouse or doing other things or they, you want to fix certain gaps that do exist in the native setup. That's likely. I'm assuming it's going to be the same thing with GA4 because GA4 is very, it's much more robust, uh, in the way that the event and User property data is structured so it's not, it's not always just page view driven and it's honestly it's more explicit versus implicit. Implicit is what we've lived in and tracking over the Last forever since Web2, Web 2.0 started where you drop in a piece of JavaScript and it sets a cookie and that cookie grabs a bunch of data from your browser and does the magic fingerprinting, passing it back. That's, that's not going to be the future. The future is going to be very explicit of here's a tracker, here's the data that this tracker needs to collect, is there consent, yes or no, et cetera, et cetera. So I would imagine that's probably a uh, an onion that they are peeling back with their GA4 transition.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I can imagine how challenging it would be because it's a different, totally different approach to data structures. But in my mind like you know, key value pair, event based approach, it makes more sense to me like logically like why didn't we start with that way back in the day? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: Yeah. So we'll see, we'll see what they come out with. But uh, again I would uh, imagine brands that are a certain size, they're probably going to want to stay with a Google Tag Manager or some other app or platform that gives them more control to do what they want with their data.

Speaker A: Sure, that makes sense.

Speaker B: What are your tips Brad, around um, planning and strategy? Um, we find at the agency that it's not that the tools aren't available for clients, it's that from the jump there's a lot of um, sometimes lack of ownership, lack of documentation within the organization so that everyone has a clear sense of what is being tracked and how things are being triggered. I'm curious about how you approach that with your clients.

Speaker C: Yeah, if I think about our Chrome extension, our Chrome extension can make it very easy to tag your entire site and track everything. But that doesn't always lead to the best end result because you still need to process that data, analyze, extract insights. So one thing that we, we do in our, for anybody who's going through our paid onboarding process is we'll ask what are the top five questions that you were trying to get out of your Google Analytics data and just try to solve for that first because just in my experience there's going to be things where it's ah, a Wednesday afternoon at 2pm and someone asked you a question about a particular conversion rate for a product and the variant and how this funnel is working through a collection page, whatever it might be. Uh, I would probably not worry too much about that because those are very in the moment type of questions that what's the real impact going to be? And I would focus more on those five questions that you want to get answered out of your analytics data consistently and ensure that you build tracking around that and maintain it. And what we call our user journey report is, um, that's the default if anyone's just looking for like well, what do you recommend? And we just say, well we feel like this report is the best because that's what customers have gotten the most value. And the user journey report is very simple. It's you, it's a goal, it's essentially goal based. So it's how many people sign up for an email if you have videos that are critical in your funnel, how many people watch, watch the video, how many people added a cart, viewed a product page, initiated checkouts, uh, was on site and scrolled, you know more than X percent which is an engaged session. But you pick out those, you have your core events like your product view, add to cart, initiate checkout, et cetera. But then you find the other three to five key interactions with your site that you would consider part of your journey and funnel. You set up event tracking for those. You create goals in Google Analytics so you can get the percentage based like a session conversion rate for how many, what percentage of people sign up for email or watch the video and then you just build a simple report. You just build a custom report where you can do it by landing page by source medium, you can do your heat map over top of it and that way you can look at okay by channel, what channels are driving more top of funnel activities? So Facebook, paid social, how is it doing driving email signups, how is it doing getting people to view a product? And then you look at your bottom of the funnel channels. You expect SMS to have a very high conversion rate or initiate checkout conversion rate. Is it doing that? So that's an example where again just using that best practice strategy, start there, start those three to five questions, create a report that can summarize that in one view and then worry about the other nuanced questions later.

Speaker A: Is this type of consulting helping the client, um, get those events tracked and set up across Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics. Is that a part of the service that you provide on your higher level package and you do it for the client, right?

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: That's awesome.

Speaker B: I love that. Just paring it down even I would say three. I love that you just said three to five. It's like just pick three that have the biggest impact and don't get overwhelmed by the rest. There's so much data and you're providing such a service, making sure the data is actually accurate.

Speaker C: That is a plug for GA4 though. So GA4. The one use case we do use today is the Funnel Funnel Builder, our product. We used to have a custom funnel builder where you could go in and define step one, step two, Step X with page view.

Speaker A: I remember that.

Speaker C: For event data it was our most popular feature and we had to shut it down because uh, the data we were getting back from the API was just wrong. It was being heavily sampled and just wrong. So M we had to shut it down. The reason why that was our most popular feature as part of our product was because it allowed someone to have that. Wednesday 2:00pm I need to answer this question. I can't get it in GA goals right now because goals are not retroactive. I needed to build a funnel to see how many people are. See how many people are doing this thing. GA4, you can do that now. So the funnel builder was only available in GA360 which was 150,000 a year plus. But you can do that in GA4 now. So doing that in GA4 is. That's that. I need to answer this question in 5 minutes or potentially 50 minutes if you're new to GA4 trying to learn how to use the funnel builder but. Mhm. That is a pretty.

Speaker A: So fantastic. Yeah. That they've released that now accessible outside of 360.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Yeah. And the pathing report, there's some other pretty cool utilities and uh, there's actually a lot of cool new utilities. But I think the default reaction that we have and we joke about what you typically see on Social is the reports that everyone's used to using in the ua. Show me my source medium report. Show me my landing page report. Show me my shopping funnel. They don't exist as default reports. The exact same way that we're used to seeing them in Universal Analytics.

Speaker A: The reporting is definitely challenging in GA4. It's a learning process.

Speaker B: M. I know right now it's interesting working with clients who come in for consulting and they're on Universal and you're like well you can fix this, this and this. And also you're not going to use this in a year. So don't do that, just do this instead. Um, it's an interesting time. Um, yeah. So speaking of with data Ongoing maintenance. I think that there's definitely a perception that you can see that you're tracking and it's like a set it and forget it situation. And we always like to compare data as more like a living, breathing, like a plant you have to water. What's your perspective on that in terms of ongoing care for your data and tracking?

Speaker C: Like how long you are 100% right? Yeah, it's ongoing. It's. Yeah, you need to water it. Not every day, but every week. And uh, yeah, because things change. I mean it's. If you're just talking Google Analytics, there probably aren't as many changes. While GA4 does change that actually. But historically Universal analytics, they weren't rolling out massive changes to their platform every week or every month or every year. But with all of your marketing tracking, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, et cetera, that's changing every week. Literally there are changes happening, requirements changing every single week. So for example TikTok, they deprecated page views. Most 99.9% of people using TikTok doesn't know that. And that creates a bunch of uh, urgency or concern that page views aren't working. Page views aren't working Well, I deprecated it. Klaviyo is changing the way that you can adjust property user, uh, property data. Snapchat, we went back and forth with their technical support trying to get them to help get their conversion API to a point that was acceptable for E Comm, where they didn't have rate limiting for accepting data. So that was a massive change that rolled out for them. Where previously you really couldn't use the conversion API if you were an E Comm site doing more than a million dollars a year.

Speaker B: Oh my gosh.

Speaker C: Uh, Facebook, think about Facebook. All the changes with post iOS and their conversion API was like every month there was a new requirement where you

Speaker A: need that Action source.

Speaker C: Yeah, you need that. There's all these different parameters that they're adding in that you have to collect and send. If you don't just have a set it and forget it type of app, uh, or tool to do that. So that's where it becomes watering every week is important just to stay on top of it.

Speaker A: I'm curious, how does your organization approach, um, keeping up on all of those new releases, all of those changes? Do you have a check in every day? You have some fees coming through into a single place where you're reviewing that and obviously you have some partnerships. It's a lot of information to keep up on.

Speaker C: Yes, we follow change Logs closely. When you get the companies that are that big, it's like the Snapchats and the Facebook. Facebook shut down their technical marketing. What they're. I forgot the acronym they called it. But they shut that down a year or two ago, which was a bummer because that's how we were to stay ahead in a lot of the changes. But yeah, we follow change logs. We, we have a daily sync, uh, customer success daily sync that anyone, um, in the company can drop in a technical challenge question that comes up from customers. And a lot of it is from being in the weeds with our customers where they have a unique use case of consent mode, using X, Y and Z tool and wanting a mix of client side and server side tracking. And that sends us down the path of we got to figure out what's going on and we discover, oh, this doesn't work, it's not documented. So I wish we had a single dashboard that showed us everything pulling it in. But unfortunately what we find a lot are a lot of undocumented or misdocumented changes.

Speaker A: Updates.

Speaker C: Yeah, changes around tracking. And we see this with different Shopify APIs as well.

Speaker B: Well, nice to have you at the forefront.

Speaker A: Ah, thank you for doing that, for

Speaker C: going through the weeds.

Speaker B: Um, I'm curious about some really tangible technical tools and recommendations. Do you have some favorite go to Shopify themes plugins, um, analytics, um, tools that are complementary to your offering?

Speaker C: Yeah, pretty obviously biased towards the analytics tools. But um, Inquire Labs is one that we probably have an 80% customer crossover and that's the. We push data so we think about what we do versus what other attribution solutions like the Triple Whales, North Beam, Rockerbox, et cetera, Elevar, we push data so we, we collect data from the site and we push it wherever the merchant wants that data to go. And then you have these other platforms where they pull data in. So they're pulling data in. They're pulling data in from Facebook cost data, Google AdWords cost data, et cetera. So the Inquire um, labs for qualitative so survey data, that's part of that pushing data. So we're. Every brand needs to collect first party data and zero party data, which is the direct from consumer type of data. So that's one that we see a lot of customers use. And it's not just for attribution either. They had a, um, I had Matt on my podcast and his. We were talking about different use cases really try to get in the weeds on like you are like give me. I Want to hear real use cases? I don't want to hear philosophy. Uh, and he had, they had a customer that um, you know, they're asking, you know, what are you using the product for? And they thought they were selling, I'm not gonna get this wrong, but they thought they were selling their product was cleaning for dirt bikes and that's what all their advertising and everything was for. But their survey, post purchase survey was oh, we're using it for ATVs. So then the brand just changed all of their creative to just ATVs and they just uh, took off. Yeah, that was a pretty cool, pretty cool use case that came out. Matt, uh, nice podcast. Um, Audacity, that's another one that there's a lot of people using for. If you're using Amazon, selling an Amazon ebay. Other marketplaces need merchandising insights, need inventory forecasting, things like that. Uh, that's one that we see a lot of customers use and speak very highly of.

Speaker B: Nice.

Speaker C: Rebuy is another one for personalization. I don't, I used to, we used to, I personally used to work a lot with dynamic yield, even pre, pre Elevar and um, so Rebuy is, is similar, I would say a similar type of product where you plug them in and they're going to serve up product recommendations. Uh, there's, there's a ton I'm missing out on a lot. But I don't. What do you think, what do you think about those? Do you have, are you familiar with any of those for Facebook messenger marketing?

Speaker B: Sure. Yeah. No, those are good. I always love asking about very specific tech tools or like what are the go tos? What's everyone using today? Um, so that's cool. Um, yeah. And like what do you think? So like just future looking. How do you think business owners can prepare themselves for the next five years? Which I know is kind of a wild question especially with web three and all the. I mean I don't know how quickly the blockchain really affects E commerce customers. Seems like quite a while out. But what are you thinking about as an organization and what do you think business owners should be thinking about to prepare for the future?

Speaker C: Good question. Uh, uh, my, my approach is as a, from a business owner perspective is have your strategic plan. So have a one page strategic plan that has your 10 year vision, your three year plan, one year quarterly rocks and plan against that. So it's. I can't predict what's going to happen in five years. Nobody really can. I mean we, we can try but we're going to be wrong in most of those. So. But I think having that tangible plan where this is where I want to be in 10 years or this is where we want to be in three years, this is how I think we're going to do it. And this is our brand, this is our marketing, this is our, this is the flywheel we're going to create and focus on that. So control the controllables versus the things that are outside of our control, like potentially economic uh, headwinds, things like that. So I know it's kind of a cop out answer, but if you're familiar with traction or any of those, uh, the EOS type of frameworks, I think it really starts with a business plan of understanding if you're trying to be a billion dollar brand or sell for a billion dollars, whatever it might be, that is going to dictate what you need to be doing today, next year, three years from now. If you are looking for a lifestyle business that you want to pull out X number of dollars in profit per year, whatever that might be, that also is a different decision, uh, making different avenue that you need to take and plan for that. So did I help or does that a cop answer?

Speaker B: Well, now I'm going to ask a specific question. No, that was a really good answer. Um, who do you think are doing, who of your customers do you think are doing things right? Um, and I'm kind of curious, who are the funnest businesses to work with? Uh, in your experience at Elevar? Like do you have specifics or uh, specific industries that you enjoy working with or personality types?

Speaker C: Um, I'm afraid to name names because I don't want to get called out for not naming the names that should be naming. But so I'll share couple. So one brevity. Um, backpack. So everyday backpacks, camera backpacks. I've known Dylan and Elliot and Brandon more Dylan and Elliot, but there's three brothers. Uh, Dylan came, I think he's been, he's been a customer for four years now and came in searching like how do I fix my Facebook Pixel or something like that. Landed on our blog post and follow GTM and set up and like many do this and I knock on Dylan but you get stuck. You're like holy, holy cow. This is taking a lot longer than I think it would. And then he signed up and has been a customer since then. But I think what, what's unique about them, they're bootstrapped and they uh, he, I think Elliot shared on LinkedIn recently and I, we knew this was going on behind the scenes, but his LinkedIn post went really viral and he just shared. They just cut off Facebook. They just stopped spending all their dollars on Facebook. And obviously that turned into. He shared what happened business wise and between revenue and profit changes and what they thought might be true about their business. And some of that proved right and wrong. But any case that just created this, holy cow, we've done the same thing. You're so smart and holy cow, you guys are idiots. Did you not think about X, Y and Z? And so it's really interesting seeing the banter back and forth. So I think that's, that's something that I've appreciated about them is they, they've gone on to do new markets. I know a couple, a year, a couple years ago they had their, um, their. When their factories had some major issues and they had to go spend like six months over there finding a new factory. And uh, I can't remember exactly. It's not, it wasn't China, it was another, um, their country. But uh, anyways, so I don't know, it's just been interesting following along their story and all the different challenges that you face when you're trying to build a business and grow a business. So that's uh, that's one I have, I have others, uh, but I don't anything stand out from a couple of those stories.

Speaker B: No, it's fun hearing and seeing customers grow over time. Especially bootstrap business. I mean, that's like, it must be really enjoyable to see, to see organizations grow. That's what I love about our, you know, working with businesses. M. Personally. So. Yeah, that's cool.

Speaker C: We still have some customers like, uh, Nirav from Anada and uh. Do you know Anada?

Speaker B: I don't know Anada. What is that?

Speaker C: Uh, Design development Growth agency. I'm getting his tagline completely wrong. But, uh, he signed up when we first launched our beta product. He was customer number two. I remember chatting with them through live chat and uh, yeah, that was pretty, pretty cool. There's still a customer today with other brands of theirs, but, uh, it's always good to see someone that's been with us really since day one. Literally day one.

Speaker B: Wow, that's really cool. That's awesome.

Speaker A: Have you noticed, um, a lot of your clients stopping, uh, ad spend on Facebook or decreasing it over time? We have sort of started noticing that trend. I know you mentioned it, uh, with the backpacking company.

Speaker C: Yeah, I would. It's been pretty rare that I've seen people and branches completely cut it off. Uh brevity is one we've seen a couple or have heard of a couple. Obviously we don't know what everyone's doing per se but diversifying spend has definitely been something we've seen since last year. Um um I actually think what we're starting to see is people moving back to Facebook. So if they pulled spend decrease spend 6 to 12 months ago they're now starting to see some of them are seeing that even though Facebook isn't reporting that it's performing it's not like overnight that you're ah just performance is gonna go away. A lot of nuances with targeting and what they're able to do but in general I think we're actually starting to see and hear of uh people moving spend back to Facebook because probably less

Speaker B: competitive now because everyone flew away.

Speaker C: Well it's a top of funnel so you lose out on that top of funnel. The tofu awareness of we just need to. You need to hit people up 20 times before they buy. Facebook was never prospecting was for most was never going to be someone sees an ad and then they buy right away.

Speaker A: Sure.

Speaker C: So if you lose that ability to prospect and hit hundreds of thousands not millions of people that you've got to. You need to find those. You need to build awareness somehow. So if you're not building awareness at scale Facebook then obviously everyone moving to TikTok. But TikTok also has its own challenges of their ad platform and reporting is obviously several years behind the need to create and maintain content. So the creative aspect is that's very time intensive. Um brevity actually they're one that they he started. They started doing organic TikTok a long time ago. They were pretty early.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: But yeah I think it's more I wouldn't be surprised six months from now if you start seeing people go back to normal of removing moving budget back to Facebook.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: I could be wrong.

Speaker B: We'll see if your trend forecast is right. That is interesting. I mean I'm sure you get to see kind uh of are at the forefront of the ads platforms everyone's dabbling in because then you have to figure out the data.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Oh I get this. Well let's see what else. I'm curious for you. If you were to start let's say you um decided to get back into E commerce tomorrow if you started your own E commerce store do you ever have ideas for things because you get exposure to so many types of brands and just curious if you're waking up in the middle of the night with your own E Commerce idea.

Speaker C: Oh yeah, I already have it.

Speaker B: Nice. Oh do you, Are you willing to Jeff?

Speaker C: Oh yeah. Cause it's not gonna, I'm not doing anything with it. And it's not really that unique. The brand was called float. So F L O a T and it was gonna be a. You know, this is too big. But think about a cup. So if you're in a pool or at the beach or at the lake or whatever, I, I live in Charleston so we're on the water. So it's very top of mind for me. But you don't you want a, you know, floating koozie? That's not gonna, that's just audio so those just listening, you won't hear it. But where it's always stable so your, your drink is always staying straight up and it's not spilling. So if you're in a pool. I have two kids. So if you're in a pool and someone jumps in and the wave happens and you're Gatorade or whatever your spills.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I'm in Arizona so we live in the pool too. And that would be very useful. They have some out there that are like kind of, you know, from the 99 cent store, a little floaty but it's not, you know, industrial.

Speaker C: So yeah, there's way too much math and science to go into it. But the way I was originally, I was like, that's out of my league.

Speaker B: Maybe one day. Maybe one day you'll be back growing.

Speaker C: I don't know. Growing an ecom brand is hard. It is really hard. And it's getting harder.

Speaker B: Mm mhm. Yeah, it is hard. It's complex. As we were saying before, just like with um, production and just all of the variables that go into it, it's hard to really even get a sense of um, margins. And then obviously the competition is just so high. Do you think it's better to go like, do you see success in brands who niche down and sell socks or um, do you have any sense of what you feel like is going to be successful when you connect with E commerce brands?

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean the rich, the riches are in the niches. So I think that still holds true for E Comm as well. And so you start, start niching down on one product or one category and then start building out from there. I mean Rothy's obvious, uh, easy example where they've expanded out from, from their original core product. But yeah, we have, we have a lot A lot of brands that I've personally worked with, known with or just seen come through that. That's probably a trend is you, you crush one product or one category and then you expand out from there.

Speaker B: Yep. Nice cuts.

Speaker C: Clothing, another one. So think about like men's brand of just amazing T shirt. Just we're gonna make or they are gonna make the best T shirt, best fitting T shirt and then how that's continued to grow and expand and uh, there's probably a ton of examples like that.

Speaker B: Mhm. Yeah, it's hard to do. Everyone wants to be there for everyone. They're like my customer is everybody. Um, even still it's tricky but niche really is the way to go. I love Rothy's by the way. They have cool products.

Speaker C: Quality.

Speaker B: Yes, Yes.

Speaker C: I don't know if you all were like this but when I started to shop more on Amazon and you just get exposed to bad quality where it's just, it's a crappy product and um, I'd rather pay a little bit more for something that's going to last longer versus having to buy something that's poor quality that I'm going to have to replace shortly. M after and it's probably, I don't know if there's any data, there's probably no data out there to validate that. But I'm sure for a certain segment or cohort of consumers that is a real legitimate thought psychology of okay, I'm sick of getting a bunch of crap from Amazon vendors for these products. I want to find something that's very, that's quality. I'm willing to pay a little bit more for quality. And that's where I think a lot of the direct consumer brands that have focused on that have done really well and that's why they've grown because people just, it's you want something quality and one T shirt that's going to fall apart after a week or two.

Speaker A: Well, it's also more sustainable and better for the planet building for the long term.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: M. Yeah, that's actually a really good final thought. I mean it doesn't matter how much um, data magic you can wave and ah, you could have the best data structure and at the end of the day if you don't have a quality product then that you know there's no data magic there to help you out. So. Yep, good thing to keep in mind as business owners.

Speaker C: Cool.

Speaker B: Um, well I think that's probably a great way uh, to end the show today. Unless Jacqueline was there. Were there any Other questions we had for Brad. Any.

Speaker A: I did have one. One question we didn't go over, I don't think when we were talking about uh, data tracking from the beginning. Do you have any templates or anything that you provide to your customers to help them go through that process?

Speaker C: This would be the coming up with what questions to answer or the actual template of tracking.

Speaker A: Both. Let's figure out what you need to do and then how do we put it down on paper for us to build this thing?

Speaker C: Yeah. So there we have a few articles on our blog that will go through that user journey type of report or how to pull in survey data in the ga, things like that. Um, a template for the three to five questions you want to get out of ga. Yeah, we don't, we don't have a template or something that walks through specifically that and we probably should. Uh, we have internal, internal docs on that. But nothing a scatter shot of different articles on our blog about that though. I think there's one. It's called, it's. The article is event tracking for CRO or how to use Event tracking to drive CRO. That's, that's probably the closest one I'm thinking of. Um, and actually one of my, one of the episodes of my podcast, the Conversion Tracking Playbook, I can't remember the title but it's my five step process to CRO or tracking. Again, I can't remember the exact name but that, that was probably a good example of a step or framework that I would go through. Is this starting a little bit more at the end in terms of looking at analytics to pick out low hanging fruit, focusing on like a page by page funnel performance and then going a few steps further. But so that would be on the analytics side in terms of tracking like a template for tracking. That's what our product is. You, you click the data layer install that installs everything that you need to populate a uh, data layer to use in gtm. And for those that want to go server side tracking again you just. Now it's all in our app. You don't need to do anything with Google Cloud or anything like that. You just click Install. You enter your Pixel IDs and select what channels you want to send to Facebook, ga, et cetera.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: And uh, you're live. And then we have all the pre built tag templates for GTM for client side tracking. So if you need to implement any marketing channel you can just go to our pre built template library, enter your Pixel ID and download it.

Speaker A: Perfect. So we'll be sure to include those links in the show notes to your podcast with the five steps and then uh, the sections on your website with examples of those tracking templates. Awesome. Thank you.

Speaker B: Awesome resource. Mhm. How about you Brad? Any parting takeaways? Um, I know we kind of like had a meandering conversation, but is there anything that you feel like you'd like to share with the um, business owners of the world, Mobile app owners of the world?

Speaker C: I want to hear. Yeah. Where do you all, what's your five year vision? Where do you see, where do you see the industry in five years?

Speaker B: Well we have done a few episodes on blockchain and cryptocurrency. Um, I am really interested and I know right now there's like a lot of controversy around what's going on with NFTs, but I think that the foundations of the blockchain are so fascinating and such a game changing shift, it's hard to even really imagine. And then of course all the building out of Metaverse and all that stuff. So maybe not in the next five years but I think uh m There's going to be so many changes in the next coming years around data, the way data is tracked, ownership of data on an individual level made possible by the blockchain that's going to really impact all of us on this call.

Speaker A: I m also think that this whole new no code movement and all of the um, updates um, in terms of capabilities of technological platforms is going to continue to simplify things for end users that are not going to require as complex of engineering teams to do these really complicated implementations. So there's going to be a lot more access to people in marketing that don't necessarily have a technical background to start doing this type of work which I think is going to become really, really powerful, um, and very exciting and provide the opportunity for um, teams to spend more time on the creative stuff and the experimental side because people aren't freaking out about why this API connection isn't pulling data from this API connection anymore. I think it's going to get really fun personally.

Speaker B: Less band aids.

Speaker C: Yeah, spot on. No code movement for everything. Site building, analytics, tracking blockchain, everything.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, we'll have to connect in another six months. We'll see where everyone's at.

Speaker C: Uh, hopefully in six months this uh, market pressure and everything starts to uh, subside which some of the leading indicators are looking good with that.

Speaker B: Yes, let's hope.

Speaker A: Cool.

Speaker B: Um, well Brad, thank you so much for being here. This is great.

Speaker C: Thanks for having me on.

Speaker B: Awesome. Appreciate it.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening. You're listening to Jacqueline, director of technology, and my co host is Moni o', Brien, director of marketing. And we're the founding partners of Digital Dames. We're so grateful for our team. Our podcast project manager is Laura Kurtenbach. Our show producer is Alyssa Holderbein. Our show art is designed by Marie Salonga. Our audio engineer is J.C. carofelli. And most of all today, we'd like to thank Shay Baird and of course, our guest, Brad Redding, founder of Elevar.

Speaker B: You can find Brad sharing his knowledge on YouTube, the Elevar blog, which is getelevar.com and his Conversion Tracking Playbook podcast. He's also on LinkedIn. Just search Brad Redding at Elevar spelled uh E L E B A R and he's on Twitter ambrading M. We at Digital Dames would love to hear your thoughts and we welcome your questions and feedback. You can email us anytime at Conversion Path Digital Dames IO keep up with us across the web. Our social media handles are Digital dames on Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn. And we'd love for you to leave us a review, um, and subscribe to us on Apple, Spotify and wherever you listen to podcasts. Until next time. Thanks so much.

Speaker A: Thanks,

Speaker C: Sam.