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Speaker: All right. It is one o'clock, let's get started. I wanted to welcome everybody to Measure Better. My name is John Paglio, digital marketing manager here at flyte new media. I hope everybody was able to dig out if you were in the Northeast and get to your office today. I know I was, but I am currently looking over Commercial Street right now. And if you've been downtown Portland on Commercial Street, all the snow is now in the middle of Commercial Street. It is kind of wild. I actually had to make a big old U-turn to get into work today because they didn't plow entrances to all the parking lots, so kind of cool. But yeah. So anyways, let's get started.
All right. I wanted to set the stage, first of all, with letting everyone know that this presentation over the next 35 to 40 minutes is going to be a mindset shift. I'm not here to talk about dashboards or spreadsheets or the tools that you need to use, what button do you have to click in Google Analytics, how to set it up, what pie chart to use in Looker Studio, how to use tags and tag manager. The tools can be taught. You can go to YouTube, you can go to Google, you can go to Gemini Chat, whatever your favorite LLM is, and you can do all that.
What's harder, in my opinion, and far more powerful, is learning to think differently about measurement. So again, it's all about the mindset and how we approach the data. We're not going to look at your measurement and your data as a chore or a box to check every month, every quarter, every year. But it's a way for us to make smarter decisions, run better campaigns, and communicate with confidence.
So with all that, again, my name is John Paglio, digital marketing manager here at flyte new media. I am a certified measurement marketer via the MeasureU brand. It was a much more rigorous test, in my opinion, than the Google Analytics certification or the Google Ad certification. It was a two and a half hour written test that was graded by a real human, by the MeasureU folks. And with that, I was actually able to become a MeasureU mentor. So I am in their backend spaces helping other measurement marketers get better with their measurement.
And I wish I could see some green grass on a golf course right now because, good God, I don't know when I'll get to play golf here in Maine. It's going to be like May 15th by the time I get to play. So I'm really wishing for green grass these days.
Just a quick run through of what I want to go through today, really why measurement matters. How do we focus on the right metrics? Where do you use your data and your dashboards? Making sure that our team is aligned. And then lastly, I just want to throw in some common mistakes that I tend to see with reporting in dashboards.
So I like to equate a measurement plan to a pair of running shoes. So let's say we're running a half marathon in July and we're going to train for it. So what are we going to do? We're going to go out and buy running shoes. But what happens when you don't train and July comes around and you're not in shape and you got to go run that half marathon? You're probably going to come in second to last place, maybe even last place. You're going to be sore for the next seven weeks. And it's just like, I'm never doing that again. Why did I even sign up in the first place?
I do think that goes hand in hand with a measurement plan. I know it's a stark analogy, but they do go hand in hand. And here's why. You can go out and buy all the fancy tools that brings your data together, but if you don't use it and you don't have a plan on how you're going to use it over the next day, week, month, quarter, year, then it's not going to work come time of review.
Campaigns run and they end and you need to go figure out what worked, what didn't work. But if you didn't have a plan between A and B, then how are you supposed to know what's going on? And at that point it becomes a guess. And I know we all have played, Guess Who?, I used to love Guess Who?, I used to dominate in elementary school. I loved playing this game so much. I actually love it so much that I bought it for my daughter for Christmas. But unfortunately when she opened it, she kind of was like, oh, what's this? Now she's five, so hopefully she grows into it. But super excited to start playing this with my daughter.
But anyways, so when we guess right, like in the game of Guess Who?, you typically have some sort of strategic plan going in. You're going to ask, “Does your person have black hair?” “Does your person have blonde hair” “Are they wearing a hat?” “Are they blushing?” You know, you have all these questions that you're asking and you're trying to gain information back. So that's with having some sort of plan in your head.
But as we know, there's always somebody in school typically, that would sit down and just guess, right? They had a one in 24 shot of guessing who your person was, and if they guessed it right, the whole class would go crazy and you would be shocked and you're like, ah, whatever, they just guessed. It's a one in 24 shot.
So it happens all the time with clients when I'm talking to them about what are you measuring. How are you measuring it? Typically what's happening is they're going off their gut and they're going off of hope. But I'm here to tell you that hope is not a KPI. We can't just go off of hope that your campaigns are going to work. We can't hope that creative for your Meta ads is going to work. We can't hope that that headline and description for your Google Ads is going to work, right? Like we can't hope it. There's no way to fit that into your marketing plan because of the fact that when you hope about data, it's usually never correct.
I have conversations with clients all the time where I'm like, “How many phone calls have you got in the last two months?” And they're like, “Well, I think we've gotten like 30 to 40.” And then the next month they'll call you and they'll be like, “Hey, our calls have gone way down ever since you changed this.” But if they were never tracking it in the first place, how am I able to get an accurate read on what's going on? That's where that hope comes into play and that guesswork. Stop guessing. Start building a measurement plan from the ground up. This is where you start. Today is day one.
In day one, you're not going to have all those answers, and that's okay. But as long as you have a plan going forward, those answers will become clearer and clearer. And on day one, starting right now, I always like to start with the end in mind. What is your business goal? Is your business goal more revenue? Is it more customers? Is it business growth? That is the end business goal that any campaign typically has. But from there, you start to work yourself backwards on what is my marketing objective that I need to achieve so that my end goal can get met or matched?
So for the sake of this entire presentation, I'm going to be owning a local car wash called Clearwater Car Wash. AI really failed me on this photo. As you can see, there are a bunch of cars that are wet that haven't even gone through the car wash yet, but that's a whole other story for another day. I just gave up. But anyways, so I own a local car wash, my business goal is I want to increase the usage in the bays, in the self-service bays as well as in the automatic bays.
So when I take a step back, I'm saying, okay, my business goal is car wash bay usage. My marketing objective now becomes, okay, I know I need to sell more memberships because the more memberships I sell, the more my bays will get used. So there's that correlation there, then I'm going to start to think, okay, what is my tactic that I'm going to take?
So I'm going to run Meta ads locally here. What metric do I want to track to make sure that I'm on track purchases? And then my guardrail is my cart to purchase rate. Now some of these terms may not be crystal clear for you right now, but I'm going to get there. I have a whole, um. API scorecard, I like to call it that, has a bunch of definitions on it that will help all of this become clear. Because when you're working backwards from your business goal down, this is where measurement becomes real because you're tracking exactly what matters to your business and to your campaigns.
So what if you don't measure? What if you don't measure? You're going to start to waste time and you're going to start to waste budget. You're going to waste time of your peers or the agency that you're working with. You're going to start to waste budget. If you're spending money and you're not measuring it appropriately, or you're not reporting on it appropriately, come the end of the year, your fiscal year, your boss or the management team may not provide you enough budget going into next year because you won't be able to prove or align the marketing dollars that you're spending.
You're chasing vanity metrics. You’re not measuring because you're just chasing any metric under the sun. So there comes a point where like you're thinking to yourself, “Oh my God, I have to look at Facebook. I have to look at my email provider. I have to look at my CRM. I have to look at GA4.” There's too many metrics and you're pulling them all together, and most of them are vanity metrics anyways, so you're just like, ah, I'm done so I'm not going to measure anymore because you end up chasing too many different metrics.
And then lastly, you're going to lose credibility and buy-in. Number one and number three tie very closely together with this. Because what happens is if you are not measuring or you're not measuring appropriately, your executive team may lose faith in what you're doing. So therefore, they're going to look to use your marketing dollars on other avenues to grow. And then that leaves you with a much smaller marketing budget, which doesn't help you drive the campaigns that you need to drive.
At the end of the day, measurement makes your entire team care. Executives care about the ROI. Your sales team cares about the lead quality. Your operations team likes to see what the market demand is. And then you as the marketer, you like to see those marketing results. It all happens in this big bubble, and you're all floating around in it, but you're all floating together instead of it being all your own bubbles. I wish I could make a bubble animation and I'm in a bubble, but that's really what I'd be looking at is if you all can get into one bubble and float together versus floating away from each other, it's going to make people care so much more. Because inspiring metrics are great, they're useless if you're tracking the wrong ones.
And I know I've been throwing out the word ‘vanity metrics’ here quite a bit. So really, it's about finding the right metrics. We want to be able to find the right metrics when we're running our own campaigns. And we'll get into it, but every campaign that you run will have different metrics, and that's okay. That's one of the biggest mindsets that I'm still trying to get over in 2026. I've been battling this mindset of every campaign needs to lead to a sale, or every campaign needs to lead to a form fill. But if you're running some sort of brand awareness campaign, you have to be okay with reporting on impressions or reach.
So anyways, we fall into this black hole of vanity metrics. This is what happens, right? We're running that purchase campaign for the car wash, and we start to just see all these metrics show up in analytics, right? And we're just like, “Oh my God, what do I think is important? What isn't important?” So I'm just going to start to grab all the numbers and put them in my report so that when my boss starts looking at the report, he's going to see, wow, impressions are way up, or we're getting a lot of page likes, or we're getting a lot of video views.
Again, all of these metrics have a place. They certainly have a place, but what happens is we end up in this free fall state of grabbing every single metric and making them all feel important. So what I've done is I've created a quick KPI filter, a key performance indicator filter, that you can ask yourself when you're trying to think of your campaigns on what is my key performance indicator or my number one metric that I want to track.
So one, is it actionable? If I'm tracking impressions on a campaign where I'm looking for purchases, can I act upon my that impressions metric? Not really. Just because a lot of people are seeing my ads doesn't mean that people are purchasing. So the two don't necessarily correlate from an actionable standpoint.
Is it tied to a business goal? Remember, we go back and we say, okay, we want business growth. Is it because 2 million people saw my ad? Is that related to business growth? Again, no. So maybe impressions isn't a good KPI, whereas I'm still going to take that purchases number.
And then lastly, does it help improve something just because I know that 2 million people have seen my ad? Is it going to help me improve the campaign to make it any better? Or keep it going the way it is. Probably not. So this quick little exercise that you can go through can really help you hone in on that one metric. The one, two, or three metrics that you should be tracking in any campaign you're running on any platform, email, social, organic, social, paid social, uh, Google Ads, whatever, SEO, right?
This can really help you hone in. Uh, I will be sending the slides after this, so feel free to screenshot any of these slides, but you'll also be getting the entire slide deck as well. So between this KPI filter, this measurement first approach that I'm about to talk through, and my KPI scorecard that I have more at the end.
I think these three slides is going to make you a 40% to 50% better measurement marketer. And that's a hope, I know I told you not to think about hope as a KPI, but that's what my gut is telling me. I have no data to back that up, but I really truly believe that the three slides in here can really help shift your entire mindset on how you're tracking your marketing channels.
Alright, so the measurement first approach. So this measurement first approach I learned via the MeasureU brand. So I'm not going to take ownership of it, but I'm definitely going to share it all with you. It brings in this QIA method, this Questions, Information, Actions. So before you start any campaign, you sit down and you fill this out. You say, okay, what questions do I want to ask while this campaign is running?
So again, if we're thinking about this purchases campaign for the car wash, I want to know are users converting at key CTA sections on the landing page and how long are users watching the video? Because I know from past marketing campaigns or from talking to customers, that the video I use is very influential in getting people to buy because we use in our email campaigns or SMS messaging campaigns, other social campaigns, et cetera. So that's the Q (questions).
I is information. So now I'm telling myself, okay, what information do I need to gather to answer the questions? So for the CTA sections, I'm going to track purchases or the information I need to gather as purchases. And in the video, question is going to be how long are they watching the video? Those are the only two pieces of information that I'm going to track because it's this measurement first. And when it's measurement first approach, it means this happens before the campaign runs. This doesn't happen after the campaign runs. This happened before.
And then lastly, actions. And it's not answers. I always think it's answers, but it's actions. What actions are you going to take based on the information you get? So if my purchases are low, then I need to look at the landing page and I need to optimize it. Should I move the payment form up on the page? Should I make it shorter? Should I make the page content longer, be more in depth? It's all these questions that you start to ask yourself. It's like this cycle, right? You go into these actions, you do them, and then you ask the questions again.
And then lastly, I'm going to test different length videos. So my current video is two minutes. Let's try a 45-second spot instead of a 6o-second spot or 120-second spot, right? Like, let's try different length, size videos to see if it's getting people to engage more.
So with the measurement first approach, you start asking these questions at every stage of the funnel. And I think this is definitely a very important piece of measurement in general. Again, the hump that I'm still trying to get over, you have to be okay with the KPIs that you're picking for each step of the funnel. If you're running a brand awareness campaign, don't expect people to click on your website or don't expect people to buy. I mean, it's the icing on the cake, right? It's not what we expect to happen. We have to be okay saying, okay, we're running an awareness campaign, those impressions or the reach is going to be our KPI numbers.
Or with our consideration phase, we're going to have to be okay with landing page views or clicks on the ad or scroll depth or PDF downloads as our KPIs. Because I know we always want to run back to that main business goal and say, okay, we want to build our business or grow our business. And it’s hard to work backwards sometimes when we have that in mind. And then we're trying to say, okay, well how do clicks in the web, clicks to the website transfer to business growth? And they do. But you just have to kind of work at it. And the main idea, one of the bigger ideas here is having campaigns run at every step of the funnel so that when they do get to that decision phase of buying something, filling out a form, calling you, they've kind of warmed up to who you are and what you do.
So the decision phase, like I said, purchases, form fills, phone calls, those are KPIs I'd be looking at, retention, advocacy, I do feel get pushed to the wayside a little bit when we're running ads, or not even ads, but just any kind of campaign we're running. But the retention standpoint of it being SMS marketing, email marketing, so those open rates, those click rates. That's what I'd be looking at for KPIs when it comes to retention and repeat buyers.
If you're an e-comm business or repeat service calls as well, that's always good for retention. Advocacy one is a little bit trickier. I mean, the obvious ones are Google reviews, I’d be tracking really any directory that I would be tracking those reviews on.
You can also, you have your micro and your macro influencers, so that advocacy right there, you could be tracking their referral links back from them to you. Those are those KPIs I'd be looking at. So we have to be okay with saying, okay, if we're running a retention campaign via email, we're going to be reporting on email open rates, email click rates, and those are going to be the two KPIs where we can start to figure out what's successful and what's not.
I had a conversation the other day with a client two clients, they're on the same side. They wanted to run a conversion campaign. So in that decision phase, we’re going to track form fills about 15 to 20 minutes into that call. The other client said, “Yeah, we're just really looking for brand awareness.” So on our end, we had to do the education piece of saying, okay, well we can't just run brand awareness ads and expect form fills or vice versa.
Because when you're choosing the stage of your conversion in Meta, in Google, Pinterest, wherever, that platform is going to then make sure and optimize for that stage. So we could be like okay, if we're telling Facebook we want to do brand awareness, then Facebook's goal is going to be impressions and reach, et cetera. Again, we have to be okay with that. They got it. We figured it out.
We ended up running some brand awareness and some consideration ads for them after talking through it. But again, it's getting over that hump of being okay with knowing that impressions are your KPI in the awareness stage. And sometimes you have to take one step back. And the example that I always have in my head is buying a billboard. Now, we can't buy billboards here in Maine because of laws and whatnot. So I don't exactly know the whole kit and caboodle of it but think of how much money you spend on a billboard. And what is the point of a billboard? It's that brand awareness. So however much money you're spending on a billboard, your ROI is going to be very, very low, unless there's something very distinct about it that you can track from it. So it's that awareness piece, right?
When you're spending all this money on a billboard, you're only going for awareness, and people are okay with spending that much money for a billboard. So when you start to understand that there are different KPIs at the different steps of the funnel, I love to layer that in to now my audience. This is taking a measurement plan to the whole next level, right? So don't worry if you're not here yet. It's just something that I want to layer in with knowing that there are no KPIs at every side of the funnel. There's also going to be, what does a decision KPI look like for different personas in your audience. We've all gone through these exercises now that we have ChatGPT and Gemini and all that, right? Now personas are our fingertips. But you're already starting to segment your audiences based on your ad targeting and whatnot, and you've already tailored the content, your copy, and your imagery, but now you can actually create even better and more accurate data points based on who they are.
So now instead of just a decision being purchase for a car enthusiast versus a daily commuter can be totally different. Car enthusiasts care about quality and protection and trusting the process with their vehicles finished. So as the car wash, we win them with proof – visuals, reviews, premium benefits, paired with a package that is focused on protection. You know, they go for rides, they get in a group together.
My dad's in a Corvette club, and they travel all the way up to Owl’s Head to go to the transportation museum here in Maine, or they'll go to the Castle in the Cloud, which I believe is in New Hampshire. They'll go on all these rides as a Corvette club. And I've seen Corvettes, right? They're clean, they shine. The insides of their car are squeaky clean as well. So if I'm thinking from a car enthusiast standpoint. Those KPIs at the decision phase could be how many times are they booking detailing with us, and are they booking the premium packages as well?
And then the daily commuter side of things, they just want a clean car without thinking about it. It's all about speed and convenience and a very simple membership, that it's just to set it and forget it for those commuters. So we're looking at new membership purchases and we're looking at return rate. So again, not all of these KPIs come from one place. There's multiple different places that we have to look, and it's all about understanding where to get them from and having the right tools at your disposal.
So just kind of thinking about what kind of tools that we need and where we need them. We need to look at all of our social channels and all of our ad channels, Google Ads, Meta, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Pinterest. Whatever social platform or local directory platform you're on, you're going to just need to know that you can access the data from there. So we're not pulling data yet. We just want to know where the data is and how we can grab it. We obviously want our analytic data from GA4. We want to then bring it into Google Looker Studio.
And then lastly the mountain icon here is Microsoft Clarity. Now, if there's one thing that you're going to take away from this presentation today, and it has nothing to do with the measurement plan – and frankly that's okay – go download Microsoft Clarity for your website. Microsoft Clarity is built, obviously by Microsoft, it is a screen recording, heat mapping, click mapping, it's a free tool. Completely free. I don't know how many times I have to say that, and I'm not being paid to say it. It is an amazing tool. I know there's Hotjar out there and there's Crazy Egg out there, and there's a bunch of other screen recording tools out there. They are heavy on your website. Load times are slower. Users can kind of get a sense that the page isn't working very well. Microsoft Clarity has a very, very light script that you can put on the website and you can start to see the data and it will help you make deeper decisions.
Now, it's not decisions that you can export and then put somewhere. You can connect your Google Analytics and your Google Ad accounts to Microsoft Clarity and be able to watch those audiences, which is phenomenal, but there isn't anything for you to take out of it. It's just something to deepen your knowledge and help that conversation continuously go on as you optimize your website, as you optimize your landing page experiences for your ads or any of your content, for SEO. All right, off my Microsoft Clarity soapbox. But go download that right after this. Don't tune out but do it after. Write on a Post-it note and do it after.
Next, if you have a third-party payment processor in place, PayPal or WooCommerce, or whatever it may be, just make sure that you know that you can grab some data there.
And then lastly, your CRM and your email. Now sometimes those are one. I know HubSpot, that's one. MailChimp is more just email, even though some people use a CRM, there's plenty of CRMs out there. I mean, there's what, 12 tools here. By knowing what metrics to grab, where that then leads you to your KPI.
It's going to then get you in the mindset of saying, okay, I do need a dashboard now because I know what I need to grab. When you have a dashboard, it helps your entire team focus, right? Not just the marketing team, but your entire leadership team that is overseeing all of this. You have one dashboard that rules them all where you have one KPI on that page, in that report, that everyone can focus on. Because what you're doing is you're taking that raw data and turning it into a decision. Rather than just passing along spreadsheets every month or a 20 page report every month, you can pass along a one-to-two-page report that is very actionable, that subdues any campaign panic going on.
When I think of a dashboard that I have fallen victim of creating, and I created them for like three years, it was information overload. It was like Fenway Park’s Green Monster, where the Boston Red Sox play. On the Green Monster, you have advertisements. You have who's pitching, who's hitting, balls and strikes, inning, score, the Al league standings, and the out of town score with all the other games and their scores. Information overload. You don't know where to look, you don't know where anything is until you get acclimated with it. But you are always still finding your eyes, going a little crazy, trying to find what you're trying to look for.
Now your car dash, on the flip side of things, it's much more direct. I'm no mechanic, but I still know what most of the icons appear to be and it's quick, and I can tell it in like 15 to 20 seconds that my lights are on, or I need to change my oil, or no one has seatbelt on, right? It's a quick decision that I can understand. It gives me that kind of system check that I know what's going on. So when I talk about dashboards and those quick decisions, I think of building some sort of funnel. Because dashboards give you that visibility that show you what happened, that's showing you what is happening, and it subdues that campaign panic if your dashboards can't tell the story. If someone doesn't truly understand it, the dashboard can at least start the conversation, right?
I'm sure that everyone looking at this dashboard right now can infer three to five questions right now. I've got website users, to the shopping platform, to searching for memberships or packages, to beginning checkout, to purchase, and I have percentages every step of the way. And I have my revenue at the bottom. Very expensive car wash. Don't come here, please. And then on the right-hand side, I do have a breakdown of all the traffic coming from different places.
The great thing about Looker Studio is that you are able to utilize it in a way that can… it's interactive. So I know that my checkout rate right now is at 21% for the entire website. But if I were to click on the Google CPC line item, I can now compare that data to my full website. It's 18%. So I've been talking about these two slides for about a minute and a half. Already, we know that our cart, our checkout to purchase rate is lower than our main website. I could do that for any of the sources in that table, and already we can have a conversation about what's going on, how things are working.
Again, that's where if the dashboards can't fully tell the story, start that conversation with your team, because data alone isn't the goal. Insight is collecting data is the easy part. We can all just throw the Facebook pixel on our website. We can all install GA4, add Microsoft Clarity, but the value comes from interpreting the data in deciding what to do with it. So that's why we have started to pair a KPI scorecard with every dashboard that we build here at flyte.
We haven't fully rolled it out yet, but I do want to give you a sneak peek of what that looks like so when I talk about this KPI scorecard, and I know this is going to look overwhelming to start, but I promise it's going to make so much sense the more we look at it. The scorecard is how we keep performance simple and decision driven. So we're not all over the place and we don't provide some sort of dashboard that is all over the map. You can see that we have six different indicators here in this report card.
We have primary KPI, we have supporting KPIs, we have a leading indicator, we have a guardrail in our data sources. And you've seen that guardrail term back at the beginning of all this. So now we get to a chance to actually look at what does that mean? But first, the primary KPI is that one marketing outcome that we're paying in this situation to create. So we're trying to get sales and purchases from our Meta ads if we hit the number, that is our target number. And that means the campaign is succeeding. If we're missing it, we can diagnose it before we make changes.
Now, I know a lot of questions out of the gate are like, well, what if we don't know our target number? There are ways you could find industry standards or baselines that you can just kind of throw in here. If you've run ads in the past, even if it was 3, 4, 5 years ago, dig those up and still use them here as a target to start. But that doesn't mean it's a set it and forget it.
You could change your targets as these campaigns go on, right? So what are the supporting KPIs? These explain what's driving the primary KPIs and how can we start to fine tune those Meta hats. So we have cost per conversion and return on ad spend. Your cost per conversion is an efficiency check, so even if we're getting sales, we don't want to be overspending to get those sales.
Let's say my membership costs $50. If my cost per conversion is a hundred dollars, we need to figure something out and we need to figure out something quick. And then return on ad spend, this is a percentage number. Typically you want anything at above a hundred percent is a good return on ad spend. You know, you could start off lower, you could start off at like 60% or 70% to start, but as you start to kind of build off what you're doing, then that number could be 140% for your target.
So essentially, let's say I make $200 off of a hundred dollars of ad spend, that's 200% return. Then we have our leading indicator, which is our checkout rate in this case. So this is going to provide us that momentum of how things are going even if we don't get a lot of traffic, we can still see what that checkout rate is to see is it still on par with our overall website data. It's this scorecard of numbers that we can just quickly look at, and you can quickly show your boss, if they ever ask you, instead of showing them an entire dashboard.
And then lastly is your guardrails. So if you're driving down the road and you've got those guardrails on the highway to prevent you from falling off the road, they're essentially protecting us from optimizing the wrong way. And in this case, we're going to use average order value. If my monthly membership is $50, and my average order value is $30 because they're just coming in for a one-off, then maybe we're misaligned here and we need to realign ourselves.
And then the last indicator is just the data sources. There's no data here that needs to be collected, but it's just to provide clarity on where are we getting our numbers and how are we getting our numbers so again, everybody can be in the know. Now, if you want to take this to the next level, and this is what I'm really excited about, you can take this scorecard and you can put it into a dashboard, a very quick and easy dashboard. Same thing we just looked at, but now what people can do, or whoever you give access to, you can change the date range.
This is built in Google Looker Studio. They can change the date range in the top right-hand corner. You can conditional format red and green or any color you want. So essentially, you can start to see, did I hit my mark this month or did I not? How quickly can we look at this and say, something's going right or something's going wrong. It's not pages and pages of information that people need to dive through. And then on page 17, there's an understanding of, okay, this is exactly what we need to do.
And that's a big part of this is if you can provide this KPI scorecard to your entire team. You make the dream work, right? Teamwork makes the dream work. Most measurement problems are tech problems. Now, there's a lot of tech problems going on in the measurement world right now. We've got VPNs, we've got the cookie list tracking, we've got consent banners, attribution problems. There's a lot of problems out there, but I do believe that measurement is actually a people problem because you're not aligned, you can't fully align yourself with what's going on, on a day-to-day basis or a campaign-to-campaign basis.
So when I'm thinking about your team. Again, I'm thinking about the bubbles that we're all floating in different directions, we're never going to get to this. We're all going to go up, right? Because bubbles are going to float all the way up, but we're all going to go up to different places. So we want to be able to be in one bubble, so we're traveling together to whatever that end destination is.
The shared KPI or a shared dashboard with key KPIs can be a game changer for teams. I've seen teams come together when everyone starts to understand what we're trying to do. When we're thinking about what the team can bring to the table during a marketing meeting, the marketing team can bring you the measurement plan, they can bring the digital data that they're seeing. The sales team can bring the lead quality and the services purchased on a monthly basis, quarterly basis, or the trends that they're seeing from sales. The ops team can bring in customer issues and satisfaction and anything else that they're talking through with customers on a day-to-day basis. And then the admin team, the boots on the ground team, can let you know what's going on in those car washes and the car bays. Are people not liking the new soap that you bought and it's making people cancel their memberships or whatever it may be, right?
The more you get your team acclimated on, okay, we're trying to push new memberships for our commuters, you bring this team together and say, here's what we want to do. You start to get everyone on board, and you start to understand what team member can bring what piece of data back to you.
Now, a lot of that data may not be able to go into something like this, but that's okay. It's just going to give clarity. Remember, these dashboards are to create the conversation. It's not always going to be the end all, be all. It's about the trends and patterns in something like this. It's not about the exact numbers.
All right, so quickly I want to wrap up here with some common reporting mistakes that I tend to see. And this is on myself, too. This is inner reflection. This isn't just saying I'm the best ever, because I know I'm not. But what I often see are a lot of people not using UTM codes on any link that they're putting out into the internet or onto the internet. And if you know me, you know that this is a big soapbox issue for me.
If you're not using UTM codes and you're posting organically to Facebook, you're posting organically to LinkedIn, you're sending out email campaigns, you're doing Google ads and Pinterest ads that all come back to the same URL, how are you going to be able to differentiate that traffic to know what's working or what's not? So if you want more information on UTMs, I've got a plethora of data or a plethora of information that I can provide to you that I really do believe would benefit everybody. And especially with this day and age of tracking and attribution kind of getting a little bit more iffy, UTMs is just one another thing, another fail safe to use.
I already brought up the baseline issue where I've heard from people who say, “Well, I don't have a baseline, I've never done this before.” WordStream does a really great job of compiling industry data for average cost per click, average click through rate per industry, and I'm sure you can find your industry. Now, if you're a super niche industry, you may have to knock yourself up a couple rungs to be in the majority rather than the minority. And again, it's just a start. It's not the end all, be all. Use a baseline to start, and then after the first three months, six months, a year, now guess what? You have your own baseline that you can start to use.
I really want to reinforce the lack of funnel awareness, the lack of the marketing funnel. If you want to run a traffic campaign, don't set it up as a brand awareness campaign. They just don't see eye to eye and you're not going to see the results you want. Same goes for a purchase campaign on a brand awareness campaign. Just make sure that you are understanding what stage of the funnel that you are in and what you're tracking as your KPIs. And then lastly, tracking everything and using nothing. I was notorious for this in 2022. I got my hands on Looker Studio. I thought it was the best creation ever. I was pulling data in from Facebook, and I was pulling data in from LinkedIn, and YouTube, and everything under the sun. And was providing clients with a 15-page report that had 17 metrics per page. And then I got on a call with a client and they're like, “Uh, walk this through to me and tell me what's important.” That was tracking everything and using nothing. The much more focused approach we can have on our measurement, the better our campaigns across the marketing board will go.
So we're here to build better and measure smarter. So I hope that in each section you took away a little bit from it why measurement matters. You know, data turns guesswork into strategy. When we find the right metrics, we can track what truly moves our business. Within the tools and dashboards we're making data visible and not buried and become that conversation starter.
And then lastly, your team alignment equals great measurement can be a group effort. I'm a bulletin board guy. I don't know how many sports fans are out there, but they always say, “that's great bulletin board material”. Like when someone talks badly about another team. So from a bulletin board material standpoint, take all three of these, take one of these, totally your call. But if you could do something at the end of today or this week, pick one KPI that actually matters in your marketing and start that measurement first approach.
Start that KPI scorecard. Or schedule a 30-minute sync with another team, not necessarily your marketing team, but a different team. And let them know what your KPI is and how they can help you with it, and what data they can provide you. Or build or clean up your dashboard that you already have. Maybe you have that 30-page dashboard. I see you. Go clean it up. Make it three pages. See, challenge yourself to be very focused on what you're trying to accomplish.
Thank you everyone. I really appreciate you all for being here today. My name is John Paglio. If you scan the QR code, I will be providing free measurement consults. It's a 30-minute zoom call and it's recorded. Basically, just kind of showing you your measurement plan and you can tell me what you're trying to do and how I can help. So thank you everyone so much.