Episode 19: How to Make Informed Data-Driven Decisions In Your Digital Product Business with Jennifer Grayeb

Speaker1: [00:00:00] Today, I have a special treat for you. We are going to be talking about everyone’s favorite topic numbers and data. And I’m chuckling to myself a little bit because you’re probably thinking I don’t really like data, so why are we going to be talking about it? But the reality is that, data is the backbone of every business out there. And that’s no exception for online business or for those of us who are creating and selling digital products online. But unfortunately, data doesn’t always come easy to a lot of us.

Speaker1: [00:00:35] And that’s why I’ve invited on a very good friend of mine who has been there from the very beginning of my blogging journey. Her name is Jennifer Grayeb and she is the CEO of The Nimble Co., a consulting group focused on helping online business owners better understand their numbers so they can make data driven and profit generating marketing decisions. She recently left her senior strategy role at a Fortune five hundred company where she had six roles in just seven years. While in that role in just two years, she built a productivity blog that reached over two million page views per year, which she went on to sell in every role she’s had or every company she’s owned. One thing has been consistent. She delivers results without working 80 hour weeks. Now she helps others do the same with one of her best kept secrets, data. And what I think you’re going to love about our conversation is that she does a great job at breaking down why you need to understand your data and where you can actually find the data that matters for your business while you’re selling digital products.

Speaker1: [00:01:41] So let me bring on my good friend, Jennifer. You are listening to the Empowered Business podcast. I’m your host, Monica Froese, a mom of two and your secret weapon to creating a six figure digital product business. I’m on a mission to help 1000 women make 100000 dollars a year. That’s right. One hundred million dollars towards financial independence for women. As an online business expert, I am teaching you everything I know right here week after week so you can join us on the journey to one hundred million dollars. Sound good? Then let’s jump in. 

Speaker1: [00:02:35] Jennifer, welcome to the Empowered Business podcast. How are you? 

Speaker2: [00:02:36] Hi, I’m good. How are you? 

Speaker1: [00:02:38] Oh, I’m great. I’m so excited that we finally get to talk on the podcast. I think it’s funny. I always like to give context about my guests because most of the guests so far I’ve known fairly well. And you were in my first peer mastermind in the online business world, which is kind of crazy. Feels like then we’ve known each other like a lifetime. Pretty much. Yeah. I just think that’s really I just think that’s funny. So for context, Jennifer and I literally have known each other since the beginning of our businesses, so we know a lot about each other and it’s been an interesting journey. So with that being said, why don’t you tell everyone how you got started on this entrepreneurial journey and what your business is and what you do now?

Speaker2: [00:03:17] Yeah, so I actually started and I’m going to try to give a really streamlined version of the story, because Monica knows that there have been a ton of things that have happened in this journey for me. So, but I started back in 2009 as a fitness blogger. I co-founded one of the first influencer networks when I realized that there was such a big gap between bloggers and brands and how they partnered and worked together. I actually found through co-founding that company that I really had a specialty in online community management. So I ended up going in and doing some consulting for Monster.com to help them with some community building. And then I went on to the Y, you see, which was a young entrepreneurship council where I served as their community manager for quite some time.

Speaker2: [00:03:57]  So I really kind of got the entrepreneur itch even more in that role because I was working with these huge name entrepreneurs who now are like celebrities in our world. But back then, we’re just getting started. And so it really just sped that side of me. But I also had just gotten married. I really wanted to have kids and I was working around the clock. So I decided to kind of take a pause and go into corporate and kind of like float one of the nice cubicle jobs, have a couple of kids and then leave. I had no intention of staying long term. I had no intention of trying to, like, climb the corporate ladder. I just wanted good benefits and a steady paycheck and like a nine to five. Well, I somehow accidentally ended up in H.R. That’s a whole long story during the time I was in corporate and this is when Monica and I started really becoming friends, is I had started another blog when my itch, came back. I’m constantly cycling through wanting to be an entrepreneur whenever I’m not. So itch came back.

Speaker2: [00:04:48] I started another blog. Monica was a blogger at the time, so we became friends through that, started our mastermind. I ended up going on to sell that blog and business to a large company kind of resume focus on my corporate position. And then it came back again and I left the corporate job and started helping other online business owners with their operations, because at this point I had so much experience in the back end of the business. So in doing that, I was helping all these people and realized that they had such a gap in their data like they were making decisions. And I would be trying to understand where the decision was coming from or how I could influence the decision. But there was no data to back up what they were doing.

Speaker2: [00:05:27] And so when I felt like they were doing the wrong thing, for example, I am a very opinionated person. 

Speaker1: [00:05:29]No!

 Speaker2: [00:05:30]So when I felt like they were doing the wrong thing, I’m like, I need a way to be able to quantify this, to show them that they’re wrong. Right. Like the ultimate brat I am.So I started really digging into Google Analytics from there, just got techier and techier and realized that as I was building, I started building custom dashboards for my operations clients and I realized that there was such a gap and such a need for this in the space. And so over time, I started shifting away from operations and focusing solely in data analytics and measurement, specifically around marketing and sales. So that’s the summary of how I got to where I am.

Speaker1: [00:06:08] So in other words, you have a lot of different experiences and your journey is very fascinating. I have so many questions I could ask right now, but I think, first of all, what I want to say is I would say a decent amount of the audience listening has probably been a student of mine at some point, unless you’re brand new here. Either way, welcome. But people who’ve been following me for any amount of time know that I love data. But here’s the differentiation I’m really good at intaking data so I can look at let’s just say, like when I’m running ads, I can look and say immediately on different data points and be like, OK, So this is where I should start problems shooting because this number is too low. It’s very easy for me to ingest data. What Jennifer does to dumb it down. And there is so much data out there, and there’s so many ways to collect data that the issue is it’s really hard to get a holistic view of what’s going on in your business and like aggregating that information. And to this day, I’ve never had a really great way to do it. It’s kind of like piecemeal and it’s a lot of work when it’s piecemeal and then you miss things. So actually while we’re speaking, I’m going to be signing a contract for Jennifer to get me a dashboard finally. 

Speaker1: [00:07:19] So just know that everything when we talk about data, nobody’s perfect.

Speaker1: [00:07:20] Fortune 100 companies are not perfect with data. I’ve seen you over the last few years, find your sweet spot making data accessible to people who otherwise wouldn’t have it.

Speaker2: [00:07:29] Yeah, I know I. Couldn’t agree with you more like when I was in corporate and it’s funny, my backgrounds are in the corporate side of things,

Speaker2: [00:07:35] And so people think of H.R. to have nothing to do with data. But actually over the past five years or so, people analytics have become a huge focus in these large organizations.

Speaker2: [00:07:44] And so I consulted internally with top executives, people making decisions for Fortune 10 XYZ company, and they don’t have time to be sifting through piles and piles of data. And also they tend to struggle with the super analytical people who are gathering the data. Right? So I found a sweet spot. I always joke and this is probably not a nice way to phrase it, but I’m the nerd translator like I am so good, at least in corporate. I would work with the data analytics team, get all the data and then how do I then take that, synthesize it down to what the executive actually needs to know to make a decision, visualize it so they can look at that and make a decision in 30 seconds or less and then give it to them. And so my goal was to try to bring that here into the online business space because we’re using multiple tools, we’re selling on different platforms. We’re running ads on different things. We’re marketing on different channels. And you’re right, there’s no one size fits all centralized solution to be able to see everything right? Most entrepreneurs are waking up in the morning and checking five different platforms to see how they’re doing versus, I wake up in the morning and I pull up my dashboard on my phone and I know exactly how much I’ve made to the penny this month. Broken down by product, broken down by source, even more detailed than Quickbooks because they can’t break it down that way. So that is really like what I’ve loved to be able to do for people is to help them not get so overwhelmed by data and exactly make it accessible and make it easy for them to be more strategic by leveraging data in their business.

Speaker1: [00:09:15] So I can’t even imagine the day when I can look at one thing, which hopefully I will have after working with Jennifer. And because I can, like I said, I can ingest the data very easily. I can look at data points and be like, OK, I know it’s go time. I know exactly what I need to change based on the data I’m looking at. But you’re exactly right. I have to pull data from a myriad of different platforms, not only from where I host myself and landing pages, but where people check out which my business is still four different places based on the funnel, which is actually very common because as you evolve as a business owner, you’re trying different solutions and funnel based checkouts are different than shop based checkout.

Speaker1: [00:09:51] And oftentimes you have a need for both.

Speaker1: [00:09:54] I mean, it’s actually in a way, it’s kind of like why is it this way? But it just is because this is tech. This is how tech is. I try to explain to my students that it’s really hard because people who come into the online business world, they want one tool to do everything. And I was in tech for 11 years prior to being an entrepreneur and my husband still in tech. So we laugh because we’re like there’s no such thing as an all in one platform. A company is really great at one thing, typically, sometimes two, but usually a software company specializes in one thing and that’s not going to cover all the aspects of your business. You end up with multiple tools pieced together, but how they talk to each other and the data they transfer between each other isn’t always a clean, smooth thing. It just isn’t. And so having someone like you to connect those dots for people like me who just want the data available, like you’re you’re talking about your executives, I’m like, I am that person. I want to sit in a boardroom, give me the data so I can make a decision. I don’t want to collect it. I want someone or something else to do it. When you’re listening to this, do not underestimate how important what she does is, which we’ll talk more about. But I actually, I’m jumping a little bit because there is something you said in your intro that I also want to touch on, because I have a lot of people in this audience that are bloggers. Like you said, we met because you had a website which was like a productivity website, and we were both heavily pushing our blog posts back then. And it was a very typical blogger type model leading with free content creation. Why did you decide to sell?

Speaker2: [00:11:21] Wow. Yeah, that’s definitely a surprising question. So there were a couple of things. One, personally, in my life, I had Lyme disease at the time, so I was really struggling physically. And so to be dealing with that, I actually did seek a disability leave from work for five weeks. I was a mom of two at this point, a very demanding, full time corporate job in a very senior role and running this business. So adding in getting sick was just like the straw that broke the camel’s back. But what I will say is that part of the reason was because it was so much work to lead with all free content, like I was just constantly having to create nonstop.

Speaker2: [00:11:59] And it kind of also felt like when you’re promoting only free content, it felt like and you remember this because like we were dealing with the algorithm change, right? Like you’d finally hit a smooth spot with, like Pinterest or Facebook or Google and then all of a sudden an algorithm change slams down and your income is cut in half. Or remember the year Amazon changed our affiliate commissions and that was like gutting! They dropped us from like eight percent to four percent and it was brutal! So it just kind of felt like I was like running a hundred miles an hour, but I was never getting anywhere. And the biggest advantage to that business was when I started introducing digital products, and that was, I think, probably influenced by you because you had just started doing that with some of your courses. And I was like, well, I need something even just like ebooks and getting started with, like mini courses and then eventually a bigger course. That was what kind of made the work start to be worth it.

Speaker2: [00:12:51] But then again, with me getting sick and having all these other things on my plate, plus I just, if you couldn’t tell from my story I love change. So it’s easy for me to just quickly be like, I’ll just start something new. The opportunity presented itself. So I went for it.

Speaker1: [00:13:04] Ok, let me ask you this then. If you were going to get back into having a blog again, what would you do differently in the landscape that you see now in online marketing?

Speaker3: [00:13:17] Oh, good question. So I would not be as focused on pushing out a million different things, like for me it would be very strategic, it would be about funneling them to what I want them to do. And then the pieces of content I would create would also be really acquisition focused. So, for example, if I thought like, If I, I just see so much data, so I’m struggling to answer this question in a way that makes sense, but like I see so much data about people who push out content everywhere, and there’s always a leading source of traffic for certain pieces of content, certain topics, etc.. And so I think I would be really strategic about that and knowing, like when I’m creating this content, not only who is it for, but where am I going to be promoting this and what kind of content works really well on that platform so that every action step I’m taking a strategic from the point of getting them to get to the blog post and then what do I want them to do from that content to something that’s actually a little bit more profitable. Right? Which would be getting them on my email list, getting them into a digital product or a digital program.

Speaker1: [00:14:16] We think very similar, this is literally how I teach in my course. I actually just did a free challenge where I kept, it was a lot of people who were new to the online online landscape. And the number one question I got in this challenge, sometimes it’s so frustrating to articulate this because it’s like, no, you’re asking the wrong question. I kept repeating myself. You’re asking a question because what they were asking was, well, OK, if I create a digital product, and then I set it up with the sales mechanism, the sales funnel to sell it, how do I get people to it? I said, you’re still asking the wrong question because everyone wants to know how to get the traffic. And I kept saying, we don’t care about the traffic until we understand what the end point is.

Speaker1: [00:14:57] And back when we were blogging, the end point was like a moving target. It was like, well, we will get some display ad income or like you said, let’s let’s send them to an Amazon affiliate link. And the reality was we were pushing on a lot of free content and it served like a lot of different not very profitable purposes. And so it didn’t keep our content like honed in and always driving towards a main call to action. And so every time someone is like, well, how do I get people there? You’re asking the wrong question, because first we need to identify what you want them to do when they’re there and work backwards. I compared it to like getting a college degree, you know, at the end of the four years you’re going to graduate. Right. Isn’t that the first thing you know is you’re going to graduate the whole point of being here a degree, that’s the end point. Then you were back in freshman year. You take your Gen Ed,  and then you take your intro to your major and then maybe you’ll add on a minor in your junior year. And that’s the reality. You backwards moving same thing and resulted on X date. I’m going to buy a new house. OK, well, what has to happen to get me into the new house? Well, now I got to get a real estate agent and then I got to put my existing house up for sale. You always start with the end point in mind, but for some weird reason in the blogging model, it was not taught that way for many, many years. It was just like free content. And that was it was like a dot a period at the end of that. 

Speaker2: [00:16:27] Well, and it’s still not. And I also think, like, sometimes people need to put a little bit of the blinders on, like when someone looks at a business owner that’s ahead of you, you’re not seeing what’s behind the scenes. So like let’s say Monica is like I’ll use myself as an example. I post blog post every week, some weeks we have two pieces of content that come out. Right. But like Monica said, one, we are very strategic and intentional about the content that we’re putting out. I am paying someone else to optimize that, to acquire new traffic from Google or other platforms. We are creating things based on data, based on where people are coming from.

Speaker2: [00:16:49] And I have a team. Right.

Speaker2: [00:16:50] So it’s not just me throwing out random content like I would have done in two thousand nine or twenty thirteen, right. Where it was just like put as much as you can and the more you put out the more chances of you have of people coming to your website and you getting that like point zero zero one cent for their view right now. It’s like yes, maybe even when we have content that people are like, like we just did a post that was about like best morning routines.

Speaker2: [00:17:16] And at first like, I could see someone coming and being like, oh, Jen’s just trying to acquire any traffic she can. It’s like, no. When you actually read that blog post, we talk about the importance of data, like having a data review in your morning routine, because guess what? When I wake up in the morning, that is the first thing I do. I check my data before I brush my teeth.

Speaker2: [00:17:33] I know, I know I’m next level. But like, that is what I do.

Speaker1: [00:17:35] Back in the day when we were bloggers. And I say that in quotations because I have a whole episode before this that was about how I hate the term blogger and we’re actually content creators. But you can go back to Episode twelve if you want to hear that rant every morning. We used to check our Google Analytics, but not to see how much money we made. We were checking it to see how many people were on our site. Backwards, backwards. Do you care how many people are on your site or do you care how much money you made while you were sleeping? I personally would rather see how much money I was making while I was sleeping.

Speaker2: [00:18:07] A hundred percent. And I get in this fight with clients. I’m like a difficult person to work with and I’m not worried about working with you because we’re so similar. But like a lot of times clients come to me and they’re like, great, we’re going to measure how many Instagram followers I have and how that’s growing. And I’m like, no, we’re not. And if you think we’re going to, I’ll give you your money back, because that’s not the kind of data that I look at. I’m happy to tell you how much money you’re making from your Instagram activities. I’m happy to tell you which of your stories or which of your posts resulted in getting people on your email list or making a purchase. But if you just want to measure. How many people follow you on Instagram, you should go invest in a seventy nine a month tool and not in a data analyst because this is not what you need. Like I focus on helping people figure out what of their marketing activities are getting them results, because I spent many, many years just like you back in the day spinning my wheels and churning out stuff that was not strategic when I could have if I had just been. And I will say that, you and I were a little bit more data driven back then than the average blogger. But even using us. Right? Like we both really doubled down on Pinterest back then. And I mean my blog was two million page views a year. And I think 80 percent of our traffic was coming from Pinterest.

Speaker2: [00:19:18] So we were looking at that, seeing where people were coming from and then pushing out more content to those platforms. But most business owners are not thinking that way. And I don’t know if it’s the blogging edge that helps us with this, but like, I’ll get behind a seven figure business owner and I’m like, great, where most of your sales are coming from. They’re like my cart tools. And I’m like, no, like where? How are people getting to your cart tool, like, how are they buying? Oh, I don’t know. But I market everywhere. Well, if you’re spending money on a Pinterest person in money and an Instagram person in money on your YouTube person and you’re doing all these things, how do you know which of those activities is actually selling your products? And they’re like, oh, we don’t know that. I just pay them off,

Speaker1: [00:19:57] Which is crazy when you think about it. Like even I am very fascinated to see when you build my dashboard, if I’m correct, because I know where to go to get the information. So I think I understand. But I’m curious if I’m missing something, because, again, I don’t have the information properly aggregated to make it as clear as you make it. So, OK, so this gets into a really good data conversation that I think, and I get that the word data is intimidating to a lot of people like me. And you and I happen to like numbers a lot. And I understand that a lot of people do not. So let’s talk as if we’re talking to those types of people, because I think that’s probably predominantly who’s listening right now.

Speaker1: [00:20:40] So someone is getting going with selling their digital products and they’re making some money right now and they like everyone else, that has the buzzword out there. I want to scale! I want to make lots of money as I sleep and they come to you in there. They want your help. And you’re like, you know, here’s the thing. When we you take on clients, but let’s say that they’re just not there to be able to afford like a one on one service and they want to, like, DIY it. Where do you even start? Like where should we be starting as a digital product creator of any kind, whether it’s a course, a group program. I mean, because in essence it’s kind of all the same, where do they start? What should they be doing? 

Speaker2: [00:21:22] Absolutely. So first, I’m going to start with even like the question before your question, which is like they need Google Analytics. Yeah, like every

Speaker2: [00:21:30] Thought forum, all of these individual platforms have their own tracking mechanism. I like to centralize it all. So I would say you need Google Analytics installed on your website. First and foremost, since most people listening probably are digital product creators, which is what everybody should be doing.

Speaker2: [00:21:44] So they are working with a cart tool, right. Or a funnel tool. What you want to do is do a Google search and look up like, let’s say you’re working with Thrivecart. Thrivecart, Google Analytics, e commerce. People do not realize how easy it is to get the revenue like the actual sales data from your cart tool into Google Analytics. So first and foremost, install GoogleAnalytics on your site, do a Google search of your cart tool and e commerce with Google Analytics, because I would say at least 50 percent of the car sales on the market, it’s just a matter of toggling on one setting and do lot and putting your ID property in the right spot in that tool. And it’s all going to

Speaker2: [00:22:23] Flow in beautifully and easy. It’s not going to be perfect, but not I mean, it’s you and I talked before this about attribution and how impossible it is to make anything one hundred percent. But it’s going to give you a ton of insight into where your

Speaker2: [00:22:34] Sales are coming from. And then next, in terms of what to focus on, it’s that for me, as someone that’s behind the scenes and a lot of digital marketing companies, I’m looking at what sources of traffic are getting leads or sales. And so there’s a report in Google Analytics called the Source Medium Report. It’s in the acquisition section under all traffic I believe. That report will tell you almost everything you need to know for a product based business owner. You’re going to see where your traffic is coming from, how long they’re on the site, which I think

Speaker2: [00:23:04] Is an important metric. I know that that’s kind of a one people to be on. But when you’re looking at sales pages, to me it’s very indicative of how sticky your content is and how long people are staying on the page. And you’re also going to be able to see that e commerce information so you can know if they actually went on to become a leader of sales. So that’s honestly like if you do nothing else, it’s understanding first and foremost where your traffic is coming from. And then which of those traffic sources are actually creating those leads in sales? Because it will tell you I’m behind the scenes, a lot of big numbers. And it’s not always your top source of traffic. That’s your top. Source of revenue or sales,

Speaker1: [00:23:39] Though, I find. That the complicated part, like I know how to go into Google Analytics and find out where my traffic is coming from, I know if it’s coming from my email list, if it’s Pinterest, Facebook, I even as far as understanding if it’s

Speaker1: [00:23:52] Coming from Facebook ads,

Speaker1: [00:23:54] Because we use these cool things called UTM codes, which Jennifer also has a whole product on, and you should buy it if you don’t know what I’m talking about, because it will change your life. And we’ll link to all this in the show notes.

Speake1: [00:24:05] But the one thing that I

Speaker1: [00:24:08] Find is the sticky point. Once you start getting going, so you get your Google analytics, you hook it up to your e commerce card. So like my Google Analytics, I see all my Thrivecart data. That’s predominantly what we use for checkout at this point. We see all of that data come in like we just did a big launch. And so Google Analytics, we log in and it was like your week is insanely like 500 percent over last week. I’m like, well, yes, it better be because we’re launching. So I have all that. But where it breaks down and I think where a lot of people who don’t like numbers don’t realize it’s breaking down is to your point of,  you can see where people are coming from, but understanding where they’re converting from is very difficult. And this is where this concept of attribution comes in. So I first ran into this with Google Analytics because I wanted to set up goals and goals I thought were going to be a very straightforward thing in Google Analytics. And you’re probably like, yeah, you’re wrong. Yeah, I was wrong when I found out in the whole reason I wanted to set up goals. This was my whole purpose. OK, I want to see if the sales coming from Facebook Ad, what campaign,

Speaker1: [00:25:12] What ad set, what ad.

Speaker1: [00:25:14] Same thing with Pinterest. And then I was like, then I got going on Instagram. So I want to see that. And what was happening was my goals were not attributing to those platforms. They were attributing to lead pages where my sales pages hosted or was attributing to my checkout cart at the time, which was send out. And I’m like, wait a minute. But that wasn’t their entry point. Their entry point had to be somewhere else with my email. Was it Facebook? Where was it? And I’m like, why isn’t it attributing to the original source? That is very difficult to figure out.

Speaker2: [00:25:45] It is. This is the whole reason that I have service based business right now, because it’s actually I mean, if you are someone that’s comfortable with tech, like if what we’ve talked about so far has not scared you at all, if you Google what’s called cross domain tracking, that is the solution to what Monica just described. And let me explain to you why Google does it, because

Speaker2: [00:26:06] I think people don’t understand why that’s happening. I get a lot of people that will show me their first media report and PayPal’s in it. People is not sending any one of us traffic people does not care about your business. They care about making money. But what happens is like think about it from Google’s perspective. Google sees that you click over from Facebook, they see that you go to the sales page, they click initiate purchase, they see that you click on PayPal, but now you’re leaving the website. You’re technically going to PayPal to complete a transaction. So Google’s moved on from you right there over. And all of a sudden you’re getting sent back to the website for the thank you page. And Google’s like, hey, look, we have someone new coming from people. And you ask the fact that that sale actually came from Facebook. So it’s called cross-linking. Tracking it is a little bit more technical, but that is what you need to set up in order to avoid that from happening if your user changes your URL at any point

Speaker2: [00:26:59] In the journey. So like with your website, for example, they probably go from your domain to like your domain dot thrive card dot com to check out and then they’re sent back to your domain or they’re still on a Thrivecart.

Speaker1: [00:27:10] Thank you. 

Speaker2: [00:27:11] And that’s where that breakdown happens. But yeah, I mean, you do start to like you can’t trust exactly what’s in there out of the box. I see. Start there for most people because it’s more than what they’re currently looking at. Right. Like it’s not going to be perfect. There’s going to be a ton of direction on traffic and you’re going to be like, oh, these people all kind of bookmarks. No. Twenty thousand people do not have your site bookmark like that just means Google didn’t know where they were coming from. But you’re getting some indication. And the more you get in the habit of what I like to say with data is like the more you get in a habit of

Speaker2: [00:27:41] Looking at it, even if you

Speaker2: [00:27:42] Don’t really know what you’re looking at, you’re going to start having questions.

Speaker2: [00:27:45] Even if, like everyone who comes to me and says, I’m not a numbers person, I’m not a data person, I don’t know what I’m looking at. I have never actually had anybody look at data and then not have a follow up question. And that is where the gold is, because even when I’m talking about this source media report and let’s assume for a minute that you don’t have the chromosome problem if it says that Facebook is your biggest source of traffic, like you said, about the utmost. Well, Facebook, I have a million ways to send you traffic was a Facebook story. Was it a post? Was it a post on your profile? Was it a post in a group? If it was a post in a group, which group was it? Which post in which group was it like? Was it an ad? Which ad was it. Which campaign which attracts so many.

Speaker2: [00:28:24] Like just knowing it’s from Facebook is kind of useless because you might be investing forty nine different ways in Facebook. So being able to draw that down, also understanding which pieces of content like what was it on Facebook,

Speaker2: [00:28:37] Not just where specifically on Facebook but like was it the you are directly promoting your sales pitch or were you directly promoting a piece of content that had a banner in it for your digital product, and that’s how they got to the sales pitch and bought. So it’s like we you’re saying it’s like starting with the end in mind and then slowly backing out of it.

Speaker2: [00:28:54] But I think people feel like they need to like they’re probably listening, going, oh, I wouldn’t have thought to do that.

Speaker2: [00:28:59] So how would I know?

Speaker2: [00:29:00] You don’t. it’s normal that you don’t think to do that. You look at the data and then you will have questions. And that’s going to be what makes you think to do that. But most people’s barrier to entry is that they’re just not looking at the data because they think they won’t know what to do.

Speaker1: [00:29:13] And the next barrier to entry is expecting perfection. We had a thing in my fortune five hundred company I worked for, which means I was working for one of the top two publicly traded companies in the United States. Like so like if anyone is going to get their data right, the people reporting to Wall Street better.

Speaker1: [00:29:31] Right? But yet we still had a saying that was very popular in the company. It was called junk in, junk out. So in other words, year over year, same junk data. As long as you’re measuring the same way, junk in, junk out. Because the reality was no company has perfect data, not even the richest companies on the planet. And I think new entrepreneurs have a very hard time grasping this, that there is no such thing as perfection. So one of the things when I was talking about how I go into multiple different tools, because I’m talking specifically about all the different ways you could be getting traffic from Facebook.

Speaker1: [00:30:03] Well, if I’m spending ten thousand dollars a month on Facebook ads, which is a very average budget for me like that, I could expect to spend that this month in Facebook ads. I leverage Facebook’s actual reporting a lot because I need a better idea of how those ads down through the actual ad creative and pictures that are being shown. But the thing is, even that’s not perfect because Facebook wants to take credit for as much as it can.

Speaker1: [00:30:30] And that’s a whole, we could have a whole podcast on attribution windows, which we won’t do right now. But the reality is, even as someone who understands data as well as I do, I understand that I’m seeing what Facebook wants me to see in reality. And so trying to aggregate this information through Google Analytics can only make my business stronger, which is why you’re like my next step, you’ve been my next step for like a year and a half. But, you know, sometimes I just kind of want to put even I want to put my head in the sand about data sometimes be like, let’s just deal with what we have. The reality is, I know it sounds scary, but you can’t do this magical thing. People talk about scaling, which is still a bad word. You can’t do it with no numbers. There’s just no such thing. And so even if it’s not, it makes you uncomfortable. Like, that’s just one of those mindset blocks where you have to break through if you want your business to be successful, just like in a nutshell.

Speaker2: [00:31:21] Yeah.

Speaker2: [00:31:22] I mean, I wasn’t it’s not like I majored in economics or

Speaker2: [00:31:25] Or statistics or geometry or I don’t even know all the math terms, because if you had asked me, like, I probably have corporate mentors that would laugh if they knew I had a business based on numbers. Right. Like, I never well, I love numbers. And I and definitely I’ve always been I would say, like business wise, more of a numbers person in life. I never considered myself a numbers person. I majored in English literature. I worked in H.R. I count with my fingers. Like if you try to be like my seven year old is better at math than I am, OK, but I mean, I am a ninja and excel like you want to excel to do that math like I’m your girl. So I think you just need to give yourself more credit. If you’re listening to this, you are creating

Speaker2: [00:32:03] Something out of nothing, like literally nothing. And I think because we’re in this world of people that are making a million dollars overnight and we’re always feeling like we’re imposter’s or we’re not doing enough or we’re not making enough, I think we lose sight of how incredible it is that we we’ve built these businesses from nothing, like nothing. And so stop doubting yourself like you can do this. It’s not hard. You just need to trust yourself and your ability to look at numbers and be open to asking questions. And that’s all it comes down to.

Speaker1: [00:32:35] Yeah, you need a healthy dose of curiosity, is what I like to say. My MBA, my master’s in business, is actually in finance and marketing, which is hilarious. I was the girl in undergraduate did Poly Phsy. I was going to go to law school. That was actually my path. And then I had some stuff happen to my family and it didn’t end up being my path. So I was in my corporate job. I got my master’s, funny enough because I didn’t have the undergrad accounting classes and everything. Luckily, I’m pretty good with numbers, but I will never forget I took a summer class, it was corporate finance. That professor would probably laugh if he knew what I did for a living now Because there’s these financial calculators that I swear to you two times two is not four when you put it in th. And this class was like a 601 class. So I mean, I should have had a lot more building blocks before this. And I was so confused. I’m like, this calculator is not a typical calculator. Why isn’t two times two four? And I was like freaking out. He probably thought I was dumb and I finally had to go up to him and be like, listen, I didn’t take this in undergrad. And you’re speaking such a foreign language when you’re teaching. I need you to say on your calculator push these buttons, and I’m like, I might be the only one that needs this, but you need to do this for me because I need to pass this class because I had a 4.0 getting my MBA and he wasn’t going to ruin it. And, you know, it’s funny because, like, if I hadn’t gone up there and asked for him to dumb it down, to show me on his calculator what he was hitting, I probably would have not only ruined my 4.0, but who knows if I would have passed that class. Same thing when you own your business. Ask, ask questions. Get to know the person. Like how I know Jennifer. And she’s really good at this. And I ask her questions.

Speaker1: [00:34:12] You ask Questions. A healthy dose of curiosity. There’s nothing wrong with admitting you don’t know.

Speaker2: [00:34:17] Ask one hundred percent when I’ll tell you when I was in corporate I work for a Fortune 100 like you did. And so we had these annual investor calls, right. There were actually quarterly investor meetings. And one of my mentors, like when I first started in H.R., he was talking about something finance related. And I said, no, I am not a numbers person. Write a sentence. We all love to say I’m not a numbers person. He said you need to be a numbers person because numbers are the language of business. So you think you understand the business that we are in. I want you to listen to the investor call and tell me how well you understand our business. So fine. So I sat and I listened to the investor call and I realized they like from after the CEO gave his welcome and like the niceties and then they jumped in. I realized I knew nothing about our business. It was like they were speaking another language. And so I showed up to every single one of those calls for the seven years I was with that company. I would invite executives to come listen with me exactly like people who know more than you love to talk about what they know about. So I would ask them, hey, can you can look, can I sit with you in your office, with you when you listen to this call so I can ask you questions and I would ask questions. And then when I moved on to manage a team, I did the same thing. My team and I would invite executives to come in and sit with us. We would ask them questions, “Oh, what were you thinking when they said this? What were you saying when you said this?” And I don’t work for this company any more. But I guarantee you, if I got on one of those calls right now, I would be able to answer those questions for other people because it just sometimes takes time and exposure and curiosity like

Speaker2: [00:35:43] And that’s it.

Speaker2: [00:35:44] There’s no magic pill here. It’s just you’ve got to just take the time and get curious and put yourself in front of it.

Speaker1: [00:35:51] That reminds me of when Pinterest went public and I read their whole public filing was like one hundred eighty pages. Oh yeah, I remember that. And I distilled it down into like maybe like a seven thousand, ten thousand word blog post. But what was really telling from that was when you go public, the company has to tell a lot about what’s going on behind the scenes. And Pinterest literally laid out the roadmap of what they were doing with the product and all these things that people are saying and Facebook groups and all these assumptions that were being made. I’m like, that’s not what Pinterest is doing and that’s not what that means. And they’re like, well, how do you know? I read it. You know, I had I was telling a Pinterest course on their advertising. And the only way, if you’re going public, the only way they were making money was through advertising. I’m teaching people about advertising. So they’re going to put in that report what they’re doing in terms of advertising. So if I’m going to be a good teacher, I should read it. So I did. And then I was like, oh, man, no one knows what they’re talking about in these Facebook groups at all. And it was just it was really it just solidified that I had a healthy dose of curiosity about the thing that I was helping other people on. And no one else thought to do that. Like not a single person thought to do that. That I know of to read the report because they thought that was something that’s not something we do in marketing. Well, yeah, it is. Yeah, it is. So yeah. This is oh my gosh. I could talk to forever. Now I, I hear my kids starting to come up because we’ve gone over. If you have you guys can hear my three year old crying, I apologize. But this is the world of podcasting when you have children. OK, so can you tell us for all of us who have that healthy dose of curiosity now about data and I know you have some really great entry level products, you tell us how we can find you.

Speaker3: [00:37:36] Yeah, absolutely. So it’s the nimble co dotcom and Monica can link everything in the show notes. But we have a shop on the site. We have courses that will teach you kind of if you wanted to go a little bit deeper and learn some of the technical things that we talked about. We also have complete DIY solutions, like if Google Analytics terrifies you and you don’t want to be clicking through pages and pages of unknown ICEL dashboards that are just plug and play that connect to your Google

Speaker2: [00:37:59] Analytics and just synthesize it down to like kind of the basics that you need to see to get started. But yeah, even if it’s not through me, YouTube, Google, like, I just want people to understand that there’s tools available because it will change your business. So whether it’s you’re buying something for me or you’re consuming my free content or you’re just spending time Googling it or searching on YouTube, like I highly recommend investing in the skill of it for yourself. 

Speaker1: [00:38:35] That’s what I love about you. You have such a heart to want to help people. How many people when they’re closing on a podcast, even if it’s not for me, go, go and look at a YouTube video. I mean, honestly, that just goes to show that your heart is truly to help people read their data better and succeed in their business. So. Thank you so much for joining us. Such a great episode.

Speaker3: [00:38:41] Thanks. This was so fun.

Speaker1: [00:38:47] Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Empowered Business podcast, Let’s Stay in Touch. I just opened a brand new Facebook group for digital product creators. Whether you are new to digital products or an existing digital product creator, our new Facebook group, Digital Product Insiders, is perfect for you. Head on over to Monica Froese dotcom forward slash group to join for free. See you here again next week.