Hey, everyone! In today’s episode, I share the mic with Scott Desgrosseilliers, the founder of Wicked Reports, which is a service that will accurately track each element of your marketing plan and measure its value and efficacy.
Tune in to hear how a lobster business inspired Scott to found Wicked Reports, how the service integrates with all your marketing services, why they charge based on revenue generated, and how they’ve grown with just word-of-mouth advertising.
[00:34] Before we jump into today’s interview, please leave a review and rating and subscribe to the Growth Everywhere Podcast!
[02:13] When Scott first read Steve Jobs’ biography, he related and was inspired.
[03:04] Wicked Reports is a data company that happens to track marketing; they are not a marketing company. They are “techies through and through”.
[03:33] Scott has always been drawn to the idea of using data to predict outcomes.
[04:15] In 2014, Scott had a friend who was selling lobsters online.
[04:40] The friend spent his marketing budget on Facebook ads and it didn’t pay off.
[06:08] Wicked Reports has done about $1.7 billion in SMB transactions in three years.
[06:30] They tracked it and found that from first click to first purchase, the average time elapsed was 44 days.
[07:20] Scott ended up inventing something that has yet to be patented: a way to “wire” into an email system and track clients, sales, and revenue.
[08:35] It helped figure out the length of time it takes to close someone.
[09:35] Wicked Reports pricing model has evolved and Scott is finally happy with it.
[09:45] Wicked Reports now charges based on revenue generated.
[10:00] If the business doesn’t grow, then Wicked Reports doesn’t get any more money.
[10:10] So, the pricing starts at $199/month for up to $1 million in revenue and every additional million is another $49/month.
[10:20] This model gives them revenue, but is a small price to pay for their clients.
[10:53] Scott came up with the pricing model because he has a friend who runs Price Intelligently.
[11:10] After attended a Price Intelligently workshop, they surveyed their existing customers.
[11:38] Pricing was based on what customers were willing to pay based on a value metric.
[12:38] Wicked Reports integrates with Facebook. They auto-track your Facebook ads.
[13:04] They also have a tracking template for AdWords.
[13:23] Wicked Reports also connects offline sales to online activity.
[13:28] They are the only company tracking online and offline sales through Facebook integration.
[13:45] Wicked Reports can also integrate with Taboola and Outbrain.
[14:20] Scott plans to stay with SMBs within reason.
[15:00] They can also track sales and interactions through your social network activity.
[16:07] Wicked Reports is at $1.2 million ARR.
[16:10] They also have about 390 customers. They have basically doubled their customers each year they have been in business.
[16:55] They now have a Zapier integration.
[17:54] They can also hook that into Quickbooks reports.
[18:42] Scott wants to create reports that will help clients make quick decisions.
[19:40] Wicked Reports has the ability to track “anything”.
[20:04] Jason Moore from Modus Operandi Wine is doing wine events.
[20:24] He is a Wicked Reports client.
[20:38] They found a way to track these live events and track sales related to the events.
[22:15] Wicked Reports will have a timeline of everything that has happened.
[22:34] There are three new facets that they are adding to their product.
[22:48] They are going to add the concept of “benchmarking”.
[23:12] Niche companies will find it is a harder road to a positive revenue stream. Benchmarking will help smaller companies reach their sales campaign goals, give context, and offer perspective.
[25:38] Knowing intent changes how Wicked Reports tracks data for their clients.
[26:14] Scott had two other businesses that he wasn’t into and that weren’t that successful.
[27:00] After helping out his friend with the live lobster sale business, he wanted to do a webinar about tracking ROI.
[27:25] From there, he was able to sell an initial data tracking product. It was a rough go, but it was a good start nonetheless.
[28:15] He got 10 customers out of the webinar.
[28:50] Scott didn’t have to reverse engineer his marketing funnel, it was all word-of-mouth that led to his success.
[29:55] Wicked Reports launched in 2015 at Icon.
[31:20] Influencers are open to helping if they think you will help them in return.
[32:35] Scott recommends the book The Surrender Experiment.
Hey everyone, in today’s episode I share the mic with Chase Granberry, co-founder of Authority Labs, which allows you to track rankings on Google and Bing.
Listen as Chase discusses how he built the company by hustling and being the best in the SEO software space, the value of zeroing in on one thing when it comes to growing a company, why it’s so important to track rankings, how he struggled to scale the technical side of the business when he knew nothing, and how positive thinking and reading voraciously are two key factors that have contributed to his own success.
01:25 – Authority Labs helps track your ranking and SEO in Google and Bing
02:15 – It is important to track your ranking for your brand name
02:56 – For the long term, your Google ranking will help draw organic traffic to your business
03:16 – Chase worked for a commercial printing company and he built an e-commerce site for them
04:20 – Chase worked for another company doing ad sales
04:40 – Chase did “anything internet” and got into consulting, building websites, email campaigns and SEO, and started to look for tools that he could use
05:30 – Authority Labs earns 3 million a year and they only have 4 full time employees
05:51 – The company grew by hustling, word of mouth, and being the best in the SEO software space
06:10 – There are more than 2,000 customers for Authority Labs
06:20 – Authority Labs has two different products: the interface product which starts at $99 and the other product which does data feed, it starts at 99 cents per thousand
07:48 – Chase wanted to add more products, but their focus is on scaling their service’s ranking for now
08:15 – The company is now coming to a point of trying out different products
09:15 – Eric likes Authority Labs’ focus on tracking and SEO
09:42 – How did you acquire your first 500 paying customers? – For the first six months or year, they were not charging the credit cards automatically
10:23 – All deals were straight sales deals and was going through direct messaging on LinkedIn
11:23 – Within the first six months, they got large data deals and grew their revenue from that
12:03 – Chase didn’t have any money at the time and had to work with what he knew and what could make the biggest impact
12:50 – They are now working on building more products and doing more sales
13:22 – They are also working on adding more blog posts such as technical articles and guest posts from influencers such as Todd Malicoat
14:35 – What’s one big struggle you had in growing the business? – This is the first company Chase has owned and ran
15:07 – A lot of the struggle is on scaling and growing the company as well as keeping up with the technical side of things
16:15 – Chase learned the technical side through a lot of reading and asking questions
16:30 – What was the one thing that was a game changer for you? – Reading about different cases of how people scaled and general concepts of doing work
18:33 – What’s one big change you made in the last year that’s impacted you or the business in a big way? – We intently started focusing on building new stuff
19:31 – What’s one new tool that you added in the last year that added a lot of value for you? – Datadog
Analytics and tagging aren’t the sexiest topics to entrepreneurs and marketers because they want to be working on things that have the highest impact on driving the needle.
But not implementing the proper tagging and tracking solutions leads to an overall slowdown in your marketing operations.
Not implementing a tool like Google Tag Manager is like letting debt snowball. In the technology world, people like to use the word technical debt. In this case, we can call it analytics debt.
First, we need to define what Google Tag Manger is. At a very high level, it helps marketers decrease the need to reach out to your engineers or IT team to add/remove/modify tracking codes on your website.
This means there’s no need to ask for:
adding Facebook or AdWords pixels
adding javascript snippets from miscellaneous tools (like e-mail service providers)
help with adding event tags
and much more
Basically, you’re no longer at the mercy of your developers/IT team and they’ll be a lot happier knowing that everything is safe in one place. As marketers, speed is everything—this means testing new tools and vendors in days rather than weeks.
For those visual learners like myself, here’s a quick introductory video:
Other key benefits:
Since Google Tag Manager is one line of code, it means it’ll help decrease load times.
Coding errors are minimized. Manual tagging causes more room for human error (and it’s tedious). GTM makes this all manageable. And if you have issues with the tags? Just deactivate them.
Here’s how to get started with Google Tag Manager:
Once you have created an account, you’ll be presented with the account dashboard.
Whenever you want to pull up your Google Tag Manager code, click on the link next to the name of the account (this is the code you will deploy across your site):
After that, you’re free to start creating tags and triggers for your website.
What Are Tags?
Google Tags make it easy to add conversion tracking, analytics, remarketing tags, and more. These are small snippets of code that can be Google Analytics/AdWords tags or non-Google tags (such as Facebook pixels).
Here’s an example of a tag we use to track who is clicking on our ‘Services’ page for our digital marketing agency:
A few key points on what’s happening here.
The naming convention:
Drip = Our e-mail service provider.
Event = An event we’re tracking in Google Analytics.
Custom HTML Tag = This is a snippet of code we’ve taken from our e-mail service provider.
Fire On = We’re only looking for people who click on specific links on our site. In this case, we’re only interested in the people who are clicking on marketing service page links.
How To Set Up A Tag
To set up a tag, click on ‘Tags’:
Then click the red ‘New’ button.
Then select a tag that you’d like to add. If you don’t see your product here, just choose ‘Custom HTML Tag’. For example, Facebook pixels would go under ‘Custom HTML Tag’:
For the sake of simplicity, we’re going to go with a Google Analytics Tag. And this will be the tag that is typically used across a website to track user behavior:
For ‘Tracking ID’, you’d put in your Google Analytics Tracking ID.
After that, hit ‘Continue’.
Where it says ‘Fire On’, select ‘All Pages’.
Viola! You’ve just set up your first tag!
This is a very simple implementation of a tag. You can certainly add complexities down the line for whatever you are trying to do.
Watch this video to get started with tags:
What Are Triggers?
Triggers will determine whether a tag is fired or not fired. More simply put, these are ‘rules’. Here’s what one of our triggers looks like:
For Triggers, there’s the option of selecting different events. In our case, we chose to look for people who are clicking on specific text (‘Content Marketing‘).
How To Set Up A Trigger
On the left sidebar, click on ‘Triggers’.
For this example, we’re going to track someone who clicked on a specific link, so select ‘Click’:
Select ‘Just Links’ under ‘Targets’, deselect ‘Wait for Tags’ and ‘Check Validation’, and then hit ‘Continue’:
In the ‘Fire On’ section, select ‘Some Clicks’ and select ‘Click Text’:
Enter in dummy text for now and save the Trigger. We’ll come back to it in a second.
Now it’s time to find what ‘Click Text’ actually looks like. First, we need to hit the carrot button right next to ‘Publish’ near the top right corner of the screen. Then we’ll hit the ‘Preview and Debug’ mode:
Here’s how to use the Debug Console:
What Are Events?
An event is an action. For example, if someone clicks on your phone number, you can tag that as an event and have it fire in Google Analytics. By doing this, you’ll be able to consistently measure actions that you deem important.
How To Set Up An Event:
Go to ‘Triggers’ on the left side.
Click on the red ‘new’ button.
Choose ‘Custom Event’:
For this event, we’re trying to track all people who ended up on our ‘Thank You Page’. We used the ‘Preview & Debug’ console to find a specific event to track and ended up with the following result:
After saving this Trigger, I’ll go into ‘Tags’ and make a tag specifically for tracking a Facebook conversion on this page:
Watch this video for more on how to set up event tracking:
What Are Macros?
As you continue to add to GTM, you’ll be adding repetitive tasks. What if you had the ability to create shortcuts for these tasks? That’s what macros are.
Here’s a video explanation:
What Are Some Practical Use Cases for GTM?
Where To Go From Here?
For more in-depth training on setting up Google Tag Manager, I highly recommend watching videos from GTM Training on YouTube.
In terms of practical use cases, here are some:
Consolidating all your web tags (such as analytics and conversion tracking)
Tracking events on specific sections of your website (such as phone numbers or filling out a lead form)
Tracking multi-channel dimension tracking (multiple sources from where a user came from)
Lead Source Form Tracking
Filtering Internal Traffic with Google Tag Manager
Removing referral spam
Tracking YouTube videos
Here are some of my favorite videos from GTM Training:
Track YouTube Videos with GTM
Phone Number Tracking with GTM
Track downloads (pdf, mp3 or mp4) with GTM
Multi-channel Dimension Tracking with GTM
E-mail Input Form Variable for GTM
Bonus: Google Tag Assistant
Google has a browser extension called Google Tag Assistant that allows users to see specific tags that are on each page. This helps with testing/implementation.
At the end of the day, Google Tag Manager is not only helpful for organizing all your tags; it opens up the possibilities for doing more with your web applications and speeds up your site by consolidating all the snippets that you had lying around before.
Give it a shot and let us know in the comments below what you think!
