So What? Content Marketing AMA

Well, hi there, everyone. Welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show. I'm Katie, joined by Chris and John. We're always above me for some reason. I don't know.

I feel like I always join late even though I'm always on time. It's just the way it works out. Anyway, uh today we're doing a content marketing Ask Me Anything. So basically, we've collected a lot of questions from our community, from past shows, uh from our subscribers about content marketing in general. And today we're gonna do our best to cover as many as possible.

So things like what is the biggest waste of time in content marketing, uh Google's changes and their impact on content marketing, content attribution. Um so we have a lot of questions. We have a decent list, Chris. So where would you like to start today? Well, let's see.

Let's start with uh our first question. This is from Lakshmi, who asks the very interesting question. How my question is how to measure the impact of content marketing on sales. What are some of the best metrics to evaluate how content marketing helps increase sales or revenue? So what do you two think?

Um, you know, I think there's a lot of different kinds of content, and I think that that's where I would start is what kind of content, what was the original intent of the content? You know, and you know, so our live stream, for example, our live stream is more of awareness and engagement content, at least in from my perspective. And so this particular show and the associated pieces of content that go with it are not necessarily meant to drive more sales, they're meant to demonstrate expertise, let people get to know us. So that's where I would start. That doesn't answer her question, but I would need to start to parse out first what content are you creating specifically.

Um but then that's where I might start to look at Chris some of uh our attribution reports, like a most valuable pages, which uses the Markov chain modeling methodology. Um, look, it looks like it got the answer right. If this if Chris already had it pulled up. Um, which essentially, so what this report does is this tells you what pages on your website, what content on your website is contributing to conversions. And if you have the conversions on your website set up such that it's you know, contact sales or buy this thing or fill out this cart or whatever the sales equivalent is for your company, then a report like this can tell you that the content.

So, for example, five ways uh AI is changing marketing. It was a keynote. That particular keynote is driving people once they're on our website to take some kind of an action to contact us to fill out a form. Those are the conversions that we've set up. So your equivalent might be to you know, have a cart completion or something like that.

So that would be the way that I would look at it. That's exactly right. For content that you own that is on your site, this is the best model to use. Because it's essentially like looking at where people walk on the way to the register. Like what aisles in the store do they go through the most?

And then can you put um can you can you funnel people towards those aisles knowing that it helps that to get them there? Now, here's where it gets challenging if the content doesn't live on a site that you manage, right? So, for example, if you post content on LinkedIn or YouTube with and so on and so forth, those are no longer under your control, and you can't see what else somebody is doing. So, in the cases like that, um, you have to do essentially really, really, really large-scale regression analysis to figure out what of the I guess audience destinations that you're on, which one of those and the activities that you're doing and the metrics you're doing on those platforms are leading towards um some kind of measurable outcome. So, this is actually something we're uh in the middle of working on for ourselves.

I was working out this morning. Um, what I've I'm doing here uh is taking as much data as we can get from all sorts of different places. So we have inbound links to the Trust Insights website from Hrefs, we have uh Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter from all of our individual social channels from Agora Pulse. Um we have our download stats from our podcast, both of our podcasts on Libson. We have our Search Console data, we have our YouTube channel data, and what this is essentially doing is creating really, really, really, really, really big table of every single variable that I just talked about.

And what we're going to do is feed this to a machine learning algorithm to give it a target, an outcome of some kind that we care about. In this case, I'm I'm looking at at um uh Search Console uh impressions and clicks, and we're gonna say which one of these variables, alone or in combination, has the strongest mathematical relationship with the outcome we care about, and then can build a testing plan from that. So if it comes up and says Katie's Twitter account is the thing, plus our YouTube live stream, well, you know, obviously we'll continue posting on YouTube, but then like Katie, you need to be tweeting like 20 times a day. I'm just gonna go nuts on Twitter and just tweet everything I can possibly think of. Exactly.

And so this is an example when you're when you're dealing with content that isn't on a property that is that is yours, you can get the back end data from. Um, and we obviously recommend using really good uh systems like Agora Pulse and Talk Walker and and etc. to so that you can download the data. One that we actually need to bring in is I need to bring in our talk walker data as well, because for public relations, people who are media doing media mentions of us that aren't necessarily inbound links, they're just you know, someone mentioned uh John Wolf, uh partner Trust Insights was in interviewed this article and seeing when those things happen. So that would be my answer for the other part.

And if you have to Lakshmi's question, if you have things like sales data, that goes in this table, and then that is the the response variable, the target outcome that you're benchmarking everything against. And if you do that, you may find some interesting surprises. I remember when I did this for myself a few months ago, one of the variables that I did not expect was Twitter followers. I was like, so I it actually does matter how many people follow me on Twitter, um, which was was awkward. Well, excuse me, and you know, in a more realistic, simplistic way, but that people who don't have access to machine learning uh and writing custom code can actually do today.

If you're using a system like Google Analytics 4, as long as you have a goal in Google Analytics that's tied somehow to your sales. So again, a form fill, a cart fill, whatever the sales looks like for you, then you can use their attribution modeling software built into Google Analytics 4 to help you understand the content on your website uh that is doing the work. Or, you know, if you create a piece of content and then you post it to Twitter, and then you see that that piece of content from Twitter is then bringing people back to your site to buy something, that's a really straightforward way to start to see like is my what is my content doing. Exactly. So that would be the answer to that question.

Next question. Um actually, we had a quick uh comment from LinkedIn. Uh Russ was asking, does it work with getter and rumble? I'm not familiar with those properties, so I couldn't tell you whether it is or not. I know that our own stuff is this is all of our own code that we've written uh for these things because it's not built into uh existing utilities.

So uh quick quick side note. So getter, quick Google search is uh a brand new social media platform founded on the principles of free speech, uh so on so forth. So Getter is a social platform, and Rumble, I'm guessing Rumble is a uh management video platform. Gotcha. I mean, if those platforms give you CSV exports, then the answer would be yes.

Um, you know, if you if you're allowed to export your data and the performance of it, I don't see why that would be the case. Uh let's see. Next question. Lisa uh asking, what should content market market? Well, John, I'm gonna throw this one to you.

What should content marketers be doing about Web3? Web3, yeah. No, we were joking about this before we started. I said, well, it depends on which web three crackpipe that you're smoking. That would define what you should be doing.

Um, yeah, I've you know, we have had a lot of discussions about this stuff. Um yeah, I mean, really, you have to put a stake in the ground first and say, you know, what are you considering Web3? And you know, um, there's the whole currency NFT side of things, which I don't know, I don't even consider any of that stuff web three. There's more the um augmented reality, virtual reality web three stuff. Um, and then uh there are some people that push Web3 to be more of um like AI and massive computational power in the hands of users, you know, because up until now that's only been in pretty much the corporate realm where there's been enough power for people to use that, and now that's down at the third, you know, level.

So, for example, gathering all of your data for your fitness apps, like that a lot of people say that that's web three, that's content revolution, because you could never grab all that data and all that stuff. So, all that stuff said, um, stay away from the cryptocurrency unless you're a bank, and even then probably still be afraid of it. Um, don't do any NFTs unless it's tied to a physical thing. Like all these cheesy graphics scams are basically just scams. Um augmented reality, virtual reality.

I think those are really cool for shopping and for real estate stuff. So I think there's some stuff that can be done there that might be interesting. The jury's still out on these headsets. You know, Apple came down and said basically that look, people just don't want to isolate in their closet wearing a headset. Like that's just nobody wants this.

Um and yeah, Katie, are you suspicious of that? Are you you internet? I'm trying to like I'm trying so hard to follow this particular question, but you've basically just outlined every single topic that my brain cannot retain information on. Um Chris looks goofy. See, yeah, that's the birth control headset they call that.

You know, if you're wearing that around, nobody wants to talk to you. Um so that's that's that. And then the um, but the third part of it, you you know, explosion and user-generated content. Um, I think there's all kinds of huge opportunities there on all kinds of fronts. Like I said, all these fitness apps, everybody's generating a ton of data.

You've got um smart speakers, a ton of data being generated from that, all these uh internet of things stuff, home security, doorbells, light bells, like there's so much stuff can be built around all that. So, yeah, a huge long answer to say that you know, if you're internet of things, I guess there's a lot of cool stuff you should be thinking about as far as content. All the other stuff I would let shake out before you dump any money on. How about you, Katie? I got nothing.

This is not my question. I'm still like, wait, what's web three? Are we on web 2? Still people are just like, so wait, it sounds like a lot of shifty uh snake oil stuff. And I'm like, yes, pay no attention.

Did you do this? Yeah, this is not a question that I would feel comfortable answering for anyone else because I still have no idea. Regardless of how many times you've talked about web three, my brain is just like not information you need to retain. Fair enough. All right.

Well, Anne asks, what is the biggest waste of a content marketing budget? I'm gonna go a little controversial right now. And I'm gonna say it's artificial intelligence that writes the content for you. And the reason I say that is because I know from our work, and I know from Chris and research that you've done that AI generated content is mediocre, sometimes halfway decent, and you still need human intervention to edit it and put it into a good place. Okay.

What do you think, John? Yeah, no, I I'm definitely in line with that. I think my answer would be related in that it's just stop producing content that's brochure wear. You know, you need to be making interesting content. The biggest waste of content and budget is when people are just cranking out, you know, white papers and vendor papers and all this content that nobody cares about.

You know, I mean, you need to spend a ton of time figuring out what people actually want to hear about and are willing to take time to read or watch or whatever. Because yeah, we don't need another hour long video about you know, all kinds of security software. Like nobody is tuning in to listen to an hour of security software unless you're actually working in the industry and you know somebody on the podcast. Um all that stuff is just uh, you know, stuff to throw on the pile. If it's not remarkable, you're probably wasting your money.

Yeah, I would agree. If it's if your content doesn't provide any value, then it was a waste. And and that probably is budget you could have done something else with, you know, buy bagels and cream cheese or something stuff. All right. Uh Jeremy asks, this is a fun one.

What is your most hated jargon or business speak and why? In general or related to content marketing? Uh he wasn't clear. I mean, I could probably go on forever about how much I hate jargon and business speak, but I think rather than list off all like the terms that I personally think are sketchy, I think it's really more so try not to use them in your content to get your point across. You know, so you know, we found synergyistic ways to circle back to the parking lot where we left all of our really good, you know, top of the funnel ideas for a rainy day and sort of like you're not saying anything.

And I think that might be more of the question, or that might be a better answer to the question, is using business speak and jargon to try to get your point across means you're just not saying anything. You need to start with the ugly draft of what is the point that I'm trying to get across, and then you can edit it, make it a little bit more coherent. But starting with you know the business jargon of you know who knows, whatever it is, you're not gonna get your point across. So I guess it would be more so don't use it in your content if you can avoid it. Gotcha.

John? Yeah, I don't know. It it's tough. There's figures of speech and things like that where you can save some time because if you're talking about things that people understand, like diminishing returns or something like that, you know, things like that people get. But yeah, I think over in all it's just all lazy copywriting, you know, all any of those hackney uh cliches can be replaced with real language if you do a little bit more work.

And I think the big thing that Katie hit is if if you're writing about a product or something, don't presume that the audience knows all of the insider um phrases and you know terms that normally get used, like write it for a you know, write it like I'm for kind of thing. Um, because yeah, sooner or later, especially that there's I don't know, there's there's been some study in this, but I don't have a lot of numbers. But as far as um the folks that know the least are end up being the most probable to be leads, because the folks that like know anything, those are the ones that are doing research and buying and doing stuff. The folks that know all the jargon and all the terms, they're less likely to be leads anyway. So so write to the uh to the one on one level.

I think you bring up a really good point, John, um, around using your internal terminology in your writing, because you know, you make assumptions that everybody knows what you're talking about. So when we say things like G DCJ and MVP and blah blah blah, those are terms that we came up with. So our job is to educate people on what that means when we say them, so that we're not just using shorthand, and everybody's like, Well, I'm not gonna read this because I don't know what the heck they're talking about. It must not apply to me. Exactly.

George Bernard Shaw said every profession is a conspiracy against the laity. Um, which is I think is really sums up jargon really well. There is no there are no bad words, like same as profanity. There are no bad words, there's only bad people. Um, and the it the people who like to sling jargon do so with the intent of excluding other people, right?

They they they want to sound cool, they want to sound like they're in the they want a mask that they may not actually know what the hell they're talking about. Uh, and so they might say, Oh, yeah, let's let's double click in on this this thing. Like, that's great if you're over 40. Uh, but nobody under 40 uses that that particular uh expression, not unironic. I've never heard anyone use that expression.

Oh, you don't go to enough conferences, and I'm okay with that. I need to hear that one. It it's popular among a very specific certain crowd. Okay, Louise asks, does it matter if people consume the content? Does it matter if people consume your content, or is it enough for them just to just notice it?

Well, why did you create the content in the first place? That's what I thought when I got the script. Well, well, what's the point? I'm wondering if this is sort of the impressions versus clicks uh conversation, and so an impression means that somebody it at least showed up on their feed, whatever that feed is, it showed up somewhere versus a click, which means they may have like interacted with it engagement. So I feel like that might be more of the question is does it matter if I get an impression or is engagement and clicks more important?

And it really depends on what your goals are. And so I know a lot of companies, a lot of teams still use impressions as hey, we got a million and five impressions, so we did a great job. This always reminds me, Chris, of the whole billboard analogy that you would talk about when talking about impressions of just because somebody drove past it because that was their route to work, does that mean that they actually saw it? But the billboard technically c considers that an impression. And so that is what I equate to this question of is it enough for them to notice it?

Well, you know, when I drive into Boston, I probably drive past at least a dozen billboards. I couldn't tell you what a single one of them says unless I'm taking the time to actually read every single one of them, which is a very different experience. And so I think it just matters on what your goal is. Is your goal impressions is your goal engagement clicks? I think it depends on the content too, right?

So like you could see a YouTube thumbnail, but you may not necessarily watch that video, but they the at least seen that one of your favorite creators has made something, and maybe that might be enough to nudge you to to go check them out later. Yeah, there is, I mean, there's the whole awareness thing, right? If you're just trying to appear to be a bigger brand than you are and you're putting up airport billboards and you know, doing a lot of stuff that's yeah, that content does have some impact, and you can even measure that through surveying and other things. But yeah, it's a totally different thing than engagement. Yep.

All right, Natalie asks, name one or two mistakes people make while managing a content marketing team. Managing a content marketing team, I'd say that's mistake number one. No, that's just a stupid joke. Sorry, I threw that out there. That's a tough one, actually.

Like what I'm every team is unique and has its own wonderful assortment of errors and failures. Um I'm trying to think of something that's well, not having a content calendar, like just doing free for all. We see departments do that. There's nothing worse when like you see a company do four different campaigns, and you're like, oh, well, if they had maybe gotten together and had a meeting before that, like this one piece of content could have been used for all four of those things instead of like four totally different type, you know, the webinar for this month is totally different from the blog post, which is totally different from the videos which they did, which and they're not talking about any of it at the trade show. So yeah, I'll throw content calendar out there as an easy one.

I think the big thing, I think, along the lines of uh John, what you're saying with a content calendar is not setting expectations in terms of what the heck this thing is meant to do, who it's for, what the purpose of the piece of content is, and any kind of parameters. And so, you know, I've I've worked with teams before where I've seen the direction be like, okay, we need a blog post. Okay. Um, I don't know, just figure out write it about analytics. And so is it the role of the manager to set the expectation for all of those things?

It depends on you know how the team is structured, but if you're assigning it, you should probably have some sort of even a sketch of an outline to be like, okay, here's a good structure that you could use. We don't have a lot of content about you know what to do when your analytics go wrong, or we don't have a lot of educational content about analytics, so maybe there's the angle, you know, the audiences, people who don't know us versus the audience are people who are ready to buy something from us. So it's setting those expectations of what the content is meant to do, I think is the number one problem, and just assigning something to be like, okay, you figure it out, and then getting it back to be like that's not what I wanted. Well, you didn't tell me what you wanted. I mean, that's true pretty much of any team, is just set expectations for the love of Bob.

The the one I've seen that causes the most friction on content teams is people feeling like they're getting pigeonholed. Um, like, okay, you're you're the writer, so you only write stuff, and you know, you're the you're the designer, so you only make PowerPoints and stuff, and not letting people spread their wings and and try different content formats, different mediums and different projects and things like that. Where because a manager has sees a person just as a task-based person in a role instead of seeing the person as a creative, and letting them say, Okay, let's let's all figure out here's the goal, here's what we want to create. Let's get everybody's ideas and stuff because the writer may have great ideas, even if they can't necessarily use Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, they may have creative ideas that can get left behind if just say, no, no, no, you're just the writer, you know you don't need to be in this meeting. All right.

Let's see what else is in the uh bucket here. Uh we have, oh, this one's from this one's also from Lisa. Should brands still be on social media given the poor organic performance of most social networks. What's your purpose for using that particular social channel? Is it awareness?

Is it conversion? Um, where it really comes down to where is your audience? Where do they hang out? Is it in a you know gated community? Is it on Twitter?

Is it you know, are you targeting people on TikTok? And so it really comes down to where your audience is hanging out and meeting them where they are. And so, you know, we do this show and we post it to YouTube and some other video streaming social media platforms for the purpose of being educational. And if we find that that's not where people are going, that's not where our particular audience is going to get educational content, then we have to pivot. We need to find out where are they going to get educational content around the topics that we have expertise in?

And so that should really, I think the blanket statement of should brands be on social media is the wrong question. It's what channels, what social media platforms should you be participating in and why? I I would agree. John, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, if your customers are there, and especially if you're taking a beating, you know, just because you're not getting free organic traffic, you know.

I'm sorry that you can't just, you know, get money off the table for nothing, but you know, you have to get into that. Um, yeah, as a matter of fact, really the goal of social are conversations that connect. You can talk to your talk to your customers on social channels, engage them and uh and yeah, a little plug for Brooke there. Nice. Um the easy answer to this is look in your own analytics, right?

If you don't see organic social showing up in your attribution model over a long period of time, right? You know, stand back, look night like the last 90 days. If there's no social whatsoever, then yeah, it's probably not working for you. And you either can revisit your strategy or you can say, you know what, maybe this isn't the thing. You know, for us, it's it's in there, it's in the mix.

Organic social is in the mix at all three levels in the attribution in the customer journey. So it it still is on the table for us. Uh I you know, it would be I would be surprised to see an organization that was making a legitimately good effort um at engaging uh with with their audience not have at least something, uh some way of demonstrating, even if you're just driving traffic, uh, not necessarily conversions. Uh that would the answer to that question. Okay.

Uh Robert asks, how does TikTok indirectly or directly affect content marketing? Directly or indirectly. I mean number one, are you using TikTok for your brand? Number two, do you have a plan for using TikTok for your brand? So for example, you know, we've been posting snippets of our videos to TikTok to see if there was any value in being on that social platform.

Can we attract a different audience? Is there any engagement? You know, jury's still out. Like we don't post a lot of content to TikTok. So it's really hard for us to say that it's working or not working because we're not posting with the volume that a lot of other successful TikTok accounts post.

And so that's problem number one for us. So I can say it's not directly affecting our overall data, but it does affect our content marketing in terms of we've included as part of our plan. How about you Chris, you you've been able to pull data. The API still allows you to pull a lot of stuff, so you can measure what's going on, right? You can measure and TikTok provides you uh analytics and data about your account itself, right?

And you you can look at your stats and things. And it's interesting, uh it's one of those platforms where as long as you've uh done a decent job with things like your tagging and stuff like that, you will at least get some attention on it. Uh you know, when we look even just very casually at some of our recent videos and things, we've had st uh stuff, you know, a couple of shows get a couple of hundred uh views on these things, and we're you know, these are not uh using the the spammy hashtags, not using the four-year page ones. We typically will use the hashtags that are specific to whatever that show is about, like AI or marketing and stuff. And the numbers are not zero, right?

That's that's the important part. The numbers are not zero. We we've put up now uh I forget how many videos, and none of them have goose eggs. So it it's there. Um but I think the I I think you know the the initial confusion everyone had about the question is is a good sign of it's a channel, right?

So it's a channel, it's a distribution channel, it's a place to put your content. So it directly affects your content marketing because it's a place to put your content. And maybe not all your content goes on there, but certainly even if you've just got images and things, use something like an audiogram or whatever to put up stuff there that might be useful that might be that might be helpful. Um so yeah, I would I think that's that's a decent answer to that question. Um okay, Ann asks given all the instant answers Google delivers in search results, does SEO still matter for content marketing?

Yes. Yes, it does. There's four parts to SEO, Chris. So this is a more nuanced question than at first appears. And here's why.

This year, Google rolls out its multi-uh use model. Um which and they're already doing stuff like summarizing uh passages with uh feature snippets and things. And so a lot of the simple answers, the easy answers, Google is putting in a search results so that there's no there's zero click results, right? Rand Fishkin talked about this two years ago, saying that you know, 50% of queries were zero click and that number keeps going up. The thing is though, there's a lot of stuff that doesn't fit in a zero click.

Um, you know, for example, uh, what's the difference between phenylephrine and and pseudoephedrine, right? That's not something that's gonna be uh show up in a zero click. That's a a topic that you want to research and dig in. So the easy stuff Google's gonna answer, right? Um, the multitask unified model will will synthesize easy answers like what pair of shoes goes with this purse.

Um, and you can do color matching, whatever. For more complicated questions, like what is multi-touch attribution or how does it work? Um it won't summarize that as well, and users will still probably have good incentive to take a look uh and see what else is there. But also, Google is doing more stuff with things like Google Discover, for example. Um, that is funneling people to your website just based on topic and interest.

So even though it's much harder to do SEO now than it was even two years ago, there is still room for it if you're tackling difficult subjects that need explanation. If you've now, if you're everything on your content is is super easy, then no, it's it's probably not going to be a very effective channel for you. Okay. Uh let's take a look here. We have Angie asking Accessible and inclusive content marketing has garnered more attention in the last couple of years.

How have you seen companies addressing either one? Personally, I don't know that I've seen brands overtly stating we are addressing content that is more accessible and more inclusive. I think what I've seen are pivots in the way that they are distributing and disseminating content and also how the content itself is structured. And so more of an emphasis on things like alt text, more of a awareness of using closed captionings more consistently so that you know videos are accessible to people uh who have a hearing impairment, or making sure that there's some sort of an audio file to go with it for people who have you know some sort of a uh vision impairment or that alt text that can be read out loud to describe some sort of an image. So I haven't seen a brand say, okay, so this year we're tackling the accessibility of our content.

I feel like they're just doing it. If you make an overt announcement about it, like what's the point of that? Personally, I don't know. Yeah, there's a couple vendors on that front that I've been following doing things that you know kind of it's baked into the content creation process, which is cool. It's great to see those things just being automated so that it doesn't even have to be an initiative, it just happens as part of the workflow.

Yeah, I'm seeing definitely uh also companies like um Google and Facebook in particular are doing stuff like auto-labeling. So uh Facebook, it's interesting. If you turn off uh images, you will see all the alt text for every image that's shared on Facebook, and you'll see it's uh vision, it's image recognition attempting to do um all the the captions thing like three people and a rose, two people smiling, a person and a dog, um, which I thought was interesting. It's you know, it obviously leaves a little bit to be desired. It's better if you provide it.

Um when you post on LinkedIn, for example, if you post a video, uh it will ask you for a closed captions file. If you post an image, it'll ask you for the alt text. So um the tools are starting to be more incorporated. I think um still have ways to go. What about inclusivity?

I think there's I think there's a ways to go there as well. Um a lot of companies are still very homogenous. A lot of teams aren't aren't constructed in a way that they are more diverse. That takes time. Um then there's a learning curve to what that means to share an opinion that isn't yours, to share an opinion that's different from yours.

Um that's it that's a trickier question. I want to say that there's an easy answer that companies are just having a more balanced sort of portfolio of content that sort of addresses everybody, but that's not true. That's not true at all. Um I think your best bet there is to honestly find writers, content marketers with very different backgrounds, very different life experiences, work histories. You know, I'm not even saying like you need to find, you know, every different ethnicity you can possibly find, but just someone who isn't identical to you and your history and your experience is a step in that direction to start to bring a new voice, a new perspective, and make your content feel more approachable and inclusive.

Um, in terms of brands that are doing it, I again I haven't seen necessarily brands be like, we're gonna make our content marketing more inclusive, because that's a bold statement, and I feel like there's a lot of layers to that. Yeah, I think there's a lot too, as far as digging into your own customer base and figuring out, you know, who needs to be included, like who's in there that you hadn't thought of. It's funny, over in Analytics for Marketers this morning, I had come across a data set of um it's for an upcoming road race, and it was uh women outnumbered men more than two to one, which and I have no explanation as to why that's the case. I was able to dig into the actual race numbers, and women do outnumber men by about five to six percent over a five or six year period. And so that but there's nothing to explain why um doing this virtual tracking that goes along with it through this app that they would be, you know, almost three three to one.

Um so it for any kind of inclusive stuff, you know, digging in doing the work as far as like, okay, what's the gender, what's the race, what's religions are here? Like have a picture of who's in there. That'll give you an idea of like, oh, hey, you know, maybe we should have um, you know, more of our advertising should feature pe people of color because they're 20, 30 percent of the audience, and that kind of stuff, at least you can, you know, get a better picture of who you should be reflecting. Yeah, the the double-edged sword of inclusivity is being very careful what you do with the data because you're working with protected classes like age and gender and uh ethnicity, et cetera. So uh on the one hand, yes, you can calibrate with your audience, but on the other hand, if you're using it for any kind of stats or data science or machine learning, make sure that you have good policies and governance in place as to what you do with the data because that data is radioactive.

Uh last question here is from Andrew. And this is a fun question. Uh well, it's not fun if you work in in in advertising. Um digital ad spend dwarfs things like public relations and stuff, but how much of digital ad spent is wasted or lost to fraud? Anyone want to take a guess at the number?

Oh, um a hundred percent. Or is that are we doing like prices right rules where it's like close this without going over? Um it's uh according to uh some folks who have done uh market research studies, it's about 90%. 20% of the ad spent uh is is useless ad spend, meaning that you're you're targeting as off and stuff like that. And 70% is lost to to fraud, uh to bot farms to clicks to fake accounts and things like that.

So and when you give some thought to it, when you look in your own data, like when we were looking this morning at our Google Ads data, um, you know, we we ran a campaign using the new performance max stuff. We we set it up with some great targeting and stuff like that, and it had a zero percent return on investment because it just it went nowhere, even though it generated a lot of theoretical attention. Um, and we do know it was delivered to humans, but uh at least to some humans, because folks did reach out and say, hey, I saw the ad for your new Google Analytics course. That's cool. Um it did not generate anything beyond that.

So from there's a substantial amount of it. And honestly, when you think about it, I think marketing, but digital advertising in in particular as a profession is the only profession where you can fail 99% of the time and still have a job. Yeah, well, and the other thing is it's black box, right? I mean, you have no idea where your stuff is going, what it's doing, even your bidding too is controlled bidding. I mean, every every point of the process is um and then layer on top of that, you don't know if your copier advertising is good unless you're running on multiple channels and you actually are successful on a different channel.

Um yeah, you really are just completely flying blind and uh throwing money into the uh the bonfire. Exactly. All right. That looks like um uh Michael says Katie has an opinion on this. Not all of my opinions are appropriate for public consumption.

I mean, John did compare web three to crack pipe, so you gotta call it like you see it, you know. Not gonna care about it. All right. So that ends a very uh circuitous ask me anything. If we missed you somehow, I'll have a link up in uh the closing thing for our Slack group if you want to uh ask any questions we didn't get to in today's show.

But thanks everyone for tuning in, and we will talk to you all next week. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it for more resources and to learn more. Check out the Trust Insights podcast at trustinsights.ai slash TI podcast and a weekly email newsletter at trustinsights.ai slash newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today's episode?

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