Mark Was Ready To Stop Advertising Completely Until He Found Wicked Reports

Mark was ready to stop advertising completely…

Mark Murrell went on Facebook, spent $4,000 on Facebook Advertising and made 1 sale worth $200 bucks.

Fast forward 4 years later, that same business had grossed over $2 million in directly attributed sales from facebook ads and google ppc.

Listen to the story in the vide above as told by the founder of Wicked Reports.

You can jump to the 9:24 minute mark until 16 minute mark for to hear the Mark Murrell story.

The best way to illustrate the power of this is the Wicked Reports origin story.

So my friend runs an e-commerce store. He’s using Klaviyo and Infusionsoft is CRM. Yes, he has two, and he’s on Shopify. He was originally on whew. So he’s used the gamut of all the marketing techs and it started when he had really terrible bottom of the funnel ENT, he went on Facebook, spent 4,000 bucks and only made one sale for 200 bucks.

So this friend of mine, mark from get Maine lobster.com. He emails me. He said, Facebook sucks for lobster. I said, mom, Okay, that may be true. Why do you say that? And he said, well, I lost four grand sucks. That’s terrible. And this is a guy who now is marketing budgets, about 200 K a month. It was 4k a month at the time.

So this is a worthwhile story. It started his scaling now spends hundreds of thousands a month and positive ROI on it. I said, well, what happened there? He said, well, I’ve got all these clicks at 12,000 clicks. Only one person bought last night. And I said, well, have you tried, you know, capturing the lead and following up.

And he hadn’t because, I mean, he’s, he’s just selling stuff. He’s not trying to nurture people with a big education process or anything. If you can see that big plane coming over, hopefully it’s not too loud. So I’m tying to them. And I was like, well, Why don’t we see if we can track the leads from the ads and then I’ll match it up against your sales and we’ll figure out if it worked.

And he’s like, okay, great. So I’m looking for software and there wasn’t any, and that’s kind of the baby foundation and wicked reports, which was all spreadsheets and frantic UDM capture and other things for another, another podcast. But as it relates to lead attribution, He targeted people that he’s selling lobster, which is a product from Maine.

So he targeted people that didn’t live in the new England area, but were liked a Boston sports team. Cause the thinking mean everyone’s jealous of us cause we always win. So why would you possibly like our teams unless you over from there, he had some affinity for new England stuff and therefore. But you’re out of the new England area is too expensive to run down and get quality lobster anywhere.

So maybe you want to ship it in. That was the premise. And so. The idea, uh, was good. Right. But there’s a lot of good marketing ideas doesn’t mean they work. I’ve had plenty that stunk and I was like elated with, so you got to check the data, but for this idea, it was like, oh, geez, well, what am I going to do for lead magnet?

I mean, I’m an e-comm store. I don’t do lead gen, what do we even do? And I was like, I don’t know. I said, just, you’re already going to be doing a sale anyway. Right. Mark up your stuff so that you can do it. And just put a lead gate on the thing, Lee gate being an often page that says, Hey, opt in, you’re going to get this offer.

And then when they opt in, you can email them the offer, but you can also just redirect them to the offer and then maybe they buy right away. Great. And if they don’t, well, you have the email and we’ll see if they buy off one of your, or their emails. And he’s like, all right, well, 92 tough. I mean, creating a he’s an unbalanced at the time.

And I mean, creating unbalanced landing page is, I mean, they’re easy. They’re great. And it’s not rocket science. He took his product. Pasted it on some, you know, he has a gorgeous product images paste that on, get the deal by six lobster tails, get six free pictures of lobster tails opt in. We’ll the deal to your email?

The deal. I think it wasn’t, I don’t know it was a coupon. It was just the deal. Right. And then he had a secret URL. I don’t think it was a secret. I think you could have went to the deal on his website, but that’s what we did. And so he still, already would have run ads directly to his product nowadays.

Because he’s gotten better at converting people fast. It’s not like a lot of work for an e-commerce store to lead gate a product. You just give it a deal because if I’m scrolling around in my feed and Facebook, or I’m on Google searching for your stuff or Pinterest or snap, you know, all those things marketing attribution can contract or should be able to, you’re not thinking, oh, What, if I can get to this page without the lead gate, I’m not going to buy, like, nobody thinks that you just want to buy the stuff that you don’t.

Right. So we run the ads and he spends like five grand. So, you know, he has a budget of four grand. I said, oh, I don’t know why. I don’t know what it was with five grand, a couple hundred bucks a day. We’re gonna run it for 30 bucks, an ad set. And like 10 ad sets. We dreamt up, we gonna do 300 bucks a day and see if you can run it.

A couple of weeks and it ended up being like 5,500 bucks. So it was not really a lot of science behind us, this part. And so we did this and we capture all these leads and sure enough, you know, when he first starts running it, he spending 300 bucks a day, knock it in sales, immediately stressed out, and then he slowly got into the get sales, but he’s running in the red while he’s running the campaign.

And he’s running it to people he’s excluded his email list. So it’s just cold traffic so that we know it’s new leads so that the stats are pure. It’s newly leads only can we convert new leads somehow profitably. And so while he’s doing that, you know, they get on the list and he’s emailing. Quite a bit, uh, I don’t know, maybe three times a week, which we, you know, we were nervous.

Hey, is that a, is that a too much is not enough? Everyone’s got an opinion. Of course. I mean, I do too, right? This is my, my opinion was, well, even though I don’t like to email people, uh, since we’re doing an experiment, email the hell out of them, because I really want this to work. That was my thinking, like email the hell out of them.

Send emails. A decent amount. And you know, after the couple of weeks we stop at down like two grand, so he’s being, so he’s like, oh, you know, I only lost two grand, still not great. And I’m like, well, just give it some time how I was doing this. This was like, I don’t know, 2014 or something. 2013 was very, a convoluted way and very susceptible to losing the tracking, which was, we had very complicated naming scheme on them.

We type it all in by hand, you paste them in and then you’d have to capture them on the page and serve them through a form and cert them in your CRM. Make sure it didn’t overwrite. Make sure you didn’t switch domains, all the stuff that we don’t have to worry about anymore. Like proper market technology’s evolved.

You don’t have to do any of that. Now. It’s all just done for you. But at the time you had to do it. I mean, you know, I was making it up as I went. There was no one that was doing that. Uh, jam all the UTMs in and I export them out. We all have these leads. So lo and behold, these people start buying it. And you know, sometimes it’s like just, you’re not ready to buy.

Think of all the things, all the busy-ness of the day today, I meant to buy my son some gamer headphones today. I meant to buy him yesterday. And then he gave me grief when I was going to drive him to hockey. And I said, you know what? I’m not buying your headphones today. So. If you’re the marketing person looking at your, get your stats for the gamer headphones.

You’re like, man, I got to click. Oh, they didn’t buy my offer. I got to, you know, something’s wrong with it or whatever. No man was, my kid was giving me lip on the way to hockey. Think of all the reasons that are going to slow you down. We’re outside here, occasional people walking by for those of you that have been watching it home from YouTube surprise.

I’m now in my backyard. With a nice fresh haircut. What happened was when we were taping that initial episode, uh, the wind proved to be a little too chaotic for the last few minutes of the podcast. So here I am rerecording with fresh insights on my initial insights. How great is that back to the topic at hand?

A lot of people just don’t buy right away. They’re busy things happen. And yet your metrics keep leading you to believe that they are, that this ad converted people when it was weeks or multiple clicks, maybe dozens of touch points, hundreds. And that misleading of the metrics is one reason that you’re failing to scale because relying on last click attribution to scale top of the funnel, it just doesn’t match.

You’re measuring the wrong thing. For the goal you have in mind. And so people at that point pivot to first click attribution, where they’re saying, let’s see the very first thing that someone clicked on, because if I can scale what they first clicked on and what they last clicked on, I’ll be rich. First click has its own complications.

When you first install a tracking script, that first click is going to include all the first clicks of people. That really weren’t your first clicks that have been clicking on your marketing for weeks, months, or years. And unless you take great mathematical purity effort, you got. Get confused. Cause all your first click date is going to be junk because it’s only the start of when you first tracked your first clicks, not the real first click that happened.

Furthermore, if some of your first clicks came from an iPhone, well you’re in trouble there because you have to capture the first click within seven days or else. Um, it may or may not be a first click depending on what your software is doing to track that. So due to all these complications in scaling top of the funnel, I like to rely most heavily on a new lead attribution.

I do this for a couple reasons. One, it’s a very strong signal. If I’m willing to opt in and give my email address, like something compelled me to take that action. It wasn’t just a click or, or passively viewing something I’m typing in my email and clicking a button that takes commitment quite a bit.

Second. It’s a definite top of the funnel. No real dispute, they were cold traffic. They weren’t on your email list. Now they are, it’s a very clean metric and it’s really no vague fuzziness about it. And it’s verifiable and therefore trustworthy that you can verify, Hey, this click happened at this time. My lead was created for this time.

It really created the new lead. So I always love that. Because it’s easy to understand for people and it’s clean. There’s no like fuzzy, discrete math involved, but the most important reason is that it works. When you find new lead traffic sources, campaigns are targeting that leads to high customer lifetime value and their value exceeds their spend at an ROI.

You like, you can spend more there and make. And that’s, I mean, proofs in our business. I mean, we’ve grown because that works for people and then they grow and then they tell their friends and then that’s why we’re here listening to me. I mean, the very first example, I mean, mark with, I mean, that spreadsheet where I was tracking his leads that he got on Facebook, he spent like five, six grand, maybe five grand.

He had. And it may come back two or three grand. I have the original spreadsheet actually, which is kind of fun. And then in three months he had made 10 X and that’s when you’re like, holy crap. Maybe their Facebook actually does work for lobster. It just works after they’ve been warmed up with all your emails.

And so that has led to mark now making over 4 million from Facebook, top of the funnel leads. All revenue. He was never going to have cause he was going to abandon it. So we’ve seen this time and again with e-comm, if you can play the long game and just get that lead, even if they don’t close right away, if you can at least capture them, tends to lead to higher ROI because you can scale these true peer cold traffic audience areas.

Do you know what ad made lead that became a sale and can you repeat that over and over again to make more sales?

The biggest challenge we have with our customers once we setup their paid ad tracking is getting them to understand, trust, and act on the data.  If they hit all 3 of those goals, then they can scale their paid advertising for more profit. If they miss even 1 of the goals, we are always at risk of having them not be able to scale.

The best way to use attribution data is to match the attribution model to the campaign’s goal. When we do this, the revenue is scored in the most helpful way for our clients to make a decision.

Would you like a handy checklist that has the 4 metrics we track for every paid ad marketing tracking project we do when we set up Wicked Reports (Our tool of choice)? If you have these then you can reliably hit all three goals of understanding, trusting and acting on your data.

The first 2 METRICS you need to be tracking:

#1 What ad drives initial brand awareness and new eyeballs?

#2 What ad acquires new leads at a high ROI?

Get the other 2 metrics here.