00:00:02.15 evergrowmarketing I got a couple of things from, we got a couple of things from Google, uh, at the, at the, well, at the beginning of this podcast, we talk about Google a lot because we're SEOs and that's what we do. 00:00:06.19 Cody We do. 00:00:11.89 evergrowmarketing So like, I would like for there to be eventually a transition to like just talking about social a lot or other things in Google, but we're just, we're just in this so heavy that all I see on my LinkedIn or everything is Google. 00:00:24.67 Cody Oh, like, right. 00:00:26.71 evergrowmarketing Yeah. Like guess SEO, like just, and not everybody that listens to this is an SEO. but 00:00:32.21 Cody Yeah. Oh, I imagine there's a large it's, it's really, ah okay. Coming out with the hot take. It's really hard to take it seriously though. And everybody's always just like social, social, social. Cause. 00:00:43.53 Cody Okay. Okay. Okay. Let's, let's talk about, can we talk about the Reddit thread? I sent you last night though. 00:00:54.02 Cody Cause I was dying, man. 00:00:54.29 evergrowmarketing But should we, can can we just read it? Is that what we do? 00:00:59.79 Cody Yeah. Maybe just a little bit of it. Let me dig it up. 00:01:02.40 evergrowmarketing Okay. Uh, you sent it to me. Okay. Yeah, yeah. You sent it to me and you said, you said, bah, ha, ha, ha. 00:01:08.86 Cody Yeah, because I was about to dump on social and and I think this is a good. 00:01:09.45 evergrowmarketing All right. Well, it's only. 00:01:13.70 evergrowmarketing Okay. So it's only like four short sentences, really, uh, four or five. So the title of it is I gave up everything to start my agency. Now I'm facing the harsh reality. I have over 14 years of work experience in marketing and sales. Last month, I made the big decision to quit my full-time job to focus entirely on my own digital agency. My philosophy was very simple. Offer the best services, ensure 100% client satisfaction, and be transparent as possible. I believe this would help me grow. 00:01:41.06 evergrowmarketing It's right off the bat, like, great, you have the philosophy of Walmart. Like, ah okay. 00:01:46.80 Cody Cool. I see no problems. Very altruistic. Go get them. Yeah. 00:01:50.27 evergrowmarketing So it goes on to say, I created multiple marketing packages, like social media growth, more brand visibility, lead generation, et cetera. There's a lot of conflicting things in there. Um, but one of them was a basic social media package for $99 per month, managing four accounts with daily posts. 00:02:06.55 evergrowmarketing That's a lot of work. Uh, that's what four accounts for daily posts. That's 28, uh, 28 posts a day, uh, for 99 bucks. 00:02:14.37 Cody Yeah. Certainly not a human doing it. 00:02:17.03 evergrowmarketing Right. Uh, but now I'm facing a harsh reality. Most prospects are trying to bargain me down to $30 to $20 a month. Can you imagine? The market rate for what I offer starts at $500 at the very least, which is accurate. I would say that's, that's fairly accurate. I'm shocked and honestly, heartbroken. Now I'm seriously considering going back to my full-time job. It feels like no matter how hard you work or how exceptional your services, brother, you haven't even started to offer exceptional services. 00:02:49.00 evergrowmarketing People only care about it saving a few bucks. P.S. And these clients are from tier one countries, which makes it more even more surprising. I'm assuming because he referenced tier one countries that he's not from a tier one country, because that's not how we would say that. 00:03:05.33 Cody Ma. No, it would. You would say it if you had like an affiliate background, um because that's definitely how people describe it and stuff. But man, I. I want to sum this up by saying this is the this is the yoga teacher problem, right? That's the best way to describe it, is that people think. And that's that's why what what I want to say about social is social is the yoga teacher problem. You have people with. 00:03:37.62 Cody Um, skills, rare skills, unique skills, valuable skills that are worth a lot of money. And then they think, you know what? I'm tired of this oil rig. 00:03:50.52 Cody This is a real, that's a bad comparison because oil rig workers don't become yoga teachers. Um, but that is a very good skill. Uh, I'm trying to think of something, something lawyers. 00:04:00.25 evergrowmarketing I'm tired of this. 00:04:00.64 Cody Here we go. 00:04:01.28 evergrowmarketing Okay. 00:04:01.86 Cody Um, 00:04:01.88 evergrowmarketing Or like I was gonna say, I'm tired of this finance job. 00:04:04.58 Cody Yeah, perfect. Perfect. i'm I'm tired of sitting at this computer all day. I want to I want to, you know, be more involved with people's lives and and do the yoga stuff. So they become a certified yoga teacher, which comparatively is not that hard, right? You're not going to college for it. um And But yeah, it's just you can do it in like a year, I believe. And then you go out there and then all of a sudden people don't want to pay you a lot for your log your your yoga teaching services. And you're like, wait, what? What happened? I'm talented. I'm good. I know yoga. And then you realize that's not how the world works. So I remember reading this and I thought 14 years, 14 years. 00:04:56.19 Cody And not once did you learn business. There wasn't a single moment in there where you, you figured out the business part of it. 00:05:03.66 evergrowmarketing My, my mind was like, okay, so you've been doing social media since you were eight years old and then you're probably 22. And like, and you're just like extrapolating like, this is my experience in social media marketing. 00:05:12.87 Cody Yeah. 00:05:16.95 Cody I told the boys to come over on Insta and they did. And that was, that was promotion. So therefore marketing. 00:05:22.66 evergrowmarketing Yes. I mean, we all embellish a little bit, maybe, maybe not you, but like we all embellish a little bit even on resumes, like how long we've been in industries and stuff. And it's like, well, I've been doing marketing since, and I say like, since I was 19 because I helped the paintball field I worked at do like their marketing and I'm like, whatever. So that's a little bit of an embellishment there, but like. 00:05:45.38 evergrowmarketing they' In no world have you been doing social media marketing or do you have 14 years of experience in social media marketing and sales and charging $99 a month for what you're saying you're doing? like Charge anywhere close to the companies that you were working for or like understand why they were doing that. And I think this whole post just comes down to a fundamental lack of understanding of business common sense. 00:06:10.39 evergrowmarketing and That's what this is. So my advice to this person is absolutely go back to your day job. 00:06:17.59 Cody Yeah, yeah, it was hard because it was I'm not usually the guy to just dump on it, right? I want to be like, hey, I'll be I don't know more strategic about this, but ah yeah, knee jerk was totally like, look, it's not cut out for you or you're not cut out for it. I mean, just just go back. It's fine. There's other one with that, um but Uh, more so it was just too comical to take seriously. And especially because most recently I've had so much of this social media stuff. Um, and I, I, man, it's really hard not to dump on it completely. When you talk to people, when you talk to business owners, um, who have spent their personal money on this sort of thing, you you realize that. 00:07:11.45 Cody The social media is the entry point, just like yoga teachers for a lot of things. And they're super legitimate people in there. And they're completely surrounded by the, you know, 20 year olds that are just getting in this and and really don't have experience and knowledge. And not that being 20 isn't isn't necessarily the problem. You can be young and have experience, but usually they don't. So then you're all up against that. And It, it's just, it makes it hard to take seriously. Right. 00:07:48.00 evergrowmarketing Yeah, I think, uh, the, the, the general con I felt bad being like, kind of coming off and saying like to go back to your day job, because normally i'm I'm inclined to actually help and say like, look, this is really what it takes. And I'm letting people come to that decision on their own. But like lately. 00:08:08.36 evergrowmarketing I've been helping a lot of people when people reach out to me in DMS, like I won't say that I'll say like, this is awesome. And what it is. And I'll let people come to that decision on their own. But when I told you, I was like, I want to comment on here, but I'm like, I don't have the time. And so like my lack of time explanation is go back to your day job. Fortunately. Like the top comments on here were like, wow, hate to be blind, but after seeing this website, it's clearly OP might be better off returning to a full time job. Yeah. I mean. 00:08:35.83 evergrowmarketing A lot of, I said like like the Venn diagram for business sense and common sense is almost a circle. Like like there there's very little, um there's like things in business that you learn as you go, and it becomes apparent that that is common sense, but you don't know that until you learn it. 00:08:45.29 Cody Mm hmm. 00:08:54.36 evergrowmarketing But the majority of things to get you to that point, and I would argue everything to get you to that point is common sense. If you just follow common sense in business, you'll get to the point where the business sense stuff makes sense, just intuitively. 00:09:10.58 evergrowmarketing um But you can't only, you can really and necessarily teach a lot of that. 00:09:15.58 Cody Yeah, I don't know. 00:09:17.24 evergrowmarketing which is fortunate which Which is fortunate for us because like, I mean, we need the people who don't have the business sense to to work for us. 00:09:17.56 Cody It's hard. 00:09:26.56 Cody Yeah, I'm not. This isn't for everybody, and that's not a bad thing. Everybody should try it if they want to. Right. Go for it. Give it a shot. 00:09:40.12 Cody ah There was, I wish I could find it. There was one about, I think it was this older woman. She was in her, I say older. She is only like her forties, but compared to the audience, the demographic of listeners that we have, it's probably for a lot of them older because we know our biggest demographic would be technically younger than that. But she had tried to do this. It was this whole thing about she had this idea for Fortune cookies and then the amount of time that she was putting into it and then doing a financial analysis and being like, man, this is a whole lot more work to make less money. 00:10:13.86 Cody And then she decided to go back to her day job. And yeah, we we love people at day jobs. We need people at day jobs, right? We we need to give people their day jobs. 00:10:27.31 Cody So. Yeah. ah But it is when you just read 00:10:30.05 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:10:34.24 Cody It's the highlight reel, right? You're, you're reading the high rally reel and somebody saying, I've got 14 years of experience and everything is crumbling. I'm like, what did you, what, what was happening? 00:10:44.67 Cody It was happening those 14 years. That's a long time. I don't know that. What have I done? 14 years of not this yet. 00:10:51.21 evergrowmarketing I think agents, I think agency you is just going to need like a fundamental business course. 00:10:51.75 Cody Not technically. 00:10:57.39 Cody Yeah, probably. 00:10:58.02 evergrowmarketing And maybe it's free, maybe like the entry entry level part of it is just free. Like this, this is just what you need to, to start a business. But. 00:11:07.56 Cody Yeah, I, I told you, I got done doing books yesterday. I'm like, it takes longer every time. i could I imagine the future in which I'm like, no talking to me today. All I'm doing is hanging out here with my calculator and doing the very unsexy part of moving money around to the appropriate places. But, uh, it's important. It's super important. 00:11:31.49 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:11:32.88 Cody Anyway. 00:11:32.86 evergrowmarketing Okay. What's your article? Let's talk about your article. 00:11:35.27 Cody Ah, okay. 00:11:36.04 evergrowmarketing Let's wait. 00:11:37.78 Cody And you found this one, but I'm going to read it. 00:11:41.17 evergrowmarketing Which one? 00:11:43.17 Cody Here it goes. Ready? 00:11:43.81 evergrowmarketing Oh yeah. Yeah. I found on LinkedIn. Yeah. 00:11:47.82 Cody I guess this one doesn't count. Cause I think he actually, did you read the whole thing? 00:11:51.62 evergrowmarketing Um, I did, but just read like the the title and the subtext and then I just do my, my. 00:11:55.77 Cody Okay. Google is making a major change to local service ads. Initial reaction. 00:12:03.02 evergrowmarketing Woo hoo. 00:12:04.03 Cody Yeah. Great. And businesses must have a matching Google business profile to run local service ads with unverified or mismatched profiles leading to ads or leading to ad pauses. 00:12:18.54 evergrowmarketing Okay. My initial thoughts for reading this and, and, and they also didn't, they didn't cover this in the article, but my initial thoughts with reading this was there will be less fake business profiles. 00:12:33.16 evergrowmarketing Because if you want to run local service ads, you have to supply documentation about your business and that name has to be your actual business. And so if there's a mismatch in the Google business profile, and if those are actually connected, then your local service ads won't run. So I think SEO wise, there's going to be, there's still going to be those business profiles that have the business name plus the city or whatever. 00:13:01.95 evergrowmarketing But if they want to run local service ads, then they can't have that on there, which means that a a good offensive strategy for a bulk amount of competitors having those like location name modifiers in their business name is to run local service ads because they can't unless they change that name. And if they change that name, then they lose out on the SEO value. 00:13:30.40 Cody Yeah, it's hard to tell if this will be a big cleanup or if this will be people who say no, no to LSAs, and then I'm just going to spam the map more. ah But as far as the quote, legitimate businesses go, they'll have no choice, right? If they want to do both, they're going to have to be clean. 00:13:52.56 evergrowmarketing Which we we for us, its this is all good news for us because we that's what we force our clients to do. You have to be clean when you work with us. 00:14:01.66 Cody Yep. Yeah. um I've read into some of that recently. I can't remember where where it came up. I was reading an article about Oh, it was about I think we were doing documentation on. What was it? It was people with their pins down versus service or service area business profiles and everything that I was reading this person had said was basically in agreement with what we have and do and have said. ah But. It's it's weird. It's almost like there's a differentiation between people who take the time to publish stuff about this and and articles and blogs and that sort of thing. And then what you see and read in just general comments on social, right at Facebook, that sort of thing where you get a lot more 00:15:00.21 Cody I don't know people who are just opportunists and trying to make the most of whatever loophole they can find. 00:15:07.88 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:15:08.05 Cody Yeah. 00:15:09.85 evergrowmarketing I... 00:15:12.55 evergrowmarketing Yeah, I agree. um 00:15:14.93 Cody You think I think this will hit rank and rent for sure. People who yeah and I don't know. 00:15:20.22 evergrowmarketing Good. 00:15:23.33 Cody I don't know if it's it's hard to tell if this will make more more of that for people that I guess the two are unrelated in the way, because if you're doing a rank and rent, you're not doing a legitimate profile anyway. So you're just getting whatever you can to rank and then sending it out. But that means. Yeah, I hope that they up the. They won't. They definitely won't, because everything that Google is doing is the opposite direction of this, but you hope that they up the 00:15:58.96 Cody review team, right? So that there's actual manual actions, manual penalties on people who are doing things like both, right? Let's say that they have a legitimate GBP, they get their legitimate LSA connection. And then on top of all that, they add a rank and rent on a location that they're not in, but they want to be showing up in. 00:16:20.57 Cody I think if they, if they want to be clean, they want to really do all of this properly, then that they would crack down on the rank and rank profile. Um, and then it would also not just that profile, but they would do some sort of punishment to the the company associated to. 00:16:40.50 evergrowmarketing Yeah, I, I don't know. I feel like I don't have a problem with people doing rank and rank. The problem that I have with, with shady tactics is that these people are educating our prospective clients on this tactic. And then when our clients get approached by it, I just, I hate having to defend it because I want, I don't like trash talking, quote unquote competitors, but What a choice do I have? 00:17:07.74 evergrowmarketing Like they're stupid. I don't know what to say. Like, yeah, like it works for a while and then it just doesn't. Um, it's, it's, it's renting. 00:17:19.36 evergrowmarketing It's, it's renting business growth. That's it. And then like, once you're done, you're done and your businesses and your business like plummets. 00:17:23.40 Cody Right. 00:17:27.06 evergrowmarketing Um, I will say one thing in this article that it does say that I'm just going to say, but um, that I really liked, and this is my favorite part about the entire thing. And. If this article was literally like, this is all it does, I'd be like much more, I mean, a much stronger proponent of LSAs, but it's that reviews are going to be consolidated. 00:17:48.43 evergrowmarketing So instead of like having people leave reviews on the LSA, they're just going to pull the reviews from the Google business profile and all of those will be consolidated. 00:17:48.58 Cody All right. Yeah. 00:17:57.93 evergrowmarketing I'm like, finally, that should have been like the thing from the beginning. I don't know why they separated that. 00:18:00.78 Cody Yeah, very much. It's bizarre that that's not how they did it right from the start, but that's good. 00:18:08.08 evergrowmarketing Yeah, so great. 00:18:08.25 Cody That should be. 00:18:13.12 evergrowmarketing Okay, cool. Well, speaking of, it's not really Google, our our episode. um it's it It kind of is, that's what we're dealing with. 00:18:21.04 Cody It is, it is sort of. 00:18:21.31 evergrowmarketing But this does apply to the the SMMA's out there, the the Facebook agencies and those and everything. 00:18:23.17 Cody Yeah, I mean, what we're doing is very much Google because that's what Google calls it. 00:18:35.10 evergrowmarketing like so When we did our email marketing episode a couple episodes ago about like the things that we're working on, um one of those was an SMTP solution for email, like deliverability for website conversions. 00:18:50.40 evergrowmarketing The second thing kind of goes hand in hand, but what we've had to start dealing with is enhanced conversions or server side attribution for conversions, which is a mouthful, especially if you're like a newer agency and you haven't quite dived into like the technicalities of things. So given our size, we are a relatively small agency compared, comparative to like, you know, the bigger agencies out there that we, that we came from. 00:19:14.63 evergrowmarketing but the things that we're working on, they're not even working on yet, which is which is a little weird. um but ah So at a certain point, we don't really expect a lot of our listeners to be to to be aware of this stuff right now. In fact, we've reached out to a few of our listeners who are either the same size or bigger than us who really haven't dived into this yet because it's still relatively new. And the only reason I brought this up to you, Cody, 00:19:42.47 evergrowmarketing was because the last company that I worked for full time, just this last April, ah they were big enough first party data as third party cookies were kind of being deprecated by browsers and regulations and everything. So there needs to be a new way of tracking. Tracking is important to us because as agencies, that's how we report on the success of our KPIs, conversions and leads and acquisition traffic. 00:20:10.07 evergrowmarketing everything, um, you know, how much money are we spending and how many leads are we driving? That's literally what clients are judging us on. And that's probably what clients are judging you on. So I thought it'd be really good to just walk you through something we're working on. And hopefully this gets everybody listening to, to take this a little more seriously, because this is kind of what the future of marketing is going to be, especially in the digital ecosphere. 00:20:35.47 Cody Yeah, even if it's not now, it's coming. Right. 00:20:37.86 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:20:38.36 Cody So if you're not doing it now, that's probably fine, but have a proper heads up that this is going to come for you and that you need to be prepared for this in the coming years. 00:20:48.68 evergrowmarketing This is what's going to separate bad agencies from good agencies. This is what's going to keep people from from moving from freelancer to agency is is this right here. So with that said, let's start from the beginning because I think we can't just jump into enhanced conversions. We have to start talking about how agencies previously tracked leads and just online metrics in general. 00:21:16.25 evergrowmarketing And, um, there's a few ways, but a few of these, you might do a few of these, you might do some are more rudimentary, some are more like technical. Um, but I wrote some notes out, I wrote these out a while ago. So I'm going to, I'm just going to kind of read them as naturally as I can. And then we'll, we'll go into explanations from there. 00:21:36.03 Cody I'm gonna let you do that. I'm gonna drink water and mute myself and yeah, yeah, yeah. 00:21:38.89 evergrowmarketing You can do the Caesar thing where just this when you agree and you just, yeah. 00:21:42.22 Cody I'm gonna, that's great. 00:21:43.15 evergrowmarketing Okay. 00:21:43.64 Cody Keep it up. Just like that. 00:21:45.93 evergrowmarketing Uh, all right. So if you're an agency and you focus on getting leads for your clients, as most agencies do, there has to be some sort of way for you to track and quantify the number of leads you're delivering that are a direct result of your efforts. So the most common and direct way smaller and newer agencies do this are through two main methods. So the first one is dedicated landing pages with dedicated forums. This is probably the easiest one and probably the the thing that most agencies do. And it's fact and most. 00:22:15.79 evergrowmarketing guru courses, I guess, whether it's like, uh, previously, like in 2017, 2018, all the way up to like 2021, it was all about ClickFunnels, like setting up a ClickFunnels landing page and having those ClickFunnels forms. And then you just take the literally those submissions. 00:22:31.64 evergrowmarketing You divide it by this the ad spend that you spent and then that that was your cost per lead or your CPA as we call it here. um And then you just send those leads to the client. And maybe there's an automation that you have set up where every time someone fills up the form, the client gets it right away. But then at the end of the month, you tally it up, divide it. How much did it cost? That's like the simplest way to do it because that landing page cannot be filled out unless somebody clicked on the app. Okay. 00:22:56.25 evergrowmarketing Uh, the other way is lead ads. So like platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn and even Google, um, have direct lead attribution paid media strategies. Like, so Google is like local local service ads, which means nobody, you don't go to a site once you click the ad. So on Facebook, a lead ad, you click, you click, um, the ad and then a form pops up. Then you fill out the form. Facebook records that in their own platform as a lead. And then you get that, uh, the lead notification. So. 00:23:26.49 evergrowmarketing But Facebook is a little weird because you don't get emails when someone fills out a lead. At least you didn't used to. You'd have to set up a Zap through like Zapier or you, there are some other integrations. I think high level has one, a natural integration with Facebook lead ads. um But those are direct lead at attribution models. You spend money to people fill out form on the, on on the page or on the platform and and boom, you tracked your lead. 00:23:50.94 evergrowmarketing Okay. So, um, now there's the next layer of that is people click on an ad and they go to the website. And so now how are you tracking leads in the website? So this is like, we went from being like 10 year olds to like 15 year olds now. 00:24:09.08 evergrowmarketing So like the 10 year old is like literally just counting the form submissions off of, off of landing pages. The 15 year old, like the, like the the teenager, uh, level of maturity with lead tracking is pixel trackers. 00:24:17.38 Cody So. 00:24:22.81 evergrowmarketing So this is like putting the Facebook pixel on the client's website or using Google analytics and Google tag manager to track on page metrics and then even setting up conversion actions. 00:24:34.37 evergrowmarketing So with Facebook, just walking through this real quick. Facebook has the Facebook pixel. It's just a code snippet and you put it in the header of your website and most CMS is high level Wix, Squarespace. They all have like a spot in like the settings that you can just copy and paste this code in and it's super easy. Anybody can do it. and You're probably familiar with it yourself. um This is a browser pixel. So how this works. 00:25:02.03 evergrowmarketing Is you, uh, when somebody clicks onto the website, Facebook takes that data through that pixel and it reports it back to Facebook for tracking. 00:25:12.69 evergrowmarketing So then it tracks where that user visited. Um, and then then setting up conversion actions is similar. Like you tell Facebook, Hey, if this person loads the thank you page, that is a conversion action. 00:25:23.89 evergrowmarketing That means the only way they got there was because they filled out a form. Oh, it's long winded here. Um, so. 00:25:31.65 Cody You're doing great. Doing great. 00:25:33.21 evergrowmarketing Thank you, thank you. ah So i when you define these conversion actions, so like with pixels, um there's a couple of things you can do. ah One's easy, one's a little bit harder. The easy one, so like a form fill, for example, is kind of what I explained. You just put the pixel on every page of the website, including the form fill, but then you tell Facebook that when somebody lands on the thank you page, they fill it out a form, they get redirected to a thank you page. When somebody fills that out, 00:26:03.60 evergrowmarketing They go to that thank you page and then Facebook says this page was loaded by this user, report it back to the platform, put that into the reporting for your Facebook ads. And then it says, yeah, you spent X amount of dollars and you got one conversion off of that because we reported somebody from our platform, fill out that form by landing on that thank you page. The only way Facebook knows that they filled out that form is because you said that the only way that they could have gotten to the thank you page, which was the conversion action is if they fill out that form. So really Facebook's just reporting. 00:26:34.30 evergrowmarketing the thank you page of load and not a form fill. Go ahead, you did this. 00:26:37.73 Cody Yeah. So the clear technical note for people who have never done this before is to know that those pages, the pages that you track as conversions, when it's the page load, that's important. 00:26:52.37 Cody You need to make sure that that page isn't accessible any other way. So, um, no links to it, right? That's the obvious thing, but probably the most technical thing that people should know is you, no index you it, it 00:27:05.94 evergrowmarketing So it can't be found in search engines. 00:27:08.05 Cody Right. So if you're like, yo, it's just a very simple way. You can just go into the the settings of the page. If you're using something like WordPress and then say, Nope, I don't want this in there. So, you know, it's not, it's not in Google. People can't just search for page at all. The only way to get there is through the flow that you've specified as important. And then when it loads, you know. 00:27:31.79 evergrowmarketing The workaround is like, if you know the ah URL and you type it directly into the browser, you could get there too, but no one's going to do that. ah Platforms like Wix and Squarespace have the ability to know index and just the setting of the page. WordPress, you have to use either hard code it, or you have to use a plugin like ah like Yoast or RankMath to do that. 00:27:55.08 evergrowmarketing When I explain this, I feel like it's a little bit more technical for the people that I engage with, like in my DMs on Reddit and Facebook. Um, so like, yeah, absolutely. 00:28:03.50 Cody Oh, this and setting the no index. 00:28:05.88 evergrowmarketing Yeah. I mean, this is like, because usually what people do are like the lead ads or they do like the dedicated landing pages. 00:28:06.72 Cody ah Yeah. 00:28:13.58 evergrowmarketing And, um, like that is like entry level. And then the, the pixel is like. Like you should just, as a marketer, you should just know how to place a pixel and how to like do basic tracking and tracking a thank you page load is extremely basic. Facebook's so easy. Like all you have to do is when you set the pixel up, you go to the conversions and you say, like you click to the website and then it has like the conversion debugger debugger up. And then it just says, okay, click around. What do you want to be the conversion? And then you fill out a form, you go to the thank you page. 00:28:45.18 evergrowmarketing And then in like the little window that pops up, you say, I want this page load right here to just be the conversion action. Like it's literally like WYSIWYG almost. 00:28:55.32 Cody Yeah, I think the problem is that it, it can be simple. It can also get extremely complicated depending on how you're, but I was going to say complicated in a different way. 00:29:01.82 evergrowmarketing Let's talk about that. 00:29:06.59 Cody Cause you can choose to to track them. That's probably where you're going. I'll, I'm going to shut up. I'll let you keep going with your. 00:29:11.36 evergrowmarketing Yeah, yeah yep that's exactly where I'm going. 00:29:13.11 Cody Yeah. 00:29:13.36 evergrowmarketing Thank you. 00:29:13.59 Cody Yeah. Okay. 00:29:13.88 evergrowmarketing So um every time Cody and I are thinking the same thing in our chat, we send ah an emoji. yeah it's the It's the brain and then it's like the little squiggly lines and then the other brain. 00:29:27.66 Cody Yeah. 00:29:27.67 evergrowmarketing That's the brain waves just matching up. 00:29:29.69 Cody It might even be a mustache. Is it the squiggly line or I? 00:29:33.17 evergrowmarketing I do the squiggly line. 00:29:34.72 Cody I think I've done the mustache thinking it was a squiggly line. So then it's just like a lot of mustaches and in a row. But anyway, go ahead. 00:29:43.15 evergrowmarketing ah 00:29:44.19 Cody Go. 00:29:44.20 evergrowmarketing okay Okay, so the other thing you can do, and I think the actually the more accurate thing you should do is actually ah tracking tracking the the form submission as the conversion. 00:29:44.85 Cody Go get him. 00:29:55.57 evergrowmarketing So if if if it's complicated for you, I'll take a step back real quick. um The thank you page load is not a form submission. That's just saying the thank you page loaded. But intuitively, the only way to get there is if the form was submitted. 00:30:09.20 evergrowmarketing However, I did mention that you could just type in that yeah URL and go there. And as long as your browser loads the thank you page, technically Facebook would report that as a conversion. So there is a way around it and there is some, there could be some false reporting, however unlikely. When you track a form submission, what you're doing is you're tracking when somebody hits submit pending, all of the fields are successfully submitted. So if you have fields that are required to be entered or have certain formats and syntaxes, 00:30:39.28 evergrowmarketing on a successful submission, that form will then quote unquote submit and the JavaScript action for that submission is what's tracked as the event. Whereas previously the event was the thank you page load. So this this version is is independent of the thank you page load. 00:31:00.33 evergrowmarketing ah This is more difficult to do. This requires sending Facebook like specific parameters. It doesn't require coding, but it does require modifying, like polling the JavaScript and modifying it to tell Facebook, like, this is what I'm looking for. 00:31:17.23 evergrowmarketing And maybe not moding maybe modifying is the wrong word, but being able to like look at the JavaScript action in in the then the console and being like, these are the these are the names, these are the IDs, this is a successful submission. That's harder to do. It takes a little bit more ah education, which is all free, by the way. Anybody can do it as long as you're willing to to learn it. um and That is what we were going to switch to at one point until we started focusing on enhanced conversions, which which we'll get to later, um which is actually something it's baked in. It's the same. it's's It's baked into it, but we just took it a step further. um So those are like the two main ways you can track form. This is all form fills, by the way. There are other things that you can do. So we track, we also track emails and and phone calls. 00:32:10.26 evergrowmarketing And those are even more rudimentary. Those are like, Hey, if somebody clicks on this link, so like we link the phone number to like an actual phone number using the, the tell, um, linking schematic. Um, and if somebody clicks on that, that counts as a conversion and we report that back to Facebook or Google. And, but you know, the downside of that too is, you know, someone could click it and and not complete the call or they could click email and not send an email. We get the conversion action, but something didn't actually go through. So. 00:32:40.78 Cody Mm hmm. 00:32:41.85 evergrowmarketing Okay. Wow. 00:32:43.90 Cody You winded? That's a lot, man. 00:32:45.58 evergrowmarketing Yeah. So I've noticed that like, when I, when I inhale on this mic, it picks it up. 00:32:47.06 Cody There's a lot of things happening. 00:32:50.86 evergrowmarketing And so like, I tried to remember that old video. Um, who was it? Uh, Tazonday is like, uh, uh, the chocolate rain guy, chocolate rain. 00:33:03.66 Cody Oh, yeah. 00:33:04.25 evergrowmarketing So like, if you watch the video of him, do it. Anytime he takes a breath, he turns his, he turns his head like this. And, uh, cause he's like inhaling, he's got like, uh, you know, big pipes. 00:33:14.65 evergrowmarketing And so like, when I talk, I try to turn my, turn my head when I inhale, but like, like that, I did it a lot early in the army in the episodes, like the ones that are coming on YouTube. 00:33:20.03 Cody That's smart. Yeah, that's cool. 00:33:25.56 evergrowmarketing You can see me like turning my head when I inhale. 00:33:29.07 Cody um No, no, I'm not. 00:33:29.91 evergrowmarketing Yeah. But my microphone is like right next to my face. Yours isn't. So what you do, you have a habit of clearing your throat a lot. 00:33:35.17 Cody I'm not that pro. 00:33:38.14 Cody You. I take that personally, sir. 00:33:43.23 evergrowmarketing Need more tea. I mute myself when I have to clear my throat. 00:33:49.70 Cody Yeah, I've been trying to get better at just doing the meeting in general. 00:33:53.29 evergrowmarketing that we We should use this messaging feature more often, but I feel like every time I use this messaging feature in Zencaster, I'm like, it's rude, you know? 00:34:04.86 Cody Hmm. That's okay. 00:34:05.73 evergrowmarketing I don't know. 00:34:07.48 Cody I don't care. 00:34:07.71 evergrowmarketing Okay. 00:34:08.14 Cody We can do it. 00:34:08.99 evergrowmarketing Okay. So, um, we should, uh, We, I, and you can weigh in talk about how browser pixels work. 00:34:14.72 Cody Hmm. 00:34:17.64 evergrowmarketing So like we just explained how you would use it, but like technically let's talk about how they work because that's important to understand for what we're going to go into and why we're diving into enhanced conversions and server side attribution. 00:34:34.06 evergrowmarketing Okay. So. 00:34:38.33 evergrowmarketing There's been a lot of buzz around third party cookies dying and there's a lot of confusion around cookies, third party versus first party. 00:34:47.04 evergrowmarketing Cookies are not going away. Cookies are always going to be present. So let's get that out of the way. Um, yeah. 00:34:53.03 Cody Good, we like cookies. 00:34:55.48 evergrowmarketing Well, yes, especially more so as marketers, but. 00:35:00.18 evergrowmarketing Cookies are a, an anonymized identifier. It is just a string of numbers and characters that identifies your browser or profile. The difference we're going to first in a third party cookie and first party is we own that. So if you, um. 00:35:22.08 evergrowmarketing HubSpot, for instance, um, we can create first party cookies with HubSpot, the CRM, uh, because we have the HubSpot code in our site and everything. Um, so we can implement things on our site, like pop-up banners and things like that for users that have taken specific actions previously. We can do that because we technically own those cookies. Uh, they're on our site now. 00:35:49.58 evergrowmarketing Um, HubSpot, if they were to use our user data information on our website somewhere else and market to those users somewhere, that would be a third party cookie. They're taking data from a different site, a different property they don't own and pushing it elsewhere. That's third party. 00:36:08.59 evergrowmarketing Uh, a better example would be when you engage with things on Facebook, let's say you go to a business's Facebook page and then you're scrolling through the timeline and you see an ad like a retargeting ad from that business. You're retargeted on that because of a first party cookie. You were on Facebook's platform. 00:36:27.58 evergrowmarketing And that ad was retargeting people who are likely to engage with that brand. So Facebook pulled your information because you were literally on their platform doing that. They can do that. You consented to that. When you, let's just say you didn't go to that business's profile. Let's say instead you went to their website, but their website had the Facebook pixel on it. Then when you go back to Facebook, now you're being retargeted that ad. 00:36:56.98 evergrowmarketing You're being retargeted that ad because of a third party cookie that they had placed on that business's website. You didn't engage with that business on the platform. You engage with them off the platform. That's third party. 00:37:08.20 evergrowmarketing Third party cookies are what browsers are deprecating. That's what's being legislated. That's what's, that's, that's everything that is essentially dying and going away. 00:37:19.04 Cody Did we talk about this once on the podcast already? 00:37:20.83 evergrowmarketing We did. Yes. Yeah. 00:37:22.06 Cody Like I have deja vu right now and I don't know if, okay. 00:37:23.45 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:37:24.84 Cody Okay. 00:37:25.35 evergrowmarketing But these counts, a lot of these concepts are important, I think, to to reiterate because I think the audience is a little bit different every episode, uh, based on the title and what we're talking about. 00:37:36.45 evergrowmarketing Um, so, uh, well, like, and I talk about this all the time, even people who do listen to the podcast and like, they're like, what cookies are dying? I'm like, not all cookies. Like, you know, like it's, people hear that word and they're just like, it's, they're dying. 00:37:47.38 Cody Yeah. Yeah. 00:37:50.09 evergrowmarketing Okay. Um, 00:37:51.75 Cody It's making me hungry. 00:37:54.31 evergrowmarketing So when you, those, those consent, those consent banners that you see that like are like pop up and it's like, do you accept the cookies? 00:37:54.43 Cody I haven't eaten yet. 00:38:00.88 evergrowmarketing You're what you're doing is you're accepting multiple ones. You're accepting third and first. So, but mostly first, because first is like how they're going to tailor their websites experience to your history. 00:38:11.77 evergrowmarketing If you say no, the website experience isn't going to be tailored. Um. And then, uh, a lot of it too is like ad banners too. Like if you say yes, they can serve more relevant ads to you. Um, but also if they have specific popups for specific actions, then, um, that will also factor into whether you consented to to those or not. Um, 00:38:33.89 evergrowmarketing Okay. So browsers are kind of getting ahead of the times, getting ahead of legislation and the EU and the U S where they're saying, no, no, no, we're going to block all third party cookies by default. And so, um, Firefox did this, uh, safari did it. So I think safari was like the first one to do it. Um, because it's Apple. Um, so it's not only safari is owned by Apple. It's not right. 00:38:59.39 Cody I don't know how it works. Let me Google it. 00:39:00.78 evergrowmarketing I don't know. 00:39:02.87 Cody I'll look it up. 00:39:02.89 evergrowmarketing Sure. Sure. And I'll keep talking. 00:39:03.90 Cody Here you go. 00:39:04.93 evergrowmarketing Um, and then like brave does it by default. Now you can turn these off. You can, but by default they're blocked. Um, I think edge does it. This safari owned by Apple. 00:39:15.81 Cody Yes, sir. Yes. 00:39:17.09 evergrowmarketing Okay. 00:39:17.45 Cody Apple owned Safari. 00:39:17.93 evergrowmarketing So Apple has been like ever since iOS 14, Apple has been like the pioneer of, of quote unquote privacy, but really what they're doing is creating a sandbox that they're going to monopolize on ad space. 00:39:29.62 evergrowmarketing Um, they don't say that, but that's what it is. But anyways, they've been like the pioneers of privacy. So they're the first ones, they're, they're the reason why we have to do all this, like, uh, they're not the reason why I'm exaggerating, but they're probably the reason why we have to do all this like email crap. 00:39:47.74 evergrowmarketing Uh, because this is a tangent, but Apple. 00:39:52.09 Cody Oh about how they open up emails but they... 00:39:53.95 evergrowmarketing Yeah. So Apple mail has a bot that opens up all emails first. And so like Apple, it's part of their Apple tracking and transparency, whatever. And that like all reporting for email deliverability like has like skyrocketed. So people don't actually know how their users are, how Apple mail users are engaging with emails. They don't know if they're clicking on links. They don't know if they're like opening them. So now like every now and then if you subscribe to a publication like Stacked Marketer, they will say, hey, if you're still like actually reading this, click on this link here. And then then they'll use that link click action, like that landing page load action. 00:40:32.02 evergrowmarketing as like ah an indicator that your profile is actually still engaging. um But anyways, I digress. 00:40:40.88 Cody Man, this is nerdy stuff. 00:40:41.09 evergrowmarketing Where was it? Yeah, and I know. I know. 00:40:43.47 Cody Hey, I was, i'm I'm listening, but I'm also thinking other things in my head. 00:40:43.58 evergrowmarketing Where was it? Where was it? 00:40:48.61 Cody And I wanted to ask you when I say safari, what image pops into your head or what do you think of? 00:40:54.50 evergrowmarketing A compass. I think of the logo. I think of the Safari logo, the compass. 00:40:59.58 Cody Oh, you do really? 00:41:01.47 evergrowmarketing Yeah. What about, what do you do? 00:41:02.68 Cody Oh, not that. No. 00:41:05.38 evergrowmarketing you think I was like an African safari? 00:41:07.26 Cody No, I think of the, the safari and Pokemon, the safari zone. Do you play Pokemon growing up? 00:41:11.68 evergrowmarketing Hmm. Nope. 00:41:14.48 Cody What? 00:41:15.30 evergrowmarketing I mean, I played it a little bit, but I never like, I was more of a Wario person, like Pokemon like on Gameboy, like on Gameboy. 00:41:21.76 Cody I forget you're, you were, I think you're cooler than me. Um, wait, what really? 00:41:25.91 evergrowmarketing No, I don't know. Cause all the cool kids play Pokemon now. 00:41:33.74 evergrowmarketing Well, maybe not, you know, it's become trendy, you know, like, I feel like, uh, all the old, like Dragon Ball Z and like Pokemon is like trendy now. 00:41:34.82 Cody Okay. 00:41:42.42 Cody Yeah, I don't know how it works now. Um, I really don't get it because now all the things that we used to make fun of people for and myself included, right? I say we, as if like everybody was making fun of everybody. 00:41:53.55 Cody Um, but it was, if you, if you did those things or you liked those things, you definitely got made fun of. 00:41:53.61 evergrowmarketing I think Pokemon, I'm sorry, I interrupted you. That was rude. 00:42:04.06 evergrowmarketing Yeah, I say Pokemon like I didn't, like Wario is the equivalent. 00:42:04.13 Cody Um, 00:42:08.12 evergrowmarketing No, I played um and played ah a lot of Zelda on the Game Boy. 00:42:13.42 Cody Oh, OK, OK. 00:42:14.70 evergrowmarketing So I played a lot of Zelda and then Wario was the other one. Wario had some fantastic Game Boy games. Just amazing. 00:42:22.73 Cody Yeah, no, they slapped. 00:42:24.43 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:42:25.39 Cody Because then you you'd like collect the coins and then you got to the end and based on how many coins you had. I can't remember which one. I think it was the second one. 00:42:30.77 evergrowmarketing There were so many, there were so many Easter eggs in those too. Like there were so many, like you could just beat the game, but then you could also find like the secret item in each one and then like unlock secret worlds. 00:42:40.98 Cody Yeah. 00:42:42.04 evergrowmarketing That was awesome. 00:42:42.23 Cody Yeah, that was fun. 00:42:43.35 evergrowmarketing So my aunt, my great aunt, she's my grandma's age, cause she's my grandma's sister. We played all the Wario games together. 00:42:47.76 Cody Makes sense. 00:42:50.27 evergrowmarketing And then we worked to like a hundred percent those games and like get to all the secret world and everything like that. And even at like in her mid fifties, we were beating all the Halo games on Legendary. 00:43:00.88 Cody So you never went to the safari zone. 00:43:00.91 evergrowmarketing Uh, not that I can recall. 00:43:05.31 Cody Man, man. 00:43:06.60 evergrowmarketing No, I played like so little Pokemon. I don't know. And by the time like I was 10, 11, I was playing Diablo on the computer. 00:43:18.54 Cody and 00:43:19.81 evergrowmarketing Yeah, but we weren't, i I mean, we, I didn't grow up wealthy. So like when I, yeah I say that like, you have to be wealthy to play Pokemon. Um, I didn't grow up with any money really. So like the only, the only console we had was a Nintendo 64 and we had like three games, uh, golden eye, extreme G2 and Diddy Kong racing. And, um, 00:43:39.93 Cody Mm, 00:43:40.64 evergrowmarketing Whenever I played Super Nintendo, I was at my grandma's house. Whenever I played Game Boy, I was at my great aunt's house. Whenever I played computer, I was at my cousin's house. 00:43:47.39 Cody okay. 00:43:47.95 evergrowmarketing So I was always at somebody's house when I was playing these games. And so there was nothing I could like dedicate myself to. 00:43:50.48 Cody Right. Yeah. 00:43:53.43 Cody Yeah. Yeah. And the RPGs, you definitely had to have your own sort of deal or else you didn't. 00:43:58.38 evergrowmarketing Yeah, Perfect Dark. We had four games. Perfect Dark was the other one. 00:44:02.19 Cody Oh, yeah. 00:44:03.95 evergrowmarketing hope I hope i hope i we triggered some core memories with some of our listeners at our age. 00:44:04.00 Cody Yeah, I. 00:44:08.08 evergrowmarketing That'd be sweet. 00:44:09.62 Cody But I think Perfect Dark was what T for Teen, which meant that um there was no place in our house for that. We we were capped out at E for everybody, for everything. So when I saw someone, when I have like, when a friend had ever mature, I was like, wow, you're so grown up. 00:44:19.95 evergrowmarketing That's hilarious. 00:44:25.98 Cody That's crazy. You get to play games like that. 00:44:26.41 evergrowmarketing Oh, ah ah five five games we had, um, war gods. 00:44:32.34 Cody Even know what that is. 00:44:32.45 evergrowmarketing And I, I hope so. It's kind of like, uh, it was, I can't remember who it was built by, but you can Google it war gods, Nintendo 64. Um, that was M for mature. Oh, and 64. 00:44:43.86 Cody Ooh. 00:44:45.56 evergrowmarketing This game was so cool. it It was it was brutal. It was like the Mortal Kombat of the day, which is funny because Mortal Kombat was actually predates War Gods. But um that was fun. 00:44:56.12 evergrowmarketing Like I always played with ah ah Kabuki Joe, who was a clown. I hope if if any of our listeners played War Gods in like the late 90s, please reach out. 00:45:02.36 Cody Kabuki. 00:45:08.83 evergrowmarketing I want to hear from you because I have never heard of this game other than within my own household. 00:45:16.59 evergrowmarketing Okay. Let's talk about tracking other nerd, grownup nerd stuff. 00:45:22.20 Cody It is grown up nerd stuff. Yep. 00:45:24.00 evergrowmarketing Um, okay. So browsers, it sounds like browsers, uh, browsers have, have started, um, blocking that tracking. So the the fallout of that is when you, when you're on Facebook and you have, um, tracking on your website and a user clicks on your ad, goes to your website. 00:45:46.52 evergrowmarketing The, that tracking pixel can't report anything back to Facebook on what that user is doing because the browser is just blocking it. And so there has to be a way to go around that. Enter server side tracking. So this is, this is the crossroads. These, these are the crossroads that we are at, or is it this? 00:46:09.36 Cody There are crossroads in this moment. 00:46:12.95 evergrowmarketing In this moment, there are roads that cross and we are at that intersection. 00:46:15.54 Cody Yes. The roads are crossing. 00:46:18.33 evergrowmarketing Yeah. Uh, English is hard, dude. 00:46:21.25 Cody It is. 00:46:22.16 evergrowmarketing Um, so, uh, that's where we're at. 00:46:22.40 Cody I'm with you. 00:46:27.24 evergrowmarketing So right now we're, we've historically right now that see, that's an antonym there, right? Right now. And historically, historically, historically, and right now. 00:46:34.89 Cody right Right now, historically. 00:46:38.68 evergrowmarketing Um, we have done browser tracking through Google analytics. So Google analytics, we track the thank you page load. We track the clicks to call, things like that. And then we report that through, we pass that through, uh, Google ads and those share that attribution there. And that's how things are tracked. What we have struggled with is every single year, our costs per acquisitions increase and. 00:47:05.93 evergrowmarketing It's usually it's a function of increase cost per click because Google does increase that just about every year. And we report on it on our website, but the other thing that affects that too is a lack of attribution. So let's just say that our clients are spending a thousand dollars and let's go lower because our average client spends 500 bucks. So a client spends $500 and they get, and we track five leads. 00:47:34.35 evergrowmarketing Okay, so that's a hundred bucks a lead. And then the next year we track four leads. That's $125 a lead. Our cost per acquisition went up 25%. So that's, that's a lot. 00:47:45.66 evergrowmarketing But what happens if like, instead of four, what if we'd still track five, but we just, but we lost one because of attribution. 00:47:45.88 Cody Uh-huh. 00:47:54.83 evergrowmarketing Like what if five people clicked on, like actually fill out ah a form from our ads, but we couldn't report on that. ah And this has become a huge concern, especially when we have clients who are spending a minimum of 250 or yeah, just 250 bucks. And instead of tracking one lead, so like, or instead of tracking two leads, they only tracked one. Then your cost per acquisition goes from 250 to, or it goes from 125 to 250. That's a huge gap and it really makes us look bad. 00:48:26.91 evergrowmarketing Because we're losing tracking and things now, this is all conjecture, but I think it's very valid because whenever we run an ad campaign off of the minimum $250 budget, if you think this is insane, please go back to episode 42 and just, just listen to our business model. Um, because if if you're new to this, then it doesn't make any sense, but. 00:48:48.64 evergrowmarketing Um, if, if we only track one lead and we spent 250 bucks and our clients like, wow, that's bad. We got one lead with 250 bucks. You have to remind them like, yeah, but if we tracked one more, it'd be 125, which is within your target cost per acquisition. So, um. 00:49:04.29 evergrowmarketing This but kind of became more apparent to me as I worked at my day job and server-side tracking became more and more prevalent within these paid media platforms as a countermeasure to browsers stopping cookies. 00:49:21.79 evergrowmarketing So what is server-side tracking? Server-side tracking is when you, instead of, oh, yeah, ask me Cody. 00:49:29.37 Cody Sorry, I felt like I should ask you. So you could have, but you you already did. So it's a little late now, but I was going to be like, Hey, Jake, what's server side tracking? 00:49:39.02 evergrowmarketing That's a great question, Cody. Thank you for asking. Uh, so server side tracking is where instead of tracking the event and passing it to the browser, to the platform, you actually send it up into the server. So into the cloud, that information on the user. And then that goes to the other server. So like Facebook server and then down into the Facebook platform and the reporting. So you're like, imagine the wall between the U S and Mexico. 00:50:09.06 evergrowmarketing or Poland in every other country. ah You would, instead of like going, so normally, pre-wall, you would just go through the border, right? You just you just swim across the Rio Grande and you just enter the border, all right? that's That's basically like pixel tracking. 00:50:26.45 evergrowmarketing There's a wall there now. So now you have to go over it. And so that's like server side tracking. So we're going over that wall. However, this only works with PII or personally identifiable information such as first name, last name, email. It does not work with cookies because our first party cookie is different than Facebook and Facebook can't assign a user a cookie and then also recognize that cookie on your site. It just, it has to go to the browser for that to work. 00:50:57.39 evergrowmarketing So with PII, what's happening or with service that attribution, what's happening is when people click on an ad from Facebook, Facebook knows this user with this first name, this last name, this phone number, and this email clicked on an ad, it was your ad. And then like, and at this time, at this time they clicked on it too. And then let's just say they go to your website, Facebook loses visibility. They have a blindfold on. They're like that, the see no evil monkey, right? They don't see anything. 00:51:26.04 evergrowmarketing And then that person fills out a form on your website. And then what happens is they enter their first name, their last name, their phone number, their email, whatever other PII you're trying to collect. And that Facebook will accept. And then once that form is submitted, what you do is you grab that, that information from the form, those form fields, you send that to the server. First name, last name, phone number, email, that server sends it over to Facebook. 00:51:52.54 evergrowmarketing Facebook receives that and says, yo, dude, this person with this first name, last name, email, and phone number definitely clicked on an ad right before they filled out your form that you're saying they filled out. 00:52:04.27 evergrowmarketing We're going to report on that. 00:52:04.63 Cody but yeah 00:52:07.65 Cody This is, it this is great. This is exactly what people should expect from our podcast is saying, yo, dude. 00:52:13.93 evergrowmarketing yeah 00:52:16.45 Cody Yes. 00:52:17.77 evergrowmarketing Okay. and And the reason why that's okay and not cookies is because when they fill out that form, they consented to giving you the information. Now generally you have to have a thing on there that says like, you know, Hey, by filling out this form, like you consent to us tracking this form submission or something like that. And there's just some canned language that you can use and and like integrated forms from CRMs and things like that. But, um, it's just general terminology. It's also on the privacy policy too. You can throw that in there as well. Um, but. 00:52:46.77 evergrowmarketing You send that information over Facebook says, aha, yes. Uh, this person definitely clicked on an ad and you're reporting that they filled out a form. Okay, cool. We'll put that in your ad account as a conversion. Um, because we know that, uh, now you, you basically shook our hand and said, yes, this person, you handed them off. Whereas before like Facebook had to like go to the website with the person and just like follow them around and see what they did. But now you have to actually report that back to Facebook and say, yes, um, they did this. So, uh, 00:53:16.49 evergrowmarketing That is a little bit technical. Like you have to not only recognize the form submission, but you also have to say like, this this is the data, like these line items they filled out is the data. And I need you Facebook to report on that. Um, and so you have to like, kind of set up a little bit of JavaScript on Facebook send and in our tag manager or rudder stack or whatever you're using for, for a tag manager. 00:53:43.02 evergrowmarketing And, um, I mean, there are some downsides to it too. Like they misspelled the first name and last name. Okay. Well, maybe they still have their email and phone number to match within Facebook, but what if the email that they use on your site is separate from the email they use on Facebook, then Facebook can't match that user. So the more information that you collect from that person, that the more information that they can gather and, or they can match in Facebook is better for server side attribution. So. 00:54:10.95 evergrowmarketing Where do we fall into this? Finally, enhanced conversions. So enhanced conversions is Google's form of server side attribution. 00:54:22.04 Cody Wait, so Facebook has all this stuff too. 00:54:24.06 evergrowmarketing Yes, it's cappy, uh, conversion API. We talked to Kobe about it, uh, on the Wix episode. and Wix has it. 00:54:30.92 Cody Okay. 00:54:31.62 evergrowmarketing Wix has this built into Wix, which is crazy. So like we're talking like super technical, but if you go to Wix studio and you set up a site, like they just have this integration as API set up and it's literally like dumb, dumb can do it. 00:54:34.97 Cody Nice. 00:54:43.28 Cody Well, uh, I was going to say, I mean, it sounds strategic, right? That, uh, and based on what Coby was saying. Mm hmm. His background is that the people who would be using Wix would be better matches for that. 00:54:59.28 Cody It sounds right. Right. I mean, I don't know. 00:55:01.91 evergrowmarketing I would rather do it. 00:55:02.04 Cody I said it before. 00:55:02.72 evergrowmarketing Like I say, dumb dumb is going to do it, but I'm like, yeah, but it's easier, right? So like, yeah. 00:55:06.61 Cody Yeah, the more we're doing, especially because this is yeah, this was a monster to to go down this giant rabbit hole and figure out what we need to do. But sorry, keep going. 00:55:17.22 evergrowmarketing Yeah. So, um, the thing about conversion or service side attribution is like that PII has to be present on the conversion event. So the conversion event is like, thank you page loaded. then that user's information has to be displayed there. That's generally pretty hard to do. In e-commerce, you can do it because you can then just load like the the confirmation page, and it has their information dynamically pulled in. But with like like just general leads, it can be harder to implement, but not necessarily harder, but more of kind of like a weird user experience. like Why am I seeing all my PIIers on this page? So we went to form submission route, which is also there' just a more accurate way to to track it. 00:55:56.12 evergrowmarketing um And with enhanced conversions, it works the same way. We're telling on Google like, Hey, you know, this is pull this data from this form and then send it to Google ads. And then that's how we're going to track now. And what we're hoping to see is an increased number in overall conversions, but we're actually going to test the efficacy of this. 00:56:20.85 evergrowmarketing And I'm sure we'll write about it. and I don't want to exactly say how we're going to test it because I don't want anybody criticizing me yet until you read it. um But we want we want to see if like doing the the enhanced conversions is better for the volume of conversions that we get with the type of businesses that we work with versus just using like a browser pixel. 00:56:42.66 evergrowmarketing um but Yeah. I mean, I don't know where to go from here, but this is like a whole thing that you've been diving into with Jay relatively recently. We've had multiple discussions about this and it's, it's all come down to like, okay, but how do we isolate the test? 00:56:56.36 Cody Yeah, that's most recently. I mean, before that, though. I don't know, Google sending out all these emails and they're telling you it's like they internally, but they do this. They internally decided, hey, this is our new propaganda and we're going to start blasting it out. So everybody does exactly what we want them to. um And they decided that enhanced conversions was one of those things and. 00:57:18.59 Cody So I was like, okay, I'll go down the rabbit hole and figure out what we need to do in order for this to function, how we need it. We need it too. And there's different ways that you can set it up. Um, there is, I think they put them into three categories. Um, you have fully automated, which you just check a box inside your Google ads account that says, yeah, whatever you can find for PII. 00:57:46.94 Cody that's sent through personal identifiable information. So find that name, that email, the phone number, whatever, find it when it gets pushed through. And then assuming that it does call that a conversion. Now we tested that with our setup and it didn't work. The information that we needed to be pushed through was not pushed through to the data layer, which means that we can't rely on it. It doesn't function how we need it to. 00:58:09.83 evergrowmarketing Well Cody what is the data layer? 00:58:13.28 Cody the tattler is this magical land where yeah where you and man uh the stuff the variables that the variables man i don't know this isn't this isn't who i am 00:58:17.75 evergrowmarketing Where everybody hates themselves. 00:58:32.93 evergrowmarketing I, I, I'm pretty good at visualizing things. So imagine you see the website and then like off to the, uh, okay, here's, here's a good example. So go to website, you right click on it. If you're on PC, if you're on Mac, I don't know. Sorry. Um, and then click inspect the right console that comes up the right side of that. That's the data layer. That's the, that's the things that's happening. Um, like with code and how things are changing around dynamically being inserted, things like that, that the user doesn't see. 00:59:02.74 evergrowmarketing Um, but what browsers see, uh, that's the data layer. So there you go. 00:59:09.00 Cody Yeah, I like to think of it, though, as the magical land that's kind of like this ocean and then it's the things that are happening under the water that this stuff that's moving and there's a lot happening back there, but. 00:59:22.11 Cody not everything, you know, some things float. That's the problem is some things float on the water and then they don't go where you need them to because they need to go under the water and then go somewhere else to the other part of the magical land. And they're not doing it. And that was our problem is that our stuff was floating and and not going where it needed to. um So we had to manually get it. So okay, other options are 00:59:47.12 Cody Well, tag manager, you can set these things up in tag manager, or you can just do it straight up on the website, too. Right. You can. Add whatever code you need to to pass through the information that you're looking for, make sure it gets the right person, in this case, Google and. 01:00:02.12 evergrowmarketing Why did we use a Google Tag Manager? 01:00:04.34 Cody Why? um Makes life easy, you know, as an agency, it makes life very easy. you know We can have um and really, I think anybody ah Tag Manager consolidates all of your tags into one place. If you have all these tracking scripts and you're not sure how or where they go or that sort of thing, or you just don't want to be wrestling with the website every time that you want to make a change. You place Tag Manager once and then you control everything inside of Google Tag Manager. So that's what we do. That's why we do it. um It does make life comparatively easier. 01:00:41.51 Cody um Yeah, especially as an agency, if if I was doing my own e-commerce or something, it would be a little much less scary or or much less hesitant to be making website changes and that sort of thing where you're actually playing with the code on the site. But if you're not doing that, then tag manager is great. So that's what we did. Our specific use case. Um, we found that Divi. 01:01:12.01 Cody is not passing through the information that we needed to. 01:01:16.16 evergrowmarketing And that's the visual builder theme that we use with WordPress. 01:01:19.04 Cody Yep. I mean, really, this just gets highly specific um to our case. It's, yes, we use WordPress, then we use Divi, and Divi wasn't passing it through. So then we had to look for something that we were using that was. Now for forms, we typically use Ninja forms. So after many hours of, 01:01:39.48 Cody hunting down information on the internet. I found some YouTube video that got us close enough to where we needed to be. So we were able to set up set up something that would say, if it's if it's going through Ninja Forms, the Ninja Forms you pass this through. So that's what happens now. um That's what we were able to set up. So we we have tracking now. We know how it It works, it's doing what we need it to. So now Ninja forms will, when there's a form submission, send it over to Google. And that's what we have been successful with doing. Now it's us wanting to test Google on how important this truly is. Because they're the ones sending out all these email blasts saying, hey, this is important. You should do this or else you're goingnna you're you're losing tracking. 01:02:32.82 Cody Now to us, we're like, yeah, conversion rate is down year over year. if If the rate is down, why is the rate down? Because one, one potential answer for that is just not tracking things are getting dropped off and it makes it look like it's worse. 01:02:47.23 Cody Um, you might actually, what? 01:02:47.79 evergrowmarketing And the other answer, so then the other answer makes Google look bad. 01:02:53.29 Cody Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. 01:02:55.45 evergrowmarketing The other answer is you're sending us crap traffic now, which is probably true according to the the DOJ findings. 01:03:04.32 Cody Yeah. So we're, we're going to set up a mass test and we're going to figure out the rate at which things drop off. Right. 01:03:11.35 evergrowmarketing And this would be easier to track if we had loads of conversions. 01:03:11.45 Cody Um, 01:03:13.83 evergrowmarketing Like if, if we were an e-commerce company and we had like hundreds a month, the, that's, that's where the use case lies, but we track. Six leads a month from Google ads on average from, from each client. 01:03:27.99 Cody Jenny's asked me about this. She's like, do I need to worry about that? Do I need to care? Like probably, probably you. 01:03:32.27 evergrowmarketing yeah yeah Yeah. 01:03:32.77 Cody Yeah. Um, but that's what we're going to test and find out is do we need to care? Do people our size need to care? 01:03:39.66 evergrowmarketing I think, um, 01:03:40.01 Cody Because Google is not making that clear. And in fact, when you read through all of this documentation, all the supporting materials, you're like, this doesn't seem like it's written for the little guys. 01:03:50.54 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 01:03:50.91 Cody And the little guys are anybody who's spending less than, geez, I don't know, a hundred thousand dollars a month. 01:03:57.02 evergrowmarketing Yeah. I agree with that statement. 01:03:58.74 Cody If you got a annual budget under a million, this is all written for people for with over a million dollar annual budgets. Probably this, that's hypothesis, right? But we're going to find out. We're going to test it. 01:04:08.93 evergrowmarketing Yeah. There's, there's no way like a local service business is going to be able to set up this on their own. And I don't say that like. narcissistically or anything like this is very technical. Like we had to do a lot of research and figuring out this. And if we ran a local service business, we would stop doing our local service stuff to figure this out or again, hire somebody, but, um, I, there's going to be, um, it's going to be easier if you're an e-commerce agency. Again, I think Google just caters to e-commerce companies, like probably because that's where they make the bulk of their money, but. 01:04:47.08 evergrowmarketing There are, you mentioned when you set up enhanced conversions, that there's an automatic way and there's a manual way because Google is super, super smart at determining purchases from websites. 01:05:01.79 evergrowmarketing So smart. In fact, that when you set up GA for Google analytics for purchase is already a conversion event. It's already set in there. 01:05:09.28 Cody Mmhmm. 01:05:09.89 evergrowmarketing They just automatically set it up. You'd have to do anything. And it's because if you're a new commerce site, there is a like. There is literally a set of parameters that are, that is so universally used that Google can understand it. They can understand pricing. They can understand all of that. so If you're an e-commerce company or an e-commerce agency, setting up enhanced conversions and service-side tracking and everything is going to be way, way, way easier than if you're like a local lead generation company. And on top of that, like as an e-commerce company, you like your primary goal is to sell sell, is to sell online. And every single time your primary KPI or your primary conversion action is met, there's PII associated to it. 01:05:54.93 evergrowmarketing Someone has to check out, whereas us, we have three primary events, phone call, form fill, and email. And two of those, unless we use call tracking, two of those, we really can't track the way that we can track forms. 01:06:09.21 Cody Yeah, I think Google is under fire with with so much, right? So much is happening right now for them. I think that they're getting. 01:06:20.10 Cody I don't know. But here it goes. Hot take and speculation. I think that they're losing the e-commerce share. Right. That's not a surprise. 01:06:29.16 evergrowmarketing Mm. 01:06:29.84 Cody They've said that I can't remember the quote, but they said, like, you know, um people always bring up Bing as our competitor when the reality is that it's Amazon. 01:06:39.14 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 01:06:39.45 Cody Right. People search on Amazon and it's specifically for products. It's different, but not to Google that to them. It's just total, total share, total um share of the market. And it's going to Amazon. It's going to Walmart. It's going to TikTok. Right. um TikTok being a little different, but still people shop on TikTok. That's the thing. 01:07:04.39 Cody um 01:07:05.12 evergrowmarketing I disagree with all those findings. Like, yeah, I just don't believe it. 01:07:07.71 Cody You do. 01:07:10.53 Cody But I was, all right, let me finish this though. If I had the ability right now, I feel like nobody's talking about this, I really do. If I could drill down a company and split out stock as in the the different parts of their company, I would take so much money, so much money right now. I would go into Apple, I would break off a piece of Apple map in all of my money. 01:07:41.30 Cody would be doubling down on Apple map stock because nobody's paying attention. Nobody's paying attention to what's happening and it's growing. certain like local Local has been neglected just in general. 01:07:53.64 evergrowmarketing Mm hmm. 01:07:53.83 Cody like it's not um If you watch over the last, and this is this isn't even this has been over time, a decent amount of time. Directories have died. A lot of what used to be the whole directory game is, is now there's been acquisitions and someone just died off and consolidations and mergers. And there's not that many now directories and the ones that it's just gotten the ones that are there is stronger and the ones that aren't aren't there on as many of them. And then the ones like Apple, because of everything else that's in the ecosystem has grown a lot and nobody's paid attention. 01:08:33.43 Cody Right. Apple maps is now local search for some people. and This keeps coming up. If you need to ask people, this will happen in people's lives when they're like, hey, we'll meet up at this place. 01:08:46.95 Cody And then that's like, yeah, I checked the hours and you're like, wait, what did you check the hours on? They're like, ah, Apple maps. 01:08:51.88 evergrowmarketing That literally happened to us. 01:08:52.30 Cody Right. 01:08:53.15 evergrowmarketing That's why we talked about this. Like I was in what I was in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and I was like, yeah, let's go to like Taco Bell or Taco John's or whatever it was. 01:08:54.69 Cody Yeah. 01:09:01.81 evergrowmarketing And Um, I check Lauren's like, it's closed. I'm like, not on Google maps. And then she's like, well, Apple maps that is closed. 01:09:07.94 Cody Mm hmm. 01:09:09.69 evergrowmarketing I'm like, okay. Like we were talking about this prior to that conversation that I had with Lauren. And I'm like, yeah, this is big. This is like, there's a discrepancy between the maps and like Apple sucks. 01:09:20.69 evergrowmarketing And we were like, we were kind of shitting on Apple, but then like since then. 01:09:23.54 Cody As a as a marketer, this it's such like a woke moment. You're like, whoa, hold on. We need to stop. We need to talk about this because this is like this is like that's our fiance. 01:09:32.53 evergrowmarketing It was, it was so big to us and Lauren's like, so what? 01:09:35.62 Cody So it's great. Right. But it 01:09:36.78 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 01:09:38.35 Cody If that would, I don't think it happened. It wasn't Jenny. This is not what Jenny, it was, it was, um, but it was a close enough friend that I just stopped and was like, wait, wait, buddy. Listen for a second. 01:09:50.89 Cody What did you search on? He's like, this is Hikaru. Right. That was the guy. He's like, Oh, you know, Apple like, okay, hold on. I, we need to break this down. 01:10:00.03 evergrowmarketing This is like, this is like those like, 01:10:00.59 Cody Like how old are you? Do you use this as your default navigator? 01:10:05.07 evergrowmarketing This is like the Sherlock movies where like someone like random says something and Sherlock just like clears the table and he's like, oh, he that's like starts going to like notes. 01:10:05.39 Cody Do you? 01:10:13.66 evergrowmarketing And then the dude is just like, what is going on? like What did I say? 01:10:18.66 Cody It's huge. It's massive. And and again, nobody's talking about it. And it's just such a, it's crazy. I would, I would be doubling down so much money if I could just specifically onto Apple maps because local search, they've they've been, I mean, it's going to be more, right? I think Apple is going to do more with search in general. 01:10:39.94 Cody Um, so it'll be mobile search because that's especially where they have some massive dominance in the market, but man. 01:10:49.45 evergrowmarketing Yeah, I could definitely see this is big. Yeah. I mean, like Apple maps, having local service ads, um, Safari running like their own native search engine. 01:11:02.69 Cody Yeah. ah We just, we internally have our own separate documentation specifically for Apple maps now. Right. And normally it's, it's just kind of loose and lazy for a specific, um, 01:11:17.61 evergrowmarketing like bing Like Bing is super lazy because it's like you can literally import your Google profile into Bing. 01:11:23.21 Cody right. Yeah, um, directories. I don't know. That might blow some people's minds. Like we we have at least a video for each directory that matters. Um, we don't have extreme detailed documentation on every individual one because I last I checked, we have about 30 that we consider important. 01:11:32.41 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 01:11:43.18 Cody Um, but. 01:11:43.85 evergrowmarketing Yeah. Some people are like, well, there's like 200 that you can get on Bright Local. Yeah. All of them suck. All of them don't even matter. They don't move the needle. You're spending money on nothing. 01:11:51.35 Cody Yep. Yeah. So when you look at the important ones and yeah, Apple is, um and I don't know. I just died there. I don't know. I don't know what's man. If I could, I wish I could, I wish I could. Cause I've never felt so like confident about something too, because I've seen the growth of it and how it's been happening and how with everything else that's going on, it's being neglected. But I do. If I could. 01:12:20.11 Cody I just want to, I want to buy that. I want to buy a piece of that and I just want to wait. 01:12:25.65 evergrowmarketing I mean, you could just buy Apple stock because they're going to get into the ad space here really soon. And I mean, like bigger than they already are. Like, like big, because Google is creating their privacy sandbox. Apple's already set up to do it. They've been doing this with, with their app store and everything. Now granted, um, they've been. 01:12:47.11 evergrowmarketing Kind of teetering on the wrong side of things and being hit with, uh, litigation. But once they figure it out, because Apple starting from the ground up, they're seeing what Google did. And Apple does this with everything. Like really with everything. Apple is not a company of innovation anymore. They, they, they haven't been for a long time. They haven't been since the iPhone and like the iPhone one ever since then they have let companies innovate and then they perfected. 01:13:15.49 evergrowmarketing And so what Google does with innovation with LSAs, Google ads, browsers, privacy sandbox, Apple just sits there and watches and they see what goes wrong. And then they build the privacy sandbox first. So they they take control of the market with devices, Apple devices and Apple loan properties. People willingly buy those. And then, google so Google is going through litigation right now and talking about breaking up the monopoly, which means your phone. 01:13:42.73 evergrowmarketing If you're an now Android user likely won't come with Chrome installed on it anymore because that is an argument that Google has a monopoly on those. However, if you buy an Apple phone, then you're already consenting to Apple products on that phone. 01:14:00.32 evergrowmarketing So if they control 50% of the mobile market share, that means that yeah, yeah, that means that 01:14:05.49 Cody That's globally, right? Say it's, it's gotta be bigger, a lot bigger, just like the U S only. 01:14:09.78 evergrowmarketing in the U S yeah, but that means that they already have a device. That's a privacy sandbox where they can serve all the ads they want to you. And they have skirted the, um, the antitrust and, uh, privacy regulations, the things that Google is struggling with. So like, I think there's a future in which Apple rules, not rules, but like. 01:14:38.94 evergrowmarketing literally leapfrogs being and becomes the number two competitor to Google. Um, in terms of ad revenue, search, sorry, I mean, I gotta, I keep putting asterisks on these in terms of search ad revenue. 01:14:54.21 Cody Um, yeah, I don't, I don't do speculation buying. Um, this is getting into finances. Um, but, but I don't, ah it's true. 01:15:01.70 evergrowmarketing This is, this is, this is what your recommended podcast and it was like all the financial podcasts in your auto flight. 01:15:07.33 Cody We talk about Vanguard a lot. I don't do speculation buying. Um, but my, I'm a generally a boggle head, right? So I think don't, don't break out the market. Just buy the whole market because the whole market always goes up. 01:15:19.94 evergrowmarketing Well, if it goes down, then you have different problems. 01:15:20.00 Cody Um, so, right. 01:15:22.16 evergrowmarketing Like, right? 01:15:23.11 Cody Yeah. 01:15:23.16 evergrowmarketing Like you got a bet. It's like, it's like betting on your own team. Like, why would you bet against your own team? That's stupid. 01:15:29.29 Cody Mm hmm. Yeah. So I am a generally believer of that, but I don't know. Like, I just truly don't know enough to say I don't know how Apple stands as a whole. And, you know, if something like this is only three percent of the total company, then that's not enough for me to to have that sort of confidence. um But I don't know. Maybe I could dabble on it just for funsies. um But can't be, can't be the, the serious money. 01:16:02.72 Cody Right. That's, that's how people end up getting made fun of on wall street, Brett bets. And like, here goes all my life savings in three weeks or whatever. So yeah. 01:16:15.62 evergrowmarketing That was a, I feel like that was a little heavy. I hope it was informational. 01:16:21.91 Cody Um, we're, we're going to roll this. 01:16:22.82 evergrowmarketing All this is in an effort just to like be transparent about like what we're working on, but it's hard to say, like, it's hard to talk about what we're working on without like establishing foundations of like how we, how do we get here? If it was like, like the opening, like the first 45 minutes of this episode was literally like those episodes, there's, there's shows where it's like, I bet you're wondering how we got here. 01:16:43.49 evergrowmarketing like let's back up and the remainder like the first 30 minutes of the show is literally just like setting the story. you 01:16:50.20 Cody Well, we want to talk about it more, just the things that we're doing and working on within the agency. And this is, this is definitely one of the big ones. We finished nail gun. That was big. That whole rollout SMTP, that sort of deal and conversions is now up there, but there's going to be a ah testing period in which we collect the data and and know what actually happened from it, as opposed to just a, we will roll it out no matter what, because It's an improvement, but we want to know what the impact is as opposed to just doing what every other market is doing and drinking whatever Kool-Aid Google dishes out. 01:17:32.74 Cody So that'd be cool. And then the other thing that we've really been working, it's just always documentation, continued documentation, which isn't the most exciting thing in the world to to talk about, but maybe we can have a, an updated documentation talk later. 01:17:45.15 evergrowmarketing I was talking to, I was talking to someone on a Reddit, still am. Um, and just my DM is about like documentation in general. And cause he's asking like how long it took us to get to where we're at. I'm like, what's it about? I mean, where are we going on year six here? And he's like, well, could, do you think you could have done it any faster if you had the knowledge that you have now back then? And I just said no, because. 01:18:08.39 Cody Not the knowledge, no. 01:18:09.44 evergrowmarketing No, it's not, it's not the knowledge. 01:18:09.63 Cody That's not what it is. 01:18:10.86 evergrowmarketing It's the documentation. It's the training at the processes. Like, despite having the knowledge, you still have to get that down on paper or on something in order to, to hire the team to do that work. 01:18:20.95 evergrowmarketing So you can continue doing everything now. And like all the knowledge we have right now is just, it is just better, um, better execution of the services, uh, and better deliverables and better value. 01:18:35.03 evergrowmarketing It has nothing to do with, um, you know, sales or acquisition, because our retention has been the same. Our retention is like 90%. Like it's, it, that has always been in the case. I think, I think if you have like bad retention early on, then maybe the knowledge later on will help you grow. But if you don't focus on documentation, then it doesn't matter how long, how far along you are, you're never going to get any bigger. 01:19:00.68 Cody Is the implication that this person wants to grow faster than us? Is that what they were getting at? 01:19:05.15 evergrowmarketing The, the, this person has used to be deep in the guru rabbit hole. 01:19:10.42 Cody Oh, so just judging us for how supposedly slow. 01:19:10.40 evergrowmarketing Um, and has his. Not judge. No, no, no. Like he, he's super like understanding and he's like, he's just tired of the guru stuff. And he just sees what I post a lot on Reddit. So he's like actually seeking advice. 01:19:23.12 evergrowmarketing Um, and so there's like this preconceived notion of like how fast things should grow. But then like, when he's hearing advice from me, he's like, why don't you have videos about this? I'm like, well, we have our podcast, but like. 01:19:35.32 evergrowmarketing Like actual videos that are just like straight to the point. And I'm like, time, like we don't make money doing this. We make money with our agency. Like this is all just like mostly just help people. And he's like, why do you do this? I'm like, I don't know. My own ego, the warm fuzzies. Like, and, uh, so it's not that he's. 01:19:55.95 evergrowmarketing ignorant and said he's naive and he understands that he's naive and he's trying to to like get a realistic perception of how long it actually takes. 01:20:06.03 Cody Well, it's good to see that there's some beginnings of self-reflection there. I think, I don't know. I think about this stuff a lot. I think about, cause to me, my default, i'm I'm a skeptical person. I just stand by default. So when I, I think, wow, this information is very easily available and accessible to me. 01:20:27.36 Cody I'm already skeptical of that. Why is it so easy? Why is this? Why is this YouTube ad getting thrown in front of me? If it's so truly altruistic and good and and that sort of thing. Why, right? Because. This it really bugs me, man, the the whole timelines and things like that, like part of me gets it when you're younger and you're like just wanting to do well. 01:20:53.39 Cody You want to do better. You want to make good money. And then you eventually hit a point where you're doing well enough. And then whatever you want to keep doing past that is, is less of a financial thing and more of just a personal goals. Um, and maybe these people are there and maybe they're not. I don't know. I don't know how they work, but I really do wish that. 01:21:17.85 Cody people would just stop listening to random people. This doesn't work because we're random people on the internet, right? To to somebody we are, we are the random people on the internet, but that's what they do. Uh, they're just reading these things and they're finding, I think what I was, i I started writing something about this and then I deleted it. 01:21:40.33 Cody just because I couldn't articulate it the way that I wanted to. But what bugs me is that nowadays people aren't comparing themselves to the 1%. It's the .001%. The internet amplifies everything. They amplifies what's normal. It amplifies what you think is reasonable and acceptable to you. So then you're watching these TikToks, these shorts, whatever it is of these people who aren't even the normal exception. 01:22:11.91 Cody They're, they're the extreme exception and making you believe that their level of success is a normal thing. 01:22:20.69 evergrowmarketing Yeah, they make that like that's expected of you. 01:22:20.99 Cody It's not. 01:22:22.69 evergrowmarketing like I mean, this is normal. Like, why aren't you here here yet? that's And that's just not the case. I was telling you the other day. 01:22:27.35 Cody Like imagine if, if you got off the internet though, and you just went locally in your town and found the successful people in your town and you ask them their stories, how do you think that will go? 01:22:32.15 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 01:22:37.82 evergrowmarketing And I bet most of them are in their 50s. 01:22:37.99 Cody Right? Yeah. 01:22:40.88 evergrowmarketing I was just telling i was telling you the other day about my sister and and how me and Lauren and my sister, we were comparing household incomes because like last year, Lauren and I were like 350. And then my, but this year I quit my job and that reduced our income by a full six figures. And now we're at like 200, 220. And my sister was like, we're at 450, but last year they were at like 250. So like last year we were ahead of them and now we're back, but at the same time, like I quit my job. I lost six figures of income in order to focus on my agency. And I was telling you, like, it's a weird feeling. 01:23:14.98 evergrowmarketing I'm not, we're not, we're comparing ourselves in the fact that we're comparing, but like, we're not like, it's not a competition. And, and we realized that and like, we just live different lives, but in the way it's it's kind of weird thinking about how like, like 450, 500,000 and like a career-driven life, like that's usually like peak. That's like you're topping out right now. And. 01:23:36.86 evergrowmarketing Uh, for me, like that's not anywhere near where my top's going to be. And it's just a matter of like pulling. It's like a rubber band. Like you gotta pull it back before it just launches. 01:23:47.94 evergrowmarketing And like, I'm, we're like quitting my job as me just pulling it back. And so now granted, like some people, it snaps and then you're. Got to go to a day job, but don't pull back too far. 01:24:00.78 evergrowmarketing Right. Just enough. Uh, but yeah. 01:24:06.35 Cody Yeah. 01:24:07.15 evergrowmarketing Uh, oh, um, it reminded me of this one, and what you were saying earlier. 01:24:07.35 Cody um 01:24:11.06 evergrowmarketing I don't know what what it was, but it reminded me of this message I got and run Reddit yesterday. This guy comes in and says, I'm Chris, the CEO of an SEO platform designed to make rank tracking and keyword research easier. 01:24:22.36 evergrowmarketing I have noticed you're active in the SEO community. So I thought this might be helpful for you. I'd love to offer you a free 30 day trial to give it a try. Let me know if you're interested and I can get you started. Cheers. Chris. I said, Hey, Chris, this really isn't a good elevator pitch and doesn't interest me. There already are, or there are already a hundred tools that do this. Like, and it just made me, I don't know what you said that made me think of this, but I'm like, do you have no business sense? There's like a million tools out there that that do exactly what you're saying. Like why, why would I care? 01:24:57.32 evergrowmarketing about yours. 01:24:59.07 Cody Yeah, it's nice that he gave it for free, right? It was a full free trial. That's what he was going for. 01:25:03.32 evergrowmarketing Yeah. I'm kind of like, I'm trying to like help, help him, but like, and kind of like an asshole way kind of being like, like work on it, man. Like, why is this different than nature? 01:25:15.89 Cody Yeah. Yeah. I don't, I don't know what to tell people anymore. I really don't lately. I feel like um I've had more exposure to a lot of the stuff lately and it just tires me out. 01:25:28.23 Cody because i i I don't have it. 01:25:28.82 evergrowmarketing Get used to it, buddy. 01:25:33.56 Cody I'm not the right the right person, um especially not the right piece person for a lot of people to just when they. The if they're aggressive and broey about it, and I see the irony of being called the Everbros, right? 01:25:52.52 Cody It's not lost on me. But that was the joke. That was always the joke is that we're not that broey and we have, we have truly convinced people that we are actually bros. 01:25:58.16 evergrowmarketing The joke went too far. It went too far back it up. 01:26:08.53 evergrowmarketing Well, cool. 01:26:09.28 Cody Yeah. Anyway. 01:26:10.90 evergrowmarketing Well guys, thanks for sticking around. Um, hopefully you found some information out of this that is valuable. Um, if you got any questions, feel free to reach out to us. We've been getting less and less engagement and I don't know why more listens, but less engagement. 01:26:22.10 Cody Yeah. 01:26:24.91 Cody Yeah, we got to do the standard, uh, lever of you. If you haven't, please do that. 01:26:29.73 evergrowmarketing comment on all platforms in the, in the description of this, we have all of our socials on there and YouTube go onto YouTube. There's some awesome shorts in there that are hilarious. 01:26:41.32 evergrowmarketing All of the video episodes are on there, which are longer than our audio episodes. Just so you know, which means there's some content that wasn't in the audio episodes. 01:26:46.19 Cody Yep. 01:26:49.75 Cody And if you just want to say anything, hop on over to the website, shoot us a message through the form. 01:26:49.94 evergrowmarketing So. 01:26:54.45 evergrowmarketing Mm-hmm. 01:26:54.60 Cody And, uh, we like reading them. 01:26:57.41 evergrowmarketing And responding to them, we respond to it. We're not big enough to where like we get a message and we ignore it unless you're trying to be a guest in the podcast. We get tons of those, but, uh, it's still hard to sift through those. 01:27:08.03 evergrowmarketing There was like nine times out of 10 solicitations for people who just want to capitalize on the audience. And it's just, it's hard. Um, no, it's always somebody like for somebody else, like and not the actual person wanting to be on. 01:27:14.40 Cody not even good ones. Yeah. 01:27:21.36 evergrowmarketing And like, I just don't like those as much. Um, 01:27:24.90 Cody I don't, I don't like when people delegate the wrong tasks, but delegate things that they shouldn't be delegating. Right. 01:27:33.19 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 01:27:33.35 Cody When it's supposed to be a personal thing and then you're delegating the personal thing and the point of it being the thing that you do is the fact that you're the one doing it. 01:27:38.82 evergrowmarketing It's like, it's like if you had your assistant write a thank you letter to Kobe for being on the podcast. 01:27:43.82 Cody Right. 01:27:43.82 evergrowmarketing It's like, don't even send it. 01:27:45.22 Cody Right. Yeah. 01:27:47.93 evergrowmarketing Uh, yeah. So anyways, yeah, fill out a form, just say like, Hey guys, listen to the podcast. You guys are cool. I like, we like that. 01:27:55.86 evergrowmarketing Or comment on the episode on the, on the, on the website. So, well, everybody, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. 01:28:05.97 Cody See ya. 01:28:07.66 evergrowmarketing Oh, there's a nose hair that's been hanging out that I've been trying to, I got pulled out. 01:28:11.45 Cody Yeah, you better.