To give all of our listeners a little more background. I know we touched on this a little bit last time in our first ever office hours debut, but I am new to the home builder industry. I worked for a builder for about a year and a half prior to coming to DYC. So still getting my feet wet was so much of what is specific and unique and wonderful about our industry, challenging about our industry. And this is a great chance to just open up those office doors.

so to speak, and let you all learn from Kevin as I'm learning from Kevin in this role.

Kevin Oakley (01:18.07)
Awesome. So we're talking about attribution today, huh? Okay.

Rachel Spaugh (01:20.657)
Yes. So when I was at my builder before I came here last summer, I remember seeing the attribution is BS series from Beth, Jackie and Julie loved it, found it so helpful. I felt like they were saying something that nobody had said to me yet. as I was really trying to learn how the marketing journey works in this industry. And I think there's just a lot of rich nuggets in there that we could dive into a little bit deeper. There's some specific questions I want to ask that I felt like too, too new and worried they were dumb questions when I was in my builder.

marketing role so I'm going to ask you those today and we'll dive into it and see what happens.

Kevin Oakley (01:53.134)
Awesome.

Okay, I love this topic because my quick background is that this topic used to be completely ignored or undervalued by people. This was back when I first started working at Do You Convert? We didn't even offer as part of our official scope of work any social media advertising because almost no one was doing it still. And when they were doing it, all the owners and senior leaders were highly skeptical.

that it was worth any investment at all. And only once I was able to show using at the time Facebook's offline conversion tools and other ways to get deeper insight into attribution and started talking about that, people were like, wait, you're telling me that this many people who ended up becoming a leader or purchasing a home saw this ad and this ad and this ad on Facebook or Instagram? And so we...

Then it feels like we've completely swung this other direction where attribution is like the only thing that people care about and they're letting it make every decision for them. And it's coming at a terrible time because the amount of insight that we can get is lower than it has been in the past. It's not completely gone, but it's lower than it's been in the past. And the gamification...

buy advertising platforms and agencies to make attribution look really good and say, despite the fact that you're not selling homes or not, whatever your ultimate outcome is, that's not happening. But look, all the attribution data says this is working fantastically and that disconnect, I've never seen higher, honestly. So it's a great topic, good choice.

Rachel Spaugh (03:39.263)
Yeah. So quick clarifying question off of what you just said. Why are there less insights right now? I think I know the answer to that, but I want to make sure we're talking about the same thing.

Kevin Oakley (03:48.844)
Yeah, partly because our compadres in Europe who kind of like everything from a consumer privacy protection standpoint seems to start in Europe, go to California and eventually spread across to the entire United States. So part of it is regulation and GDPR was a big part of this, which was the main privacy protection stuff that was put in place by the European Union.

And then Apple and Meta going to war and Apple really deciding that privacy was a key pillar of them defining who they were and what they were about. wasn't, know, Apple was really prior to that, though, were the tool for creatives and people who want to make stuff and challenge the status quo. And then when they decided that privacy was a big part too, they reduced dramatically the amount of signal.

that an iPhone or an Apple device could send back to the advertising platforms. And then they also started saying, hey, we're going to start creating erroneous data back towards email campaigns that are happening. So your open rates started to become unreliable. And so it's been wrapped around this idea of consumer privacy. And that leads us to this place where Apple, Google, and Amazon,

and Meta basically have the lock on consumer data. Like it didn't go away. All that data is still there. The question is who's using it. And Apple in particular decided to go to war against Meta. And it had a big impact for a couple months until Meta was able to find ways to counterbalance it. But a lot of that counterbalancing now is about taking the data that they do get signals back from. And part of that is trying to keep

when you interact with an ad on Meta, Instagram or Facebook, their goal is to keep you within the Meta browser for as long as possible because then they can get more data on what's happening. But they take that and they're using sophisticated machine learning, not artificial intelligence no matter what they say, it's machine learning. And they're using that to make really good predictive bets. And it turns out that a lot of the things that we feel like are wow, how did they know is pretty obvious. Like if you go on Zillow, you're...

Kevin Oakley (06:13.23)
considering something about real estate or you're just incredibly nosy. But that insight is projected insight. It's not that the personally identifiable information is there for any marketer to just go in and use. It's its own and kept more close to the chest by meta.

Rachel Spaugh (06:15.967)
Mm-hmm.

Rachel Spaugh (06:31.603)
Gotcha, yes, the way these platforms change things up on us, I think is the bane of every marketer's existence, at least when those changes are happening.

Kevin Oakley (06:38.818)
Yeah, and I have one more kind of, again, pull the hook on me anytime. But the opportunity then is for people to say, then I'm going to start putting in my own additional tools in place to track and get data on what is happening. At least when they come to my website, I'll use a tool like User Maven or Audientstown or something else to try to get that additional insight and...

and personally identifiable information in particular is what a lot of people are talking about of, well, we will connect that data point to individual users in your CRM and everything will be open to you about everything related to that individual went on the website, where they became a lead, what all the different sources they used in their journey, all that stuff. You can start trying to do some of that, but I do wanna warn builders that you need to make sure that your privacy policies

and I don't like getting legal involved in anything, but you better make sure that you're doing this the right way or there are people who are using tools to basically see everything that a builder is sniffing around in terms of data. And if it doesn't match what's in your privacy policy, they are going to sue you. Sometimes even if it does match what's in your privacy policy, but it's against some particular state or federal regulation, they're gonna sue you.

So just be careful.

Rachel Spaugh (08:05.895)
Yeah. It's a huge liability. And going back to the whole point of what we're even talking about today and what we're about to get into, if you have the right view of attribution, you maybe don't necessarily need all of that super fine point data. So looking at first Beth's article, because this was a three-part series. We will link to it in the show notes for those of you listening.

The first thing I wanted to ask you about, Kevin, is scenario A is something that Beth has in her article of the marketer who's maybe doing this the wrong way. So she makes a few assertions at the end of that section. She says you might end up paying top dollar for traffic you could get through organic efforts. And then she says you could allocate budgets to ads with a high.

cost per click, but low reach, effectively paying three times more for the same lead volume. So I know you've looked at this article too. Will you walk us through the scenario that Beth outlines here and unpack those statements she made?

Kevin Oakley (09:03.734)
Yeah, when she says you might end up paying top dollar for traffic you could get through organic efforts, what she's talking about is why I pull in pizza companies as the example. There's this reality that happens where when someone goes to order a pizza, least a lot of people I know and who I ask about this phenomenon, say how many of you get or save or...

Don't unsubscribe from your favorite pizza company simply because they give you a coupon and fairly reliably, you feel like ordering pizza anyway. It's not that you saw the coupon and thought, my gosh, I could save an extra $6 on dinner. Next Friday, I'm going to hold on to this email. The idea is knowing that I'm just gonna put this in a bin where I can go back and search and find it when I'm already wanting to order pizza.

Now you could make the argument that that coupon then is securing that I use that particular pizza place and that's a valid argument, but that's not the argument that most of the dashboards and reports within pizza organizations are made to CMOs or CEOs. The argument that's made is that the email with the coupon led to discovery and attribution itself. And that's not clear at all that that's what's happening.

and the number of times that people go look for a coupon, which the whole reason coupons exist too, I think is fascinating. The whole thing is attribution. So every time you go and look for a coupon code, the only reason that most retailers use coupon codes is to try to get an insight into attribution. But if you are already about to check out and you see that there's a coupon code field and you say, I should go look and you go find something,

good for you as a consumer, but the marketer is going to believe what or whoever the marketer is reporting to is going to believe the attribution reports that says this was the procuring cause. And then that if not understood leads to let's plow more money into coupons and distribution of coupons. And that's kind of right. And so what we I've only been in, I think one real like argumentative

Rachel Spaugh (11:14.171)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, the coupon didn't create the interest.

Kevin Oakley (11:28.138)
Zoom call in my life. And it was with a company who they were there's the corporate team and there were divisional teams and the corporate team was running ads for like if I was looking for a particular type of home in central Ohio where I live, they were running ads at the corporate level around the brand name of the company. So if I typed in the name of the company and my local area,

the top result was an ad that took me to a landing page that had less information and less insight, but potentially got more leads to the organization. But also there'd be people who would say, no, "I was just looking for floor plans and trying to figure out if this builder was a good fit for me". And they left and didn't do anything. Like by definition, gated landing pages are a high risk, high reward scenario.

You're gonna get a higher conversion, but there's a whole bunch of people who leave and don't get any other context. And then the next two results below that was the local divisions page, ungated, floor plan information there, and because the search included the brand name, there was no need. I mean, at the very least, if you were going to say, and make that argument, kind of like the coupon argument, well, we're just gonna pay a dollar to secure that click. Great.

Why are you sending them to a landing page instead of the place that the consumer wants to go? The only reason is because you're trying to claim additional attribution. And what was happening was the person at corporate was saying, my ads and my strategy are awesome. I don't know what's going on with these divisional people, but everyone needs to do it like me. But he was just writing off of the brand name, which people have to know the brand name in order to type it in, which means they had some other prior information or interaction.

Rachel Spaugh (13:20.243)
Yes.

Kevin Oakley (13:23.254)
with it and so that's what, that's a really convoluted long way to just give it examples of what we're talking about is if you're paying for people who are already looking for you and that's why typically we try to say, hey, we wouldn't recommend starting out with any more than 10 % of your digital marketing dollars going towards branded strategies like that because the idea in most market scenarios and for most communities and most builders is to increase

the overall awareness of your offerings, not to people who have no interest in moving or no interest in housing at all, but to more people than less people, as long as there's qualifications in there. And if you just go straight to the people who are converting and being attributed and their brand terms as an example, then you're gonna fall into scenario A, the best talking about.

Rachel Spaugh (14:16.575)
There's a lot of common sense being left at the door with that strategy.

Kevin Oakley (14:20.842)
Rachel, you just summed up, like that is the concern. Attribution and simulated intelligence, which is now what I'm going to only try to get myself to call what other people call artificial intelligence. It's simulated intelligence. Like the people building these tools are totally happy if it just simulates thought. Like they're the latest studies. I'm not going to distracted. The latest studies that have been reading, Rachel, say that how simulated intelligence works.

is not scientifically transferable to any other organism on planet Earth. Like how LLMs function has no parallel to how squirrels think, humans think, gorillas think, cats think. It's a completely different artificial simulated experience. But there's this huge crossover of, but the data says this.

Rachel Spaugh (14:56.959)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Oakley (15:17.996)
I think we talked about this in our other Office of Hours episode. It's like, the number claims that, but did you check it? Did you verify it? Do you know? And not to give away the punch line I think we're gonna get to at some point here is.

The temptation is for marketers to skip past deeply knowing their actual customers. For those of you listening, how many of you, I wish I could see everyone at the same time here. Raise your hands. Don't do that if you're driving. How many of you have interacted with one of your home buyers in the past 24 hours or the last week or the last month?

Rachel Spaugh (15:59.305)
Right.

Kevin Oakley (16:02.702)
And an ideal scenario, you are interacting with multiple home buyers or purchasers who are in the process of buying or customers who are thinking about buying. You, the marketer, actually talking to them, getting on a video call, talking on the phone, texting them, sitting down for coffee or buying them breakfast. They wanna talk to you and you have no way to shortcut the insights that you will get by actually doing that work. But...

This is where attribution makes it seem like, no, we just need to run more coupons. That's what the numbers say.

Rachel Spaugh (16:36.541)
Yeah, Magic Wand. man, that's a whole different episode to get into for sure. So we'll pause that one for today, but maybe next time we can go into more of that. See similar things all over my feed right now on LinkedIn.

So just a little term clarification now in this article for those newbies who were in the seat I was in and don't know these terms and are maybe a bit too embarrassed or shy to ask. In scenario B of this same article, Beth uses the terms general market meta ad and an in market display ad. How would you clarify the difference in those two things for someone who is new?

Kevin Oakley (17:13.006)
Yeah, so there are I can see why that would be confusing the the thing we have to back up to is an understanding of intent and We created this artificial Tool meter. Yeah, it's a meter. That's that's the word for it. That doesn't really exist called the intent o meter It's like a size seismograph for like the higher the intent

that you can visually see on this little device. And we tried to use that as an illustration of the Marketproof Marketing Academy. You have to understand the level of intent that the customer is giving you voluntarily by the platform and the ad copy and the engagement that's occurring. So what you're speaking to, I think the first insight that is important is to understand the intent, generally speaking,

of social versus display. Display, there's two main categories of display and display oftentimes, well, I'll just give into it. There is just display broadly, which is highly unqualified, highly untargeted. We all have these experiences or had these experiences of seeing display ads where Obama or whoever the president is wants to give you a mortgage for X number and.

terrible GIF animations and everything else. That's basically something that we don't recommend anyone does ever. It very inexpensive, but highly unqualified, untargeted. In-market display ads are display ads targeted to these categories that Google puts people in based upon their actual behavior. And Google has as much signal

Rachel Spaugh (18:36.105)
Yes.

Kevin Oakley (19:03.712)
or sometimes more than anyone else on what consumers are doing, because most people are using the Chrome browser, which is owned by Google, or they have an Android phone, which is owned by Google, or all of the websites on planet Earth, and most of the apps have some version of analytics installed on them, and all that data goes back. And so this is where I say, it doesn't take rocket science or simulated intelligence to say, hey, and this is what Google does, essentially. When someone goes on Zillow,

or goes on a mortgage website or goes on a home builder website. Google knows what those websites are about and what categories the consumer might be thinking about when they are on those sites. So when someone goes on Zillow, they're not just added to an in-market audience for people looking to purchase a home. They're also being added to an in-market segment of people who might be interested in furniture or interior decorating or a whole bunch of host of other things. And so when we say in-market, it means

Essentially, the customer is in the market for this. And there are hundreds of options for marketers to select from. And so it's not perfect. There's going to be mistakes there, but most of your money is going to go towards people that Google believes are in the market for what you select. But it's still display, which compared to SEM, paid search, organic search, lower intent.

because no one's typing in and asking for something and getting served what they want that's just being shown to them. That's right, that's right. General market meta-ad, in our terminology, when we work with customers, what we're referring to is a market-wide ad that covers multiple locations. So a general market ad would be like if I'm a home builder in central Ohio,

Rachel Spaugh (20:35.539)
Right, they might be looking for a recipe to make for dinner.

Kevin Oakley (21:00.064)
and I have 18 different communities and they're spread throughout the central Ohio area. The general market ad is going to be, is gonna have a defined radius or a geofence for those people who get really excited whenever someone uses the word geofence. That's essentially what you're creating. And then the targeting is handled by not choosing an audience or saying I only wanna reach this kind of people.

but giving an outcome that you want the customer to take. And then Meta is saying, okay, I'm going to run a whole bunch of different experiments on everyone within that geographic radius. And as people start to make the behaviors that we tell Meta, we are excited to have them do, that could be clicking on something, it could be commenting, it could be going to the webpage and submitting a lead. It can be whatever.

the advertiser or the home builder chooses to define as success, and it learns off of the outcome. So display doesn't optimize Google Display Network, does not optimize based upon interaction. It goes into the auction. I don't want to get overly technical, but it does have some factor if an ad is getting great click through rates. But it's not the same as how meta ads are.

are optimized. And so even though they both have the word market in them, in market and general market, completely different approaches. But I think the most important thing is understanding intent. So search has the highest intent because someone has to define exactly what they want out of it. AI search, by the way, has an even higher intent because people put in way longer prompts in AI searches than they do in Google searches because Google kind of trained you not to do that. If you've got overly specific

Rachel Spaugh (22:53.619)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Oakley (22:54.668)
you might not find anything at all to start your journey. So we got more generic in general search and AI search is getting more specific, but that's the highest intent. Social then has kind the next level of intent and display has the worst, but it still serves an important function as long as you think about it strategically. And then syndication platforms, they're...

In theory, like they're the highest intent without any signal of intent by the consumer being necessary. Just by the fact that they are a vertical search engine, you're only really going there to either again be nosy or to look at homes. You get to, mean, it's kind of like you said before, it just makes sense. Wouldn't you wanna show up where your consumer is going to go? Now the question then is like, do I show up by paying a bunch of extra money to advertise to them?

Rachel Spaugh (23:24.711)
what they are.

Kevin Oakley (23:46.83)
Can my content shine through enough on its own? Like there's different ideas there, but that goes back to you're also, you're limiting your audience. So highly qualified, yes, but like the biggest complaint that we hear about syndication generally, all of them, is not cost, it's not complexity. We hear some of those things too, but what we really hear is, I just wish they would send me more leads. I'm not getting enough out of it.

Rachel Spaugh (23:58.758)
Mm-hmm.

Rachel Spaugh (24:14.106)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Oakley (24:16.514)
And that's because the overall market is still very, very narrowly defined.

Rachel Spaugh (24:22.653)
Yeah, but super high intent, as you said. Yeah, so much of this just makes sense if you stop and think about it. And I do have some more questions that relate back to syndication sites out of Jackie's article. So we'll go there in a minute. One last comment I just wanted to make on Beth's article. This didn't stand out to me when I was at my builder, but I think about it a lot more now from being inside DYC and seeing the way we work. But Beth goes into a lot of detail on breaking out, OK, if you use scenario A versus scenario B there.

How much are you spending versus what you're getting for the results? And she has just astronomical figures. She talks about how a 55k spend versus a 10k spend for the same amount of leads and a 6k per sale versus about 1k. And the staggering difference over the course of a year is $540,000. Now, I think about that now, and I think those numbers seem too good to be true. What do you mean I could get the same results from the lower number? And you could imagine.

a marketing agency out there in the world who wants to be paid by volume of the work they're doing for you, is going to want you to go with that bigger cut because then their cut is bigger, or that bigger spend, mean. So that just stood out to me a lot where if you don't understand what you're looking at as a marketer, you are much more susceptible to be taken advantage of by people whose interests are not aligned with yours.

Kevin Oakley (25:44.524)
Yeah, I don't like ascribing ill intent to people. So I know it exists and I've experienced it a lot over my career, but I always assume good faith. And the challenge becomes that if your job is simply to create leads or to justify the actions that you're taking, that's very different than looking at things holistically.

And I think the key point of what you said is less the ill intent part, although again, it does happen as much as it is the disbelief part. And that I think is really interesting where we don't work with five builders or 15 or 30. We work with over 90 different organizations around the country in North America. And this doesn't just happen once or twice. It happens most of the time where

Rachel Spaugh (26:22.207)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Oakley (26:42.318)
depending on different, every builder is different. It's not that every builder is gonna be able to save all of that money in her scenario, but more builders than you would guess absolutely can. And a lot of times more data and more signal doesn't make it easier to make decisions. And I'll give you an example. In a perfect scenario, when we start with a new builder, even if there's additional budget available, unless they are in crisis mode or...

or like we just have to get our results spiked up really fast, we ramp up slowly. Because what you're looking for is the tipping point of effectiveness and efficiency, like the Mount Everest, if you're just listening. We're looking to find the highest point we can on the graph and then balance there. And the problem is that that builder who could save all that money, even if they could, it's going to be...

really hard, nearly impossible to get them down to the appropriate level of spend because it's just too scary. Wait, I'm gonna take away, what? What's gonna happen? And thankfully we have enough data and case studies to show people when we start working them, but it's still scary for them. We watch every, they're like, sometimes we tell them, you are going to get fewer leads, but you're gonna get more sales. And they're like, what? Like this just doesn't make sense. So I think...

Rachel Spaugh (27:46.591)
Cut back, right, yeah.

Kevin Oakley (28:07.752)
Your point is a fair one in that it's also like I watch when my daughters who are the older two of the four Oakley kids, one's gonna be a freshman in college and one will be a junior in high school this year. They're having conversations with people and they're talking about marketing or AI or something and I'm like, you're wrong. You're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong.

But it doesn't matter. And the other person is like mildly aware of the topic and is agreeing with them and like, yeah, I heard so and so can't get a job either because of AI and or this is how marketing works. And so it's hard enough for people on their own. There's fear there. And then they're talking to their old agency or another builder who's kind of doing things similar to them. And they're like, I don't know, that sounds crazy. Like who wants fewer leads?

Rachel Spaugh (29:00.713)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes.

Kevin Oakley (29:03.02)
And I get it, but if you want more sales, you might need fewer leads.

Rachel Spaugh (29:10.367)
Yes, we've been so well trained to think you get what you pay for and more is more.

Kevin Oakley (29:15.918)
Mm-hmm. And not just trained by falling in love with big numbers, but trained by prior market conditions. And those market conditions are not the same anymore. And so I looked yesterday with a builder and based upon their current appointment to sale ratio from both online appointments and walk-in, they would need to go from getting 400 leads a month to 12.

Rachel Spaugh (29:18.066)
All right.

Rachel Spaugh (29:26.889)
Mm-hmm

Kevin Oakley (29:45.582)
100 in order to have an opportunity to barely hit their sales goals. And that's a couple of years ago, you could be like, well, is that possible? Yeah, sure. Everyone's looking to buy a home. There's 20 offers in on everything. We're all sold out. That's no one that we work with today is hitting their sales goals because they have 30 % more leads than they did a year ago. No one. And yet most of time that's still what people are scratching for.

Rachel Spaugh (30:14.909)
Yeah. OK. Well, let's keep going with part two here, Jackie's article in this series. So here, Jackie kind of starts by talking about how you wouldn't turn off all of your meta ads, all of your Google, all of your syndication sites. That's crazy because you know you need them, but we don't always understand which ones we need or how much. So I wanted to talk a little bit here about how to.

use those third party dashboards for syndication sites or different things you may have available to you in combination with GA4 to analyze lead quality? Where should somebody start?

Kevin Oakley (30:53.322)
I would, I just really encourage people to always have multiple points of accessing data. So like we will build dashboard reports for our builder partners or someone will say, well, I have everything I need in HubSpot now. So I don't even look at Google analytics anymore or just all variations of the things I just said, like we only need this. We only need that. We only look at this. We only look at that. And

You can't do that because everything is slowly breaking all the time, it seems like. And I'm, and it sounds like, again, old man screams at cloud or something, but the number of times where a Google Analytics report has not agreed with a meta report or not agreed with a CRM report or not agreed with a user maven report, which is another analytics tool.

Rachel Spaugh (31:33.715)
You

Kevin Oakley (31:52.482)
the number of times that those things don't agree is off the charts common. And so you have to understand that each platform that you're looking at from a reporting standpoint and looking at the data is adding a lens to which they want you to view the data from. And so you can't shortcut it as a marketer. As the CEO or the vision president or other senior leader, you might get a pass from me.

on short-cutting it because you should be able to rely on the marketing person. But if you're a marketer who says, only look at my dashboard reports and I don't go into the ad platforms or I don't go into the CRM, your risk level is off the charts for making incorrect assumptions. And so what Jackie's article, is titled, let's see, I'm scrolling, transforming the misguided marketer into the savvy marketer, what she really is trying to help people understand is,

You're constantly being, we use the word lie to be like for shock value. They're just trying to add 50 shades of gray into it to make their data set look stronger for themselves. HubSpot doesn't do this as much anymore, but it used to be that HubSpot by default, if it didn't have clear attribution data that it could assign something to, it just said it's inbound because HubSpot was all about inbound marketing. And so it was all based upon inbound methodology

organic traffic and the like, and it wasn't accurate. Now, again, they do that less now than they have before, but if that was your single source of truth and you didn't understand that everyone has a bias and an intent on a way that they want you to look at the data, you're in trouble. having multiple dashboards to check and verify, and each time you're looking at one saying, what's the bias here? What's in it for the company that put this together for me? And what should I be suspicious of?

Rachel Spaugh (33:51.049)
Mm-hmm, absolutely. I think that hits right at the point of this whole series. So in our final article, Julie's article, which she titled, Taking a Strategic Approach to Help Us Reach Our Goals, I loved this one. First, I just found the illustration that she does at the beginning. Those of you who are just listening, you got to go look at it. It was so relatable. I think anyone who's ever sat in a meeting with sales and leadership has heard these ideas put out there as if they were in controvertible truths. And if you don't know your data back and forth,

it's really hard to fight those strongly held beliefs from people outside of marketing. So Julie in this article, she wisely lays out pretty early in that great attribution starts with understanding how conversion rates relate to your sales goal. I remember really struggling with that early on because I didn't have a lot of visibility into where sales goals came from or why they needed to be that way. It wasn't broken out into we need this many in this community, this many in this community. It was just get us this many leads.

And I found that really frustrating. It was hard to work with. So just, do you have any advice for someone who's in that place?

Kevin Oakley (34:58.414)
Yeah, well, it's going to be hard at first. Again, I don't remember everything we talked about in the last office hours episode, but I think this was the like becoming consciously competent and then unconsciously competent. Right. So that's where there is no avoiding this. It's going to be hard. It's going to be confusing, but it becomes less confusing, confusing the more real you make it. This is why like you have to get your butt out of your chair.

Rachel Spaugh (35:10.238)
Yes.

Kevin Oakley (35:26.678)
and into the communities and talking to salespeople and talking to customers. Because without actually experiencing it, the numbers don't make sense. Like there's no way to even have, I just made a video about this topic of salience, which is a word that I had never really even heard except for maybe referring to salty water, but I think that's a different word entirely. But this idea of like things being noticed or popping out or like something is salient to you when you notice it.

it's relevant to you, it's important to you, or it just seems off and in some way important but not quite right. And if you've never been out to visit Happy Acres, and you've never seen it, and you've never talked to customers, and you've never looked at the CRM, and you've interviewed the sales rep and talked about their common struggles and where people are coming from and their stories, then when you look at where the leads are coming in from, you don't know to question it.

You don't know to say that's strange, like this particular lead source and I always say you have to go back to, go look at what the ad says, go look at the copy, go look at the pictures, understand the intent-o-meter of that platform and the strategy that you've chosen. Then go to where the consumer's gonna go when they click or interact with that piece. Look at that page, look at the content on it from as much of an unbiased perspective as you can or the perspective of the homeowners and...

potential buyers that you should be really intimate with. And things will start to just say like, I don't care what the data says. We didn't just magically get 80 leads from display when last month we got two. That's not gonna happen because we didn't change any of creative. We didn't change any of the targeting. What probably happened is that those leads are spammy or low quality at best. And I need to go investigate that.

And so what she's talking about is don't just look at lead count or traffic count and say, we did it, we succeeded. You've got to go dig in further and say, how many of the leads became responsive? How many of the responsive leads ended up actually holding an appointment? And this brings us all the way back around to people going, Kevin, all I really want to see is how many sales are directly attributed to a source. But that is fantasy land. If you...

Kevin Oakley (37:51.03)
It's complete and utter make believe. That goes back to the graphic that Julie made, which is every buyer, because of the length and complexity, I was just, again, on with the builder this week, they've done a really good job of tracking. Their average lead to sale timeframe is 150 days. From the time someone gives them their contact information, 150 days, and they're not an on your lot or a fully custom builder, it's a production builder scenario.

with a lot of inventory too. There is no way that anything is getting 100 % credit. And if your system is telling you that and you believe it, you are lying to yourself. And again, you can't blame the platforms because they're designed to make things as appealing as possible for their point of view. But you have to get in there, have to spend the time and don't just look at it in a vacuum. Go look at it while you're out on site after you've met with customers and talked with members of the sales team.

Rachel Spaugh (38:50.013)
Yeah, you know, I think we're going to tie everything back to that first episode for a little while because it was just so foundational, the philosophy behind what you were saying of numbers are there to solve problems. You can't just go look at the dashboard and be like, well, what story is going to pop out at me today? I think the whole point here is you have to understand your buyer psychology and your buyer behavior and then ask questions based off of thinking through those things through other sources, right? Talking to your salespeople, looking in the CRM at the notes. If you have them, hopefully you do. Your salespeople are

are doing that for you. But you can't move backwards through this thing and expect the same quality of insights as if you start with really thinking deeply about what problem am I trying to solve.

Kevin Oakley (39:32.29)
Yeah, like the salience example or test that is, if you can just pull up a copy of the market proof algorithm and know nothing about the community, nothing about the builder, it's all blocked off, all you see are the numbers and you can quickly identify what the likely issues are. That's because of this overall overwhelming amount of experience that allows those numbers to tell a story without having any other context. But most people would look at and go, I don't, I can't tell.

Or another example would be if I showed you a map of central Ohio and said, Rachel, where do most people want to live? And you go, I don't know. I don't have to think about that. And it's not because I'm superhuman, it's because I've lived here most of my life. And I know the geographic areas that people would prefer to live in. not, it's not, it just jumps out at me. It is, is salient in a way that, and when we're talking about data, it's so easy to take advantage of people who don't have that ability.

to ignore most of the data most of the time. That's a really important skill to say, that's all noise. Here's the important thing. And you gotta train your brain to do that.

Rachel Spaugh (40:34.695)
Mm-hmm.

Rachel Spaugh (40:46.899)
Yeah, you can't shortcut your way there. This has been a fantastic episode, Kevin. Any parting thoughts on attribution?

Kevin Oakley (40:55.342)
Be very, very careful about the certainty with which you present this information to people above you. Most of the people listening are marketing managers or marketing directors. And the degree to which you give certainty around this stuff, even just one time, can lead to everyone else saying, basically, we don't need to listen to everything else that Kevin is about to say here, because the dashboard and the number says this.

what you're trying to do, if you get a chance to talk and present, a lot of times people want to present complete confidence. And instead what I would recommend you do is explain clearly and succinctly how difficult this job is. Not to take off like the, like the, it's still your problem to solve as the marketing leader.

But you have to help people understand that it's not as simple as they think it is. And you have to be really careful about how much certainty you give people based upon what the data says. Again, it's one of those things like easy to cheat on a test and just pull a data point and present and go, this isn't the issue because this number and that's the way it is. But that will come back to haunt you when market conditions turn and they're gonna say, but you said that was the number and now you're trying to tell us it's not, that seems awful convenient.

Like you have to help educate people along the way, not just tell them a factual answer.

Rachel Spaugh (42:27.003)
Excellent. Well, thank you so much. That's a wrap for today, everyone. We'll be back with more office hours next month.

Kevin Oakley (42:33.016)
All right, see you next time.