Zoom Meeting with Bear Iron Works – July 15, 2024

Tami

Hey, Josh.

Tami

Good morning.

Michael Frick

Morning.

Darlene Frick

Good morning.

Roggen

Good morning. Good

Darlene Frick

How’s it going, Rogan?

Roggen

Here are you.

Darlene Frick

Guys have a good weekend.

Roggen

Yeah. about you?

Tami

Yes, I took a short trip with my family and. Monday’s are always hard after a weekend trip, but otherwise good.

Tami

Sometimes I’ll get online and just check my work email on Saturday just to sort of prepare my mind for Monday.

Tami

Right. And then come back and like, oh my goodness.

Josh Ramsey

All right, can you all hear me now?

Tami

Yeah.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah. I was, I’ve been awake for hours, but I think I’ve been awake too much or something because like.

Josh Ramsey

I don’t know what’s going on around my. in my world, then I’m in same morning already, and I feel disarrayed.

Josh Ramsey

So either way, I will work through it. Good morning and hello, everybody. All right, so Rogan, I don’t know exactly where you want to kick off and what part you want to go through and where you want to land with this, because you and I chatted about a few things last week in the past couple of weeks kind of on and off just with calls and you and I.

Josh Ramsey

So we’re going to kind of start setting a new regiment starting next week where Tammy will have a little bit more of an agenda kind of outline and we’ll try to get that over to you at the beginning of or before the call, maybe like 33 minutes before the call, so that’ll kind of keep us on point.

Josh Ramsey

But you know, have a couple things in mind for today, but Rogan, I’m going to let you maybe kick it off.

Josh Ramsey

Kind of talk about which direction you want to go today.

Roggen

Yeah, something that I’d like to identify today is like one of the key performance indicators that we all would like to track to kind of show, like, this is the progress, this is happening, and if we do this, you know, these are going up and down.

Roggen

That way, Mike and Erlen, you can get up to speed with like what those indicators mean and why we track them.

Roggen

So that’s kind of what I want to identify today.

Josh Ramsey

Okay. So Mike and Darleen, I will kind of, that’s what I figured we wanted to talk about. So I’ll kind of take that off and show you a lot of what I watch.

Josh Ramsey

And then if there’s something more that you want to add to this, then we can kind of create it.

Josh Ramsey

We document this out and we have I’m telling you, I need to go hit a hard reset or something, like go lay down in my bed for a minute and get up again and like just see if I can like hard reset my brain or something.

Tami

You need a morning nap like a toddler.

Josh Ramsey

I don’t need the nap. feel rested. I just feel like there’s like this.

Tami

I need red bowls that you had today. Are you drinking red bowls?

Josh Ramsey

Not enough. Oh, had my morning shake and my morning coffee. I need to probably drink more water, but I don’t know.

Josh Ramsey

I’m freaking feeling like I’m losing it. Anyways, so I’m going to show you three metrics that that I watch for.

Josh Ramsey

Maybe four, if I add in, add words, which I can add in. And what we can do is we can have these email to us at the beginning of each morning, like each Monday and have that come across.

Josh Ramsey

There’s a lot of different metrics, but I’ll show you. you again, high level, what I what I look at weekly or every other week.

Josh Ramsey

Just like computer will catch up. I paid, I increased my bill by like double. And they’re like, Oh, you’re in it.

Josh Ramsey

It’s gonna work so much better.

Roggen

And I’m like, right now, but it’s always a lie.

Josh Ramsey

Where’s the news? Yeah, that’s all it is. Here we go. This one. I’m not this one. I’ve got this one and then I’m.

Roggen

Oh, there are the bad ones.

Roggen

Wow. Oh, Okay, sharing screen. Okay, so if you recall, or haven’t heard me say it before, I’ll say it again, but it all starts with impressions.

Roggen

I’m sorry, it starts with rankings. So if you get the ranking, then you get the impression and then you get the click and that allows us to have a lead.

Roggen

So in this metric, what we’re watching for is ultimately we want to have the top 10, we want to be on page one.

Roggen

So a year ago, we were at 125, we took a dip, which was… happens in the algorithm of Google, now we’re at 134.

Roggen

So we want to continue to climb that. And what you’re going to see, this is just page one, position one to position 10, it’s organically page one.

Roggen

And then what you see is you see the metric of growth of organic. So now we’re up to a little over 1,000.

Roggen

And you can see that where we were here maybe weren’t the best key words, because while we’re up this way we’re not as high, right?

Roggen

But then here you can see we’ve jumped up about the time that that jumps. So you can see this metric jump.

Roggen

If you look at that ridge going up. So this is the first thing that I always look at is knowing where that’s at.

Roggen

The next part that I look at is our smaller key words going up. So this is page two. What happens is get to page two and it moves to page one.

Roggen

So as long as page one is going up, I’m okay with page two kind of going wherever. But I want it to continue to go up because my the goal of SCM

Roggen

Post push from position 20 to 50 to position 11 20 right because you’re constantly pushing from position 100 you’re pushing up to page one.

Roggen

So this is kind of what we’re always watching is now what happens and this is part of when we look at budget we look at should we spend more where like if we’re trying to get more leads in where do we spend it where are these coming from Tammy if you can pull that link so I have it of the budget real quick and send it to me so I can pull that up but that’s where we then start making decisions on budget is what we’re getting in but when we grade SEO in general we’re looking at this which is are we going up here and then we’re going up here we cross check that with Google search console so if we watch Google search console and we run a compare three months over three months what we’re looking for is we really want these work.

Roggen

Clicks, but we want more impressions to get more clicks. So our impressions have gone up from 95 to 120, 2.84 to 2.85.

Roggen

So that metric continues to increase, so we’re getting more. Now we do have this anomaly right here, where you can see we get a jump in the blue of previous three months.

Roggen

So you see that right there, that’s some type of anomaly where we had 160 clicks. That could be on January 16th, if you did a trade show, if we ran extra ads, we did, you know, this, that whatever, that’s a jump.

Roggen

So who knows what that is. So this is actually of clicks, we had some anomalies, so it’s actually. better the last three months than it was before, not by a lot, but by a little, and you can kind of see where we’re at here.

Roggen

You look at impressions and you can see that we’re going up with impressions. We’ve got a nice little increase here in growth of impressions.

Roggen

So that’s the next part that we look at. There’s variables that go into that that we probably don’t want to look at, but that I look at, such as site maps.

Roggen

I want to make sure, and this is what the SEO team does, but then I come in every month, three months, whatever it is, or when I’m in here just clicking around.

Roggen

And this is, for instance, a variable that I tracked. Do we success when was the last time it’s submitted?

Roggen

This is based on what Google does, and then I look at pages, and this is where I benchmarked the team, and what they’re working on.

Roggen

And right here, this is one of the things that I would tell the team, I would tell the team,

Roggen

Hey, you need to be doing more like we dropped a little bit here. What’s going on? Why are we down?

Roggen

Well, you can see that they’ve started to we passed three and this is constantly running So even though it says failed again, this is what we call an SEO world build it break it fix it so We don’t Crawl we could be waiting on more pages So when you go in here, you have to wait for this to work So this happened over the weekend or Friday So they haven’t fixed it because you wait for it to finish crawling before you go do it So scrap track off pad this looks like it failed So they have to go back and fix it so all of this infrastructure is what affects what we were talking about of Are we ranking are we growing how many clicks are we getting?

Roggen

And so forth, okay? So that’s that’s that part. So I talked to you about SEMrush and tracking and then I talked to you about SEM about search console.

Roggen

Then we go in and we look at the actual GA4. So again, this is Google inside. So these are different reports, sorry, again, my brain.

Roggen

These are different reports of what we’re identifying and how we’re identifying what we’re tracking. A quick look, and Rog and I were actually looking at this on Thursday or Friday, whenever we last spoke.

Roggen

So 28 days over 28 days, you’ll see if it’s red or green sometimes it’s not showing up as a compare, but then we can go in and we can run it comparison.

Roggen

And we can run it 90 days over 90 days. So there’s a time to. look at incremental growth and there’s a time to look at bigger perspective growth.

Roggen

So you’re looking at 90 days, but you’re also looking at 28 days. So it just becomes why you’re looking at it and what’s your goal of tracking that, what’s your goal of seeing the KPI.

Roggen

So it says revenue is down 30 percent, 90 days over 90 days. It’s also tracking the 14th of the week of the 14th, and that’s why that’s down because it’s tracking it by the week.

Roggen

But you can see users are up, new users are average engagement, time is down, then paid search. You can see has improved, organics is down 4.5, display is up, direct is down, so forth.

Darlene Frick

So can I take my question? with the revenue, how, and this is kind of an underlying thing I’m trying to piece together, so when you talk about $160,000.

Darlene Frick

How are you calculating that?

Josh Ramsey

That’s set up in the metrics, but I don’t ever trust that inside Google Analytics. We track that more through Shopify, which you and Rogan have.

Josh Ramsey

I don’t track that as much. What I’m tracking is. I need to delete this one. Here we go. This is where Rogan and I have been moving to is building this out.

Josh Ramsey

We’re building out the actual sales. Then when we go into March, we’re building out is Google Organic. This is approximately the dedicated spend for SEO in Google Organic.

Josh Ramsey

This is our cost per lead, meaning how many contacts have put in, and this is where whoever’s tracking leads have got to be deadly accurate.

Josh Ramsey

The more deadly accurate that the person tracking leave in is tracking it, the better I’m going to be. So 24 right here in the unknown phone calls, again, I know we’re working on this and this is back in March, but this is a KPI that we need to know.

Josh Ramsey

If you said, Josh, boil this down to one KPI of what’s going to make you the best and make the company grow, it’s going to come back to this where we know that 11 phone calls were not tracked.

Josh Ramsey

I literally have been dealing with a client who’s not answering their phone and they’re a remodeling contractor out of Houston and they’re not answering their phone and they’re like, oh, well, I call them right back.

Josh Ramsey

I’m like, it doesn’t matter. You’re not answering your phone and they’re calling right now. So they’re calling three remodeling companies.

Josh Ramsey

They’re going to interview two of them. So out of three people, you don’t answer your phone and two of them, dude, you missed out.

Josh Ramsey

You’re done. Now I’m not saying that’s you. But I’m just saying in general, if I don’t know where this 11 goes and this 90,000, then it’s hard for me to tell all of you and or again, because we’ve been talking about this a lot more than anyone else.

Josh Ramsey

It’s hard for me to say this is where you spin, but all of the metrics from March, April, May, and June, the best that we’re doing is the lowest spin, which is Google or a gaming.

Josh Ramsey

So now if you go, okay, Josh, what do you track this? If you say, Josh, how do you read this and what would you do?

Josh Ramsey

I would say you cut being, you cut paper, click, and you increase organic or you cut being because it’s doing nothing for you and I can get to that in a minute.

Josh Ramsey

You cut being and you cut paper, click, or you leave paper, click, and when you cut being, you move that to the organic and you grow the organic because it’s doing the most.

Michael Frick

So, so the trackable ones are coming in through the phone. members that we have, right? So the ones we’re getting phone calls.

Michael Frick

There was 11 phone calls made that we don’t track, which may be the Craigslist or calls coming to my phone possibly, right?

Roggen

Right. So these are, so that’s still the month of June. So there was a lapse with gone and he thought the CRM was automatically tracking stuff.

Roggen

So he stopped asking customers where they came from. And then on that, we didn’t have phone numbers in place that were unique to each source.

Roggen

So we didn’t have Craigslist, a phone number just for Craigslist and a phone number just for machine or trader and a phone number just for XYZ source.

Roggen

And so it’s like, who knows where they came from. And so now, since we have those phone numbers in place, the unknown phone calls, that number should get smaller.

Roggen

We should start to know where people are coming from a little bit better.

Michael Frick

Yeah, I have One guy told me, he was like, I’ve been texting you, you haven’t been read. I’m like, what was the number?

Michael Frick

He gave me a number for I never recognized. And that ended up being that Missouri phone number, I think.

Darlene Frick

Okay, that’s a bummer.

Roggen

And so that should go into the CRM when they text there. Okay.

Michael Frick

So they do pick up the text then those four numbers. Yes. Okay. All right, cool. I’ll watch for that then more.

Josh Ramsey

Now, you know, that’s number one. Now, again, if we look at Google paper, click and we go, what’s happening?

Josh Ramsey

So if we look at where I’m saying at this moment, if we made decision on on being agile and making moves into the marketing side to generate the leads, right now, I would say you increase Google or land organic.

Josh Ramsey

But I said, maybe you lower pay per click, but probably not depending on the budget we have available. So now, when we track ads, this is where I spend a lot of time because this is a big source of spend.

Josh Ramsey

It’s our top spender and it’s generally from what we’ve seen our top producer because it is driving some of the organic and I believe it to be driving more traffic than what our results are saying.

Josh Ramsey

So if we look at June, it says four, but we look here and it says one. But our numbers change a lot if that goes to four.

Josh Ramsey

It drops it from 2000 500. That’s a big . But now look at how close we are 300 500.

Josh Ramsey

But those three. That’s for now again, if they saw us and add words, but then they looked back up in, in organics, because they now know our name and we don’t advertise our name.

Josh Ramsey

Again, that’s a whole nother. A whole nother. Again, my brain parts. It’s like a whole other strategy here of information.

Josh Ramsey

So this is what I was saying. Good information and good information out. But you can see how that shifts, right?

Josh Ramsey

So watch that 2200. Again, I go and I change that to a four. That 2200 goes to just with three of them, right?

Josh Ramsey

So I’m going to put it back at one because that’s what we’re tracking. So this comes down, but we can’t track it because we don’t know what that is.

Josh Ramsey

So that’s. That’s when we look at this. Now, how we track this is going to be search impression share.

Josh Ramsey

This is a whole other battle of explanation. I’ll give you kind of the top level of it. You were spending a lot here and you were running it very different because you were running it 24-7.

Josh Ramsey

So in 2023, you can see that you had a higher percentage search impression share. It’s gone down here because we modified a lot and part of what it modifies is it’s saying search impression share.

Josh Ramsey

Because we shut off certain days of the week and we’ve gotten some better results, we’ve been modifying this to see if we can get better.

Josh Ramsey

So if you compare this and you said, OK, let’s run. Jin through July and then compare previous. period. This is when we get into the nitty-gritty that Rogen and I are looking at, which is our cost per conversion went up, our conversions went down, but we also had a really slow month, but we had a slow month.

Josh Ramsey

Was it because of conversions? Was it because no one was buying? Like there’s a lot of little factors that we have to look at.

Josh Ramsey

Is it time to change it or is it time to not change it? Like there’s a lot and then we start getting into, okay, you know, how’s our computers versus mobile phones, okay?

Josh Ramsey

Mobile phones is really high. So now we go into, you know, a whole other thing where we run Google Lighthouse and we look at the performance.

Josh Ramsey

So if I now go to, and again, I’m kind of showing you, I know I’m getting in deep, but I’m sure you have to kind of understand when you read the KPI at the top level, you have to somewhat understand the bottom.

Josh Ramsey

of level to know what the KPI is at the bottom level as to why we’re making decisions at the top level.

Josh Ramsey

Because if you take it in the vacuum of, hey, your search impression share sucks. And you’re like, you know, you went down.

Josh Ramsey

Well, part of why our search impression share isn’t as good as it was a year ago is because we were advertising 24 seven, and we didn’t cut it down.

Josh Ramsey

And we weren’t getting anything from it. And right here, you can say our display network is up, but then we have to start looking at, you know, things like conversions.

Josh Ramsey

So when you, when you take all these metrics in, you can see we need to get rid of the display network, which is one of the things that we’re talking about, get rid of.

Josh Ramsey

But this is just June through July, where we want to get rid of that, because we’re getting clicks, we’re getting costs.

Josh Ramsey

But again, this comes back to the metrics of how many people are finding organically. So again, Giving you a lot of information, I’m trying to not overwhelm your brain, but when you ask for these cases, when we want and add these KPIs, we definitely need to understand that when we read this, this is a big deal.

Josh Ramsey

But if we want to go beyond this KPI and know, hey, we had one or we had four and here’s our number.

Josh Ramsey

Do we spend more? This is when we’re all going to get down to the nitty gritty more and say, okay, you know, our conversions were down, our cost was up, but our clicks were down.

Josh Ramsey

What do we, you know, what happened? Did we change key words? You know, do we do this? Now I go into change history and I’m looking at what we might have modified, whether we modified it.

Josh Ramsey

So this tracks what we were doing and what’s happening and so forth, right? And then all of sudden, now you get deeper and you start going to all these pages to see, know, I’m kind of making this up but we, you know, we don’t want to do the washout tubs.

Josh Ramsey

So let’s reduce that. We’re going to wash it out tubs and we start looking at performance. You can see our cost went down because we’re spinning less, but our storage impression share went up.

Josh Ramsey

Now you ask the question why and you work through it. You can see we’re constantly limited by budget. So I spoke a whole lot.

Josh Ramsey

Sorry, but I think it covered, you know, the details of it. So, Darlene, like, what question do you have or thoughts or?

Michael Frick

I guess I guess all that that’s a good information. I’m not quite following it completely. I understand it really, but what do we need to do?

Michael Frick

What’s it showing you? What do we need to do?

Josh Ramsey

The number the number one thing is that we have to better try. This phone calls unknown need to be zero because we dispersed this $90,000 into Craigslist or organic or other things.

Josh Ramsey

And at some level, they all tie together. Craigslist maybe doesn’t tie as much, but we’re making. System modifications to Facebook.

Josh Ramsey

We said we got zero, but again, that changes a lot when you add in if two really saws, you know, for 13 would be better when I track that versus that.

Josh Ramsey

Now, all of a sudden, if we know that we got to from Facebook, it’s a whole lot different information.

Josh Ramsey

So the answer to your question is, we got to have zero unknowns. When I have that, then I’m able to go in and really hone in stuff that I want to be very clear on this, and I think Rogan knows this, but I want to be clear to everybody.

Josh Ramsey

Not that I’m not doing anything and that the agency’s not doing anything. That there’s a lot of metrics and sometimes you have to touch a metric and then sit back and wait and watch that metric change before you jump back in and do something else.

Josh Ramsey

There’s certain things that are ongoing, but we’re also handicapping. our SEO team by not giving them more budget and time to go work on SEO things.

Josh Ramsey

But again, it’s because we have to live within a budget. And right now, we’re at 7,000 to generate 163.

Josh Ramsey

So there’s a lot of little metrics. But again, coming back to it, Mike, is that unknown number.

Michael Frick

Okay. So we’ll get Don and Mike’s off to track them and report it. Again, give it to you, Braga, I guess.

Roggen

Yeah. And I need to get with Don and run up through a memory exercise with him on all the previous ones that he didn’t track.

Roggen

So we can see if we can lower that number. And I think he’s back and doing that. But yeah, if you can just, you know, we can track so much stuff based on somebody’s behavior of how they click on our website and so many things like that.

Roggen

It’s really at the end of day the best way to find out where they’re from is to ask the point blank where did you hear about us because Maybe they saw us on Facebook and then googled us And then clicked on our organic stuff, which would say that organic is better But if you ask them they say well, actually heard about you first on facebook so then we can attribute that to facebook Okay, yeah, because I had one guy the other day he said that he was on craigslist found us Then went to our website Right and so call this from the website phone number Right and you can see how right there even with the phone numbers that we’re putting in place to track craigslist If he if somebody does that and they go and call them the main number on the website then it’s we’re not going know where they actually came Okay, and so asking the questions the best way to find out.

Josh Ramsey

Okay, and that’s that’s where we’re always going to live in some ambiguity But you would want to report that as craigslist but the

Josh Ramsey

Ambiguity could be that they didn’t quite remember our name, but then when they see it in AdWords, because they type in rock, you know, rock screen, grizzly, whatever, and we show up, they’re like, oh, yeah, I remember seeing them somewhere.

Josh Ramsey

So that’s where your marketing becomes ambiguous, where you’re just like, what am I really getting from it? Like, where did I really get it?

Josh Ramsey

So it all does work together. So it’s not necessarily that you just kill one thing, unless you can identify that it needs to be killed, which we’re looking into being, because Rog and I were looking at it last week, and being cost has gone up a lot.

Josh Ramsey

So when we look back in January, February, being was 500, 500. Something happened in March, where being went to 800, and then in April to 16, it doubled, and then in March,

Josh Ramsey

Day to 17 to June to 23. my ads guy is out today. He got sick or something over the weekend, or maybe he’s just one of the extra day of vacation.

Josh Ramsey

I doubt he probably is sick. But that’s where we’re getting into being and we’re trying to figure out why did that change and how do we lower that because then again, so then, Rogan, you were going to be working on this, giving the forecast on these.

Josh Ramsey

And when you give me the forecast, then we can go in and continue to modify. But everyone can see that our budget went and a lot of this change here was from being because if you count it, that’s then came from being.

Josh Ramsey

And then what we’re doing is we’re going to be tracking this information March, April, May, and then when we get into the back end of July, we get into August 1st, then we’ll pull that information and we’ll continue to make decisions on next step.

Josh Ramsey

That’s in modification of budget and lead gen based on lead gen and what’s happening and what’s spelling.

Darlene Frick

I have a quick question and I can appreciate the data and I know sometimes data can be really difficult to sift through to draw conclusions.

Darlene Frick

It’s not always usually not very clean in my experience but I also recognize that we’re not the only people in this industry doing this type of advertising and trying to make decisions based on data and my question is is there are there other for lack of better words?

Darlene Frick

Are there scholarly articles out there that say manufacturing companies that have done advertising in this way have found that this, this, and this is most successful and

Darlene Frick

And it’s just what our program is being based on.

Josh Ramsey

In your industry, because it’s such a small niche industry, not really, because it would be like someone like Caterpillar having to say, this is what we’ve told of this product, and while they may put that out there, they’re not going to put out there what their secret sauce is of what they’re advertising and how they’re advertising.

Josh Ramsey

Now, what I can tell you is the CMO is doing this. The CMO is tracking this analytics to be able to say, how many impressions are we getting?

Josh Ramsey

Is our search impression chair up? When are people buying? When are they looking? How can we optimize that? Like the CMO’s job is to basically look at is to ask the questions that no one’s asking, and then make sure that people not to be kind of sending to anybody, but to make sure the people underneath that sit in the actual chairs of the data research are looking at the right thing.

Josh Ramsey

The data comes back to the CMO and the CMO goes, okay, you know, CEO, the data says that based on this, we had one sale and now I’m talking in circles where I’m coming back to, they’re looking at this type of data.

Josh Ramsey

Now the spreadsheets look different, how they track it is different. You there’s a lot of little things that kind of go into that and what it all, different people run different charts like in dynamics or in other things.

Josh Ramsey

I’m a little bit old school and I don’t like paying for extra charts, but if we’re a, you know, $100 million company, then yeah, we’re going to use a different set of data and we’re going to pay for different charts because to do a hundred million, we’re going to be spending more than 900 on an organic.

Josh Ramsey

I can tell you that for sure. I worked with the company called the Thousand Bulbs. and they were spending 1.2 in AdWords.

Josh Ramsey

We were tracking that very different in AdWords when we’re spending 1.2 million in a year. And the interesting thing that they hadn’t figured out when they hired me to come in, that they were spending 1.2 in AdWords and it was their third best lead generator.

Josh Ramsey

Their number one was SEO and they were spending 235,000 a year. So I’m like, why are you not doing it more SEO?

Josh Ramsey

And they didn’t really have an answer for me. So that’s, that becomes the next, how do you make the decision when you don’t have the right data?

Josh Ramsey

Well, that’s when it comes to back to the salespeople and it says, are we answering the phone and what are we getting from it and where are they coming from?

Josh Ramsey

And again, that knows the ambiguity of, yeah, Mike, when they say Craigslist, your market is a Craigslist, not a website, but it’s good that you’re finding that out.

Josh Ramsey

So the more data, that our sales team gets to feed to the marketing, the marketing team can then generate it, you know, at a higher rate, because and then spin less and manage the budget.

Michael Frick

Okay.

Darlene Frick

To me, it might be important to ask the question, and you guys tell me if you’re wrong, but as we’re looking at Craigslist and pay-per-click ads and machinery trader, people may end up in the end on our website, Google, or Bing.

Darlene Frick

And we may ask the question, you know, how did you hear about this? And I’m just thinking of me, because I was, I haven’t known about all of the research that goes into this as a consumer, and I usually just tell them, oh, I found John Google, but that’s not necessarily what I for us to know, to ask that question, where did you first hear about us?

Roggen

I could be a good way to ask that.

Josh Ramsey

You can start that off by saying that. You can start off by saying, you know, how did you hear about us, but more you create a conversation with them to build that relationship, the more you’re going to find out because what happens is I’m calling you and I’m saying, I haven’t, I haven’t need it, right?

Josh Ramsey

And if I have a need, then it becomes, I want the answer first, then I will give you the information you’re looking for.

Michael Frick

That’s fair, but, yeah, I can help you a little bit dark, how I handle that, just don’t have to do this.

Michael Frick

Yeah, yeah, okay. When they call me. I start listening to their needs, right? And I try not to ask them, hey, we don’t care about it.

Michael Frick

I don’t do that right up the bat. So the easiest way to go into it is once you sit there and listen to their needs, and then you, you know, somewhere along the line, I go, so have you been to our website?

Michael Frick

And they’ll go, they’ll either say no, or they say yes. And I’m saying at that point in time, I can go to where did you see us on Google, or did you Google this, Craigslist, or where did you see it?

Michael Frick

I know right away right there within apps, though a conversation, that’s when I, that’s when I can pull from it, because they’re easier.

Michael Frick

They, they want to, like he, like Josh was saying, if you ask it up right off the bat, they’re like, whoops, you know, really don’t want to talk to you about that.

Michael Frick

You want to keep them hooked, you know, so that’s why I keep them interesting. by asking them what they need.

Darlene Frick

Right. And I wasn’t trying to say you have to ask it right at the beginning of the call. But my second question to that would be, is Mike, it sounds like you’re creating, you’re collecting some more discrete data as far as, you know, you versus the Craigslist, right?

Darlene Frick

And then we went to the site. I guess my question would be is I really liked that spreadsheet that Josh showed us at the end.

Darlene Frick

Came from Google, came from what was it being, came from paper, click ads. think would the information that you gathered from your customer, would it fit in one of those categories?

Michael Frick

I’ll sort right now down and so we’ll done.

Roggen

Yeah. And then when you’re entering it, when you’re entering a sale in Shopify, there’s tags in there for those sources.

Roggen

And then if you, if they say like, I. I heard about you from, I don’t know, say like the Kroger shopping ad, and you’re like, I don’t know where that is, know, put it in his other and put an explanation, know, like, or like if they heard from us from somewhere that, you know, maybe it wasn’t like the Sarvan Arvin’s table ad that we did, you know, you know, maybe that thing finally gets a hit after three years that it’s been sitting on the table, you know, we got to write that down and say, okay, the table had three years ago finally got a hit.

Michael Frick

I’ve never seen that.

Roggen

That’s pretty bad.

Darlene Frick

Okay, thank you.

Josh Ramsey

I mean, the soft projection right now and raw. I’m going to fill out more information on this. But the soft projection right now is that we will spend approximately 60,000 in marketing budget compared to last year, 94,000 in marketing budget.

Josh Ramsey

These are very soft projections we could dive in deeper, but as it stands right now, we’ll spend about, we call it fully loaded 75 versus 94 in the previous year, in spend.

Josh Ramsey

And our projected sales right now on the track we’re on would be 2.6 over 2.1. So we’re spending less than marketing and our sales would be hired.

Josh Ramsey

So, and I did, Rog, and I have not even looked at going back before we started working together. But this was one of the reasons why Rog and I worked together in the first year with me saying, let’s get better data.

Josh Ramsey

Let’s have you. to run it, see if you can do it, have the data, and then look at, you know, a year later, do you need and want me to come in more?

Josh Ramsey

But I look at it and say, okay, am I of value to the company? And based on the current projection, you know, we’re doing better.

Josh Ramsey

We’re able to do more. Now, I really feel like when Mike can load in that information of sales and so forth of like where they’re coming from specifically, I’m going to be two or three times even better than where we’re at now.

Josh Ramsey

Because now I can guide and say, we got to go here, we got to spend here. We’re trying to make more over here, we’ve got to increase this.

Josh Ramsey

And right now I would say, look, mean, back on saying spend more in SEO right off, even though that’s what the metric says.

Josh Ramsey

But I definitely said, let’s look at being and figure out why, which I’ll have tomorrow. The next day is to specifically why that increase and why we’re not getting anything from it and double check it.

Josh Ramsey

But again, all those metrics change with being even if we come back and we go, hey, being did generate poor sales.

Josh Ramsey

But again, it’s a little bit ambiguous. We don’t want to change too much too quick because if we go change AdWords and being an increased SEO, SEO will take several months to really kick in.

Josh Ramsey

But I already have a plan of SEO outline, it’s right here. But I have a plan of SEO outline of what we need to change and ultimately it’s going to come down to building more pages and more blogs that are SEO driven.

Josh Ramsey

That’s the biggest change right there. And then diving into the pages a little bit more, but really it’s going to be hitting certain cities with geo and with blogs.

Josh Ramsey

In short, that’s what we need to be doing. done. That just takes time to build the pages, write the pages, code the pages, get them live, and then let them gain traction and then submit them in a sitemap so that it picks up.

Josh Ramsey

Again, that’s the little micro details of what has to happen, but that’s what would need to happen with the SEO side.

Darlene Frick

Yeah, I completely understand the SEO piece and I’m like, just so you guys know. don’t have any questions about the necessity for SEO.

Darlene Frick

I think the data that I’m kind of looking for, I know like we’ve already discussed, the data is not always very, it’s not clean, right?

Darlene Frick

There’s multiple influences when you say this is doing this. Yeah, it is, but this probably helped or this maybe didn’t help or did.

Darlene Frick

I get that. But I think where I’m looking at a little bit is the paper click adds. the social media on meta, those pieces, to me, and you guys tell me if I’m wrong, but to me, that’s where we’re really trying to figure out where’s the most paying for not the SEO.

Darlene Frick

We all know that SEO is important. Is that correct?

Josh Ramsey

Or am I Yes. mean, it’s all about now it becomes about leveraging what you’re doing. And the leverage is the positive way.

Josh Ramsey

It’s the manipulation of data to find what works best. So it’s a constant tweaking turn of let’s modify this, let’s look to improve this.

Josh Ramsey

So it’s a make the modification, wait two or three or four weeks, make the modification, wait two, three, four weeks.

Josh Ramsey

But I mean, we did changes before I took a vacation and we, I came back and looked at it and all the changes had done better.

Josh Ramsey

We had improved on what we were doing. So now we came in and said, okay. Let’s modify this. We’ve improved again.

Josh Ramsey

So again, you come in and change too much. You don’t know what really changed. But yes, it is a whole, because again, when we go back to your SEO, tied into AdWords, using Mike’s thing Craigslist, they found you online.

Josh Ramsey

Well, when they found you online, if Mike really got micro with these guys, how did you put this on?

Josh Ramsey

What did you type in? You type in our name? Just type in a product and see our name and you remember this.

Josh Ramsey

That’s a big difference there, right? Because if they typed in a product, maybe we didn’t show up. Number one, maybe they had to scroll down.

Josh Ramsey

Did they remember our name? Then when you talk about meta, now we get into, we identified what a week ago or two weeks ago, we identified that people were coming in and calling and then like, oh, I need this information.

Josh Ramsey

Now we’re modifying what our user data is telling us, both in internally and externally when we’re reading the data points, but we’re talking to our salespeople.

Josh Ramsey

So yes, I don’t think I disagree. I think I’m answering your question and saying yes, you’re right. It is how those things work.

Josh Ramsey

But again, now you go to something I didn’t say earlier, which is law of diminishing return, because you can only do so much SEO.

Josh Ramsey

So I would, I think I said this to Rogan, but I mean, doubling your SEO budget would be a big step.

Josh Ramsey

But I think it would be good. Now, do you have to? No, we have to look at what our budget is, and then we have to project what it’s going to be.

Josh Ramsey

But if we’re looking at it and we’re going, okay, Josh, spend the 94, but get in, but get us at 2.4 or higher and then build on that for the next year, I’m going to say, okay, that gives us in the last end of the month, 20,000.

Josh Ramsey

We don’t need 20,000 in SEO for the back end of the year. It’s too much. I don’t want to spend that because I can’t.

Josh Ramsey

Can’t justify keeping my job, which is spin little in game more, right? I mean, that’s how my job works.

Josh Ramsey

I would not be doing my job if we were at projected by the end of the year, if we were at, you know, rather than 2.1 plus, if we were at two and our spin was already at 60, 70,000, I should be fired right away.

Josh Ramsey

But right now, I look at it and go, okay, what’s my job? Spin as little as possible, maximum results.

Josh Ramsey

So how do we do that? Now you get into the micro paid ad, meta, okay, within that, the granular pieces.

Josh Ramsey

And that’s, that’s what we’re looking at. So again, when we come back to the KPIs, we can look at everything that I showed, looking at it weekly, not going to do much.

Josh Ramsey

You’re not going to see that much in a week to week. But looking at, you know, monthly, I do these weekly calls and check-ins to basically say, hey, what are we doing?

Josh Ramsey

Anything hot we need to talk about their ship is there any change has the phones just completely died You know did something break?

Josh Ramsey

Everything seems to be working Right cool. they’re meant to be 10 minute check-in even though we spend an hour usually and that’s fine But that’s that’s what they’re meant to be One more question Josh and and I apologize for all my questions today I’m really trying to understand so I can support the team the best I can So part of my my previous role.

Darlene Frick

I went through a lot of training Lean training six Sigma things like that. don’t know if that’s familiar, but we had something called lead and lagging measures and The lagging measure was the ultimate goal.

Darlene Frick

So in this scenario the ultimate goal would be to have a sale The leading measure would be like those And it’s not always Very completely clean, but we have a pretty good idea that This needs to happen

Darlene Frick

Often so many times in order to increase that sale. What would be a good example, a sales person comes on, and we know that if the sales person is not making phone calls, we’re not going to make that sale, which is our lag measure.

Darlene Frick

So we set a goal for the sales person to make 50 calls a day, and because that lag measure may be two to three months out, which would be increase in sales, we measure, did you make the 50 calls today, or however many that we would say.

Darlene Frick

And that’s just a small example, but does that translate to impressions, or how does it, first of all, does that make sense, and then does it translate to our scenario?

Josh Ramsey

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve heard that type of terminology used. I had to go back and refresh myself, and I’ve never referred to it in that terminology.

Josh Ramsey

When I pulled it up on Google, this is how I translate it and what Google translates. Basically, leading measures are full.

Josh Ramsey

Forward looking and predictive while lagging measures are retrospective and measuring past performance. So anything that we’ve done. So I look at it kind of proactive and reactive, but I’m always looking proactive based on the data that I have.

Josh Ramsey

So you getting the same terminology, I would look at the at what you’re using in your terminology, I would look at the lagging measures to be able to make decisions on what you call the leading measures.

Josh Ramsey

So I understand what you’re saying, but that’s how I projected is by saying, I want this to happen. Here’s the result I’m looking for.

Josh Ramsey

So I’m going to make this, this, and this move, whatever those moves are to project what’s going to happen.

Josh Ramsey

And a lot of times when I teach conferences and I’m doing like high level SEO, I’m talking about build it right to fix it, right?

Josh Ramsey

Build something and you’re looking for that metric to go up down, but you never want it to stay the same.

Josh Ramsey

Because if you go up, do more of it. If you go down, you know you did something wrong, go back and read what you did wrong based on the metrics and the data to make modifications to go back up and bring that down arrow back up.

Josh Ramsey

So, but again, you can’t sometimes make decisions because when we looked at the trend of user volume and search in June meaning people just weren’t buying what our company sells.

Josh Ramsey

They weren’t searching. So, when I look at it, sometimes you have to be careful of being too reactive based on what you call lagging measures because if you’re reactive to it, you could be making a bigger mistake because the market dictate and the market becomes volatile.

Josh Ramsey

That’s how I see it. I’m not always right, but that’s how I see it as I’m always making progress.

Josh Ramsey

Objections based on what’s happened and as I make that projection. I’m constantly looking for improvement and jumps forward to say, okay, I saw this happen.

Josh Ramsey

I think I can make more of this happen.

Michael Frick

Something I noticed, Josh, I have, I don’t know if this is a correlation at all, but I have stock and caterpillar and new core, which new core is the largest manufacturer the United States, which we use.

Michael Frick

But whenever there is stock goes down, our stuff goes down. I don’t know, and that’s what happened in June is to stock went down and so.

Josh Ramsey

So I am terrible at the stock market. My brother knows it really well. He used to be a trader and he worked with TD, TD Waterhouse.

Josh Ramsey

And that’s back before every merger happened and everything else that was back in like 95 to 98 is when he was doing that.

Josh Ramsey

So I’m not very good at that, but I feel like there’s something to be said. within that, but I’m looking at more of, you know, if I pulled up how many people were searching, the downside is something that I use in some markets is Google Trends.

Josh Ramsey

So if you want to go play with Google Trends or type in Google Trends and go look at it, and you can see a lot of information, but Google Trends doesn’t give us in our industry here enough information that we can actually make good projections on it.

Josh Ramsey

Like it would give you home improvement, other things like that. Like, I hate, I don’t want to go down a dark road on this call, but, you know, Google Trends tells you like the shooter that shot at Donald Trump, like you’ll see the trend pop, the UEFA soccer it popped.

Josh Ramsey

So you’ll see the searches of who the players are, you’ll see the searches of whatever’s going on, but it’ll allow you pass that and it’ll give you a little bit of a projection of what they think is coming.

Josh Ramsey

But, still not for sure. And the data still is usually three or four months behind when you look at Google trends, it’s still far behind.

Josh Ramsey

So now you’re trying to look, Darlene, at your metric of lagging data, don’t want to wait three or four months to see what Google comes back in and says.

Josh Ramsey

So I never really look at it. I’m looking at a projection at times, but I don’t and our search impression share.

Josh Ramsey

And those are the metrics that I start making decisions on, on how to move forward. And that’s where it’s hard to give you a KPI because sometimes I don’t have it.

Josh Ramsey

So the only KPI can really give you is what I’ve showed you today, which again, I can, you know, typically pulls these monthly so we can continue to pull these monthly and then we go through them and we set an hour and a half call because today I’ve got another five minutes and then we can jump and then we can reset.

Josh Ramsey

That I mean, but by the way, darling, all your questions are welcome. I mean, to me, this is an executive roundtable and I’m here to answer any of the questions that you have at any point in time and pick up more phone calls later in the week as needed.

Josh Ramsey

And like the past two or three weeks, Rogan and I’ve jumped on hour, hour and a half calls the past couple of weeks to nail down some budget numbers, get that spreadsheet honed in, continue to hone it in, and we kind of have it a good point.

Josh Ramsey

So, Rogan, your homework as we start to wrap up here will be, I need you to go into that spreadsheet and, um, and identify the forecast for all of this year, both marketing, spin, what’s allowed budget.

Josh Ramsey

Don’t have to know, like, already have what’s done, but if you want to go back into your notes of what’s allowed budget and then look at the forecast, and then if you want to pull last year’s as well, I’ll add that in here as well.

Josh Ramsey

I’m going to add that now, so I’m going to insert one above and I’m going to call it 2023 for sales.

Josh Ramsey

So you’ll see that added in. then Tami, if you’ll shoot everyone an email and make sure that they can all get into the budget sheet, that would be great.

Tami

So let’s get that done. I’m going to clean some of this up. going to delete that one. Okay. And I’m going to put it.

Tami

I’m going rename it. Okay. So everyone will get that wrong. And if you can up those sales numbers last year and this year, so we can take a look at that projection and then forecast this year.

Tami

And if you need to get with Darlene to look at that, I’m going to share this one more time.

Tami

So, Darlene, I don’t know how much you might need to help Darlene with this. I’m going to call it you determine that or the two of you working.

Tami

Together on that. But if you’ll give 2023, we’ll look at what the sales were, and we’ll forecast this year of our projection of what we want, and then we’ll track the actual sales here.

Tami

So this is all in the overview. And then if we’ll forecast the spend of marketing for this year, then we can identify for overspinning, understanding whatever we want to do to hit our sales goal, and then I’ll all calculate these numbers out.

Tami

And then we’ll create a projection of where we’re at.

Darlene Frick

So I really like this spreadsheet.

Josh Ramsey

It’s all a maturation process, honestly guys, it’s just a constantly trying to improve on where we’re at, what we’re trying to achieve, and where we want to go.

Josh Ramsey

So that’s that’s what we’re doing. It’s not all done in one day. It is a progression and we just get better and better with tracking the leads, tracking the numbers, trying to forecast, trying to project out, then figuring out what are the

Josh Ramsey

The next step. So we looked at meta, we made some changes, we’re implementing, we wait. Google AdWords, we continue to make some changes, probably over the next couple of weeks by at least the beginning of August, we’re probably going to make some more changes.

Josh Ramsey

I want to see that, I want to see it calm down because June seemed to just be crap. We made some changes in May, June, but it just didn’t result in what we want.

Josh Ramsey

Now, I want to see it calm down, see what we got in July, or sales per Rog and I short conversation seem to be back up a little bit.

Josh Ramsey

So now I want to see, okay, can we get back up in July without changing too much? Was it a market downturn or was it something else?

Josh Ramsey

That’s where we have to kind of see what’s happening and then make projections based on the data. Any other tasks or I guess for now, we’ll just wrap by saying that that’ll be a new KPI sheet.

Josh Ramsey

But again, it’s going to be kind of a monthly deal. But we can always jump on and say, hey, let’s look at this or let’s look at that.

Josh Ramsey

Again, to me, this is a round table of, you know, we all have to be called to the carpet.

Josh Ramsey

I’m called to the carpet. Mike, you know, you’ve got to track those leads. Darlene, you just have to sit there and smile and look pretty for everybody.

Roggen

We’re all going to just have to hold the bird and make sure it doesn’t poop on his head.

Michael Frick

So.

Josh Ramsey

But I’m always good at the questions and all the details, you know, like that doesn’t change for me. So I’m good with it.

Michael Frick

Thanks, Josh. I appreciate that.

Josh Ramsey

You. Yeah, absolutely. So next week, came you’ll kind of come up with it. Rogan, if you need me more this week, just hit me up.

Josh Ramsey

If you’ll let me know when you have these projections set and then I’ll let you know on the being stuff in the next day or two, I’ll have that won’t be today because he’s out, but we’ll take a look at that and figure out what’s going on with the being.

Josh Ramsey

What happened? and then how to modify it, reduce that down, get that down and we’ll have that done at least by tomorrow.

Josh Ramsey

So we’ll go through that and kind of figure out where we’re at there.

Roggen

Okay. That sounds good.

Josh Ramsey

We love it.

Darlene Frick

Yep. Thank you. You guys have a good week.

Tami

Continue.

Michael Frick

Thank you.

Josh Ramsey

All right guys. See y’all.