everythingswan

Was going to comment the same. I've managed a wide variety of campaigns over the years and the best money for jam in terms of optimization is always the search term report. For non-G-Ads enthusiasts, it's the actual list of queries that a user searched for when your ad was clicked. The problem is usually rooted in too many keywords (top of funnel, as their awareness ladder says) or use of broad match keywords--exactly as you said gk1.

My favorite point: "Lesson #1: Test and trim keywords sets before hiring an agency to scale things" - the number one indicator of a successful campaign and client relationship for me is whether the internal team has legitimately tried to use the marketing channel before. I think you can successfully test channels with freelancers but I think a simpler process that likely has a higher rate of success is to test internally before you move it to an external resource.

The core benefit is knowledge acquisition for your team. You'll make better decisions with that knowledge and leverage the time of your freelancer or agency better than if you had to ask about every detail you didn't understand about their work.

Jokes on you if you're rolling your eyes as you open the article, as I was. It's actually very practical advice on marketing for any company into revenue.

I frequently revisit the idea that you are a sum of what you do. For companies that are products, you should be product-centric with your time and resources. For service businesses, probably more focused on process and the people behind it since they are your product. It's stressful dealing with the influx of pressure to be growth-hacky and growth-focused every day. It's a pretty gross environment in digital marketing right now, especially in SaaS and eCommerce, and it's no surprise that innovative or high quality companies discover the growth secrets: because they have great products!

Aside: I used to do more SEO and have used ahrefs a few times, more often using their competitors, but I still follow quite a few SEO's on Twitter and via email: they all _love_ ahrefs. Stellar product and about within the last 7 days I saw a huge Twitter thread about how helpful their latest feature release is. I would say they're living it.

Absolutely. And since they stock different brands, it's even more important to get the sizing right. I remember reading shoes and apparel made up a high portion of their gross sales.

In general, my experience is that the higher the price, the longer and more intense the buying cycle is. It's not ground-breaking to think that but I also think it will indicate the last retail stores to bend at the will of online demand: cars, boats, engagement rings, etc.

Good thread, found it really interesting!

I am processing some research on DICK's Sporting Goods, 750 stores and 90% are their core brand. I knew the reality was something along these lines but just didn't expect the % to be so small: "The Company's eCommerce sales penetration to total net sales has increased from 2.8% in fiscal 2010 to 10.3% in fiscal 2015."[1]

It's certainly growing every year for them, easy to see since it's a public company, but not at a tremendous rate like my news bubble or profession would have me believe. It furthers your point that brick & mortar are certainly not dead, or even dying, since many people still shop in-store.

Of note, a good portion of their 10k was devoted to omni-channel experience, which is the thinking that customers are customers and not defined by online or offline alone--they use both. Omni-channel strategies seem pretty basic at this point but also well worth their investment.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1089063/000108906316...

That may sound snarky to some but I feel like it's the right response. Sometimes we forget what risk really is (and why it pays well when it works) when we talk about romantic stories like this list.

I've run lead gen campaigns there that were almost comparable to Facebook but can't they "worked".

I think the problem is, as an advertiser, treating it like I do the other social channels. I don't feel like it's similar to Facebook at all and has become even more different over time. Pinterest has similarly fragmented.

I see using content as remarketing ads to be effective there. But that's the hardest ad-use-case to prove ROI on, in my experience.

I tend to dislike them because of their past but I'll defend with a thought about their roadmap.

With their current business model, I don't think they have it in the bag. They don't have much that other ride shares don't.

But I think that if they had the infrastructure built out to support their current model for the whole country, they would be the only company capable of being the software side of autonomous vehicles. Or, at least, the best positioned company to win that contract.

I think that transportation itself is big enough to warrant such a big valuation. So I think their competitive advantage will be built over time and, right now, it's not anything sustainable by replacing taxis.

Of course, once someone wins the race, maybe we won't need anymore clones since the cost/transaction will reach a good equilibrium for everyone. Then they can build a different type of sustainable competitive advantage.

Yea, being a little dramatic about the temp, I apologize. It's 90F during the day on average: https://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/tampa/florida/united-s... The humidity makes it a different heat.

I'm talking relative humidity with the percentage, which is typically what weather reports. It averages over 90% for most summer months: https://climatecenter.fsu.edu/products-services/data/other-n...

Totally agree on the happiness part!

My only gripe with Tampa is the length & intensity of summer.

It's incredibly humid the entire year. Close to 100% humidity and 100 degrees F quite often in the middle of the day. April through November is just hot as heck.

You are hot and sweaty...and stay hot and sweaty until you take a shower and dry off. I see people walking around in suits downtown and I can't understand how they manage it. Getting into your car is a task because you're essentially hopping in an oven.

Additionally, today is the first "nice day" in a while and its's still 90 F with 60% humidity. It's almost October. We don't really have a fall, which is what I loved about living further north in Atlanta. I'm exhausted by it by the time August ends and this will last into November.

The strangest part is that the humidity makes cold nights feel even colder than dryer places. So 45F in Tampa is crazy cold due to the moisture in the air. It doesn't help that we're not geared up for those 10 nights per year either. I noticed this when I spent time in CO. I want to go for a run at 45F in Denver!

The only other major gripes I have is that our transportation and the way our downtown has developed hasn't worked. Urban sprawl hurt us quite a bit with the former.

But(!), there are benefits. * I can easily get away with wearing shorts for nearly the entire year. I go to meetings in shorts and it's great. * Rent is _very_ reasonable. * Lots of outdoor things to do: our Riverwalk downtown is amazing to bike/walk/run on. * We have some quality food and FL loves beer, so we have some nice breweries beyond Cigar City.

Due to the heat, I want to spend some of each year up north. It's just too much for me.

I think the clear answer is it's not for you. Part of the reason behind selling through other channels is to capture people like you: you (and me for most things) would rather shop through Amazon than a retailer.

Retail vs. online is a prime example of channel selling. Some people prefer to try on things or are so brand loyal that they're blind to other retailers.

I watched a few of these videos and I didn't hear outbound mentioned once. Did he cover this in a video? I may have missed it since I skipped around.

I was watching/listening to it from the perspective that the company is generating inbound leads from a marketing team/channel.

Well put.

There's probably a theory that better explains this, but I think of it as getting to 60%. How can I get to 60% certainty without wasting too much time?

I'll never get to 100% (likely not even the 60% I think I am getting to) but how can I uncover just enough information to feel confidence in my decision? (edit: to add the "?")

The rest is just assessing past decisions and asking the same questions until we get satisfied with the result.

Lentils and most beans are low on the glycemic index and have a balance of protein in them. As a T1 diabetic for 10+ years, I personally find that glycemic index is the leading indicator for how large and sustained my insulin spikes are

GI Info from ADA: http://www.diabetes.org/food-and-fitness/food/what-can-i-eat... GI info: https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/glyce... Lentil Macros: https://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/macro-organic-gre... Black Bean Macros: https://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/publix-dried-blac...

This is more of an exploration than an explanation but it seems like you're pointing to the threshold of success in a series of experiments.

As deyan mentioned in physics or chemistry, we get a high level of certainty after isolating all the variables. When it doesn't go according to plan, it's a known or unknown variable to blame.

It seems to me that behavioral psychology is still in its infancy in terms of identifying those variables and/or the threshold of Truth is much lower than sciences like chemistry.

Lots of patterns exist that have lower thresholds. Sports analogies are fairly illustrative. Hitters in baseball are considered great if they succeed 3 times out of 10. Then again, they run 500+ experiments a year (for hopefully many years) to determine their average...

I agree with your conclusion that experiments needed to be repeated more over time. I simply wonder what type of success threshold we will look at as the Truth in time.

I worked with a team remotely for 3 years, solely relying on Google Hangouts for video and an occasional Zoom meeting. The video/mic/hardware problems are _incredibly_ rare.

Being late or grabbing coffee instead of starting a meeting are culture problems at a company, not problems with the medium.

I think the length of the program is a good place to start: 15 weeks full time vs. 9-12 months full-time is a huge difference: https://www.ucsc-extension.edu/certificate-programs?cname=So...

I know people I've talked to (work with a similar company) feel the weight of family duty very heavily with career decisions. Having children or other family to be responsible for is one of the things that holds people back. Child care is incredibly expensive and having to carry that burden on your own can be very taxing and can get in the way of your work if you're at home.

Shorter runway to earn more is a much more desirable option.

Think this happened within last 6-12 months. Not long ago it wasn't possible to see referral data from YouTube in something like Google Analytics without manually adding utm's. I noticed the data coming in automatically sometime in that period.

This is essentially my opinion of it. I look at both Trello and JIRA as useful, depending on my use case. With a cross-discipline team focused on delivering a few things (basically epics/features/whatever) at once, I love JIRA. Working on my own, I'd use Trello.

It has a similar feeling to the hatred for Excel we all have as we start to use it. So. Many. Features. When you have a team member who is a power user, it can be frustrating since they will want to lead the implementation. Then you run into a bottleneck when they are the only ones that can run/fix that report. Maybe not a great comparison beyond that.

I like John's take on it that you should start with a simple, physical board. If I start with a new team that will be my preferred path.

I joined a team on Asana and we simply used the list type for a project with acceptance criteria. Not a physical board but it was super basic. Over the next 3 months we started to add colored tags for epics, important links to the description during the sprint, & links in the description to related stories. When it became JIRA 6 months in, we moved to JIRA.

If we would have started with JIRA there would have been a riot. But now that we know the features we need, we don't find it bamboozling. It still can be for features we're figuring out we need (I spent 3-4 hours on a simple plugin last month), but the attitude is definitely not the "JIRA sucks" mentality that I hear a lot about.

At that point, it's on the advertiser. It's a weird dynamic where they want to enable the advertiser to factor that in and not advertise to you, but they want to maximize rev and imperfect advertisers increases rev.

( = edit for grammar)

I don't really like the term middle man for this. They repackage and sell a service. They have solved a problem better than anyone else. That is real value.

Just because the product or service is a derivative of something else doesn't mean it doesn't have real value. Fantasy football, for example. Should we look at fantasy football sites because they just repackage NFL stats?

In this situation, we should just let AT&T/Bell dictate all things internet, since they laid the foundation with their lines. I think the point has some weight, but there's a lot more at stake than a simple service fee.