What are marketers getting wrong today? Welcome to The Marketing Accelerator Podcast, featuring three insights in about three minutes. I'm Drew Dinkelacker, and today I'm speaking with Jeff Greenfield. He's the co-founder and CEO of Provalytics, where they deliver AI-driven marketing measurement for a privacy-first world. Jeff, you've been in the marketing game a long time, just like me. What have you seen that marketers keep getting wrong?
Jeff Greenfield: What they keep getting wrong is focusing on the click. The click seems to be the central thing that everybody is focused on, and they're forgetting the most important thing you do with marketing is you're buying eyeballs. And the purpose of that is to build awareness, and then the clicks come. But those eyeballs are measured in impressions, so you need to be focusing on impressions. That's what really matters, not clicks.
Drew: Well, that seems like an easy pit to fall into, given the demand for fast results. Where else are marketers missing the mark?
Jeff: Well, because they're so focused on clicks, they've moved all of their money down to the bottom of the funnel. And with all of that money down at the bottom of the funnel, they have decreased the number of eyeballs they're reaching, which we call "reach" in marketing. And now the problem is the marketing world is this biddable world. And so more people come into market, the bids go up. So, you are fighting for the fewer number of people, and the prices keep going up. That's really what people are getting wrong. When you focus on impressions, you move up higher where there's fewer people playing.
Drew: I think part of the problem is not understanding how to leverage impression data. How do you go about it?
Jeff: Well, the simplest DIY route for every marketer is to take that Google Sheet that you've got open all day long, that's got a list of every day and everything you've spent on with your cost per click, your cost per sale and all that stuff, and just go up to the top and add a new column and write in impressions and then go back for the last 12 months and add in your daily impressions. And what you will start to see is a pattern. It's not going to be a day-by-day pattern, but you'll see on days we have high impressions, probably the next couple of days, maybe even a week later, you'll see a boost and more people come into your website and more sales. You want to understand those patterns. That's how you leverage impressions and a marketing plan these days.
Drew: Impressions bring that drone-level perspective that's so valuable compared to getting into the weeds with clicks. The Marketing Accelerator Podcast is a production of MarketingAccelerator.com, where we help business leaders gain confidence in their marketing efforts and help marketers develop into high performing leaders. I'm Drew Dinkelacker.