Data-Driven Insights with Jonathan Torrey
In the virtual Lemonade Stand, Crystal and Emily are joined by Jonathan Torrey from Searchlight! They discuss unlocking the power of data-driven decisions, knowing the origin of your leads, and the value of operational efficiency for your data.
0:07 - Exploring Data-Driven Marketing Strategies
7:13 - Analyzing Revenue Potential and Conversions
10:22 - Improving Contractor Operational Efficiency
22:04 - Uncovering Customer Journey Insights With Searchlight
30:05 - Digital Marketing Revenue Flow Analysis
If you would like to learn more about what Searchlight can do for your business, head over to www.searchlightdigital.io to get in touch with their phenomenal team!
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We’ll see you next time, Lemon Heads!
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Speaker 1: 0:07
what's up, lemon heads? Welcome back to another episode of from the yellow chair. I'm emily and I'm crystal, and this week we're going to talk about the power of consistent investment and structure to your seo yeah, we're going to dive into oh yeah, everyone's favorite topic.
Speaker 2: 0:27
Yeah, we're really going to dive into unlocking the potential with data-driven marketing. Y'all know this is a company after my own heart, and so we're really excited to meet who we have on the show today. So let's sip some lemonade. Let's do it. All right, so joining us in the lemonade stand today is John Torrey, a pioneer in revenue flow attribution, and we're going to really dive into what that term is within the home services vertical.
Speaker 1: 1:00
And so he is the co-founder and director of marketing and partnerships at Searchlight vertical. And so he is the co-founder and director of marketing and partnerships at Searchlight. They are a revenue analytics platform for the home service industry and have so much value and have helped so many of our clients. And so, John, tell us a little bit more about yourself.
Speaker 3: 1:17
Yeah, definitely so. John Torrey, as you mentioned, director of marketing at Searchlight, and I've spent about 12, 13 years now in digital marketing. So I went to the University of Vermont and my first job right out of school, when I graduated 2011, was in social media marketing at a time when it was brand new. So, advertising on Twitter, advertising on Facebook you wouldn't believe how cheap it was back then, but that didn't exist when I, when I started school so came out into this new world where a lot of brands were recovering from the Great Recession, we worked with a lot of consumer packaged goods companies. Then we ultimately worked with a very large website and digital marketing provider for car dealerships and they were very curious hey, can Facebook drive sales for car dealers? And they gave us that project to work on and we were actually able to prove this out. And this was again in 2012, when everybody sort of said Facebook's for teenagers, we don't want to advertise there, but we were able to prove that advertising spend on Facebook drove sales for car dealerships.
Speaker 3: 2:23
And ever since then, that concept of data and attribution and finding overlooked and undervalued channels where everybody else tells you hey, you're wrong about this, has been something that excites me. So I spent the next 10 or so years in automotive working in everything from business development, product operations, product management, market intelligence, and was very client facing. I used to travel to Detroit a lot to present to some big clients there like Ford, and I would work with Subaru and Audi and Volvo. So just a lot of really high level strategy where do we spend our money, how do we capture some undervalued attention and then ultimately ended up in the home services industry. So kind of bringing that experience and what we saw in automotive into our vertical today.
Speaker 1: 3:10
No, I love that and, like you know, kind of, like I always said a pioneer and so that you kind of guys truly were like before this was the cool trend and things like that, really discovering and figuring it out, and then so like, to me, cars and automotives can be a lot more sexy and maybe like fun than heating and air conditioning systems, if you will. Yeah so what made you kind of try to get into the home service industry versus, like, shifting out of the cars and into this home service industry?
Speaker 3: 3:40
Yeah, so there there's a couple of things that I think, one that is true, and it's always funny because I tell our clients the same thing it's way more fun to look up Audi A4s on CarGurus and other things, and then you get put into these audience buckets.
Speaker 3: 3:54
It's a different shopping and research experience, but the principles are the same. There's activity that happens online to seek out the product or service that you want, but the purchase happens offline, so to speak. So that's kind of one of the things. But our CEO, his father's a plumber, and the whole genesis of Searchlight is that he put his sons through college with his business. He wanted to start spending on digital marketing and he kind of did it on his own, didn't really look at some of the data because it's just not his expertise. So I called his son, his son called a few colleagues, myself included, just to look under the hood, and what we saw was pretty disappointing.
Speaker 3: 4:32
We took a little bit personally because we had felt that he was taken advantage of and we thought, okay, let's do a little bit more digging into this industry. So I went to the Facebook groups, the Reddit forums, the revenue flow attribution came from people talking about airflow and we thought, oh, you know, this is interesting, but we originally launched as an ad agency. That's the first problem that we wanted to solve is hey, we have a decade of experience with some of the toughest clients in the world who are really on us for performance. Being car dealerships, we think that we can potentially come to this industry, be very transparent and really try to fix some of the issues that we had of a family friend who was experiencing that.
Speaker 1: 5:13
No, I love that.
Speaker 2: 5:15
Yeah. So you know, a lot of times like to Emily's point, you know, we it's not sexy. What we do Backflow preventers, condensers and indoor air quality is not, exactly, you know, somebody's ideal search for the day, because people will tell me to all the time, like my website looks so good. I'm like, yeah, your website can be beautiful and producing absolutely no money at all. Yeah, and so that you know this, this idea that we need to be tracking everything, so this revenue flow attribution I'm so intrigued by that I told you when we were prepping to get on the calls, I'm going to get a shirt made Because, as a fractional marketing coach, that's exactly what we try to teach every day Is that we need to know where your leads are coming from and how they're working, because we're not super easy to promote. So you better know what is working, what is catching attention, so that you can make that work. So, uh, so that you can even add more dollars to those things that are working, or or take things away when things stop working. And so tell us a little bit about what you're seeing right now in the industry.
Speaker 2: 6:22
I know you guys do a newsletter. I fangirl over it because it's so data driven and I'm normally like I love data, but I also understand. One thing that I really try to use as an analogy is this cake analogy with contractors. You know, if you ask me to give you a slice of cake, I can't give you a bowl of flour and walk away. You expect me to have built a cake, built straight up out of Napoleon Dynamite. Build you a cake, you expect me to bake you a cake, right? So it's more than just one ingredient. It's the whole combination of those things together that make a solid platform for us to celebrate together, for us to celebrate together. And so I was just curious tell me what you're seeing out there right now, as we're in the coming off the winter and heading into the spring, of people's paid strategies and what they're doing.
Speaker 3: 7:13
Yeah. So I think the cake analogy is amazing because that 100% is accurate and what I'm finding a lot of the time is people look at data in silos. So when I get on calls and this is sort of one of the things that I like to tell people because I've been very client facing I'm in the data. I've presented Searchlight's data over 1000 times. I've been beat up 100s of times. There's a lot of evolution from this and there's a lot of detail and how we put this platform together and think about it. So I've faced almost every scenario you can imagine, every challenge that you can imagine. But some of the big trends that I'm seeing right now in Q1, demand is down. Now I look at AHRI data, the US shipment data, and we've seen declines larger than what happened during the Great Recession towards the end of last year. So even 2023, 2022, we're kind of seeing things come down. So the next thing that I see right and a lot of people ask me how many conversions did I get? That's such a popular question, it's such a key metric and that's fine. But again, not in a silo. We've seen them come down. So from January, we saw a little bit of a spike from December, but February, march. We've just seen this downtrend. There's just fewer people reaching out. That's number one. Number two what I'm seeing is not only are there fewer people reaching out, but a lot more revenue is getting quote, unquote, stuck in unsold estimates.
Speaker 3: 8:41
So if there's one takeaway from this call, one data point that you want to look at for your business is you want to look at the revenue potential versus the revenue closed. So we tend to bucket things in three phases. So we have unsold estimates. We take the average for your customers. We don't duplicate it because you'll get five estimates. We don't want to count that and skew the numbers. But we've got that bucket. We've got the sold revenue, which that's sold, but it's not yet complete. So there's a chance they could cancel or there's a chance that the work could happen in the next month. So we look at it as your pipeline. And then there's this closed revenue.
Speaker 3: 9:14
What a lot of people don't realize and this is kind of what you talked about, crystal is digital marketing companies can bring you the leads. They can bring you the leads. They can bring you quality leads. They can bring you the ideal marketing mix. Your website could look beautiful. You could get the perfect customer. But if something happens and this is that flow process if something happens where it's even at the initial lead response time, maybe you're just missing form leads because the person who used to respond is on vacation or left the business you'd be surprised how many times that happens or it goes into a spam folder. You can point the finger at the digital marketing company, but at the end of the day it's an operational problem.
Speaker 3: 9:52
But that's going to be captured in this. Return on ad spend potential versus return on ad spend close, because that potential is your unsold estimates. Sold jobs and closed jobs added together, that's your total dollar opportunities coming in. How much of that are you closing? If you're below 50% which I'm seeing more and more right now, and it could be weather, so they're going to hold off on doing that install. Thank you for the estimate. We're going to be a little bit patient, but we really want to look at that and game plan around that.
Speaker 1: 10:22
Well, and that's that's the last thing that contractors want to hear is that it's their fault or their problem with these operational deficiencies. But that's our job to kind of help bring it to light so that they can be aware of holes that they have, or leaking buckets, if you will. They're bleeding money because they're not completing out these open estimates, things like that. They're not doing the follow-through on it, and so, beyond just some numbers here that's coming through your website, being able to identify so that they can make true decisions on that, because it's not just a marketing deficiency or a leads deficiency- that's totally correct, and I've been the bad guy.
Speaker 3: 10:59
I tell people when I said, look, I'm going to be the bad guy. But I just want to tell you the truth because we're here to help you grow your business, absolutely, and I've been yelled at enough times. But when I look at our data, I can tell I can, I can almost. You know. There was a point at which I could come in and say you either fired a CSR or a CSR is sick, or you're down a person. And they'd say well, how do you know that? And so, well, I can see that your match rates for phone calls drop by 25% and when I've seen that before, that typically means so what are we doing about this? Right, it just brings up the questions that are hard to talk about. Sometimes I get all the time and everybody listening to this is probably sitting there thinking I have a great follow-up process. I don't need John from Searchlight to tell me to improve the process, but I've had that a lot when I ask people okay, well, could you just humor me and explain your process?
Speaker 3: 11:49
Who owns that? Who owns that? Well, it's our whole sales team. How are you tracking who gets reached out? Who does? Well, they each have a spreadsheet. You combine the spreadsheets, you look at the spreadsheets. Well, no, I don't. So if you're closing, 50% there might be. I'm just, you know, we're just trying to help.
Speaker 1: 12:03
So and do you have any automations in place, like through marketing pro, with emails? Do you have it with like chirp and text messages, things like that? Like there can be a lot of a little bit more. Set it and forget it, but like let it roll in the background and do the work for you so that you remove that human element of okay, so-and-so salesperson does not keep up with that spreadsheet or so-and-so was out for a week on vacation or something like having those things in place that it can roll for you to help close some of these deals and remove just some labor costs from it. The human error side of it.
Speaker 2: 12:35
Yeah, yeah. So you know, I think a lot of times we get very complacent, like, well, we went, we went to the call, we did it, we did all this, we, we, we did what we were supposed to do. And then we're like just looking for the next like we're kind of like looking for the next hit, like we're looking for the next inner you know buzz of getting that new lead opportunity. And you're like man, you're sitting on a treasure box full of opportunity. And people be like man, I had a rough March and the first thing I say is tell me what your rehash strategy was. And they're like oh wait, we're doing some outbounding. Okay, what is your outbound strategy? Well, we're calling and scheduling our maintenance appointments for our tune-up customers.
Speaker 2: 13:13
Yeah, that should be a given, that's not an extra strategy. Like, that's what you should do on any random Tuesday. Like, what is your strategy? What lever did you pull now that you saw that this big drop in demand? And, by the way, like I feel like I advocate for digital companies very consistently like a digital company has a job to do, but that job does depend on factors like demand. So we can't a digital company can't make people search for you. Now they can make themselves show up when the searching is happening. So you got to be intelligent enough and when I say that, like in the how marketing works, that you understand, like man. Right now, when demand is low, my rehash has to carry me. When demand is high, then paid ads should start carrying. Like, all of that is really so topsy turvy and you've got to understand that. That's a. That's a.
Speaker 3: 14:03
That's just how the nature of the beast yeah, and that's why we encourage tracking this data. That's why it's so important, because if you can see the wave forming, because what I've seen over the years, another trend is nine times out of 10, the back half of April is when the weather starts to warm up and you start to see those increase in crystal. You nailed it Match rates go down. So match rate is the percentage of those unique leads that match to that net new opportunity. You can think of it as a run job, right, we tend to see when lead volume goes up, those go down. So does a paying customer rate. The percentage of those unique leads that turn into a sold or closed job tend to come down. Why, well, I've got all these calls coming in. If we don't get this one, we can get the next one, and that's okay, depending on capacity. But there's multiple factors to think about there and what I was explaining to some of the other day.
Speaker 3: 14:53
As part of the sub stack, we published Chirp data because we built a dashboard for them, so they have analytics to see. Hey, how much revenue is this driving? In February, for the sample that we collected, chirp campaigns drove $183,000 of closed revenue per business location. So if you're sitting here looking at. Okay, I'm going into a lot of homes right now. There's some replacement opportunities, but customers are hesitant because it's the end of the season. Do I really want to replace my furnace in March? I really want to wait until next year? That's when you can start thinking. Okay, I have historical data on my business to know that I'm probably going to see a dip in demand come November December. This is that audience list that I want to make sure that I bring back up so it gets you thinking differently about your business and how to handle some of the seasonality and just working with what you've got Right, absolutely.
Speaker 2: 15:44
You know, tell me this on your, tell me about the newsletter. Like I know you guys have a partnership with I call it a partnership with Relentless Digital Love, josh Crouch and his team and you use their data to kind of show things, and I mean man, every time I read it it is directionally on point with some of my clients that aren't necessarily Relentless Digital clients and I'm like man. It is so indicative that most of the times the waves that we're riding we're all riding together. Yes, very rarely am I watching somebody drowned in a placid ocean Like I'm. Normally, if everybody's suffocating, if one of my clients is suffocating and they're doing right by their vendor, then normally we're all kind of like struggling. You know, dog paddling through something. But tell me a little bit about like that partnership and like the access to data that you have to actually show those results.
Speaker 3: 16:38
Yeah, definitely so. As I mentioned before, searchlight originally started as an agency managing PPC campaigns, facebook campaigns, things like that. Right, we didn't build websites or do SEO, but we really focused on the paid side. We had some really cool technology, rockstar team, decades of experience in the space, and what ended up happening is we had a client come to us and say hey, one of our early clients right, young business, we're trying to make this work Really large business out of the Pacific Northwest. They said John, I like you, I think that you care about our business, we like your team, but we are not seeing the revenue in our CRM. We're not seeing enough to justify the spends and the fees and all. I mean, how many people have heard that before as a digital marketing agency? So what I ended up doing is asking them for 60 days to track lead to revenue by hand, because we've been doing this for a long time. I just couldn't accept it. I was like either PPC doesn't work for this industry, which would be surprising given the nature of the urgency behind it. Business is one of the search engine level, and that's what we ended up finding is there was a lot of nuance in terms of the attribution, I found a lot more revenue. I was able to prove it out to them over and over, step by step. I had spreadsheet after spreadsheet. I would send a list of customers and here's the Google Click ID and here's the exact ad that they clicked on. And it clicked for them and they said, oh my gosh, this solves a huge problem for us. They tripled their budget. They ended up doubling revenue over a couple of years. They ended up exiting.
Speaker 3: 18:04
But that's when we decided to pivot and say we don't even want to offer PBC services anymore because we just want to focus on this, because that's an entire company in and of itself, with years of work to do to accomplish what we want. So the way to get distribution because now our original strategy was hey, we're PBC, we can add these dashboards in and that can be our competitive advantage. Or we could go out and partner with agencies like Relentless Digital, who was, I believe. Or we could go out and partner with agencies like Relentless Digital, who was, I believe, our very first partner in this to say, hey, you can use the analytics, we can build this right, we can set it up for your clients, and then your teams now can take your clients through that. Now you've got revenue attribution data. So that was part of the strategy and Josh, when he saw this early on, was a huge advocate for us.
Speaker 3: 18:50
So thank you to him because he knew how passionate we were. He gave us a chance, he gave us a little bit of a platform. He would share our data and when it comes to the newsletter, our company how do we get the word out? We asked Josh hey, could we use your data to share some of the trends that are happening? And if anybody knows Josh, he cares about the industry. And he said, absolutely, if anybody knows Josh, he cares about the industry. And he said absolutely, I want people to know what these trends are. If it's going to help them with their business, even if they're working with a competitor, please do it. And that's what I respect about him and just this industry in general. But it's interesting, crystal, that you said you know when you read it, you say OK, yeah, we're all riding these waves together.
Speaker 3: 19:31
Viewership of this. The Substack is a newsletter platform. Viewership of the newsletter skyrockets when demand is down. So when I see triple or quadruple the amount of my average monthly views, I know a lot of people are feeling it, but this is what we do. We take a group of contractors, anonymize the data, so we're not sharing anybody's specific data and I walk through our core KPIs conversions, unique leads, sold revenue, average tickets, customer acquisition costs, return on ad spend and then any insights or recommendations from that data that I'm seeing. So we publish it weekly. We do organic Google local service ads, ppc outbound campaigns with Chirp and we just like to share that data and it's a free resource. That's also helped to market our business, because a lot of our clients have said hey, or you know, future clients will come through the newsletter and say hey, we love this data. How do we get it for our business?
Speaker 1: 20:21
No, and that's what I've loved so much about the data that you guys provide. So, like I was on a call with a client, you know, a month or two ago, and he's like I hate PPC, I'm spending all this money, like I can't see the revenue, dah, dah, dah, and like he's like done with it, like it's dead to me. Um, but they got on with Searchlight and you know, two months later he's like oh my gosh, searchlight has been so insightful. He's like do not take, you know, 10 X easily. And so he's like you know it was just so insightful to the where they could make really data driven decisions, and that's a key that's so missing. And a lot of times people just don't even know, okay, and they might have the data, but like they don't know how to interpret it, they don't know what it actually means to where they can actually make decisions from it, and so I think that's what's so helpful to see a bigger picture. But that is understandable as well too.
Speaker 2: 21:13
Yeah. So when, when I think when clients you know we're all scared of digital as a contractor, like we're scared to not do it, but we're kind of mad that we have to do it but do we really have to do it? And they say they're doing all these optimizations and things. I don't know, like you have to have so much trust. And then a lot of contractors that are listening, they know this, they know this same story. If I go to a different digital vendor and say, hey, what do you think about this site? In my paid ad strike, they're going to beat it up. They're going to tell me how terrible it is. It was the worst decision. They hate that people are taking advantage of other contracts. It just gets so soap opera, like you know, um that I think contractors live this life of like I don't know who to trust anymore. Everybody tells me that my company's telling me it's great, you're telling me that it's fine, and they're telling me that it's terrible. Like, where do I fit in? So when I discovered searchlight, I was like, oh my gosh, I feel like I have discovered, like I have pulled the sword out of the stone. I just felt so empowered to that word, though, because I was like man.
Speaker 2: 22:18
When you coordinate your digital efforts and you're tying tracking numbers inside of the CRM, like Service Titan and like Field Edge and things like that, you do get a glimpse into what's performing. But we all know that the customer journey I wish it was that black and white. It is not that black and white. They are experiencing our brand all different places. So, again, it's the best we had at the moment was to tie the directional tracking numbers. But now, like Searchlight, following that journey of those customers, it is so insightful. Like Searchlight, that following that journey of those customers, it is so insightful. And so it is a red flag to me. Now, when I have some digital vendors that don't want to integrate with Searchlight, that's a big red flag to me right now.
Speaker 3: 23:00
Yeah, I appreciate that and the kind words are amazing, and I want to reiterate to people how seriously we take this, because you're making business decisions from our data. So we have worked hours and hours I don't even want to talk about how many hours have sort of looking customer by customer, but I do want to mention something, because you just mentioned call tracking. So the way that we've approached this is we want to look at everything holistically in this analytics and attribution space and be the best that we possibly can be and be the best in the space. One of the things that has come up a lot and this is something that, as a contractor, I would be a little bit scared of this, but I would talk to your agency about it, and if you're an agency and you want to talk to us about it, please do Call tracking setups.
Speaker 3: 23:46
We are seeing a lot of breakage, a lot of incorrect setups and, honestly, it's not even anyone's fault because there just hasn't been visibility to the data. So what we found and this is a shout out to our engineering team working nights and weekends on top of our current roadmap, so we suddenly started to see some lower match rates, paying customer rates, things that feel off, based on our benchmarks for certain clients. And when we started to dig into it, we realized, oh my goodness, you have this DNI, you've got these call tracking providers, you've got, you know, click to call, right Call extensions and the Gclids are pulling in. And I don't want to sound too technical here, technical here but we went and built an entirely new capability that allows us to QA automatically this call tracking by pulling the data from Google ads, comparing it to the call tracking provider and seeing if there's a breakage happening, so that if the data doesn't look right or something is not properly set up, we now independently can identify that, which is really powerful. I don't expect a contractor to kind of say oh that makes so much sense, john, now we really need to have you.
Speaker 3: 24:54
But from an agency perspective, I know that there are people out there who have had to deal with oh, the numbers aren't swapping Shoot. We changed this phone number to this brand, but it's still picking up calls from this other brand because their Apple number is still this. There's a ton of things there and our platform enables us and this is just the beginning, but it really enables us to monitor what's happening to make sure that you're set up properly and you can track the data. So a lot of times now we're getting on calls and it's not even about the ROAS, it's about your call tracking is really screwed up right now, and here's exactly what's happening. Google's saying you're having, you have 300 calls, we're only seeing a hundred. You probably have another call tracking provider that you don't even have access to or know about, and they'll come back and say oh my gosh, you're right, because we have these now. We have these microsites, these landing pages that our PBC provider uses. We've got to get those wired up.
Speaker 2: 25:58
We didn't even realize this. So, listen, I call it the tracking line tango. Like I'm forever, Like we haven't used this tracking number in two years but it still gets phone numbers or calls Like where is this Number one? Not that I'm mad, I'm just trying to figure out what's still working that's making me call, and so, like, one of the things that Living Seed really tries hard to do is is to reiterate the importance of those tracking numbers and the importance of knowing, like, where they truly come from. Like if you and not using like super generic ones people get very much down in the weeds about, oh, tracking numbers, you know it is your only lifeline. Literally, it is your right now.
Speaker 2: 26:31
Like, I feel like part of me is a little hopeless when someone says I really don't have a tracking software. I'm like just throw the whole thing away, throw it all away, Cause that's what we're about to do, is we're about to throw a bunch of money up in the air and pray that it catches somewhere. We won't know how or when or who caught what, but something must be working. It is a challenge. You're flying blind with those things, and so this is a super powerful tool and I don't really think that everybody understands the true business level, changing that input like SearchLock can actually provide and you guys are a great team but just the data, just having access to the data. And I know we've kind of beat that up a little bit, but I contractors are desperate for some unbiased information and this is it. Like I don't, as I say, I don't really think SearchLot has a dog in the fight for the most part, so they don't care what you do with the information. Here's the information. Do with it what you want. But I will tell you another thing that I've noticed for contractors when they are aggressively spending so and aggressively is all relative, so let me just everybody be prepared. If you're driving in the car, you're going to hit the brakes or the gas, one of the two.
Speaker 2: 27:47
But let's say you have a client that's spending $20,000 in pay-per-click every month. Okay, Some people are like I don't spend $20,000 a month in my entire marketing package. Well, we have to talk about that later. But so people that are, that are invested. $20,000 a month is is competitive even in the in a Dallas market. So $20,000 is not small potatoes. The problem is they're given that $20,000 and they'll literally say I don't have any idea what I get from it. Yep, and like it literally like burdens my soul, Cause I'm like man, you're $20,000 is a big investment. Like you're a $7 million company doing $20,000 a month in PPC. So but something's working cause it got you to $7 million.
Speaker 2: 28:32
So you don't want to just panic and cut the whole budget, but identifying that you don't know what you don't know, so like how can you work with your digital provider to say this is what search slide is showing me, Now, how do we optimize these campaigns? It really puts the ball back in your court with the digital provider to be able to say I understand clicks and impressions and I appreciate the effort there. I've never been able to make payroll with a clicker impression. I mean my employees will not let me pay them with clicks, you know. So, um, and I already say like I tell you what I'll pay y'all the vendor in clicks and impressions and y'all tell me how it feels exactly right, it's exactly yeah yeah, no, what I was gonna ask you.
Speaker 2: 29:16
so what do you think? Most of the time, I think I'm going to make a projection and you might disagree. Most of the time it's a little risky, but I'm going to go for it Most of the time. Once you get everything connected correctly, you probably are seeing that the majority of the time, your digital ads are well spent, true or false?
Speaker 3: 29:40
I would say true.
Speaker 2: 29:48
True. So there's no need to just utterly panic. It's more about making the good better. And so you know, right now people are like, oh my gosh, I'm afraid I've been spending $20,000 a month and it's not generating anything. I'm like, well, you're at $7 million, it's done something. Now let's get in there and see what part of that $20,000 was actually performing. Same thing goes for websites that don't have strong SEO strategies. People will say I have a good website, my brother does it, it looks really good and I'm like I'm glad it looks good, but what is going on behind the scenes? So what about organic? How are you guys approaching the organic SEO side of things, comparatively speaking, I guess, to the paid ad side?
Speaker 3: 30:26
Yeah, no, that's a great question. So what we tend to look at with digital marketing channels is volume versus efficiency. So in your business, so we're talking about okay, we're spending $20,000. What are we counting on in return in order to continue to hit our budgeted goals for revenue? So if I'm looking at a like, I want to know for my business is PPC, which tends to drive driving the highest volume In most businesses. It does, but we had a few businesses last year where that was Google local service ads, service ads and the trends and I've written about this in the newsletter Google local service ads volume-wise, have been coming down pretty significantly to the point where we've had a few brands say we're not even going to spend on it because they've been tracking this data, they know that they need to pivot into other strategies and that's really, really important.
Speaker 3: 31:17
So something like organic is usually going to be the least expensive to acquire a paying customer. Now what we do is we use the SEO management fee as a cost basis because you are spending money on it. You're not spending per click like you would PPC. But the volumes, again, it depends on the business. It could be as much as PPC, higher or lower, I tend to see it a little bit lower. But when I look at organic, I'm also thinking about what's the customer behavior? Because, at the end of the day, behind all of this data is where are my customers clicking and looking? Where is their attention? Because you could tell me, john, I ran a TV ad, that's why they came to organic. Okay, but they're still coming to organic. Are you showing up? What are they clicking on when they get to your website? How are they converting? Are they converting via chat and nobody's answering those chats? Are they wanting to schedule online but you don't want to invest in that tool because you don't know how much revenue it's going to convert. There's that piece of it, but I actually have my sub stack pulled up because I wanted to remember these numbers.
Speaker 3: 32:17
So 75% of closed revenue from organic channels came from Google, my Business, in March. Now that's down 81% from February, but the majority three quarters of closed revenue that we are seeing from organic channels is coming from the Google business profile. So if you're working with your SEO agency that's a point of conversation Is anything that we can do, whether it's content, whether it's? Hey, I want every single month to go back through and make sure the phone number is accurate, my hours are accurate, my services are accurate, reviews are looking good. Where do I want to invest my limited time to get the best bang for my buck? Because right now I'm looking at, 21% of closed revenue came from Google organic listings, which is up 19% from February. But that's interesting to me because now I'm sort of seeing, hey, that Google business profile is converting a lot of these customers and we want to spend some more attention there because I think traditionally it's you know, hey, and yes, it's very important location, specific pages, seo strategy, all very, very important and it's likely that they go to your website, come back, google your name and then look at the reviews on the business profile and call in. But we want to know how they're behaving.
Speaker 3: 33:39
And the last point about organic is that 18% of revenue opportunity every dollar generated from organic in March, 18% of those converted via form, chat and online scheduling, and that was 22% in February. So in February, one out of four people that came in and had some sort of dollar opportunity with your business did not convert via phone calls. So are you communicating to your teams? Hey, it is really important that we're monitoring forms and responding quickly, that we're monitoring chats, or maybe we invest in that more expensive chat tool that has an AI bot to collect the information and make sure that we're rapidly responding. It's worth spending that money. And the last point I'm just scrolling because I know I have new customer data in here and this surprised me a little bit. So in February, 72% of closed revenue from organic came from new customers, but then in March, 55% came from new customers and we can start to see how are new customers converting on your website?
Speaker 3: 34:40
We have a couple of brands in certain markets where new customers aren't calling. They're converting via chat or online scheduling because we tend to think that their new homeowners are a little younger. They don't want to call the business. We want to spot those trends now because if in two years that's the majority of your client base, we better have a darn good system to make sure that we're giving the customer what they want and meeting them where they are.
Speaker 2: 35:05
Absolutely, absolutely. So I think, a lot of times again, you know, I know I keep going back to this word, this revenue flow idea, in our head, of attribution. You know where we are getting new customers and how they are coming to us, whether it's organic or paid or all that. Again, it goes back to that cake analogy, like you got to understand the whole picture and where things are coming for. And then you have to pivot. I tell everybody like marketing is not, like I'm going to press play and I'm never going to, I'm never going to have to pause or stop or, you know, do anything with it. And it's just not that way it is. You're actively involved in it and you have to be that way.
Speaker 2: 35:49
There is no, there is no easy way around those things. There are easy resources to give you more information, but a lot of my contractors, they have analysis by paralysis, no, paralysis by analysis, because they have all this information. I just need people to act on it. You know, we just need them to be, to be active. So well, today we've really explored the potential of this revenue flow attribution. And, john, you guys, I just I'm telling you if you have not engaged in a conversation like just I tell my clients, just give search lot one month and then you're going to be like, how did I live without this right? So hey, if they wanted to like really get in touch with you other than reaching out to lemon seed, how can they um get in touch with you or in like the newsletter and search and all that? John, like how do they go about all that?
Speaker 3: 36:39
yeah, absolutely so. You are more than anybody listening. You are more than welcome to email me, jon at searchlight digitalio. So that's jon at SearchlightDigitalio. So that's J-O-N at SearchlightDigitalio. You can subscribe to our newsletter. It is free. People like Crystal and there's a few others out there there is an option, you know, to pay. Substack bears it and they do. It's just so humbling and amazing because I know they want to support what we're doing, but it is totally free to access. So that is thedatadriventradessubstackcom. And then you can also check out our website, searchlightdigitalio.
Speaker 3: 37:13
We have some examples of the reporting that we do, some of the data that we collect on your behalf. But any one of those ways and then if you're on LinkedIn, which I know some people are Jonathan Torrey, you can always follow me there. I take some of the highlights from our newsletter and we put it in a nice visual graphic that you can share with your teams. We see that happening a lot. So LinkedIn is just Jonathan Torrey. That's another way to access, but that's you know. Again, you can always email me if you want to ask specific questions or set up time to take a look.
Speaker 1: 37:46
No, that's awesome. I introduced this topic by saying this is everyone's favorite topic and there's really some sarcasm behind that because people love to hate digital, I think. But you know, you guys have provided so much insight and tools and resources to help understand it to where you can hate it less and you can actually attribute the revenue and see the progress that your digital is making for you and stuff. So, John, thank you so much for being on this episode with us. We really appreciated it.
Speaker 3: 38:13
Thank you so much for having me and for all the kind words that we're working hard. It's a tough problem to solve. There's a lot more to do, but it's our main focus. We're committed and excited for what's to come in the future.
Speaker 2: 38:25
We're going to win the game. Yes, we're going to win the game, that's all. We're going to win the game. Well, guys, thank you for listening to another episode of From the Yellow Chair. If you loved our episode, we would love a review. Share on social media. Tag John. Tell him how great he is in all that we do. Thank you, guys, for listening. Until next time, keep sipping lemonade, see you next time.
