Automation and Analytics with Authenticity feat. Bastian Earth of Wild Audience

ASG 077 – Automation and Analytics with Authenticity feat. Sabastian Earth of Wild Audience

Chris Davis: [00:00:00] You’re listening to the All Systems Go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot, learn how to deploy automated marketing and sales systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of Automation Bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis: [00:00:32] Welcome to the All Systems Go podcast. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis, the founder and chief automation officer of Automation Bridge the place online to learn about small business, marketing and sales automation, where we focus on turning digital marketing professionals in and out of into automation service providers. And if you’d like to become an automation service provider or find out more, please visit AutomationBridge.com/Asp. In this episode, we get to discuss a new way of tracking the performance of your marketing active campaign with Sebastian Earth, who is the founder of Wild Audience and the creator of a plethora of wild products, from wild audience to wild mail to now wild metrics that allowed that is an API based approach to providing you with all of the metrics that you need to make intelligent decisions as an active campaign user. And I can’t stress enough how much fun it was recording this podcast, not just because the software is great, but the story and just the full circle nature of how I initially got connected with Sebastian and how we got reconnected. It’s an amazing story of just value on both of our ends. We’re both adding value in a and different capacities to the same audience. Right in different areas, and that audience ends up bringing us back in together.

Chris Davis: [00:02:08] So it’s always great when things like that happen and it’s always great to learn about new technology and tools that can help you and your marketing. All right. So before we jump into it, if you’re new to the podcast, make sure you listen to this episode in its entirety and then subscribe. I have an invitation at the end to let you know when is the time to do that. If you can’t wait, go ahead. You and anybody else who has been listening and not subscribe, you can go to Apple podcast, Google podcasts, even on YouTube, you can subscribe. So while you’re at it, since we’re here, leave a five star rating and review. It will be greatly appreciated if you are struggling in any capacity trying to figure out where to leave a review in your podcast app, we have you covered. Go to AutomationBridge.com/review and we’ll do all of the heavy lifting for you. All right. So with that out the way, let’s jump right into today’s episode. Bastian, welcome to the podcast, man, glad to have you on. Glad to reconnect and have you on. How are you doing, man? Thanks, Chris.

Sabastian Earth: [00:03:15] Good man.

Chris Davis: [00:03:17] Looking forward to this. Yes, yes, you know, our first time connecting was when I was running the the ActiveCampaign podcast and that’s right. And we got reconnected through one of my students that’s using your platform, which I can’t wait to dive into. And I have to say this. You were one of the most enjoyable guests on the active campaign podcast when I recorded it. Because of your understanding of marketing and your unique approach to it. Right. Your relationship approach, which we’ll get into that as well. Right. So to see, man, the evolution of where you’re at today, I just I think that it’s exemplary of anybody in the space that is dedicated to continual growth and adding extreme value, especially when the market exposes a hole or a hole is exposed in the market for. So anyway, that’s that’s a little bit of foreshadowing of what we’ll cover. Give my audience a understanding of you, your background and your business.

Sabastian Earth: [00:04:22] Yeah, sounds good. I remember the chat we had at the active campaign. It was a good one. Yeah. Talking about relationship fun and like best marketing. Yeah. Men like still the same, you know. So work while audience still running the show here. We still do relationship finance and we really like focus on doing marketing that it’s respectful, hence the term respect, respect based marketing. And the only difference is that like when we did the part because we have active campaign, which was probably like a year or so

Chris Davis: [00:04:54] Ago, as probably going to have that man like two and a half times been flying

Sabastian Earth: [00:04:58] Two and a half. Oh, wow. Oh, man. So when we did that, so at that time we were helping UPS companies, online businesses built relationships. So we had courses and consulting services and whatnot. And while working with all these different types of businesses, we really tapped into the into a huge problem. And that was analytics like really figuring out, OK, where to put the budget. Is Facebook better or Instagram better or outreach or what is it. Right. And so we try to solve that with all kinds of different Google sheets and extolls and formulas and whatnot. And in the end, we we we decided to solve it ourselves. And so now we are a company we built we are in the process of building a social product called Wild Metrics, which is API based marketing analytics. And that basically helps you understand where you lead and your customers come from and what makes them convert. Right. And the magic sauce, so to say, is API based marketing analytics. And what this means is what we can talk about.

Chris Davis: [00:06:03] Yeah, yeah. That’s that’s that’s so good. And where respect based marketing was a term that was new to me when I when I had initially met you and I fell in love with the idea immediately. Then you started talking about relationship funds. Has this always been an approach that you’ve taken just in business or did it start before marketing? Like where? What was the inception of that that approach?

Sabastian Earth: [00:06:30] That’s such a good question. You know, like I’m one of these people. Like, for me, being authentic is something I really, really value and admire in people. And it’s very important to myself. And I’ve always been one of these people who really follows one’s own journey and really. Appreciates and respects the journey of learning and then learning more about yourself. So I spent many years being by myself leaving home, traveling, exposing myself to different types of situation and getting closer and closer to who I am and meeting myself. So this authentic approach or like. Yeah, seeing life. Through your own eyes is always something that I really admire, so obviously now when I I’ve always been interested in marketing and startups, and so when it came to like doing funnels and automations, I mean, there was no other choice for myself doing it in a way that it actually makes sense to me. And that was always like building relationships and being yourself. I think being yourself is such a powerful thing to be or to do. But it’s also difficult, especially for many people. Or if you talk now about marketing. Right. You see this. I know certain campaigns out there and then you’re like, oh, I got to do the same, I guess. And I basically follow copy something. And you don’t really ask yourself, like, is this me? Right. You know, or does this speak to my audience actually. Right. Yeah. And so and if we think about what marketing is right. What is marketing, it’s it’s it’s a relationship between humans. Right. If you sell if you have a company, if you have a software product or service that your product, whatever you sell. Right. In the end, it’s a thing between two people. You know, it’s business, it’s relationship between people. That’s what business is. And so if we design a journey, if we do marketing, that actually establishes relationships easier. Yeah. Then that’s something I sign up for.

Chris Davis: [00:08:47] Yeah, I love it, man. It’s so easy and it is so easy to get influenced by the crowd and the leaders. And in doing that it gets even easier to lose yourself. Right. And by default feel inauthentic. And this is where the imposter syndrome comes in and people feel it, they feel when they’re not being authentic. So to to build a business around it. It’s one of the reasons why we have the tagline out of automate your business the right way. So, you know, the right way is all about, hey, look, let’s break away from what everybody else is saying do and let’s do it. It may take longer, right? It may be a little harder, you know, may take a few more hours, but we do it the right way. In the beginning. We don’t have to revisit it. It stays and works for you in an ongoing fashion. So there’s when we when we talk about what. Sure. What your offer is now or you need the product that you’re creating in the industry that you’re serving, the foundation really is in the understanding, the importance of analytics. So I wanted to give you the floor here and just talk about the role, the importance in the role that analytics plays in marketing automation, because there’s so much I would say there’s so much lust around like building automations and they need to be built. Yes, but the analytics is even more important than what you build. What what would you say is the the importance of analytics in the role that it plays in marketing automation?

Sabastian Earth: [00:10:35] Yeah, so I think what’s important is to not overcomplicate things. So if we think about analytics, what’s the first tool that comes to our mind? It’s probably Google Analytics, right. And mostly all the listeners right now. Probably most of you guys have it installed to install the pick. So it starts to track stuff. You can Google Analytics, you see some visitors and whatnot. Right. And but now let’s ask ourselves, like, how often do we actually look into Google Analytics or what type of questions or what type of responses do we get to our questions from Google Analytics? So most people I talk to the clients when I did the customer research before we built what metrics? It’s like, yeah, I do have Google analytics, but I have no idea what to look for or where to look for it. So I use it, Max, once a month. Right. And that’s and then basically it’s checked like how many visitors do I have on my website and where do they come from? Maybe from mobile. From desktop, but that’s where it ends. Some people, they go a step further and they they start to use an Excel sheet or a Google sheet and they start to pull data from different places. And so if you have an active campaign account, maybe half a stripe or PayPal account, maybe you have some website visitors from Google Analytics, maybe use some Facebook ads. So maybe some people should go to all these different tools, grab the data and then put it into Google sheets or Excel.

Sabastian Earth: [00:12:12] I know you do that. Yes, I do that myself. Right. So that’s what some people do. And that’s and that’s I would say is what gets us the closest right now. Yeah. And I’m talking about small to medium sized businesses. I’m not talking about huge enterprises who have their teams had to have infrastructure developers to have data scientists, data analysts, they have data warehouses and all these type of different things to have huge budgets. That’s a different story I’m not talking about, though. We’re talking about the smaller medium sized businesses here. We don’t have a beta team. We are the founder. And maybe there’s someone else or two people who work in the marketing team and that’s all we have. And so we cannot afford this huge marketing team leader teams and whatnot. Right. So what do we do? Right. As I said, the best option is Google Sheets. But the problem there is that. First of all, it’s so manual and it’s so manual, like we spend every Monday, 90 minutes just going to different tools and trying to figure out like grabbing the data or copy paste. Copy paste. Right. It’s so annoying. We did it over years for multiple clients. You know how much that how much time that is and how annoying that is. And so that’s one aspect to it. But then the other importances and that brings me back to how I started this is like.

Sabastian Earth: [00:13:41] Keeping it simple, and so, for example, our Google sheet used to be huge, I don’t know, like 100 rows and we had all these different data points and it’s just a pain in the ass to maintain to pull the data. And then it was not accurate. You know, that’s usually the experience. So when I talk about data and analytics, what I’m trying to describe here, that’s usually the frustration of feelings to what people bring to the table when they when they do analytics. So what many people do, especially if you are less technical. Right. I look into my bank account, how much money is there? How much money is coming in, how much money is going out? And I’m good to go up. And that’s pretty good. I would say that’s pretty good. So. So to answer your question, so I was trying to pull in a little a few aspects of different people, different like how people perceive and experience data, and it’s there, I wouldn’t say there’s a one. There’s not a single answer to it. Everyone has their own little story when it comes to data. But I would say for me, my story is that in the end, I want to be able to have an overview like I’m the CEO, I’m the founder. I want to have a good overview of what’s going in, what’s getting out of mind.

Sabastian Earth: [00:14:53] And I also want to know what’s working, what’s not working. Should I do Facebook or should I do podcasts, interviews or content? Right. And then maybe on a third level. Right. And that’s not for everyone, but for the the maybe the big spenders who have hired Facebook ads, budgets and whatnot. They want to go into the funnel I had inside my funnel. Right. Where are the loops? Where are the holes? Where people leaking. And there are different metrics you can look at in order to tweak and optimize your funnel. So these are three levels. And so far it hasn’t been a tool that allows you to click, connect, connect, connect, integrate all the tools you use as a marketer from top of the funnel. Middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel. I’m talking here. Facebook ads, Google ads. I’m talking here. Active campaign HubSpot. I’m talking here. Strib, people, I’m talking here. Webinar jam ever webinar cleanly type forum. Right. So all the tools we use as a marketer to build funnels and convert leads into customers. I want to keep connec, connect, connect, get all the data from these tools and then just see data. I don’t want to do any ask you out. I don’t want to do any like formulas. I don’t want to set things up or clean data. I just wanted to work out of the box. Right. And that’s what what metric is. Yeah.

Chris Davis: [00:16:09] You bring up the the word performance when you were talking about the importance. And I think it all I think that is safe to say across all businesses. You need the data in the analytics to understand the performance of your company. Right. Like at a base level. And I know that some companies don’t even do this. Some small enterprises know what’s coming in and know what’s going out. And just know if you’re red or black every month, like at a bare minimum, or at least be tracking that. But when things are working, you don’t want to just say, hey, it’s working, let’s turn a blind eye to keep up whatever you’re doing. The word repeatable comes to mind for me when I think of analytics is I don’t I don’t want to know just what’s working. I want to know how it’s working. Right. And then lastly, I want to know why, you know, like I keep asking these questions as a marketer that only data can answer it. Nobody else can answer bastian. Like, I can’t go and hire somebody and say, hey, this is happening.

Chris Davis: [00:17:16] Why? The data is the only one that knows. And it is so instrumental to so marketing automation, because while a lot of people focus on automating process and removing themselves, they also lose sight. Sometimes that automation also automates the process of gathering data. Right. Like it’s all coming in. But that brings us to the next topic I’d like to discuss. Bastion, we’re using marketing automation platforms. OK. The data is being acquired in these platforms in an automated fashion. Why is it so hard? Why is it so hard for those platforms to display what your tool does? And this is not a this is not a question for you, because that’s really a question for them. In fact, let me let me take a step back, because I let me let me not get ahead of myself. And I felt a little frustration kicking in. So let me come down. But talk about how you how you identified that need in the space as you were serving your clients and why you chose to chose to solve it with with wild with wild metrics.

Sabastian Earth: [00:18:42] Yeah, that’s a good one. So, I mean, to answer to answer this, I would say we are our first customer. Right. So we had this problem first and foremost ourselves. And I had I paid a team member to do analytics and dashboards every week. And and in the end, we got some insights, but we knew the data was wrong, because when you do these type of things or it is Google Sheet type of analysis, the problem there is that you don’t have cohorts, meaning that the data points like leads and trials and customers write all leads and webinars and customers or leads and sales calls and customers. These three events, they’re not connected with each other in the specific time period. If you explore data from active campaign and whatnot and put it into a Google sheet. So we knew that this is not connected and it’s not inaccurate. So we had that experience ourself. And then on top of that, we were working with clients and there we experienced the same exact thing. And so we tried a lot of different tools. So I have a list and our notion of manual, which basically I think let me check, but I think it’s almost 74 different tools, which I literally sign up for and trial.

Sabastian Earth: [00:20:14] And some of them even had sales calls and demos, you know, from simple like website tracking to link based tracking to UTM is tracking to pixel based tracking data warehouses and whatnot. So I tried a bunch of them and in the end I was like, man, like, this is not. What I’m needing, and this is not what’s what’s doing the job, because in the end, I still had to put in manually the variables and all the ads and all the links and everything was like so much work. You know, if you think about wicked reports and you have to do everything so much set up and it’s so expensive, everything. So that was the third part, right. So the first part was we had the same we had that problem. Then the clients had the same problem. Then I tried to solve it with different types of tools out there, fail to solve it. And then at some point we’re like, all right, let’s build it right. And I had this idea for to solve this problem maybe for a year and talk to people. And I was like, should I do it? I mean, building a new sauce company is like a ten year journey. Do I really want to do this now? And I already had a pretty good business.

Sabastian Earth: [00:21:24] Right. We’re all making good money and everything was awesome. And and and then in November 2019, we had our Q4, Q1 twenty twenty retreat, so in Q4 of twenty nineteen. And that’s where the team that’s where we made the decision to you know. Let’s. Renounce consulting, let’s stop it in the next quarter and let’s turn this whole company into a sauce company. Let’s pivot. That’s why we invested all the money we made as a consulting business and put it into hiring developers. And basically, you know, if you turn off one product and then build a new product, it’s not like, you know, there’s of this phase in between where there’s no money coming in to build this new product, but you don’t have any money coming in from the product. So that’s this face. And so we that was that was a very conscious decision and say, OK, why are we going to invest all that money we made into a new thing, into a new chapter. So that’s kind of like was the whole thing. And but now looking back to it, like almost a year maybe. Yeah, eight months, it was definitely the right decision. And we have been loving and enjoying this process very much indeed.

Chris Davis: [00:22:37] Yeah, I’m you see a theme for those listening who have been listening to to the podcast for a while. I’ve had various CEOs on here and founders and they the theme is starting, you know, scratching your own itch. Right. And and sometimes there is a place where you can go to the market with an idea validated and grow and listen to the market and really, really have success. But a lot of times we identify the holes by just providing an excellent service. Right. So I tell people a lot. It’s one of the founding or I should say guiding principles that I tell people when they’re trying to figure out what should I do? Well, who should I serve this? Find somebody something and just do it. Excellent, right. Because in doing it at a level, nobody else’s things are going to start to be apparent beyond the general knowledge. Right. The basic approach, when you elevate into excellence, you start to see like, wait a minute, there really is no to. I am trying to provide excellent metrics for my clients so I can make excellent decisions. And when I look at the landscape, there’s 70 plus tools that I’ve signed up for. I’ve logged into I’ve tried to use because I need this and it just doesn’t satisfy. So to see that journeyman, it’s as it’s always good for me.

Chris Davis: [00:24:04] It’s reaffirming the power of excellence. And I’ll say this. I think it has a one to one tie into the authenticity piece. I think that you understand in order to be authentic, in order to to really serve you the best, I have to know what’s working right. I’m not going to fake like I know something that I don’t I’m not going to tell you what somebody else said that I saw in a Facebook ad or some webinar I attended. No, this is real. And I think that. Let me. Let me ease up off of the software providers, right, because none of them really get this right. Absolutely none of them. I think HubSpot is the closest, but you have all of this data and for whatever reason, displaying it in a way that’s visual for the end users to easily understand the performance of their marketing still seems to elude all of them, which is why you’ve got 70 plus solutions, you know, out there. So one of the things that I’m really excited about, wild metrics, is that you take to use your platform, Bashan, and I know this was intentional. I’m just saying it for our audience. You take the same approach someone would use using active campaign. Like I would go and look at a tag and see how many contacts have that tag, that same approach you can use.

Chris Davis: [00:25:30] And while metrics to start to analyze the performance of your funnel from the top, middle and bottom of the funnel, you could say, hey, top of the funnel, these are the tags or the tag that’s at the top of the funnel. And while metrics do the API, which, by the way, everybody, if you if you didn’t get excited when Bastian said API, it is the feature of integration of all sorts. We know the pixel is dying. What I think Chrome and Safari are the first ones that are killing the pixel. So you’re going to want when you hear API, when somebody says API, you should get excited because that’s a direct connection. The data is being passed in a much more stable and secure manner. So you have this API that’s pulling the data from from active campaigning so I can go in and say, hey, wow, while metrics, the top of my funnel is this tag for my live magnet and you just automatically populate. How many contacts have that tag? Then I say, hey, middle funnel. It’s a webinar and it’s this tag. Oh, and actually I’ve got two webinar. So it’s both of these tags and you’re pulling those numbers

Sabastian Earth: [00:26:39] Or you get an automation, you add an automation with multiple emails. Just added them. They’re right. It tracks the whole journey. Yeah.

Chris Davis: [00:26:44] So so what I like about it in concert with what you said, with some other platforms where it was like so difficult to get started and set up. I’ve worked with some of these enterprise analytics and they they have to install an entire data layer there like it is a process getting enterprise level type metrics going. So to have a tool that you don’t really have to learn anything new, you have to familiarize yourself. OK, log into to metrics, click this button on the left, basic stuff. But I can do the same thing that I’m already doing. I can select the tag. Right. I could

Sabastian Earth: [00:27:21] Do. And you know exactly there and like that’s what I really disliked. Always was like the setup stuff. Yeah, right. I mean, if you most always require you to set a pixel, right. That in itself can be difficult or not, depending if you depending on if you know how to use certain plugins and WordPress or the Google tag manager, that can be OK. But that in itself is already I feel like a hurdle for many people. And then only it only checks data from the moment on when you have the pics to install to all the previous data is lost. Yeah. So if you have a business for three years and then you’re four, you decide, OK, now I have the time in the budget and the energy and the focus to start on analytics. The first three years of lost. Right. So while metrics if you have an API, if you have API based marketing analytics or API based on politics in general, when you connect to the tools, you not only get real time leader, you get all the historical data from all the years right. So you connect directly from an account and starts to collect all the real time stuff, all the events that’s happening in real time. But if you have an active pinna constant five years, all the data from these five years boom is inside of what metrics? And it’s just because one click right, the same with Strib, PayPal, ever webinar or whatnot, Facebook ads and whatnot. Right. So that’s I that’s something I really want to it’s like I don’t want to like have a script at JavaScript Pixel to install. I don’t want to like revamp my whole Facebook account by putting variables everywhere. I don’t want to open up each email my automation’s and put some UTM things or unique variables. I don’t want to have this setup stuff. Yeah, I just want it to work out of the box. Right. And that’s so important.

Chris Davis: [00:29:07] And and really up until this point, we’ve really talked about contact performance. Right. Like how context flow through. But the other side is you integrate with Stripe and do some automation, automated reconciliation, I’ll call it, you know, where you can see based on that contact, what or not even the contact I just realized, Bashan, even the tag, you can start to see the the monetary value of a tag and or a. Contact, right, because you integrate directly with Stripe and pull all of that information in.

Sabastian Earth: [00:29:44] As well as Automation’s and email’s, right, and then so not only on a single data point type of level, you can also combine the data points, right? So you can say I want to see revenue per let’s say TICC or contact, but I can combine them. I want to see first the first touch point, let’s say, is attacked. The second one is an automation in that automation of multiple email data points. Yeah. And and then you have a purchase and then you connect all of them. You have a journey. Right. And then you see like a funnel top and bottom what the conversion rates are and where people connect. Convert is the email that converts. This is the webinars of the trial. What is responsible for the conversion rate? And I think that’s a really powerful if you can allow people to use the data they already have there and their business and then just see what’s actually working, what’s not.

Chris Davis: [00:30:36] I love it, man. And if we bring it back, if we go full circle here and then end where we began with speaking about relationship funnels, I hope it’s apparent to our listeners now how you can just create that deeper relationship, you know, through automated marketing with your audience when you have a a level of ease in visually understanding or I should say being able to easily see how contacts are flowing through your funnel and how it’s performing. Right now, you we’re eliminating a lot of questions. Hey, what what kind of email should I send? What what should I what should I say next? Like, the data is is being delivered to you in a way that’s so easy that you can just look and say, oh, wow, our middle of the funnel is performing really well. Let’s let’s just get more people to get to the middle of the funnel because our conversion rate to the bottom is great. Right. Like, it starts to remove some complexity and not just complexity and marketing itself, but complexity in marketing to people where they’re at, you know, what they want to do or need to do. And that’s

Sabastian Earth: [00:31:52] Right. And who they are, like like for me, what I love is like. So first of all, like you, I’m I run a company on the phone of a company. It’s something I put a lot of sweat and hard and passionate energy into it. I care about my company and I care about my team. I care about the products we invest in and build. I care about our customers. Right. And the people who engage with us, our audience and the people on our email list and the people who watch our YouTube videos, the people who listen to a podcast. I care about this. Right. And I want to see them. I want to connect with these people. Right. But like. For me, I was always like, OK, we’re having, like, let’s say, an email list of 10K. We have a couple of hundred people customers, we have a bunch of automation’s, but I couldn’t touch it and feel it. So what I did is I set up slack. I set up slack. We’re safe here and connected all the tools, the tool we’ve saved here. And it’s like, so if someone clicks an email, I get a notification slack, someone opens an email. This happens if someone visits a sales page. I get I see life happening in the business and I see so and so. Now we have a channel which is instead of slack, which shows all the lifeblood, the life of the business happening right here.

Sabastian Earth: [00:33:08] And that’s the same what we want to do now. And metrics like I want to be able to we don’t have that feature yet. We’re building it. It’s like when you open up the dashboard of what metrics in the morning you have your coffee, you see your business, it’s alive, and you see the data stream, you see all the things that are coming in, you know, like in a console, like when you have, like, this TV type of console thing and these hackers whatnot. And like all the datastream. Yeah, yeah. Imagine this like being the blood of your business. Right. Cos being scheduled demos trials opens clicks website visitors customers leads different things. Right. Subscribers and it’s all coming together and you see your business and and that’s also what theater is for me. It’s not only to make decisions and have a bigger overview or a smaller overview about specific parts of the business. I also want to see the people. I want to see things that happen in my business. And that’s also what we want to do with what metrics like bring your business like show the life of your business, you know, through the data that our business has, because there is a lot.

Chris Davis: [00:34:10] Yeah, yeah. And and I’m excited to announce that by the time our listeners get this podcast in their hands, the I think the next version is that the beta is is a debate that will be available.

Sabastian Earth: [00:34:27] I can’t it’s going to talk about it. It’s going to be this. It’s going to be the second version of our alpha version. Right. So it’s going to be zero domain 2.0. Yes, that’s so it’s it’s it’s the alpha version, but with a sleek design, like with the core functionality. And now we we’re basically working in cycles and sprints and each cycle has three sprints and each sprints every two weeks. There’s new things happening and new features and so on. So, yeah, lots of cool things in the pipe. And I’m so excited to build all of this. And the feedback has been amazing. Chris, it’s I mean, I’ve showed it to you and a bunch of people and yeah, we’re having a bunch of founding customers and it’s just such a fun project to work on if you get that that excitement from people. Yeah. So, yeah, let’s see how it leads us this year.

Chris Davis: [00:35:18] I’ll say this. This is not a solicited statement bastian. This is not paying me for any of this, but. Gave me a thorough we’ve, I walked through it a couple of times now, thorough walk through, and I had been to a point with analytics finding a tool for analytics where I just really gave up and was just like, you know what, spreadsheets are the best way. You know, I’m familiar with it. I’ll do some Google search. And if I need to create a specific formula to populate a, you know, a chart that I need, I just needed to see the data that bad. So for years, man, I can’t recall the last time I’ve actively searched for, like a dashboard tool or anything like that. So when you demo while metrics, I was nervously in apprehensively excited. Right. Because just like, wait a minute, this looks like everything that I was trying to do before, but it can’t be because, like, I didn’t want to get myself too excited and now, man, to have gone through it a little more thorough with you and have a second sight at this, see the next alpha and see the beta coming up. I’m like, wait a minute, this is real.

Chris Davis: [00:36:34] This is the real deal. Right. So I am telling you, everybody who is listening, that is a digital marketing professional, a data analyst, anybody responsible for marketing the performance of marketing and improving marketing, you owe it to yourself to check it in, especially if you’re an active campaign user. You owe it to yourself to check out this platform because it truly is going to make your life easier when it comes to data collection. And we need as many people like myself who are going to use it the right way so that we can have a voice to really help guide and create the best analytics platform for marketers right now. So unsolicited. But I am passionate about this because this has been a huge hole, man, huge hole. And I love how the ease of approach in the UI of your platform and the fact that it goes to direct API man, I just you guys are doing it all the right way. So if people want to find out more about wild metrics, wild audience, wild, wild, anything, where should they go bastian? And if you have like a wait list or anything, feel free to share that as well.

Sabastian Earth: [00:37:50] Amazing. Chris. Yeah. People should go to, I think, two places pretty much. First of all, I think if you go to WildAudience.com, which is on websites and then the menu on the top, it says products and there you will find wild metrics. And there’s a video which you can watch. You can sign up for it, try it. You can schedule a call. Right. And so that’s will be what metrics? The second thing I would say would be for people to check out our podcast. So that’s that will be the wild audience FM podcast. And that’s it’s literally where we talk about these type of things. Yes. But actually, we not only talk about marketing and business, I want to now make it a focus form for myself to talk about things that I’m passionate, passionate about. Right. So, for example, things like psychedelics or Tantra. Right. Or some sort of spirituality, but always in a context of how this could help someone who is an entrepreneur or creator or founder, because there’s so much to business. And so I want to shine a little bit. I want to shine some light to different parts of of what it means to be an entrepreneur and a creator and the founder. So these are two places while audience FM on Spotify are everywhere or just wildaudience.com and and searching for what metrics under the product’s great.

Chris Davis: [00:39:15] Great. Well, I can’t agree more man. Just like when someone goes to a regular job, they bring their whole self. You know, everything outside of the job comes in. They say, check your ego. This we’re human beings man. And we are not simplified to just do this. Just do that. If you’re an entrepreneur, best believe there are other aspects and areas of your life that are playing in. How you do anything is how you do everything. So, yeah, man, I think that’s great, man, that that you’re giving a more comprehensive view of entrepreneurship. And again, tying it all in life is the greatest teacher. Man, I learned so much I can watch my kids jumping on a trampoline and get a marketing lesson from it, just like, yeah, maybe before you try a flip you should just jump first. That’s the MVP like.

Chris Davis: [00:40:05] All right.

Chris Davis: [00:40:07] So life is always instructing, is just waiting for the student to be ready to to learn. So, Bastian, man, thank you for coming on the podcast, man. This was this was beyond great to to reconnect. Really, really, really happy for you, man. And what you’re doing with with wild metrics and all the success that. You’ve had and will have man is greatly deserved, man, and I’m excited to be a part of it, man, and I’m looking forward to the ride going forward.

Sabastian Earth: [00:40:35] Thanks so much, Chris, I really appreciate the support and your input and the feedback and all the calls we had. I learned a lot from you, so thanks so much for the conversation and the chat.

Chris Davis: [00:40:44] Yes, yes. Absolutely. No problem, man. And I’ll see you online.

Sabastian Earth: [00:40:49] Peace out.

Chris Davis: [00:40:51] Thank you for listening to this episode of the All Systems Go podcast. Did you not enjoy not just learning about this stuff? I knew you would. I knew you would. And and I hope you got googly eyed and a little precipitation of of the mouth when we talked about some of the fun of visualization options that are available in wild metrics. And hopefully, by the time that this podcast has launched, it either is available or is approaching availability. I can’t stress enough. These founders are great. Are they not? Every founder that we talked to the story and their motor and their driver, its sales, you just as much as the software itself. So let me know. I don’t know. Is it helpful for you all to know about the founders behind this software as well as the software? But if if you have been struggling with spreadsheets. I don’t think you I don’t think you can afford to ignore this, so when I ask who needs to hear this, who is that marketer that is savvy with spreadsheets? Because I tell you, I’m savvy with spreadsheets and I still don’t want to do them. So there’s a good chance they’re doing it by necessity, not by choice. And you may be able to free them up of such modes of operation and get more visualization easier into what’s going on inside of their marketing if they’re using an active campaign. OK. So if you found this episode valuable, now was the time that I invite my new listeners. Is your first your first episode right? You have completed the first step, second step. Subscribe those of you who are listeners and I subscribe time for you to subscribe as well.

Chris Davis: [00:42:41] You can do so again, Apple podcast, Google podcasts, wherever you get your podcast, where they’re your five star rating. And reviews are appreciated in advance. Here at Automation Bridges, we’re dedicated to training digital marketing professionals of all capacities to become automation service providers for their industry, for their industry, because small businesses and enterprises, they need it. They need it. They’re being teased right now with a lot of talk and there’s a lot of fluff from digital marketers saying things that they don’t know how to do fully, which is automating building automated systems for marketing and sales. All right. So that is what small businesses need. And that’s what we’re preparing. That’s what we’re creating. That’s what we’re training. We have an entire program that is structured to walk you step by step. It equip you with everything you need to provide the service of automation in the marketplace with excellence. So if that’s you and you want to say, you know what, I’m I’m getting serious about my business, about my career in automation, I need you to go to automationbridge.com/ASP and take the next steps to talk to someone on my team or myself to assess if you’d be a good fit for any of our current program offerings, most specifically our automation service provider program. We’re also accepting guests like today’s on the podcast. OK, so if you know a savvy SAS founder like Sebastian with some great software that you’ve been using and you just absolutely love it, right? Marketing or sales software. We love to to discuss their to their software and their journey. Right. And if you’re a marketing automation consultant and you’re experiencing success with your clients that you like to share with the collective audience, how are you measuring how how are you how have you been doing dashboards? How has that benefited you? Right.

Chris Davis: [00:44:37] You have a story to tell. We have an audience of consultants that are looking for as much insight as possible on what to expect and what success looks like. So if you’re that SaaS founder, that marketing automation consultant that would like to come on to the podcast, go to automationbridge.com/guest OK, the time to take action is now everybody. There are small businesses. Here’s the problem. Small businesses are taking action faster than these marketing professionals are taking action to equip themselves to match their needs from the action that the small businesses are taking. It’s just what it is. And the level of the quality level of the service of automation is being provided right now. We collectively should be ashamed of ourselves, but not to harp on that. I’m saying that to say there’s a better way, the need is great, there is a better way. I’m seeing it with my own eyes and I’ve been serving with serving it with my own hands for years. And I’m just inviting you to be part of the solution, OK? You are the one who can provide an excellent level of service. I’m here to help go to automationbridge.com/ASP and take the next steps. All of the show notes and podcasts are accessible at AutomationBridge.com/podcast. You can subscribe there and listen to all the other episodes at your leisure. So until next time I see you online, automate responsibly, my friends.

ASG 077 – Automation and Analytics with Authenticity feat. Sabastian Earth of Wild Audience

Chris Davis: [00:00:00] You’re listening to the All Systems Go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot, learn how to deploy automated marketing and sales systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of Automation Bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis: [00:00:32] Welcome to the All Systems Go podcast. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis, the founder and chief automation officer of Automation Bridge the place online to learn about small business, marketing and sales automation, where we focus on turning digital marketing professionals in and out of into automation service providers. And if you’d like to become an automation service provider or find out more, please visit AutomationBridge.com/Asp. In this episode, we get to discuss a new way of tracking the performance of your marketing active campaign with Sebastian Earth, who is the founder of Wild Audience and the creator of a plethora of wild products, from wild audience to wild mail to now wild metrics that allowed that is an API based approach to providing you with all of the metrics that you need to make intelligent decisions as an active campaign user. And I can’t stress enough how much fun it was recording this podcast, not just because the software is great, but the story and just the full circle nature of how I initially got connected with Sebastian and how we got reconnected. It’s an amazing story of just value on both of our ends. We’re both adding value in a and different capacities to the same audience. Right in different areas, and that audience ends up bringing us back in together.

Chris Davis: [00:02:08] So it’s always great when things like that happen and it’s always great to learn about new technology and tools that can help you and your marketing. All right. So before we jump into it, if you’re new to the podcast, make sure you listen to this episode in its entirety and then subscribe. I have an invitation at the end to let you know when is the time to do that. If you can’t wait, go ahead. You and anybody else who has been listening and not subscribe, you can go to Apple podcast, Google podcasts, even on YouTube, you can subscribe. So while you’re at it, since we’re here, leave a five star rating and review. It will be greatly appreciated if you are struggling in any capacity trying to figure out where to leave a review in your podcast app, we have you covered. Go to AutomationBridge.com/review and we’ll do all of the heavy lifting for you. All right. So with that out the way, let’s jump right into today’s episode. Bastian, welcome to the podcast, man, glad to have you on. Glad to reconnect and have you on. How are you doing, man? Thanks, Chris.

Sabastian Earth: [00:03:15] Good man.

Chris Davis: [00:03:17] Looking forward to this. Yes, yes, you know, our first time connecting was when I was running the the ActiveCampaign podcast and that’s right. And we got reconnected through one of my students that’s using your platform, which I can’t wait to dive into. And I have to say this. You were one of the most enjoyable guests on the active campaign podcast when I recorded it. Because of your understanding of marketing and your unique approach to it. Right. Your relationship approach, which we’ll get into that as well. Right. So to see, man, the evolution of where you’re at today, I just I think that it’s exemplary of anybody in the space that is dedicated to continual growth and adding extreme value, especially when the market exposes a hole or a hole is exposed in the market for. So anyway, that’s that’s a little bit of foreshadowing of what we’ll cover. Give my audience a understanding of you, your background and your business.

Sabastian Earth: [00:04:22] Yeah, sounds good. I remember the chat we had at the active campaign. It was a good one. Yeah. Talking about relationship fun and like best marketing. Yeah. Men like still the same, you know. So work while audience still running the show here. We still do relationship finance and we really like focus on doing marketing that it’s respectful, hence the term respect, respect based marketing. And the only difference is that like when we did the part because we have active campaign, which was probably like a year or so

Chris Davis: [00:04:54] Ago, as probably going to have that man like two and a half times been flying

Sabastian Earth: [00:04:58] Two and a half. Oh, wow. Oh, man. So when we did that, so at that time we were helping UPS companies, online businesses built relationships. So we had courses and consulting services and whatnot. And while working with all these different types of businesses, we really tapped into the into a huge problem. And that was analytics like really figuring out, OK, where to put the budget. Is Facebook better or Instagram better or outreach or what is it. Right. And so we try to solve that with all kinds of different Google sheets and extolls and formulas and whatnot. And in the end, we we we decided to solve it ourselves. And so now we are a company we built we are in the process of building a social product called Wild Metrics, which is API based marketing analytics. And that basically helps you understand where you lead and your customers come from and what makes them convert. Right. And the magic sauce, so to say, is API based marketing analytics. And what this means is what we can talk about.

Chris Davis: [00:06:03] Yeah, yeah. That’s that’s that’s so good. And where respect based marketing was a term that was new to me when I when I had initially met you and I fell in love with the idea immediately. Then you started talking about relationship funds. Has this always been an approach that you’ve taken just in business or did it start before marketing? Like where? What was the inception of that that approach?

Sabastian Earth: [00:06:30] That’s such a good question. You know, like I’m one of these people. Like, for me, being authentic is something I really, really value and admire in people. And it’s very important to myself. And I’ve always been one of these people who really follows one’s own journey and really. Appreciates and respects the journey of learning and then learning more about yourself. So I spent many years being by myself leaving home, traveling, exposing myself to different types of situation and getting closer and closer to who I am and meeting myself. So this authentic approach or like. Yeah, seeing life. Through your own eyes is always something that I really admire, so obviously now when I I’ve always been interested in marketing and startups, and so when it came to like doing funnels and automations, I mean, there was no other choice for myself doing it in a way that it actually makes sense to me. And that was always like building relationships and being yourself. I think being yourself is such a powerful thing to be or to do. But it’s also difficult, especially for many people. Or if you talk now about marketing. Right. You see this. I know certain campaigns out there and then you’re like, oh, I got to do the same, I guess. And I basically follow copy something. And you don’t really ask yourself, like, is this me? Right. You know, or does this speak to my audience actually. Right. Yeah. And so and if we think about what marketing is right. What is marketing, it’s it’s it’s a relationship between humans. Right. If you sell if you have a company, if you have a software product or service that your product, whatever you sell. Right. In the end, it’s a thing between two people. You know, it’s business, it’s relationship between people. That’s what business is. And so if we design a journey, if we do marketing, that actually establishes relationships easier. Yeah. Then that’s something I sign up for.

Chris Davis: [00:08:47] Yeah, I love it, man. It’s so easy and it is so easy to get influenced by the crowd and the leaders. And in doing that it gets even easier to lose yourself. Right. And by default feel inauthentic. And this is where the imposter syndrome comes in and people feel it, they feel when they’re not being authentic. So to to build a business around it. It’s one of the reasons why we have the tagline out of automate your business the right way. So, you know, the right way is all about, hey, look, let’s break away from what everybody else is saying do and let’s do it. It may take longer, right? It may be a little harder, you know, may take a few more hours, but we do it the right way. In the beginning. We don’t have to revisit it. It stays and works for you in an ongoing fashion. So there’s when we when we talk about what. Sure. What your offer is now or you need the product that you’re creating in the industry that you’re serving, the foundation really is in the understanding, the importance of analytics. So I wanted to give you the floor here and just talk about the role, the importance in the role that analytics plays in marketing automation, because there’s so much I would say there’s so much lust around like building automations and they need to be built. Yes, but the analytics is even more important than what you build. What what would you say is the the importance of analytics in the role that it plays in marketing automation?

Sabastian Earth: [00:10:35] Yeah, so I think what’s important is to not overcomplicate things. So if we think about analytics, what’s the first tool that comes to our mind? It’s probably Google Analytics, right. And mostly all the listeners right now. Probably most of you guys have it installed to install the pick. So it starts to track stuff. You can Google Analytics, you see some visitors and whatnot. Right. And but now let’s ask ourselves, like, how often do we actually look into Google Analytics or what type of questions or what type of responses do we get to our questions from Google Analytics? So most people I talk to the clients when I did the customer research before we built what metrics? It’s like, yeah, I do have Google analytics, but I have no idea what to look for or where to look for it. So I use it, Max, once a month. Right. And that’s and then basically it’s checked like how many visitors do I have on my website and where do they come from? Maybe from mobile. From desktop, but that’s where it ends. Some people, they go a step further and they they start to use an Excel sheet or a Google sheet and they start to pull data from different places. And so if you have an active campaign account, maybe half a stripe or PayPal account, maybe you have some website visitors from Google Analytics, maybe use some Facebook ads. So maybe some people should go to all these different tools, grab the data and then put it into Google sheets or Excel.

Sabastian Earth: [00:12:12] I know you do that. Yes, I do that myself. Right. So that’s what some people do. And that’s and that’s I would say is what gets us the closest right now. Yeah. And I’m talking about small to medium sized businesses. I’m not talking about huge enterprises who have their teams had to have infrastructure developers to have data scientists, data analysts, they have data warehouses and all these type of different things to have huge budgets. That’s a different story I’m not talking about, though. We’re talking about the smaller medium sized businesses here. We don’t have a beta team. We are the founder. And maybe there’s someone else or two people who work in the marketing team and that’s all we have. And so we cannot afford this huge marketing team leader teams and whatnot. Right. So what do we do? Right. As I said, the best option is Google Sheets. But the problem there is that. First of all, it’s so manual and it’s so manual, like we spend every Monday, 90 minutes just going to different tools and trying to figure out like grabbing the data or copy paste. Copy paste. Right. It’s so annoying. We did it over years for multiple clients. You know how much that how much time that is and how annoying that is. And so that’s one aspect to it. But then the other importances and that brings me back to how I started this is like.

Sabastian Earth: [00:13:41] Keeping it simple, and so, for example, our Google sheet used to be huge, I don’t know, like 100 rows and we had all these different data points and it’s just a pain in the ass to maintain to pull the data. And then it was not accurate. You know, that’s usually the experience. So when I talk about data and analytics, what I’m trying to describe here, that’s usually the frustration of feelings to what people bring to the table when they when they do analytics. So what many people do, especially if you are less technical. Right. I look into my bank account, how much money is there? How much money is coming in, how much money is going out? And I’m good to go up. And that’s pretty good. I would say that’s pretty good. So. So to answer your question, so I was trying to pull in a little a few aspects of different people, different like how people perceive and experience data, and it’s there, I wouldn’t say there’s a one. There’s not a single answer to it. Everyone has their own little story when it comes to data. But I would say for me, my story is that in the end, I want to be able to have an overview like I’m the CEO, I’m the founder. I want to have a good overview of what’s going in, what’s getting out of mind.

Sabastian Earth: [00:14:53] And I also want to know what’s working, what’s not working. Should I do Facebook or should I do podcasts, interviews or content? Right. And then maybe on a third level. Right. And that’s not for everyone, but for the the maybe the big spenders who have hired Facebook ads, budgets and whatnot. They want to go into the funnel I had inside my funnel. Right. Where are the loops? Where are the holes? Where people leaking. And there are different metrics you can look at in order to tweak and optimize your funnel. So these are three levels. And so far it hasn’t been a tool that allows you to click, connect, connect, connect, integrate all the tools you use as a marketer from top of the funnel. Middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel. I’m talking here. Facebook ads, Google ads. I’m talking here. Active campaign HubSpot. I’m talking here. Strib, people, I’m talking here. Webinar jam ever webinar cleanly type forum. Right. So all the tools we use as a marketer to build funnels and convert leads into customers. I want to keep connec, connect, connect, get all the data from these tools and then just see data. I don’t want to do any ask you out. I don’t want to do any like formulas. I don’t want to set things up or clean data. I just wanted to work out of the box. Right. And that’s what what metric is. Yeah.

Chris Davis: [00:16:09] You bring up the the word performance when you were talking about the importance. And I think it all I think that is safe to say across all businesses. You need the data in the analytics to understand the performance of your company. Right. Like at a base level. And I know that some companies don’t even do this. Some small enterprises know what’s coming in and know what’s going out. And just know if you’re red or black every month, like at a bare minimum, or at least be tracking that. But when things are working, you don’t want to just say, hey, it’s working, let’s turn a blind eye to keep up whatever you’re doing. The word repeatable comes to mind for me when I think of analytics is I don’t I don’t want to know just what’s working. I want to know how it’s working. Right. And then lastly, I want to know why, you know, like I keep asking these questions as a marketer that only data can answer it. Nobody else can answer bastian. Like, I can’t go and hire somebody and say, hey, this is happening.

Chris Davis: [00:17:16] Why? The data is the only one that knows. And it is so instrumental to so marketing automation, because while a lot of people focus on automating process and removing themselves, they also lose sight. Sometimes that automation also automates the process of gathering data. Right. Like it’s all coming in. But that brings us to the next topic I’d like to discuss. Bastion, we’re using marketing automation platforms. OK. The data is being acquired in these platforms in an automated fashion. Why is it so hard? Why is it so hard for those platforms to display what your tool does? And this is not a this is not a question for you, because that’s really a question for them. In fact, let me let me take a step back, because I let me let me not get ahead of myself. And I felt a little frustration kicking in. So let me come down. But talk about how you how you identified that need in the space as you were serving your clients and why you chose to chose to solve it with with wild with wild metrics.

Sabastian Earth: [00:18:42] Yeah, that’s a good one. So, I mean, to answer to answer this, I would say we are our first customer. Right. So we had this problem first and foremost ourselves. And I had I paid a team member to do analytics and dashboards every week. And and in the end, we got some insights, but we knew the data was wrong, because when you do these type of things or it is Google Sheet type of analysis, the problem there is that you don’t have cohorts, meaning that the data points like leads and trials and customers write all leads and webinars and customers or leads and sales calls and customers. These three events, they’re not connected with each other in the specific time period. If you explore data from active campaign and whatnot and put it into a Google sheet. So we knew that this is not connected and it’s not inaccurate. So we had that experience ourself. And then on top of that, we were working with clients and there we experienced the same exact thing. And so we tried a lot of different tools. So I have a list and our notion of manual, which basically I think let me check, but I think it’s almost 74 different tools, which I literally sign up for and trial.

Sabastian Earth: [00:20:14] And some of them even had sales calls and demos, you know, from simple like website tracking to link based tracking to UTM is tracking to pixel based tracking data warehouses and whatnot. So I tried a bunch of them and in the end I was like, man, like, this is not. What I’m needing, and this is not what’s what’s doing the job, because in the end, I still had to put in manually the variables and all the ads and all the links and everything was like so much work. You know, if you think about wicked reports and you have to do everything so much set up and it’s so expensive, everything. So that was the third part, right. So the first part was we had the same we had that problem. Then the clients had the same problem. Then I tried to solve it with different types of tools out there, fail to solve it. And then at some point we’re like, all right, let’s build it right. And I had this idea for to solve this problem maybe for a year and talk to people. And I was like, should I do it? I mean, building a new sauce company is like a ten year journey. Do I really want to do this now? And I already had a pretty good business.

Sabastian Earth: [00:21:24] Right. We’re all making good money and everything was awesome. And and and then in November 2019, we had our Q4, Q1 twenty twenty retreat, so in Q4 of twenty nineteen. And that’s where the team that’s where we made the decision to you know. Let’s. Renounce consulting, let’s stop it in the next quarter and let’s turn this whole company into a sauce company. Let’s pivot. That’s why we invested all the money we made as a consulting business and put it into hiring developers. And basically, you know, if you turn off one product and then build a new product, it’s not like, you know, there’s of this phase in between where there’s no money coming in to build this new product, but you don’t have any money coming in from the product. So that’s this face. And so we that was that was a very conscious decision and say, OK, why are we going to invest all that money we made into a new thing, into a new chapter. So that’s kind of like was the whole thing. And but now looking back to it, like almost a year maybe. Yeah, eight months, it was definitely the right decision. And we have been loving and enjoying this process very much indeed.

Chris Davis: [00:22:37] Yeah, I’m you see a theme for those listening who have been listening to to the podcast for a while. I’ve had various CEOs on here and founders and they the theme is starting, you know, scratching your own itch. Right. And and sometimes there is a place where you can go to the market with an idea validated and grow and listen to the market and really, really have success. But a lot of times we identify the holes by just providing an excellent service. Right. So I tell people a lot. It’s one of the founding or I should say guiding principles that I tell people when they’re trying to figure out what should I do? Well, who should I serve this? Find somebody something and just do it. Excellent, right. Because in doing it at a level, nobody else’s things are going to start to be apparent beyond the general knowledge. Right. The basic approach, when you elevate into excellence, you start to see like, wait a minute, there really is no to. I am trying to provide excellent metrics for my clients so I can make excellent decisions. And when I look at the landscape, there’s 70 plus tools that I’ve signed up for. I’ve logged into I’ve tried to use because I need this and it just doesn’t satisfy. So to see that journeyman, it’s as it’s always good for me.

Chris Davis: [00:24:04] It’s reaffirming the power of excellence. And I’ll say this. I think it has a one to one tie into the authenticity piece. I think that you understand in order to be authentic, in order to to really serve you the best, I have to know what’s working right. I’m not going to fake like I know something that I don’t I’m not going to tell you what somebody else said that I saw in a Facebook ad or some webinar I attended. No, this is real. And I think that. Let me. Let me ease up off of the software providers, right, because none of them really get this right. Absolutely none of them. I think HubSpot is the closest, but you have all of this data and for whatever reason, displaying it in a way that’s visual for the end users to easily understand the performance of their marketing still seems to elude all of them, which is why you’ve got 70 plus solutions, you know, out there. So one of the things that I’m really excited about, wild metrics, is that you take to use your platform, Bashan, and I know this was intentional. I’m just saying it for our audience. You take the same approach someone would use using active campaign. Like I would go and look at a tag and see how many contacts have that tag, that same approach you can use.

Chris Davis: [00:25:30] And while metrics to start to analyze the performance of your funnel from the top, middle and bottom of the funnel, you could say, hey, top of the funnel, these are the tags or the tag that’s at the top of the funnel. And while metrics do the API, which, by the way, everybody, if you if you didn’t get excited when Bastian said API, it is the feature of integration of all sorts. We know the pixel is dying. What I think Chrome and Safari are the first ones that are killing the pixel. So you’re going to want when you hear API, when somebody says API, you should get excited because that’s a direct connection. The data is being passed in a much more stable and secure manner. So you have this API that’s pulling the data from from active campaigning so I can go in and say, hey, wow, while metrics, the top of my funnel is this tag for my live magnet and you just automatically populate. How many contacts have that tag? Then I say, hey, middle funnel. It’s a webinar and it’s this tag. Oh, and actually I’ve got two webinar. So it’s both of these tags and you’re pulling those numbers

Sabastian Earth: [00:26:39] Or you get an automation, you add an automation with multiple emails. Just added them. They’re right. It tracks the whole journey. Yeah.

Chris Davis: [00:26:44] So so what I like about it in concert with what you said, with some other platforms where it was like so difficult to get started and set up. I’ve worked with some of these enterprise analytics and they they have to install an entire data layer there like it is a process getting enterprise level type metrics going. So to have a tool that you don’t really have to learn anything new, you have to familiarize yourself. OK, log into to metrics, click this button on the left, basic stuff. But I can do the same thing that I’m already doing. I can select the tag. Right. I could

Sabastian Earth: [00:27:21] Do. And you know exactly there and like that’s what I really disliked. Always was like the setup stuff. Yeah, right. I mean, if you most always require you to set a pixel, right. That in itself can be difficult or not, depending if you depending on if you know how to use certain plugins and WordPress or the Google tag manager, that can be OK. But that in itself is already I feel like a hurdle for many people. And then only it only checks data from the moment on when you have the pics to install to all the previous data is lost. Yeah. So if you have a business for three years and then you’re four, you decide, OK, now I have the time in the budget and the energy and the focus to start on analytics. The first three years of lost. Right. So while metrics if you have an API, if you have API based marketing analytics or API based on politics in general, when you connect to the tools, you not only get real time leader, you get all the historical data from all the years right. So you connect directly from an account and starts to collect all the real time stuff, all the events that’s happening in real time. But if you have an active pinna constant five years, all the data from these five years boom is inside of what metrics? And it’s just because one click right, the same with Strib, PayPal, ever webinar or whatnot, Facebook ads and whatnot. Right. So that’s I that’s something I really want to it’s like I don’t want to like have a script at JavaScript Pixel to install. I don’t want to like revamp my whole Facebook account by putting variables everywhere. I don’t want to open up each email my automation’s and put some UTM things or unique variables. I don’t want to have this setup stuff. Yeah, I just want it to work out of the box. Right. And that’s so important.

Chris Davis: [00:29:07] And and really up until this point, we’ve really talked about contact performance. Right. Like how context flow through. But the other side is you integrate with Stripe and do some automation, automated reconciliation, I’ll call it, you know, where you can see based on that contact, what or not even the contact I just realized, Bashan, even the tag, you can start to see the the monetary value of a tag and or a. Contact, right, because you integrate directly with Stripe and pull all of that information in.

Sabastian Earth: [00:29:44] As well as Automation’s and email’s, right, and then so not only on a single data point type of level, you can also combine the data points, right? So you can say I want to see revenue per let’s say TICC or contact, but I can combine them. I want to see first the first touch point, let’s say, is attacked. The second one is an automation in that automation of multiple email data points. Yeah. And and then you have a purchase and then you connect all of them. You have a journey. Right. And then you see like a funnel top and bottom what the conversion rates are and where people connect. Convert is the email that converts. This is the webinars of the trial. What is responsible for the conversion rate? And I think that’s a really powerful if you can allow people to use the data they already have there and their business and then just see what’s actually working, what’s not.

Chris Davis: [00:30:36] I love it, man. And if we bring it back, if we go full circle here and then end where we began with speaking about relationship funnels, I hope it’s apparent to our listeners now how you can just create that deeper relationship, you know, through automated marketing with your audience when you have a a level of ease in visually understanding or I should say being able to easily see how contacts are flowing through your funnel and how it’s performing. Right now, you we’re eliminating a lot of questions. Hey, what what kind of email should I send? What what should I what should I say next? Like, the data is is being delivered to you in a way that’s so easy that you can just look and say, oh, wow, our middle of the funnel is performing really well. Let’s let’s just get more people to get to the middle of the funnel because our conversion rate to the bottom is great. Right. Like, it starts to remove some complexity and not just complexity and marketing itself, but complexity in marketing to people where they’re at, you know, what they want to do or need to do. And that’s

Sabastian Earth: [00:31:52] Right. And who they are, like like for me, what I love is like. So first of all, like you, I’m I run a company on the phone of a company. It’s something I put a lot of sweat and hard and passionate energy into it. I care about my company and I care about my team. I care about the products we invest in and build. I care about our customers. Right. And the people who engage with us, our audience and the people on our email list and the people who watch our YouTube videos, the people who listen to a podcast. I care about this. Right. And I want to see them. I want to connect with these people. Right. But like. For me, I was always like, OK, we’re having, like, let’s say, an email list of 10K. We have a couple of hundred people customers, we have a bunch of automation’s, but I couldn’t touch it and feel it. So what I did is I set up slack. I set up slack. We’re safe here and connected all the tools, the tool we’ve saved here. And it’s like, so if someone clicks an email, I get a notification slack, someone opens an email. This happens if someone visits a sales page. I get I see life happening in the business and I see so and so. Now we have a channel which is instead of slack, which shows all the lifeblood, the life of the business happening right here.

Sabastian Earth: [00:33:08] And that’s the same what we want to do now. And metrics like I want to be able to we don’t have that feature yet. We’re building it. It’s like when you open up the dashboard of what metrics in the morning you have your coffee, you see your business, it’s alive, and you see the data stream, you see all the things that are coming in, you know, like in a console, like when you have, like, this TV type of console thing and these hackers whatnot. And like all the datastream. Yeah, yeah. Imagine this like being the blood of your business. Right. Cos being scheduled demos trials opens clicks website visitors customers leads different things. Right. Subscribers and it’s all coming together and you see your business and and that’s also what theater is for me. It’s not only to make decisions and have a bigger overview or a smaller overview about specific parts of the business. I also want to see the people. I want to see things that happen in my business. And that’s also what we want to do with what metrics like bring your business like show the life of your business, you know, through the data that our business has, because there is a lot.

Chris Davis: [00:34:10] Yeah, yeah. And and I’m excited to announce that by the time our listeners get this podcast in their hands, the I think the next version is that the beta is is a debate that will be available.

Sabastian Earth: [00:34:27] I can’t it’s going to talk about it. It’s going to be this. It’s going to be the second version of our alpha version. Right. So it’s going to be zero domain 2.0. Yes, that’s so it’s it’s it’s the alpha version, but with a sleek design, like with the core functionality. And now we we’re basically working in cycles and sprints and each cycle has three sprints and each sprints every two weeks. There’s new things happening and new features and so on. So, yeah, lots of cool things in the pipe. And I’m so excited to build all of this. And the feedback has been amazing. Chris, it’s I mean, I’ve showed it to you and a bunch of people and yeah, we’re having a bunch of founding customers and it’s just such a fun project to work on if you get that that excitement from people. Yeah. So, yeah, let’s see how it leads us this year.

Chris Davis: [00:35:18] I’ll say this. This is not a solicited statement bastian. This is not paying me for any of this, but. Gave me a thorough we’ve, I walked through it a couple of times now, thorough walk through, and I had been to a point with analytics finding a tool for analytics where I just really gave up and was just like, you know what, spreadsheets are the best way. You know, I’m familiar with it. I’ll do some Google search. And if I need to create a specific formula to populate a, you know, a chart that I need, I just needed to see the data that bad. So for years, man, I can’t recall the last time I’ve actively searched for, like a dashboard tool or anything like that. So when you demo while metrics, I was nervously in apprehensively excited. Right. Because just like, wait a minute, this looks like everything that I was trying to do before, but it can’t be because, like, I didn’t want to get myself too excited and now, man, to have gone through it a little more thorough with you and have a second sight at this, see the next alpha and see the beta coming up. I’m like, wait a minute, this is real.

Chris Davis: [00:36:34] This is the real deal. Right. So I am telling you, everybody who is listening, that is a digital marketing professional, a data analyst, anybody responsible for marketing the performance of marketing and improving marketing, you owe it to yourself to check it in, especially if you’re an active campaign user. You owe it to yourself to check out this platform because it truly is going to make your life easier when it comes to data collection. And we need as many people like myself who are going to use it the right way so that we can have a voice to really help guide and create the best analytics platform for marketers right now. So unsolicited. But I am passionate about this because this has been a huge hole, man, huge hole. And I love how the ease of approach in the UI of your platform and the fact that it goes to direct API man, I just you guys are doing it all the right way. So if people want to find out more about wild metrics, wild audience, wild, wild, anything, where should they go bastian? And if you have like a wait list or anything, feel free to share that as well.

Sabastian Earth: [00:37:50] Amazing. Chris. Yeah. People should go to, I think, two places pretty much. First of all, I think if you go to WildAudience.com, which is on websites and then the menu on the top, it says products and there you will find wild metrics. And there’s a video which you can watch. You can sign up for it, try it. You can schedule a call. Right. And so that’s will be what metrics? The second thing I would say would be for people to check out our podcast. So that’s that will be the wild audience FM podcast. And that’s it’s literally where we talk about these type of things. Yes. But actually, we not only talk about marketing and business, I want to now make it a focus form for myself to talk about things that I’m passionate, passionate about. Right. So, for example, things like psychedelics or Tantra. Right. Or some sort of spirituality, but always in a context of how this could help someone who is an entrepreneur or creator or founder, because there’s so much to business. And so I want to shine a little bit. I want to shine some light to different parts of of what it means to be an entrepreneur and a creator and the founder. So these are two places while audience FM on Spotify are everywhere or just wildaudience.com and and searching for what metrics under the product’s great.

Chris Davis: [00:39:15] Great. Well, I can’t agree more man. Just like when someone goes to a regular job, they bring their whole self. You know, everything outside of the job comes in. They say, check your ego. This we’re human beings man. And we are not simplified to just do this. Just do that. If you’re an entrepreneur, best believe there are other aspects and areas of your life that are playing in. How you do anything is how you do everything. So, yeah, man, I think that’s great, man, that that you’re giving a more comprehensive view of entrepreneurship. And again, tying it all in life is the greatest teacher. Man, I learned so much I can watch my kids jumping on a trampoline and get a marketing lesson from it, just like, yeah, maybe before you try a flip you should just jump first. That’s the MVP like.

Chris Davis: [00:40:05] All right.

Chris Davis: [00:40:07] So life is always instructing, is just waiting for the student to be ready to to learn. So, Bastian, man, thank you for coming on the podcast, man. This was this was beyond great to to reconnect. Really, really, really happy for you, man. And what you’re doing with with wild metrics and all the success that. You’ve had and will have man is greatly deserved, man, and I’m excited to be a part of it, man, and I’m looking forward to the ride going forward.

Sabastian Earth: [00:40:35] Thanks so much, Chris, I really appreciate the support and your input and the feedback and all the calls we had. I learned a lot from you, so thanks so much for the conversation and the chat.

Chris Davis: [00:40:44] Yes, yes. Absolutely. No problem, man. And I’ll see you online.

Sabastian Earth: [00:40:49] Peace out.

Chris Davis: [00:40:51] Thank you for listening to this episode of the All Systems Go podcast. Did you not enjoy not just learning about this stuff? I knew you would. I knew you would. And and I hope you got googly eyed and a little precipitation of of the mouth when we talked about some of the fun of visualization options that are available in wild metrics. And hopefully, by the time that this podcast has launched, it either is available or is approaching availability. I can’t stress enough. These founders are great. Are they not? Every founder that we talked to the story and their motor and their driver, its sales, you just as much as the software itself. So let me know. I don’t know. Is it helpful for you all to know about the founders behind this software as well as the software? But if if you have been struggling with spreadsheets. I don’t think you I don’t think you can afford to ignore this, so when I ask who needs to hear this, who is that marketer that is savvy with spreadsheets? Because I tell you, I’m savvy with spreadsheets and I still don’t want to do them. So there’s a good chance they’re doing it by necessity, not by choice. And you may be able to free them up of such modes of operation and get more visualization easier into what’s going on inside of their marketing if they’re using an active campaign. OK. So if you found this episode valuable, now was the time that I invite my new listeners. Is your first your first episode right? You have completed the first step, second step. Subscribe those of you who are listeners and I subscribe time for you to subscribe as well.

Chris Davis: [00:42:41] You can do so again, Apple podcast, Google podcasts, wherever you get your podcast, where they’re your five star rating. And reviews are appreciated in advance. Here at Automation Bridges, we’re dedicated to training digital marketing professionals of all capacities to become automation service providers for their industry, for their industry, because small businesses and enterprises, they need it. They need it. They’re being teased right now with a lot of talk and there’s a lot of fluff from digital marketers saying things that they don’t know how to do fully, which is automating building automated systems for marketing and sales. All right. So that is what small businesses need. And that’s what we’re preparing. That’s what we’re creating. That’s what we’re training. We have an entire program that is structured to walk you step by step. It equip you with everything you need to provide the service of automation in the marketplace with excellence. So if that’s you and you want to say, you know what, I’m I’m getting serious about my business, about my career in automation, I need you to go to automationbridge.com/ASP and take the next steps to talk to someone on my team or myself to assess if you’d be a good fit for any of our current program offerings, most specifically our automation service provider program. We’re also accepting guests like today’s on the podcast. OK, so if you know a savvy SAS founder like Sebastian with some great software that you’ve been using and you just absolutely love it, right? Marketing or sales software. We love to to discuss their to their software and their journey. Right. And if you’re a marketing automation consultant and you’re experiencing success with your clients that you like to share with the collective audience, how are you measuring how how are you how have you been doing dashboards? How has that benefited you? Right.

Chris Davis: [00:44:37] You have a story to tell. We have an audience of consultants that are looking for as much insight as possible on what to expect and what success looks like. So if you’re that SaaS founder, that marketing automation consultant that would like to come on to the podcast, go to automationbridge.com/guest OK, the time to take action is now everybody. There are small businesses. Here’s the problem. Small businesses are taking action faster than these marketing professionals are taking action to equip themselves to match their needs from the action that the small businesses are taking. It’s just what it is. And the level of the quality level of the service of automation is being provided right now. We collectively should be ashamed of ourselves, but not to harp on that. I’m saying that to say there’s a better way, the need is great, there is a better way. I’m seeing it with my own eyes and I’ve been serving with serving it with my own hands for years. And I’m just inviting you to be part of the solution, OK? You are the one who can provide an excellent level of service. I’m here to help go to automationbridge.com/ASP and take the next steps. All of the show notes and podcasts are accessible at AutomationBridge.com/podcast. You can subscribe there and listen to all the other episodes at your leisure. So until next time I see you online, automate responsibly, my friends.