Learn about leveraging Google Tag Manager, Analytics, and Ads for ecommerce and WordPress LMS websites with Shopify store scaling expert Brad Redding in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. Brad is from a company called Elevar, which is a tracking software that helps people track conversions across platforms like Facebook to your website.
In this episode Brad shares some key tips he’s learned and how they can apply to online course creators looking to navigate the world of advanced analytics tools. Google Tag Manager is the tool Brad recommends getting started with, as it’s the conduit to implement other pieces like Google Ads, conversion tracking, remarketing tags, Google Optimize, Google Analytics, GA4, any of the other marketing tags.
In the CRM (or email list tool) space, the term tag is used to segment your audience. So in the LMS use case, if a student enrolls in a course, they’d get a tag in your email list tool letting you know they’ve enrolled in case you want to send out offers to enrolled users. Or you could decide to not send a specific marketing email to users who are already enrolled.
Google Analytics is a platform that allows you to look at page views, whereas Google Tag Manager offers a bit more depth by showing what videos they interact with, if they submit a form, etc. It also allows you to see conversions based on segments. So if you want to see the conversion rate of people who watched the video, you can see that segment. That’s a great way to see what tools are useful to visitors and track conversions across your site.
To learn more about Brad and the great work he and his team are up to, head to GetElevar.com. Their product is focused more on Shopify brands rather than WordPress, but it is a great example of conversion-based priorities in the online business space. They also have a blog with some helpful resources on conversion optimization.
And at LifterLMS.com you can learn more about new developments and how you can use LifterLMS to build online courses and membership sites. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. If you like this episode of LMScast, you can browse more episodes here. Thank you for joining us!
Episode Transcript
Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest, Brad Redding from Elevar. That’s at getelvar.com. Welcome to the show, Brad.
Brad Redding: Thanks, Chris. Appreciate you inviting me on.
Chris Badgett: Yeah, I’ve been looking forward and wanting to do this conversation for over a year because of your experience with Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager. Just at the highest level if we look at the Google universe, if we look at Google Ads, Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, and Google Optimize, how do these all fit together for somebody who has an e-commerce store or is selling something from their website?
Brad Redding: How long do we have for this?
Chris Badgett: Give us a simple version first. People are like, yeah, you know what, I want to be scientific. I need to track. I need to run experiments, maybe, I want to pay for traffic and we need to see what’s working and what’s not working. How does one start in Google?
Brad Redding: Yeah. A loaded question and there’s different variations, different answers to that. I would say this is what we consider best practice, the foundation in terms of getting started in the world of Google is Google Tag Manager. Google Tag Manager is essentially the conduit to implement Google AdWords, conversion tracking, Google Ads, remarketing tags, Google Optimize, Google Analytics, GA4, any of the other marketing tags. And then there’s other terms that, maybe more technical folks that are watching this, they might hear G tag, like you have the average G tag that GS and you need to have consent mode and all these other things. Those all start with Google Tag Manager. So if you have Google Tag Manager implemented on the site, it makes that process easy to get all these other tools and services that you mentioned up and running quickly.
Chris Badgett: And for somebody who’s coming more from a marketing background and has been using tags in a CRM to segment people and trigger campaigns and things like that, how is Google Tag different from a CRM tag?
Brad Redding: Yeah, the nomenclature is why we’re in business because it’s very confusing. And by nomenclature, let’s even take a Google Tag Manager. Inside of Google Tag Manager, there are tags. And the tags that exist in Google Tag Manager that’s essentially the Facebook pixel, the Google conversion tracking, the email CRM. So whether it’s Klaviyo, Drip, MailChimp, et cetera, they all have tracking, like a tracking script that they’re going to say, hey, install the tracking script on our site. That is implemented through a tag in Google Tag Manager.
And there’s so many examples of where a nomenclature can trip people up inside a Google Tag Manager because if you look at the three, let’s just take three big marketing providers out there. You have the Facebook pixel, you have the ad Google Ads tag, and you have Twitter event tracking. So if you want to set up Twitter, three different names, one calls it a pixel, one calls it a tag, one that calls it an event. They’re basically all the same thing. It’s all tracking scripts that you can implement through Google Tag Manager. So a tag in Google Tag Manager, that’s essentially the conduit to actually get that tracking script or the pixel running on the site. Again, you can compare that to your tagging that you’re doing, which has more filtering inside the CRM.
Chris Badgett: So Google Tag Manager, if we’re tracking events or the Twitter where we’re paying, we’re doing Twitter ads and we can tell that this traffic that we paid for from Twitter is converting on our site. Google Tag Manager is the bridge for that, right?
Brad Redding: Yes. Yep. Yeah. If you don’t have the tracking implemented that Twitter provides, you’ll be spending money but you won’t be able to get your metrics like cost per landing page, cost per ad, add to cart, cost per conversion, or form submission, et cetera.
Chris Badgett: Is Google Tag Manager something that we just kind of set it, forget it, or do we have to configure it for all those different things? How much setup is involved?
Brad Redding: It’s not a set and forget it. That’s certainly not the case for Tag Manager. It depends on how active you are and a couple of different verticals of your business. If you are actively, or companies, folks watching this are actively testing out new channels, then you’re going to use Google Tag Manager to implement the tracking tags. Some of the benefits of Google Tag Manager are you don’t need to go into a codebase, you don’t need a developer to go through and implement this and deploy this to your production team. Google Tag Manager allows marketers to just very quickly and easily implement these tracking scripts through GTM sometimes by just getting an account ID because there’s built-in what are called tag containers inside a GTM. So that is one where it can be fairly active.
And the second part, which is very heavy of what we do in part of our product with a Chrome extension is what’s called Google Analytics event tracking. So if you think about your website and you have buttons and videos and forms to download and all these things that people can do on one page, your standard Google Analytics implementation is generally just page views. It’s just tracking page views. And you go into GA and you’re looking at where people are leaving, what’s my landing page performance, what pages have a higher page value, et cetera. But all those different interactions, people watching the video, again, downloading the form or submitting the form, et cetera, those are called events and you can track that behavior. It’s called event tracking, and you implement that through Google Tag Manager as well. So those are the two primary use cases where we see GTM is honestly part of a marketer’s toolbox that they’re going to touch weekly, bi-weekly at the minimum.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So if we know a landing page is performing, if we’re not using Google Tag Manager, we might not know that people who watch the video on that page are 10 times more likely to buy. We don’t have the full picture. Is that kind of an example?
Brad Redding: Yeah. I’ll use it on our site and get all of our [inaudible]. So we have a video demo page and there’s some smack, there’s like a video with three different video tabs right there. That’s all set up with the event tracking, and people that watch our demo video, it is literally something like that, like they convert 10 times more than people who don’t watch a video. And that’s all done because when someone clicks the watch video button, that pushes an event. So that event is triggered through Google Tag Manager, pushes that data into Google Analytics. So now inside of Google Analytics, I can just do a basic segment of people who watch a demo video versus people who don’t watch a demo video, what’s their conversion rate.
So for where that leads us in terms of driving just different marketing or CRO, conversion optimization across the site, I want to push people to that demo page as much as I can because I see the demo video is useful somehow. I don’t why, but the demo videos is answering some of those questions and helping that user down their path to purchase. So that’s a great example of how event tracking can help with the conversion optimization.
Chris Badgett: How does that sit in relation to goals in Google Analytics? Is this like a new and improved kind of thing that you do instead of goals, or do you do goals as well inside Google Analytics?
Brad Redding: I could talk about this stuff all day, so it’s a great question. Events. So goals, when you look at a goal creation inside of Google Analytics, it’s going to give you a couple of different options. You’re going to have a page view option. So you can set a goal, like if someone reaches my form submission thank you page. There’s the custom option when you create a goal, and the custom option allows you to set any event action that someone does onsite as a goal. So they can configure that as a goal. To give you a real example, so an example of some goals that we have created in our site, we have a lot, is we have a goal for somebody watching a demo video. So basically what you do is when you create that Google Analytics event via Google Tag Manager, it pushes that data into Google Analytics. The event action is called watch demo video. And then when you create the goal, the goal is if event action equals watch demo video, then that’s a goal success.
So now when you have these different behaviors across your site, because I can look at one single report either by landing page or by channel and have all my goals listed out so I can see what percentage of goals am I completing. So for, again, our site, which is a B2B SAS site, I can look very clearly and see percentage of people that watched the demo video, percentage of people that sign up for a trial, percentage of people that scroll 50% and are on a page for 30 seconds, percentage of people that download a PDF, percentage of people that are doing things. That’s what I want to ultimately evaluate. And so the event tracking is that can really supercharge your goal creation because you have 20 goals and if you don’t use them, then you’re missing out.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. This reminds me of that quote about marketing, that we’re doing a lot of marketing, we just don’t know which half is working. However, in your style, you do know what’s working and there’s just much more clarity and less incomplete data sets there.
Brad Redding: Yeah. It can be a double-edged sword though because if you’re not used to analyzing this data and tracking it, it can be overwhelming because now you have a lot of data and to analyze it does take time. It just takes time. So there’s that double-edged sword where you can track everything and then you end up with analysis paralysis.
Chris Badgett: I totally get that. What’s an example, if somebody new and getting into it, where should they start? There’s all this data, should they work backwards from a conversion? Or, where’s typically in an e-commerce business on Shopify or wherever, where is the low hanging first place to focus?
Brad Redding: Yeah. There’s not a first place to start. The answer to that question is a question back to you or the person that’s asking the question of what questions are you trying to answer from users’ activity on your site? So let’s use your site on LifterLMS. Just think of that, you have, I don’t know how many pages you have in your site-
Chris Badgett: Hundreds.
Brad Redding: Yeah. Are there burning questions that you wish you knew the answers to certain user behavior on your site?
Chris Badgett: Yes.
Brad Redding: What are those questions?
Chris Badgett: One of them would be something about the channel, like revenue per channel with more clarity than what I know now. That’s an example,
Brad Redding: That’s one.
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Brad Redding: Okay. What are some other ones?
Chris Badgett: I would like to know something about time from lead to close, going through a form for a digital lead magnet download to becoming a paying customer. And then if I was going to do one more, I’d like to know some really detailed kind of event, like what are people doing on my pricing page? And what are people clicking on, or how many times are we coming back here? Like just more insight into the pricing page.
Brad Redding: Yeah. So you create your tracking plan based on those questions. So if we use the pricing page again, let’s say you have an FAQ on there, you have maybe some tooltips or you have a video, or you even have logos that are at the bottom of the page, you can look at a conversion rate for people that see the logos or case studies versus people that don’t. So the event tracking isn’t just clicks. So then tracking can be just if it becomes visible on the page, that’s called an impression or visibility event. So, that’s where you would start. Again, and when it comes to e-commerce and Shopify, there’s certainly some standard events that we consider our normal or our base set up for what we call user journey tracking.
And for that, it’s email signups, it’s a percentage of people that scroll at least 50% and are also on the page for 30 seconds. That’s good for just engagement, like a combo and engagement metric. Viewing a product page, adding to cart, initiating checkout, and then completing purchase. And then if you have like a wishlist or a quiz or something like that, then those are additional ones. But generally, if you have those six to 10 events, then you can look at by channel and say, okay, well, Facebook Ads is doing great in terms of email signups, but people coming in through Facebook, they’re not adding to cart or purchasing. But I see a channel, people coming in from my email list, they’re doing great at adding to cart and purchasing. I mean that’s a fairly common scenario, but that would answer the question of, okay, we want to pull in people from Facebook, drive them to an email list, and then use that email list to essentially drive more of the add to cart and purchase process.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let me ask you about something you said earlier about channel and source. So if you’re on the campaign URL builder page of Google, and you’re trying to create a tracking link that you’re going to use in an ad or in a link that you’re posting on social media, is that the old school way of doing it, or does that become obsolete with Google Tag Manager, or is that still necessary?
Brad Redding: Completely different. So Google Tag Manager doesn’t do anything. Unless you’re super advanced, Google Tag Manager doesn’t do anything with UTM parameters. So the Google URL builder, that is something that if you’re doing it, everyone should do that because the more you can … Again, this goes back to nomenclature, tag, like tagging the traffic, I prefer. That’s one way to say it, but adding UTM parameters to that traffic, what you’re essentially doing is giving you the possibility within GA to segment that traffic a little bit more so you can look at it by campaigns or the content of a particular campaign. So yes, always quote-unquote tag your traffic with UTM parameters, and then you can do the channel breakdown. So if you want to customize channels inside your acquisition source medium, you do that inside of Google Analytics because you can customize those.
Chris Badgett: Awesome. Awesome. Your site is awesome, by the way, getelevar.com.
Brad Redding: I appreciate it.
Chris Badgett: I love how clean it is and I spent a lot of time on it today when I was checking it out and I was learning a lot. And one of the things you said is you help build a bridge between marketers and engineers. And in some ways, that’s kind of what we’re doing here in this interview, and you have a unique ability of like, all right, we have all this awesome tech and we need to make it approachable to the Shopify store owner or just the online business owner. How does Elevar build that bridge, or how do you think about that bridge, and what does it look like, the problems? I know from my past, trying to get tracking scripts installed by a developer, it’s always a pain. It’s a hassle. And I don’t know, what do you mean? What’s your take on this whole bridge building?
Brad Redding: Yeah. Great question. It’s not the only time I’ve heard that, that it’s a pain in the butt to get tracking involved. So here’s the reality, and engineers on our team, they say the same thing. Let’s say you need to implement a Facebook pixel and Twitter tracking and Pinterest and Snapchat and TikTok and all of that, it’s a very simple exercise for a technically skilled person, so for an engineer. They don’t want to be doing that. They don’t want to do that task because it’s basically a copy and paste task, and you have to swap out a few variables. It’s not exciting. They’re not learning. They’re not expanding their skillset.
So take it from the marketer’s perspective, the marketer, they have no idea what goes into a tracking script so most of them aren’t even going to touch it nor should they because it’s not their specialty. But the job that the marketer is trying to do is when they say, hey, implement my Facebook pixel, that’s the requirements they hand-off to the technical person. The technical person will implement the pixel, and then the marketer is going to say, what the hell, I want to know what my average cost per product view, what’s my average cost per add to cart, what’s my row ads, my return on ad spend for purchases? So they’re going to go back to the technical person and say, hey, I want to know all these stats, and the technical person’s going to say, well, you never told me those requirements.
So then they’re going to shop the marketer. They’re going to shop around and try to figure out how they need to communicate to the engineer to implement. At the end of the day, the marketer, and again, implementing the pixel isn’t the job they’re trying to get done, the job you’re trying to do is attribute and analyze their spend so they know where to spend more money or pull budget back. The marketers aren’t technical so they don’t necessarily know the nuances of how to implement variables and tracking and all that. And the engineer, they don’t know anything about marketing, most of them, so they don’t understand the job that the marketer is trying to do, so they’re just basically going to just copy and paste whatever sent to them.
So it can end up in weeks and weeks and back and forth, and that’s the niche, that’s the bridge that we are solving, is we understand both sides of those. So we and a combination of our software and our services builds that bridge between the two to make the job symbol for the marketer. It’s much more of a one-click setup. And you take the burden because it literally is a burden for most engineers, they hate doing this, setting up tracking, takes that burden off of them where it’s just a one-click and they just say, just install Elevar and follow their set up instructions.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s a super great friction point. In this skill that you have of building that bridge to the non-technical mind, what is the data layer? What does that mean, and why is that important?
Brad Redding: All right. Data layer, this is where it will get a little bit confusing, especially the way I try to butcher explaining it. So let’s take a WooCommerce site. So most of your customers WordPress versus Shopify?
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Brad Redding: Okay. So it doesn’t really matter. WooCommerce, Shopify, it doesn’t really matter, the concept is the same. If someone has a WordPress store and they have WooCommerce plugins, so they have some purchase and some ability for people to buy things, whether it’s courses, et cetera. If someone is going through and purchasing a course, the business owner that is selling the course, let’s say they have … Do many of your customers have multiple courses, so they have more than one?
Chris Badgett: Yeah, and some even have a whole WooCommerce store and they also do training, like with physical and digital products. So, yeah.
Brad Redding: Okay. We’ll take a store that has 10 different products, a combination of courses and swag or whatever else. Each one of those products, they have a product name, a product skew, a price, potentially variants, like size, color, if it’s a shirt or some sort of swag. And when someone goes through and completes a purchase, that data needs to go to Google Analytics so you can look at what channels perform the best, like you were mentioning earlier. That data needs to go to Facebook. So when you’re evaluating your row ads, you’re measuring, okay, did they buy a $200 course or a $20 jacket? That’s a big difference in your row ads that you’re going to report on.
So all of that data is essentially, it’s variables that are built out through a data layer. The data layer is basically a Google term. It’s essentially a JavaScript that runs on the site that you essentially push these variables into a data layer. So if someone purchases that t-shirt, a piece of swag, they actually have to look at the data layer and the source code, it’s going to have product name was t-shirt, price was $20, skew is ABC123. That data layer is dynamic for every user, every session. Everyone that’s on that site, that’s going to adjust for that particular user. And then Google Tag Manager, essentially, so that’s your data layer foundation. Then Google Tag Manager, the GCMUI, where you have all the different tags and triggers and variables, that essentially is reading the data from the data layer and then sending those different hits to GA, to Facebook, to AdWords, et cetera, using that dynamic data from a data layer.
Chris Badgett: So we’re getting more information than just, they spent this much money. There’s a much more richer set of variables in the data that the Facebook can see and everything else.
Brad Redding: Yeah. So these examples, if we use a retail, let’s say you have a gender split store, let’s say you have men’s and women’s boots or something like that. By sending that data to Facebook instead of just Chris bought $20, you’re saying, Chris bought a pair of boots, that was the color brown, that was $20, and skew X, Y, and Z. So then what the store owner is able to do inside of Facebook, we talked about the conversion tracking so they can see, okay, they spent $10 for you to click on it and you spend 20, so their row ads is two, but now they’re able to build an audience. So now they can build an audience. And the rules are anybody who purchased boots from a gender of male or maybe boots that were the color brown, now have an audience inside of Facebook and the audience, they can just build up and then re-market it to you, so when the next version of brown boots comes out, you’ll see it, others like you will see it, and they can create lookalike audiences.
So you have that audience inside of Facebook, and now we say, hey, Facebook, go find more that match this group of people that purchased a pair of brown boots, go find more people like them, and put my ads in front of them. So that’s taking data layer, your tags pick up that data, they send those hits to Facebook, you track your conversion tracking, and then using the data from a data layer, you create custom audiences that then you tell Facebook to go find more people like them. Facebook puts the ads in front of them, someone clicks on the ad, they come through the site, and then essentially the cycle repeats.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I was going to ask you about remarketing next. You brought it up already. If someone who’s going to get into remarketing for their e-commerce store, what should they try first? What’s the strategy for remarketing to start with?
Brad Redding: Anybody who added to cart or started the checkout process, but did not purchase. So the way using the data layer and event tracking, what you can do is if you’re sending unique events, essentially, if you go back to those user journey tracking reports I was telling you about, you send an event to Facebook when somebody adds to cart, or if somebody starts to check out. And then inside of Facebook, you created an audience. And the rule can be as simple as for the people in the last 90 days that added to cart but did not trigger the purchase event. So now you essentially have a bucket of people who added to cart but did not purchase, so it’s a very high intent. And then you create a campaign that is remarketing to them. So the campaign’s not your top of the funnel, like, hey, here’s my new store. Check us out.
Chris Badgett: These are the shoes … These are our abandoned carts that follow us around the internet, like dude, you want these shoes? Do you want these shoes?
Brad Redding: Exactly.
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Brad Redding: Yeah, exactly.
Chris Badgett: Very cool. Very cool. If I’m describing this wrong, correct me, but isn’t Google Analytics right now or recently as of this recording, we’re recording this at the end of January 2021, coming out with a new version or something?
Brad Redding: GA. Yeah, so GA4.
Chris Badgett: What’s the difference? Should we upgrade? What happens if we’re really deep in the old version? What’s new here?
Brad Redding: GA4, they launched July in 2019. It used to be called App + Web. So they launched the new property, it was called App + Web. And then I think it was October or November 2020, they essentially rebranded it and said, “Hey, a new version of GA’s out, it’s called GA4. Everyone should go through an upgrade.” It’s going to be a long time before people give up or basically stop using what’s called a Universal Analytics, which is the GA you’re talking about that we’re all familiar with, and migrate fully GA4. Historically, people weren’t doing that because it wasn’t feature complete. It really didn’t compare to the existing GA.
So what we have been recommending to all of our customers and on our blog where we’ve shared how to go through and set it up is you just run them in parallel. Even if you don’t use GA4 today, get it up and running, just start tracking and sending data to the property. So if and when you do want to start using it or Google essentially forces our hand, you’re not starting from scratch. So that’s our recommendation of what to do with it.
What are the differences of it or how is it different from the existing GA? It’s completely different. The main difference, there’s two or three main differences. Number one, it’s very much heavier in event tracking versus page view. So it allows you to get more granular, like the event tracking I was talking about, people watching the video, doing things like that. It’s a better version for analyzing that type of behavior. And simply, also, because you can merge data sources, so you can have web data with app data and potentially other data sources.
Toaster, if you have data tracking on a smart Toaster, in theory, you can send that data to your GA4 property and start comparing and slicing and dicing. But that’s obviously, if you’re 99.9999% of people, it’s not relevant. The second big benefit, so again, it’s more event-driven than page view-driven, which can be easier, better for analysis. Number two is it has a lot of the features that GA 360, the paid version, which has historically been like 150,000 a year, it has many of those features for free. So the funnel builder, there’s a funnel builder, there’s a custom page path thing, there’s an analysis hub. Those features were all GA 360 historically. You couldn’t use them unless you paid the 150K a year. Now they’re baked into the free version of GA4. That’s benefit number two.
Number three, I think for us in the world of e-commerce where we live, it’s just more customizable. And it goes back to the event data, it’s more customizable versus everything trying to fit in this one box. And most of the analysis that we do is very heavy on events, on event tracking. The page view tracking, it’s great but for many, it only tells you so much. It tells you how many people looked at it, what your bounce rate was, what your talent page was, but that’s an inaccurate metric anyways, and what your page value is for that page. For most people, they don’t know how or care to, or even need to know how to correlate page value back to actually business value.
Chris Badgett: That’s cool. Well, that’s a big relief if you can just run them in parallel and just get started. It’s not like this massive switch. That’s cool. One more thing you mentioned, I saw on your site or in one of your videos was around page speed and time delays or where things like the chat widget, if you’re using chat, which is very common on e-commerce sites, what’s that all about? Because we all want a faster website. Tell us more how to speed it up.
Brad Redding: So this goes back to managing your tags in Google Tag Manager. Many of us, and this has been the normal way to do it over the years, maybe not so much the last couple, but if you have all these different services that you are utilizing for tracking-
Chris Badgett: Like Drift is an example, like the Drift chat app, or Intercom, or whatever.
Brad Redding: Yeah. So you probably have that, you could probably have Google Analytics, and Google Ads, and Facebook, and potentially others. Those are all scripts that normally you might implement directly in the theme. So it’s just there in the theme, and based on where it is, position-wise, it’s going to load. So most of those providers say, hey, put this at the very top of the head and make sure it’s the first thing that loads on the site. They say that because they want to make sure that their script quote-unquote is always loading and never has a chance to not load because a user progresses past the page before it finishes loading, which I won’t go down that route.
With Google Tag Manager, what you can do is there’s different types of triggers, so with the tag manager, you have tags, triggers, and variables. The world GTM starts with variables and then from there, it’s triggers. So with triggers, you have page view is a trigger, click is a trigger, impression is a trigger, which I mentioned earlier. Timer, so there’s a trigger called a timer-based trigger. And what we do with many customers is we move their tracking to GTM. So if the live chat is Zendesk, it was probably the example I was talking about, when someone is loading a site for the first time, they’re not going to load a page and go directly to live chat. There’s no need to have that live chat part of that initial page load for the site.
Chris Badgett: Slowing it down.
Brad Redding: Exactly. So you can create a timer-based trigger in GTM, let’s say, hey, five seconds after the page is done loading, there’s a trigger, and then that can fire up the Zendesk, and then the bubble would pop up on the right. You can do that with all of your marketing tracking scripts.
Chris Badgett: That’s pretty cool. That’s pretty cool. That’s a big unlock there. Who’s a perfect fit for Elevar?
Brad Redding: A Shopify business owner that’s doing at least a million in revenue a year. That’s typically their thought process to scale. They’re trying to scale effectively and they need to trust their data. They need that solid data foundation to make decisions from. But typically, they’re a small team and they’re doing a million different things and they just don’t have the time to learn this stuff.
Chris Badgett: What’s the core problem that getelevar solves for these people?
Brad Redding: Ensuring that you have trust in your data and getting the right data to the right marketing channels.
Chris Badgett: The easy way.
Brad Redding: Yeah. Again, for us, it’s actually been a challenge for me personally and us as a business is really just simplifying how we articulate the value of what we do. Because again, one of the interviews that we had with our customers a while back, the job you’re trying to do isn’t implement tracking. The job they’re trying to do is make-
Chris Badgett: Trying to scale their company, right?
Brad Redding: They’re trying to scale their company, yeah, and using data to do that. So many people will come to us because they don’t trust their data and it’s inaccurate and they just need a fix. They’re like, just get our data foundation fixed. I had one guy tell me a year ago, right before Black Friday, he was spending 20 or $30,000 a day in Google ads. His cost per acquisition went from $10 to $20. So think about that, if he’s spending, and let’s say he was at a 4 or a 4x ROAS, that is a huge, huge drop in revenue. So he literally said, he said, “I’ll gladly pay you guys 500 bucks a month if my tracking never breaks like this ever again.” He’s like, “I’ll do that. I’ll pay you that the rest of my life, just ensure that doesn’t break.” So again, the job that he wasn’t trying to do was get tracking up and running. The job he’s trying to do is to scale with trustworthy data. So that’s a little backstory on the value prop for us. Sorry about that, I think my internet might’ve just cut out there.
Chris Badgett: It’s all good. So what is the best way if somebody has a Shopify store and they want to get into Elevar, what’s the best way for them to get started?
Brad Redding: You’d either find us on the App Store, the Shopify App Store, or just visit getelevar.com, and go trigger one of those events on the video demo page.
Chris Badgett: Yeah. [crosstalk].
Brad Redding: And honestly, all that tracking, we don’t know it’s you per se. There’s obviously those that are worried about people tracking everywhere, but Google Analytics data, it’s all anonymous and we don’t know if it’s Chris, or Beth, or John, or whoever. We can’t tie it back to the person. It’s more like just anonymized data.
Chris Badgett: So, this is compliant with GDPR and privacy and all that stuff. It’s just cookies and whatnot. Yeah, I think that’s an important point. Just because you have better tracking, it doesn’t mean you’re breaking any kind of rule or anything. You’re actually figuring out how to help your customers better. And there’s some anonymity is there.
Brad Redding: Yeah.
Chris Badgett: Brad, thank you for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. You’ve taken us to school on the Google Universe, Google Tag Manager, specifically. I wish you all the best and thank you so much. It’s really been an eye-opener for me because I know I need to level-up in this department. And I know your tool does it, but you also just build that bridge as a technical person yourself to the every man and woman like myself. So thanks for taking us to school today. I really appreciate it.
Brad Redding: Awesome. Anytime. I appreciate you having me. Thanks, Chris.
Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action. And I’ll see you in the next episode.
