Tracking Web Data is Totally Useless (Unless You Do This)

Feel overwhelmed trying to analyse your website analytics? Wish you knew how to act on all those metrics? Chris Mercer, co-founder of Measurement Marketing, simplifies measurement with his proven framework.

Learn a “stick figure simple” approach to dashboards that shows clear pictures - not vague data - so you instantly know what marketing tactics to adjust. Hear how one member 10X’d conversion by applying Mercer’s methodology. Discover why he says teaching measurement refines your own skills and strategies.

If you’re weary of combing through crosstabs only to remain directionless, Mercer brings clarity. Let him reveal high-impact key performance indicators tailored to your goals. You’ll gain “x-ray vision” to optimise journeys, scale what works and stop lead leaks for good.

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Transcript

Jim James (00:00)
Well, if you think that your marketing is not performing and you, like me, not that good at numbers, and you think that measurement is all of that insights and data, and frankly, seems kind of hard to manage, like doing your accounting and you tend to prefer to spend rather than to measure, then my guest today has got a great solution for you because they've built a product that really helps make insights and measurement accessible to

entrepreneurs. So you can really tell what part of your marketing is effective, but more importantly, what action steps to take next. We're going to talk to Mercer today, who's in Austin, Texas, and is running a company called the Measurement Marketing Academy. Mercer, welcome to the show.

Mercer (00:47)
Thank you, Jim. Pleasure to be here.

Jim James (00:49)
Well, it's a pleasure to have you on the show because I hold my hand up. I prefer to create content than to measure what I'm doing. But I know that leads to really an unprofitable marketing activity. And yet I've looked at some of the measurement tools and frankly, I get a little bit bewildered by all the data and the flows and stuff like that. Tell us about you and about the Measurement Marketing Academy because it sounds like you could have just an amazing

solution for those of us that need to measure what we do and take actions against the stimulants and the results of our marketing.

Mercer (01:26)
Yeah, it's a great question. The reason that we did that was because there seemed to be a gap in how people were using tools like Google Analytics. I mean, these free tools that are out there, especially from Google, um, that allow us to measure our marketing. People were putting the code on their pages. They were loading it up. They would go into the Google Analytics. They would, they would look at stuff and say, like, I have no idea what this means. I'll come back in a couple of years and try to figure it out. It's like looking at the matrix for a lot of people. And I get that. And so when we came into this, we started teaching it in a

kind of a from left field. We kind of didn't teach it the traditional way that most people teach. Like, oh, here's how you click this box to do this thing or whatever. Because that really isn't hard to learn that. You can go watch that stuff on YouTube. The trick was, how do you think about this

tool?

In other words, how do you think about measurement as a strategy in your organization? And you have a measurement strategy, which is why we came up with something called the measurement marketing framework that we can definitely go into. And then we took that and said, well, now that you know the measurement strategy, here's how to use the tools now to implement that strategy. So now Google Analytics has a certain purpose, right? Or Tag Manager or Looker Studio, whatever the tool is that you're using, it's for that specific purpose, to actually

implement a strategy versus what I think a lot of entrepreneurs do, which is they buy all these tools, right? Some of them paid, some of them free. They start using the tool, but there is no strategy for it. So you're technically using the strategy that the tool came with, you know, and so it ends up being that the tools start dictating your strategy and it should be the way around. Your measurement strategy dictates how you use the tools and then it makes them a lot easier to use.

Jim James (02:58)
Mercer, I think you're absolutely right. You know, I've tried doing the, you know, the pixels and the Google Analytics, and then you, after a while, you get onto something that's easier to do, actually, frankly. And as you say, if you work on some of these platforms like HubSpot or Zoho or Buffer, they start to dictate what kind of content and pace and frequency, but worse still, you start to create content that looks and goes out the same as everybody else, right? And you start to lose your brand identity.

Mercer (03:05)
Yes.

Right.

Jim James (03:27)
Tell us a little bit about the Academy. And I've got, for those people that would like to look at YouTube, if you go to the Unnoticed YouTube channel, you'll see I'm sharing the screen for Mercer's account here, Mercer's website, which is measurementmarketing.io. But Mercer, if one signs up to the Academy, what do they get? What do some of your clients actively do once they've learned some of the tools

that you've got on offer.

Mercer (03:58)
In a word, it's transformation. Because you have to think differently about how you use measurement in a conversation. And I will give you a very quick one. So like you and I are having a conversation. I'm going to listen to what you're saying. I'm going to respond based upon what I'm hearing. And you're doing the same thing, right? We're constantly adjusting. We're listening and responding. Well, that is happening right now in everyone's websites. Except there's a conversation that's still there, but it's between the user and the website. Well.

OK, right now, you and I are talking. It makes sense. I can hear you. But how do I hear them? How do I listen into the user side of the conversation so I can adjust the website and make sure that the conversation is going the way I want it to? Measurement's how we listen in. And so the better you get at measurement is the more you can listen into their side of the conversation so that you can adjust the website, adjust your marketing, to keep the conversation going in the right direction. So the Academy teaches this sort of mindset. And it goes through a very specific framework,

So you can implement a strategy and then it shows you, here's how to use this tool to actually implement this strategy. And then we bring in the tools. So instead of just trying to jump in and learn a tool like Google Analytics 4, of course we have courses for how to do that. But we're gonna first train you on the framework. Here's how to think about this stuff. Here's how to build a proper measurement plan. And now that you've done that thinking, and we make it easy, because again, we're marketers building this for other marketers. We're not building this for data analysts and data scientists. They don't need this.

But marketers really do, entrepreneurs really do. People that are business owners really do. They need to think differently about how they're measuring their marketing efforts. And so we go through that strategy first, and then here's all the implementation courses. So whether you or somebody else in your team can do the implementation, maybe the owner's doing more the strategy side, but we cover both strategy and tactics in the academy.

Jim James (05:43)
And if you do go to measurementmarketing.io you'll see there are a number of free tools actually available as well. Plus in the Academy, you've got things like, you know, what's your traffic story? And then there's a 29 page PDF guide where you learn where the traffic is coming from. But Mercer, if I'm right in understanding, you then show people how to correct the marketing strategy that might be off course. I think many of us go, oh, well, for example, I've got a bounce rate of, you know,

60% and you can read that on Google Analytics, but you're like, well, what do I do next? Right. And then you go to YouTube and try and figure it out. So am I right in understanding that within the measurement Academy, you go, if that's the problem, high bounce rate, this is what you'd need to do next. Is that right?

Mercer (06:23)
Right.

Right, right. And with an Academy member, bounce rate is such a great thing to talk about because in the Academy you'll quickly learn that bounce rate is super relative and not all that useful actually believe it or not So it's what numbers are important, right? So when we're going into our numbers, it's let's put our measurement plan We're gonna list out the questions We're trying to get answers to we're gonna gather where we can get the information to get those answers and we're gonna think about what? Actions we're gonna take based upon the answers we're about to get.

Then we'll teach them, that's the planning stage, then we'll move into the build. Here's how to use the tools to actually collect all the information you need, where the numbers start flowing in. And then we teach them how to actually launch their measurement dashboards and reporting. In other words, how to actually use them. First by listening to the conversation, looking for those trends and patterns, measuring against your forecast, and then ultimately knowing where you're hitting the mark and where you're not, so you can start to optimize. But the entire process of this starts by rethinking that, right? So if you come into it and say, okay, well, I gotta learn all about bounce rate.

The first thing I'm gonna do is like, hey, hold on, that's awesome you wanna learn about bounce rate, first let's learn measurement. At a certain point, you get to the point where you realize, oh, actually this bounce rate question isn't so important to me anymore. Because I don't really care about bounce rate. What I care about are they engaged? Did they engage with my journey? Well, engagement with a blog post might be different than engagement with a video, right? One is literally them watching a video for a certain period of time, whereas the engagement with a blog post is them maybe scrolling and spending time maybe clicking on links.

And you can measure for those different behaviors. We can learn to measure for that. It's not a hard skill to pick up, but it's unknown because, let's face it, these tools are a little complicated looking, right? There's a lot of moving bells and whistles. So our job is to say, listen, forget about learning 100% of this tool, just learn this 20% that is so powerful, and you'll get the 80% results that you're looking for. And then eventually, if you want, you can level up your skills or bring other team members to learn the finer points of it, but you can do an awful lot with very little when you understand

the strategy behind it. And then that is really the key. It's learning how to cook, not necessarily how to assemble a bunch of ingredients, you know, but why are those ingredients there? What are we doing?

Jim James (08:31)
Well, it sounds so, Mercer, as well that with your background in course building, because I know you had a sort of an education based business before that you're helping entrepreneurs like me to learn how to do something almost like having my own private guide, my own consultant sitting on my shoulder, not saying this is wrong, you're on your own, but this is the issue. These are the steps you need to take to fix it.

Mercer (08:49)
Exactly.

Jim James (09:01)
Now tell us then, Mercer, if we have any kind of question now about content and memberships and training, and we've got to talk a little bit about AI because...

Traditionally, we go to a course, you find the course and you're kind of hunting for the answers. How are you using AI within measurement marketing to serve the client with the learning that they need? I know there's a proper term for this, isn't there? But I can't think of what it is, but there's sort of AI assistant, but there's a proper term for the technology now helping to find the content that you need. My sister, My daughter's using one of these maths

learning programs and it's feeding her the appropriate content for her maths level.

Mercer (09:44)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, there's a couple of directions I'll take with that. One is kind of from an owner's perspective, like how I'm using it within our company to help grow our company. And that's just to figure out where it can best leverage the existing skills that we have in our organization or where it can add skills that we don't necessarily have yet. So an example of growing those skills might be taking client notes

where somebody used to throw, and this was back in the day, you'd have to record the video, send the video over to rev.com or pay somebody to transcribe it, take their client notes, and somebody else to summarize those. Well, now that can all be an AI and Zapier and that sort of thing. So we're using a lot of that to be like, let's summarize these notes in an area that we need to summarize them, have next action steps, and we can get to action faster as an organization when we're doing that, when we're meeting with ourselves or with clients that we might do some of the done for you work for.

Then we've got on the opposite side, like how is it that we're actually helping from a student's perspective? And it's showing them two things. One is how to use AI. So an example might be on a more very technical end. There's a big thing called BigQuery, which is kind of the new kid on the block when it comes to measurement tools. And it's a database and learning how to actually when people are talking about first party data, they mean own your own data. Well, you got to put that data somewhere. So you put it in a database.

And so how do you work with this new thing? Well, there's things called SQL carries. And all of a sudden your mind starts going, holy cow, well, you can use AI to help you with some of this, to shortcut some of that.

At the same time, AI is not always right. So you have to make sure that you're using it properly and you're what we call TBVing it. You have to 'trust but verify' that it's correct. And how do you know that? How do you actually work with AI as kind of the well-intentioned but somewhat dumb assistant that it is, right? That's how we think about it. Well-intentioned, it really, really wants to please you, but it's not always right. So you have to always kind of question it. And so we'll talk to students about that. What I do not do, and I have not done, is create an AI bot to serve customers.

I'm not a huge fan of that yet. I think human as a service is going to come back in style because there's going to be too much of this AI stuff out there from a branding perspective. And that's one thing at the Academy that we're pretty proud of is we have so much human contact. So when you join, you're not just getting a bunch of courses and you're left to your own devices where you get tech support back and forth. But we've got the measurement mastermind with group coaching. You've got the Ask Instructor where you can send videos back and forth to instructors. And instructors will send videos back and forth for you specifically to help you out. Because in this business...

Like measurements of department now, it's not a project. It's not a one and done thing. It's a constantly evolving skillset. So you need to be in a community where you can talk with one another and actually talk and connect with other humans around how they're doing stuff. So I don't think AI will ever replace that for us.

I do think we'll use it in some marketing. We'll use it for some content generation things, but I'm gonna hesitate currently of using AI for actually helping give answers to students because I love the human connection component of that. And to be honest, as you teach, you learn. So I love the instructors teaching because the more they teach, the better they get at their own skills. And if I give that to AI, I'm gonna lose that power. It won't be as good because they're gonna stop teaching. And teaching is a skill and it makes you more stronger in your own right. So that's kind of how we think about AI.

Jim James (12:58)
Yeah, Mercer, yeah, okay, that's a wonderful insight. And yeah, that's sort of a dumb intent to please assistant. But can you give us maybe a case study, someone that's a client of the Measurement Marketing Institute, Academy rather, what have they learned by using your templates and what action did they take as a result? Because it sounds like it's not just measurement, which to some degree is

Mercer (13:24)
Yeah.

Jim James (13:28)
That's an analysis, isn't it?

What I'm understanding is you're giving people then a prescription of what to do to improve. And that's really the key, isn't it, for us, is we want to take action, not just to know the problem or another solution. So can you give us an example?

Mercer (13:30)
Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah, that's 100%. Yeah, exactly right. You want more, you don't want more data, you need more action, right? You want to know, do I turn out the Facebook campaign or turn it down? Right? Do I start using more many chat or less? So we had a client that came to us where they had numbers, they had them in what they call a scorecard. And it was basically spreadsheet. And they were just sort of recording these numbers because somebody said you should record these numbers, but they weren't really using that.

So it was kind of like, okay, how do we turn this into something more actionable? And so we, we went them, we talked them through the measurement framework and went through that measure marketing strategy to make sure that we understood, okay, what questions are you trying to answer? What information should we collect? What actions are you going to take about this? And then we helped them with their builds, right? To set this up. So instead of looking at a spreadsheet with a bunch of numbers or a data table where their eyes were starting to cross, they now look at essentially pictures.

So you think about a dashboard that sort of says like, oh, here's your landing page, but the landing page has got a little picture of the page. And then, you know, here's all the different landing pages. They all go to the cart and the cart picture is there. And then here's the percentage of those people that are going to the cart. Here's the percentage of those people that are going through the cart to actually purchase. And here's the average amount for each one of those pages. So now they can see their user journeys. They've got four different user journeys. They can see them all. They can see which one is actually better than the other ones,

and they can instantly look at this and it's kind of, we call it conditionally formatted, so it lights up like red, yellow and green. They can see the red blocks and be like, oh, I gotta fix this. So now they can see it, they go, oh, I'm gonna go focus on the red, the greens are good, we're gonna scale traffic there. The reds, we're just gonna go and start to maybe learn from some of the stuff that is working, how can we apply that to the ones that are red and then try to adjust that so in a couple days we check again and make sure that it's working properly. And it's what we call that stick figure simple approach because again,

When you're looking at a dashboard, and I think people get confused by this, when you're looking at a dashboard, they think they should have to go analyze data because that's what they've been told, but that is not true, especially from a marketer. A marketer shouldn't have to analyze anything. They should be able to get into a dashboard, look at it, and then go back and go to work, right? Go take action, because nobody wants to be in a report all day. Kind of like your car dashboard. If you're driving your car, you see your speedometer, you instantly know, do I hit the brake or hit the gas, based upon the number that you see? And that's how our marketer's dashboard should work. So we

worked with them to actually do that. And it cleared up a ton of confusion because they could see actions now. They don't see information. They don't see data. The data is naturally telling a story. Now they just see the story so they can go take the action. And that's the idea is, believe it or not, learning measurement is getting data out of the way. So you stop seeing just numbers and you start seeing those actions.

Jim James (16:17)
I love that analogy with the car. You don't necessarily know how many revs the engine is turning over. You just know if you're going too fast or too

slow, and then you just have the accelerator. You've got on your website case studies where people have turned businesses into $2 million accelerated businesses. Is there one example that you can give a practical way, maybe by using your framework, someone adjusted their

Mercer (16:25)
That's exactly right.

Sure. They, yeah, this is a very recent example. We had somebody that was at a mastermind, that was at a high level mastermind, who happened to be a student, and he was on stage talking about how he 10x'd his conversion rate. I later found out that he was a student when I was talking about it, because it was kind of his thing he was showing during this presentation on how he did it.

Jim James (16:47)
podcast strategy.

Mercer (17:04)
And so he was like, yeah, I bought your course. I went through it. We set up our funnels. And I was asking, how did you actually do it? And he's like, I just did it in GA4, which is Google Analytics 4, kind of the newer platform that Google has now for that. Free tool, by the way. So he went in and he used the measure marketing principles to set up the measurement on his site. And then he set up his own reports in Google Analytics 4 so he could see how things were performing. Because for them,

they were trying to figure out they were just guessing a lot, right? Well, we think money comes in here, and then money spits out at the bottom, but it was a black box in the middle, they couldn't figure out how their marketing was working. So they didn't know if something broke in the middle or not, they would just keep putting money in the top and hope money came out the bottom. And when it didn't, they didn't know what broke. So setting up that measurement gave them almost like an x ray and to be able to lift that hood and see, oh, here's how the machine works. I can see the gears

that are not functioning now, let's go fix those. And that's what gave him his 10X conversion. It was because he had visibility, he could see it. And he did it as a marketer. He's not a numbers person, but he understood why he was setting up his measurement. So it was easier for him to do that. So he could actually get visibility. And it was a great example of somebody using measurement to get a pretty good result.

Jim James (18:14)
Yeah, that's great. Actually, you can have an X-ray vision into where things are not coming through the system. It's really, really valuable. It gives you a real proper insight. Mercer, you're also an entrepreneur. You've had many businesses originally, I understand, sort of training, online training. Tell us about Measurement Marketing. For those people that can't see us today, today is probably the landmark case because Mercer is the first guest to

actually have a branded hat and t-shirt at the same time as I've got my brand hat on. So we are matchy-matchy today with our branded hats on. Great minds. Mercer, tell us, how have you been getting the Measurement Marketing Academy noticed as an entrepreneur?

Mercer (18:43)
Ah, see?

Great minds.

A fantastic question because we tried the traditional methods we tried doing paid traffic a lot. And just sort of putting our stuff out there and it and it wasn't working now partly this is because of we had a problem creating offers it's a skill that we have to learn.

To be honest and get much better at creating offers, which we are. But the other issue was this is a more nuanced topic. This is like a niche of a niche of a niche. It's not as simple as selling weight loss pills or something like that for a massive market exists for that. This is for marketers who are trying to improve their marketing results and they've got paid traffic and they just want to make sure like what happened to that dollar and should I put another dollar in that campaign? So again, niche of a niche of a niche. It required a conversation. And so what I personally have a skill...

And this is something I was born with, which was great. I didn't happen to develop it, but I like speaking on stages. The bigger the crowd, the better for me. So I was doing a lot of speaking on stages and noticing we got results from there. Well, fast forward, this is like a number of years ago, of course, but this thing called podcasting was starting to take hold. And people were like, hey, would you be my podcast? Well, if you think about it, podcast is like being on a virtual stage. You're in the room, even a small podcast, you're gonna be in a room with a few hundred people

listening to that and larger podcasts, obviously, tens of thousands or millions. So the idea was, OK, well, let's do this podcast thing, see if it works. So what did we do? We measured it. So we set up the podcast. We did the podcast and I would measure to see the traffic coming back from that podcast. Not just did I generate traffic? Did that traffic take the actions I want them to take? Did they engage with the brand? Did they sign up for the free membership? Did they eventually become members? So we measured for that and I could see it coming back. And we saw the initial spike.

And here's the thing specific to podcasts, which is why I love this medium so much. After about a year of doing this, we started looking back and we realized, wow, we're getting traffic. We're getting traffic still from podcasts I did a year ago. And I tell you, I would never have predicted that. I would have thought podcast traffic was big spike, goes away, never to return again, because who's gonna listen to an old episode? So wrong, so wrong on that. There were so many long tail traffic that I get from podcasts now at this point, I've done six years ago,

seven years ago, I still get traffic from it. Now, how do I know that? Because I've measured them all. I put a little date code so I know when I recorded the podcast. So I know which one they listened to. I know what I talked about. So I can then it gauges me on how I can take the next podcast and continue the conversation for the things that are working and stop doing the things that weren't. So that's sort of how we get ourselves noticed is by having conversations like this, that causes somebody to go like, wow, that guy thinks a little different. This is

definitely not the same old thing. When you think about data, this is not what I thought it was gonna be about. This is something that's causing me to think differently. Maybe they can help me. Maybe this is why it's gonna be different this time with the Academy. And then they come to the Academy page more ready to engage with the brand, more likely to purchase, because we've moved them from more top of the funnel awareness through the podcast to more engaging with the brand and thinking a little bit closer to solving the problems that they have. And hopefully we can be a part of that.

Jim James (21:54)
Yeah, and that's wonderful, Mercer. The SEO qualities of podcasting is one part, but then the long tail, as well, as you say, of a show sticks around for a long time. I have people listen to shows that I recorded three years ago, and they're still big hitters in terms of downloads. So Mercer, you've been a successful entrepreneur for many years.

Mercer (22:09)
Yeah.

Yep.

Jim James (22:21)
But you know, I do like to ask you without trying to embarrass anybody if they've made one mistake, that they would give us a little bit of forewarning so we don't make the same mistake ourselves. What would it be?

Mercer (22:33)
Yeah, I'll give you a really big mistake that I did growing as a leader, because I think there's different levels, and you're always going to make mistakes. So I'm going to have new mistakes next year, you know, when you and I talk, you know, but the more recent mistake that I personally made as a manager was handing off work to our team when they weren't quite fully trained on it, I thought they were I thought they could handle it. And I and I let them go

and run a particular client, right? In fact, this is one of our most successful clients now, believe it or not. So this is also a good turnaround story. But we let them run the client and they just didn't quite have that connection of being able to manage a client in the same way that I would have. And so the client started leading them. And that was a problem because when the client is telling us how to measure,

that's going to go wrong because they clearly don't know measurement. Right. So why would we listen to them type of thing? That's why they're here. But she couldn't quite figure out how to switch that back so that she could come back in the lead. So we did have a bit of a blow up. We were producing reports, to be honest, that were information, nonaction. And I'm looking at this going, how are we producing this result? It's a huge error. So I went to the client. The client wasn't happy, which I get because we were not living up to our promise, which was true.

So what did I do as the entrepreneur? I fell on the sword. I made everything us because it was us and I fully accepted the responsibility. Now, could it have been something the client did that if they hadn't done this one thing, we would have been better? Sure, but you know what? Sometimes things are not our fault, but they are our problem. And that's a big saying we have as a team here. It's not your fault, but it is your problem. So you've got to work the problem. Let's not work whose fault it was right now. Work the problem, get the solution out. So I went to that client and I did, and I said, listen, this is our fault. This should have happened. I shouldn't have let it happen.

I'm I put everything on the line. I said I will refund every dime you've paid us, which is a substantial amount of money at that point in time. If I can't turn this, I need 30 days. I need 30 days to turn this around. If I cannot do in 30 days, every dime is coming back to you. So there's no risk. Can we do this? And, you know, to their credit, they, she's like, yeah, fine. We can do it. So we did, we turned it around. We gave her these reports. All of a sudden she had this visibility. She could take these actions she could never take before. And now she's out there talking about us all the time, you know, and we're, we're with her for over a year now

because of this. And we are growing tightly in our relationship together and we're guiding her company in all sorts of areas of measurement Because we were willing to just say we made a mistake And I think that's the first thing that people sometimes don't do they kick it off to somebody else's problem We didn't we accept the responsibility again. Not our fault is our problem Let's solve that and then in doing that created a client for hopefully for life at this point who is actively promoting us anywhere She can because of the experience that we demonstrated to her.

Jim James (25:12)
Yeah, that's a wonderful story Mercer. And my experience is that clients start to lead the agency if the agency is not showing leadership themselves, right? They step into the vacuum and they, as entrepreneurs or business owners, they're used to solving problems. And if they feel that the vendor, the agency, the consultant isn't doing it rather than walk away, they try and sort of triage the situation themselves. So great, great share there. Thank you for that. And what about...

Mercer (25:21)
That's exactly right.

Direct. Yeah.

Jim James (25:42)
A number one tip then, Mercer, that you'd give as an entrepreneur to me as an Unnoticed entrepreneur, what would you

say?

Mercer (25:50)
I'll give it for those that are starting to have teams, entrepreneurs that are growing their teams, because the challenge is when you become an entrepreneur, a lot of entrepreneurs come in from the freelancer. They're really good at doing this thing, like copywriting or whatever it is, and then they start to hire a team of copywriters. Now all of a sudden you're an owner, and there's no training. It's just like you just become an owner the next day, right? And you're like, oh, now I'm an owner, now I'm a manager, now I'm a leader, how do I do all of this? And you end up becoming a wheel and spoke business model.

Everything revolves around you in the middle. Your team's constantly coming to you. You're feeling stressed out and you're like a bottleneck. So the project management is kind of the issue there. So what I would encourage people to think about is not so much managing products as much as reporting productivity and come up with systems that allow your team to report their productivity to you.

So the way that we do that is we will use a project management system, like a ClickUp or Asana. It doesn't matter what you use. They can all do this. But we sort of create filing cabinets, we call it, where we say, OK, what's the thing we're talking about? So for us, it's a win course, right? These courses, like how to set up Google Analytics or something like that. We'll create a course. This is the place we talk about the course.

And then we have them in their notes, right? We never complete the task. It's not a task like system. We just create this place to talk about the thing. And then we pass it to the different people who need to talk about it. Once it's done, right? And they've left their notes and everything. Once it's done, it goes back in the filing cabinet. It's not deactivated, because we're gonna do another update to the course eventually anyway, but it sits there. And when it's there, it's got all the notes from the last time that we updated it.

And then from the last time before that and last time before that, and it gets better and better and better, the more that people are using it, because we don't start over from scratch. And I think with project management, that happens a lot. People start over from scratch. So it's this idea of creating a place to talk about all the different things you do as a, as an organization, and then being able to record those places, not letting them disappear out of your system and holding all of that conversation there so that everyone's learning from each other from kind of what we reference it as your past self is helping your future self. Leave notes.

Leave your notes now for your future self for the next time they have to do this. So it's easier to do the next time, right? That sort of stuff. And we constantly teach our team to do that. So the system starts getting faster and faster and faster. And it doesn't involve me because they're helping each other out and they're learning to communicate with each other to get the work done so that I can free myself up from that wheel and spoke being in the center all the time. And instead go focus on building revenue, growing the company in different ways that I need to do to help grow the team so that they can get the goals achieved that they wanna do with their lives.

Jim James (28:21)
That's wonderful. Final question, got to be speedy because we're at 28 minutes now and I'm, you know, I'm trying to keep this show to under 30 minutes. A podcast that you'd recommend or a book. Which one would you

like to go for?

Mercer (28:32)
So selfishly, I'm going to recommend a podcast that I've recently started with a partner, Jeff Sauer, over at Data Driven You. But it's called Business Unfiltered. So if any of this kind of rings a bell, and you're kind of like, oh, it's kind of like what he thinks about, we talk about operations, business operations, how to structure, how to run teams. It's really that. The business of business is what that conversation is really about. So Business Unfiltered would be the podcast that I'd like to talk

Jim James (28:54)
All right, there you go. For those of you that would also like to get a hold of Mercer directly, how can they do that Mercer?

Mercer (29:02)
Great question. So it says measurementmarketing.io is our site so you can go there find us and there is a free membership which actually teaches that framework it actually I give away that course and that membership. So if you go to measurementmarketing.io/theunnoticed will get that free membership again measurementmarketing.io/theunnoticed.

Jim James (29:21)
I love that because Mercer has taken a leaf out of my own course, which I just launched, the Podcast Guest  Blueprint, which is to leave an offer for the audience because we'd like for you to get something from listening to the conversation Mercer and I are having. I mean, you'll have information, but also we'd love for you to be able to take action on the information that you shared. So Mercer, thank you so much for joining me from Austin, Texas today.

Mercer (29:47)
Thanks, Jim. It's been a pleasure. Thanks again for having me.

Jim James (29:49)
Well, it's been my pleasure and one of the joys of being a podcast host is I get to learn, you know, from every guest information. And for me, one of the main takeaways from Mercer's sharing today is that there's a solution that analytics isn't just about being good at numbers. It's about there's an option and an offer there to find what you need to take in terms of action against the insights and the numbers that we keep getting. So.

For those of us that are not numbers people, but marketing people as entrepreneurs, that's gonna be a great reward. So I encourage you to go to measurementmarketing.io/theunnoticed. Until we meet again, just encourage you to keep on communicating. Thanks for listening to this episode with me, your host, Jim James with Mercer in Austin, Texas.