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If you’ve ever stared at a marketing report and thought, “Now what?”—this episode is for you. Jeff Sauer joins us to unpack the difference between measuring your marketing and building a measurement-first strategy that actually improves it. From smarter planning to practical use of AI, Jeff shares a framework that helps business owners stop guessing and start growing.
Why Your Marketing Data Isn’t Working for You (And How to Fix It)
You log into Google Analytics, stare at a sea of numbers, charts, and percentages, and walk away more confused than when you started. Sound familiar? Most small business owners have fallen into what is often referred to as the “data trap”—collecting tons of information but getting zero actionable insights.
I recently sat down with measurement marketing expert Jeff Sauer to figure out why this happens to so many smart business owners, and more importantly, how to fix it. What Jeff shared might just save your sanity (and your marketing budget) too.
The Problem: You’re Doing Marketing Measurement, Not Measurement Marketing
Here’s where most of us go wrong. We launch a marketing campaign, set up some basic tracking in Google Analytics, and hope for the best. When the campaign is running, we look at the dashboard and see… well, numbers. Lots of them. But what do they actually mean?
Jeff calls this traditional approach “marketing measurement”—you do marketing first, then try to figure out how to measure it afterward. The result? Dashboards you never look at, overwhelming reports that don’t tell you what to do next, and that sinking feeling that you’re missing something important.
I’ve seen this countless times when taking over client accounts. They’ll have a 100% conversion rate because they’re tracking page views as conversions. Every person who visits their site is technically “converting,” but obviously, that’s not telling them anything useful about their actual business results.
The solution Jeff proposes flips this entirely. Instead of “marketing measurement,” he advocates for “measurement marketing”—starting with the end results you want and working backward to create a tracking system that actually helps you make better decisions.
The Framework That Changes Everything
Jeff has developed a nine-step framework that takes you from “marketing in the blind” to having predictable, scalable results. But don’t worry—it’s not as overwhelming as it sounds. The framework is organized into three phases of three steps each.
Phase 1: Plan (Before You Do Anything)
This is where the magic happens, and it’s all about something Jeff calls “QIA”:
Questions: What specific results are you looking for, and how are you currently getting those results? Not vague goals like “more traffic,” but concrete questions like “Which traffic sources are sending us the highest-value customers?”
Information: What specific behaviors do you need to track to answer those questions? This might include tracking which pages people visit before buying, how long they spend on key pages, or which email campaigns drive the most qualified leads.
Actions: If specific scenarios happen, what will you do? For example, if your conversion rate drops below 2%, do you optimize the landing page, adjust your ad targeting, or review your offer? Having these decisions made ahead of time prevents panic-driven changes that usually make things worse.
This planning phase may feel like extra work, but it’s actually the secret to everything else working smoothly. It’s like having a GPS for your marketing—you know exactly where you’re going and how to get there.
Phase 2: Build (Setting Up Your System)
Once you’ve got your plan, you move into building out the actual tracking. This involves three components:
Results: Setting up proper conversion tracking that measures what matters to your business, not just vanity metrics.
Traffic: Implementing proper UTM tracking so you know exactly which marketing efforts are driving which outcomes.
Story: Creating a system that connects your traffic and results into a coherent narrative about what’s working and what isn’t.
The key here is that you’re building everything with intention. You’re not just throwing Google Analytics on your site and hoping for the best—you’re creating a measurement system designed specifically for your business goals.
Phase 3: Launch (Making It Work in the Real World)
Finally, you launch your campaigns and start collecting real data. But here’s where measurement marketing really shines compared to traditional approaches:
Listen: You’re comparing actual results to your plan. Is reality matching your expectations, or are there surprises?
Forecast: Because you’ve been intentional about what you’re measuring, you can now use your data to predict future performance.
Optimize: When something isn’t working, you know exactly what to fix instead of making random changes and hoping for the best.
Why This Beats A/B Testing for Most Small Businesses
Jeff argues that measurement marketing is often better than traditional A/B testing for small businesses. Why? Because most small businesses simply don’t have enough traffic to get statistically significant test results.
Instead of running tests comparing two completely different approaches (and hoping one works), measurement marketing helps you identify the specific point where your funnel is broken. Then you fix that one thing instead of rebuilding everything from scratch.
Think of it like finding a leak in your plumbing. You don’t need to test two different pipe systems—you need to find the leak and patch it. Measurement marketing gives you that diagnostic capability.
How AI Makes This Easier Than Ever
If the technical side of setting up proper tracking sounds intimidating, here’s some good news: AI can handle most of the heavy lifting. Jeff has created custom GPTs that walk you through the entire framework and can even help generate the tracking codes you need.
Instead of spending weeks learning Google Tag Manager or trying to figure out UTM parameters, you can ask AI to create exactly what you need based on your specific business goals.
The key is using AI as a strategic partner, not just a reporting tool. While Google Analytics might eventually build more AI features, right now they don’t understand your specific business strategy. But ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini can help you translate your business goals into actionable tracking setups.
Getting Started: Your First Steps
If you’re ready to stop drowning in data and start swimming toward real insights, here’s how to begin:
Start with the QIA framework for just one marketing campaign or channel. Ask yourself: What questions do I need answered? What information do I need to collect? What actions will I take based on different scenarios?
Don’t try to fix everything at once. Pick one part of your marketing funnel that’s clearly not working and apply measurement marketing principles to just that piece.
Join communities of people who are thinking about measurement the same way you are. Jeff’s MeasureU community is a great place to start, and you’ll find templates and resources that make implementation much easier.
Remember, the goal isn’t to become a data scientist overnight. It’s to create a simple, focused system that gives you the insights you need to make better marketing decisions. Most successful measurement marketing implementations focus on just a few key metrics that directly impact revenue, not dozens of vanity metrics that look impressive but don’t drive business results.
The Bottom Line
Your marketing data should make your job easier, not harder. If you want to be an Agent of Change for your business, you need better data and better reports to make better decisions.
The difference between marketing measurement and measurement marketing might seem subtle, but it’s the difference between having data and having insights. One leaves you guessing about what to do next. The other gives you a clear roadmap for growth.
The businesses that thrive in today’s competitive landscape aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest marketing budgets. They’re the ones with the clearest understanding of what’s working, what isn’t, and exactly what to do about it. Measurement marketing is how you join their ranks.
Measurement Marketing Framework Secrets Episode Transcript
Rich: My next guest is the co-founder of Measure Holding Groups LLC, which represents the brands. MeasureU.com, profitschool.com, and measuresummit.com. He’s a business coach, award-winning blogger, university lecturer, and was the owner of a five-time Inc. 5,000 award-winning agency that was acquired back in 2021.
A firm believer in data-driven marketing, he has frequently been named as one of the top 25 Most Influential PPC Experts, and his work has been featured in many industry publications and best of lists.
He has had over 50,000 digital marketers enroll in his marketing training programs, and has delivered over a hundred keynote presentations and workshops in 20 countries. He wants to make you be empowered to take control of your business, offers, products and systems so they can become a strength and something you enjoy doing, leading to a more profitable business.
Today we’re going to be talking about all things measurement marketing with Jeff Sauer. Jeff, welcome to the program.
Jeff: Hey Rich, thanks for having me. I’m really excited about this.
Rich: So you are now partnering up with friend of the show, Chris Mercer, AKA Mercer, to become a dominant leader in all things measurement marketing. How did that come to be?
Jeff: Yeah, so it’s a “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” scenario. So Mercer and I, we never really met in person, but we both had started around 2015 online teaching courses. Both of us taught, actually, I think in a classroom before we went online. We were always doing courses for other people. I did them for a lot of online institutes, Mercer was doing stuff for Digital Marketer, and so we never actually met. And we were always the person that one group chose as their analytics teacher.
And then we got introduced through some mutual friends a couple times in late 20 teens, Peep Laja from Conversion XL, Julian from Measure School, and they’re like, “You guys should meet”. And I was like, I don’t want to meet this guy. I don’t really want to, he’s competition. I don’t really like him. I don’t like looking at him. I don’t, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Long story short, we started talking, and it turns out he’s super generous. He’s as generous with his competitors as he is with his students. And I was almost like, what’s the catch here? Why is this guy being so nice? Why is he telling me all this stuff, he shouldn’t be? And it turns out that’s just his personality. So we liked talking so much that we did the next call, and then we did the next call, and then we said, hey, we should turn this into a podcast.
And so we started podcasting together. And then about seven months into the podcast, hearing how he thinks about the world and how I think of the world, I said, “Let’s become business partners”. And he’s like, “Hmm, never even considered that. But I’m open to the idea.” And within about 30 days, we had decided we’re going to become business partners.
And then we spent all of 2024 merging, integrating, getting everything working. And now we’re really ready to take on the world in ways that we hadn’t been able to do before. And really the main thing is that we just had really complimentary skills and we had a lot of the things that we figured it’d be like multiplier force, multiplier, one plus one equals 10 situation.
Rich: Awesome. That’s fantastic. Love that story.
Alright, so speaking of measurement marketing, I’m wondering, what is the difference between marketing measurement and measurement marketing?
Jeff: Yeah. And why does ChatGPT, or actually not ChatGPT, why does Google try to auto correct you all the time when you put ‘measurement marketing’ down or they think that you got it wrong?
It’s a counter play to mediocrity. And so the proper way to say this sentence in the English language would be “marketing measurement”. Because you think of marketing first, then you think of measurement second. And that actually is the problem. When you say marketing measurement, it means that your objective is to do marketing and then figure out a way to measure it later on. And what that results in is dashboards you never look at, data overwhelm, whatever it is, all these different situations. Data, big data, needing to mine the data in order to get insights and nobody really finds any value. You have surface level metrics, like impressions, maybe some clicks, maybe conversion, yet everything’s a conversion, so you have a hundred percent conversion rate, and you can’t really optimize anything.
And ultimately, people say either my marketing’s working or it’s not. But you don’t really know why. You don’t really know the story in between. And so that’s traditional marketing measurement. It’s been around for a long time. I can’t believe that every day a new person learns measurement but doesn’t understand how it actually should be. And you would think that the industry would be so mature right now that I wouldn’t even need to explain the difference.
But ultimately, I do need to explain the difference because people are marketers first and their data people last, and that’s really indicative of the quality of analysis they’re doing. Whereas measurement marketing is the opposite. You start with what the result you’re looking for is, and then you use measurement, and you use data, and you use tracking, all these technologies to hone in your results to get the precise answer as to how do you make your marketing better.
And so what it does is it puts you in a position of you have to do a little bit more work upfront, but not a lot. And actually with AI, most AI can do most of that work for you. ChatGPT is very well versed in what measurement marketing is, so you can actually have it spit out all that you need to do through AI. But the answer is that you do a little bit of upfront work to be more intentional with what you’re measuring, more focused on the result you’re looking for. And then you might choose channels based on your strategy.
And when you do that, you’re going to find that it’s a lot easier to tell if it’s working or not. You’re going to find that it’s a lot more practical, the results that you’re measuring, and then you’re going to be able to forecast things into the future to get better results over and over again because you’re really pinpointing the things that you need to do to be successful with measurement. So instead of being a top in approach, it’s more of a bottom-up approach. You’re building this thing from the ground up with measurement marketing.
Rich: All right. And I’ve definitely gone into clients’ websites that we’ve taken over and seen that a hundred percent conversion rate, because page view was the conversion they were measuring. And every time somebody visited a page, check that box. So yeah, I’ve seen that problem.
So you have this framework that you’ve developed called the Measurement Marketing Framework. Can you walk me through the key concepts in that?
Jeff: Yeah, for sure. And this will help you understand what measurement marketing is. So it’s not just like an idea of countering marketing measurement, it’s actually a framework that gives you a way to look at the entire world that you’re living in marketing.
And it’s a nine-step framework. And the idea is to go from what we call ‘marketing in the blind’ to having predictable and scalable results with your marketing, which is all what we want. We want our marketing to be consistent because there’s already enough variables in marketing, there’s already enough challenges, there’s platform changes, there’s a technical know-how. There’s all kinds of stuff that you have to deal with.
The last thing we want is that it performed differently today than tomorrow and the next day. And then you’d have no idea why. Or the person who left your account is gone and now you have no idea how to read the reports. Or they set something up based on their limited knowledge, but they didn’t have any consistency. So this framework allows you to be consistent with what you do.
It’s very strategic, so it starts with the answers and then works its way back to the results you’re going to do, and it’s just more clear of what to do. So if you’ve ever been overwhelmed by what do I do? This is just telling you, here’s the nine things that I would look at in order to get to knowing what to do. Now nine things might sound overwhelming, but it’s pretty straightforward.
So the first thing is we have a plan phase. It’s phase one. And the plan is, it’s three things. We call it QIA. You need questions, which is like what are the results that you’re looking for and how are you getting those results? So the questions like, what questions do you want to answer from having data from measuring your marketing.
Next thing is what information? Information, which is, what behaviors do you need to collect in order to know the answer, to enhance that?
And then finally, what actions. So if this happens, what actions would you want to take? So for example, if our conversion rate is a hundred percent, what would we do? If our conversion rate is less than 1%, what would we do? So basically, role playing and saying what you would do in the scenario when this hits the real world and having that plan for that before you even start measuring.
Now, it sounds like you run ads. I’ve run ads many times. And anything around marketing, what ends up happening is as soon as it doesn’t match, either you don’t have a plan, like the agency doesn’t have a plan, or the client doesn’t have a plan, or they don’t really know what they want. And then as soon as something happens in the market, you get either emotional and you get reactive, or you throw the plan out the window or you don’t really know what to do. Or you’re not even measuring something and so you’re like, why is this working? Or why is it not working? It’s not very intentional.
But if you do that before you put this into the market, now you’re like saying, hey, if this works, here’s what we’re going to do. And then everybody’s on the same page. So you’re not just guessing at that point. You’re doing what you think you need to do, what the company agreed on doing. So that’s the first step. We call it planning because we’re not putting a line of code on a website, we’re not doing anything. We’re just coming up with these answers and we are using that as. or not even answers. We’re coming up with the framework and then we’re saying, hey, is this good to you? Clients who get it, they’ll be like, yeah, this is good. Sometimes they might need some compromise. They might need to change things around, but that’s the whole point.
They say in the coding world, it’s easier to catch something in the UX design. It costs almost nothing to change something when it’s in a design file. Once you write code, it’s more expensive to change it. And then once it’s quality assured, it’s almost impossible to change it, right? Same thing with your marketing. It’s easier to catch these things sooner and get on the same page. So it just lets everybody take a beat, pause, and say, “Hey, we’re going to go and this is what we’re going to do if this works, if it’s doesn’t work, these are the scenarios we’re going to play.”
And then you build it out. So the next one is you build, and that’s a three-step process as well. What results do you want? How many users are going to ask, consider, and transact with you? Traffic, who’s sending you traffic? What type of traffic and why are they sending it? To understand your traffic.
And then story, which is a combination of your results and your traffic. What is a story that ended up happening here? Piecing together a story, these are real humans coming to our website. Why did they do that? What happened? What could we do better? What didn’t go well? What do we need to improve? And that just gives you a pretty clear input as to why it worked or not.
Rich: And are we at this point looking at actual data that’s coming in, or are we still hypothesizing about what we expect to see or what the framework is that we’re going to be paying attention to?
Jeff: Yeah. While you’re building it, you’re being intentional with what is the result we’re looking for? Making sure you have your conversion set traffic, making sure that your traffic is tagged properly with UTM codes and everything like that. And then story is really just a little bit of tying it back to the first step while you’re doing this.
So you are in the build phase, you are putting the code on your site, you are putting these things in place, you are putting the tracking in place as much as possible to get that in place. So you will be building, you’ll be putting it on your site. You probably won’t be doing as much analysis because you’re just waiting for that initial data to come in. There could be some challenges. There could be something wasn’t implemented properly or on time. So you’re it’s like your test month of starting to collect the data.
Rich: So if I’m planning on putting on a presentation here in town under the brand Flyte School, in the build stage maybe I’m starting to think about the UTM or writing out the UTM codes that I’m going to be using for tracking and all this sort of stuff. Am I planning out or working on the ad campaigns or the other marketing stuff that I’ll be doing at this point, or is that still to come?
Jeff: Yeah, so I think with results you’re going to be talking about what your action is. So what is your conversion metric and what is your success? And then traffic is what channels are you going to use? So you would be saying, and actually the framework is pretty agnostic to traffic. It accepts any traffic as long as you tag it properly. So later on, in a later step, you can then do individual channel level analysis.
But the cool thing is a channel level analysis is tied to the result, and it’s tied to the user journey as opposed to just ad platform saying you got a conversion or you didn’t. So it’s multidimensional, which is really nice. And then that allows you to create that story, which is such an important piece of everything that you’re doing. And so they do work hand in hand. You don’t like, it’s all right if we are talking about setting up measurement marketing, not necessarily setting up marketing campaign, but they work hand in hand. So as long as you have this in place before you run traffic to something, you will have the benefits of measurement marketing.
Rich: Understood. Excellent. All right. Yeah.
Jeff: And the ability to adjust. And then the third step is you launch it. So you get this into the marketplace. The first thing is, and you all know we all have a plan until we get punched in the mouth, like as according to Mike Tyson, right? So we’re listening like, is this matching our plan? Is this what we thought was going to happen? Forecast. Can we use the results to forecast what will happen next week, next month?
Our dashboards are so sophisticated that by taking those questions, information, and actions from the first step and what the actions are, we can program that into the dashboard, so you know if you’re on track or not. By answering that stuff earlier on, we end up building that into the later dashboard, so you know if you’re on track or not. Which is great because then you can say, hey, we expected you’d be at 55% of people would do this. Only 45% are doing it, and that’s why you’re not hitting your numbers. And then, that’s where you need to make the adjustment is to that percentage, that little part of the entire funnel or of the funnel instead of the entire funnel, right?
And then the final step is optimize. And what happens when you optimize? You go and fix that. So basically, measurement marketing is better than marketing measurement because we are purposeful, and we are intentful. I think that measurement marketing is better than conversionary optimization. Conversionary Optimization, or CRO and A/B testing. And I don’t mean all conversionary optimization, I specifically mean A/B testing. A/B testing, what ends up happening is you’re basically saying, let’s run a test to figure out if wildly different version A works better than wildly different version B, and let’s put some math behind it and some statistics.
Most sites don’t get enough traffic to make that happen. And most of them are basically saying, we don’t know what our strategy is, so let’s try two strategies. Because then we have a 50/50 chance of getting it right because compared to if we do one strategy, we have a hundred percent chance of getting it wrong because we know it’s wrong. So testing in that sense doesn’t really make sense.
However, if you say, hey, let’s tag our site for these actions. Let’s say what our benchmarks are, what we’re trying to hit, and then let’s give us a visual representation of where we’re falling short. You’re not having to do an A/B test, you’re fixing. You’re just fixing the one thing that’s broken. You’re fixing the thing that’s broken on your funnel as opposed to having two different funnels and hoping that one of them works.
Rich: Makes a lot of sense. And I think most of the people that listen to this podcast probably fall into that camp of we’re not getting massive numbers of people to our website. Anywhere from a few hundred to maybe 10,000 or 20,000. That’s going to be a big difference. Maybe on the high end you’re getting some good data for some maybe split testing, but for most people there’s just not enough data points there.
So if we implement this framework and once we’ve got it in place, what are some of the, it’s very easy to feel overwhelmed. I think you even used that word before. When you see some of these reports, when you are working with people, are there like three to five critical KPIs that almost every business needs, or is it a case by case basis? And how do we figure out what the KPIs are that lead to that bottom line revenue?
Jeff: Yeah, so this is going to sound… You won’t even believe this, but we don’t really use the word KPIs all that much. And it’s because ultimately, all the planning ends up becoming your KPI. So it’s more around what are the actions that you want somebody to take? What are the questions you want to answer? And what’s the information you need? And that’s ultimately like a proxy for our KPI.
So our QIA steps help you figure out what traditionally are called KPIs. But it’s not like we’re saying like out of this thing you’re saying, “Hey, let’s do a KPI of purchase value and then add to cart rate” and stuff like that. We don’t think in those terms, because ultimately that is, I think that sort of makes these metrics try to be magic bullets. It’s the overall view, the view of what’s happening. And we look at it as like an overall holistic process. Hey, you have a sales page you’re sending people to and you want somebody to buy. We’re giving you a dashboard as to every single place where they stop the buying process. And so that’s not, you don’t really need a KPI to say that.
Ultimately, if we put a gun to my head and say, what are the KPIs? It’s probably sales leads. It’s whatever your conversion action is, that’s the KPI. But everything else it’s really, we call it, Eyes on the Journey. For example, we have a funnel of the five eyes of where they drop off in the process. We have the expected funnel, add to cart rates, and those types of things. That is our KPIs. But we’re not looking at it like, it’s not quantitative, it’s diagnostic.
So I think that’s the difference in thinking. We are using this as a diagnostic tool as opposed to saying, report on these three things and everything will be solved. We’re giving you 10 things that are potential, but hopefully only one of them really matters. Because if you fix that one thing, it gets the water to go down the funnel. It fixes the clog.
Rich: Understood. It fixes a clog, or at least you patch up all the leaks along the way so more of the leads actually reach wherever you want to have them end up.
Now we can’t have a conversation about marketing and not bring up AI. So you mentioned AI earlier, and you can lean into it when you’re setting up a lot of these processes. How are you using AI to get better measurement?
Jeff: Yeah, so AI is incredible, right? Just first of all, we do what we call ‘AI first’. So our Profit School brand, everything is AI first. And that is, instead of even asking another human, ask AI to make you smarter.
The analogy I’ve been using lately is that as AI gets to artificial general intelligence, which means that it has an IQ over 180 or whatever. It basically means that you have the smartest human being ever on your shoulder talking to you. So you have Albert Einstein on one shoulder and Stephen Hawking on the other one. And so why wouldn’t you ask them what they think about something before you even talk to a human? It makes your ideas better, it refines them, and it kills a lot of bad ideas, and it puts fire on a lot of good ideas. So that’s pretty cool, right? So when it comes to marketing or measuring your marketing, to the measurement marketing it can do a lot of stuff.
First of all, I mentioned that it can be intimidating or a little bit challenging to set up something like measurement marketing, because it makes you make decisions earlier. And a lot of times marketers just punt decisions over and over again and they rely on instinct. And I don’t want to make a decision, I just want to put something in the market and let the market decide. So this one allows you to answer those questions sooner with AI.
So if I said, what questions should I ask? AI will give you the answer. And then you can put it through the human filter of what your business, whether those things may make sense or not. What information do I need? What action should I be doing? Chat with AI. I’ve actually created a measurement marketing custom agent custom GPT in ChatGPT. I’ve created one in Google and Google Gemini, and it basically maps you through the framework and tells you exactly how to fill it out. So it’s like a cheat sheet for this exam on how to do things. It’s just there for you. So it’s a cheat sheet for you.
If people are intimidated by putting code on their site to track these things. Because it’s easier to say I want these three KPIs, and if Google Analytics has those things in there, you’re like, I’m covered. My KPI is bounce rate and Google has it in there. Awesome. I don’t need to learn code, I don’t need to do anything. Well, the reality is that’s a crappy KPI. Bounce rate is not a metric when you don’t have metrics. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s basically like a default. It’s like saying I give up and I’m just lazy. Either lazy or you don’t have the knowledge. And I’m not accusing people of being lazy, necessarily. But yes, if you don’t do it, if you don’t think about these problems, it’s lazy to choose bounce rate as a KPI. Trust me, I’ve seen a thousand reports that have done it though, and I’ve been on a personal mission to stop that.
Anyway, rant over. So we get into the point where eventually, if you want to be above average and you want to actually do these things, you probably need to code your site a little bit and customize it. AI does that. I gave examples where it tells you what tags in Google Tag Manager? What are your triggers? What actual code do you put in there? What values do you put in there? It creates a table where you put that stuff in there. So all these things that used to require knowledge or buying a course or something like that, you can actually get the answer. And then suddenly, and all you really need is just the confidence and the experience and the syntax to do that, to get this thing in place. And now you’re doing measurement marketing.
So it’s actually not like, we always say it’s a 90-day process. I think that the first time you do it, it might be 90 days if you include learning curves and everything like that, for the rest of your life. But the next time you do it, it could be in a couple days because it’s that efficient. And AI can really cut that learning curve down in every way possible.
Rich: So when you’re using AI, you’re not talking about the AI that’s built into some platforms. You are talking about using a separate AI like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, to help you through the process of getting these things set up. Is that correct?
Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. That’s one use case. And that’s exactly a good use case for it right now as far as saying, “Hey, what if I use an AI feature in Google Analytics to do all my analysis for me?” That wouldn’t really be congruent with our framework because Google Analytics doesn’t understand our framework.
If it was built on it, that would be great, but they don’t have the customization necessary to do that. You can change a few things around, but ultimately most of our analysis isn’t happening in the analytics tool anyway. The clickstream analytics tool, it’s happening in the dashboard, it’s happening in the visualization. And that’s another one where you can use AI to tell you how to visualize these things.
We have our templates. So it’s a combination of even the free resources that our MeasureU community, plus AI, plus these templates that we give away for free as well, that really fill in all those blanks. So it’s a combination of these things. If I were to say there’s an AI tool that’s going to solve your problem, the closest one is probably Microsoft Clarity, which is built by Microsoft. They have their great relationship with OpenAI. That one is starting to do some analysis for you. But again, that analysis is only as good as what inputs you give it and what you tell it your strategy is.
And so Google Analytics doesn’t really distinguish between what type of website you have, any of that stuff. They’re way behind on this and they’re not even close to giving you insights yet. Maybe at some point it’ll be there, but for now, really the answer is you would use AI to make sure that these tools match your strategy versus the other way around, that their AI strategy is your strategy.
Rich: So it’s more like these Google Analytics is more like a viewing tool, so you can see how people came to your website, maybe what their behavior is. But in terms of getting this more accurate data, or maybe not accurate, but this data that can help you measure more accurately, build out better processes, build out better campaigns, that’s really the leverage of the AI. And you’re using that in these third party LLMs, if that’s what I’m understanding correctly.
Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. Within reason. I know it’s a little bit complicated, but yeah, you’re not using AI for Google Analytics. Google Analytics basically is your database. It’s your repository that collects all the data that’s happening, helps you deal with things like consent. Especially in a privacy-led world, like if people are opting out of cookies and stuff like that. It’s still your repository where you store things. It’s storage for you, but then it’s how you take that stored data and then you visualize it, you represent it, you match it to your strategy. That’s the important thing. And that’s really, it’s a combination.
Right now you’re using a combination of the framework plus AI to help you build that out, to do more of the coding piece, the technical stuff right now. But you can still use it for analysis. Like in ChatGPT, there’s custom GPTs that allow you to upload a data file and it will do analysis for you. The only challenge with that is just getting the data ready to go, it’s exporting the data. It’s still a pretty technical endeavor to get data out of one system and into another system, which I hope changes soon, because that will help you with the analysis. It’s just what quality of the analysis will it be if it doesn’t understand your strategy.
Rich: You mentioned that you had created a custom GPT based on your framework. Is that something that’s in the ChatGPT marketplace, or how does one get that their hands on that?
Jeff: Yeah, by the time this episode goes live, it should be live in the marketplace. So you’d be able to do the measurement marketing custom GPT on ChatGPT.
Rich: Cool. If somebody wanted to implement your measurement marketing framework, what is the first step or two that they should take to get started?
Jeff: Yeah, so they can join our community. We have a really thriving and vibrant community of people who are interested in this. There’s a chat, there’s a bunch of resources in our toolbox, and there’s even an occasional live training they can get into, and they can watch workshops and stuff like that. It’s the place to be, and that’s over at measureu.com. You can join our community. I think it’s still free, but we are going to charge for it once we reach a certain number of people. But I think as they’re listening to this, just assume that it’s free.
And then you get that stuff, and you can get a PDF of the framework. I’m actually looking at it right now. You have templates, everything you need in order to implement these things. Plus some pretty high-level training on how to do the basic steps. And then if you need more help, you can take courses and stuff like that. Those are premiums so we do charge for the courses, and we have live implementation, so we have coaches who would help you through this stuff live, multiple times a week.
And so the biggest step is to get familiar with the framework, watch some of those videos, and then start to fill out the templates we give you. Like, what questions do you want to answer, or do you want to ask? What information do you need? What are you going to do if this works? And that’s really how you get started. It’s pretty quick, pretty easy to grasp. Just like anything that’s new, to change your mindset from the old way of doing things to the new ways, it can be a little bit uncomfortable or challenging to do that, but that’s growth. We call that building muscle, and we call that really building that de mote around your business, around your career and everything.
So going to our community is a really good place to start. And then, even just having the plan, like you can get to the point where you’re asking the questions, you’re looking for the information and the actions, this is the key steps. And if you don’t think this is going to be useful to implement it, go back to the way you’re doing it. But honestly, there’s people who are like celebrities in our industry who are like, once I saw QIA I couldn’t unsee it, and I can’t go back to the old way of doing things. And that’s the hook right there.
Rich: Nice. If people want to learn more about you, Jeff, if they want to learn more about MeasureU, where do we send them?
Jeff: Yeah, so measureu.com as I mentioned, they can join the community there. I also do something called Profit School. It’s about AI-first business, and that’s where we talk about how to do this for your business, not just for your marketing measurement, but for everything. I do a weekly newsletter that we publish. We publish newsletters for MeasureU and for Profit School. We have an annual conference at Measure Summit. So you had mentioned these in the intro, but it’s measureu.com, profitschool.com, and measuresummit.com.
They’re for specific audiences, sometimes there’s some overlap. But the idea here is to push you forward into the new era, the new way of doing things. The ‘AI first’ way of doing things as much as possible, whether it’s for measuring your marketing or if it’s for your business itself. So those are the places where you can find us.
Rich: Awesome. And we’ll have all those links in the show notes. Jeff, thanks so much for coming by today.
Jeff: Yeah, thanks for having me, Rich. Really enjoyed this.
Show Notes:
Jeff Sauer is a business coach, university lecturer, and co-founder of MeasureU, where he helps marketers build data-driven systems that actually work. Head to measureu.com for free resources, and consider joining Profit School or attending his annual Measure Summit conference.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.