Actionable Analytics and Client Retention, with Iris Shoor
On this episode of THRIVE — sponsored by Workamajig — Kelly and Iris Shoor talk shop about how Oribi takes the guesswork out of customer journey analytics and campaign attribution to help agencies improve performance and retain clients.
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Episode 102 Links
Oribi: oribi.io/thrive
YouTube Channel: youtube.com/channel/UCboltXvff1KfeCHpQbY_8PA/
Vimeo Channel: vimeo.com/agencyscaler
TRANSCRIPT:
Episode 102: Actionable Analytics and Client Retention, with Iris Shoor
Duration: 20:48
Kelly: So welcome back to Thrive, your agency resource. We’re going to get a little more analytical today than we usually do. My guest today is Iris Shoor. She’s the founder and CEO of Oribi, which is a software company that offers a little more insightful information as an alternative to Google Analytics. So, I’m really excited about it because I always felt like Google Analytics had a little bit of a monopoly in the industry. And there was a lot of data that wasn’t necessarily actionable, especially for my team when I had my agency. So I know if that’s been an issue for you, you’re really going to love today’s conversation. Iris, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show and welcome.
Iris: Thank you.
Kelly: So, let’s talk a little bit about this idea that as a startup, as a founder, you saw this incredible gap in the market, as we all see some of those things, but you actually went ahead and built something that could actually address some of the issues that we’ve all had with Google Analytics. So, I’d love to hear what you were seeing in the market and how you went about building Oribi?
Iris: Sure. So Oribi is my third company. I had two different startups in the past. The first one was acquired. The second one is still going and doing well. Each one was very different. The first one was around 3D modeling. The second one was for developers. And in both of them, I led the marketing. I was always very, very passionate about marketing and always found it amazing how hard it is to be data driven. I believe that all marketers, the more data savvy we want and the more creative we want, we all want to be data driven. And we all want to understand if what we’re doing will have an impact. And today, it’s so hard to measure it. So I was always amazed by how hard it is to ask the very basic questions just to understand what’s unique about the user segment to sign up to a product. And what happens on a specific page that most people leave it and so on. And with my previous company that was always about using lots of developers and using Google Analytics. I would say, it’s a very rich tool. There is a reason that editing dominates the market. But most people don’t really like it. So it’s very technical. It’s pretty complex. And you need to have the resources in order to collect all the data. And we felt that the window changing and editor is a place for a much leaner and easier tool and it doesn’t rely on developers and it will enable the marketing team to be more agile and more independent and to analyze things themselves.
Kelly: Yeah. All music to my ears, right? Of course, as marketers, we want to be more agile. We don’t necessarily want to rely on our developers. We love our developers, but we’d rather utilize them for the heavier technical lifts.
Iris: Yeah. We love developers. They’re not crazy about the marketing tasks. That’s the issue.
Kelly: Right. So talk a little bit about this no code approach, because there’s so many beautiful benefits to Oribi, but like the developer cost savings, and the ability, from a resource allocation standpoint, to use your developers for what they are most skilled at, as opposed to dealing with Google Analytics, like attribution and event setup and things like that. Talk a little bit about that no code approach and how you’ve seen marketing agencies really lean into that.
Iris: Yeah, definitely. So when I first asked myself what is wrong with marketing analytics today, I think some of these answers were about the user interface, analyzing data, getting more insights. But definitely the first barrier is just collecting the very basic data error and being able to see all the data was around using the developer. So most of the companies and that’s also an experience that I experienced myself, don’t manage to collect all the data. So usually not the very low number of events. So we know who signed up, who purchased the product, but everything in between is kind of like a blind spot to us because of this issue. And I think there are different types of companies. SMBs usually don’t have dev resources at all. And therefore, when they set up Google Analytics or another tool for the first time, do some events, but never changes, sense of setup. And for other companies and more address companies, they always hear the same, that there is a bottleneck around dev resources, that it usually takes weeks to months until they add a new event, and that the data is limited. And that’s why I decided to focus with Oribi on building a technology that will enable us to collect all the data in a cordless way. In a way it’s like Shopify or Wix that we managed to disrupt the industry by allowing everybody to create your own website. Even though you could have said before that it’s pretty easy to build a website. You just need a WordPress developer for like a week or two, a really huge gap of allowing companies to do it themselves and that is what we are trying to do for the analytics world. And if you were to try out Oribi, you can see that we have this beautiful event builder. We track all the events that happen on the website. Everything is also retroactive. So at any given moment, you can say, okay, I want to see who explored my new products, who decided to sign up, who read my content. And another thing that we do that is very unique is that we really translate all the actions and buttons into meaningful events. So usually, you’re not interested in understanding how many people clicked a certain button. But you want to see how many people had high intent, how many people read your content, how many people decide to purchase, and it can have, like different ways to show up on the website. So, part of the core technology is about smart grouping and understanding of the key actions. And you have this catalog of all the different events on the website, and you just choose them. And then you can see which visitors performed each event to the finals based on this information to create reports, and to analyze campaigns, analyze email marketing, to really see that entire visitor journey without all the hassle of using developers.
Kelly: Right. And so, from an agency standpoint, a lot of us have employed more junior employees who may not necessarily have the experience to let’s say, when they were looking in Google Analytics to understand like, well, this data that I’m looking at, this actually is interpreted this way. And these are the actions that I need to take on the front end of the website in order to increase conversions, or in order to better understand that customer journey. So what this does, and I think, there again, there’s so many beautiful benefits to this. But what this does is it actually takes all of that guesswork out of that, so that it’s very plain to see this particular customer came to this page, this is the action that they took, here’s where they fell off. And there are actually some, I guess you would call like recommendations, or some suggestions that come out of Oribi to say here, if you were to do this, this might increase this number, which is brilliant, right? I mean, that’s what we all need.
Iris: Yeah. So the way I see marketing analytics is really taking all the tests that you perform the last week also and really understanding the impact. I think the main question that we need to ask ourselves as marketers is, how is this campaign converting? What is the impact of the last email blast that they send? What is the impact of the last video I produced or the last article that they sent? And with Google Analytics, their design is a bit outdated and it’s more about metrics, like time on site, bounce rate, and how many people visited each page. And what we’re trying to change is the concept of fast impact. So there might be a lower time on site for certain campaigns, but people could revert it beautifully. So it’s more about asking how each action impacted my key goals such as selling the products, getting signups and so on, and understanding the visitor journey. So it’s less about those website parameters. It’s more about visitors and the behavior and about impact and about really connecting the key use cases and the key things that you’ve been working on to results.
Kelly: I’m smiling because I remember having some of these conversations with clients of my former agency, and it was like, well, if one of our KPIs is to lower the bounce rate, what are we actually talking about? Right? Because if someone was googling, let’s say, this is a silly example, but googling, like the name of the company and the phone number, and the contact page actually came up in the search results, right? And Google, they clicked it, they went to that page, they found the phone number. And they either wrote the phone number down or clicked if they were on their mobile phone, or what have you. And the bounce rate is incredibly high on the contact page. And that’s because they actually got exactly what they needed. So in that case, the bounce rate was not negative. And so, when you think about what these KPIs really mean, I think your approach takes so much more of the actual human behavior and the impact into consideration, whereas you’re right, a lot of Google Analytics, the way that they’re measuring things, and by the way, those measurements themselves have not changed in a very long time, right?
Iris: So you’ve seen that these metrics represent the web for like, 15 years ago, when it was mostly about how many people visited my website, which pages they visit. And today, most of the transactions happen online. And that’s what we’re aiming for. And for understanding user behavior, so it’s not about page views. It’s about conversions.
Kelly: Yeah. No, I love that. What you’re really doing, essentially, what I’m hearing is that you’re tying humanity into technology, as opposed to technology for technology’s sake. And that’s where everything is going. So this is a really pertinent conversation. [Commercial]
Iris: Yeah. That’s like one perspective that we’re trying to implement within the product, that is to have the aggregated view, as well as individual view. So it seemed that there are always like two angles of viewing the behavior. One like 30% of the people that read my content eventually signed up, but you also see how individual users use the product. So you can actually see how people are reading your content, what they’re doing later, to really understand where they came from, what they have done in different sessions. And it’s really like peeking across the shoulder of your users and trying to understand what they’re doing. And I think that’s also something that we’re missing. So we’re so much into the high level numbers. And it’s also important to understand what users do. And to really see what they’re seeing.
Kelly: Yeah, so important. Yeah, it really gives you that insight. And so talk about that a little bit from the standpoint of integrations. So if you’re looking at this aggregated view, obviously, there have to be, I would imagine lots of integrations now, and I’m assuming ones that exist already. And then I’m assuming there are probably a lot of other ones kind of in the pipeline.
Iris: Yeah. So okay, just to make sure that we rely on you speaking about integrations of data coming from Oribi to other tools, right?
Kelly: Yes.
Iris: So as I mentioned, the main part of Oribi technology as differentiation between Oribi and other tools is being able to collect the entire customer journey in a tagged way without using code. When we started developing this technology, it was more about Oribi. So how to use marketing analytics in a better way. You don’t need to use developers. And then we started to get lots of requests for customers asking, okay, this is an amazing event. And I want to create a lookalike audience on Facebook using this event. How do I do it? Or I want to create a segment on MailChimp. How do I do it? Or a new field on HubSpot. So that’s one direction that we took during the past year, and we’re going to double down on it during the next year, sending data to other platforms as well. So we have a very strong partnership with Facebook in which you can create cordless data to export to Facebook and create look-alikes, and conversion events. Based on age you can mix and match. So for example, you can say like I want to create a lookalike audience of all the users that signed up or used a chat or contacted us. So to create more accurate look-alikes. With all the recent changes of iOS 14, I wouldn’t say that we’re resilient to it. As we’re doing everything on the server side, we are able to collect more data to match the data more accurately, and everything without any privacy issues. So, we’re just imitating and sending the data as if it was created by using developers or code in a smart way and on the server side.
Kelly: That’s great. And then other integrations that are planned going forward.
Iris: Yeah, so probably that Klaviyo segment, Zapier, Salesforce. We’re trying to get to all the marketing tools and to enable this prebuilt customer journey data layer, without all the hassle around it.
Kelly: Yeah, it’s so amazing. So I hear that’s sort of like the next year of what you have planned. And then this past year, but really, this has only been, I guess, you’ve launched about two and a half years ago, and there are already 10,000 companies using this platform. It’s just really, really amazing. And also speaks to the benefits of it. So even though Google Analytics might be “free”, when you start to add up the cost of developers versus the cost of this, it’s kind of a no brainer.
Iris: It’s the cost of developers, but also the insights. I see so many companies today that spent tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars in mass marketing, as they don’t really understand what is the impact of each channel and each campaign. So every minor optimization, even if you are able to optimize your marketing efforts in like 2%, or 5%, if you’re not able to see the entire picture with your marketing analytics tools, it has a huge impact.
Kelly: Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about that impact because most of the agencies, the leaders and owners who are listening to this or watching this, what they actually care about is not so much the like, how did we get here, but it’s really more about how are we retaining clients? Like, is this something that can help them retain more clients simply because the results that they’re achieving for their clients are going to be that much better?
Iris: So yeah, what we had in mind when we built Oribi, was the main marketing use cases. So it’s paid acquisition, email marketing, content marketing, and using different channels for the website, website optimization. And what we’re emphasizing at Oribi is really about all the different touch points of visitors with this type of content. So let’s say for example, that you are producing lots of content marketing, and you don’t have many readers to the articles, and clients might say that you’re not doing a good job, you have only like 200 people a week reading the new articles. But if you’re able to show them that out of these 200 people, 20 converted, and you have this amazing match rate to conversions. So this is incredibly important. If you’re able to really understand, especially with all the mess that happens there right now with paid acquisition, attribution, and each platform attributing in a different way, those impact and it’s also things that are important for the marketing agencies themselves. So if for example, in writing amazing content, you have lots of failure. We’re able to drive a lot of visitors, but none of them convert, then you need to understand how to build a different strategy. And so one of the main pain points between agencies and clients, and the topic that we hear a lot is how to measure things. And if you’re able to show the results in a very simple way, and in a very clear way, it’s not about guessing and it’s not about different arguments, it is about how you see the numbers.
Kelly: Just the data.
Iris: Just the data, and then you’re able to show how much value you contribute.
Kelly: Yeah. Well, this is great. I definitely want to invite everyone to sign up for the seven-day free trial for Oribi. And if you would like to subscribe, once you are blown away by how insightful the data is, you can get 20% off of that subscription. You can either just mention it when you’re talking to someone in the chat or by phone, just mention Thrive. Or you can actually just go directly to oribi.io/thrive in order to pop onto that landing page. So, Iris, this is so great. I am so excited that you were able to join and talk a little bit about this. It’s an amazing tool. And thank you so much for building it and thanks for your time today.
Iris: Thank you.