In this episode of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast, I welcome back Chris Mercer (co-founder of MeasureU) to discuss how e-commerce store owners can transform their approach to data and understanding customer behavior. We dive deep into Microsoft Clarity, a powerful free tool that helps visualize how users interact with your website, and explore how AI can be leveraged strategically to enhance measurement and business operations. This conversation is packed with actionable insights that can help you understand what's really happening on your website and how to make data-driven decisions that boost conversions.
Key Takeaways:
- Microsoft Clarity: The Visual Analytics Game-Changer - Discover how this free tool provides heat maps, scroll tracking, and screen recordings that help you see your website through your customers' eyes. Learn how its built-in AI can analyze patterns across numerous user sessions to identify friction points you might otherwise miss.
- The Measurement Mindset Shift - Understand why e-commerce measurement is really about "listening" to the customer side of the digital conversation. Mercer explains why you should focus on behavior patterns rather than just conversion metrics, and how to set up proper expectations before analyzing data.
- From Data to Action - Learn the three-step framework for effective measurement: 1) Plan what questions you want to answer, 2) Gather the right information, and 3) Decide in advance what actions you'll take based on different potential outcomes.
- Strategic AI Implementation - Discover Mercer's revolutionary approach to using AI effectively. Rather than telling AI "how" to do something, learn to focus on communicating the desired result and letting AI determine the optimal path to get there.
- UTM Parameters and Traffic Identification - Find out why properly tagging your traffic sources is critical for understanding which marketing efforts are working and how to optimize them for better performance.
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Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction
(04:41) What Is Microsoft Clarity?
(16:40) Shifting Your Mindset About Measurement
(19:10) How To Get The Most Out Of Microsoft Clarity
(33:52) The Measurement Framework
(42:36) Simplifying Measurement for Actionable Insights
(47:24) A New Approach To AI
(58:29) Conclusion
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Show Notes:
- Chris Mercer
- MeasureU
- Social Media Marketing World
- Michael Stelzner
- Mike Rhodes
- Ralph Burns
- Microsoft Clarity
- Why We Buy
- AutomateToWin.com
- Jeff Sauer
- Unreasonable Hospitality
- MeasureU.com/evolution
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Connect With Brett:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce
- Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/
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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more
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Transcript:
Chris:
E-commerce owners in particular need to understand how their stores are operating specific to the behaviors. It's not just about ROAS and ROI that's important, but it's about how you're getting ROAS and ROI.
Brett:
Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today I've got a long time friend, a return guest coming on to the pod, but we also discussed leading up to this that it's been too long. He was a guest, but it was years ago, plural, more than one. And so I've got on the pod with me today, Chris Mercer, AKA Mercer, probably nobody calls you Chris except for maybe your mom. I'm not really sure. But we're going to talk about some CRO stuff, some cool new tools. And then I think we might just blow your mind a little bit talking about the way Chris AKA Mercer is thinking about ai. And so we're going to dive into that. But with that, Mercer is the co-founder of Measure You and he and I go way back though because I think we were a couple of the OGs speaking at Traffic and Conversion Summit I think for maybe four years in a row, something like that. You may have spoken there more times than that, but I think it was four years in a row. Does that sound right to you?
Chris:
It was a while back. And then I think we may have crossed paths to it, the Social media marketing world, social media
Brett:
Marketing world, shout out to Michael Stelzner. Absolutely. Great event then. Yeah, I think the last pod we did Mercer was GA four
Chris:
Maybe. It probably was, yeah. Which makes it years ago because
Brett:
Kind of been an old story now
Chris:
Back universal to GA four days. Absolutely right.
Brett:
Yeah, that's awesome man. And so certainly want to hear what you got going on at Measure U. And I know for the longest time you talked to with smart people, Mike Rhodes or Ralph Burns or some of those guys, and if there was ever a question about measurement or how to set up your Google Analytics or how to really measure what's going on in your business, the response was always just go talk to Mercer. Right? He'll take care of you. And so delighted to have you back on the show, man. And so do you want to give everyone just a quick update on what's new with Measure U and kind of what you guys are building there?
Chris:
Yeah, absolutely. So measure u.com, so it's measured with the letter u.com. We've got a whole community out there. We've got a free community now with training resources and places for people to get help that are just sort of starting out. And then we've got the done to do it yourself level courses and everything else that's there for people of various techniques and skills if you're just starting out all the way to experienced people that need to level up. And then we've got done with you training. So we just sort of made this one stop shop where everybody can understand measurement because to your point, back when you and I were on those stages, first kind of meet and greet, this is what, a decade ago, we've probably been doing this stuff now. So it's like when that was around, there was pretty much Google Analytics and that was the tool. There was a tool, now there's thousands, there's Tag Manager, there's Looker Studio stuff, there's Big Query, people have to have first party databases. Now there's data transformation, there's all this stuff to try to keep up with in the measurement industry, measurement truly has become a department. And so Measure U is there to help educate and make sure that people in the companies have their skills in-house, whether it's a measurement department or just the marketers that understand how to use measuring to improve their results.
Brett:
And I can attest to the quality of the training as we have team members inside of OMG that want to level up on their understanding of GA four, any type of measurement, we have sent them through your courses and receive rave reviews. So shout out to what you guys are doing and kudos to you for Ability, just a great company and some amazing training that's leveling people up on the measurement side. And I think it's good transition to talk about CRO for a minute and a tool that you were telling me about that I was actually unaware of. But before we kind of talk about it, I think it's really important to underscore that what we don't need right now is more data. That's not the solution. Exactly. Just give me more numbers. I want more data on my business is no, I want more insights. I want more clear actionable data going on. Here's a problem or here's an opportunity, let me then fix that or exploit that. And so with that in mind, let's talk a little bit about Microsoft Clarity. What is Microsoft Clarity and why are you so jazzed up about it?
Chris:
This is one of my favorite tools, and this is kind of the benefit of being a part of Measure U because Microsoft Clarity has been around for four or five years at this point, right? It's been around for a while, maybe even longer than that, but it has essentially what it is, is a replacement. I think for tools like Hotjar, crazy Ag, any sort of heat mapping, scroll mapping, screen recording, mouse flow, things like that. Lucky Orange is another example of a tool that used to do that or does that. But what Clarity did Microsoft in particular when they created Clarity, they wanted to have an answer to Google Analytics. They wanted to say, this is our analytics platform, but they didn't want to do what I think Facebook's mistake was because Facebook, way back in the day had Facebook analytics, which had a very brief one year existence and then went away.
But it's because they tried to just create Google Analytics and everybody was like, well, why would I do both? This is ridiculous, except theirs was more limited. So what Microsoft did is said, okay, we're not going to do the data side, we're not going to do the data tables. Don't get us wrong. We're going to have data, but it's not going to be these ugly tables and charts, and your job is not to sit and figure out how to analyze reports all day long. That's not what we want you to do. We want you as a marketer to be able to understand what's happening on the site, understand the behaviors that are happening, and then be able to now that you know those behaviors, to be able to say, Hey, if those are the behaviors we want, awesome. Let's scale traffic. If those are the behaviors we don't want, here's some insights that might be something you can do to adjust the marketing or adjust how the site is on your side.
So those behaviors are less likely to occur and that's what those heat maps show. So they will show visual, and this is what I like about this platform, it's visual, so it's intuitive for somebody who's not a trained data person or something, the people who own the stores, you're running a Shopify store and you're not quite, you don't really consider yourself a numbers person, but you know need to kind of know your numbers. You're in that I need to take my medicine, but I don't really want to, you know, need to. Microsoft Clarity is that spoonful of sugar to kind of grow back to that Mary Poppin song, right?
Brett:
Love
Chris:
It is the spoonful of sugar helps medicine go down and it's freaking awesome because it's visual. So you can instantly, intuitively understand what a heat map is telling you by the color code. What parts are red are really hot. People are seeing this. Parts that are blue are not so much. Same with scroll maps. They have a thing called click maps where you can kind of see generally what area of the page is being clicked on,
Should that be the area that's getting clicks. These are the questions that you can start answering. And then finally it does screen recordings so you can actually see users as they're interacting with the page and you can see the recording of it. They want from page one to page two to page three, the entire session. And there's nothing better than that over the shoulder view of actually seeing a user do that and go like, wow, maybe that's why the checkout isn't quite working. Or maybe that's why this particular product isn't selling compared to all the other products we have in our catalog that are, let me go see people who just saw this product page versus the other product detail pages. And then you can watch and see how they're interact with that. There's nothing better than that. And the other thing I'll say about it, because it's very easy to understand, it's also very easy to set up. It's literally just a piece of code, a script, just put it on your site, whether you use Tag Manager for that already, some of you already have that with Shopify stores or BigCommerce, whatever tool you're using, however you're getting measurement on those sites, clarity does it the same way. The beauty of it though is where a platform like GA four truly requires some setup to get the most from it. Clarity doesn't. Clarity will give you action, just drop the code
Brett:
And you're good.
Chris:
Action actions, yes, you'll be able to interact with these reports, give it a day or two just to collect some data, but that's it. And then you can instantly start going, oh, that's something useful. I can do something with this without having to worry about three hours of learning how to use the tool.
Brett:
Totally. So we got heat maps to see what are people seeing, we've got this click breakdown, where are people clicking, how are they clicking? And then you've got the screen recordings and it's so valuable because we want to see our marketing and specifically our landing pages and our website through the eyes of our customer, and this is what this tool allows you to do. It's free, it's easy to set up. So pretty
Chris:
Powerful and it's free. Exactly right. Didn't mention that, but Microsoft is just gladly paying for it on their end, which is awesome and it truly is a fantastic product. I'll say one other thing that's a huge pro for this versus some of the pay tools that I no longer use was the paid tools. You would have to go in there and set stuff up. So I would have to say like, oh, I need you to set up screen recordings for this page and we have to do it before the email hits so I can see what people are doing. And if somebody forgot to do that in the company and traffic already hit, then you go back to look at screen recordings that were never going to be there. You forgot to set 'em up, right?
Clarity, everything's on all the time, all pages. So it's not like you have to say, I need to set up a heat map for this. What you're doing with Clarity is you're going to Clarity and you're just looking at the heat map, which will already be there for every page that has clarity code on it. It's doing that now, the catch, because everyone's going to be like, how is that? The catch is it doesn't keep it for very long. So 30 to 90 days is kind of all you're going to have some of this data for, but that's all you need it for. That's all you need. It is for that just what's going on right now, are these behaviors we want? If so, scale if not change, right?
Brett:
Yeah. It's very rare that you want to go back and look at your heat maps from six months ago, a different page, different design,
Chris:
And honestly, you can snapshot, you can just take a little graphic image and just snapshot it if you want. Right? Totally makes sense. You can download the data, by the way. So usually you have access to do that sort of stuff too. It really is a fantastic
Brett:
Platform. And then there's also AI that's kind of baked in. So with some of the other tools, you've got to manually break things down, kind of decipher, especially screen recordings are super cool in that you can see what an actual user's doing, but then that's a lot of data to sift through the AI science
Chris:
Going to, yes, I'm going to restate that question because you sort of gave away the lead there, right? Oops, oops. But you go, okay, well how do we use heat maps? How do we use scroll maps? How do we use these screen recordings say in the past, and we will cover this aipi in the second, but in the past you would have to look at the heat map and the heat maps are different because you can see 500 people seeing the page and you say, okay, do I have enough data? And it kind of, okay, cool. Now this is something useful versus one person on the page. If that one visit you don't really know how to change, you need a lot of people seeing it. That works for heat maps, that works for scroll maps. And again, you can kind of tell by the colors what's working, what's not.
But with screen recordings, you would literally have to watch a screen recording and then you have to watch another screen recording, then you got to watch another screen recording, and then you have to hope that you're detecting a pattern out of all of that. It is problematic. They're powerful but problematic. I was literally at a conference, and this was years ago, but it was a CRO conference, which I thought was exceptionally dangerous to be talking about this. They were talking about this new screen recording tool. This is back when it was New Tech, and they were talking about how somebody was going through the checkout and they were watching the screen recording and they were playing this for everybody on the screen. They're like, see where they stopped right here? Right around payment information. That's how we knew we had to change the cart. And I was like, or that's when this person's kid came in and said, Hey, dinners, where's dinner? Or, oh, I got to get my card. Oh, they expired. Crap, I have to go call the bank now. Or a million other things that would've caused that or the doorbell. And it's like they made a decision off of one screen recording, assuming this person was definitely going to buy no matter what, and they couldn't figure out how to use the truck checkout. And it was such a mess, I thought
Because it was just based on one visit, one person's opinion changed their company, which is dangerous, right? Because you can make a lot of bad decisions that way. So the beauty of Microsoft was with chat GPT when they invested in this, so Clarity Hass been around before chat, GPT was a thing, but when Microsoft came into chat GPT and bought into it, they instantly integrated all of that love into their platform. So now they download, essentially what they're doing is they're downloading all the dataset in the chat, jt, they've already got their assistance perfectly written to be able to give responses that are useful and it'll analyze all of that. And so instead of just even looking at a thousand screen recordings, you can literally go in there and say, I want to see the screen recordings where they saw this product detail page and they came from our, let's say, promotional email for Father's Day or whatever the thing was.
So we want to see how just this really tight segment of people interacted on screen recordings. What did they do? Did they do the behaviors you want in? I don't even look at the screen recordings anymore because now you can create that, what they call filter segmenting is all that really is. You create that little filter and then you just say, summarize all the recordings and it'll look at 'em all, it'll analyze and then it just sort of chat. G PT spits out a story and it'll say things like, well, it looks like a user was, maybe because some of us have membership components or a login, it looks like users were having problems logging in. And you'll see numbers next to that comment. What those numbers are are the actual screen recordings where users had problems logging in. So now instead of going, I'm not sure what that means, you go, okay, let's go see that.
Brett:
And
Chris:
Now what it's done is it's told you a story and said, if you want to go find out more, here's where I got that from. If you want to take a look yourself, which you should always do, we never let AI just make decisions for us, but it's a tool. I wouldn't let my computer automatically just work and do everything for me without ever checking it. Same thing with ai.
Brett:
Totally, totally, totally. Yeah.
Chris:
But it makes it so much faster to get to action because you don't have to watch a bunch of videos. You can just have it build this segment and then say, what is this generally telling me? What are the trends and patterns that you see? And it will do the same thing for heat maps and scroll maps and the click maps and everything else. So
Brett:
Not
Chris:
Only
Brett:
Can you do that, it's so good at doing it's right,
Chris:
Exactly. Which ation data pattern
Brett:
Recognition than humans are.
Chris:
And here's the key, I get asked this a lot, how are you guys using AI for data? And the answer is not much honestly. But that's because the way that we use measurement, we don't need AI because our reports operate. Our reports the way they're made operate faster than ai. They don't need interpretation. So I don't need AI to interpret anything. They just tell me the action automatically. So that's how we do that. That's why we don't need it. The reason it's powerful with Microsoft Clarity is because Clarity is adjusting their data and they're pre reformatting it, so it's garbage in, garbage out. That's the problem with ai. Everyone's sprinkling AI into Google Analytics for if Google Analytics four hasn't been set up properly, it's going to make bad calls because the data isn't useful. Clarity understands, Hey, chat, TPT is going to be looking at this, so they're automatically organizing it for you, so you don't have to do that.
So chat t PT can do something useful with it. So it's all contained, right? It's all in their platform. There's nothing you have to do at all, which is again, why I really like it, because I think e-commerce owners in particular need to understand how their stores are operating specific to the behaviors. It's not just about ROAS and ROI that's important, but it's about how you're getting ROAS and ROI. And if you're not seeing the behaviors going through the site, are they looking at your images that you just replaced or are they not even looking at the images? You can tell stuff like that with clarity. Are they looking at the testimonials so they even scroll down and spend some time doing that? You can literally what they call smart events with this platform. Again, little bit of setup at this point. This is what I like about it. The platform grows with you, but you can literally say, I just want to know the people that have seen our testimonial for a certain amount of seconds and have interacted with it, looking at the reviews of the product, whatever it is. And you can have a nice little segment of those. That's why I love this platform because within seconds, within seconds, could you not of looking at something, you'd be like, okay, now I know what marketing action to do.
Brett:
Yeah,
Chris:
And there's no setup. It's just activation super, which is super cool,
Brett:
Simple. And it's one of those things where really our goal with CRO or marketing in general is about behavior modification. How can I guide someone through this journey or through this process to one, be interested in my product and then to trust it and then to buy it? And so where are they getting hung up along the way and help me make sense of that. And so let's back up just a little bit. Now we've got this really great overview of how the tool works and even the AI component, which is amazing, but what should we be looking for? What strategies should we form as we look at, okay, we're going to set up Microsoft Clarity, plug it into our website, what should we be thinking about to make sure we're getting the most out of it?
Chris:
So I'll start with a mindset and then we'll get into a little bit of a framework. So the mindset really is just like you and I are having a conversation, I'm going to adjust what I say based upon what you're asking.
You're going to adjust what you ask based upon what I say. It's a series of listening, responding back and forth, right? Digitally that same thing is happening. And I think most digital, anybody in the digital world forgets this. Humans are still human. They're just now interacting as humans with a digital thing. So there's still a conversation that's happening except now it's happening on the website. In fact, you probably have heard yourself reading copy from websites so vocalizing, it's a little conversation for most people. So when you're on that and you think about this, well, if you and I were having a conversation, I can easily adjust listening to your side so I can adjust my side and vice versa. That sort of happens naturally. But how do you do that digitally? How do we listen in to the user side of the conversation, whoever's on our stores? So we listen in through measurement.
Brett:
That
Chris:
Is why it's important to have behavioral measurement because if you're not listening for that, you will never know their side of the conversation, never know. And so you have to guess or ask other people to guess for you through professional masterminds and things like that. That's what happens. And then everybody eventually just sort of settles on this is the style everybody should do because everyone's been doing it and it ends up never being tested because no one ever took the time to learn to set up measurement so they can hear their users tell them, Hey, if you move the button over here, I'll buy this. Hey, if you add testimonials that are more like this, that feature this stuff, instead of that stuff, I'll totally buy this. Hey, if you add images that are this high quality or a video demonstration, I'll absolutely buy that. But if we're not listening for those behaviors to see how the impact our sales, how can we possibly make the move and how can we be confident that the move is more than likely going to move the needle?
Brett:
That's
Chris:
Why listening is so important. So the very first step is that mindset shift. If I have to use measurement, not just for O and r, o, I get CPAs cost per lead. I understand all that. Yes, clear not the only thing, right? It's like those are the results, but you also need to know how you're getting those results and those are the behaviors left behind. So that's the mindset shift. So the way then to use a tool like this is you're coming at it with, okay, I need to listen in to our user side of the conversation because they're going to tell us what's working, what's not, and what to change. They want to also be successful. They want you to be successful. Why else would they be on your site if they had zero interest at all? Right? They ultimately want to complete that journey even if they couldn't. So now we're going to listen in for that conversation. So what we're listening for are all those little how behaviors.
What I would start with is three. One is the start of the journey, whatever that means to your business model. We'll get to specifics with e-commerce, but the start of the journey, the end of the journey when they finish that journey, and then someplace in the middle at least one. Now what we'll do is do a bunch. So as you get better and better at measurement, you start adding more steps. You understand more specifics of the journey, but it might start with who started looking at a product detail page, any product detail page. That's the start of a journey. It could be for e-commerce, the checkout process when they're starting to begin checkout, and that starts, so it's not the view cart, but I'm actually starting the checkout process. That might be the middle step that where they're actually considering completing the journey at this point. So the one they're aware of, there's a journey. The second step they now considering completing because that's what they be on the checkout. And then there's that final transaction step of them paying for whatever G average ticket is, and then they complete. So the beauty of that is if they're not completing, meaning, if you're not making sales, you would at least know some ideas to why. And Clarity can tell you this because did I mention it also has funnels? Then you can set up funnels of clarity. Again, one-stop shop to get started with.
So you could set up a nice little funnel and say, okay, why are we not getting bottom of funnel sales? Is it because everyone's getting stuck at the checkout process or stage of it? Because obviously with e-commerce you've got multiple stages normally. So it could be that you could set all those up, or is it because they're not even seeing the product detail pages to begin with? So we have something even further up, we have to get fixed so we can get traffic to those pages. Maybe they're not making it through your category pages or whatever the user journey happens to be, but the beauty of it is you can set it up and then ask those questions, have those questions ahead of time, and then when you've got it set up before you go into it, think about the actions you're going to take before you even look at it.
This would be my biggest tip I can give anybody because when you go into Clarity, when you go into any analytics platform, I think the gut reaction from most people who are not measurement oriented in the beginning, they haven't learned the skills yet. They think it's open up the platform and they go, what do I do with this? Let me try to figure it out. And that's where they start. That's already your game over. You've already lost the game if that's your first thought. So instead of that, what you do is before I open up Clarity, you go, alright, I know I'm measuring for the people that are product detail pages, I expect maybe 30% of those should go to the cart. At least half the people should complete the cart for this average ticket. This is what should be happening. Now let me go to Clarity to see is that happening?
Because what's happening now is you're going to clarity to say, I understand how my marketing machine should be working. How many e-commerce stores should be working now? Is it working the way I expected it to? Now you're going to Clarity. Clarity to say yes or no, but because it says yes or no, it's not just giving you information anymore. It's giving you an action now. Oh yes, great, I'll scale traffic. Oh no, it's not okay, let me dig into why and what can I adjust to fix that and why is one working really well, but the other one's not. And that's where I would look at especially with e-commerce descriptions. Did you describe one just a little bit juicier than you described the other pair of shoes, and maybe that's why they're bearing first pair but not the second pair. Were the images better? Was there a closeup version of the stitching on one of the shirts, but the other shirts don't have that and maybe that's the quality and that buyer was would be for quality signals.
Was there a video demonstration on one of 'em that's selling but the other video aren't on there? Maybe we should create more video demonstrations of the product or being worn or whatever used, whatever the widget is that we're selling. So those are some of the things you can do with that platform that are very, very quick and it doesn't take a lot of learning. It just takes awareness. Now that everyone's listening to this, they're aware that that's a thing, just keep that in your head, just be aware of that, never forget that and you'll automatically get more value from this tool.
Brett:
It's really interesting that you frame it that way. So this is a conversation and it totally makes sense. If I visit a website, I'm going there and I've got a question in mind, I've got an interest in mind something and I'm kind of conversing with that page so to speak, but no one is necessarily listening to my frustrations or my excitement or whatever. And that's where measurement comes in and that's where some of these tools come in. But it does seem to me like there needs to be some training or some understanding for how can I listen and listen effectively. So it sounds like part of what you're saying is have some expectation going in of what should be happening on this page. Are we setting something up specifically in clarity for how it's going to measure, or is there much customization on the setup to get in and be able to listen properly or not
Chris:
Really? Yeah, really good question. The answer is yes and not right away. So I'm going to give you another phrase that I want everybody to repeat as a mantra. Just get good enough to get going, come back and make it better later. Because the tendency is, oh, it does funnels. Oh cool. Oh, it does smart events. Oh, okay, cool. I'm going to set up all this stuff without even using the platform at all. I'm going to figure all this stuff out. And then you're having committee meetings and everyone's like, what do you want to measure? What do you want to? And everyone's like, well, I think, and then you hear this, the most dangerous phrase in any organization, I shudder to even say it. What would be interesting, as soon as I hear that phrase, I'm like, interesting does not mean useful. I just want to hear what is be useful.
Brett:
We're not here to be entertained.
Chris:
Not exactly don't care. It'd be interesting to know if people from blah blah, blah, blah, I know it's not interesting at all if you can't make it useful.
Brett:
Once you know that, what would you do differently?
Chris:
Exactly right. That's how you handle that. You say, that would be cool. What actions would you take? Actually first thing used to say, what do you expect the answer to be?
Brett:
If
Chris:
They don't even have that, it kills it. And then if they do have that, you're like, cool, what actions would you take? If it's within that range, actions would you take? If it's lower, what actions would you take If it's higher? And if they know those three directions, they totally are ready to see that number because now they know what to do no matter what. If it's perfect, they know higher. They know if it's lower. They know because they've preplanned it, they thought it through, and you want your team doing that. So these are really good questions to ask
Brett:
And sometimes to know what's specific questions to ask or how to converse, you almost just need to listen to the raw stuff a little bit, right? Just get in there and check it out.
Chris:
Yeah, and I'll go back to get good enough to get going, come back and make it better later. With Microsoft Clarity, the good enough to get going is just turning the thing on. Take the code again, it's clarity.microsoft.com to go there. You'll create a free account. You can log in with your Google account and then, or Microsoft account, doesn't matter. Create your account. It'll give you a piece of code. Put that on your site 24 hours later, go back in and start looking at screen recordings. Start playing with filters like, oh, how did people with my Facebook traffic do yesterday? How are the ones with my email that I sent yesterday, how did they do? Just start getting used to how that platform works, but for a specific purpose, right? Because you're trying to see how is email different from cold Facebook traffic? It should be wildly different emails, right? Have a No, I can trust with the brand. Facebook Cold traffic probably doesn't. Let's just retargeted. In which case it may be it will, but all of a sudden you start seeing differences and you start going, okay, cool, I can see what maybe I can do with this.
But all you're asking when it comes to questions, there's only ever two types ever. There are results questions, which are typically questions around the end of the journey. And then there are the how questions, how are those things happening? Most companies are asking the results questions, how many do we sell? What average ticket is? What's a good conversion rate? Stuff like that. But how steps they don't really ask questions around. And what I mean by that, and I don't mean today, but I mean eventually in the not too distant future, everybody listening to this could be setting this stuff up. You can have a report that says, okay, not just they landed on the product detail page, they landed, they stayed for at least 10 seconds, which implied that they wanted to be there. It they've confirmed as not an
Brett:
Accidental clicked. They're in the
Chris:
Exactly wasn't they were trying to play a game and get a gold coin to watch your video or something, right? Fat
Brett:
Problems are trying to hit X and they click on your ad type of
Chris:
Thing. All the reasons. Yeah. So now you can see that 10 seconds there. Then you would go, okay, well, did they actually start interacting with our product detail page? Are they clicking on the different images that are there? Because a real buyer that's looking at stuff probably would, let's hit the side of the buy, which is different. But an investigative buyer would start investigating. They would look at reviews, they would scroll into the description, they would start interacting with variations, large, medium, blue, yellow. They're starting to play with colors. That's a completely different behavior you can absolutely measure for. And by the way, bullet audience is on. So now you've got, okay, this product detail page, how they are supposed to work. I know a certain percentage will do this with the images. I know a certain percentage will do this with variations. Certain percentage will do this with reviews and testimonials, whatever the product is.
And now you have an understanding of how your product detail page is function, what are the behaviors they generate? And then what you do is you start comparing them to each other because occasionally you're going to find one of your product detail pages crushes it. They just buy everything with this product. And you start going, okay, what is that one? How is that different from these other ones? And that's again where you can go back to clarity. Let's do the heat maps and see if they're completely different. Let's compare and contrast. Do the same thing with screen recordings, see if they're interacting with it differently. Eventually you can and should use tools like GA four and other things to grow out your measurement skills. But I want to emphasize, yes, all that's there, but that's like talking about what the end of the marathon's like and trying to motivate yourself by saying, I'm going to cross that marathon, but I can't even get to the end driveway right now.
So you shouldn't be thinking about the winning the marathon. Just get to the mailbox and make that your win. Turn on clarity, start to use it. I think that platform especially is because it is so intuitive to use, doesn't require a lot of where are things. And I'll give you another example of that. When you come into the dashboard, this is how I know they speak marketer on their dashboard, they will say, rage clicks, and it'll give you a percentage. You know what rage click is? A rage Click is when somebody's clicking on a button or something,
Brett:
They rage click, rage click is a category inside of
Chris:
That Microsoft. And from day zero they have had this, they came out with a platform dashboard says rage clicks. It's when you're clicking somewhere and it's not quite working, so you're clicking again, maybe the site's slow, maybe something's not hyperlinked, right? Maybe something looks like a button, but it's not. And then you go, oh, it says like 7.2% of that people were being raised goes, would you like to see the recordings? Yes, click. Now you've got all the recordings. They will pres segment, please tell me ai, please tell me what's going on. And it goes, oh yeah, it looks like this button on this page is having problems when you see it. Yes, I do watch. Okay, let's go fix that button. Instant action. They have another one called Quick backs, which is when people go to a page, this happens a lot in direct response where it's like sales page and some people find it useful to hide a price.
So then they go to the cart to find how much it is, and they go back to the sales page to see if it's worth it. Anyway, so that idea of quick backs, they go to this page and they immediately go back to the previous page. They were searching for something. What were they searching for that we should have provided on step one that they thought they would find on step two? Clarity builds you an instant segment like that. So it's a lot of this, it's made for marketers to be as intuitive as possible for them to take immediate action such that they go, I kind of like this platform. I wonder if we should set up funnels now. And then you start getting into, okay, now I have to start using the platform. And whether you use YouTube to do that is fine. Measure you.com. Obviously there's courses on that and we can show you to do that too, but I don't think it's necessary on day zero. Day zero is just create the account. Everybody here has now been educated. Go to Clarity microsoft.com, create your script, activate
Brett:
It, you know enough to get a now, plug it in and insert.
Chris:
Exactly right.
Brett:
Yeah. One of my favorite retail books is called Why We Buy by Paco Underhill. I'm not sure if you've read that, but
I
Haven't been alone. Dude's been around a long time. And so what they used to do, maybe they still do it, but they would have people that would just sit in retail stores all day and track people's movements.
Yes.
What do people do when they walk in the door? How do they approach this display? What if there's something that they want to get the feel for, but it's all packaged up? What do they do then? What do shoppers do when it's like a female with a male and the male looks impatient? How long do they stay and shop? What if we put seats over here for the dudes to sit so then their female companion can shop a little longer? It's a fascinating book and really creates some great insights, and he kind of helped reshape retail experiences, but this is sort of what you're doing digitally. That's exactly how are people interacting with my stuff with my
Chris:
Online store.
Brett:
Now, how do I shift it to make it better for them?
Chris:
And this comes from retail, it comes from grocery stores. They have planograms, they have the floor plans. So and hopefully most people know this. When you go in a grocery store, there's only going to be one place where that milk is, and it's at the worst possible location. So you walk through everything. Very, yeah, very back. Make sure you walk through everything. Where the cereals, are they way up high where the adults can see them? Nope. They are eye level with the kids. Everything is planned. Everything is there for every inside
Brett:
Based on science and observation,
Chris:
Everything. They have an understanding of how much Walmart knows how much boxes are supposed to move through this little three foot section of the shelf that are supposed to do. They have that measured. Digital marketers are missing the boat because they don't treat e-commerce like actual commerce.
Brett:
And
Chris:
That's what I mean by digital marketers kind of lose their mind. They're like, oh, but the digital world, it's different on the internet. It's not, humans will always human always. So you have to treat them like that. Humans,
Brett:
Humans are always human. I love that.
Chris:
Humans are going to human, so you just go, okay, they're going to human anyway. We're just going to measure it so we can see what they're doing. And the beauty of it is the old fork folklore where it was like, I don't know how prioritizing works, but I'm not sure which half
They want to make a quote from 150 years ago. And now that became, oh, well, now can be a measure, everything. But it was always about the attribution. Part of measurement. That very last step is all anybody ever cared about. So we could kind of answer that question, which surprise doesn't have an answer, but the problem is that was the decoy. What they should have done is what you were talking about. Go, let's sit in the store and see how people use the store. Just the shop, walk the shop. And now you can totally do that automated all the time. It's called Microsoft,
Brett:
And get AI to do some of the
Chris:
Watches and get AI to do the analysis,
Brett:
Help you out. Pattern recognition, some of the
Chris:
Heavy lifting. Yes.
Brett:
Yeah, it really makes sense. So any other anecdotes, love the framework, love the setup and the mind shift and all that. But any anecdotes or thoughts on like, Hey, these are the types of things you can really uncover and shift and then the results you can see there?
Chris:
That's a good question. So in terms of it depends upon, let me just go through the framework quickly, maybe
Talk about some of those. So the way you use measurement, and this is another little bit of a mindset shift, but important measurement is not about the tools. Your tools are almost irrelevant. Some tools are better than others, easier to use than others do more things than others do different things than others, but they're just tools. The problem I think in most digital businesses in general is they're overwhelmed with tools. They do not need more tools, but we always have new ones. So Sumo is one of my worst things. Like, oh, don't go in, but I have to go in and you come up with 45 different app. So it's like, I understand the desire to have tools is shiny objects, but with measurement in particular, because there's so many tools, Wiki reports, triple Whale, Hiro, GA four, Microsoft Clarity, insert 75, others that were just created because AI now.
So it's always everywhere all the time. With that, you have to have a measurement strategy that tells you how to use your tools and when to use your tools in the way they need to be used. If you don't have a unifying strategy to kind of coordinate all those tools, you end up getting a bunch of different reports that aren't coordinated. So of course Facebook tells you something different than what Wicked Reports tells you, and you're like, I don't even know what's going on. I don't trust anything. We're just going to do it. I think I'm going to do anyway, which is what most marketers do, or most business owners Trust my gut. Trust my gut, because yeah, and half the time they're looking for the data to justify the decision they've already made, right? Yeah. So instead what we're going to do is you go through a framework, right? Go through a process. So we're going to move from just kind of wander around the dark, not sure what's working, what's not all the way through. We automatically get improved, optimized revenue and results by just following a series of activities
Brett:
Using
Chris:
Measurement, how to do this. So the first step is planning out our measurement. So really three keys to that step. We asked the questions, we talked about that already, results and how I need to know the result of my journeys. I need to know how those journeys are happening at whatever level I'm comfortable with. You start where you start. It's a muscle. And that's what people don't understand about asking questions. They think I'm going to get a magic list of a thousand questions, and they will always, it's not how it works. You start with results and how questions at whatever comfortable level you can handle. The next time you do it, you've already had some experience with the results and how questions, so you ask different more enhanced results and how questions, but now they're coming from you, not me. So your questions will be better yours.
So you do the results and how questions, we gather the information necessary to get answers to those questions, and that's where you're setting up your measurement. You might say, oh, I'm going to use Clarity to get that answer, or this one I'm going to use a spreadsheet, I'm going to pull from Shopify reports or whatever it happens to be. And then you have your actions, and that's what we talked about earlier where you have to have an understanding of at least a guess as to what that number's supposed to be, what the answer is supposed to be. I am asking the question around our average ticket. I'm going to gather all the information from shopper report so I know my average ticket and then my average ticket should be three to 350. Cool. What if it's with three to three 50? What are you going to do?
Well, I'm going to scale traffic. What if it's 150? What do you do if it's really low? Well then I'm going to start looking at upsells and the related products and see if maybe they're not doing those well, what if it's five, 600? What if it's way high, unexpectedly high? That's interesting to you. I'm going to see if maybe there's a product that's kicking that off. Maybe if they buy product A versus product B, it leads. So now I'm thinking about the activities before I even set up my measurement, and I already know what I'm going to do based upon the things that I don't even have yet turned on. But now I'm excited to do it because I already know how to fix things because of that planning process. So very quick, but very powerful questions, information, actions. So then you go into your build and that's where you're using clarity. You turn it on. If you want to set up funnels, you can, doesn't really matter. Just play with stuff. The one thing I would definitely suggest people do is pay attention to UTMs, just three letters, UTM. You can Google that. There's a billion different trainings now on how to use UTMs, but they identify traffic so that you can tell the difference between an email sending you a visitor versus Facebook cold traffic or the latest webinar you did, or product, demo, whatever it was.
Brett:
Got it. So to use Microsoft Clarity, you need to set up UTMs.
Chris:
You don't need to. This is the key. You don't need to. You should though, because if you don't, clarity can't tell the just student email and Facebook, you know what I mean? If it's not told what it is, it'll guess. It can make a decent guess, but be a guess. And I would much rather tell it
Brett:
A hundred percent.
Chris:
And the way that we do this with TMS for those are a little more advanced on the UTM thing. The way that we identify as UTM identifies the source of the traffic. So it's Facebook, Google, Microsoft email, ke. In our case, we use Keap. So it'd be Keap is the source, the type of traffic it is paid is it's social where I'm not really paying for it, but it's out there. Is it an email? Is it a podcast like this?
And then finally, the purpose, and this is the part that I think people mess up on their traffic. They're not telling their measurement system why the visit was there in the first place, what it supposed to do. Because if Facebook can't tell me, Hey, listen, I'm a Facebook ad. I'm the one that's got a picture of a horse at it. I am retargeting the audience of people who have come to the Academy Insiders page, but they didn't quite buy yet, but they did see the offer and the order form. So I sent them an ad with all the testimonials of people, my job is to get them to close, so they should be closing. That's how you need to judge me. Please let me know how I did compared to the other ads that are doing the same thing. And then right after that, there's email that says, oh, by the way, I'm email number seven of the 12 part auto responder series.
I'm talking to community members who have come in for free and they're using their resources. I'm getting the user's resources now. I'm trying to make them aware that there is a program they could upgrade called Academy Insiders. Just let me know how I did on that compared to the other emails. And now all of a sudden, you start understanding which traffic sources are causing which results. So you can start using those traffic sources better, which means efficiency in ad spend, which is what everybody tries to call ROAS and ROI. But it's really in the behaviors that tell you what to do with that when you're willing to listen. But listening takes time and patience, which most people don't want
Brett:
To. Most people do not have. We want an easy button, we want an easy solution. We just want to fix this ad or
Chris:
Spend
Brett:
More money here. Make this easy for me. But the thing about this is, I think once you learn to ask those better questions and learn what to do with the information and how to kind of decipher it, it's extremely empowering. This is almost like it's a superpower. If you could develop this, I'm sure you start to get pretty juiced up about, man, I've got stuff I can use to move the needle in my business.
Chris:
Your confidence and your level of certainty and the level of drama drops, right? Because you're not guessing anymore.
Brett:
I mean,
Chris:
You are, don't get me wrong. There's always the element of uncertainty. It's a
Brett:
Hypotheses in some that, yeah, it's
Chris:
Huge probabilities that start happening now. You're like, oh, well, the customers told us. It's like sending an email to your list saying, Hey, would you be interested if we started stocking brown shoes instead of gray shoes? And they're like, oh my God, yes. I would love brown shoes. I've put Brian Brown shoes from other people. I'd love that you carry brown now to carry brown shoes. You don't just go, well, maybe not. I don't know. And if you did, what would you do? Would say, cool, here's a link to pre-order brown shoes. And then they buy it and you're like, okay, now we do brown shoes. Because the market told us to do it. It wasn't hard for me to do that. It was simple. I just listened to what they wanted me to do in order for them to give me money and for me to provide the value. That's it. It goes back to that listening to the conversation. And that's the trick. When you're using your numbers, when you're using your measurement, no matter what tool it is, clarity or otherwise, you just compare it to what you thought was going to happen.
But that means you have to have a guess, at least as how this thing works. How does your machinery work? How do the behaviors work? Think through that.
Brett:
No, go ahead. Finish the
Chris:
I was going to say, most students will come to us and they'll say, well, we're just trying to figure out how our e-commerce stores work, how people move through the store. That's what we're trying to figure out. My first answer always is the same. How are they supposed to, and it's blank,
Brett:
Blank.
Chris:
Like, I never thought about that. But that is literally the equivalent of dumping a bunch of stuff into an empty warehouse, opening up the doors, seeing who buys what, and goes, oh, I guess we sell shoes. Because nobody wanted the bikes. You would never do that. You would plan a shoe store and then you would try it out. You would always have a, here's how it should be working. But again, digitally we skip the simple steps because it's simple. But simple is the skill, simple's the skill, and it
Brett:
Takes five minutes
Chris:
Fast. So here's what
Brett:
We expect. Now we're going to measure it. If it's higher than expected, what does that likely mean? And what are we going to do?
Chris:
If
Brett:
It's lower than expected, what does that likely mean? And what are we going to do? But then you prove it out. And
Chris:
If it's in Goldilocks, if it's in the sweet spot, what are we going to do? Also, what if things are working? What do you do? What
Brett:
If we hit that expectation? Exactly. Exactly right.
Chris:
It might be, oh, we're going to have to order more inventory. It might be that just to bring it, not even to digital marketing, but more just brass tax, e-commerce stuff is, oh, well, if that's working, we can start scale traffic. So we should order from China now because it's going to take six months to get here, or whatever the thing is. So a measurement can impact all areas of an organization, not just the marketing.
Brett:
You said something really interesting a minute ago, and I want you to maybe unpack it just a little bit. You said the way you set up measurement, it's so straightforward. You don't really need AI to unpack it or to bring clarity there. Can you talk about what that looks like? Because that was super interesting
Chris:
To take a step back. What's happening right now, like chat ct? It's very easy. AI Studio will also do this. If you go to ai studio, google.com people, everybody here has access to that too. You can show it your Google Analytics and say, tell me what insights you see,
Brett:
Which
Chris:
Again is basically saying, tell me what information you see. Just tell me in words instead of numbers now. And it'll say, oh, well, it looks like your direct non-traffic. You're doing a lot and PayPal seems to be really selling a lot of business for you. And you're like, okay, but you're still going to be like, well, what do I do? So then you're going to ask ai, what should I do with all this? And AI doesn't know to say no, or you shouldn't be asking me the question. AI just gladly gives you the results. So it'll say, oh, you should do this, that, or the other thing, but it's not right. And the problem is you don't know. It's not right, because you don't know measurement either. So it's blind leading the blind. You're asking blind questions. This thing does not know how to say no.
That'll give you an answer, but it's going to convince you your genius. Now you're finally getting insights from your data that you couldn't see before. But the problem is, again, it's garbage in, garbage out. That data hasn't been set up properly. But almost everybody, because they, most companies don't have measurement departments yet. They're starting to. They're finally because of the efficiency push, they've realized, oh my God, measurement's a department. Now we have to really do this. So the ones that are now, they can start to say, okay, here's how this is supposed to work. Is it working like this? And now you can see, compare and contrast and actions become much, much simpler, right, to get to. So anyway, the idea behind the AI ability, it's typical AI is you're going to Google Analytics four saying make up a story based on what you see here.
It's going to make up a story no matter what. It doesn't mean it's a useful story, but it's going to sound awesome. You know what I mean? So I can prompt AI to say, look at my Google account and proof that Facebook is awesome and it will do it because I asked it to. So that's the problem with ai. The way that we do our measurement is we make it so that AI is not necessary for at least up to the reporting phase. But this is why. It's because what we already talked about, we've already listed out our questions. We already know the information we're going to
Brett:
Collect. We already
Chris:
Know the know we're.
Brett:
So
Chris:
We've already preplanned when this number says 37%, no matter what that number is, we've already known is that within range, higher or lower, and we automatically know what steps we're going to take to optimize because we planned for it in the action step.
Brett:
Got it.
Chris:
So we don't have a need to go to AI to tell us what we already know because we saw the number. Think about this, like your car dashboard. That's always my favorite example with this because people go like, this is impossible. You can't really do that. You totally can. Your car dashboard did. When you driving down your street, you see how fast you're going. You see that number, you instantly know hit the gas or hit the brake. You do it
Brett:
Unconsciously. You
Chris:
Instantly take action because you see the number. You don't need AI to tell you. Right? The
Brett:
Query chat, DBT, what do
Chris:
I do? Yeah, even it was automated. You don't need AI to tell you if you're the one in control of it. So that's the point is you can make your dashboards, especially for marketers, they need to be like one minute dashboards in and out because marketers do not need to be looking at numbers. They need to be marketing. You
Brett:
Need be doing stuff. Yeah,
Chris:
Exactly. So that's how we think about that. Make the report simple so it leads to action. So now we don't have reports that we don't have to analyze. That was another thing. I'm trying learn how to analyze reports. I'm like, well then your reports are too complicated. Why would you do, that's a waste
Brett:
Of time. It makes sense. And then you're leaning into AI for the complex, time consuming. I'm just sifting through all these recordings and now AI's looking for patterns
Chris:
And
Brett:
This is
Chris:
Where we're doing it. BigQuery data and combining it with the CRM data and that stuff can definitely be used. But remember we've got measurement muscles, so nobody should be trying this at home yet to
Brett:
Practice for this
Chris:
Going to a gym, right? I've gone to the gym for 10 years now. You're not going to have the same measurement muscles that day one, but you will have them as long as you keep going to the same gym. It won't take you 10 years to grow that muscle.
Brett:
So
Chris:
Practice it and get used to it and eventually, yes, all this stuff will come to pass and you'll have AI and big create databases and first party and everything else, but you don't start there. Keep it really, really simple. Get used to it, which again, bring it back full circle. That's why Clarity is such a powerful tool. It's a good quick start.
Brett:
Love it, man. I know we use clarity as the gateway into this conversation, and I think it's a powerful tool. I'm excited to use it for our website, but really this is more about that conversation you have with a customer. It's about setting expectations and how are we going to measure what matters here and then make shifts there. But super excited about that. We don't have a lot of time left, so I'm going to do a grave disservice to this topic, but I want to at least get a couple thoughts. We'll tease this. Okay. Then we planned maybe session two, but then also I want to send some people to some of your resources where they can dig deeper.
Sure.
I love how your dashboards are simple. You can understand them. You don't need AI to unpack it. We use AI for more complex stuff, but how are you guys using AI in your business and how are you thinking about ai? That's different because as I hear you talking about ai, it's quite different than what I'm hearing from other people. So would love to hear that kind of the brief overview and then we'll send people to some free resources and stuff.
Chris:
Sure. So I'll by saying, I've been using AI wrong for the last couple of years,
But I've been using AI like everyone else has been using AI for the last couple of years, which is why I'm getting the same results that everybody else says they get, which is it sounds like AI wrote this, right? And you get that sort of like most isn't really useful or it took me longer to figure out how to do with AI than just doing it by myself. So I'm not going to worry about it and all the same stuff. And it is because I had the wrong strategy. Just like with measurement, you need a unifying strategy of how to think about measurement tools to unlock the tools. Same thing with ai, and it took me a long, long time to realize that. So shout out to sean@automatetowin.com. He's a buddy that is a huge system engineer, super geeky when it comes to ai, and so much so he speaks AI more than he speaks human. But I have fascinating conversations with him because we're so systems oriented together. We share that overlap. He's the one that really led me to this insight where he's like, listen, humans, and this is the way I would describe it back, humans, we talk about results and how questions humans think in terms of results and how we're trying to get results, but the way that humans try to get results is we explain to each other how to get the result.
Brett:
We
Chris:
Can't quite see the result, but we know the first step or two, so we know that. So we describe that first step or two and we'll figure out three, four or five when we get there. Later as we get closer, we'll figure out the next steps. So there's always that we communicate in terms of how for the actual result that we want. So there's results and how in that way we don't quite know the how, but we have an idea of what the result is. And with humans talking to other humans, that's okay because humans will work out the how's amongst themselves. They speak in terms of how's what humans, again, humans are going to human when they interact with ai, they interact with AI as if it was human, and they are discounting to their detriment that the fact that AI is very different.
AI also has results in how the difference between a human and an AI is humans are trying to figure out the how and they kind have an idea of the result. AI knows every possible, how that exists ever will exist, ever. It knows everything all at once, all the time. It doesn't think in terms of time sequence, it's completely different formatting. You can't wrap your head around how it works. You shouldn't even care. It's not relevant. It just knows everything. So the fact it knows everything is awesome. I don't have to teach it how to do anything. It knows how to do stuff. What it needs from me is what result I want to have it deliver. So the way I've been sort of training this recently, and especially we started with our team, which unlocked everybody, which was so cool because now everyone is the power of 10. So that was great. We didn't have to add to headcount, but we totally added to headcount at the same time. Creativity. Totally.
Brett:
Yeah.
Chris:
So essentially what's happening is when you're going to ai, we're not saying, oh, you are a professional copywriter who's really good at writing product detail pages for Shopify stores. Please now go look at this catalog and write descriptions based on blah, blah, blah. That's all fine. Don't get me wrong. You're going to get someone decent. But it's also going to be like, well, that sounds like ai. So what instead I would do is I would say that and I would put that into a prompt. I try to do everything I can spell it out the way I do it. This is my biggest tip for ai. Take all that out of the prompt. Don't send it. Just write it out the way you think you should write it out. Then re-prompt it. What you're going to do is you're going to say, please analyze the following prompt until you fully understand the intended result.
Note, I'm not telling it the result. I'm asking it. Look at what I'm saying here. You figure out what I'm trying to do. So then it does that and it'll say, oh, okay, I see by your prompt you're trying to get me to do this, this, this, this, and this. Awesome. Now write that prompt, rewrite that prompt so I get a result better than the intended result. So now what I'm doing is I'm telling ai, you figure out what the result is. I don't know how to speak result. It needs to hear result, though. That's when it really performs well, and I cannot tell it how, because if I tell it how I constrict it, if I say You're a copywriter, it now knows, okay, I know everything about copywriting, but it forgot about the farmer, orange grove tree that had a blog post. That may have been the secret weird sauce thing that could have given some cool creative answer. Won't even think about it. I told it not to accidentally.
Brett:
So
Chris:
Instead I say, understand the result I'm trying to get. Then create for me a prompt that will get me better than that. In other words, I can kind of describe Mountain One. What I really want is Mountain Two, and I can't even see that, but you can. So you tell me how to get an even better result than I even know is possible because you know how, and it does it. Then you take that prompt when it gives you that prompt. It'd be the trick when it gives you that prompt. You start a new chat, you have to start a new session. This is the first prompt. And that first prompt is so important with AI because it sort of sets its space in its database of content.
Brett:
It frames that whole chat.
Chris:
Exactly. Right. Everything's framed from that source. So if you accidentally triggered it to talk about cats, the musical, even though you wanted cats, the animal, it's always going to start with cats, the musical as its base and try to stretch over it. It's only going to be answered so much stuff. But if you nail that prompt and you put it in the exact right spot, it gives you better results because everything that it needs is right there. And the beauty of it is, I'm not telling it where to go. It figures out where to go because it understands the result that has been.
Brett:
It's been really, really clear on the result, and you're using the AI to help you get really clear on the result. And then you're just taking that.
Chris:
And when I say clear on the result, I mean not clear at all on the result. I understand I'm not speaking. I'm trying to communicate the result as best I can as a lonely human.
I speak in terms of how I would like this and this. You should be this, it should be this. It should create a sales page that's highly likely to convert to three different avatars here, the avatars that want blah, blah, blah. Then I say, take all of this. Tell me the result I'm trying to get. And he goes, oh, you're actually just telling me to do this. Cool. Now give me better than that result. What's the prompt? I would tell you for that excellent new chat entered that prompt that it created for itself. So there was never a human interaction at all from its perspective. And then all of a sudden you get this amazing, amazing response where you're like, okay, all of a sudden I get emotional driven words, benefit driven words, value-based things, open loops without having to say that because it already knows that stuff.
Brett:
You don't
Chris:
Have to tell how I see this healthy result I want.
Brett:
Can you think of either a specific example of what this looked like or maybe just general how your team has been able to tap into this?
Chris:
Oh yeah. So we just talked to our developer this morning as a matter of fact, on the offers call we had with our team. And as I was talking to her, except it used to be, oh, I need Jeff, my co-founder, Jeff Ser. So it was like, oh, I need Jeff to write copy on this, and I'm just waiting on the copy or the three bullet points that I need or whatever the things are. Now she's coming to us with complete copy that's written, and now this is what we've built out. So there's a little bit of build that's happened, but remember when you build these things out, they're bricks. Now you can use 'em over and over again. So it takes an hour to build it, but once you have it, you have it forever. And this is a great tool. So I've built an Avatar gem that's three different avatars and they are extensive like 300 pages each. So we know everything about these people. Journal entries. I've got 'em based on sales call transcripts. So everything's in there for the different avatars. So she'll take the copy that she got from the initial prompting that she was, again, speaking in terms of results. She uses the results style prompting. So she'll get this decent copy. Then she'll go through and say, Hey, I need all the avatars to look at this, and then tell me what they agree on.
And then you will literally see a conversation where it's like, David, he's like, well, I'm kind of concerned about the team really buying it for my team, and I'm not sure this headline really speaks to me. And then Alex comes in and says, yeah, totally walks for me though because I'm doing this for my skill. And Sarah comes in and says, well, I don't know. I'm kind of world for clients and I'm not sure how this would help my clients. And then they all have a conversation. Then they will say, well, we're thinking about this. And then it goes, you know what? We've reached a consensus. This is the one we think we should start with that is most likely to help us. So what I've basically done is create avatars that write our sales pages. I could, and again, I didn't do that by saying, create me an avatar that can write sales pages.
I asked it for result after result after result, and eventually I started getting an avatar that was so good it could write sales pages, so I could ask it to do that. That wasn't my intention. I didn't build an avatar write sales pages. It was so good. It started to be able to do it and have conversations and help our team members. I've got Notebook LMS with another popular tool with Google that are training podcast. That's a little podcasting feature. You can prompt that. So I set up custom training. So it'll speak to you as part of the Measure You customer experience team on how you can use some unreasonable hospitality from that book. A Reason Hospitality, such good book, such good book, good from that. So we have that. I've got a webinar optimizer that will go through the webinar and go through the 10 steps of every webinar, rate it on a scale of one to 10, and then offer suggestions. But it's talking to Jeff or Julie or whoever did the webinar. So they have these auditory trainings that they can always have. So I have constant experts on demand all the time for whatever I want, and so does the rest of the team. This is the beauty of it. It's not just me that can use this. As soon as you create anything, one of those little bricks and ai, a feature you can use over and over again. It can be used by the admin assistant now to write
Brett:
Copy, to
Chris:
Write all the emails. So the admin assistant literally is doing that. She's writing all the email stuff because AI gets 80% of there. And I'm not saying humans go away and just let AI do its thing. Go all there. So we still edit, we still touch it on the way out. We make sure it's brand standards and all that fun stuff. But holy cow, the idea of AI is it collapses time.
And that's the trick. Speed is the new currency. I don't think money's going to matter much in the future, but speech or will. So the people who can get speed to result the fastest will get whatever the value is that society has to want to distribute. So get fast at stuff, get AI in things and realize, I think to summarize that it is game over and game on the old way of doing stuff. We have to stop playing the old way. I come to work and I work through my computer. I'm using my computer to have this call right now with you. But I don't think like, oh, I'm using a computer right now. It's just embedded in my brain how it's like breathing. That's what AI needs to be. So for me right now, I work through AI for everything that is my computer level now.
So in the beginning when it's new, you sort of think like that, but pretty quickly it just becomes embedded. And now you just do everything through ai. It's like AI layer that everybody operates. And I wouldn't let a team member of mine use a typewriter because they didn't want to use a computer. So I would never say, you don't have the option to not use ai. You have to use it in this way. And then once we do that training, because it is so inherently intuitively useful, they instantly fall in love with it. And then they come back and they're like, oh, I figured out I can do this. I figured I'd do this. And I'm like, this is awesome. Because they're going to hundred X themselves in a year. They're going to 500 x themselves in two years. Easy. And then where are we as a company? Much, much better. So ai, everybody should be looking at that.
Brett:
It's amazing. So I knew we would run out of time. I got a million questions related to that. We'll have to come back. You have to come back. We'll talk about that way to open the loop. Another, yeah, way to open the loop, exactly. But if someone's listening to this and they're like, okay, I want to go a little bit deeper on measurement, actionable insights there. What resources do you have for that? And then any resources around your thinking related to ai, any blog posts or courses or anything like that?
Chris:
Yeah, good questions on both. So I would say measure u.com, again, measure in the letter u.com is where our company is. We've got a free community that you can join. So if you go to measure u.com/evolution. So again, measure u.com/evolution. And now you know what? I'll say that for two reasons. One free community that'll take you there. Second is look at how I'm UT Ming. So go into the browser window, everybody at Shopify stores, and you'll see where it says E-commerce Evolution is where it came from. It was a podcast for the purposes of the community from a podcast that I recorded in February, 2025 that talked about AI basics. It'll say all of that in there. So our measurement systems know why you came and what sent us, right? So this is another example, just eating our own dog food. But yeah, measure you.com for US evolution. We do AI training now in Measure You, and we've got another division within that called Profit School that we're doing a lot of more of the business ops AI training. So if you go to measure u.com, you will get access to the AI training stuff too. You'll be able to see it there.
Brett:
Awesome. Awesome, man. Mercer, this was gold, buddy. I always love to talk to you. My head explodes and then I'm always just amped up to go do some of the stuff you're talking about.
Chris:
There you go. You're going to be installing Clarity in a half hour. I can feel it,
Brett:
Right? It's going to be on the site before I go home today. There you go, Mercer. Thank you so much, man. So measurement U,
Chris:
Measure.com. Measure U,
Brett:
I'm sorry. Measure you say the URL again because I'm going to butcher it if I try. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll go measure u.com. Yep. Yep. Slash evolution that gets you to evolution. Yes. Awesome stuff, man. Really, really appreciate it and excited to do this again, and we'll try to make it a little shorter than a year or two from now.
Chris:
Looking forward to it. Thanks, Brian.
Brett:
Awesome. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear more from you. Let us know what you'd like to hear more of on the show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.
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