Funnel Reboot

This is the fourth in our five-part series on Making the Whole Funnel Work. In this episode, we talk about traffic; not the automotive type but the web visitor type. This solocast talks about all the ways web analytics tools classify traffic to your site. Then I focus on four of those channels that you can affect for getting more traffic to your site. For complete Show Notes, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/episode-12-how-traffic-make-the-whole-funnel-work/  

In this episode, we look at both sides of a website interaction. We discuss how visitors progress through a website and how marketers make conversion offers for the visitors to complete. Marketers make a critical choice when deciding the conversion actions they use, so we go through the most common actions used on leading-edge websites. Listen in for answers to these topics: Why do we have conversions? How to optimize your conversions How to choose what call-to-action to put on your webpage How to effectively use chatbots, contact form, call buttons, questionnaires, etc For all the links and the reboot mentioned in this episode, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/episode-11-how-conversions-make-the-whole-funnel-work

This episode covers what needs to be in place to know everything about people's interactions with your website. We talk about how to track conversions in your analytics, how to add Tags, run A/B testing and more. For all the links and the reboot mentioned in this episode, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/episode-10-how-a-tracking-infrastructure-makes-the-whole-funnel-work  

This episode walks through a 7-step process for building a marketing dashboard: Interview stakeholders Review Technology Select KPIs Group requirements Select Charts Prototyping/Wireframing Launch For the People, Ideas and Products mentioned in this episode, visit the shownotes at http://FunnelReboot.com  

In this episode, three PPC Professionals reviewed the long list of features that PPC platforms made in 2018 and cut it down to a handful that are having the largest impact on B2B companies. Hear what we think are the best and worst changes made this past year, and what advertisers should to in reaction to them. Check out the shownotes or signup to receive them by email at funnelreboot.com To get future episodes, please subscribe at Apple podcasts. Follow us on Twitter @funnelreboot

Does your company use technology like Marketing Automation and CRM? Is your marketing program supported by applications by the likes of Oracle, Adobe and Salesforce? More and more Marketing departments are integrating them into their technology stack. Listen to this interview with a Marketer named Ed Goffin at Pleora Technologies to hear a real company’s experience with this automation. For all the links mentioned in this episode, go to: funnelreboot.com

Panelists: Doug McCaffrey, Olga Gladycheva, Pierre Levasseur, being moderated by Glenn Schmelzle Updates made by Paid Search platforms that we cover: Custom Intent Audiences AI Attribution models Review & Promotion extensions Ad variations Modeling conversions via GCLID IF function in Ads Account Health score AdWords Experience UI Cross-device remarketing Nearly Exact Exact Match Youtube ad restrictions GSP stops reading emails AdWords + Google Optimize For all the links and the reboot mentioned in this episode, go to:  http://leadgeneering.com/top-paid-search-updates-year

One of the best known events in the modern Olympics is the High jump. Since its dawn in 1896 all jumpers used the same technique. They would run towards the bar, then begin their vault by putting one leg over, or trying to go head-first over the bar. But someone came to the 1968 Mexico City games, who couldn’t win on physicality, but who did have a hack no one had thought of.    That person was 21 year old American Dick Fosbury, who you wouldn’t find anything notable looking back at his track career.  Back in high school he’d struggled to master  all the motions used in the high jump; and coaches noted how little he practiced; when time came for track meet qualifiers, his jumps came up short.    But when he got to University for civil engineering, he began to experiment with other ways of jumping. In his studies he learned that our ability to jump is limited by our centre of gravity. Lifting our whole body over a bar at the same time demands that we raise our centre of gravity to that same height. So Fosbury analyzed to see if there was a way to get a human over the bar one part at a time, which temporarily moves our whole centre of gravity to somewhere below us, even below the bar. That means that without jumping any higher, we can clear a higher bar - it’s playing a trick on physics.    Fosbury used the technique selectively for 2 seasons because his coach still went by the tried-and-true technique, and the heights he cleared got higher & higher. It wasn’t until a month before Mexico City that he secured him a spot on Team USA.    The Olympics was the first moment where everyone saw Fosbury’s new  backflip maneuver - the press coined it the Fosbury Flop. Everyone also noticed his performance - he didn’t miss a jump right up to the metal round.  I bet as international competitors watched him advance while they hit the bar must have felt pretty disarmed by that flop. The bar was raised in the finals to  2.24M or 7 ft 4¼ in, higher than at any games before. Fosbury missed on his first two attempts, but cleared on his third, winning the Olympic gold medal and broke the Olympic record    Ever since, this back-first technique has been the obvious way every jumper has used. Fosbury’s style so clearly solved the high jump problem, we don’t even question it.      Lots of problems seem unsolvable until an obvious solution is posed. It’s a phenomena today’s guest commonly sees on websites. Her recently-launched book puts it this way: “The solutions we implemented may seem obvious in hindsight, but the problems and opportunities remained hidden until we analyzed their data in depth-and that's the point!”   Our guest has spent 25 years teaching  digital marketing strategy and analytics at business schools and consulting to companies whose websites generate hundreds of millions of dollars. She is the author of “42 Rules for a Website That Wins” and came out in 2025 with “Website Wealth: A Business Leader’s Guide to Driving Real Value from your Analytics”. Let’s go to Northern California to speak with Philippa Gamse.  Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for episode 216.

Artificial General Intelligence is a term that most of us have heard, a good number of us know how its defined, and some claim to know what it will mean for the average marketer. Here’s what OpenAI’s Sam Altman said “It will mean that 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly and at almost no cost be handled by the AI.”   What nobody knows for sure is when it will be here. Some said that GPT5 would herald the dawn of artificial general intelligence.    This episode is airing In mid-2025, and GPT5 has come out…and it is not widely believed to have AGI.   Our guest says AGI is a long way off, and more importantly, that it might not be the sought-for milestone we need for AI to be a revolutionary force in our lifetimes. Today’s guest takes us through what it will take for AGI to truly arrive. We also talk about  public vs private models, Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, the Branches of AI like Foundational vs generative, Agents and Agentic Workflows.   Today’s guest  graduated from DePaul with an MBA, has headed the AI/Analytics groups at (EY) Ernst & Young, Gartner, CSL Behring and now at the Hackett Group.   He has written several books and is here to talk about his 5th which came out in 2025.   So let’s go to Chicago now to speak about “The Path to AGI” with its author. Let’s welcome back for the 4th time on this show, more times than anyone else, John Thompson.  Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.  

Hey, Glenn here. It’s the middle of summer when I’m recording this; a time we don a pair of shades, a beach towel and a good book. Funnel Reboot usually shares talks with marketing book authors, but for this show I’m going to share some reads that go a little farther afield.  Come along with me through six books that are all amazing. The subjects range between business, humanities, technology and science fiction.    Chapter Timestamps 0:00:00 Intro 00:01:44 The Discoverers 00:12:43 Blindsight 00:19:05 How Big Things Get Done 00:24:12 Private Truths, Public Lies 00:27:41 Seveneves 00:30:01 Other SF recommendations 00:31:00 Earth Abides 00:34:57 conclusion Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode, #214.

Sometimes, to reach a solution, we must take unfamiliar paths.  In the early 1940s, a brilliant mathematician named Abraham Wald left his homeland in Hungary fleeing the spectre of war. He moved to the United States, and became part of a team at Columbia University tasked in 1942 with an aspect of the war where the Allies were losing badly to the Nazis. It involved the many Allied planes that would leave from England but never return to their bases, having been shot down somewhere over Europe. These B‑17 and B‑24 bombers had 10-man crews, weighed up to 30-32 tonnes, had wingspans of 100-110 feet, and were defended by machine guns planted along the plane’s entire length. Despite all this, they would lose planes every day, presumably because they’d taken enemy fire and  either crashed during their campaign or as they headed back over the English Channel.  Wald’s team had to determine how to minimize bomber losses. They had been poring over aircraft returning from missions, mapping out the distribution of bullet holes across their fuselages. Their plan seemed logical — reinforce the areas with the most damage. But Wald saw what others missed. Wald realized their sample set of data represented the survivors — the aircraft that had taken hits and still managed to return safely. There were other planes they weren’t examining, ones at the bottom of the channel or in occupied territory, that didn’t  make it back. This lack of data could be biasing them to look at the problem backward. The planes they couldn’t sample could have  been struck in areas that were more critical. Maybe the fact they were hit in those vulnerable spots was the reason behind them crashing and that the lack of damage in those spots on the surviving bombers simply meant they’d been lucky! the returning planes weren’t the rule, they were the exception.  Having flipped the problem around, the planes received reinforcements where the damage must be catastrophic, and from them on many more B17s and B24s completed their missions, helping the allies to victory in Europe. Some people call what Wald showed intuition, but that’s not what saved the allied bombers. Even though his approach seemed counterintuitive, data guided Wald to the solution.  This is Funnel Reboot, the podcast for analytically-minded marketers. Today’s episode goes outside our comfort zone, showing statistical tools in the hopes we’ll get a bit more comfortable using them. Our guest today is someone who uses the same kind of critical reasoning - and statistics - to make sense of their product marketing problems. He is both someone who implements analytics tools, having configured over 500 sites, and one who posts prolifically about what he’s learned. He has also taught analytics at several New York colleges, and speaks at regional MeasureCamp events. After earning his MBA from Pennsylvania Western University, he spent about 20 years in corporate analytics. Then in 2017 with the support of his wife and three daughters, he set up his own firm, Albany Analytics. Listen now as he teaches you some tools that might help in your own marketing programs. Let’s now go hear from Ateeq Ahmad. Note: Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

We as consumers do a lot of things just because the people around us are doing them. For proof, look no further than some historical examples—from the 17th-century tulip bulb craze in Holland to doomsday cults and prepper movements in the lead-up to Y2K. Buying fads such as pet rocks, fidget spinners, Beanie Babies, and NFTs all show how easily prevailing thoughts influence individual behavior.   The science behind this is well understood. The evolutionary drive to fit in with our peers is very strong. When a group of people’s purchases are plotted as a histogram, we always see the majority of them clumped near the centre - we see it so often we came up with a term for it - the Bell curve.    So even when people think they are  expressing themselves, showing individuality by their brand choices, they are only veering slightly away from the norm.    Hey, Glenn here—welcome to Funnel Reboot. Our guest today—who I really do think has positively impacted marketers’ careers—argues that marketers are just as susceptible to conformity as consumers are. We get caught up in prevailing marketing practices when doing our job, while ignoring better marketing options. That’s a recipe for mediocre results.    Our guest is the author of three marketing books and the co-founder of an eight year old digital agency that has attracted clients whose annual spend ranges from thousands to millions of dollars. What does he credit for this marketing success? The time he’s spent on the edges of the Bell curve - doing things that most of us view as too far outside of our comfort zone. And he says to be a better marketer, you too should reject the orthodoxy of conventional marketing.    Unorthodox is the name of his latest book, and I’m glad to welcome back for a second time, Gil Gildner.  All people, products and concepts mentioned are available on the Funnel Reboot site's shownotes page. 

Most of the leading AI companies tell us how wonderful their technology will make our lives.  In a recent post put out by OpenAI’s head, Sam Altman called The Gentle Singularity, he says “We will figure out new things to do and new things to want...Expectations will go up, but capabilities will go up equally quickly, and we’ll all get better stuff. We will build ever-more-wonderful things for each other.”    Of course, these new things need to be marketed and sold. Sam has good news there too, saying: “Generally speaking, the ability for one person to get much more done in 2030 than they could in 2020 will be a striking change”   This all sounds wonderful; it’s used so heavily by Silicon Valley, it’s been given the title of Effective Accelerationism. It’s essential thesis is that AI will cause progress all by itself. So we should just let it take over? Are we willing to bet our livelihoods on that?   Where we are here in 2025, it’s a challenge to do sales and marketing work using AI. Very few know how to run entire functions with Generative AI, which is why Sam qualified his 2030 prediction by saying that “many people will figure out how to benefit from [AI]” by then. How do we unlock AI’s activation in customer acquisition? How do we get out of the starters blocks?   I had the chance to moderate a panel discussion on “Gen AI Activation in Marketing & Sales” at an amazing event hosted by UC Labs and TCC Canada - please get the links to each of them in the shownotes.    The panel featured myself, Lubabah Bakht, Gary Amaral, Jim Cain, Peter MacKinnon, and Brett Serjeantson, zig zagging through everything from day-to-day challenges to legal and privacy concerns to the lack of skills barring our progress.   I count myself fortunate to not only share a panel with these experts, but for being able to call them friends.    And now, please listen to these experts on Activating generative AI in marketing and sales.   Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.    

Since July 1st, 2023, the world of web analytics has undergone a seismic shift—and if you're still reeling from the transition to Google Analytics 4, you're not alone. In this episode, we unpack what many are calling the 'Armageddon' of digital measurement. You'll hear why GA4 isn’t just a new version of an old tool, but a completely different ecosystem In human years, GA4 is still a toddler. But it is growing  rapidly and some are giving it a chance to mature.  Many marketers took their licks in the forced transitioning to GA4 and there are still some raw emotions about how this tool was rolled out. But our guest says that even though change is hard, he guest believes GA4 is the change we didn't know we needed.  Our guest grew up in the New York tri-state area, which gave him two passions. The first one is hockey and watching people grow up playing the game they love - he’s a lifelong Islanders fan. Working in Manhattan, he also worked a lot with numbers. Over time, he morphed from analyzing financial data to analyzing digital marketing, in tools like Google Analytics And  Adobe Analytics. He built this expertise at industries giants like American Express travel and entertainment’s NBC Universal. Wanting to use these skills without the constraints of being in a big corporation, he went independent and relocated to Las Vegas, where he now gives all kinds of companies insights into their analytics data.  Let’s go talk to Neil Shapiro. See Shownotes page for all people and products mentioned in the episode. 

Episode 209 When it comes to initiatives humans undertake, we only need to look at a few to see how they can fail spectacularly. One example:  The iconic Sydney Opera House came from a competition won by a young Danish Architect. The board who’d commissioned him to build it was told it would be completed by 1963, but things were so chaotic and so behind schedule, he had to be fired. It is truly a marvel of design, but it’s a posterchild for poor projects because it didn’t open until 1973.    Another example: Out of a desire to research high-energy particles and potentially solve the fundamental  of physics, the US Government set out to build the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). A site in Texas was chosen, but after 6 years they had only tunneled a fraction of the 88 kilometres, when the project was cancelled at a cost of $2B.   A last example: In 1998 NASA’s Mars Climate Observer travelled about 200M miles and was about to start researching the red planet. But the software setting its orbital altitude had been given imperial units instead of metric. This error in the code made it come in too steep, destroying the $328M probe.    These failures are so huge, it’s bound to bring out our inner cynic. It’s natural to pose questions of those leading the projects, like: “what were they thinking?”   I don’t scoff at the people who headed these projects, because I experienced something in my youth that showed me how humans sabotage missions. When I was 15 I attended a camp that took us through exercises to cultivate teamwork. I thought I knew what teamwork was; I was not prepared for what awaited. Two twenty-something Senior Counselors named Leo & Bob were in charge of it. We left the camp which was in rural New York State and drove in a van a few hours away. The van crossed into Pennsylvania, left the highway for a sideroad, then onto a dirt road and finally to a clearing somewhere in the backwoods. It was early afternoon by the time Leo dropped us off, leaving 4 of us and Bob to calmly walk for about 30 minutes, and we stopped to relax in a clearing in the forest. At that point, Bob stood facing us and told us about this simple exercise we were about to do. He said, 'you are stranded in a forest a few miles from a stationary van which contains food and medical provisions. You have to locate the help, which will signal its location by a horn-blast every 15 minutes until sundown. You’ll succeed in your mission if you reach the van by then. He didn’t tell us what would happen if we didn’t. All of this seemed doable, until Bob said one of your team is incapacitated due  an injury.' and then he closed his eyes, fell to the ground, and didn't say a word. I’s hard to be to say what the next couple of hours was like, as we tried to find the van,  carrying this 180lb man through the brush. Suddenly, it became important to recall the way we’d come, or how to lash branches together to form a stretcher, or whom among us should decide which way we should go. Each time we heard the horn, we felt a bit more exhausted and acted a bit more panicked, knowing that the horn-blasts would stop and we'd resort to screaming in the dark. The way we interacted with each other in every way, from rational to tense to hysterical. At several points in the day, I was convinced we'd never get to the van. But by some miracle we reached the van just before sunset. Each of us had time during the trip back to reflect on how we worked as a team. I no longer wonder why people have difficulty collaborating on projects, especially as the stakes get higher.  My guest also believes it’s our fault that projects fail as they do, and she’s got principles she teaches that make everyone clear on the task we’re all undertaking, significantly improving odds of success.  She is founder and CEO of Spring2 Innovation, is an award-winning design thinking and innovation expert, as well as a TEDx and TEC/Vistage speaker. With over 25 years of experience, she has driven innovation in telecommunications, application development, program management, and IT, helping public and private organizations shape strategy, drive change, and launch new products and services. Let’s go now to speak with Nilufer Erdebil.   Chapter Timestamps 0:00:00 Intro 00:06:38 Welcome Nilufer 00:10:16 Poor design in showers and on projects 00:20:12 customers' unspoken needs 00:25:07 PSA 00:25:40 Devoting more of our time to communicating 00:28:49 Mistakes stemming from bad Workflows 00:37:39 Is our UX as disorienting to customers  as a foreign language? 00:43:12 AI's potential role 00:47:55 About Nilufer, book Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.