Is ConvertKit open metrics a good or a bad idea?, We analyzed 12,037 sessions of 1013 people searching on Google to better understand how people use, and How to lie with data - 91% all cause mortality

0:01All right. So I wanted to talk about actually, there's a email service provider that you use called convert kit i you know had nathan berry at a founder's retreat a couple months ago so you do about 41 million dollars in arr or annual recurring revenue and they actually so funny enough yeah yeah here let me show you something okay okay don't challenge me let me show you this it's not even barometrics anymore this is you know what's funny? Let me give you the high level here. This thing is really cool, right? This dashboard, you know who made it? It's Ali Abdaal's brother. This is causal.app. They raised a bunch of money, I think.

0:41Okay, sorry, I lied. You're right. 38.8 million is their ARR. And then this is their goal to get to 41 this year. I think that's what it is. But I think, remember we've talked about, do we think it's helpful to share your numbers openly like this? Because it's actually really cool because when you look at their mrr churn in the very beginning right or um lifetime value you can see all these things net dollar retention uh from the from the early days you can see how it all went it got a lot better what's that i love how it says mr churn used to be high but is now is healthy i'm not i'm not trying to say convert kit is doing a bad job i'm just saying three percent a month is not healthy churn for sass as marketing software tends to turn higher so it's a lot that convert kit can't control yeah well i mean he also hits a lot of smbs too uh because when you look at arpu here you know it's it's kind of around 9k per year so it's not like enterprise contracts but you can see it all down here so the the reason i wanted to bring this up one causal dot app looks really cool and i like how it's summarized like this i would prefer not to share metrics publicly.

1:54I just wanted to go through it. I want to refresh our take on this. Is it helpful or not to share your metrics publicly like this? Well, first off, you interviewed Nathan. Did you ask him why he shares his metrics? I actually didn't touch upon that because my opinion is still the same. I don't think it's helpful to share metrics like this. I don't think it does anything for you. I think if you want people's input, you can share their metrics with those specific people and you don't have to share with the whole world. Yeah. And that's what it is. Some people still share their metrics. I know Pat Flynn used to share, like I had him on the podcast recently.

2:28He doesn't share his metrics publicly anymore because it also, as you grow more, if you're trying to be helpful to people, it becomes less relatable. And you also start to paint a bigger target on your back as well because this is just how people are, right? The more wealthier they think you are, the more richer they think you are, the more you become a target. And that's just how it is right that's human nature so i think it's congratulations to your success but i still wouldn't do it so anyway i just wanted to bring that up do you want to hear a funny story so we both know tim better be funny the stock trader whoo who tim sykes we both yeah yeah yeah yeah all right we both probably haven't seen him in a while but uh interesting guy good personality he's funny uh when you hang out with him in person when he used to talk about stock trading and he was showing how he took his barbnits of money.

3:16I don't know what that meant. It was like 30 grand or 16 grand turned into 100 grand and then millions of dollars. Dude, I need a barbnits of money. And then he kept doing more trading and showing like I was taking 1 million to 2 million or 4 million or whatever the number is. His signups actually weren't doing as well. The moment he said, all right, forget this. I'm going to start over and each year and take like 10 grand or 20 grand or something and grow that. he started doing better in signups in revenue and people following him because like you said it's more relatable i think sharing the journey assuming you're targeting smbs or people starting off from the low end to getting somewhere that can really change people's life like six figures or whatever that's amazing and you'll get a lot of followers from it and you'll generate a lot of traffic.

4:09I used to do that from aha to oh shit. And I took you did it. You did a challenge. Yeah, but I did aha to oh shit. And excuse my language. I took this from Groove HQ. But again, I said from aha to oh blank, I'm sharing my journey from zero to 100 ,000 monthly visitors. I'm learning a lot. And so will you put in your email address to learn more. did really well. And I'll blog about that every month. And those stats and data aren't too crazy because I'm not sharing like revenue numbers. But then when I went from the same thing, I'm sharing my journey from 100 ,000 to a million monthly visitors. It didn't do as well.

4:50And then when I crossed a million, I just stopped sharing because everyone's like, well, you're at a million. I can't relay. I don't even know how to get to 10 ,000. I was like, okay, this works better at lower numbers than higher. And I think if you want to share, it's not helpful in which you don't get tons of advice from people but you build up a community way faster on the smaller numbers and then just stop doing it once you got the community and you hit the number we now have a new segment in this podcast because the marketing school youtube channel is only at 2 000 subs right now so you guys will see us go from 2 000 to 10 000 then do 100 000 and then we're going to go for a million and you know the cool thing with the play button neil is you can buy multiple ones so once you get one you can buy it for other people on your team and all that so we're going to show you guys how to get a silver play button and then a goal a gold play button and then there's a diamond one too if you get to 10 million you know that i didn't i have the silver and you have the gold too from a million you have a gold i don't know where it is though i didn't know you can buy it from other people on your team no so okay here i have it right next to me over here let's check this out so here's here's my silver i've actually never seen this right now again in the microphone oh yeah so here's a silver play button right and then this document over here or sorry, this over here, this card.

6:06Thank you. Well, you can't see the card. Okay, the card says, congratulations on your subscriber milestone. We are honored to take part and recognize your achievement and I want your experience to be exceptional. If you want to buy more, basically, you can buy more for your team and you basically pay like 150 bucks per so your team can celebrate in it. But anyway, we'll share that journey. That's a good idea, Neil. And going back to Tim Sykes real quick before we move on, The fact that he's redoing it, he was redoing it every year, going back to zero, going back to zero. It shows that it's not a fluke and it's a repeatable process.

6:37And that's also more trustworthy, too. Yes. And what he found is he took that model, he started doing really well, and then he brought on other people because he already had a platform who were different types of stock traders. And they kept rinse and repeating the same model. And that's how his business grew from, you know, 10, 20 million, 30, 40, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah, that's actually a good take too, because he was the coach, right? And then he hired other people, he taught them, and they became the coaches, right? And then he went and started a new brand called Karmagala, right? I don't know that they're interrelated or not, but the charity, right?

7:14Nonprofit, okay. So that's not related, it's probably not worth talking about then. So what else do you have? No, but here's what's interesting, what he did with his marketing. he ended up making it Tim Sykes but he had tons of different coaches on there and the company was still called the same and it did well it just shows even if your brand is related to like Flynn or anything like that you can bring on tons of other people and scale it uh and it still works here this is what it is recognize your team so you see there's a there's a gold one over here there's a silver one and there's a diamond one so Neil send me your gold one so then I'll act like I have one as well.

7:48So just I can put it in the back. But anyway, I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host agency. So NP Digital, so Neil Patel Digital, what they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global. They're worldwide. They have SMB services as well. They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you could just go to mpdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode. But on a side note, we did something interesting the other day. Let's see if I can actually open up my tabs to go find the history. There you go.

8:30So we did something interesting the other day. It actually was going on for a while. We wanted to analyze Google search results and see what was happening, right? So we analyzed a little bit more than 12 ,000 sessions on Google from 1 ,013 people searching. So the exact amount of sessions were 12 ,037 sessions. And we wanted to better understand how people are searching Google, especially because of AI, what they're clicking on. And we learned quite a bit of interesting stuff. So I'm gonna end up going down. I'm sorry for reading, but I think you can share your screen, you know? Oh, all right.

9:08Let's just share the screen. I'm so sad for sneezing because someone said explicitly, I hate it when they sneeze. And I'm sorry for sneezing, but sometimes we can't control it. So number one, only 11 % of people scroll to the bottom of page one. And in most case, people clicked on a result towards the top of the search results page as they found what they're looking for. So it just shows that Google's algorithm is pretty good at just showing people what they're looking for and the top three results. The second thing was from all the sessions, 58 % of the people clicked on an organic listing. 8 % clicked on a paid result.

9:48And keep in mind, not all results actually include ads. And 34 % had no clicks. It's kind of crazy, you know? And keep in mind, this isn't like a crazy sample size. To give you an idea, there's 8.5 billion searches a day on Google. So 12 ,000 is a really small percentage. And we didn't do 12 ,000 over a day. it took us weeks to collect that, right? Because we needed the collaboration of the people actually searching. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more.

10:29And now back to the show. Three, when a search result page contained a video above the fold, searchers clicked on it 61 % of the time. Wow, that's high. If you're creating content like we are here doing a podcast, create video formats and put that stuff on social media because Google is indexing it. And when they're showing videos, there's a really high click rate, especially when those videos are above the full. For local queries, map results got 52 % of the clicks. So if you're a local business, it's really important for you to be in the map results. And a lot of that has to do with Google My Business.

11:06make sure you're getting the reviews, the ratings. 7 % of searchers modified their search query. It pretty much means like, imagine searching for something, not finding what you're looking for. So you adjust your search query in hopes that you will find what you're looking for. But it just shows the majority of the people who are using Google on their first search result are typically finding what they're looking for. And 90 % of the time, people use one of the suggested search queries provided by Google Autocomplete. So also known as Google Suggest, you know, when you type something into Google, they show you a list of pre-filled words and phrases and 19 % of the people just click on one of those.

11:47So they're pretty decent at predicting what you're actually looking for once you start typing in a word or so. when people search for a product 14 of the time they clicked on google shopping result and they were 3.3 times more likely to click on a shopping result over amazon organic result right and this data is when there was an organic amazon result so it's pretty crazy people will click on a shopping result more than an amazon result which i would have never guessed i would have actually assumed that people would have more so clicked on the amazon result but that's not the case. Of the users that clicked on the organic result, 35 % of the time people click the back button, meaning they didn't find what they're looking for and they're going to another result.

12:32And the average search duration was 59 seconds. And of the users that clicked on the listing, 54 % of the time, they only clicked on one result and that was it. No back button, no nothing. They're pretty much one and done, good to go. They got what they want. You know, one of my takeaways from you reading that is at the end of the day, human beings will be human beings because if 61 % of people are clicking on a video, that I consider a rich snippet. If they're clicking on the local map path, that is a rich snippet to me. And that's always been the behaviors in the past too. Whatever they see, whatever the human sees and whatever stands out, they're going to click it.

13:07Which is why when you release a book, for example, if it's a different color than the other books out there, it's going to stand out more. And so food for thought, try to get the rich snippets If you can, it just, it depends on the surf that you're optimizing for. Yeah. And if I had to give two more takeaways, one would be produce way more video content because the click rates are through the roof. And if you're in e-commerce, you really have to focus on Google shopping, not just Amazon. It is an omni-channel approach. Yes, you need to do marketplaces, but you also should consider Google shopping.

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15:21Shopify lets you easily create email and social media campaigns to reach customers wherever they are, whether they're scrolling or strolling. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into a game with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school. Shopify.com slash marketing school. You know, speaking of data here, here's, here's something funny. Did you, did you see that, that study recently that says time restricted eating? So basically intermittent fasting is associated with a 91 % increase in the risk of cardiovascular death.

16:01Did you see that? No, but I do. So I'm curious on this. Okay. So here, get this. Cause you like to read off a lot of data, right? So the cardiovascular death is death related to the heart. Correct. Correct. Correct. So this is Peter Atiyah. By the way, Peter. Heart attack. I don't know. I mean, stroke to me is like has to do with the I don't know as much. Maybe that's the brain more, but maybe it is. I'm not a medical person, nor are you. Right. So I don't know. But for sure, heart attack. So, OK, check this out. So Dr. Peter Atiyah, by the way, he's speaking at that. I don't know if you're going to the event in two weeks or so, but he's going to be there.

16:41So he said last Monday researchers. So basically, look, they concluded that time restricted eating was associated with a 91 percent increase in risk of cardiovascular death. These results are alarming if you take the headlines at face value. But on closer examination, the results from this study are virtually meaningless. So the researchers used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey collected between 2003 and 2018 from more than 20 ,000 people in the U.S. and followed mortality outcomes, grouping participants by average eating duration. Food frequency questionnaires are notoriously unreliable data that are frequently contaminated by recall biases of both total energy intake and timing.

17:20This analysis was done under the, sorry, parentheses, very weak assumption that the completion of two food recall surveys was sufficient data to represent the participants, quote unquote, normal eating patterns, both eating duration and total energy intake for the next eight years. There were no significant differences in all cause mortality, the most important metric. However, the TRE, so time-restricted eating group, of less than eight-hour eating duration had a relative 91 % increase in the risk of cardiovascular death compared to the reference group, 12-16-hour eating duration. Almost done with this.

17:56But importantly, the time-restricted eating group wasn't just different from the non-TRE group based on eating duration. There were significant difference in the group sizes, other lifestyle habits, and comorbidities, making it almost impossible to compare the two groups. It's unfortunate that results such as these are being used to scare people away from time-restricted eating, which is a proven way to reduce energy intake and lose weight. Previous research has already supported the notion that how many calories you eat matters more than when you eat them. This is yet another nutritional study that affirms my disappointment in the field, not because a topic is unworthy of research, but because of the willingness to draw sensational conclusions from flawed data, which us marketers like to do.

18:49So a recap for me here, Eric, right? So is he saying that time-restrictive eating or intermittent fasting, is he saying, which is similar, or same thing based on - Same thing. Is he saying it's bad for you or good for you? because he started off saying it caused more heart attacks. He's saying that's what the research paper said, and he's saying that research paper is intellectually dishonest. And also, I think who funded it, that research paper, was like food groups, right? Because they want you to eat more, right? So you got to look at who's funding it, but also the way the data was combined made it, like you can basically manipulate data to tell any story that you want, and that's what happened in this situation.

19:27And like, yes, it is a sensational headline. When I saw it, I was like, oh, crap, should I stop intermittent fasting? But intuitively, it didn't seem right to me. But like you don't know until someone like a doctor like this calls it out. So that's what it is. I didn't know you do intermittent fasting. Dude, I've been doing it since I was 27 years old before it was cool. I did the sleep tape at 30 years old before it was cool. So that's right. Anyway, guys, that's it for this episode. Please don't forget to rate, rate, and subscribe. It helps us grow. And go to marketingschool.io slash agency.

19:55If you want to grow your agency faster, that's the group that we have. And it's growing. So we'll see you later.