Ep 72: Stop Using Clicks to Measure Campaign Success

Is your marketing really working, or are you just measuring the wrong thing? In this episode of Higher Education Conversations, GradComm CEO Cheryl Broom sits down with Jeff Greenfield, CEO of Provalytics, to tackle one of the biggest challenges in higher ed marketing: proving ROI in a world obsessed with clicks.

For years, marketers have relied on clicks as the gold standard. But Greenfield argues that overemphasizing last-click attribution has led institutions to misallocate billions in ad spend, often cutting the very channels that are filling their enrollment funnel. If you’re tired of defending your budget with incomplete data and want a smarter way to connect marketing to inquiry and enrollment growth, this conversation will change how you measure success.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why clicks may be the most overrated metric in marketing
• How attention and impressions drive awareness (and eventually applications)
• The hidden “carryover effect” of advertising
• The danger of shiny object syndrome in higher ed
• How predictive modeling and incrementality testing can help you move from guesswork to proof

Thanks for listening!

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Higher Ed Conversations is hosted by Cheryl Broom, CEO of GradComm, a marketing and branding agency specializing in community colleges and public education.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Cheryl Broom: Alright. Well, great. Jess, thanks so much for joining me today. I'm so happy to have you on the podcast.

[00:00:04] Jeff Greenfield: Oh, Cheryl, it's a pleasure. I'm excited to be here.

[00:00:06] Cheryl Broom: Well, tell me a little bit about yourself, your background, your company. Let's start there.

[00:00:11] Jeff Greenfield: Well, I, I'm in this like, interesting what most people would consider, like not very sexy space, kind of part of the marketing advertising world. It's. It's the world of measurement and you know, it kind of all goes back to this, you know, that old saying, half the money I spend in advertising is wasted. The only problem is I don't know which half. And that's something that is like plagued us marketers since the beginning. If we only do one thing, if, if we only like put a banner up at our little league field, and that's the only way we advertise our business, then we know that that banner works. 

But once we start you know, putting ads in Yellow Pages side of a bus, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and Google. Now it gets really, really confusing and it actually is, comes down to a very complicated mathematical problem. And that's what we do. We solve it for folks, and the, the problem today is that there's so many black holes, if you will, where you cannot get data out of there.

[00:01:14] Jeff Greenfield: And so you need mathematical models to figure out really what's working and what's not working, and we put that all together in a platform to solve all these problems for folks that are running marketing teams, larger brands, and I've done this before. I built a company back in 2007/2008, back before there were no privacy concerns where we could track every user across every website that they went to.

[00:01:42] Jeff Greenfield: Scaled that company up and exited there right before, about a year or so, before the pandemic thinking I would never come back to measurement. I did. I spent 12 years in measurement and then all of a sudden the bottom dropped out and privacy became the number one thing which everyone in this space is dealing with.

[00:01:58] Jeff Greenfield: And so I was able to put together another solution that does it from a different angle, but provides the marketer with the tools they need to to ramp up their marketing and squeeze out more ROI out of every dollar.

[00:02:10] Cheryl Broom: I mean, that's great. I, this is the number one question that we get more and more, and I know you said it's boring, but it's what people want. It's what they wanna know is, is my marketing working? And I think there's this myth that we put ads out there and in higher education. One ad's gonna equal one application, but we don't see that and we often don't even see if ads lead to applications at all.

[00:02:37] Cheryl Broom: So I, I mean, what is the real role of marketing? What should we be looking at and, and how do we even get started in measurement?

[00:02:45] Jeff Greenfield: Yeah, so I think, you know, one of the things that's happened since. Digital marketing has really taken over and the majority of money is now spent in digital, not in your traditional marketing. So it, but since then, the, and the reason marketers really jumped in with digital is 'cause it was, it was attributable.

[00:03:03] Jeff Greenfield: You, you could actually see a click. But what's happened is we've now gone, we now have a whole generation of marketers. Where all they've done has been brought up on digital and brought up with this concept that you can count everything and you can track every user. And so their belief is that you invest dollars to buy clicks, clicks lead to leads and leads, lead to applications, and then apps lead to start.

[00:03:29] Jeff Greenfield: So that's, that's their philosophy. But really the role of marketing is you invest dollars to get attention. And attention kind of fills something in the brain and it holds a little space in the memory banks, if you will. And then that attention leads to awareness. And when awareness is up at a certain enough of a level, I always say people will walk into your store.

[00:03:56] Jeff Greenfield: And if you're in the higher education space, that means you will get clicks. Clicks lead to leads, leads to apps, apps to starts, and that's, that's kind of the way it works. But what we're, what we're missing in terms of how we look at things, I think it's best to kind of, kind of step back and look at an example.

[00:04:14] Jeff Greenfield: So, so let's say I've got this great video from like last year's graduation. That's just awesome. And I've got ads that are running on Facebook and Instagram. Then I've got ads that are running on Google when somebody types in the name of my school. Really simple. I'm only in those two places. So somebody's scrolling through their Facebook feed and I've targeted certain demographic of users.

[00:04:37] Jeff Greenfield: They're in my targeted group, and they scroll past and they stop scrolling at my video. So I've now captured their attention, but they don't watch it. They don't do anything. They just keep scrolling. Now that I've captured their attention, you know, Facebook knows that. So when they go to Instagram a couple of days later, they're gonna show them that again.

[00:04:57] Jeff Greenfield: 'cause they know it captured their attention. So now they see it. Let's say it's, let's say it's a week later, they stop scrolling. Now they watch the whole video and they say to themselves, okay, you know, I need to check that out. I definitely need to check that out. But they don't. Most of us don't do things right away.

[00:05:15] Jeff Greenfield: So then like a month or so later they're doing something. They remember, oh my God, that's right, I need to do that. So they open up their phone or their desktop and they go and they Google the name of your school. They type it in, and then they fill out an inquiry form. And so in your analytics, what you will see is you'll see that that inquiry came from Google.

[00:05:38] Jeff Greenfield: So now multiply that. By, let's say, let's say you're killing it by 10,000 leads at the end of the month, and you're gonna look at your spend, what you spent in Google, what you spent Facebook and Instagram, and you're gonna say, man, Facebook is just not doing it for me. You're gonna cut your spend in Facebook and because, and you're gonna put it all in on Google, but what's gonna happen is, is that your lead flow will start to decrease.

[00:06:02] Jeff Greenfield: But remember that whole time from that first attention through to them filling out that inquiry form, that was like a month. So you're not gonna notice a change for at least a month. And the reason for that is because, well, because of all the reasons we discussed, but also because Google only measures the click.

[00:06:23] Jeff Greenfield: It only measures the immediate impact of the media, media. What just happened today, and that is, is really cutting off your media essentially at its knees. You're not giving it its full breath, if you will. I mean, think about it. If you had enough money to run a Super Bowl ad for your school, it would, that day would be crazy, would be insane, but it would be insane the next day and the next week, and it could get carry on for months.

[00:06:51] Jeff Greenfield: That's that what we call the carryover impact of advertising and, and Google Analytics and, and any last click type stuff completely misses that whole thing. And that example with the Meta and the Google that we just discussed, I see that across all higher education, all categories. And it's unfortunate because a lot of marketers were facing budget crunches.

[00:07:17] Jeff Greenfield: Then when we go to cut things, we tend to cut the things that are filling our funnel and that that's not good at all.

[00:07:25] Cheryl Broom: Oh, I love this example, and I wanna talk about how your model and your work helps solve for this. But first, I, I wanna tell you like you. You have, I've just summarized like my life presenting in front of boards for colleges.

[00:07:43] Cheryl Broom: And I want to see if you can give maybe a little bit of advice of how I can answer these questions and also how our clients can, 'cause what will happen is.

[00:07:53] Cheryl Broom: Let's say we have a client and they're spending $10,000 a month, and they're doing the mix that you have, and maybe they're doing some like one-off things like email or TikTok around key dates or key initiatives. And then I get up and I present to the board and, and I, I wanna show, like I look at how many completed views you've had and how many lead forms that we got over this period.

[00:08:16] Cheryl Broom: And the board wants to know, but how many, how many students did you get? How many students did you get? And then we'll try to explain. Well, marketing is one piece in a, in a long journey for a student, and so we're really trying to raise interest. But they all, they just wanna know, well, how many applications did you get?

[00:08:35] Cheryl Broom: And then how many came to enrollments? And how do I know that the money you're spending on TikTok is actually getting us any students? Are we just wasting $10,000 a month? When you're trying to explain this to somebody who doesn't work in marketing and really understands it, it, it becomes really difficult.

[00:08:52] Cheryl Broom: It's a big challenge. I dunno if you have any, any advice or maybe you're solving for this with, with the models that you've made.

[00:08:59] Jeff Greenfield: We're definitely solving for this with our platform, but that is the ultimate question because, essentially you're talking about the problem of what folks would see as performance marketing and brand marketing and brand and, and what's happened at some of the larger schools and larger brands is that are stuck on last click in GA four.

[00:09:26] Jeff Greenfield: They've just come to recognize, they know branding works. They can't prove it. So what they do is, is they say, okay, performance marketing, the digital stuff that has clicks. You're over here to the right. We're measuring you with GA four. Brand: we're not measuring you. We just know it works. That's that, and that's, that's how they deal with it.

[00:09:46] Jeff Greenfield: I mean, I'm talking like some of the biggest brands like the TripAdvisors and the Orbits of the world. It's two sides of the house, and it's the strangest thing because math can solve this problem and, and, and the way to look at it from a big picture, if we pan back that camera and we look at, as I discussed earlier, how marketing works.

[00:10:07] Jeff Greenfield: The job of marketing is to get attention. So attention is different than clicks because when folks go to download their data, if you will, from Facebook or Google, you typically are downloading, how many clicks did I get each day? What did I spend? What were the campaign names? Those types of things. But inside of those reports is a metric that you could say correlates to attention.

[00:10:36] Jeff Greenfield: Most of us ignore it because it's kind of had a, a dirty persona around it. And that metric is impressions, just like what you talked about, video views and things like that. The problem is, is that when you try to explain to non-marketing people, just as you said that, well, you know, this is part of the overall journey.

[00:10:57] Jeff Greenfield: They're like, yeah, yeah, but how can you connect video views to an actual start? Because the truth is a board, all they care about, they have a fiduciary duty for financial responsibility. So if you can't prove to them that this actually resulted in revenue, they have a job to cut it. I mean, that's, that's the reality of it.

[00:11:18] Jeff Greenfield: But what you can do is that you can download all of the data. This is essentially, this is kind of the DIY approach of what we do, and then I'll explain in a, in a in a minute how our system works. But you could download all of that impression data, which is the attention metric, and then you download all the clicks, and then you download all the form fills, and then you start to stand back and you look at the graph by day of impressions.

[00:11:49] Jeff Greenfield: And you look at the graph, you overlay with that on a separate axis, the graph by day of clicks and in the graph by day of inquiry fills. And what you're gonna notice is that when clicks go up, the impressions aren't necessarily up that day. They may have gone up a couple of days or a week before. So the secret to kind of figuring out what's working and what's not working is not by looking at the clicks, but by going backwards in time to find what was it that you did on the attention side that drove those clicks. Because one secret to getting the board to understand this, if you don't have a tool like ours, is to figure out what was driving those clicks that led to inquiries.

[00:12:38] Jeff Greenfield: And then go back and do more of that and have people say, what's going on? How, how did we get so many more inquiries? We didn't spend any more money. And then you get to come in and say, well, we added more video views. Or to do it in one specific area, like pick, pick a city like Dayton, Ohio on and heavy up on just Dayton, and have people say, what's going on in Dayton is someone walking around town with the sound, with the sign of the name of our school?

[00:13:08] Jeff Greenfield: Oh no, we, we increased a concentration of video views there to demonstrate how effective things are. And in fact, that gets us into how our system works because the gold standard for proving that something works is what's known as a geo-holdout test, and essentially using Dayton as an example, like let's say.

[00:13:30] Jeff Greenfield: I'm sure there's a lot of marketers that are listening that would love to be able to prove that connected television works. So you pick a city, just one city, and you run CTV just in that city, and you wanna make sure you heavy up. I mean, you do it concentrated and you do it for like, you know, maybe like two or three weeks or even a month if you have the budget for it.

[00:13:51] Jeff Greenfield: But you don't wanna only run like $50 a day. You really wanna heavy it up. Then what will happen is, is that you wanna look at what, what were the inquiry form fills for Dayton PR prior and then after. And then look at it with other cities throughout the us And what you would be looking for is if CTV worked, you would expect you would see more inquiries in CTV as a percentage lift versus the other cities.

[00:14:18] Jeff Greenfield: 'cause the only thing that changed is you did CTV in that city. And that's, that's something you could walk into the board and prove. Now where it gets difficult is, well, what happens if you're doing lots of different things every month? And so, and, and as you start to dig in to typical media plans, like let's say you have a specific campaign ad set creative in Facebook, and you're spending, let's say $300 a day on it.

[00:14:46] Jeff Greenfield: If you notice every single day, it's exactly either $299.98 or maybe $301. It evens out to be the exact same. But then if you look at the impressions, that attention metric, which is how many ads are shown each day, it's gonna be different every day. It's gonna go up and down because it's a bid environment.

[00:15:07] Jeff Greenfield: So every day is gonna be a little different. So that campaign, actually, that combination campaign ad set, creative. You are actually running micro experiments. Every single month, you just don't know it. Now, you multiply that across all of your meta campaigns, all of your Google campaigns. You're doing tons of micro experiments every single month, just like the Dayton CTV example.

[00:15:32] Jeff Greenfield: The only difference is they're all being done in combination and it is impossible for a human being to discern what's actually working and what's not working. But that's where math and machines come in because you take those little micro differences and remember, you take prior data as well too, and then you compare it to how many people visited your website, how many form fills were there, and now the, the machine can look, okay, we changed impressions here, 10%.

[00:16:05] Jeff Greenfield: What else changed, what else was going on? And with a bunch of complicated math and machine learning, we can actually determine the incremental impact of everything that's going on. So not just measurement, but we're talking incrementality, meaning that when you do this, you get actually this many extra inquiries than you would've gotten if you had not done that.

[00:16:29] Jeff Greenfield: And that's essentially how the platform works.

[00:16:32] Cheryl Broom: That's great. 'cause as you were talking about that, I was thinking to myself, who has time to do all this?

[00:16:39] Jeff Greenfield: You, you're well,

[00:16:40] Cheryl Broom: This is a full-time job,

[00:16:41] Jeff Greenfield: You're right. And that's, that's one of the things as well that most of us got into marketing because we wanna be creative, we wanna work on messaging, we wanna be the person, you know, all of us got into marketing because we had like this vision. Like, I'm gonna walk into a boardroom and they're like gonna say, sales are down, what are we gonna do?

[00:17:02] Jeff Greenfield: And you walk in and you say, oh, I got this great idea, a chihuahua and an orange. And everyone goes, oh my God, that's amazing. And you write it down on the whiteboard and everybody's like, oh my God, you're incredible. And you walk out of the room and you collect a big check and you only get brought in 'cause you're a genius.

[00:17:19] Jeff Greenfield: That's what we all thought was gonna happen. Yeah, 

[00:17:22] Cheryl Broom: We all wanna be the Dawn Draper. We wanna, we wanna do fun stuff. We don't wanna do all this math. That's why, that’s why I'm in marketing. I don't wanna do math.

[00:17:31] Jeff Greenfield: Right. But it turns out that we're actually in spreadsheets more than our friends who are CPAs. It's crazy. And, and, and, and what's sad is that when we talk to financial teams as marketers, they think that we don't know math, which is so silly because we're using Excel.

[00:17:49] Jeff Greenfield: It's not because we have a cell error. It's that because we're taking data from Facebook and Google. We're trying to aggregate it together, and our numbers never match because there's over counting because Facebook doesn't know about Google. Google doesn't know about Facebook. Neither one of them knows about your connected television or maybe some billboards or direct mail you're running.

[00:18:10] Jeff Greenfield: So everybody is taking too much credit because nobody's talking to each other. And so the reality is, is that our goal for marketers is really to decrease your stress, get you out of the spreadsheet. So our platform handles the reporting meaning, 'cause remember, is as a, in any job, in any business, your job when you're reporting up is to say this is what worked.

[00:18:35] Jeff Greenfield: This is what didn't work and this is what we're gonna do different. And so I kind of say, you know, what worked and what didn't work is kind of like our weekly, or our monthly reporting, essentially what happened. And what we're gonna do different is how we're gonna change and move money around across our different partners and campaigns for the next month.

[00:18:56] Jeff Greenfield: So what our platform does not only is that reporting aspect, but also forecasting. So you know, hey, next month our budget is x. How should we spend those dollars across everything that we're doing? And then also, hey, if we were to increase, spend 10 or 20 or 30%, is this the time to do it? Would we actually get a 10 or 20 or 30% lift so we can run these different types of simulations and show?

[00:19:23] Jeff Greenfield: Because the model is a predictive model, it, it predicts incredibly well. So it gives you the confidence to make those bets, if you will.

[00:19:32] Cheryl Broom: So how, so first of all, what is what? Tell me the name of your. Platform. And then how does it work? Like with a college who may be running media through a separate partner? Do they have to move media to you? How can they, how can they take advantage of this platform?

[00:19:48] Jeff Greenfield: Yeah, great question. So the platform's called Provalytics.

[00:19:51] Cheryl Broom: Okay.

[00:19:52] Jeff Greenfield: Prova actually means proof in Italian. so people can go to it. They can visit get prova.com or provalytics.com, and we don't buy media. None of the media runs through us. The way it works from an onboarding perspective is we either, if you have an internal in-house team that's running everything, we'll work directly with them or we'll work directly with the agencies.

[00:20:15] Jeff Greenfield: For a lot of our clients, we give them, or the agency like a link. When you know, they have access to Meta, they click on the link and that enables us to automatically. Grab the last year to year and a half of data. We do that with Facebook, Google, and most of the platforms for inquiries and apps and any other kind of different other types of KPIs that they want us to pull.

[00:20:41] Jeff Greenfield: We can get those from their internal data warehouse or whatever lead platform that they're utilizing and all that data comes in directly to us and gets modeled on our platform.

[00:20:50] Cheryl Broom: Wow, that's so, that is so easy. And also you just said like a new word combination that I wrote down that I love, which is automagically.

[00:20:57] Jeff Greenfield: Oh yeah. Well it does. Yeah, because it does kind of feel that way because what this does now I will say this is a mathematical model, so we always like to say that, you know, and the nice thing when you're dealing with finance is that finance. They live in the world of financial models, so they're always doing financial modeling, and if you've ever put together a financial model, you know, there's a little bit of guessing that's involved with it.

[00:21:27] Jeff Greenfield: And, and if you actually spend time with the finance folks, you'll see how often they update their models. This model gets updated whenever there's new data, just like their financial model. The only difference is, is that this is predictive. It also has things that they're used to like an R Square, which is a predictive number.

[00:21:45] Jeff Greenfield: So this will give them, all of a sudden, marketing is now working on the same plane, if you will, as finance. They'll understand it, it'll make complete sense to them. But what we always like to say is that all models are wrong, some are useful, and our approach is that I, we will guarantee you that our approach will be less wrong than what you're doing today.

[00:22:13] Jeff Greenfield: I, I, I don't want anyone to think that, oh my God, Jeff has the answer. There is, there is no way to figure out exactly how human beings think and what drives them. This is looking at, you know, this is looking at what's available to come up with essentially the best approach and create a highly predictive model for it.

[00:22:35] Jeff Greenfield: But your goal each month as a marketer is to, is to be less wrong than you were in the prior month. And in today's environment, what that means is, is that you have to understand that what you did six months ago that was working, if it's been working for six months. It's not gonna be working in month seven or eight.

[00:22:55] Jeff Greenfield: It's just, it's just the way that things are because the world is constantly changing and there's more and more things that are trying to grab people's attention.

[00:23:04] Cheryl Broom: I, I think, first of all, I love the fact that your guarantee is that you'll be less wrong. But I mean, honestly, most of our clients and even the information that we give on their campaigns is not doing any sort of predictive modeling. It's just reporting back on on clicks and impressions and shares and then us making—.

[00:23:24] Cheryl Broom: You know, educated guesses on, on what to do next. So I don't think that that's like. Wrong to, to promise that because most of what's being done right now is just guesswork. I mean, it's not predictive at all. So I think that's great. And I what also I, I think is so important in the work that you are doing is we are constantly up against colleges and administrators involved in marketing who go to a student services retreat or go to a conference and they talk to an exhibitor and they get really excited and now there's this shiny object. And, and then we have to come back as an agency and say, yeah, like that's, you gotta tell your vice president that's a waste of money. And you know, these things that you're doing are doing well.

[00:24:09] Cheryl Broom: Here's what we need to be doing instead—so I love maybe having this help out with that, like shiny object syndrome. Like, like saying, oh, here's some proof of what you're doing is working and here's how we're seeing it work.

[00:24:22] Jeff Greenfield: That shiny object syndrome syndrome is one of the worst things that happens to marketers. I remember multiple clients of ours in the EDU space that were spending enough money and they were so excited. This is in the early Facebook days, they would get invited to Facebook headquarters.

[00:24:41] Jeff Greenfield: To go to like Facebook University there, and they would come back and, and Facebook was only following in the footsteps of Google. Google did the same thing, invited folks to the Google campus. And what Google found in the early days is that when you invite marketers to the campus, you walk them around and they get to see executives.

[00:25:00] Jeff Greenfield: You know, some of my folks when they Facebook, in the early days, they would see Zuckerberg and get a wave from him, and that wave was worth probably 25% more spend. And I, it, it, it just because they, you know, I went to Facebook and they showed me all the stuff that's going on and they really know everything that's happening and, and you know, they, they're gonna really help us.

[00:25:22] Jeff Greenfield: But no, you're absolutely right. It, it's, it's a very tough job. From an agency perspective and being an a consultant and an advisor to help guide folks in the right direction and, and not get their emotions involved because that's what it is. And you could kind of say that when Facebook does that kind of stuff or Google did that.

[00:25:42] Jeff Greenfield: They got people's attention, really built their awareness, and then boom, the marketer said, let's spend some more money with these folks that they're great. That type of thing.

[00:25:52] Cheryl Broom: Exactly. Actually, I took, clients to the Google campus years ago pre-COVID, and that's exactly what happened. I think it was like the the free coffee cart and the bicycles got like more ad spend than anything.

[00:26:05] Jeff Greenfield: Of course. Well, because people came back and they had an amazing story to tell. It gave them currency, buzz currency, if you will, that they could tell friends and family, Hey, you know, I was at the Google campus and let me tell you, it is so cool there. So they got, they got a chance to kind of go backstage where, to a place where most people don't get to go.

[00:26:26] Jeff Greenfield: And so as a result, they felt a special connection there. Think about, it's the same type of connection that most of us as marketers are trying to make with prospective students along the way. So same type of approach, but definitely more hands on.

[00:26:41] Cheryl Broom: Well, before we wrap up, I wanna hear a little bit from our sponsor, and then when we come back I have some fun questions rapid fire questions to ask you to wrap up our great conversation.

[00:26:51] Jeff Greenfield: Awesome.

[00:26:52] Cheryl Broom: Okay, so we're back. Such a great conversation and I'm like, have so many ideas and so many different ways that I wanna approach measuring campaigns now.

[00:27:03] Cheryl Broom: So thank you Jeff so much and as we wrap up our conversation today, I wanna ask you just a couple quick questions to just kind of some fun stuff maybe to help our marketers expand their own minds a little bit. So you're obviously living in the world of analytics. What do you think is the most overrated marketing metric?

[00:27:23] Jeff Greenfield: Oh, the most overrated marketing metric I would say is, is the click, because we just need to learn to drop it. It it, yes, it's part of the funnel, but the overemphasis on it has actually cost brands billions upon billions of dollars. And it's, and as a result, we've moved more money down funnel. And that helps companies like, especially Google win the day.

[00:27:54] Jeff Greenfield: And it, it helps now retail media, it's, and it's not, and the reason is, is 'cause us marketers, we want to get credit for what we do. We know the closer we are to that conversion, whether it be an inquiry form or a sale, we'll get credit for it. But as a result, what we're doing is we're undercutting our clients, our brands.

[00:28:15] Jeff Greenfield: We need to focus more on attention at the top, which is that impression. So let's drop the click together.

[00:28:22] Cheryl Broom: I, this is like literally the best takeaway because first of all, clicks are gonna decrease with AI search. We know we're gonna be seeing less clicks, but we're still gonna be seeing applications. So we've gotta somehow bridge what our marketing is doing in between that application and you know, our ad campaigns.

[00:28:42] Cheryl Broom: And it may not be a click anymore, but also like clicks are the gold standard and what you're saying is making so much sense. People are coming and going and coming and going, we don't know. They may see something and then a month later come back. They may be searching for things like, I remember I put up a billboard, this was like 12, maybe 15 years ago when I was at a marketing, when I was marketing director at a community college.

[00:29:06] Cheryl Broom: We put up this really fun billboard and it said, beach to biology in five minutes. And it was because our secondary campus was five minutes from the most popular beach where we live. It's the beach where all the high school students are, and we had this great billboard that had like a, like a VW bus with a surfboard and then like a chicken, like a cute little chicken and a beaker because what do you do for biology?

[00:29:31] Cheryl Broom: And it's said beach to biology where biology faculty like. Literally lost their shit. They complained about our billboard because they don't put chickens in beakers in biology. But it grabbed your attention. Like so I had to tell the president, like, everybody knows that live chickens aren't in beakers.

[00:29:48] Cheryl Broom: Like, but it's adorable. And it makes you read the billboard. It makes you look at it. Our, so we put this up in June. By the time spring came around, that campus had like increased by like 10%. We saw Google searches for beach to biology class. People were searching for the term on the billboard. So, but it took months to see that kind of form. And so we were able to go back and be like, look like biology faculty, like stay outta our marketing. 

[00:30:24] Cheryl Broom: You know? 'cause they were like, we want you to come run all of your ads by us before you put them out. I was like, we're not, if we sell what you're actually doing, no one's gonna come to your class.

[00:30:34] Cheryl Broom: Like.

[00:30:35] Jeff Greenfield: That's right. And what I would say to all, any marketers in this space that are listening, that doubt this, while everyone in this space knows about Southern New Hampshire University, they're the powerhouse today. And the reason they are is because they're amazing TV campaigns. Which don't have any clicks there.

[00:30:57] Jeff Greenfield: There's in their analytics, there is not a single registered click from tv. It just shows up. So, and, and think about all of the other cool marketing tactics today that are out there, like a podcast advertising, digital out-of-home. I mean, you can now do a billboard in like five minutes, put it live any place in the us.

[00:31:19] Jeff Greenfield: Just like that. People are gonna see it, but there's nothing for them to click on influencer campaigns the same way as well, too. So you have to understand that. And it's exactly what you said, Cheryl, with the advent of AI search, there's gonna be less and less clicks that you will be able to track. So you need to step back from that click and just stop using it as a metric.

[00:31:41] Jeff Greenfield: I mean, we're moving into, you know. Here we are, 2026, 2027 on its way. It's time with everyone knows that it's, it's, it's, it's bad, it's wrong. So it's, it's time to focus on the other metrics or get more sophisticated measurement like what we do and others do. It's time to step up.

[00:32:03] Cheryl Broom: Time to step up ofr sure. And I think that's what the boards have been asking for for years and, and clients just haven't figured out how to do it well, is you gotta step, you gotta show more. You have to, you have to prove in some way that what you're doing is making a difference. And what I'm hearing you say is that focusing on how many clicks you have is not the way to do it.

[00:32:24] Cheryl Broom: Yeah.

[00:32:25] Jeff Greenfield: That's right. Exactly.

[00:32:27] Cheryl Broom: Well, this has been such a fantastic conversation. I'm, I'm so excited to go on your website and dive in and learn more. How can people connect with you if they're interested in, in taking a look at what you offer?

[00:32:37] Jeff Greenfield: You can go to provalytics.com or go to get prova. That's GETPROVA.com. We've got some, reports there that are available for download, or you can also look us up or find me on LinkedIn. You know, I'm always putting out new content a couple times a week and, and you'll hear me say the same stuff over and over again.

[00:32:57] Jeff Greenfield: Get away from that, click. Focus on the impressions. I feel like that I have to say it over and over again for marketers to finally get it because I'm working against the 20 plus years of Google dominating driving home to people that the click is the thing and the reality is that's not how marketing works.

[00:33:17] Cheryl Broom: Oh, great. It's been such an enlightening conversation and I've just loved talking to you and thank you so much.

[00:33:23] Jeff Greenfield: My pleasure. Thank you, Cheryl, for hav