CEO Memo - January 2023
I swear that my Christmas break is all but an illusion, it goes so quickly. Then again, I am a sucker for punishment, and I was pretty much working every second day on planning for the year ahead. Well, I had a plan, but then Open AI released to the public - ChatGPT - a product that will completely change the way people live and work.
Before I get to ChatGPT though, I wanted to tell you about one of our exciting ventures that is happening for Web Wonks in 2023. Web Wonks are going international, and establishing an American franchise, the location is yet to be finalised, but most likely Texas. We have been planning to expand to the United States for the past 5 years, and after a lot of hard work, we are very close to landing.
In 2021, when we released what we call the Web Wonks Model (our workflow system, built using Microsoft Power Apps), we were able to refine the overall product we offer our clients. Our focus is on being as productive as possible, allowing us to spend our time on client strategy, not admin. We saved 250 hours per month by switching to the Model, and suffice to say; we haven't looked back.
Late last year we completed the entire scope of the model. Our two recent additions are the integration for sending monthly Xero invoices, and the ability to reconcile them in our system, and the creation of a project email to store all our communications about your project, visible to all staff internally (if you haven't seen the Romulus App, ask your project manager to show you, it’s very cool).
Our board and our management team have been in place for 18 months, and the company turns 13 this year. We have a clear pathway forward in New Zealand and we are within our target band for total clients under management (160 - 180). There are some funded clients whose work is still to transition off, but we expect to be at capacity for clients by the middle of the year.
By foregoing growth in New Zealand (outside maintaining churn), we are doubling down our commitment to deliver the best possible results for you. This means more evolution of your ad and analytics accounts, omni channel strategies to reach more customers, advanced ecommerce and GA4 deployments for industry leading marketing infrastructure, as well as hundreds of minor improvements to your account across the year.
The final touches are being put on the admin for the US expansion, and the Microsoft Tenant will be deployed by the end of March. Now, that's where my memo should end, but then ChatGPT arrived and it went from having a $0 budget on the 31st of December, to taking up 60% of our R&D budget by the 9th of January.
So what is ChatGPT? Well, it's a large language model developed by OpenAI, it is trained to generate human-like text based on the input it receives. It is capable of answering questions, generating stories, and many other natural language tasks. Now, if that sounds like gobbledygook to you, watch my video to get a bit more of an explanation and use cases.
It's been a fast start to 2023 already, so here’s to it being a successful 12 months ahead!
Market Insights
Last year we started the process of aggregating client data into anonymised reports that allowed us to provide insights into a slice of the market’s ad spend, and subsequent number of conversions and revenue. This was well received, but we want to keep working on how we better deliver insights to our clients.
One way of doing this is to integrate Google Analytics and Google Cloud to better handle larger queries and insights. To do this, we will need to make additions to your Google Tag Manager account to send data from GA4 to Google Cloud - this process will begin in July.
Overall Metrics:
NB: Due to limitations imposed by Google, the data below is only a sample of 20% of total datasets.
The details below are for the Christmas trading period - 16th October through to the 4th of January. There was a noticeable increase in ad spend, as one would expect during this time of the year, but revenue only lifted slightly.
A large push into video views shows that more clients are taking advantage of what YouTube has to offer.
A healthy climb in store visits too.
Return On Ad Spend Metrics
NB: Due to limitations imposed by Google, the data below is only a sample of 20% of total datasets.
Thankfully the trend was looking pretty good at the back end of the year. It dives in Jan, but it's still only a partial month, and ad spend has been cut, as happens most years.
Good to see the highest month was November 2022, beating October of 2021 as the previous highest revenue month we have recorded.
It will be interesting to see how the year shapes up. I suspect an increase in Ad Spend and revenue growth for shrewd operations, but higher costs and tighter competition for those who are drifting.