Iris Shoor is a serial entrepreneur who is passionate about people, simple products, creative marketing, great UX, and building a unique culture. She is the Founder and CEO of Oribi, an all-in-one marketing analytics tool designed to help businesses of all sizes make smarter, data-driven decisions. Before launching Oribi, Iris founded two other successful startups: VisualTao and Takipi (now OverOps).
Outside of work, Iris runs two blogs about startup life and out-of-the-box thinking. Her work has appeared in many publications and media sites, including TechCrunch, Social Media Examiner, Heavybit, and The Next Web (TNW).
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Iris Shoor talks about why she started Oribi and how the tool simplifies analytics
- What differentiates Oribi from other analytics tools?
- Oribi’s primary market — and how the company approaches pricing
- The popular features and benefits that Oribi offers to agencies
- Everything you need to know to successfully implement Oribi
- Where to learn more about Oribi and sign up for a free trial
In this episode…
Do you struggle with the complex technology of Google Analytics? Are you looking for a tool that can help you save time and easily understand your audience — without the help of analysts and developers? If so, look no further than the all-in-one analytics tool, Oribi.
Iris Shoor founded Oribi to help you make smarter, easier decisions for your agency. According to Iris, Google Analytics is a heavy tool that is mostly used to optimize Google ads — not company websites and other forms of content. However, with Oribi, you can automate reports, customize your design, and simplify your metrics on all of your sites and channels. This way, you’re spending less time navigating multiple tools and more time focusing on the creative side of your agency.
In this episode of Agency Journey, Gray MacKenzie is joined by Iris Shoor, the Founder and CEO of Oribi, to discuss the ins and outs of her all-in-one marketing analytics tool. Iris explains how Oribi works, the popular features that make the tool unique, and how she’s constantly developing Oribi’s program. Plus, Iris also shares how you can start your free trial of Oribi today! Stay tuned.
Sponsor for this episode…
Oribi:
This episode of Agency Journey is brought to you by Oribi, an all-in-one marketing analytics tool. Say goodbye to Google Analytics.
To start your free trial, visit oribi.io/agencyjourney. Use the coupon code agencyjourney and get 20% off any plan.
ZenPilot:
And be sure to check out ZenPilot, where we help agencies optimize their operations using our proven systems and processes.
ZenPilot knows that you are tired of wasting time on trial-and-error — that’s why we provide tried-and-true solutions that will help you grow and scale quickly and sustainably.
So, what are you waiting for?
Go to zenpilot.com to learn more.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
Episode Transcript:
Gray MacKenzie 0:12
As we’re diving into today’s episode of Agency Journey, let me tell you real quickly about our sponsor Oribi. Oribi is a super cool all-in-one marketing analytics tool. They’ve got Google Analytics squarely in their sights right now. And I can remember setting up Google Analytics as a sophomore in college and thinking this was just the coolest platform. And as its matured, it’s still super powerful, but it’s become so complex to deal with. And Oribi has a value prop totally aside from this. But what I absolutely love about my experience plugging Oribi into ZenPilot. I didn’t have to mess around with setting up what events I wanted to capture and tracking all my changes. And if I missed the view, then it would, it would delete all the data that I had. just plugged it in it crawled and captured all our all of our events made it super easy to see our funnel. And it just works a little bit. You’ll see for example, how many people read the Definitive Guide to click up for agencies a blog post that I wrote, I don’t know six months ago, see where those folks come from how that influences the buying process, the funnel the way that it works out. So super excited to have Oribi as a sponsor, you check it out, go to oribi.io/agency journey, it’s all one word. If you spin up a free trial there, use the coupon code agencyjourney, same thing all one word, that’ll give you 20% off any plan, which is super generous of them. Remember, they can track all of our conversions. So check them out. That’s Oribi.io. We appreciate their sponsorship and let’s get on with the episode. All right, welcome, everybody. Gray here. And today, I’m getting pleasure of having Iris Shoor. From Oribi. Iris. Thanks for jumping on to talk through Oribi and the mission that you guys are are fighting for.
Iris Shoor 1:45
Hi, Gray, great to be here.
Gray MacKenzie 1:46
So can you give us the new the one liner, it can go more than one line, but kind of the short abbreviated version of what Oribi is?
Iris Shoor 1:55
Okay, so the one liner is marketing analytics without developers and without analysts, and a bit more about the product with them. It came after it will suffer frustration that I experienced and that other marketers that I knew as well from using Google Analytics and having to customize it alone, having to use developers in order to collect data, and not having enough proper competition. So I guess today most of the market is a Google Analytics are very heavy tools like BI tools, or mixpanel, and so on, and require lots of integration. So we really try to simplify this experience and to give simple answers to the question that all of us ask. Right?
Gray MacKenzie 2:43
So we’ve been playing around pretty heavily inside the tool so far. And I was really impressed with the interface. It was, I went super deep because of background and SEO on Google Analytics back in like 2011 2013. And I just remember how cool it was seeing. Here’s the dots of where the individual visitors were not, oh, that’s Harrisburg piano, which friend that is that what locations were in. But a combination of things happened. As the business grew, I became a lot less technical and was skilled in Google Analytics. And at the same time, the complexity of Google Analytics grew and grew into so now trying to sort my brand new, I’ve got the handful I’ve got the five or six things, I know how to go in and grab. But it’s still it’s a bunch of clicks to go get the info that I need in that. So that’s a space that I thought I thought Oribi there’s a cool space in the marketplace. But what and I want to get into the tool itself. But what prompted you to say this is a problem that I want to tackle because Google Analytics is I mean, it’s the de facto that’s just a standard that everyone knows you have to put up with it. So it’s a hard market to break into. And I feel like takes a lot of courage to go after that market. Was there was a your background personally, or where did the idea come from and what prompted you to to take them on.
Iris Shoor 3:54
So this is actually my first company, after two successful startups. And I really love the word of flota. itself, there are better tools. And and I really felt like there is a huge opportunity around the today of the advanced marketing tools. As I mentioned, I rely on heavy integrations, you needed to set it up for a few weeks or months. And they really identified a very interesting opportunity around there. I would also add it down. You mentioned before it Google Analytics became more sophisticated, but mainly the market became more sophisticated. So a five or 10 years ago, people used to work with less channels, they’re less touchpoint. Today, measuring the marketing result is so complex, and we all want to be dated with and most of us don’t have enough resources to do it. Well. Yeah,
Gray MacKenzie 4:52
that makes sense. So to help folks who haven’t looked at it yet, try and comprehend What’s the what are the main? So you get into Oribi? What’s the experience? Like? It’s so fundamentally different from the current attribution tools or analytics tools to grab it that kind of, I guess how to, or there might be one key point that you’re focused on in terms of activation, getting people to that first point of value as quickly as possible? What’s the main distinction or difference in terms of the setup process? And then what people are getting out of it that maybe they’re not accessing right now?
Iris Shoor 5:29
Yeah. So the way I see analytics tools, and for them, the main barrier is around collecting all the data. If you want to ask different questions like you want to know the impact of the last user, you stand on how much how many people are using the coupon code, and how many of them purchase and which products, and so on, you need to have all the data points in place to need to collect all the data about all the events that happen on the website user behavior. And in most cases, most companies collect only the final event like a purchase, or they have very few events and very much harder to ask to ask different questions. And what we do very differently Oribi is to try to handle this data layer in a very different in a very different way. And we collect all of the data without using code and make sense of it. Though, it’s not just like a button quick game, we managed to understand that this pattern is a sign up back then. And then these are all the users that requested the demo. Actually, in about a week from now we’re going to launch a new version where we create automatically all the suggestions according to your website, and then you can just click for example, like, I want to track all the people that requested the demo have signed up parature that decided to cancel and so on, and everything is collected in a dynamic way. So creating this layer is the main differentiation there for other tools, and you have everything you have everything for actively. So if you want to question something that you’ve done a few weeks or a few months ago, you can easily do it. And on top of it, we’ve built a very friendly and simple interface. And and as a combination of having all the data and having a friendly interface that you sent me that really helps the marketers to to work with web to understand their results know how to allocate their budget and their which activities to invest more in.
Gray MacKenzie 7:31
Right? That makes sense. So in the one of the cool things is we were playing with it super early on was we can go in and look at what buttons got clicked. And it didn’t have to set up. I mean, it was just all there like you can sort through every single button. And there were things that we didn’t realize were buttons that are really picking up as all clicks, or what are people clicking on inside the tool right now and then obviously pick and choose, here’s the ones that we want to measure most easily and build reporting off of that. In terms of who it’s for, who, what was the because this is a has a ton of application every site could potentially use. Who’s the primary market? And is that shifted since started?
Iris Shoor 8:15
Yeah, actually, I’ll share with you with my previous two companies that I always like, like we were low touch approach. And more of inbound and with my two less companies, it was more about putting it out there seeing for the best customers. And it didn’t really happen with Oribi. So I seen it because marketing analytics is so wide. And they really feel to Blue Ecean because Google Analytics is the only player for for most companies we see. And a variety of of users coming to Oribi. So about 40% of the customers are e-commerce and 25% of the customers are marketing agencies, and NC technology companies and their education and entertainment and they finance and medicom you name it. Yep.
Gray MacKenzie 9:10
Right. e-commerce makes a ton of sense. Or Yeah, what you guys are doing. that’s a that’s a natural fit. So I I mentioned Oribi in our agency Facebook group. And there are a couple of people who might everyone’s there are a lot of people who obviously hadn’t seen it, and then a bunch of folks who’ve seen it or played with it. And there were a couple of agencies and there’s a wide mix of agencies in our group of folks who are very early on in their journey to folks who run an eight figure agencies and we call folks who had signed up early on under a different pricing model and then came back and cancelled it. We’re not we’re not using that much. We’re never too small. Came back and the pricing had increased. So can you talk a little bit and I know pricing is always strange to get into on a podcast because there’s one point in time Today we’re pricing models this and it can all change down the road. But tell me a little bit about the way that you approach pricing right now. And maybe just general range and the timestamp here, we’re in May of 2021.
Iris Shoor 10:11
Yeah. And so really, the reason I think that like many startup companies will mature the product is, is more mature, and we went to a natural process of increasing the pricing today, we start at around $400 a month. And it depends on the on the traffic. So if you have if you manage customers with high traffic, and you are going to pay more, and maybe around like $1,000 a month, and it has lots of ROI. So that’s something that we always highlight. And most customers the immediate ROI by optimising Facebook campaigns by sending more accurate data now with iOS 14 is even a stronger feature. And understanding, better understanding of how visitors behave on the website, what to change, and so on.
Gray MacKenzie 11:09
So that’s what I’m trying to get to, here’s the pricing, it’s a big jump from Google spray. It’s two totally separate products, and two different value props. So how do as an agency, I think that frame of reference, and because the context is Google Analytics, the price tag to a lot of people is going to seem like well, this is like that’s, that’s a lot to pay for a different Google Analytics, which is not really the value prop. And so trying to figure out, then how do what types of agencies should be looking to sell to either sell this through, add this to clients or, you know, whatever the model is that you have there? And then also internally, are there points where you see maybe internally that success stories, but let’s tell let’s start, I guess, with clients, or with agencies, pitching Oribi as a tool in their tech stack that client should purchase, and that they should use to help optimise campaigns? And is that normally how you see it done? Is there just, you know, asking their clients to go sign up for it, rather than buying it? And then using it online accounts, I would assume?
Iris Shoor 12:09
Yeah. So one quick note about competition with Google and with free product. And when it started to really be, it sounded crazy to go head to head with the with Google with the free product of Google. And again, lots and lots of research around this issue. Today, Google Analytics that serves mainly as the analytic tool for Google ads. And that’s the reason it doesn’t change a lot. It won’t give you enough information about different channels. And so it’s a great tool to analyse Google ads, but it doesn’t do such a good work with website optimizations, thumbnails, their attributions and other channels about this. And it definitely was, the reason that we add more value. Today, most of that most of the customers then usually start by paying about Oribi itself. Some of them do charge that the customer. And it really vary, they can say that there is one way but it’s usually being used. And in many cases down in the use of Oribi. So they wanted to use developers on the customer side. So they can track new events and into Facebook to find them on Oribi explore them without having to without a requesting access to the company website and redeploy the website.
Gray MacKenzie 13:37
So what I’m trying to get to is if I’m helping to explain this to agencies, what’s the best way? Just because you’ve seen this way more times than I’ve seen it? What’s the best way to explain that value prop to the client. And that sounds like it’s probably the key point is because I’m used to Facebook campaigns, we need you to go have somebody set up this event and this event and this event, or we need to whatever the situation is, you have somebody on their side do it. And the alternative is you can hire somebody internally on your side and get access to their CMS or their site or whatever. And NGO try and build it. Or often have clients ask, ask where from clients? So is that the main? Are there other ways that you’ve seen a pitch? Or is that the main pitch to clients is, hey, you could pay somebody for, you know, $80 an hour, you could pay him five hours, or you can just have a review and all the data is there. We don’t need to ask for anything else. It’s just gonna be there. Ongoing.
Iris Shoor 14:29
Yeah, that’s one feature and other features. They’re having them having the clients access to Oribi, though, and they’ll be able to view all of the data much easier to consume, then Google Analytics and another angle is just about more value around the customer experience and their visitor behavior and instinct more and more steps of usage within the family analyzing each bedroom.
Gray MacKenzie 14:57
Do you have any because there’s all these dashboard or bi tools out there that do and especially in the agency space, a ton of agency reporting, whether it’s agency analytics, or data box, or Google Data Studio, or any of these tools, and a lot of them have automated reporting features, or where you can not just have a dashboard, which you have a second access here in any of those tools, but you also can pull her work, which is a feature that you guys have where you can have a scheduled report and say, Look, we’ve got every Monday, here’s a report that gets pushed into slack with
Iris Shoor 15:29
Yeah, definitely. So and one of the most popular features is auto generated reports, and highly customized so you can decide which data to show. And if you’d like to, you can show only positive trends, you can customize the designs and logos and colors and and you can set automation, so you can then decide to send it every Monday. And that’s something that really saved a lot of time.
Gray MacKenzie 15:58
How tempted are you to keep going deeper in that space? Is that a struggle for you? Because I would assume I mean, you got the all the traffic info, you get all the all the site information, but you’re not pulling all the rest of the information that a client might want to see from other totally other sources is that is any there on the roadmap or a temptation to keep building out because if you do that, then there’s a competitive aspect, you’re where you may also replace an agency analytics or not to pick on them. But a tool like that where you can, where agencies might be tempted to plug in, and there’s the value pitches, not just building blocks, but it’s combining and eliminating multiple other tools.
Iris Shoor 16:39
Yeah, so it’s very tempting. But it seems that there’s so much to do around marketing analytics, so many cool features that can be developed. And I would say that we decided to go with a different approach. And then I think pulling lots of data from other resources brings us back to that to the start point in which you need a developer, it’s integration, someone who knows what he’s doing. And we decided to focus more on the other side of exporting more causes data to other platforms. Yep. And so today, we offer opportunities for options to export and call this data, any event on the website to Facebook and Google and MailChimp. And this year, we’re going to extend it to about 20 other platforms. So you’ll be able to send to your dashboard, or a BI tool, all the events and all the clicks that dad users performed on your website. And so yeah, this is the direction that we’re taking.
Gray MacKenzie 17:42
Well, that’s probably the right way to go, right? Because you’re rather than building two completely separate products, take all your data and make it available to push through. That makes sense. So when you think of agencies who’ve had success stories, are there any big success stories for agencies? And this is kind of the chance to brag more about what this means? What What’s this look like translate into real life, these big success stories that you’ve seen from agencies who are easy?
Iris Shoor 18:10
Yeah, I’m not sure I can share the names because the internet is down. And it before that, I would say that the main their main success stories are around them. optimization of the current traffic, I think it’s something that marketers neglect many times is that this optimising the website and the channels and direct campaigns, we’re still obsessed with getting more traffic. But in many cases, getting the conversion rate from let’s say, 1% to 1.5% means 50% more sales. And in order to do it, you need to know which content converts which newsletters are the right one, which pages on the website, you need to need to change. And so as the lots of success stories around it to optimize the content and the campaigns, and the website itself, also runs the reports and people hate investing a few hours a week just waiting reports. They’re mainly marketers who want to be more on the creative side. So the entire process of automating the reports and and and creating an automatic way reports that look very professional. Yep.
Gray MacKenzie 19:27
Yeah, that makes sense. For me. So one thing that we tried to do in our I mentioned this to you when we are working with agencies, one thing we give every agency is a rebuilt and process library, we’re helping you to streamline their operations and ClickUp primarily, but because that’s such a fundamental piece, their processes and project management kind of touches their whole tech stack. So we’ve got a handful of kind of pre built recommendations around but common agency tech stack pieces, and one thing that is a big push for us this year is giving them more enablement around here. This specific tool and here’s the playbook that we’ve built around how you might implement that, or how we’ve seen agents successfully do that. So I would imagine if I had to make a recommendation right now to an agency, I’m probably not pitching it, they are the ones paying for a review. But they that’s part of the value prop they give to the client and say you own the relationship directly with your vendor. And we’re just there to service it and set it up for you and run the playbook. And then as part of how you pitch it, here’s the value methods, you get all the all the data, you can have automatic reports out of there. Nobody ever has to go in and design it all the site changes, the reviews can pick it up, you know, do or build a stuff out. Whenever there’s the value props, and then on an ongoing basis, how should they get used to if we can give people recommendations on here’s how frequently you should set up a report, or here’s the types of reports that you should buy them what they should look like in the pieces. That all speeds up the adoption of any new tool. And it’s one thing that we want to give folks the degree that we’re able to support that are the different tools. So in terms of the agency setup process, a new agency getting in? Who’s using this for clients that have sold it to a client? Are there some key points in that journey that you’d recommend and say, Hey, here’s the playbook for how you want to get success with the main, the main things that you need to take care of, in what order those fall is, you’re getting on boarded with everybody.
Iris Shoor 21:18
Yeah, the oath is the first step that unlike other tools that I really takes a few minutes is setting all the main events that you want to follow and creating the main thumbnails. And the next step is then measuring everything that you’ve done during the last week. So the way we see the usage of for Oribi is every change that you made every new campaign and use that to establish their social media activity you posted, that you published, you should go to Oribi and see how it really impacted the business result. So stop measuring openweight visitors, and other metrics that I’ve still found from the ad conversion, and start to really understand how each one of your activities really contribute to sales or leads. And that’s why I see people use Oribi. So you every marketing activity that you perform, a few days later go to Oribi, understand how the audience that interacted with this activity converted. And then you were able to tell if you want to invest more, he showed you create a similar newsletter changing, add more budget to this campaign, and so on.
Gray MacKenzie 22:37
Even as you were saying that this brought up a marketing question in my mind, where from the outside, it looks a little bit like you’re taking an ad kind of like that angle. I’m curious if you if that’s an intentional move to try to push into that it makes a lot of sense. So I’m not discrediting it all the logic of what you’re saying. But one thing I like in marketing is when someone is trying to enter a new market that’s already existing, and everyone knows the competitor is there you go in and even though, if you logged into a review, and you logged into Google Analytics, I mean, the two interfaces are totally separate things. And but but you’ve gone in and you’ve said, we’re Google Analytics, but we’re way better than they are. And it sounds so I like that kind of positioning against the context of what people already know. And then here’s the main differences that we have. And it sounds almost like you could do the same thing from an email side of don’t pay attention to that it’s stats that about ConvertKit Active Campaign are giving you because those don’t really mean anything, what’s the bottom line? And so you’re the bridge between here’s the email that you sent. And here’s the Shopify data on the back end, or what the dollars are that actually come out is that unintentional pushers at an angle that you’re trying to take intentionally from a marketing perspective as you try and disrupt the market? Or is that just a byproduct of? Here’s the anchor that people need in their mind.
Iris Shoor 23:52
Yeah, so actually, I’ve never dreamed of going with this type of marketing before Weebly versus Google Analytics. And for different reasons, I didn’t want to trash on another product to be compared to Google. And, and probably like most of that of the listeners, we’ve tried out so many different messages and ads on Facebook and to find out what’s working best. And the first time we tried something. And that mentioned Google Analytics. We got like tons of comments with people from people that have frustrated bigger guys if the hateable guys if you’re overwhelmed by how much emotion people have run Google Analytics and their experience with it, and we see over time, usually this is like the best. Best messaging people understand what we do. And they have so much to say about Google Analytics that they try out already.
Gray MacKenzie 24:52
Right. I mean, that I mean, it is a little bit more controversial, but positioning against an established player, it just tends to be more attachment is definitely higher. But on both sides, you’ll have a lot of people who are frustrated with it. They don’t like it. And you’ll have people who live in Google Analytics all day. And they’ll be like, how can you? Yeah, I’ll give you both sides of it. But it’s, it’s what you’re doing. That’s what you’re trying to drive is. Yeah, you want more attention? That’s the whole part of the whole goal of marketing. I think it is an effective effect. Yeah, but definitely gets people’s attention, which is cool. Awesome. Okay. So we’ve covered a lot anything that would be helpful for agencies to know a two part question, anything else that would be helpful for agencies to know about Oribi roadmap feature? Second one is, where should people go to sign up or to learn more about Oribi?
Iris Shoor 25:45
Okay, and set them about the way we just go to Oribi.io. and sign up for a free trial. And something that we always advise to agencies is to edit with Discreet. It’s super simple. And if you’re using like Shopify or WordPress, or just a plug in editor website, because sometimes agencies they edit on their website and they how they have visitors story, different channels, so they’re unable to really explore the tool. So try use a free trial to try it on their on a real website, you really need to optimize. And as far as and whatnot, the first question,
Gray MacKenzie 26:26
yes. And then the other one is, in terms of roadmap or anything else that people should know. Oribi what does that look like?
Iris Shoor 26:35
Yeah, so I can check. Right now we’re working on more integrations and sending holders data to and to different email automation, marketing automation tools, and HubSpot, and Salesforce and, and zap here and segment, and then so on. And we’re also working on lots of cool features around their paid campaigns and all of the sent email marketing analyzes that, for example, one thing that we’re working on right now is that super finance in which we automatically am komparify, this type of different channels will tell you where you lose customers, they’re able to automatically do all the filtering work, we can identify which visitors are more likely to drop. And another cool feature is comparing segments, though, for example, you can take all the visitors coming from a certain campaign in which the conversion rate is as low as an average and to compare it to all other campaigns, are they able to see it was different about this audience than where they coming from, or maybe identify the data. And they’re using like different entry page to the website that really helps to to, to shorten all the investigation detail usually takes you days, and usually most marketers don’t do.
Gray MacKenzie 27:56
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. There is a whole element where in any tool, we see this all the time, as we’re implementing click up. There’s all these features, people want all the features. The reality is there’s a lot of features out there that a lot of people are excited to have. And there’s this sense of confidence because they have the feature but so rarely get used. And so making those accessible is a huge value as well. Awesome wires. I appreciate you coming on and sharing with us today. Thanks for your time. Thank you.
