Cave Bits: Uncovering Website Analytics

🚀 Key Takeaways:

• Why not all leads are created equal—and how to avoid chasing the wrong ones
• The importance of aligning ad campaigns with real business outcomes
• How an audit can uncover costly targeting mistakes before it’s too late

Tune in for a cautionary tale that underscores the importance of measuring what matters—because no one wants to spend tens of thousands of dollars on leads that lead nowhere.
🎙️ $72k for Zero Customers: The Cost of Misguided PPC Campaigns

In this episode, I share the jaw-dropping story of a small B2B SaaS company that thought they were winning the paid search game—until the hard truth came out. After spending $72k on Google Ads and generating 900 leads over the course of a year, they asked me to audit their campaign to see how many of those leads turned into paying customers. The result? Zero. Not a single one.

What went wrong? They weren’t targeting the right audience. This story dives into the dangers of focusing on leads without aligning them to revenue, the pitfalls of poor targeting, and the messy reality of attribution in B2B marketing.

🚀 Key Takeaways:

• Why scaling for success requires stress testing beyond your expectations
• The importance of cross-team communication when planning big launches
• How contingency planning can turn potential disasters into smooth recoveries

Tune in for a behind-the-scenes look at a moment when growth tested our limits and how we learned to always stay a step ahead—because sometimes, success brings just as many challenges as failure.
Building a SaaS startup comes with plenty of challenges, but sometimes the biggest surprises come from the success you weren’t quite ready for. In this episode, I share a story about how a joke I used to make—“Marketing’s job is to push the system to its limits”—suddenly became reality.

After landing several massive deals, hundreds of users flooded our platform all at once. We thought we were ready. Spoiler alert: we weren’t. What followed was a tense, heart-stopping 15 minutes where the dev team fought to keep the system from crashing, and I scrambled to keep our new customers calm and happy.

🚀 Key Takeaways:

• Why more traffic isn’t always better—especially when it’s the wrong audience
• How irrelevant content can hurt your authority and dilute your brand’s message
• The value of quality over quantity when it comes to SEO and content strategy

Tune in for a story that’s part marketing mystery, part cautionary tale, and packed with insights on aligning marketing goals with business strategy. Because at the end of the day, it’s not about how many cake lovers you attract—it’s about reaching the right audience that drives growth.
What happens when your marketing team is crushing it—just not in alignment with your company’s goals? In this episode, we tell the unbelievable yet true story of how a SaaS company accidentally built a recipe empire, driving massive traffic... from dessert lovers, not potential customers.

Thousands of irrelevant web pages, stuffed with meal recipes, were flooding the site with organic traffic that did nothing for the business. When we finally deleted the clutter, something unexpected happened: traffic barely dipped, but authority skyrocketed. Suddenly, Google—and customers—understood what the company was actually about.

🚀 Key Takeaways:

• The dangers of overhyping AI capabilities and releasing products too soon
• How poor internal communication can derail even the most exciting ideas
• The importance of realistic timelines, ethical marketing, and clear labeling systems

Join me for a firsthand account of how "Pulling an AudienceGenius" became martech shorthand for making bold promises without the tech to back it up. This is a cautionary tale about innovation gone wrong—and how to avoid turning your next idea into a marketing nightmare.
In this episode, I share the jaw-dropping story of how one eager marketer accidentally launched a campaign for a non-existent AI feature—and the chaos that followed. As a fractional CMO at a rising star in the martech SaaS space, we were excited to develop AudienceGenius, an AI concept meant to revolutionize content automation and consumer insights. But the excitement got ahead of reality when a draft announcement email hit our entire customer base, promoting a product that didn’t even exist.

What started as an internal brainstorm quickly snowballed into a PR crisis, forcing our team to build the feature from scratch in just four weeks. The result? A half-baked AI tool, lost customers, resource drains, and shattered morale.

🚀 Key Takeaways:

• Why defining leads together with sales is critical for marketing success
• Why "more leads" isn’t always the answer—quality over quantity matters
• Hear about the pitfalls of short-term lead generation strategies

In this piece, I dive into my experience as a marketing manager, where the demand for more leads became my personal nightmare. The sales team’s relentless call for leads—without a clear understanding of what a lead actually is—created constant pressure.

The recurring question was: “Where are the leads?” But rushing to create leads just for the sake of numbers doesn’t work. Becoming a qualified lead is a process, and not everyone who downloads content is ready to buy.

Tune in for a candid look at how marketers can shift their approach from chasing numbers to building real opportunities that convert.