Bridging-in-store-digital-analytics-julie-acosta-launchpod-v2
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[00:00:00] You need to cut through all the bull to get them to their end goal. And you have to be able to. Understand and the only way to do that is going back to that consumer behavior, really understanding what was their intent of their journey. Welcome to LaunchPod, the show from LogRocket, where we sit down with top product and digital leaders.

Julie Acosta, she leads e commerce and marketing analytics at Noble, a Boston based footwear and apparel brand. But it was at AutoZone where Julie went from merchandising to building AutoZone's first e commerce and analytics team from the ground up. By bridging the digital and in store experiences, her team altered the company's understanding of how the two were linked, including how new product lines can grow existing lines and how online customer behavior influences in store purchases.

Here's our conversation with Julie Acosta. Hey Julie, great to have you on. It's fun to see you again, like. We feel like we just had dinner for context for everyone listening. Julie joined us at our Boston networking event over at Yvonne's. We were just lucky you were in town, but great to chat again.

Thanks for coming on. Thanks so [00:01:00] much for having me. I feel like I already know you so well. You know everything about me. Like why are we even doing this? Yeah, no, are you kidding? I feel like I learned enough to ask a lot of questions now, but it was a blast. I'm super stoked. We, we just happened to be seated next to each other and very fortuitous.

We got this lined up today. So for sure. For sure. Yeah, it was a great event. I was talking to my coworker and we're like, yeah, this is like perfect network like from a size perspective. And also it felt like speed dating a little bit. It was just like rotating. I'm like, yeah, I don't have to go to anybody.

Everybody's just coming to me. Yeah, it's great. But we're talking about you today. I think one of my favorite things we got to talk about the other night that I want to dive a little bit more into is you started in merchandising. You now run marketing analytics over at Noble, but you know, I think your career has taken a swing you maybe didn't anticipate.

So yeah, growing up eighties, nineties, there wasn't like a whole, I had a great family, but there wasn't like this massive incentive to go like down the engineering route. My dad was very salesy. My mom was very outgoing [00:02:00] and I think I got a little bit of both. And all I know is that. For some reason I had this aversion towards numbers.

Did not want to do it. And I feel like it was more like psychological than I actually couldn't do it. My parents decided to move back to Brazil when I was 17 and I had to like, learn a lot of things really quickly so I could go to college there. One of those was the language, but also figuring out what I was going to do from a career standpoint.

I got, luckily I got into college there and I said, okay, great. I'm already hurdling like the language thing. I'm not going to like layer on numbers or anything like that. So I said, what is the best route I could go for from a career standpoint? And you basically have to know what you're going to do for the rest of your life.

Like year one. There's no like general courses or something here. Like gen ed. Yeah. There's none of that down there. It's. You start off exactly where you're going to go for forever now. So I decided to do advertising and marketing and it was fun. It was great. I was like surrounded by a lot of creatives, but I was always the one in Excel files.

I was always the one planning. I was always the one presenting. [00:03:00] Nobody wanted to present. They wanted to like. Create and they wanted to develop and I loved it. And it like, for me, it was the perfect balance, but I quickly found out I wasn't going to end up in an agency or creating anything or Photoshopping anything for that matter.

So a lot of like my internships were going into like business and marketing intelligence or industry intelligence and building out all of these ways that we can use data and at the time is more qualitative data or market data to make these organizations smarter. Then I got bored and I wanted to move back to the United States.

And I said, okay, I'm going to get my MBA. So I moved back home and I'm here to Memphis where I currently live. And I started working for AVL Boeing, which is essentially, you'll hear this. It's. It's AutoZone for Boeing, essentially for airplanes. AVL was acquired back in, I want to say it was like 2008 during the first recession.

It was really smart of them because it was a way that they could force customers to buy like aftermarket parts from them, even [00:04:00] if they had air buses or any other airplane. So I did account management for a few years until AutoZone actually called me and they were expanding into Brazil. And it was like the perfect thing.

That's when I entered merchandising, which was. It's perfect for me because I had that marketing background more from like a marketing intelligence. We were going into a new country. We're expanding into that new country. What I had to learn there was more around like supply chain. I needed to understand demand planning.

I needed to understand how do you develop vendors? So there was like a massive learning curve, but it was interesting because while I was learning about merchandising, I was doing it in a totally different country too. So lots of travel involved there. So I did that for our DIY business for about, I want to say three or four years.

And then I moved into our commercial business, which was our B2B. And so essentially that is just making sure you have the right assortment for your B2B customers. So the Firestones, Bridgestones, any of the mechanics, big, small, even [00:05:00] the dealerships were customers of ours, product assortment, pricing, all that good stuff that would roll up under merchandising.

I was responsible for accessories and we did it. What we called starting and charging, which were like batteries and a lot of the hard parts that we call did that for a few more years, loved it. And they said, Hey, we need to move you. You need to be rotated. And this was AutoZone's way, which I really appreciate it.

They had a vested interest in like my personal career path, which. And just amazing mentors throughout my career there. And they were like, it's time for you to grow up and you have to move up a little bit. And they got me into marketing and e commerce and we didn't really know what I was going to be doing yet.

Like we had played it by ear a little bit, but they knew that they needed someone to own the eBay store at AutoZone. So I started off with really. When in the most, the scrappiest fashion possible, like what are we missing? I don't have numbers to measure success of this eBay store. I need to understand what does catalog look like for [00:06:00] this eBay store?

How do I add more product? Or how do I repress product that I don't want to be like exposing in the eBay store? Because at the end of the day, we have the eBay store. We had our online store. Then we had our offline stores, our brick and mortar stores. You had three channels. And in some ways they could conflict with each other.

And I was responsible for the smallest one. But at the same time, That was like a make it or break it moment for me. So I, I did that and I, I scaled it up to the max that it could go. And then they were like, you know what? We need an analytics team. And I said, Oh, great. We're finally putting one together.

And I'm like, yeah, you're going to lead it. I was like, Okay, let's do it. So it's like that thing when you ask like what you don't have and you keep pushing it enough that finally they make you owner of it. So you've got to be careful what you ask for. It's yeah, that's how I got into digital analytics.

I'd say that sounds like the ultimate lesson in be careful what you ask for. Cause you might get it, but you might have to do it. I tell people all the time, I had a boss that told me one time, he's like, it's not because you Can that you [00:07:00] should, and I continuously have to remind myself of that. And my team, I'm like, just make sure you're always asking that question.

We're really good at finding solutions. I I'm, I've been very fortunate to work with scrappy people that just they're resourceful, but be careful because you will get burnt out. Yeah, we have a very tight kind of position around how we operate like that here, which is we do planning and we plan for each month, what capacity we have, what projects we're going to work on.

And it's not because we want to be really regulatory. It's every marginal thing you add should be a marginal thing you can't do, right? Everything you say yes to is like 10 things you say no to, but because if you do too much, it's not like the last thing that suffers. It's everything just gets a little half assed.

If you over prescribe, everything gets half assed. And I think that's important to keep in mind is. The way to prevent burnout and the way to stay ahead of it is do a few things doing really well and pick the most important things and it's okay to ignore some stuff. Glad to hear you guys focused on the same idea or two of that.

But I love that you went [00:08:00] into college specifically to I'm going to do this because there's not numbers, but I feel like once you were the one in college who loved spreadsheets, that's came over. That should have been the first red flag for me. I wish I knew that. And I'm just like, yeah, this makes a lot of sense.

But I think everybody else is like very. Strong aversion to Excel was like probably an indicator that was like, that was not a marketing thing. Uh, but, but now I think if you look at marketing, there's at least digital, right, there's, if you can't operate in a spreadsheet, good luck to you. But yeah, 15 years ago, I just remember it being such a challenge to measure marketing, right?

It was just like, it was based off of gut experience. And now we're in this totally different world where we have all this data at our disposition. You have to know how to work it. Oh yeah. I went to college a little bit, not long, but a little bit earlier than that. And I don't think we, my major projects were around, let's make an ad layout for a tequila brand was an actual project I did that that was for [00:09:00] advertising.

But now looking at how. We do advertising here. It's, I have numbers, I have correlation statistics running. I, we have a data team that looks at it. It's always great to see where you start and where you end up, but in that path, right, like you moved, left college, you went and worked at Boeing and basically did sales then into merchandising and kind of, you know, the, the less numeric marketing, how did that kind of feel when they were like, all right, and now you're going to run analytics.

I'm sure there were people already running. Some level of numbers at the company and you leapt right over that. So what was that process like? I think when I moved in merchandising for starters is. A lot of people that go into merchandising, they probably have a sales background. Like they came from ops or at least at AutoZone.

There, there were two sources of, of candidates, if you will, for category managers there, they were either coming straight from college. And then we would, we used to call it a AutoZone university where we'd take them and Really, uh, get them ready for their next step. So they were assistant category [00:10:00] managers for a year or two, and then we would move them into category management.

So that was one. The other one was, which is actually surprising, a more recent initiative. And that was to bring people in from the field, those who were really interested to come up. So we've got like over 6, 500 stores. Um, across the United States. It's a massive footprint. Of course, not everybody wants to move to Memphis, Tennessee.

And even if they did, it's a big change, right? Like, I mean, you're bringing your family and everything. So for those who showed interest that of course they would work with their different regional managers, and then we would carve out a path for them to come in and not only for merchandising, this would be for anything, but at the time, let's say roughly seven, eight years ago.

When I was in that transition, AutoZone has always been a very data driven companies. That is facts. We are numbers through and through, which means we have, I'm probably exaggerating a bit. I joke around with us, but it's like around 20 different analytics teams. You have analytics teams for everything cross building [00:11:00] and marketing was one of them, but e commerce was not.

And the challenge there was you, out of all of those analytics teams, you had no one looking at the website as it relates to the entire organization. You had people who were ex merchants that had transitioned over to e commerce a little bit, maybe some people from marketing, and they were trying to piecemeal some insights, uh, about the website, about what they could, like what they thought they knew about the customer, maybe throw in some research there as well.

But you didn't have a dedicated e commerce analytics team. And I think the more, one of the things that really has always intrigued me. And again, another red flag here that I probably would have ended up in analytics is that I am a consumer behavior nerd. Like from a psychology standpoint, like what drives people to buy, why they're buying, why they're not buying, why they hate something, why they love something.

Like all of these things for me were always key on. I almost. Changed my major [00:12:00] actually to psychology. I loved it so much, like to see how people tick, but then I started noticing I can actually join these two things, like the quantitative data, the hard facts with what we can read between the lines and understand about customer behavior.

So I think. When you asked, did I jump over people? The answer is no, because the team didn't exist. And I don't know that it was actually made available for anybody because nobody was asking the questions at the time, except for me and maybe my boss. And so it was just like, I think that leadership saw the opportunity there, but they really didn't think about, do we need to hire externally?

It was just like, let's see if Julie can do it. And so for me, it was more of a. Failure is not an option. They want to put me this. All right, I'll take the challenge. Let's go see it through. And so that's how it turned out, but I loved it. And I think what attracted me and really got me immersed into this is I have always had really smart people on my team, which is great.

Like data scientists that were just phenomenal at modeling and [00:13:00] just doing some more advanced analytics. And then I had the other part of my team. So that team would be more like focus of transaction. And the other half of my team was more behavioral. And that was like leveraging things like Adobe analytics to go and understand what's going on from a customer journey standpoint.

And so there was a lot of reading between the lines and mix of like art and science there. And again, Not your typical analytics team, right? So if you were to get an analyst from supply chain or an analyst from finance and try to put them in that, they would probably freak out. Like, where do I even start?

You had to have certain personality traits to be in that position. It's more like detective work. So people who were like super curious, like if I got somebody in an interview that was asking a lot of questions or very inquisitive, I could watch them look away from me for a little bit and their gears start turning.

I'm like, huh. There's something there that I can work with. So then that's how we ended up building out the team. And yeah, I was very fortunate to lead that team for about [00:14:00] seven years before my departure. And it was a great team left in good hands. So I feel like that's something that is always maybe not under.

Being an undervalue because everyone says they want curiosity. Everyone says they want curious people, but it's what you said. It's, I saw this thing and I just started doing it. I was asking the questions about e commerce analytics and I realized any of these numbers. And you started to do it and leadership saw the value and kind of light bulb went off of, Oh, we need to build this out.

We need a team here. And that is the story behind so many successful initiatives. It's not some top down brilliance and not to say leaders aren't brilliant. I think there's a lot of things that come top down, but there's also so many things that come from like that curious member of the team who isn't just curious about wondering or asking.

But just starts doing and gets out there and duct tapes it together. And then you realize, Hey, we already zeroed to one this, right? Let's take it up and take it one to 10 and that's building the team. This is one of those things that when we're hiring, that's always the question I ask is, or [00:15:00] the point I make is it's not curiosity.

It's almost a compulsive need. Yes, ask questions and understand and like, you can't hold it in because otherwise, you know, if I see you in the interview and you're like fidgeting and like, I can see you noticeably, like something has struck you and hit you. Exactly. Yes, those are the ones somebody would probably scrap that person.

I'm like, no, tell me more, please. What's in your brain right now? And it's not just like, I tell my teams though, to be careful with the busy work though, too. Like you can't just pull this data because you're curious. And like you can, if you have like plenty of time, not all of it, but at the end of the day, there's gotta be a vision for it though, too.

Like my team right now, we are, we're still building a lot of things out. And so there's a lot of opportunities, especially from like advanced data modeling perspective that we can like leverage for different parts of the team. Yeah. Love it. Told them go after it. Bring me back suggestions. I'm going to listen to them actively, [00:16:00] and it's my job then to build out what the vision for that is for the organization.

Like, how am I going to be able to apply that? So we do any kind of like advanced regression or like for our forecasting, for instance, like if we're going to use that, Yeah. I need to make sure the organization's ready to use that so that they're not wasting their time and they're not just like going through rabbit holes and try to understand that we're in a position to actually leverage it.

I think one of my favorite things that we talked about, um, the other night was beyond though, the data it's also you, I think you have something I've recognized a few people and. I love doing this. I think I tend to do this is you try and put yourself very heavily in the customer's shoes. What would I do this?

How would I operate? And knowing full well, you're a data point of one, not everyone's like you, but. There's almost like it has to pass the sniff test or you want to understand why they're doing something. And it always has seemed like that marriage of that with regression analysis and the deep numbers.

Cause you can make numbers do [00:17:00] anything you want. If you are, if you're willing to work hard enough, it's always got to pass that sniff test too. How do you marry those two things together and working with those, the deeply quantitative folks and you're, you know, Behaviorist folks, what's that look like? Or what'd that look like at Ozone?

I guess, what's that look like now? And how do you rationalize those two together? It's not easy. And I will say I was very challenged. It at times very, it was hard because I had leadership that was very black and white. They just wanted the 10, 000 foot like summary. And I, sometimes I was still in the position of, I was a senior manager there, but.

To me, because I was the one responsible for building out this team, I, it's almost like I felt the need to justify a lot of this stuff and tell them how I got there and show them like, Hey, look at all this amazing work that the team's doing. And a little bit of that was exposure for the team too, but also appreciate this amazing stuff called data that is going to get you these answers.

And so there [00:18:00] was a little bit of a struggle sometimes I would get some leaders that just, We worked together for so many years. Like it was so natural to have those data conversations. And then some of them I quickly realized are not interested in the weeds. They're not interested in understanding how the sausage was made.

And so that to me was lessons that I took away from AutoZone is really understanding your audience, right? Noble, I have. A lot more liberty, but I also have that experience in my bag, right, where I know that I have to be able to be intelligent enough to speak to my data scientists and let's get into if we need to do code reviews, we'll do code reviews.

It's not the best of use of my time right now, but let's get into it. Let's make sure that the logic is pretty sound because when the output comes out, if it's not ticking in time for whatever reason, that's what I'm doing. on their work. It's less about checking their work and just looking at it from the lens of leadership.

Is this going to make sense for them? And they never question it. There's not this like moment of [00:19:00] defensiveness that would sometimes come from analysts or from data scientists, but no, but the model says this, and we have to trust the model a hundred percent. And yes, but we also have to make this usable.

And part of it is that. Unfortunately, smoothing out some of the anomalies, you know, and being able to make it to where it has this more natural, uh, progression. So if I'm talking about forecasting, for instance, yes, like we have spikes and we have all these valleys and yes, the model put that out and it was a, a very confident five, 10 year regression, whatever, and then.

You look at it and you're like, yeah, but you can't tell me that we're going to be doing worse next year than we are this year investing double marketing dollars. So we go back and we have to fine tune it a little bit. Some of it is going back into the model to actually verify that we didn't miss anything.

And some of it is just, Cleaning it up for leadership and making sure it passes that sniff test. There's also the component rate. And this kind of gets the curiosity of analytics. Don't tell [00:20:00] you everything they can. They can explain what happened factually, like this group of people moved over here or this many people converted and you can get like correlation results, but I found so many questions, the answer is not.

In the numbers, it's, you have to, the solution has been, I went and I found 50 prospects, or 50 potential customers, or 50 customers, and just, Brute forced it and just talk to them. Like literally just went through and would reach out and email all of them and call all of them. And so often you can learn the why pretty quickly when you start to see even just three or four people all giving you the same answer and you have another conversation, it's the same answer again, you can understand the why and maybe what you took away from the data was right and it confirms it.

Maybe you realize that. Your correlation was backwards, but that's been my favorite solutions has been the numbers can lead you astray if you're not careful or can tell you, they can tell you what happened, but maybe you don't understand why and always digging into that. What's the reason behind it? What is causing [00:21:00] this?

What is the human element? And I think that's powerful. When you were at AutoZone, you were at one point working both brick and mortar and e commerce, right? Yeah, we had to, even in e commerce, this was probably one of my favorite parts of the jobs was we were required once a period, once a month, we had to be in the stores shoulder to shoulder with our store auto zoners, listening and working the counters, right?

So we were pulling parts for everyone. We were listening to it. We were working the systems, which sometimes they were clunky systems. I'm not going to lie. I think as any like 40 plus year old company, there's going to be back in systems that are legacy tied into more modern systems. And there's this whole process of getting us where we need to be for like the next.

And so when you are in the store and you've put yourself in the position of that store auto zone or engaging with that angry customer or the seeing some of the frustration that's happening in the store, you start thinking of this a little bit differently. And how does this apply to maybe online? So even though I think [00:22:00] some people might think, well, why does that even matter?

You're an online store. Why do you need to go into the store? Because the systems are the same. Like in a lot of these places, so I'll talk about the catalog for instance, it's the same catalog that's feeding the website or the store. If the customer's coming in asking for a part in their natural language, and you're typing it into your catalog system, it's not coming up.

You've got to go find that solution for online too, by the way, because they don't have that assistance online. They're not going to have that AutoZoner to go and type it four or five times. They can't get it one or two times, they're bouncing, they're out. So, it was a lot of, we would have a lot of learnings.

Um, but also a greater appreciation for the work that the store AutoZoners were there. And I think from a culture standpoint, AutoZone instilled that in every single AutoZoner. I think that was one of the things that kept me there for a long time. And it may sound horny, but it's very true. Like, I think that culture that they built the company on is still there and it's still thriving.

Every Monday morning, we had to [00:23:00] be in dress code in support of the stores. And when we had to. Be working from home because of COVID, we were one of the essential businesses that had authorization to be open, but the store autosigns were there. They were having to go into the stores, open stores early, be there for the customers that were going into stores.

So we were always reminded of the importance that our frontline teams were had in our business. So I never took that for granted. And anytime holiday season came for online, for instance, we were there at the warehouse, also picking parts. Like we would make ourselves available and we were working shifts and it's not that we couldn't afford like labor.

It was more about being there showing support and also trying to figure out any kind. And we always, my team, my director was a really good proponent of this is let's find out where there are hiccups even in the picking process. So my team is not supply chain. My team is not responsible for distribution, but my team [00:24:00] was one that would put together pick rate reports, time to ship reports, those reports that effectively would affect the online business, but not necessarily, we had control over it.

We had a say in it. And so it was important for us to be able to build out those visualizations too. Push goes, just goes back to that curiosity of, I think if you're a naturally curious person, you want to understand what are the drivers that not just affecting you, but even just what's going on around you and what is happening, these people who you work with and ostensibly you care about.

And if you care about the business, how do you kind of. Add across, but I love that you got to go out into the store like that, because there's just so many learnings that you can't possibly replicate online. Right. Like until very recently, you can't watch someone shop online, but you can see them walk around the store.

You can see them pick stuff up, put it down, get confused. I've worked in so many kind of brick and mortar stores before I ended up in tech and software. What's one of the more interesting things you were able to run into being physically at the [00:25:00] auto zones? So I think as one of them was really supporting the distribution network.

So I think that was one, I'm going to give one of the stories that I, like, this blew my mind. I had no idea that this was going to be a thing. So at Autism, we have our hard parts, which are basically our like batteries, anything that's like mechanical with your car. And then we have our accessories, right?

So things like. You had customer accessories, lighting, decals, whatever. And so part of it that was in accessories were performance parts. And so this was very much geared to those rich heads that wanted to soup up their vehicles and just take their cars up to the next level. That market is very fragmented today.

Actually, I haven't looked at it recently. Probably still is. But so you would have a few online retailers that would offer these and all of them were vendor. To customer direct, right? So the retailer was just there as the [00:26:00] billboard or the catalog, if you will. And then the individual manufacturer would ship directly to customers.

With that, there was a very long lead time, very long, two weeks. two, three weeks. And though it's not like an urgent part, like a battery, your car won't run without it. I think there was still this demand to have it sooner because almost like, Hey, I know next week's going to be a nice day or next weekend's going to be, we're going to have a couple of days of sun.

I'd like to work on my car merchandising and e com. We got together and we were like, Hey, what happens if we were to bring some of these either in our e commerce distribution center or Negotiate with a vendor to see if they can prioritize our orders. If we give them X amount of boards. So we did, and we shortened the lead time, the processing time or time to ship, if you will, to two days.

And we started flagging that and badging that on our website. Sales went through the roof. It was insane. And pride very specifically performance breaks. There [00:27:00] was this huge, uh, demand for the particular brand out there of, of performance breaks. And. It rubbed some people the wrong way, to be honest. Like we have our bread and butter lines.

We have our good better and best lines, like at AutoZone that we offer online that we offer in stores. So it was like, Oh no, we're overlapping and customers. And so I remember this being such a, a difficult conversation to have with leadership because of course they're thinking cannibalization and we're shooting ourselves in the foot.

So sales went through the roof, which was amazing because they was at a higher AOV. They were really good parts. Margin was a little bit lower. We built this view out from a customer perspective and we were looking at those who were coming online through the bread and butter lines, right? Our good, better, best lines and those who were coming online from this new line.

Were they new customers? And they were for the most part. We had acquired a whole nother set of customers that we hadn't [00:28:00] seen before because we had just changed the lead time. We didn't do any additional marketing. We didn't do anything. So these were customers that. Found us either likely through Google or, you know, some other, um, external channel.

They landed on, they were like, Oh, I can get it sooner here than I could on this other website that I normally shop at. Great. I'm going to get it there. The other thing that would happen that we found out, I think there was this assumption like, Oh, they're coming into our standard break line and then. The performance break line is stealing share from our standalone.

It didn't happen like that. It was actually the opposite. We would bring them in through the performance line and find that more often than not, they were actually shopping on our bread and butter line. So it actually helped that team. At some point there was some decisions, let's shut it off because sometimes that's the best way to test success.

And there were better ways that we could have handled this cutoff. It was done a little clunky. There was SEO impact. I don't want to talk about it right now, but anyways, at the end of the [00:29:00] day, what it did show is that there really wasn't cannibalization happening. What we did is we were able to show through the numbers, show through this additional offering, something that nobody thought like.

Something as simple as a lead time would draw up that much business and it was significant. I'm not, I don't have the numbers right now off the top of my head, but it was like, it was a decent amount of growth and it was incremental growth most and more importantly. That's always so fine when you get the kind of, not even the effect you thought, but just a completely separate add on effect, but also shows right at the heart of it.

I was talking to one of the earlier guests. I can't remember right off the top of my head who brought it up. Ultimately, the goal is solving customer problems, but you see why this is such a big thing at Amazon. They will make less money to improve the customer experience. Cause they know over the longterm it's going to pay off several X.

And that that's exactly the thing right there. You talk about is. You ended up selling more, bringing in net new people and not even like you said that they, who knows if this is true, [00:30:00] but beyond that, they come in and they buy the performance part. Like you said, maybe they do end up buying the best part that you guys offer from the core auto zone line.

Who knows if auto enthusiasts probably have more than one car. Maybe for their tuner car, they buy the top end, the non auto zone, but they got like their daily driver too. Maybe that's an auto zone brand. And suddenly you got two sales where you had zero before, but is there any stories around that too, where you can draw on lessons you learned from being in person that helped like conversion rate or anything?

I always loved like the, the physical to, to digital, uh, juxtaposition. It was still a situation to be solved. And I think a lot of it comes down to having the right systems in place. And so the questions that we would always receive would be, Oh, what percentage of our customers are shopping online and then going into stores?

Um, so that online, offline attribution, multi channel attribution, however you want to call it. It was a really important question until it wasn't anymore, because I say that because online [00:31:00] was. Supplemental to our overall business. Our, our true core business was brick and mortar. AutoZone has been very successful at that, at the brick and mortar.

They didn't, they closed zero stores during COVID. There was no impact, like from a, from an operation standpoint and there's, they're continuously expanding. So the online is a crucial part because you can't ignore it, but also knowing that. From an, a conversion standpoint, we know a lot of customers just intuitively they're going online and then they're buying in store, they're going online to check if product is available in their local store, and then they're going to their store and getting it.

I think another interesting story that we had was when we started directing traffic, so we actually have a really good organic search presence, um, And, um, when they would decide that they were going to start the local pages through yaks and land customers there, if they were looking for like auto zone near me.

So speaking of these metrics, so we would see that there was this [00:32:00] huge bounce rate. For the local pages or for our store pages. And everyone was like, Oh, we've got a problem. And it, it did. It was so big that it started like affecting our overall bounce rate. And everybody threw their hands up in the air.

We've got a problem. And then we go and do some digging and we're like, no guys, this is actually happening on store pages. They're going in, they're seeing what they need to see the store hours. They're seeing the address. They're seeing maybe the services that store offers. And then they're going into the store.

This is what we want. Am I worried about the bounce rate? No, and I think you've got to be able to read these metrics and put it into context You cannot take this stuff for face value because they're going to be Situations that are going to call into question like what you think, you know And so the bounce rate situation is one of them like time spent on site This one is one that I could speak to for 20 minutes Oh, we need to make sure that everybody's spending more and more time on site No, you are actually right now in a phase where Like attention is more limited than ever.

And you need to make sure that the customer is [00:33:00] getting whether informational or they're trying to check out, make that as fast as possible, get them what they need to see. If it's account management, how do you shorten the path to account management? If it's I need more information about product because I'm still in discovery mode then give them the information on product If they are primed for purchase, then that's what you need to do You need to cut through all the bull Excuse my language cut through all of that to get them to their end goal and you have to be able to Understand and, and the only way to do that is me, again, going back to that consumer behavior, really understanding what was their intent of their journey.

Yeah. Do you really understand that as an owner of the website, as whether you're a product owner, whether you're an analytics, whether you're a merchant, do you understand why your customer is engaging with that product or engaging with that part of your site? If you do, great. make sure you've got a good idea or good vision on how to make it like the best experience possible.

That's the thing is right. You have the North star metric and you have the kind of. [00:34:00] Supporting ones and don't ever get those messed up, right? Like there, it was time on site. It's not the deal you want people to buy. And, and probably someone saw a correlation between time on site and purchase and really more time on site would be more purchase, but not really.

You start to make it take too long. There's a gun bounce. It's the same for our world, SAS metrics. You always saw people optimizing around. We want a greater share of people's day. We want people in our, whatever your application is, whether you're at CRM or HubSpot with the marketing automation or something like that, but we looked at it and we're like, I don't necessarily want people in log rocket all day long.

Like you shouldn't have to spend a ton of time in here to get the value. The value is you're trying to find where on your site, there are areas for improvement for us. Where are things maybe that broke that you need to address? If you're spending hours and hours. Digging through data. Like we're doing something wrong.

Our goal is I want you to find that info. Ideally. I don't even want you to have to come in. Hopefully we can surface it to you proactively and you come in. You see a little bit, you find the context, you see the why and you move on. [00:35:00] And you, I want you spending time working on your products. That's where I want.

The summaries are like, it's the crumb of a crumb. Like to me, it's like when you have those summaries, especially for positions like mine or like anyone above me really is like. How do you get that quick summary? What happened yesterday? What do I need to know that's happening now? And I can send that over to the teens to go and resolve, but yes, at one point, Matt and I joked that the ideal version is someone who never has to come in at all.

If we can make it, if we can build it in a way that. You don't ever have to enter the app and you still can get all the value. That's actually the idea. If we take none of your time, aspirational. And so AutoZone, you were there for a long time, but you recently made one move and that was a job. You have an upcoming other move, which is a physical move.

So what's the Nobile move? You're running marketing analytics, right? I am. Yeah, I got hired. I think that. Again, AutoZone was right for me. Great job staying away from the numbers, by the way. Just getting further and further into it. Exactly. Next time we [00:36:00] talk, I'll be a full blown data scientist. No, I think for me, it was, I had this vision that it would be great if I retired at AutoZone and I probably would have, honestly, if I wasn't so damn curious.

And part of me was really thinking through, it gets to you and it never goes away either. I thought like, Oh, I'm going to get older. It's going to go. No. So I had this itch that I wanted to work for an organization of where I was an actual user or a consumer. Like. I learned so much in the last 15 plus years about parts and it actually worked to my advantage because I wasn't coming from the perspective of a customer.

And so I had to work twice as hard to not like one to understand their world. But I also didn't have those biases too. Part of me wanting this move or this change, um, of, of industry was, could I take everything that I learned every, all of this experience? Is it transferable? Like analytics? Yes, it is. [00:37:00] But From the way that you approach that customer journey and customer intent, and even like improving their experiences, is that going to be transferable?

Because obviously very different industries when you're going from auto parts to shoes. And I will say I am in complete honeymoon phase. Noble is an amazing organization. We have, we, are encouraged to learn quickly. So fail quick to learn quick. And that's been my experience there. We get the resources we need.

Part of it is, okay, we got in, we said, we need a session replay. So we need to figure out how we're going to get more information on why stuff is happening. Why we're seeing these numbers that we're seeing. So we got together, we put a POC together, hopefully in the next month, we'll be able to roll it out.

But that's big. That was like the interesting things is just having that liberty and the freedom to go back and say, okay, not only do I get to build my team out, but I get to also say, What are the [00:38:00] resources and all of the technology that we need to be a best in class shoe retailer or athletic wear retailer?

There's tons of things that are different between auto parts and shoes and it's probably a little easier to be the user here You don't have to go buy a spare car to like to work on or need a extra garage port for it But what have you found so far that's transferable between shoes and auto parts? I think for me, it's again, understanding that customer, the customer intent.

Um, we are in the process of redesigning the website. Went through that at AutoZone. So we understand what were the data points and the insights needed so that we can build the next version of that great site. Part of it is seamless, like getting to product easily. Do we have a good. Loyalty program or an idea of how we're going to get more people to log in.

Right. So we can go in and understand that first party data better. I think that there's a lot that we're still learning right now, but that's the beauty of it [00:39:00] is we get to learn together and there's like a lot of questions that are still being asked. But the biggest one is. market share. Like we want to make sure that we are getting more trial.

We're still a growing company and we're competing with the big boys. And so it's hard. And we want to make sure that we know we have a great product. We know that it's really well designed. How do we drive more trial up there in Boston? Everybody knows Noble just about down here in Tennessee. Not so much.

You could go to, you could go to some CrossFit gyms and people are like hardcore fans. But you don't see it like at the St. Jude marathon or for the runner, the running shoes. And we do have running shoes right now. We are in the process of drying, driving trial, customer acquisition. And so building that new website, that new version of the website, a lot of analytics is going to support that.

That's pretty much where we've started. Honestly, is getting to know our customer. If you don't have that curiosity, if you don't have that in a, not even an eight, but like almost compulsive need to understand these [00:40:00] things, you're at, uh, It's a disadvantage already because there's going to be someone who's going to be asking those questions, who's not going to be able to sleep until they understand it.

And that's the same, whether you're selling car parts or you're selling awesome, super awesome sneakers or B2B software is at the heart of it. Go ask questions. Uh, understand why people do stuff, understand their motivations. You can rationalize that you can explain it with numbers, but really you can't usually explain it.

It doesn't go the other way. You can't explain the why with numbers typically. So. I love that you approach it from both sides. It sounds like a great, awesome new challenge ahead of you. And I think I'm looking forward to seeing how it goes. And I wish you the best. We'll have to have you on again soon, but it's been a blast.

Thank you so much for coming on. If people want to follow up, if people want to ask you questions or learn more about Noble or anything, is LinkedIn the best way? Like, what's a good way to reach out? Yeah, LinkedIn is great. I always say if you can. Personalize those messages. Cause I do go through them. And so sometimes we have to set boundaries, but yeah.

If it just reference that you're curious, we want to chat more about this or that. Yeah. I'm totally open [00:41:00] to it on LinkedIn. Drop me a note and yeah, that's the best way. Thank you for coming on Julie. It's great chatting with you again. We'll talk soon. See you around. Yeah. See ya.