Clove’s Director of Marketing, Nick Sanetra, has spent nearly two decades hunting for what he calls “holes in the bucket”—the quiet moments when great products lose would-be customers. At Clove, a footwear brand built for 12-hour healthcare shifts, he runs a disciplined diagnostic practice that shows exactly where the funnel leaks, then redirects spend, creative, and roadmap decisions toward what actually moves the needle.
In a world of broken attribution and anonymous sessions, Nick walks through how Clove rebuilt its measurement stack, turned Google Sheets into a surprisingly durable BI layer, and uses post-purchase surveys as a second opinion that challenges platform-reported truth. His “mountain climber” framework for experimentation offers a practical blueprint for teams stuck between safe CRO tweaks and high-beta creative swings.
Topics discussed:
- A diagnostic approach to funnel leaks: Using monthly and year-over-year cohorts to pinpoint where prospects fall out of the journey, instead of reacting to noisy, week-over-week performance swings.
- Post-purchase surveys as a reality check: How asking customers directly uncovered that 70%+ of Clove buyers are switching from big running brands like Hoka and Nike—and how that insight reshapes positioning and channel strategy.
- From single source of truth to multi-touch reality: Transitioning away from Google Analytics as the one “truth,” layering in multi-touch attribution via Triple Whale while keeping Google Sheets as the flexible analysis layer the whole team can actually use.
- Marketing in a privacy-first era: Making decisions with rising anonymous sessions and degraded user-level tracking, without over-engineering the stack or relying on “perfect” data that no longer exists.
- GEO for the LLM era: Building a Generative Engine Optimization playbook: review aggregation pages designed for LLM crawling, structured (and sometimes hidden) text that feeds model answers, and why Reddit is emerging as a signal you can’t ignore.
- The “mountain climber” testing method: Maintaining three stable points of contact—offers, channels, or audiences—while periodically “releasing a hand” for bolder creative or strategic bets.
- Hiring for curiosity over credentials: Why Nick optimizes for intellectual honesty, self-examination, and pattern recognition rather than narrow, channel-specific résumés.
- Educating a category where comfort is subjective: The challenge of explaining why purpose-built footwear beats generic athletic shoes, and how Clove translates subjective comfort into concrete reasons to buy.
- Root-cause diagnostics before automation: Prioritizing tools and processes that surface why performance breaks, before investing in full incident automation that might just optimize around a broken system.
- Standing out in a commoditized SaaS and agency market: Demonstrating value by tying every initiative to customer-defined success metrics and near-term ROI instead of generic promises of “growth.”
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