Funnel Reboot

Episode 197

Today, we are going to talk about how those of us who sell things find new buyers once we’ve exhausted our own audiences. We involve partners, and we can do this in a few ways. These partners may have high-traffic sites or be social media influencers. We are trying to use someone else’s channel to reach their audience, hoping they will buy from us.

Alternatively, we might be the ones who are influential or have a large audience that brands want to reach, so they pay us to be their marketing channel. The name for teaming up like this is affiliate marketing.

Today’s guest came to affiliate marketing through dabbling in online gambling. He watched the incentives sites put out to attract players, and then in 2010, he created a website that reviewed gambling affiliate programs called Gaming Affiliates Guide. This site’s traffic led him to become, you guessed it, an affiliate. Over time, he managed several gambling affiliate sites.

As you progress in this field, you always hit a ceiling with this marketing channel. No matter whether you’re the one needing traffic and paying for it, or the one who has traffic and is turning it into money, everyone gets a headache tracking it. As our guest was deeply involved at this point, getting paid to manage affiliate sites, he saw numerous problems in this industry and saw a way to solve them.

There were already applications that reported affiliate activity, but he saw these technologies’ shortcomings. With his engineering degree from the University of Toronto, which had taught him how to develop things, he joined up with partners to create a SaaS tool of their own: StatsDrone.

Having scratched an itch he experienced earlier in his career, he now heads a team whose tool addresses affiliate challenges.

Let’s go to Montreal and hear from John Wright.

Chapter Timestamps:

0:00:00 Intro

00:03:35 Welcome John Wright

00:06:57 Difficulty with Affiliate tracking

00:11:27 Postbacks and tracking methods

00:18:48 tracking dynamic variables

00:23:14 PSA

00:23:54 Tracking affiliate dollars

00:42:13 Contacting John

People, Products and Concepts mentioned in Show:

statsdrone.com

[email protected]

StatsDrone on Instagram

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Episode 195

We all want our organization’s decisions to be driven by the numbers. Who wouldn’t want to have at their fingertips analytics that accurately show which course of action will be best.  

But doing this takes analysts, and that doesn’t mean hiring them, it means managing them to function well. It means creating processes for them, Outfitting them with technology. Giving them budgets.It’s hard pulling this off in a small or mid-sized organization, and even leaders of large organizations must exercise care when creating this. 

But there’s no set-in-stone law that says a data team must be in-house. Another model, managed services works well for IT and it can be used to give companies access to analysts so they can still be data-driven. 

We’re going to explore the outsourced analytics model with today’s guest. 

Throughout his career, he has worked at the intersection of data, business, and strategy consulting. He earned his Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

Following graduation, he joined Cargill as a Data Engineer from June 2011 to November 2013. He went on to serve as the Analytics Lead at Slalom from December 2013 to February 2016, where he claims to have been Minneapolis’ first Analytics Hire. 

In 2017, he co-founded DataDrive, a managed service provider specializing in analytics, alongside fellow data enthusiasts.

Let’s talk with Luke Komiskey.

Chapter Timestamps

00:00:00 – Intro

00:02:14 – Welcome Luke

00:17:38 – PSA

00:18:16 – Calculating value of having good data

00:49:29 – The MSP model

00:49:59 – Where to contact Luke

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Luke on linkedin

Luke’s company is Datadrive

Jerry Macguire

You may want to hear related episodes:

https://funnelreboot.com/episode-153-boosting-ga4-with-bigquery-with-johan-van-de-werken/

https://funnelreboot.com/episode-151-analytics-worth-the-investment-with-martin-mcgarry/

https://funnelreboot.com/episode-138-how-data-pipes-operationalize-analysis-with-noah-learner/

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Episode 194

There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Being honest, doing something differently is often neither better or worse, it’s just different.

– Playing Music with an acoustic vs electric guitar

– Writing with a pen on paper vs a computer. And continuing on that theme, it could be a Mac or a PC

– Programming can be done in various languages

– Films can be made with a variety of filming equipment, anything from an iPhone up to an IMAX ALEXA 65mm

This also applies to what we use as our analytics tool. And though Google Analytics gets a lot of attention, including in this podcast, to be fair, it is not the only game in town. The industry has a second tool,  Adobe Analytics and I wanted to talk with an expert, and to my mind, today’s guest is the person to talk to about it. 

She has 15+ years of experience helping enterprise organizations solve their analytics problems holistically, no matter where they are in their digital measurement evolution or what tool set they use. 

Few can go as deep on pixel implementation, tag management, and data layers as she. 

As a consultant at boutique agency 33 Sticks, she helps clients streamline the implementation process and get more value out of their tools, decreasing costs and headaches for developers, project managers, and analysts alike. On the side, she’s used her background as a developer to create free industry tools like the Adobe Analytics Beacon Parser and the mobile app PocketSDR. 

She loves helping and collaborating with others in the industry, and most days can be found in #measure slack or twitter doing just that.

Let’s go to the Atlanta-area to talk with Jenn Kunz 

Chapter Timestamps

00:00:00 – Intro

00:02:21 – Welcome Jenn

00:03:37 – How Adobe’s used by larger orgs

00:20:55 – PSA

00:21:32 – Navigating the Interface

00:41:48 – How to contact Jenn

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Jenn on LinkedIn

Jenn on Twitter

Jenn on Bluesky

Jenn’s personal site is Digitaldatatactics.com

Adobe Customer journey analytics

Adobe Launch (tags) props, evars

Adobe Advertising Analytics connection to Google

Adobe Experience Platform (AEP)

XDM – value pair

Data layer

GCLID (Equivalent of Adobe CID) 

UTM parameters

Scopes – a way to organize acquisition information around a user, a session, or product

Adobe’s Ben Gaines

Amplitude

Simo Ahava

Measureslack Community

Test and learn (TLC) community

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Episode 193

Those of us in the digital economy think a lot about growing our business, but we don’t think as much about the tech that enables customers to interact with our business. When our sites don’t run smoothly or aren’t available, our customers suffer and it stops working as our sales and marketing engine. Terms for these episodes: the site crashed or it croaked, give us a perception that sites are either alive and well or completely dead, when its health really resembles our own human health. Meaning, a website can give off  warning signs that can be diagnosed and treated before anything really bad happens. It doesn’t take invasive tools to catch these; monitoring services that run without any special site access can detect issues.  These tools that take a site’s pulse are also good to gauge the site’s fitness – its ability to handle business growth. 

Our guest has always called Ottawa Canada his home. He has also always had an entrepreneurial spirit, supporting the local startup scene since the 2000s, which is where I first met him.

After earning his computer science degree, he began his career working at local web tech firms. A stint at a design agency stoked his enthusiasm for websites, and in 2010 he joined the parent company of Internet Service Provider and web host Rebel.com, and domain registrar Internic.ca.  

He took on the role of CEO for both companies, where he saw first-hand how the internet fueled communication and value-creation. In 2013 he took on additional responsibility as a Director of the not-for-profit Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), where for the last decade more or less he has staunchly pushed for the internet to be used as a force for good in Canada.

Workwise, after stepping away from Rebel and Internic, he returned to his technical and startup roots. Based on his observation that while websites were getting easier for non-experts to build, they could make mistakes hurting their user’s experience of their site with equal ease. That led him to launch ONIK, a product that monitors website fitness. 

Let’s go talk with Rob Villeneuve

Chapter Timestamps

00:00:00 – Intro

00:03:06 – Welcome Rob

00:09:19 – Monitoring site health

00:29:09 – PSA

00:29:59 – How much access is needed to monitor a site

00:41:01 – Holding different patrs of site to different standards

00:42:12 – How alerts help

00:45:21 – Knowing when enough is being measured

00:49:50 – How large sites do monitoring

00:53:09 – About ONIK.IO, how to contact Rob

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Rob on LinkedIn

His company, ONIK.io

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