Category: Analytics/AI

Episode 189

My sister-in-law Janice works at the forefront of Medical Sonography. You may know it by the name Ultrasound, where non-invasive sound waves are sent into the body, which bounce off tissue and get displayed on a monitor. It has the ability to evaluate anatomy in an increasingly wide range of structures such as abdominal organs, the heart, vasculature and muscles in patients of all ages as well as the most commonly known purpose of obstetrical ultrasound.

In the past 35 years, ultrasound has changed from a tool that was used solely by Radiology and has now expanded into being used by almost every medical disciple: cardiology, emergency medicine, anesthesia, nursing, physical therapy and more. Training these non-traditional users had a huge boom, and now ultrasound is being taught in the first year of medical school as it is known that no matter what type of medicine one chooses, ultrasound will play a part. Janice and others have shared their love and knowledge of ultrasound to help and aid the expansion of ultrasound into new realms in all areas of healthcare.

In a similar way, to be better marketers, developers, or website owners, there are aspects of web behaviour that we need surfaced: specific user conversions, page views, scrolls and many other interactions. These aren’t visible to Analytics tools out-of-the-box. Our equipment must be configured to highlight them, and that’s done with tags that fire and alert our analytics software of specific interactions, the same way that medical monitors show the echoes of specific sonar frequencies.

We’ve evolved from coding tags right on our sites to operating them with tag management systems, the most common one being Google Tag Manager. Without these tagging tools, our visibility into site performance would be limited the same way that doctors before ultrasound couldn’t see what was going on inside their patients.

Another similarity these tools share is that they both come with ethical and safety considerations, and laws covering user privacy and data protection. Gathering insights, whether by ultrasound or tag technology, must respect the digital autonomy and privacy of users.

We have a guest to take us through all facets of tag management and I hope that after hearing him, you won’t think of tagging as just some machine that should be relegated to technicians, but a tool you can use on the front-lines, as something you yourself should get hands-on with. So let’s talk about tag management with Ricardo Cristofolini.

With a background in Tourism and Hospitality Management and International Trade, Ricardo Cristofolini’s Analytics professional journey began when he arrived in Canada in 2015 to study at Algonquin College of Applied Arts and Technology, where he earned an Ontario College Diploma in Computer Programming, Networked Environment, and Programming Languages from 2015 to 2017. There, he had the opportunity to put together previous professional knowledge with brand new one exploring multiple subjects, from Web and App Development to cloud computing, Database structure, and much more.

Transitioning to the workforce, Ricardo served as a Web Developer at FilmFX from December 2017 to December 2019, gaining two years of experience. In March 2018, Ricardo expanded his skills at Pondstone Digital Marketing, specializing in WordPress, Content Management, and other relevant areas until February 2019. At this point, he had already fallen in love with Analytics and Data Tracking. His expertise continued to evolve as he took on the role of Senior Data Analytics Implementation at Bounteous Canada from July 2021 to October 2022 He currently holds the position of Napkyn Senior Implementation Specialist Data Solutions, a role he has been dedicated to since 2022.

In his spare time, when not reading about Analytics and developing his knowledge (and earning a badge from Linkedin as Top Web Analytics Voice), Ricardo supports others’ new adventures in this field on multiple social media platforms answering questions and providing guidance.

Originating from Brazil, Ricardo Cristofolini’s professional trajectory reflects a dynamic and progressively challenging path within the realms of web development, digital marketing, and data analytics implementation.

 

Chapter Timestamps

00:00:00 – Intro

00:04:55 – Ricardo on GTM and Google Tag

00:27:40 – PSA

00:28:30 – All about Server-side Tagging

00:49:06 – Where to contact Ricardo

 

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What’s New with the Google Tag article

Episode 188

Dana DiTomaso embarked on her digital marketing journey over 20 years ago, initially working in tech support for a CRM before founding a web design company in 2002. In 2000, clients sought her expertise in increasing website traffic, propelling her into the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). By 2012, Dana became an active participant in the SEO community, sharing insights on technical and local SEO topics.

Dana, having typed her first line of code in 1982, consistently demonstrated an entrepreneurial spirit and started delivering talks and presentations since 1998. Recognizing the potential of digital-first marketing, she founded three businesses that educate entrepreneurs and organizations. As the founder and lead instructor of KP Playbook, Dana teaches the “Analytics for Agencies” course and manages a thriving learner community, emphasizing proven principles over quick tips. Notably, none of her clients have faced Google penalties to date.

Dana lives in an old growth forest near Victoria BC.

 

Chapter Timestamps

00:00:00 – Intro

00:03:01 – Welcome Dana

00:08:18 – The unvarnished view of data given by GA4

00:16:33 – Using custom reports and exploration tab

00:22:41 – Giving other users access to Reports

00:26:39 – PSA

00:27:25 – Reporting through Looker Studio

00:35:08 – Why knowing some UX helps

00:38:54 – Pulling other data sources together with GA data

00:44:01 – Looker studio tactics

00:53:18 – Where to contact Dana

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Reach out to Dana at Dana@kickpoint.ca

Dana on LinkedIn

Dana’s personal site

Dana built Kickpoint Playbook, which includes the course “Analytics for Agencies” – use the code FUNNELREBOOT for 20% off

GA4SPY

Supermetrics

Airbyte

TeamSimmer

GA4BigQuery

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Episode 183

As a Disclaimer, note that there’s no sponsor or affiliate relationship with the vendor interviewed here. They’re simply on the show to give their perspective on our topic.

As trite as it sounds, the way that we look at the world affects our understanding of it. Let me tell you about a time I noticed this. When I was a kid, I would go to school, walk into my classroom, and see my teacher there. She was such a constant there, I imagined that she never left the classroom, she was a fixture of the room, part of the furniture. It’s like the teacher didn’t persist as a person who had a life outside of the classroom. So when I was out at the grocery store with my parents and I saw my teacher, not dressed in their teacher clothes, not ensconced in their teacher setting, my brain just melted. 

While this might be laughable, those of us using marketing analytics tools could be guilty of falling into the same trap. Credit for making this concept clear in not 1 but 2 great books must go to Avinash Kaushik. Think about it. According to Classic web analytics, visitors who hit our website had started  an imaginary timer that we called a web session. We imagined in this race against the clock, they were viewing a sequence of pages which ferried them to forms we used as gates. We told ourselves that the gate-crossers had completed a successful session, converting from visitors into leads or customers.

Stepping back, there are a few things wrong with this picture. Users don’t only exist inside of a session, just like the teacher didn’t only exist in the classroom—they roam about as they please. 

Today’s users aren’t confined to marketing content. The experience they have straddles our marketing sites, to sites  and apps where their identity persists through being logged-in, where the interactions even span multiple devices – as we see on Slack and Discord for messages we’ve already read.

The user’s state changes – sometimes they complete a purchase, or become a paid subscriber, but at other times they may opt for a free plan or abandon their cart. 

We need analytics for all of these actions. We need to step back and view the entire experience that people have with us over time. This is something that classic web analytics just can’t measure.

This is why the new generation of tools allows us to analyze complex trends and behavior of our users. They are collectively known as event-based analytics tools, and they excel in portraying the way that users experience a product. The foremost product-oriented analytics tool out there is called Amplitude, and today, we are speaking with its product evangelist.

Since 2021, Adam Greco has been Amplitude’s  Product Evangelist, guiding clients in understanding their tool through workshops, blogs, and videos. 

He got into this field in 2005 when he joined analytics platform Omniture where he was a customer advocate for four years until Adobe acquired them and rechristened them Adobe Analytics. He then worked at consultancies for 15 years, showing people how to get the most out of Adobe’s tool,  authoring over 200 blog posts along the way. 

Lately Adam’s speaking and advising on analytics has had him splitting his time between Chicago and Amsterdam (where he was when this was recorded). When he’s in the states and not working, he enjoys restoring and going for drives in his 62 convertible corvette. 

Timestamps/Chapters

0:00 – Intro

5:00 – Meet Adam; why event-based method works better than session-based method

24:00 – PSA

24:45 – how to get value out of recent analytics tools, including warehouse-native apps

56:20 – Adam’s coordinates and free resources

 

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Adam works at Amplitude

Video of Adam speaking on Warehouse-native analytics 

Connect with Adam on MeasureSlack

Connect with Adam on LinkedIn

Gary Angel

Google BigQuery

Snowflake Analytics

Databricks

Quantum Metric

Mixpanel

Heap

Content Square

Episode 181

When a person interacts with their device or goes online, who owns their data? Today’s guest says they do, and marketers should be paying them for the privilege. Right now, you might think this person wears hats made out of tinfoil. It may surprise you to learn they are the Global Head of AI at (EY) Ernst & Young, having also been an analytics executive at Gartner and CSL Behring and graduating from DePaul with an MBA. 

John Thompson has written four books. I found out about him through his 2020 book Building Analytics Teams, which led to him being a guest on this show back in 2023. He recently released his book “Data for All” which spurred this repeat appearance – which has only happened with a handful of people. 

For links to all persons and concepts mentioned, go to Ep 181’s notes page on the Funnel Reboot site.  

 

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Timestamps/Chapters

0:00 – Intro

1:39 – How we came to giving our data for free

24:55 – Public Service Announcement

25:49 – Getting paid for our data

44:26 – Getting to John & his books

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John is on LinkedIn

John Thompson came on Funnel Reboot for episode 136

Episode 180

 ‘1 to 1 Marketing,’  sounds wonderful. Don Peppers & Martha Rogers wrote a series of books in the 1990s called this. We have thrown all kinds of technology, content, and persona construction at it over the last 25 years. But it still eludes us. Architecting communications that converses with each person, at their own point in a conversation with our brand is hard.  Is it marketing’s job to actually have 1:1 conversations? And with  what’s at stake if we  screw up personalization, can we implement or maintain it without losing our jobs?  

Today’s guest is here to help answer that. 

Since getting his M.A. in Information Studies from Aarhus University, our guest has lived at the intersection of data and communications.

Since 2020 he has been the Chief Experience Officer at Agillic, an omnichannel marketing software, where he works primarily with large companies involved in omnichannel marketing, customer experience management, and customer lifecycle projects. 

He’s on a mission to ensure that the end user gets consistent, timely and relevant communications across channels – be it web, email, app, text, social – or even in-store. He often presents keynotes on Omnichannel Personalization and sits on the jury for that at the Danish eCommerce Awards.

His first book, written  together with Colin Shearer, was a bestseller on Omnichannel Marketing. We’re talking with him about his book “Hello $Firstname,” which came out in 2023. Joining me from Copenhagen, let’s welcome Rasmus Houlind.

Chapters & Timestamps

0:00 – Intro

2:30 – Book’s Main Theme 

37:48 – Public Service Announcement

38:41 – Quantifying the value of Personalization

1:00:25 – Rasmus Contact details

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Rasmus on LinkedIn

Rasmus works at Agillic

Book has versions available for North America & Nordics

Plato’s theory of forms (here is a YouTube video on it)

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Example in book used the Financial Times

Episode Reboot

Download a free abstract of the book

Episode 178

If you go to Wikipedia and type Zero-sum game, it’ll describe it as “a situation that involves two sides, where the result is an advantage for one side and an equivalent loss for the other. In other words, player one’s gain is equivalent to player two’s loss, with the result that the net improvement in benefit of the game is zero”

Many think that’s how privacy regulations are affecting marketing. Anytime client privacy is upheld it’s at our expense. We’re losing; they’re winning. Zero-sum game.

Siobhan Solberg disagrees.  She says you can effectively market to your client in a way that does right by them and is privacy-compliant. 

She calls herself a protector of privacy, while also being a marketing consultant, the founder of a marketing agency. She has over a decade in the measurement space, having created CXL’s course on personalization. She’s also been a speaker at conferences like Superweek and The Copywriter Club. She also writes on privacy and marketing on her blog and is host of a podcast whose name is spelled out in the shownotes but which I’ll call Marketing Unf*d.

She is currently enrolled in the Master of Laws program for Privacy, Cybersecurity, and Data Management at Maastricht University. 

When she’s not not pushing these boundaries, Siobhan loves to get outside and test her physical limits

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Siobhan’s agency is Raze

Siobhan’s podcast, Marketing Unfucked

She writes on privacy and marketing on her blog, siobhansolberg.com

Chapters & Timestamps

0:00 – Intro

0:46 – About Siobhan 

2:11 – What marketers should know about Privacy

20:56 – PSA

21:53 – Privacy across the organization

39:59 – Siobhan’s contact details

Episode 177

Today’s talk is with a technology vendor, as a Disclaimer, please note that there’s no sponsor or affiliate relationship here. They’re simply on the show to give their perspective on our topic.

Today we’re going to talk about leveling up beyond KPIs to data that visualizes our full-funnel.

Comedian George Carlin knew how complicated things get with marketing technology. Or, you can imagine that when you hear him talk about stuff. This is the feeling we can get watching our Marketing technology evolve before our eyes. As our  software tools grow, so does the complexity. We’re beyond the point of logging into each of them to see individual KPIs. They have just become too specialized, and now we need meta-tools, crafted solely to connect with the specialized marketing systems, to extract and roll up streamlined data that we can analyze or see on a dashboard.

It’s against this backdrop that I invited today’s guest. 

Jacob Varghese hails from India, having graduated with a BA from University of Mumbai. Since moving to Canada in the 1990s, he’s focused on building marketing machines and crafting go-to-market strategies that yield repeatable, predictable, and scalable revenue. 

Following experiences as a senior executive at numerous  B2B SaaS outfits, he’s now the Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at AgencyAnalytics.  His passion for augmenting marketing and sales through data and automation comes through in the insights he shares on his blog.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Jacob on Twitter

Jacob is with AgencyAnalytics

Scott Brinker

Timestamps

0:00 – Intro

03:09 – Background on Jacob

09:33 – Getting to useful dashboards

26:14 – PSA

27:08 – Presenting data as a story

46:46 – Get in touch with Jacob

Episode 176

If your job involves numbers, you likely spend time graphically plotting it.  Whether it’s for analyzing or presenting, we usually toss our datasets into our visualization tool (mainly because it takes one button click) and start visualizing it. The problem here is that we’re making content before knowing our intent, we’re making the software master over us instead of being its master. 

Today’s guest says the visualizations that come from this won’t be intelligible, won’t make them motivated to act and won’t yield good decisions. However, he does passionately believe that when people who know how to read numbers, see it presented the right way, it’ll motivate them to make the right decisions. 

Lee Feinberg graduated from Cornell University with a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering. In 2012 founded a consultancy to help data leaders create armies of trustworthy decision makers.  He has worked in the analytics and data visualization fields for 20 years.

He is associated with Data Science programs at both NYU and the University of Chicago. When he’s not talking about visualization, Lee likes experiencing concerts – from the front row,  and also hanging out with his wife and kids.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Lee’s Website : https://www.DecisionViz.com 

Lee Feinberg – DecisionViz | LinkedIn

Edward Tufte

TV Show Shark Tank

Chapters:

0:00 – Intro
02:13 – What we’re doing wrong
33:46 – Lee’s framework
58:25 – Where to find Lee and visualization resources

Episode 173

Today, we’re talking about the future of data with Google Analytics 4.

It’s been about 6 months since we all had Universal Analytics. It’s good to talk to others who use GA4 to do their jobs, to compare notes. Although GA4 is here to stay, it still has gaps that need bridging.

That’s why I spoke with Jason Hackenberry, Head of Partnerships from web development agency Arctic Leaf. Prior to Arctic Leaf, he held Digital Marketing and operations roles at Weatherby and Save Khaki United, along with roles in Merchandising.

What you’ll hear is from a virtual event he and I did in December 2023, on topics including

• How Google is migrating users of its free version differently from its 360 version
• How to capitalize on the information provided by GA4
• The data you actually need vs. what you THINK you need
• Tips on finding insights, reporting, conversion tracking and data retention
• New GA4 features that can help your lead generation or e-commerce website.

Episode 172

GA4 is now our de facto analytics tool. Regardless of how familiar we were with the previous  tool, GA4 is here to stay so we may as well get good at using it. 

I’ve got just the person to make the transition relatively painless for us. 

Our guest’s love for analytics was a happy accident after she worked in marketing at a company with a sales director. They told the executive team that marketing’s budget would be put to better use hiring new salespeople. But beyond having a warm fuzzy feeling in one’s tummy, it wasn’t clear marketing’s impact could be articulated in the way that executives talked.

Not willing to watch her department disappear, she dug in and found the data that showed marketing was having an impact. She took the evidence to the next board meeting and her department was able to continue with its work.

She chose to go out on her own so she could empower marketers to do as she’d done. She now heads up The Colouring In Department, a consultancy that has completed close to 230 GA audits now, and has trained thousands of people on how to get good at their analytics. 

Joining from London England – here is Jill Quick

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Tools – David Vallejo – Event checker

Adobe analytics

Matomo analytics

Piwik pro