Category: Data/Analytics

Since July 1st, 2023, the world of web analytics has undergone a seismic shift—and if you’re still reeling from the transition to Google Analytics 4, you’re not alone. In this episode, we unpack what many are calling the ‘Armageddon’ of digital measurement. You’ll hear why GA4 isn’t just a new version of an old tool, but a completely different ecosystem

In human years, GA4 is still a toddler. But it is growing  rapidly and some are giving it a chance to mature. 

Many marketers took their licks in the forced transitioning to GA4 and there are still some raw emotions about how this tool was rolled out. But our guest says that even though change is hard, he guest believes GA4 is the change we didn’t know we needed. 

Our guest grew up in the New York tri-state area, which gave him two passions. The first one is hockey and watching people grow up playing the game they love – he’s a lifelong Islanders fan. Working in Manhattan, he also worked a lot with numbers. Over time, he morphed from analyzing financial data to analyzing digital marketing, in tools like Google Analytics And  Adobe Analytics. He built this expertise at industries giants like American Express travel and entertainment’s NBC Universal. Wanting to use these skills without the constraints of being in a big corporation, he went independent and relocated to Las Vegas, where he now gives all kinds of companies insights into their analytics data. 

Let’s go talk to Neil Shapiro.

Shownotes:

CDP – Customer Data Platform

Neil on LinkedIn

Neil’s consultancy: Zen Digital Analytics

 

Listen to episode

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

John@statsdrone.com

StatsDrone on Instagram

 

Listen to episode

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/

 

Listen to episode

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

Listen to episode