Analytics is something that everyone says they want, and some brag that they can analyze very well. But few people know what investment’s required to build a quality analytics function, and even fewer are good at justifying its value.
Our guest Martin McGarry is so passionate about analytics, as you’ll see from his backstory, if anyone can articulate the business value of analytics, it’s him.
After completing a Bachelor of Science from The University of Manchester and studying at the University of Cambridge as a Doctoral Candidate, our guest worked in the UK analytics practice of a global Management Consultancy. Due for a change after 6 years of that, he moved to Ottawa Canada and founded his own consultancy so he could offer a more independent approach. A while later started the firm he’s been leading for nearly 15 years, Bronson Analytics.
In 2018 he began a recurring event in Ottawa called Beer & Analytics, which draws hundreds from the field together for learning and socializing. In 2022, the event went outside of Ottawa for the first time, being held in Toronto.
It’s fitting, given how this is Funnel Reboot’s 150th episode, that we veer off of the standard format and dig into a niche within marketing that’s becoming a de facto part of every marketing function and is dictating new skills that every marketer must learn. I’m talking about marketing analytics.
The winning analogy of the conference made fun of how loosely people add the term AI to everything. Kenya Gillette used soccer to characterize this. Imagine you were the person who designed the game, documented all the rules and scouted the earth for people to play it.
Then someone says they can make soccer better…by simply playing the game ON THE MOON. That is the equivalent of saying that any business activity can be made better by adding AI to it.
We’re ending our series on advancing analytics today. We’ll focus on the software that, for many marketers, is at the core of this field: Google Analytics. It was introduced in 2005 as a read-only tool that tracked basic info on websites. The name has stayed the same over these last 18 years, but so much else of Google’s technology landscape has changed: they have released many other tools: Tag Manager, Google Data Studio, now Looker Studio, ways for API’ing between systems in and outside of Google, and most importantly a place where it can all be managed – Google cloud.
The new Google Analytics GA4 was born of this environment.It’s been criticized as being immature since it lacks features that were in the old UA interface. However, if judged by how well Google integrated it into their stack and how much those with technical skills can do with it, we would rate it as ready for prime time. Add to that the fact – in a matter of weeks Google teams won’t have to maintain two analytics tools, and they’ll get to focus exclusively on just one – GA4.
We can debate Google’s motives for tightly integrating GA4 with the whole Google cloud. I’m not wading into how good or evil it is to give away a product and hope users try the paid cloud platform that comes with it. But I’ll say that using Google Analytics with these other pieces lets you do much more with your data that you couldn’t do with the old GA. And when tools directly or indirectly make money for Google, that incents them to keep those tools and keep improving them. I’ll leave it at that.
Our real question is how do we economically benefit from the available tools. And that’s what our guest is going to tell us. His book which came out in early 2023 is called “Learning Google Analytics: Creating Business Impact and Driving Insights” The business impact spoken of there doesn’t mean using GA4 as a standalone lookup tool. Using it like that and ignoring what’s possible, would make the rest of the whole Google stack seem (to quote from the Movie ‘Contact’, “like an awful waste of space”
Our guest knows the value of integrating Google’s tools for many world-wide brands, as he’s done through digital agencies on his own as a GA consultant since 2008. Mark Edmondson has helped turn the out-of-the-box Google Analytics into a package that automatically describes, predicts and activates better marketing outcomes. He currently works at Devoteam as their Principal Data Engineer.
Mark grew up in Cornwall, UK before gaining his Masters in Physics at Kings College London. He now lives in Copenhagen with his wife and two children, enjoying playing music and cycling around the many lakes.
Today we’ll talk about automated marketing data pipelines for reporting and even activation. If that last sentence didn’t make total sense to you, don’t worry, our guest is going to tell us why we need it and how we can set out implementing it.
The place where Noah Learner got his start was on the island of Nantucket. It’s around 20km (15 mi) long, which is small enough that most visitors leave their cars on the mainland, come across on the ferry and rent a bike.
Noah’s journey started with a job at one of the island’s bike rental shops. Over the next decade as he rose to become the company’s GM, he became convinced of the power of SEO for driving traffic.
He relocated to Colorado, at various points he worked in corporate SEO roles and worked out on his own. He even mashed up skills from his past to serve businesses in the pedal-powered rental market, calling it ‘bike shop SEO.’
In the past 4-5 years he’s built cutting edge SEO tools using Google Cloud technology and has shared how to deploy them by speaking at MozCon, SearchLove and LocalU and in the agencyautomators.com community which he cofounded. he’s just taken on a new role that has tool-building baked into his mandate, as Director of Innovation for Sterling Sky.
When not at work, he loves doing typical Colorado things like fly fishing and skiing, along with family-friendly activities like hiking and camping where their two dogs can tag along.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show
DBT, or Data Build Tool is a set of scripts or programs that, when deployed, cleans and transforms a data source’s original tables and fields into a usable format for analysis.
You have strategized and run a program with positive results, you would think that you simply show leadership your data and then you can sit back while they lavish you with praise.
Not quite.
If it isn’t packaged right, it won’t have that hoped-for impact. Remember Maya Angelou said ‘people will forget what you said…what you did….but will never forget how you made them feel.’ That feeling is conveyed through stories. To find and tell those stories, you need business intelligence and data visualization tools. I sought out a Googler who’s an expert in their tool for doing this: Looker Studio.
Sireesha Pulipati is an experienced data analytics and data management professional. She has spent the last decade building and managing data platforms and solutions, and she is passionate about enabling users to leverage data to solve business problems.
Sireesha holds a master’s degree in business administration and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. Her work history spans multiple industries – healthcare, media, travel, hospitality and high-tech
She is currently at Google as a technical lead, helping with the business intelligence and analytics strategy for internal teams.
