Why Web Analytics Are Key to Growth

well good evening and welcome to the ecommerce podcast uh my name is matt edmondson it's great
that you're here great that you're on the live stream if you're watching this or maybe you're watching the catch-up
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to introduce a podcast and we are going to get right into it so don't go anywhere
we're going to have some fun with this one here we go
welcome to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson a show that brings you regular interviews tips and tools for building
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and ask your questions and let us know how you're getting on that will be great to hear from you as well on this week's ecommerce podcast
we are digging deep into website analytics oh yes now metrics
are an integral part of e-commerce because they drive improvements and they
uh help to focus people and resources on you know on all that good stuff which
is important so tonight's show or today's show is all about the importance of web analytics and how marketeers like
you and me and businesses can benefit from them now
i think this is going to be quite an interesting episode i'm not going to lie because we're going to deep dive into all these things with our special guest michael loban who
is the chief growth officer at infotrust which is a global analytics consulting and data governance
company he is also the co-author of the amazon best-selling book
crawl walk run advancing analytics maturity with the google marketing
platform i.e this in other words michael knows his stuff right we've got
entirely the right chat to come and talk to us about it and if you're interested in his book do stick around because we're gonna
do a bit of a giveaway and we'll let you know at the end how you can get a copy of this ball free yes
it is a great book i've actually read it myself i have lots of notes in this so you're going to want to get hold of
it so do stick around now when michael is not motivating organizations to undertake a digital transformation
he can be found passing on the power of digital analytics to the next generation of marketeers
and analysts through his roles as term adjunct professor at the university of
cincinnati and adjunct faculty at xavier university
wow right he is also a presenter and contributor white writer with work
published in forbes adweek and just basically everywhere right so somehow amongst
all of that he has found the time to come talk to us which let me tell you is no small feat
so you're going to want to grab your notebooks on this one if you can but if you're driving if you're running or you know
doing whatever you do when you consume podcasts you'll be pleased to know of course that
all of the notes and transcripts and download links will be available for free
on our website just head on over to ecommercepodcast.net forward slash
to download them okay so without further ado i think i'm going to push this button on
my desk and we are going to bring michael into the show michael good evening
how are you doing matt i'm amazing thank you so much for this kind introduction
and i'm always thrilled to talk to anyone who will listen about youtube
it's the starting a passion of mine uh not analytics itself but how to make uh
better smarter decisions with data so i'm so pleased to be here oh it's great that you're it's great
that you're here tell me i had it i mean how did you get started in this whole thing michael right did you just
it's not like i i kind of picture you you know it's one day waking up and going yeah this is what i'm going to do for the rest of my life how did you how
did you get into it certainly so we got into the business of
data probably through data and what i mean by that i did not start in analytics measurement
this was not my degree in university but in the initial stages of my career i
was working on the marketing side of digital marketing website development running advertising
campaigns and then we were looking at the data and it seems like more and more organizations are
increasing their budgets when it comes to digital spend but yet the answer of how do we measure it
uh how do we make decisions where to invest when not to invest those were not being answered in fact i
participated in a whole lot of sessions about the website redesigns launches of new websites
and in those meetings the question of data was not mentioned once right so people will look at here's the
new version of the home page here's the new version of the landing page and the
question was well how do you feel about it if everyone said yeah i feel good about it it would go live and to me
it seems like well that's one way to do it but maybe there is another way to do it and at that point i
had no idea if it's going to be better or not better but it seemed that data could at
the very least make our gut decisions more accurate right we can still rely on our god but data
can definitely uh help and uh sharpen our abilities yeah that's that's
great that's really interesting you say that because i i think it's a fascinating observation that more and more people are spending
more and more money on ads on you know the just throwing money into that whole marketing budget
um because they feel the need to or they want to drive sales and they want to drive more sales but then they're not
looking at the analysis which which comes along with that the data which comes along with that and
they're not using the data to drive their decisions i think that's quite a fascinating observation was this something that you
observed a few years ago or is this something that do you think still happens today
so i started to observe it obviously earlier in my career and uh hence
why infotrance has started to adopt this as the foundation of the business
but i would say to this day it's something that still happens one thing to consider right because uh
you know initially when we kind of hear this or the listener might be hearing this the answer is well
this just does extend why would they not get analytics but
it's a little bit more complicated that right so let's say you're in an organization an enterprise it doesn't really matter
what size you are and you have let's say a budget of ten thousand dollars okay you are making a decision right do
i take that ten thousand dollars and do i spend it or on new client acquisition
or do i spend it on selling products to my existing client base right so you have ten thousand dollars
that you can spend on marketing or you have to make decisions and say well but i can also take the ten
thousand dollars and i can invest it into analytics capabilities
and if you say well i'm going to invest into analytics capabilities you need to determine well how am i
going to measure if my investment in measurement is actually effective right yeah i can see the
complexity all of a sudden yeah otherwise we can say yes we are spending money on data or analytics but at the
end if within six nine or months of our investment into data we still cannot figure out
well did we actually do better as a result of this investment then it's not the right type of
investment that's why to this day it's some organizations find it challenging not
it's not that people do not believe that analytics can be powerful everyone i think believes that
but not many have been able to really connect the dots and see how investment
analytics has been able to generate more revenue because
they've been able to sell more products by perhaps spending less money on advertising yeah
yeah no that's i'm making i'm sorry i keep looking down because those are you not regular to the show
and watching on video i've just lifted up my notebook to the camera as i i take copious notes as we go along um
and so i'm busy uh writing riding away here so i'm just thinking
if i'm if i'm a startup if i'm a new business should analytics also be important should it be something that i
that i sort of get myself used to doing from day one
i would uh start with the word get used to yes if this is a habit right
just uh like exercise right you do not go out and say you know tomorrow i'm gonna run a
marathon so nobody is suggesting that if you are just opening up
a one-person consultant business so coaching business so if you're starting a restaurant and you're
launching next week that you should invest hundred thousand dollars into analytics practice and buy
you know google analytics product that's not what we are talking about but the
question is well how can i start developing my analytics habit right now how can i the very basic
tracking on my website how can i pay attention to how many emails i send out
how many emails have been open what is the click-through rate testing the headline or if i
start this email how does this impact those click-through rates how
does this impact then traffic to my website and then what happens on my website
so that's what we're after and then as your business continues to grow because you have this
analytics habit right you will be able to you know before now i'm just going to continue
doing more and more and i'm going to continue investing more dollars into analytics because i
know what it can do for me right but i would not suggest that hey wait until your
business is five or ten years old and then start taking advantage of analytics start from day one but certainly do not overspend yeah
that's that's actually one of the points she raised in the book i'm just turning to the page here where i where i underlined it um one of the
things that you said in the book where are my glasses hang on sorry i'm i'm gonna set stage everyone wants
to jump immediately from nascent to multi-moment but again
optimizing your market and analytics is a journey and that was a phrase that i i i underlined it is in fact a journey
and it's a continuous journey isn't it where you like you say you i like that the habit of analytics you start with what you can
from day one and you build it and you expand on it and you grow and you always look to data because
that's one of the key benefits of e-commerce is you can get a lot of data right
absolutely and uh you get a lot of data because you're directly communicating
with your audience and instead of relying on a third-party platform amazon is an amazing company right and
it's a great platform for many organizations that sell products because they're able to sell through this
channel but when you have a direct-to-consumer business one is you minimize your risk if
something were to happen with your store or amazon or this amazon model whatever that might be
and you have a direct relationship with your customer so you can communicate with them one-on-one you can launch
products you can announce products see if those products interest your customers so do not really
interest your customers it's a great way to build dialogue and analytics is the way to better understand and
measure how people are responding to your messaging to your communication
yeah so i'm a huge proponent of direct to consumer and we certainly see an opposite especially over the past year
as people have not been going to stores as much as they were before the
e-commerce business has been just uh going up and up and i do not see it slowing
down no not anytime soon that's that's for sure uh it's definitely going
to keep going crazy so when i think um michael when i and i think i'm
probably like most people right so when i think of analytics or someone starts talking to me about analytics the
first thing i'm thinking in my head is i need to set up a google analytics account right i've
i've i've made that link somehow over the years with google analytics and setting that up with my website is
that a good place to start so setting up google analytics i would
say is not really step one although it's very close to step one
and the reason i say that google analytics it's a tool and what i mean by that before you start
using any tool you need a measurement plan so before you even set up google
analytics think about your business think about your communication with customer all of those touch points
and determine well what should i be measuring right if i have a direct to consumer business
well i want to be measuring how many people come to my website i want to imagine how many people
buy on my website i want to imagine how many people return products back to me or
when i have to share refund i want to measure how many sales come from facebook
from these marketing channels right and when i measure it i want to be able to see how this
changes evolves how these numbers evolve over the next months three months six
months nine months whatever that might be right and then you have this type of measurement framework for your business
and obviously larger your business more complex your framework is going to be
then you will make a decision well to measure some of these points i will need google analytics
for others i might need another platform and then you start deploying google analytics free which is an
amazing platform majority of websites in the world use google analytics free
and you might be need to say well i also need to do better email analytics i also need to do
social media analytics and then i need to bring all of this data together even if it's just a very
simple spreadsheet or a dashboard where you can track your results
wow okay so let me just make sure i've understood this right because again i was um i i under i underlined in your book
here um where do you start yeah where do you start simple you start with purpose
uh and i i like that so actually before you start digging into google analytics before you start using any of the tools
create a plan as in what are the things that i need to measure and you talked about a bunch of things there that i
need to measure for direct to consumer um figure out what it is that i need to
measure and then understand what's the best tool to measure that for you and your business and that could be
google analytics it could be something a little bit different but you that's the best place to start is to
start with a plan um because i think i find that most
people i'm just trying to think through all of the clients that i've ever
worked with over the years no one has ever had an analytics plan everyone just kind of assumes rightly or
wrongly and i dare say you'll tell me wrongly but everyone just kind of assumes that i've got a connection to google
analytics therefore everything is okay
i think it's a very accurate observation is the the let tools
the substitute tools for strategy so instead of truly understanding what
is that that we're after when it comes to our connection with the consumer right because at the end of the day that's all digital marketing yes
we want to establish that connection we want to establish that conversation and then it yields to traffic to the
website it yields to sales recurring sales so but we need to have a
plan first for how that will take place what type of measurement will help us
accomplish that and then we start with tools we start the solutions
or you might need to even before you start using tools you might need to ask
yourself well do i actually have the right skill set to do this myself
or am i at this stage of the business where i need to hire help and somebody to to do this for me
yeah that's that's uh that's top advice actually because i think i think
if if the default is i'm just going to turn google analytics on and then everything else will be fine
you're probably not thinking i need to go and hire somebody to help me with the analytics right
um but google analytics says we i tell you what woke me up to this
michael a few years ago we hired a guy uh he still works with us now a guy called mike mike's a great guy
um he has a phd in physics right i mean he is like uber smart and
one of my son is actually starting to do a degree in physics and one of the things that surprised me
is how much of their degree is doing data analysis i mean looking at numbers especially in theoretical
physics and so for him and his brain
he understood analytics in a way that i don't think anyone else has understood before he came i mean he
could pull things out of the data that no one else could see and so i i
wholeheartedly agree maybe you you need somebody to help you with the data analysis
perhaps right then there is no right to wrong answer for any business but that something that
everyone has to make the decision on right is this part of my business
something that i want to own and execute on myself and that's great if so or is it
something that i need to have a partner to do absolutely also
greater so there are many ways to accomplish this but ultimately if you want to become
data driven you need to dedicate time to this not just by tools but dedicate actual time to this yeah
time to read and understand the data so how would you how would you you so let's say you've
got your direct consumer business you know you've got your e-commerce website you're selling stuff when you talk about letting data drive
i thought it was a wonderful phrase and i'm going to steal this quote that we use tools um to replace strategy i love
i love that that that's definitely going to i'm sorry i'm going to steal it but i'll give you the credit
[Laughter] um so when it comes to strategy and
letting data help drive that strategy um you know and help quantify our feeling i suppose it's a bit of an
open-ended question but where do i start with that
well let's use an example do you have a an e-commerce business in mind
well i can yeah sure we've got an e-commerce business that um sells uh let's pick vegetology so
vegetology sells um vitamins and uh food supplements
uh that are vegan and vegetarian certified so that's a niche that's our market
excellent and do you have a goal where you want your business to be before the end of this year
yes yeah in term in terms of turnover yes we do okay in terms of let's say top line
revenue stuff like that right from the e-commerce standpoint and i suspect you know where you are
right now yes okay so this means that we have a
certain gap right that we need to come from where we are right now to where we want to be
yeah okay so based on this but there are a couple of things the
first one is from increasing revenue from whatever it
is right now to where it needs to be the question as well what are the key drivers of that revenue well the first thing
is i need to get people to my website so that's one the second one is
when people are on my website i need to increase the number of people that look at my
product pages right because nobody is going to buy vitamin without looking at the product page when people look at my product page i
need to increase the number of people that click add to cart and then actually complete
the shopping process then when the person completes the shopping process and buys the product
i want them to come back and i want them to buy another product right in your experience
one customer how many products ideally would you want them to own
uh three three okay so if you have a group of customers that
only bought one there's an opportunity to upsell them to other products correct that's correct yeah so what we are doing
is instead of simply saying well we have this huge goal which is very important to start
with right where let's say we want to grow our revenue x we begin breaking it down into small
little steps because guess what is it easier for us to simply say well we're
going to increase the revenue times or is it easier for me to say well we have actually different small levels that
we can improve and if we improve each level by one two three percent
we are going to accomplish our goal and then you can start playing with these levers right and you can say
well while we are working to bring more new people right who've never been to a website before while we work to get them
to the website those that need to work on the email campaign where we get those customers that only
purchase one product or two products to buy another product that they've not purchased before
so now we have different if you will work stream that we are working on and that we
optimizing on and throughout this process you might say well it actually
does not make sense for me to spend a lot of time on advertising to my existing clients
because organically i can grow them so i'm gonna take my budget and i'm gonna shift them
to generating new customers because guess what my product is so good that if somebody buys one product
they're gonna buy product two and product three virtually without me spending an extra
incremental advertising dollar so now you're beginning to really shift your advertising dollars
knowing where you need the most if you will advertising help versus what you can do just organically
so that's kind of the thought process that they tend to go through when meeting and working with
organizations is let's break this down into the smallest
number of steps and see how each one we can measure and how we can begin optimizing each one
that sounds that sounds remarkably uh insightful michael is the word i'm
looking for um i've always had this thing that it i think an e-commerce business focuses too
much on the x and not enough on the two three percent like you talk about yes and a lot of two
to three percents across the board make they add up massively and quickly um
and it's a lot of it's a it's a lot of compulsion yeah yeah absolutely and it it it is the magic of compound
interest isn't it it's that whole um when you work on all these things together they do compound and actually
like you say it's easier to change something to three percent than it is to think i need x
um and i love that i i genuinely love that you know the powers of the two
three percent type thing and you talked about some of them you know the various different things um and so breaking it down into
these steps and then figuring out the metrics for each of those steps and how i can how i can
measure those and to give you another just lands right because to your point
uh completely agree a lot of times we underestimate the power of those two three percent changes right do you think
well that's just not sufficient enough but that's not large enough i've heard this analogy so i'm gonna uh
use it uh and share it with your audience imagine you have two airplanes right and
they start at the same airport and they go in the same direction
and then one makes a two percent directional change versus the other one
give them a couple of hours they're going to end up in completely different locations or spots
right and that's just the one time two percent change now imagine when you know that you have
of those levels that any business has of those levers that you can work on you might
choose not to work on every one of them at the same time but you certainly can work on multiple
at the same time hence you have so many things going for you if you can just break this
process down into small manageable tangible stuffs that's fantastic that's fantastic
so in the book um sorry i keep coming back to your books i just have lots of questions from reading your book um it's it's
title is crawl walk run which i think is quite apt for anybody anybody who's on the on the
journey you sort of you say you crawl then you you walk and then you run you sort of get bigger and
better don't you as you go along i thought it was a beautifully named title um thank you the subtitle
advancing analytics maturity what what do you mean by this phrase
analytics maturity so similar to crowbar cron right it's
the idea that we by doing something well by continuously doing
something by continuously practicing something they get better and analytics
maturity is really the same thing in terms of that
if i decide to i've never done analytics before and i decide to start tomorrow
chances are what i do is not going to be as advanced as some other organizations that have been
doing this from day one right if one of your listener is deciding has decided to start the commerce business
chances are your e-commerce business is not going to work as flawlessly as amazon does
but by making continuous changes improvements ultimately you will be able to mature as
a business and your processes are going to be not just well let's see if it works i've never done
this before you ever actually know okay this works this is why it works this is how it works and this is what we can
continue building on so the maturity is merely that we need
to create this analytical muscle where we continuously do this type of work and the better we
become better results it will yield yeah but the book was specifically around google marketing platform because
a lot of times we get questions from partners clients uh you know what solutions should they be
using because there are literally hundreds if not thousands solutions that are part of mart tech
universe and we decided well let's not write about all of them but let's focus on google
marketing platform which has an amazing suite of products such as google analytics google optimize
google tag manager and others and talk about how organizations can continuously
grow the use of those tools to advance their business yeah and that was
actually you read my mind because that was going to be my next question uh because you you know the rest of the title of the book is
advanced analytics maturity with google marketing platform um and
actually i found this remarkably helpful for understanding what the google marketing platform was and it worked and what it
still is um and so for those who are listening to the show who are not familiar with google
marketing platforms you just want to give a brief i mean you've talked about some of the tools that are included so
google marketing platform is a headline as an umbrella for for various tools
isn't it you've mentioned google analytics google tag manager google optimize
exactly google marketing platform is a suite of product and because there is a suite of products
developed by google products that uh integrate together very well
and uh products uh many of them that are available for free or at least there is a free version such
as google analytics right it's a free product there is also an enterprise version of the product such as google analytics
but a business can use google analytics free another product for example is google
optimize to run a b tests on your websites uh to see if
a certain copy performs better than the other copy or if a product image performs better
than another product image so those are just some examples and
again the important thing here is because they've all been developed together they integrate
very well a lot of times what we see is organizations that continuously build their own
digital stack and add new products yes those products can also be
very powerful but you always have to be mindful every time you make a decision i'm going to integrate another solution
into my marketing i'm going to integrate another solution you can certainly do that and we've worked with organizations that
successfully utilize different tools at the same time but
doing so means that you need to have a very fairly large and very skilled team
otherwise you're going to adapt building kind of this frankenstein of a solution that will be very expensive to maintain i love that
frankenstein of a solution that describes most people's websites right there a frankenstein of a solution
of a site so um yeah i like that so google analytics
google optimize um you know for a b testing one of the uh products in this
suite which i've heard a lot about and maybe you could touch on because this is actually quite a common question that we
get asked google tag manager what is it and what does it do
sure so google tag manager is a solution to accomplish a number of
things so if we think about how google analytics and similar solutions work
right it's a pixel it's a piece of a code uh that is placed on your website and uh
by placing that piece of code you can track certain activities of your consumers on a website
and you have virtually hundreds of solutions that work in a similar fashion where you
have to put this tracking code or you have to put their code on your website and so what
starts to happen is your id right because usually it's not marketing who is making changes to the
website but at team who is making changes to the website now they have to continuously
add new tools they have to remove those tools they have to edit the how those tools are deployed so it
becomes quite challenging so your measurement system it's think of it as a container so
instead of placing all of those individual codes on your website
you place them in this one container called tag manager and then you put that container on the
website and then somebody who doesn't even have access to your website code can go into this
tag management system and can make changes to those individual solutions so you are minimizing reliance on your
iet team to deploy and manage those marketing pixels marketing technologies and that's
something that quite often we do as a partner for our clients
we manage their tag management systems and hundreds of tags that are deployed throughout those tech
management systems wow okay thank you for clearing that up did when you talk about
like um for those who are listening to the show
just to sort of explain a little bit more so you have website every website is made up of a series is
made up of code and usually somewhere in that code is a bit of code
given to you by your analytics software for example there'll be a bit of code which connects to google analytics which
your web developer will put in or there'll be something in the back end of your cms that allows you to add that
uh facebook pixels would be another one right where you you start to add all these they call them code snippets and you add all these
code snippets to your website um i sort of i go into cold shivers when
when that's maybe two three or four but you're talking about or um bits of code interacting with your
website how do you how do you and tag manager
manages this does does that mean because i know if i put snippets of code on my website it is
going to slow down to a halt i mean it is going to grind down
so what we've seen from our experiments deploying these tags uh properly through
a tech management system should not seriously impact the performance of the website
now some websites take it to the next level and uh you might have to and in that case
yes a consumer will notice uh impact but an average website might have
tags and consumers should not notice that those stacks are
present on the website partially just because of how they load but you're absolutely right this is the
concern and right now there is a new fuel development in the industry server side take management system
not to get too technical but again the idea is to how do we continuously simplify this
tech management ecosystem and how do we
have better governance so having a proper data governance that translates
into tech governance how all of these stacks are deployed who owns those these types is very important because it's not just
having tags but a lot of times we do an inventory
and then we ask organizations so who owns each one raise your hand and uh you will have
five six tags that have been maybe put on the website years ago by somebody who is no longer the company
they are not used for anything so you have a lot of that that purely needs to be taken out and never
put back on the website so data and tech governance is a very important topic
well that's fascinating so when you you you mentioned with um there's a good
there's two questions that i that i still want to sort of clarify a little bit around this google marketing platform um how do i know when i
went to step from the free version to the enterprise version i mean so there is a bunch of free stuff
with google marketing platform and then there is the you know google's going to charge you um
when do i when do i know that i need to do that
so there are a couple of uh answers to this the first one probably is when you
realize hey i'm seeing some limits and this is impacting my ability to make decisions for example
you might say look i'm getting way too much traffic to my website and the ability to export
raw data is not there for me or i'm seeing so much traffic that the
data is sampled in google analytics so much that it's just not viable
i cannot be looking at two or three percent of all the data and that's it so you're going to start
hitting certain limits and uh you know we have plenty of comparisons
uh people can visit our website there's a lot of free resources that compares google analytics to
enterprise version of google analytics but really it comes down to not
just to those limits but when you're have a marketing question or a hypothesis
and you're working to find an answer and you realize i am hitting some limits right so your
your analytics maturity right or practices are possibly exceeding what the solution is able to offer you
and that point you start looking at what are the other options and google analytics is certainly another option and right
now we actually are going through this big change google is going through this big change uh of introducing google analytics for
which is their new uh tracking mechanism for google
analytics right now it's called universal analytics and this next phase is google analytics for it's a free
product uh and actually we published the crowbar crown edition
which is the next edition of our book which was expanded uh quite a bit and we have a whole
separate chapter on google analytics for and what it does how it works and why google
has decided to introduce it yeah i mean we were talking before before we came live on air and i've
you know the copy of the book that i've got which which which came out in october is currently out of out of
date and you've revised the book and added this new chapter on google analytics for which i just think is
remarkable that's how you know it's funny how quickly you have to adapt and change isn't it into these
that's right into these things it's um so this whole new chapter which
you've added to the book is around google analytics for what are i mean we've talked a lot about
google google analytics google marketing platform what if i'm not a big fan for whatever
reason of google and what are some of the competitors to google analytics that are probably
worth looking at do you think well if you're advertising your business
online you probably can't say no to google right if you're a serious
advertiser right simply deciding hey i'm going to stay off
google your options are somewhat limited yes you can obviously advertise on facebook you can
advertise on instagram you can advertise across some other uh platforms but chances are you're
going to be missing a real opportunity if you decide not to advertise on google
as far as analytics solutions so i would say for a free product
there is nothing really better than google analytics when you are an enterprise there are
other solutions that you can pay for um adobe is probably another a big
competitor to google analytics but if you're just starting out
an e-commerce business so if it's a couple million dollars in in your revenue i would say
continue leveraging google analytics yes there are other platforms but in my opinion
um as far as free products no one comes close in terms of the functionality that will
be available to you through google analytics yeah okay that's fair enough
that's i mean it is a remarkable suite of products uh there's no doubt about it and we use it a lot
michael what what possessed you right to actually sit down and write a
book because that i mean you know you it's it's funny you mentioned that you just wanted to cover just one product which
was google and there's what nearly pages in just talking about google so if you added more products this was
going to be a very thick book um but what i mean what what caused you to
to i'm just curious what was that process that got you to go i need to write a book
a couple of reasons one is we continuously get
a lot of questions that are similar and we decided to answer them in a kind of comprehensive way the other one
is info trust is a fast growing organization but no matter
how fast we grow we only can work with so many clients and we typically work with
large enterprises but how companies can be used in analytics is
not really limited to those enterprises right everyone can be doing something good to improve
their business with analytics and there are thousands of small
uh e-commerce businesses or people that are just starting an e-commerce business and we decided
well why not share our knowledge with those that might not yet be ready to spend
a lot of money on analytics but they want to be better and perhaps they want to start doing
some of this themselves so it was how do we take what we've learned and what we've been doing for
the past years with some of the largest enterprises in the world most recognizable brands in the
world and how do we take lessons learned and make them available to everyone
who is uh working to market their business to sell their products online that was a big motivator for us yeah
yeah that's very good i have to be honest with you i'm very grateful for the book i i i i i thought it was very well written
and very very helpful um
what do you think i mean you've talked a little bit i suppose with with you with google for here but what
do you see are some of the changes coming up in um in this whole area
well a couple uh i would say three right so one is uh consumer
concerns uh and around the privacy is certainly a very big one right
consumers are paying a lot more attention to what information about them is
going to be collected uh more consumers are using uh what's maybe considered privacy
safe browsers [Music] so that's one thing to to keep in mind
is uh consumers are looking go for privacy
for advertisers to take their privacy seriously yeah so that means that we
need to adjust our not just marketing analytics practices but all in overall how they communicate
with our consumers then we have regulatory changes that happen in gov they've been happening in europe for a
while known as the gdpr e-privacy and others and now they're
common and growing in the united states such things as california consumer privacy act and
obviously technology changes you know we've been reading about the
death of cookies and how the the world of marketing technology is
going to change so those are the three big pillars of change that i see
that all of us have to navigate that's really really fascinating where
do you think the well let me ask you a question a different way do you think it's going to become more
and more complex to get data with these changes the privacy changes the regulatory changes
the technology changes do you think it's going to become more difficult to get the data out
i do think it would be more difficult but i don't think it's a bad thing i
distinctly remember a couple of years ago i was speaking at a conference in
dubai and i was on a panel with somebody on the question was around cloud uh should i just start collecting
go the data that is possible for me to collect about consumer or should they be more mindful
if you're about it that was a question right and uh um the other person on the panel
they spoke out first and the response was collect all you can and then figure it out
and my response was uh quite different i did not get in the
fight but i i think that's one of the reasons maybe the ends adapt in this
situation is because we collect all the information even without knowing what to do
this that data and um is that really a good experience for the consumer
shouldn't we be more intentional about what we want to collect why we are collecting it shouldn't we
share this information with the consumer and give them choice if they want to actually allow us
to collect this data so i think making this process more difficult means that we have to be more
intentional means that we need to have a strategy first before we start using tools for data
collection yeah it comes right back to what you said at the start it's it's uh it's defining your your analytic
your data strategy isn't it and then figuring out the tools and then understanding the limitations of those tools and
and revisiting that and going that that that i think uh is is very very i agree with your
answer i don't know who said the other one collect if i'm honest with you the guy that said collect everything that's probably the answer that i would have said
um jeremy just collect everything and figure it out later but the thing is we never do and so
actually the world in which we live being much more mindful of how we use other people's data i think is becoming more
and more critical and so you know for a smart business person it's an opportunity isn't it it's
um an opportunity to do things different and right and in a way that engages your customer which i'm all for let me tell you uh
michael listen i i feel like um i'm just starting to scratch the surface of my questions
but i want to be mindful of time if people want to reach out to you if people want to connect with you how do
they do that where can they connect with you from sure i'm fairly easy to find on linkedin just
search for michael obama my profile is going to come up obviously my book is available on amazon
if you're interested i would suggest buying edition it has everything that edition has
and it is expanded with google next four and a couple of other pieces of information uh and uh
the other way is you can always visit our company website inference.com and contact me through the website or just
fill out the contact us form uh mentioned that you want to chat with me but between the website and between
linkedin it should be fairly easy that you get hold of me wonderful and never hesitate to reach out there's
any questions i i i'm very passionate about the topic so i'm more than happy to always take
the time and just chat with somebody who who shares my enthusiasm that's very kind of you and that's definitely my
experience so uh michael thank you so much for taking time out of your extraordinarily busy
schedule to chat with us today really really appreciate you being with us thank you so much
pleasure all mine thank you thanks michael well wasn't he fantastic michael
i i hope you got a lot out of that and i hope you're it sort of started to scratch an itch i
don't know if that's the right phrase but maybe ignite something in you where analytics is concerned because i have to
be honest with you when i talk to different e-commerce entrepreneurs and when i look at
e-commerce businesses analytics are always one of the last things on the list
and so if that's you i would strongly recommend you get hold of michael michael's book
edition two with the google analytics for not the edition one that i've got um you can actually
get a copy of this book for free we have some free copies uh in this week's giveaway all you have to do if
you follow the little uh ticker thing across the bottom of the page there if you're watching the video uh is go to our website
ecommercepodcast.net forward slash not only will you find all of the links to michael
and the show notes from today's conversation you will find there a little form just putting your name and address
submit it and you may be one of the lucky winners of michael's book i on having read it
honestly highly recommend it if you want to get your head around these things a little bit more you want to understand
analytics a bit more you want to understand google web google marketing platform a bit more definitely check it out it's a great
book and it will be very very helpful to you and read the book do what i do scroll in
it write lots of notes and then get in touch with michael and ask the questions that come up as a result and then record it as a
podcast and share it with the rest of us because actually it'll be really interesting so make sure you do that a big thanks
again to michael for joining us all that's left for me to say is a huge
thank you for joining us on today's ecommerce podcast make sure you subscribe wherever you consume this
content whether it be audio whether it be video on youtube or facebook
make sure you stay connected with us because we do bring out more and more of these free podcasts uh each and every
week so you can get all of this good stuff to help you grow online
yes you can uh my name is matt evans and thanks for being a part of the show tonight and uh we'll see you
again very very soon bye for now
you've been listening to the e-commerce podcast with matt edmondson join us next time for more interviews
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