2023: Measurelab’s year in review

2023 was a momentous year for Measurelab. It marked a decade of delivering analytics excellence to the world, a year when we were named one of the UK’s best places to work and became a fully-certified GCP partner, a summer that saw the sunsetting of Universal Analytics, followed by the new dawn of generative AI and the beginning of an augmented analytics era.

Into the sunset

From the very beginning of January, right up to the deprecation deadline of July 1st, we were swamped with GA4 migration projects. We just couldn’t hire quickly enough and even had to turn business away (gutted). Thankfully, all you 360 customers have had another 12 months to plan and prepare, so there won’t be a similar rush in the run up to July next year, right? Right?

Besides migrating new customers to GA4, we were helping our existing ones get more from the platform. Either through the adoption of advanced features, or by streaming the data into BigQuery for more advanced SQL analysis, modelling and activation – never missing the opportunity to flex our newly-certified cloud engineering and machine learning muscles (nice work Matthew and Elisa).

April saw the launch of our first six-week GA4 Immersion course, with 41 lucky learners joining the first cohort. This was a true labour of love on Dan’s part, with over six and a half hours of video instruction recorded, plus 79 specially produced website resources. More than 850 people have completed our CPD-accredited Google Analytics 4 courses this year alone.

And when we weren’t implementing or training people on GA4, we were writing and talking about it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 2023’s most popular blog was Nasima’s What is a ‘User’ in GA4?, closely followed by Katie’s piece on How to debug your SQL in BigQuery and Dan’s seminal work on GA4 property and data stream setup best practices. With new co-host Bhav joining the Measure Pod, our most listened-to episode was the one about personalisation with Rasmus Houlind from Agillic. The conversation with Johan van der Werken, the brains behind GA4BigQuery.com a very worthy runner up.

Welcoming new arrivals

Over the course of the year we saw some lovely new clients arrive. Among them: Salesforce, the University of the Arts London (UAL), Cambridge University Press, Pod Point, Cytoplan, SecondSale, Scientific American and most recently, The Brain Tumour Charity. We were delighted to see our engagements with Google, EDF Energy and Springer Nature all grow, while we also bade a fond farewell to a few clients too. Happy to say they left on good terms – and with much-improved analytics implementations.

The growth (25% up on last year) meant we were able to bring some new people on board. We welcomed the supremely talented Olade, Chanté and Máté to the team, supplemented by some fantastic freelance support from Adam, Andy, Graham and Stacey, and our first full-time marketer and pod producer, Will. And let’s not forget the two gorgeous Measurebabies who made an entrance in 2023 – Zoe and Alfie.

The social highlights

One of the proudest moments of 2023 came when we were named one of the UK’s Best Places to Work by the Sunday Times. The list is compiled using anonymous feedback volunteered by employees, so it’s a really meaningful gauge of how people feel about working here. And the outcome is a glowing reflection of the culture that Mark and Dara have created.

That culture is most evident when we’re able to get together in-person and there were plenty of opportunities through the year thanks to the efforts of our social schemers who had us chuckling at comedy nights, smashing sixes, escaping rooms, gaming, puzzling and guzzling at various get-togethers.

Spring saw the entire company descend upon London for our inaugural Innovation Day, a high octane blend of Y-combinator’s famed demo day and colouring-in time at the local pre-school. At our summer gathering in Greenwich, we marvelled at the Painted Hall, gazed the heavens above at the observatory, and strolled hand-in-hand together through the park. The early autumn heralded MeasureStock. Twenty or so happy campers (and one or two slightly tired and grumpy ones) brought together in a field in Sussex, bonding around a campfire, with excursions to the go-karting track, driving range and a country pub.

An unfortunate episode

It wasn’t all sunshine, rainbows and toasted marshmallows though. After a first half of plentiful work, we experienced a tricky post-summer slowdown that sadly led to us having to make some redundancies – the first (and hopefully last) time this has happened at Measurelab. It would be easy to edit this bit out – it was an incredibly tough period for those involved in the process. But it’s part of the story and thankfully the great people who left the business have since secured new roles. We wish them the very best in 2024.

Facing the future

Speaking of 2024, it’s just around the corner. And if you thought 2023 was eventful…

The focus of our FY24 kick off in November was AI (what else?) with Mark’s AI challenge. The announcements of custom GPTs and Assistants API the day before at OpenAI DevDay triggered a mix of anxiety and excitement, followed by a wave of innovative energy, culminating in the creation of the MeasureBrain, a.k.a. Brian, our new friendly neighbourhood AI assistant.

Elisa, Matthew, Victor, Katie, Scott and scooped this year’s company values awards. Next year we’ll be celebrating the team members who’ve shown the most initiative, support and adaptability – a new trio of values decided by the people, for the people.

Back in the non-artificial world, the gradual deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome begins in 2024 Q1, which will have a lot of organisations thinking hard about their first-party data strategies. Based on current client demand and the rapid repositioning of various vendors, not least Google, Customer Data Platforms could well be challenging AI’s claim to be the next big thing.

Thankfully, we’ve got a few days off before we dive back into all that malarkey. Precious time to panic-buy presents, bicker with loved ones and gorge on mince pies. We’ll be back in 2024, a little plumper perhaps, but still hungry and dishing up more data-driven delights. Toodle-pip.