#60 The inevitable… Google postpones sunsetting GA360
This week Dan and Dara discuss the recent announcement that the sunsetting of GA360 has been pushed back 9 months to the 1st July 2024. The news comes bundled with other new feature announcements such as custom channel groupings, automatic GA4 property creation and native bidding in DV360. What does this mean, why did they do it, and what now? These are some of the questions Dan and Dara discuss.
The blog post from Google with the announcements is http://bit.ly/3UL2ySz.
Want to chat to Dan and Dara on your need for GA4-360, or not? Email them both at podcast@measurelab.co.uk to arrange a call!
Dan’s writeup on Consent Mode is at http://bit.ly/3EjIeCg.
In other news, Dan becomes fireproof and Dara goes to the talkies!
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Intro music composed by the amazing Confidential – https://spoti.fi/3JnEdg6.
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Let us know what you think and fill out the form https://bit.ly/3MNtPzl, or email podcast@measurelab.co.uk to drop Dan and Dara a message directly.
Quote of the episode from Dan: “Google’s going to do what Google’s going to do and we’ll be on the receiving end of it.“
Quote of the episode from Dara: “just because you have been using UA360 doesn’t mean you’re going to need, I’m just going to call it GA4-360, you don’t necessarily need it“
Transcript
Intro
[00:00:15] Dara: On today’s episode, we talk about some recent updates from Google, including what we thought was inevitable, the postponing of the sunsetting of GA360, it’s been pushed back another nine months. So Dan and I talk about what we think that might mean and some of the reasons we think there might be behind that, as well as a couple of other updates that were actually included within the same announcement.
[00:00:37] Daniel: And this actually brought up a whole conversation around whether existing 360 clients need to be on the new GA360 contracts when it comes to GA4. So if you have any questions around whether you need to be on GA4’s version of 360, or if this is an opportunity to save some money every year, get in touch. There’s a link in the show notes and we can have a quick chat and see if GA4’s 360 is the right move for you.
[00:00:59] Dara: And this is episode number 60, so as is tradition, we’re going to take a short break after this episode, but we’ll be back with you soon. Enjoy the show.
[00:01:07] Daniel: Enjoy.
[00:01:08] Dara: Hello and welcome back to The Measure Pod, a podcast for people in the analytics world to talk about all things analytics. I’m Dara, I’m MD at Measurelab.
[00:01:16] Daniel: And I’m Dan, I’m an analytics consultant and trainer at Measurelab.
[00:01:19] Dara: So what are we talking about today then Dan?
Topic
[00:01:21] Daniel: Well, it’s probably good for us to spend a bit of time talking about the recent news from Google, and they have posted on their blog, obviously all links will be in the show notes, but their most recent blog post detailed a couple of things. One major announcement tucked between a couple of nice to haves, so I don’t know if that was deliberate, but there was a couple of things they have announced within their last blog post. The nuts and bolts are, or at least the four key takeaways, are that they are delaying the Universal Analytics 360 sunset for another nine months, so that’s until the 1st of July, 2024. They’ve announced custom channel groupings, they have announced native bidding in DV360, and there’s this auto GA4 property creation that they’re going to start doing next year.
[00:01:59] Dara: They’re finally starting to do the job for people. So they’re like, right, if you’re not going to move to GA4, we’re just going to do it for you, we’re going to automate it.
[00:02:07] Daniel: Yeah I think they’ve kind of had enough of telling people to migrate and parallel track, and they’re like, You know what? We are going to just automatically transfer stuff over, and then eventually we are going to automatically turn off Universal and then maybe delete it. But at least then, you know, for the GA (Google Analytics) you check once every couple of years, there’ll be something there for you to have a look at.
[00:02:23] Dara: Yeah and not a big surprise, them pushing out the 360 sunsetting. I don’t think that shocked us did it? It didn’t shock me anyway.
[00:02:32] Daniel: No, no. I think I’m going to title this episode “The Inevitable Google Starts to Delay things”. But not that I necessarily want or demand the delay to happen. It’s just more that I can see the writing on the wall a little bit. When Google made the announcement, they had all the best intentions to have everything in place for these key dates, that’s the 1st of July 2023 for the free properties, and then the 1st of October, so three months later for the 360 properties. But the reality is they’re just not there yet, there’s a couple of features they haven’t even released yet, and I’ve got no doubt in my mind that by this time next year, so at the time of recording, it’s the end of October 2022. So, you know, giving it 12 months, I’m sure they would’ve come up with all of their answers to a lot of the kind of plugins and connectors and things like that the current GA360 people are using, but what they’re lacking then is an onboarding period. Are they giving themselves enough time to release the features? And then are they also giving sort of enterprise clients enough time to onboard them, road test them, find bugs, fix them, and transition away from them. And I think that’s the thing that I thought was inevitable, is that things kept getting pushed back and back on their roadmap and ultimately that’s just eating into people like us and our clients actually using these systems and transitioning over to them, which was just kind of unfair.
[00:03:40] Dara: Yeah, exactly I think it is, It’s those, you know, the enterprise clients, there’s integrations and there’s features that they have come to rely on and it’s not such an easy thing to just say, oh well I’m just going to move over to GA4 and wait for that to come along. Because they’re going to need time to have these features set up. So for anyone who’s currently relying on UA 360, if that’s what it’s called, they’re just not going to be able to make a quick switch if the features they need aren’t there yet. Like, and I know we’re going to go into some of them, but like the Salesforce integration, I guess would be a big one for some people.
[00:04:08] Daniel: Some of the other announcements they made in the blog post also address some of these concerns. So, for example, native bidding in DV360 via Campaign Manager 360 with Floodlights, that’s a huge part of this. So even just looking into the wider Google Marketing Platform connectors, making sure that they are fully set up compatible and operational within GA4 that’s going to be a huge part, because currently in Universal Analytics all of those connectors are gated behind 360. So there’s a likelihood that a lot of Enterprise 360 clients are going to need fully working GMP connectors to move over. Custom channels and things like that, sure, yeah they’re going to be really nice to have, these are all just kind of quality of life features as well, but the things that are currently paywalled that are even, even if they’re now free in GA4, that almost doesn’t matter. But it’s making sure that they’re the same if not better feature parity or feature rich, otherwise they’ve got nothing to transition over to.
[00:04:58] Daniel: And yes, Salesforce is the big one, I’m trying to speak to people at the moment who are asking to go to GA360 on the Universal Analytics side because have adopted Salesforce and they want to use the audience sharing and the sales cloud integration within the Universal Analytics 360, but we’re in this kind of catch 22 where you can’t buy a GA360 contract anymore. It has to be on the new GA4 contracts, but the Salesforce integration isn’t out on the GA4 yet. So in a sense, we are kind of stuck, I want to use a feature, I can’t pay for it and I can’t get it for free and I’m stuck. And I think this is the reality that we are seeing or we’re kind of butting up a bit more of over the last couple of weeks and months, and I think this is why it’s inevitable this delay, is because they just need to push it back by, you know, even nine months and just say, look we’re going to get all these features there so that all clients can transition over Salesforce connector to Salesforce connector, GMP connector to GMP connector, as well as other things.
[00:05:48] Dara: Yeah, it’s buying time for existing enterprise customers, but it is, as you kind of alluded to there, it’s frustrating for anybody who’s looking to, who’s looking to introduce an integration like that now, who isn’t an existing UA360 customer, so they’re just stuck in limbo while they wait for Google to create these integrations or finalise them, I’m sure they’re in the works, but it’s probably just not ready yet.
[00:06:11] Daniel: Yeah, and I don’t know how they’re going to address those people. There are other people that are ready to transition to an enterprise solution now and yet aren’t allowed to or can’t or they won’t be able to do it for the reasons that they need it for. So, you know, there is an element that is kind of pushing people away from Google right now, unless they start making some compromises or allowing people to join. Technically now we’ve got well over a year’s worth of Universal Analytics 360 left, surely they should be allowing new 360 contracts right for Universal. So I feel like it’s just should be less proud and allow people to have the old contracts for a couple months more and then move on. But let’s see if they backtrack on that as well, and let’s see where they go with that over the next couple of months really, still pretty fresh news. So, I mean, Google’s not really had a moment to respond to the reaction to the news, I suppose.
[00:06:52] Dara: Well, that’s it exactly and the fact that they’ve pushed this timeline back by another nine months might, this is just a complete guess with no information to back this, but that might suggest that there could be some interim measure that they introduce for somebody who does want to have a kind of short term contract or something like that with UA, with all the features like the Salesforce connector, but that’s speculation.
[00:07:13] Daniel: And speculation is what we’ve got right. And I think this is where, you know, if I was owning this product it would be, okay, well let’s start doing quarterly rolling contracts or six month rolling contracts because, you know, let’s let people use these solutions, buy into the ecosystem. You know, it’s only ever going to be good for Google to allow people to use this stuff, even if it’s for a sort of less than 12 month period of time. There’s no point us guessing or having all this wishful thinking, Google’s going to do what Google’s going to do and we’ll be on the receiving end of it.
[00:07:37] Dara: Exactly and you know, as you said that there was a kind of a few updates bundled in together with this one. You mentioned the kind of Campaign Manager, Floodlight integration, the custom channel groupings, that’s a big one, that’s one that people have been screaming for a long time now.
[00:07:49] Daniel: Yeah it affects everyone, that’s the thing. These are the changes that affect everyone, not just the 1% as it were. And with the custom channel groupings, they’re all going to be fully backdateable, which is amazing. So, the one thing that I’m hoping for, and I don’t know anything that anyone else doesn’t know, but I would love for these to be available in the API as well. I’d love to finally be able to use a custom channel grouping in a Looker Studio dashboard now because that will be the dream to have this kind of customisation, but then also using it externally as well.
[00:08:15] Dara: Yeah because it was always a frustration, I never understood that it was only the default channel groupings you could get out through the API.
[00:08:21] Daniel: Yeah I mean, I’ve got no expectation that things are going to make it into BigQuery because I think, you know, it kind of bypasses the UI before it gets into BigQuery but yeah, fingers crossed for that one. And the native connectors to DV360 via Campaign Manager via Floodlights, all the kind of dominoes there. I think that’s going to be really important for a lot of people. And these are going to be people that I suppose we’re not addressing right now, which is people that are currently enterprise level, so UA360, that might not need to be 360 come the GA4 transition. So at the point of their contract renewal, they might look at this and say, well, I’ve got all of the BigQuery exports done for free, I’ve got all of the GMP connectors now done for free. Let’s say I don’t use Salesforce and that’s no longer a point of discussion. The point here is that all of the things they might have been paying for GA360 beforehand is now available on a free licence. And I think this is a really good opportunity for people in that position to rethink and not just kind of roll over contracts for the sake of it when in actual fact, you can be saving yourself, not an insignificant amount of money every year.
[00:09:15] Dara: Yeah, exactly right. And I think something that we’ve talked about so many times before is you know, don’t just assume you need it because it says enterprise. This was the case when I keep getting muddled with what to call it, UA360, when it just used to be Google Analytics 360 people would sometimes assume they needed it if there were a big business, and actually they weren’t pushing GA standard to its limits. Exactly the same thing applies now, it’s like just because you have been using UA360 doesn’t mean you’re going to need, I’m just going to call it GA4-360. You don’t necessarily need it so, you know, it is another opportunity to look and take stock and think, actually, what do we need from this? Because a lot more of those features that people would’ve used 360 for before, like the BigQuery export, they’re just available to everybody now.
[00:09:57] Daniel: Yeah again, we just agree with each other. I think this is the call to action really is if you’re currently on an enterprise contract, if you’re on the 360 contract, then don’t just assume you need it. Again, going forward with 360 it’s brand new, it’s a brand new tool, different contract even so when you get to the point of renewal, talk to your resellers or speak to us or someone else and see if that’s something that you’ll need to save yourself some dollars into the next financial year. There is a couple of other things regarding the whole announcement though, and I think this is the, maybe this is a sign of things to come, which is Google in a sense, the way I’m reading into this, and then maybe I’m reading stuff that doesn’t exist. But the way I’m reading this is that they’ve started to put their hands up and accept that they’re not moving as quickly or the industry isn’t moving as quickly transitioning over to GA4 as maybe they once hoped, maybe they planned for at the beginning.
[00:10:41] Daniel: And I think this is a huge part of it too, which is even things like, how do I transition something that has properties and views over to something that doesn’t have views? And I think this is the kind of thing that, especially enterprise level clients, you know, there’s a huge, there are a subset of GA4 users or Google Analytics users, but what they have is quite a lot of higher demands on the tool itself and also a demand for continuity and consistency. So especially when it comes to things like view structures, if you’re a multinational organisation that has many different websites and different states, different domains even, how do you structure that within the GA4 world and you know, up until recently there wasn’t such things as sub properties and roll-up properties as well. But even then there’s a question mark around how does one transition from views to properties, even if they’re sub and roll-up properties, and then how does that affect things like the connected ad platforms? Do I still get to do all of my Looker Studio reporting? Do each one of those connect to BigQuery or do I have to do them all individually and does that cost me more?
[00:11:36] Daniel: So I think there’s lots of question marks around this and I think that’s not anyone’s fault for taking their time doing this, I think just the nature of how different these products are is not something that people are just going to accept and move on and just roll with the punches, and especially enterprise level companies that have got a lot of ad dollars, potentially riding on a Universal Analytics setup, that they can’t just run headfirst into a GA4 world. I picked the views issue or the views conundrum as an example, but not the only example. But this is the kind of thing that I think that Google thought wouldn’t have been a bigger deal as maybe it has become.
[00:12:08] Dara: Yeah and another good example of that is the lack of Signals support with server-side GTM for GA4. So if you’ve got that set up with UA at the moment, if you’re using Signals for kind of remarketing or any of the other features that it enables, then you’re simply not going to be able to do that at the moment with GA4, that’s another fairly significant roadblock, at least to a good portion of companies.
[00:12:29] Daniel: And obviously that’s just server-side GTM and I suppose it’s slightly tangential, but it’s super relevant, is that a lot of enterprise level clients generally have the best in class technology and they’re the early adopters of a lot of this new technology too, especially things like server-side tracking, you know, especially when it comes to measuring ad performance with server-side becomes a step above client-side in terms of quality and etc. etc. And there’s a whole other conversation we can have about server-side tagging, but probably the chances of an enterprise company having server-side tag manager is a lot higher than a non-enterprise level or non-360 client. And the fact that it doesn’t work with Google Signals and it makes the entire GMP and ad platform connectors redundant anyway, even if they were all out now. I feel like that’s such a huge barrier for people to transition to GA4 because you know, if you’ve got server-side tech and you want to use server-side tagging, and they’re basically saying you can’t, for the reasons that, you know, you’ve mentioned around Signals. So yeah, it is a big deal and you probably think, well, how does that affect people using GA4? For the most part it doesn’t, but there’s a high likelihood that enterprise level clients will be using things like server-side Tag Manager.
[00:13:31] Dara: Yeah and then other discrepancies or features that are maybe lacking at the moment. Things like you know, the fact that there’s no session or product scoped custom dimensions, you just have user properties in GA4. So for people who would’ve had a lot of custom data tracked through custom dimensions in UA, they’re going to be a little bit frustrated at the moment.
[00:13:50] Daniel: Well yeah, you’ve got 200 custom dimensions in Universal Analytics, and you’ve got nowhere to put them right. Or at least, you know, session level or product level, for example. That is a huge part, how do you transition a lot of probably business critical data over and across. There’s always the classic get out of jail free card, which is just use BigQuery but that doesn’t always work. Or at least it doesn’t always satisfy the needs for a lot of the people that are using the tool on a day to day basis. But yeah, that must be a hard task, not only where are views and how does this work, but also how do I move this 200 data points over when there’s nowhere to do that. It’s not just rethinking event names is it? This is rethinking the entire data structures.
[00:14:24] Dara: Yeah and you know with the breaking changes we discussed a few episodes back, maybe this is another reason why that could have been a stepping stone towards reintroducing scopes. Maybe there is a line of thinking here where there is a need to have scopes in GA4 again, and this would be one use case for that to be able to actually have these different scoped custom dimensions.
[00:14:44] Daniel: It would definitely make a lot of people’s lives a lot easier, right, than trying to have to reformat and transition away from certain metrics and KPIs. There is also one thing I would like them to reintroduce as well, which is, they’re looking at custom dimensions a lot, but things like custom metrics too. I think if we can have parity between custom metrics and custom dimensions and the same levels of scope, that would be really useful. And I know at the moment it’s not the same, there is disparity between the kind of dimensions and metrics side of things so again, I’m just curious more than anything.
[00:15:09] Daniel: The decision to diverge from the kind of Universal Analytics standards. I get data structure, data schemas etc. etc. But you know, to not have things like this and then just expect people to kind of suck it up and roll with it. I think that’s the thing that, again, going back to my point, I think this is the thing that Google’s noticing isn’t happening as quickly as they may have expected and for people to be like, but you don’t have session level custom dimensions now let’s move on. Whereas actually a lot of people are like, actually let’s take a second, let’s think about this, and they’ve just had to cave, I suppose. You know, they’ve played chicken and Google blinked.
[00:15:40] Dara: Yeah and you know, you kind of feel a little bit like this setup assistant that they’ve included in this kind of bundle of updates. I don’t know, maybe I’m being a bit harsh here but it’s a little bit of a token update in a way, isn’t it? Because I don’t think the problem with people moving to GA4 is them not having the time or ability to import the goals or connect up the ads accounts. I think it’s to do with this lack of parity with some of these features that people are holding out for. So the setup system maybe will be a good way to ensure anyone who just has no awareness of these changes at all, or is just thinking, I’m just going to leave UA and I’m not going to bother changing anything. Well, maybe it’ll be helpful in those scenarios, but I don’t think it’s going to help to push people over to GA4 and a GA4 mindset.
[00:16:24] Daniel: I mean these features that they’re announcing and the kind of whole setup assistant isn’t really for us anyway, or people like us and probably everyone listening right now. I mean, this is probably something we never will use, because it’s for people that aren’t thinking about GA4 now, it’s people that aren’t parallel tracking and aren’t transitioning over. It’s going to be for the people that forget, have no idea, and have built a Squarespace website once and just threw GA on because there was a box for it, and then they’ve never come back to it and it’s so unimportant for them, and Google are trying to dump this old technology. So their final point is, look, let’s just rather than you coming back in a year or so later and finding nothing, you’ll have something. It’s just something, and I’d be really interested to know for maybe those people that do have, for example, views setup you know, even if it’s just a standard like reporting and unfiltered views, what will they do then in GA4? How are they going to transition automatically someone that has views over, because addressing just something like that is going to be interesting enough. They’re going to have to create one rule that addresses every GA property out there that hasn’t already been transitioned. It’d be interesting to find out what the logic is for how they’re going to do this.
[00:17:25] Dara: Yeah, well I guess we’ll find out. I’m sure we’ve got a couple of accounts sitting, kicking around somewhere that we can just leave and see, see what happens when they get automatically converted over. There was another little update, say little, there was another update within the blog that announced this, and that was around the behavioural modelling being added to real time data as well, which I have to admit wasn’t exactly, particularly exciting for me. It is worth mentioning it because it was included in the same announcement. Are you excited about that?
[00:17:52] Daniel: No.
[00:17:53] Dara: Do you ever use real time?
[00:17:54] Daniel: Well, only when I’m demoing it really. The way I explain real time reporting when I’m doing that training session is that it’s interesting, just not very useful. If you’ve got a website where you are the only person on there, it could be quite useful. But like most of the time that’s not really practical and DebugView comes in perfectly for that. Anyway, this is an interesting update because I spent a lot of time over the last couple of years talking about like the data, talking about data accuracy in Google Analytics and specifically Google Analytics 4, with the rollout of things like the Consent Mode, changes to behavioural modelling, attribution modelling, conversion modelling, so all the different machine learning models that are being applied into GA4 by default. So in a sense, out of the box to the layman, you won’t know that this stuff’s there. These are things that are happening without you even knowing. It started a number of months ago now with conversion modelling where all of a sudden Google is going to start re-attributing conversions that it can measure against ones that come through Direct, and there’s no way to identify which conversions have been modelled, the different channels from direct than haven’t.
[00:18:51] Daniel: So first of all they’ve basically said, we’re changing your data you can’t undo it, you can’t opt out, and we can’t tell you which ones have been modelled. And then they’ve come along and said, okay, there’s this other type of modelling, behavioural modelling, which is now modelling every other piece of data in GA4. So that’s users, sessions, revenue, conversions, page views, everything. And it’s easy enough to turn off actually, because you can go in, change the reporting identity and do side by side comparisons, not easy, but it’s doable. But now they’re saying on a real time basis, you won’t see the exact number you’re going to see an estimate, in a sense, a modelled number. So this is the final piece of the puzzle, doesn’t sound very exciting, and it’s something that I probably will never use. The point being is this is the final piece of the puzzle in GA4 that uses old data, you know, original data. This is the last part to be modelled, and now you’ve got conversions, revenue, users, and now realtime data all going through this modelling process.
[00:19:40] Daniel: It just means that it’s becoming harder and harder and harder, and layers and layers and layers of this kind of like, well modelling, muddling whatever we call it, is going on layers under this that it means that we won’t ever really know if we are looking at accurate data, real data, modelled data, it’s all just going to be, this is Google’s interpretation of your data and a lot of people are just going to assume that it’s the same as it used to be. And I think that’s the hardest thing that we are going to struggle with as analytics professionals is trying to explain to people that Google does a lot of stuff with your data before you see it, and they never used to do that. But now you’re assuming it’s continuity, it’s assuming the same. I get it, this is the final piece of the puzzle for Google to release modelling into their data ecosystem. But at the same time, I’m not a huge fan of where it’s going, even though I understand it and appreciate it. It’s how masked it is, I think the way that Google has masked what it’s doing a lot deliberately, and letting people just assume that it’s tracking everything, I think that’s the thing that I’m struggling with.
[00:20:32] Dara: Yeah, and I think that like, look, the reality is, as we’ve said before, we don’t have a choice anyone who’s going to continue to use Google Analytics, that’s the way it’s going to work. But it kind of adds a bit even more contrast between, well it does add more contrast between UA and GA4 and this is a weird kind of update in a way that they’re going to push down the line of the sunsetting of of UA360, because it’s almost like on the one hand they’re saying, we know that there’s some features lacking, therefore we’re going to let you stick with your UA360 contract for nine months longer. But what else is going to change in those nine months? What extra gap is going to build between UA and GA4 in those nine months? Because in the very same announcement, they talk about how, and I mean this is obvious, that they’re going to stop the focus on UA and just fully focus on GA4. But they say it explicitly in that article that in 2023, the focus is going to shift entirely to GA4 and the, effectively the quality of UA is going to start to decline over that time period.
[00:21:32] Dara: So it’s a really strange place to be if you’re stuck on UA360 because you don’t have things like, for example, the Salesforce integration, but that UA implementation is becoming further and further out of touch with the latest technology and the, you know, the reality is that’s the kind of new status quo. So having these extra nine months it might be useful on one hand, but it might actually work against you on the other hand.
[00:21:55] Daniel: I think it’s like Apple slowing down old iPhones to kind of force your hand a little bit to move over. So there’s an additional incentive that things are grinding to a halt, and that’s another reason for you to transition over. It’ll be interesting to see because they can’t turn the service off, right? People are paying a lot of money for this, but they don’t have to actively develop it. I wonder if they can do anything funky with the SLAs, I wonder if they’re going to like turn off the SLAs or extend the SLAs for that period of time, just so that they’re not beholden to the kind of four hour date of freshness or something like that.
[00:22:23] Dara: Yeah, or the 99.9% uptime just drops by a percent every day for that nine month period.
[00:22:30] Daniel: Oh god yeah. Who the hell knows? Yeah, but you’re right. I mean the feature parity is going to be the first thing, but then obviously is it really exceeding Universal Analytics in a lot of different ways and I think that’s going to be the thing that, how much of that is going to change? I have no doubt that by the 1st of October 2023, when the original date was set for, all of the features will be out and ready to kind of move over. It’s just then giving people nine months, optionally nine months, shall we say, to move over once they’re happy with it. So yeah, it’s not saying everyone’s going to be using UA360 to the bitter end, or at least probably not. Maybe it is, who knows? But it’s more like giving everyone an additional buffer just in case they’re not super happy or familiar or fluent with the features.
Wind down
[00:23:10] Dara: All right, so what have you been doing to wind down outside of work for the last week or so Dan?
[00:23:15] Daniel: I live in a town called Lewes, and if anyone knows of Lewes, it’s probably because of the bonfire nights that it’s quite famous for having. It’s a huge affair here with hundreds of thousands of people coming into town. There’s seven societies that have their own fireworks displays, their own bonfires and their own processions and marching all going through town. I’ve succumbed and I’ve joined one of the bonfire societies and I picked up all of my kit and have, as of recording, this is a couple of days before bonfire night, so I haven’t done the marching yet, but I will be doing it in a couple of days. So there’s a lot of preparation, a lot of stuff to do, and a lot of kit to make fireproof that we’ve been going through over the last couple of days. So it’s stuff I’ve been doing leading up to something which hasn’t happened yet. But yeah, looking forward to marching at the weekend.
[00:23:59] Dara: Sounds hazardous, be safe.
[00:24:01] Daniel: I’ll try, we are walking through town of lots and lots of people burning stuff and throwing bangers around, so this is only as safe as we can really make it. I’m wearing eye protective gear, if that’s going to make you feel any better.
[00:24:11] Dara: Yeah, I’ll sleep better at night knowing that.
[00:24:13] Daniel: Oh, good. Well, what have you been up to Dara?
[00:24:16] Dara: Well I’ll keep mine seasonal, seasonally related. So you talked about bonfire night so, at the time we’re recording this, it’s Halloween today. So last night we went to see The Thing at our local cinema, which is a film that’s a year older than I am. So to see it on the big screen, I saw it when I was a kid, obviously not when it came out first, but it was just brilliant. And to see it on the big screen was really special. You know, obviously it’s dated a little bit given it’s 40 years old, but it was still, it was still brilliant though, just the way it’s made and the acting and everything. It’s one of my, probably one of my favourite films. So to get to see it in the cinema was pretty special.
[00:24:51] Daniel: It sounds great, I’m quite surprised they managed to find a colour version. Did they have colour film back when you were born?
Outro
Dara: That’s it for this week, to hear more from me and Dan on GA4 and other analytics related topics, all our previous episodes are available in our archive at measurelab.co.uk/podcast. Or you can simply use whatever app you’re using right now to listen to this, to go back and listen to previous episode.
Daniel: And if you want to suggest a topic for something me and Dara should be talking about, or if you want to suggest a guest who we should be talking to, there’s a Google Form in the show notes that you can fill out and leave us a note. Or alternatively, you can just email us at podcast@measurelab.co.uk to get in touch with us both directly.
Dara: Our theme is from Confidential, you can find a link to their music in the show notes. So on behalf of Dan and I, thanks for listening. See you next time.
Daniel Perry-Reed
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Further reading
The complexity paradox: why your spreadsheet is complex and BigQuery is simple
You’re sitting on a SQL time bomb: defuse it with Dataform
