#111 ROI of analytics and GA’s gravy train (with Adam Greco @ Amplitude)

[00:00:00] Dan: Welcome back to The Measure Pod, sorry for a slightly late episode this week. We, a mix of travel, being busy and just life getting in the way. It just meant we missed last week’s episode, but we’re back this week and we’ll endeavor to stick to our fortnightly cadence that we have imposed on ourselves, but we’re back today.

[00:00:32] Dan: We’ve got episode 111. We recorded this, on the 12th of November, 2024, and it’s the return of Adam Greco. who is the product evangelist at amplitude, we’ve, we, we had to kind of run, I feel like we sprinted through that episode just because we had a time limit we had to keep to. And inevitably we promised a third or another follow up episode as we, as we tend to do when we get into the weeds and we start enjoying ourselves doing this kind of talk.

[00:00:56] Dan: But, what’s your thoughts coming straight off the back of the episode? What, how did you think it went? What have you taken away from it. 

[00:01:02] Bhav: I think you’re right. That definitely felt like a sprint. I don’t think we’ve ever had such a hard stop it wasn’t on our side Actually adam had a meeting and that’s just the way these things go when you record podcasts Sometimes you just have to you just have another meeting you can’t get out of But I think generally the episode went It was really interesting.

[00:01:19] Bhav: I I love listening to Adam’s stories and his, and his, his experiences. I’ve heard them before. I really enjoy hearing them every time. The thermostat versus the monitor analogy that you’re going to hear shortly is one of the best analogies when it comes to thinking about analytics and your role as an analyst.

[00:01:37] Bhav: And it’s hit home so well for me because I just, I kind of like, you know, you hear anything. Yeah. Like, yeah. Fuck. Yeah, this is, you know, it’s definitely right. Like, why haven’t we, why hasn’t this analogy always been around? So I think it’s one of my favorite analogies when thinking about our roles, and just generally, it’s nice to catch up with Adam again.

[00:01:54] Bhav: That’s he always, he’s, you know, he’s got so much experience and wisdom and it was a sprint, but I think we covered a lot and I, I can’t wait for number three to get him back to go a bit deeper. 

[00:02:09] Dan: Yeah, I just love these, these kind of, these kind of guests we have that are just really good thinkers about our industry and the, the kind of world and, the world of analysis and analytics and marketing and products and, and this kind of stuff.

[00:02:21] Dan: And I think it takes, you know, it’s that idea of just stepping back and thinking about stuff like this analogy you mentioned that he mentions that we’ll talk about thermostat thermometer, it just rings so true. And I think that’s why it’s so powerful and such a good analogy. and also like the idea of.

[00:02:36] Dan: The analytics as a cost center profit center. I know you, you kind of mentioned your thing, which is that the profit enablement center is talking about profit and identifying as, you know, all this kind of interesting stuff, which is, you know, sometimes, and I’m guilty of this and I’m sure we all are, but we’re just so busy getting on with the job, i.

[00:02:52] Dan: e. the work in quotations that we stopped to think about the impact of it or the profitability of it, or the kind of growth of it, you know, like he mentioned is that, you know, measuring ROI on every sort of pound and dollar spent is probably not the best use of time, but if you need to justify a new tool, like a new Adobe analytics or Google analytics 360, or if you want to hire new people into your team, you’ve got to prove that you, you can use them and that they’re going to be valuable.

[00:03:16] Dan: And it’s a no brainer, like having this approach to being like, look, we are a profitable organization within the business, or a team within the business or person within the business. Give us more. We can make you more. You know, it’s like a no brainer. It’s so obvious. And I love these, these things that are just obvious when you say them out loud, but actually it just needed someone to say out loud for it to be obvious.

[00:03:34] Bhav: I think it’s true. And one of the things, and you know, so I won’t delay the episode any longer than I have to, but even if you can’t get down to doing the pounds and pence calculations of your work, I think even just. stopping for a second and having a think about is this the most impactful thing I could be doing is something that analysts and data professionals could be spending more and more time doing.

[00:03:55] Bhav: It’s, it’s really simple, what else could, what else could we be doing or how, how, how better could we be spending our time? And if there isn’t an answer, then you’re probably working on the right thing. But if there is, I think it’s a, it’s a really Anecdotal assessment of what you’re doing, even if you haven’t got Adam’s like cool spreadsheet approach.

[00:04:12] Bhav: So I think, you know, Adam’s way is probably the, the more leadership. arm twisting method. But if you, if you just needed to do a self reflection, you’re, you know, you’re not a head of analytics and you’re just someone who’s, you know, you’re an analyst in a wider team. Just being able to ask yourself that question, is this the most valuable thing I’m doing is, you know, it’s another, it’s a small step in the right direction.

[00:04:33] Dan: Anyway, let’s, let’s, let’s, let’s do that. And let’s jump into the episode. Let’s let’s, let’s meet Adam and go through all this cool stuff. So, just before we do that, I just got one plug to share. hopefully by the time you hear this, it’s still not happened, but, we’re running our first ever crap talks Brighton, believe it or not in Brighton on the 3rd of December, on Tuesday, the 3rd of December.

[00:04:52] Dan: myself and a guy called Ed, we’re running this event. and we’ve got three speakers, everything from conversion rate optimization, product management, analytics, and everything in between. We’ve got food, we’ve got drink, we’ve got a venue, we’ve got speakers, and it’s free to do. So I’ll put a link to the community, the meetup community in the show notes. and I think that’s it really. Anything you want to plug Bhav? 

[00:05:15] Bhav: No, I mean, as the founder of crap talks, just hearing that it’s branching out into a new city is music to my ears. I couldn’t be happier about the fact that this is happening. We’ve been in London and Manchester for so long. It’s really nice that we’re going to be expanding out into Brighton now.

[00:05:27] Bhav: So please attend if you’re in the area or surrounding areas. Awesome. All right. Well, 

[00:05:33] Dan: without further ado, on with the show.

[00:05:37] Dan: Okay. Welcome back for a second time round, Adam Greco. I think it’s probably worth us doing, just because we can’t assume everyone listening has listened to every episode of the MeasurePod before. who are you? where do you work? And tell us a bit about, the journey you’ve taken in the world of analytics, and you can go into as much or as little detail as you like.

[00:05:55] Adam: Awesome. thanks for having me again. I’ll, I’ll be short, but my name is Adam Greco. I’m a product evangelist at Amplitude. prior to being at Amplitude, I’ve been in the digital analytics space for about 25 years. My claim to fame is I was one of the early customers and early employees at Omniture and spent a lot of time in the Omniture Psychatalyst product, blogging about it, ultimately wrote the book on Adobe Analytics and, have been part of Measure Camp a lot. I’ve been on the board of the DAA. So just been around for a long time doing digital analytics stuff. 

[00:06:28] Dan: Awesome. Well, welcome back. I think you’ve got an awful lot to talk about, but just to set the scene a little bit, we, bumped into each other at Measure Camp London and, unfortunately, while me and Bhav were recording our live episode, you also were running a session.

[00:06:40] Dan: But what was quite interesting is that, your session actually turned into a kind of cost versus revenue. Profit center for analytics, which actually was a theme that we spoke to Steen Rasmussen, a couple of episodes back, and you had a, an interesting take that you wanted to kind of almost do like a, a follow up conversation about it because it landed quite well at Measure Camp.

[00:06:58] Dan: So I suppose you really like, what, what kind of, brought this topic to mind and how come you ended up focusing on this at MeasureCamp? And I suppose, you know, what do you want to argue with Stine through the power of podcasting about? 

[00:07:11] Adam: Well, I’m smart enough to never try to argue with Steen. I’ll never win an argument with Stine. But, what’s interesting is I was worried because I’d already, done a promotional video for this topic. And then I heard your podcast and I was listening to your podcast. I’m like, Oh no, are they going to just cover everything? And is my session going to be redundant?

[00:07:29] Adam: But your episode, took it in a little bit different of a direction than I did. And I think the reason why I like this topic Is just having done digital analytics for so many years. I get frustrated at times that a lot of companies, think of digital analytics as a checkbox item. You know, we have digital analytics.

[00:07:53] Adam: We implemented a particular product and they never really follow up to see. If they’ve actually gotten value from that digital analytics product. And so that was the challenge that I had. And I think I freaked out the audience, but hopefully not too much because my session got the award for the, for the highest rated session.

[00:08:14] Adam: So I think I freaked them out in a good way. But what I basically said to them is how many of you in this audience are really treating digital analytics as an investment. that you’re making, that you’re expecting to get an ROI from versus just something that you have to do because it’s part of the cost of doing business.

[00:08:35] Adam: And what was interesting is most of them were like, Oh no, we definitely think of it as an investment. I had a lot of heads nodding. So then I hit him with the one, two punch of, I said, okay, well, if it’s an investment, how many of you have added up how much money You spend on digital analytics tools and add up how much money you’ve spent on all of your analytics team, including their salaries and benefits and all of the resources that you spend doing tagging all the resources doing QA.

[00:09:07] Adam: And have that on a spreadsheet that you could show me right now, how much money your whole program costs you. And on the other side of the spreadsheet or the other side of the ledger, have documented cases where you know that you’ve actually impacted the business in a positive way by either making additional incremental money or saving money.

[00:09:31] Adam: And suddenly all of the hands went down. All the people who had felt like they treated analytics as an investment suddenly got really quiet. So I’ll pause there. That was the opening premise of my talk. 

[00:09:46] Bhav: So I’m going to jump in with this cause I’ve, I’ve spoken about it a few times. I think we covered it with our call with Dean as well.

[00:09:53] Bhav: Adam. And I remember the conversation, the time old conversation of analytics as a profit center versus analysts as a cost center. It’s something I’ve wrestled with. And I, in my view, I don’t see it as either. It’s not a cost center. It’s not a profit center. And I do want to ask you a direct question, but my view on this is.

[00:10:10] Bhav: Analytics shouldn’t be seen as one or the other. It should be seen as a profit enablement center. So when we talk about sort of like ROI, the ROI of, analytics, it’s, it’s hard for analysts to be able to say we delivered a media value because what we’re, what we’re delivering are insights that other people will action to then potentially deliver value or not.

[00:10:33] Bhav: Right. So when you talk about. Having that spreadsheet with all of your costs and all of your pieces of work where you’ve identified, you know, where you’ve actually made the money for the organization. It’s never really you. Right. Because there have been, there might’ve been like 10 other things that you would have recommended that never actually saw the light of day because at the end of the day, someone else is the decision maker.

[00:10:55] Bhav: What are your thoughts on that? 

[00:10:57] Adam: Yeah and I’m not saying it’s easy and I totally get that, but I’ll give you an example. When I worked at salesforce. com, I was, you know, in charge of marketing analytics and our team got bombarded with requests all the time. You know, we could literally never end if we wanted to.

[00:11:13] Adam: And so, what we started doing is working with the teams who were requesting our services to say, Can you explain to us how the data and the analysis that we’re going to give you is going to help the community? The bottom line, either make money or save money. And what we did is we use that as a way to, kind of triage the requests that we had.

[00:11:36] Adam: And as you know, if people will come to analysts all the time and say, I just need to know this. I’m curious about this, but then you spend a bunch of cycles on it and you never hear if anything happened of it. And so by putting in that triage process, we started documenting, okay, the product marketing team asked us for data on this.

[00:11:58] Adam: We would put that on the spreadsheet. The other team asked, and initially we just took all the requests that we normally did, but we documented it. And then we would go back to that team and say, Hey, can you walk us through how this ended up helping? Did you make a different decision because of that data?

[00:12:17] Adam: And if so, for example, let’s say they made a decision that impacted a change to a lead form and the lead form rate improved by 5%. Well, can we compute what an incremental lift of a 5 percent increase in the lead form ultimately means for the business? And it’s, it’s not perfect, but we would put that in the spreadsheet.

[00:12:37] Adam: And then eventually we got so good at this, That we would use it as a way to deflect requests where we would say, listen, if you want our team’s help, like the one who makes the best business case with us is going to get our resources because, we wanted to ultimately have, the most amount of money on that spreadsheet at the end of the year.

[00:13:00] Adam: So I’m not saying it’s easy, but I have found that simply asking. The question of how is this going to help the business honestly deflects like 50 percent of the bogus requests that you’re going to get all the time. And it does get your stakeholders to do a little bit of homework on their end to say, before I bug this team, that basically costs me nothing.

[00:13:27] Adam: I want to actually do, I’m going to be told to do a little bit of homework. So that they understand why they should focus on this. And I think that one mindset change, I’ve implemented this when I worked at Analytics Demystified with a lot of companies. And it’s amazing how many requests are just useless.

[00:13:46] Adam: And you’re just, you’re busy. But you’re not actually adding value. And I think that in the long run, the companies, even the stakeholders appreciate it because they know that our time is valuable. We understand their time is valuable and we’re all working towards the same thing, which is adding value to the bottom line of the business.

[00:14:06] Dan: So there’s, there’s something in me, which I completely agree. And we’ve been thinking about this for quite some time. And I don’t think we’re ever going to get to a perfect answer of, of cost versus profit center. But I think, Something that, that I always sort of, and are about is this idea of, do we need to prove something?

[00:14:20] Dan: Do we have something to prove? so there’s an element of like, does, if the business is, data savvy or data mature enough to understand the value of analytics, is it still our responsibility to prove the value of analytics or is there an element, I suppose what I’m trying to say is, is, is, do you think that, do you think you can be a successful analytics team without having to, you know, Go through this process of, of essentially proving the, the impact on the business.

[00:14:47] Adam: Yeah, I definitely think you can. And I think that in many cases I’ve seen organizations where one analysis is so impactful that it basically cost justifies the entire team for a year, you know, and you need to just have one or two, what we’ll call big wins, and that may be enough and you may not need to get down to that granular level of detail that I’m talking about, but you got to understand I’m.

[00:15:11] Adam: I’m an analyst and as a, you know, that’s just the way I work is I like to get into the details. But, I think the biggest thing I’ve found is that an analytics team ends up with a reputation at a company. When I joined Salesforce, the reputation of the analytics team was awful. So much so that I literally restarted the entire analytics program because I did a survey and we got a score of like 1.9 out of 10 in terms of trust and value. 

[00:15:36] Adam: And I’m like, you know what, we need to turn the page here and we need to start fresh. But ultimately we ended up with a reputation where our score jumped to like a nine out of 10 after a year and a half. And at that point. Everyone pretty acknowledged, pretty much acknowledged that our team was awesome.

[00:15:56] Adam: We had great talent, we were doing great things. So at that point we could kind of ease up a little bit on justifying, but I will say that there’s always a request that you have where you want another team member, or maybe you want an additional technology that you think would be really helpful, and when you are considered to be a profit generating is so much easier to get buy in for those resources or those tools than it is if you’re a cost center.

[00:16:27] Adam: And I found that when I was at Salesforce, like I had a small team when I started of like three people. And then ultimately I think when I left, we had like six people and I probably could have had more if I wanted to, but I was lazy and didn’t want to manage that many people. But basically. We had proven ourselves to be very successful and we had a good reputation and a lot of that was because we did take this mindset of like we’re here to help the bottom line.

[00:16:52] Adam: We’re not here just to like be a reporting tool to just let you know and keep score. And in the presentation that I gave, one of the analogies that I use all the time, and people who’ve seen my presentation are probably sick of it at this point, is I use this analogy of a thermometer and a thermostat.

[00:17:11] Adam: And I find, if you think about a thermometer, it’s a tool, and it’s a tool that just tells you what the temperature is. And you can see what the temperature is right now, you can see what the temperature was last week, it’s like a reporting tool. But a thermostat Is still related to temperature, but it’s unique in that you could spin the dial left or right and make it cooler and warmer.

[00:17:29] Adam: And I think that most analytics teams, I would say 90 percent of them are what I call thermometer teams where they’re just reporting and they’re like the umpire, the referee telling you what’s going on, but they’re not actually changing the business in any way. They’re not using data. To impact change in either websites or apps or processes and those that are thermostats are the ones that are actually adding value.

[00:17:54] Adam: And they’re saying that we’re turning data into something that’s really impactful for the company. And I always challenge people. I’m like, if, if you were to look at the last 30 days or 60 days of your analytics teams work, and you’re really honest with yourself, how much of it would be thermostat work?

[00:18:12] Adam: versus thermometer work. And usually when people are honest, they’ll tell me that probably 90 percent is thermometer and 10 percent is thermostat. And my challenge to them is every month, try to change that by 5%, try to make 5 percent more where you’re actually doing, you know, thermostat work versus thermometer work.

[00:18:33] Bhav: How do you, how, if you imagine I’m an analyst and I, I tried to adopt this philosophy, but for the record, I love the thermostat and thermometer analogy. I don’t think I’m ever going to get sick of it. I have heard it a few times from you, Adam, but I don’t think I’ve, I’ve ever gotten sick of it. my, my, my, my question is one of two things.

[00:18:52] Bhav: One, why wouldn’t you just always turn it up to hot? Right. And just like, that’s it, right? You just, it just never cools down in our organization, but that’s a bit tongue in cheek. I don’t really mean that one. My question really is you’re not always a person who can turn the thermostat. Right. And. At the end of the day, you can tell people that it’s cold in here.

[00:19:12] Bhav: And, and this is how you can increase the temperature by turning the thermostat. But you’re still never going to be the one to turn that thermostat. And I think one of the problems, that a lot of analysts will face won’t be, oh, I mean, some of them will, of course, not all analysts think like how, you know, maybe the three of us do around, looking at analytics less as a, as a tool, just to report numbers and, you know, do health checks, but as a way to Optimize and improve the organization, but they’re still not going to be the ones who do turn that thermostat.

[00:19:45] Bhav: So I think my question is, how do you, what was, what, what did you do? That was so different that allowed that got your stakeholders to buy into you and your philosophy, At the end of the day, you still presented some information and you told them how to change the thermostat, but they were the ones that had to pull the trigger.

[00:20:07] Bhav: So I, and I think a lot of analysts will struggle with this is that their stakeholders are just not listening. They’re not taking action. they’re getting a lot of Requests that are not actionable. you know, do you know what I mean? Like how do you how would you go about changing that philosophy?

[00:20:23] Adam: Yeah, and that’s part of what I covered in the in the session as well because I hate to present problems without solutions So i’ll share a couple things that I shared in my presentation one I think there’s a fallacy in the analytics space That the people who should be in analytics are people who are really good with data and really good with numbers and these people Tend to hide in cubicles and tend to do reports and SQL and spreadsheets.

[00:20:50] Adam: One of the big changes that I have made at Salesforce and other companies that I’ve consulted with is I tried to explain that you’re actually in the communication business. You need to be going to lunch with the different heads of different departments at your company. You need to be understanding what is important to their business.

[00:21:09] Adam: And you need to be understanding how the company makes money and insert yourself in certain situations. So I’ll give you a real world example. When I was at Salesforce, we had, I was in the marketing team and the sales team honestly could care less about the marketing team and the website. They were just, you know, all they were trying to do is drive deals.

[00:21:32] Adam: And they had hundreds of people that called people the minute someone filled out a form on the website. The only thing the sales team thought about the website was people fill out forms. We call them, we get deals. So I tried my best to get the sales team to understand that there’s actually a lot of really rich information they could learn about what users are doing on the website.

[00:21:51] Adam: And so I took a couple salespeople and I said, here’s what we have on our website. And I was shocked that they actually had no idea what was on our website. And I walked them through and I said, what. Pages that I’m showing you on the website would be interesting to you that like if someone viewed this page versus this page, you would want to talk to them on the phone.

[00:22:09] Adam: So we went through this exercise and they said, well, if they view the page that talks about our products, like I would definitely want to, that’s good. If they view our pricing page, Those are my people, the people who are checking out pricing. I want to talk to them as soon as possible. So I actually came up with a weighted scoring system where as people were navigating the website, I was accruing different points based on what the salespeople told me.

[00:22:32] Adam: And then when they submitted the form, I tallied that score and secretly submitted it In the form into Salesforce, then I went to the sales leader and I said, can I have two weeks of call logs of people? And I want to know which people hung up on us and which people didn’t. And the sales leader is like, why do you care about this?

[00:22:51] Adam: I said, just trust me. And I said, give me the file. And I had that secret score and I figured out that there was a threshold. Like, I think it was 70 points. If they had over 70 points in my web based scoring system, they didn’t hang up on us that often. But if they were under 70, they were basically like, don’t call me.

[00:23:10] Adam: I hate you. You’re a spammer, you know, take me off your list. And it turned out that like 70 or 80 percent of our calls were under 70. So I went to the sales leader. I said, I know this is going to sound crazy. Actually, if you just waited to call, The 70 percent that are under this point score and let them marinate a little bit and let them come back to the site and become more qualified.

[00:23:32] Adam: You wouldn’t need as many salespeople to call and you’d probably not lose that much money. So we did a test of that. And my theory proved out that we didn’t lose that much business and we didn’t have to make, we only made like 30 percent of the calls. And the sales leader said, you know, I was about to hire hundreds of more salespeople because we always have these more leads coming in.

[00:23:54] Adam: Maybe I don’t need to do that. And they, they did a back of the napkin calculation and figured out that we had just saved them potentially about 2. 5 million in headcount that they were going to do. And suddenly the sales team was like, Hey, this marketing team, like they’re, they actually, Have some brains, like they’re actually doing something that is helping me.

[00:24:14] Adam: And that was an example of me knowing that there was a problem, knowing how our business work, meeting with people who I would normally not talk to inserting how data could help them in that situation. And suddenly our team had an amazing reputation and the salespeople actually invited me to. To the mark, to the first marketer ever invited to the sales meeting in the history at that time to explain what the analysis we had done and why we shouldn’t be so quick to call people based on this.

[00:24:43] Adam: And then suddenly the salespeople were all interested in the website. And then I started teaching them about ABM and that we could show them which companies are on the website. And they’re like, wow, this is really cool. But all of that started by not being in my cubicle, but Going out, explaining how we could add value.

[00:24:59] Adam: So sorry for the long winded story, but I think that’s just one example of how you can get people to think differently about analytics. 

[00:25:08] Dan: If you set up a Google BigQuery export from Google Analytics 4, and you’re not really sure what to do with it. It’s your first time using the GCP, then give us a shout.

[00:25:15] Dan: We’re here to help. We’re GCP certified, GMP certified, and of course, I can’t stop talking about Google Analytics 4. So we’re here to help you make the most out of that data and show you exactly how powerful it can be. The world of cloud databases in the Google cloud platform can be complex and overwhelming at times, but ultimately it’s there to serve a purpose and to make the most out of the data you have.

[00:25:35] Dan: You can reach out to us by scanning this QR code, or you can click the link in the show notes to find out more, or you can just head over to measure lab.co uk and find out a bit more of what we’re about.

[00:25:47] Dan: I love that story. And I love, I say story. I love that real life example. And I, and I love examples much like that. And I’ve got similar ones, not quite the 2.5 billion or million dollar mark, but, but similar ones whereby what, what I’m thinking about is, especially. You know, today when we’re recording this in 2024, like it’s a couple of years, kind of post generative AI, everyone seems to be wanting predictive models, machine learning algorithms, whether it’s attribution, whether it’s scoring models or anything like this.

[00:26:14] Dan: Do you think there’s an element of like, actually simplicity is essentially. As good as, or if not better, because it’s easy to understand, you can get a sales team to, to adopt something that’s easily explainable. You’ve got this scoring system. If it’s above 70, then go do this. Because I think there’s a risk for people like us as analysts to want to play with the shiny new object and overcomplicate stuff and say, that’s a perfect opportunity to play with this new AI machine learning model that big queries just released.

[00:26:44] Dan: And I want to put this scoring system into here. And then the. The team are just like, so what, what is this? What are you trying to tell me? Like there’s such a, there’s such a simplicity in these kinds of stories. And the impact can be so big, not saying that we’ll never quite get there. I think that’s where you go into the optimization of these kinds of models and scoring system.

[00:26:59] Dan: But, I don’t think I have a question. It’s just more of a statement of like, as analysts, we need to be aware that simplicity is actually easier. To explain in the increases adoption. I find that when I talk to a lot of companies about attribution modeling and trying to explain a machine learning data driven attribution model in like something like Google analytics for versus last click, most people use last click because they can understand it.

[00:27:21] Dan: And then we just move on with our lives and it’s all good. 

[00:27:24] Adam: Yeah. And I know that was a question, but I think the one thing I’ll just add to that is I do think that we. Sometimes as an industry, we get, we love to get down into the details. And I think that we go from like a zero to like a 10 of complexity when just because like, look, for example, I can’t tell how many accounts I’ve talked to where we have hours and hours debate about time spent on page, for example.

[00:27:50] Adam: Like. I can make an argument that time spent on page is good if it’s high. I can make an argument that it means your website sucks and it should be lower. I mean, I can make an argument both cases, but the fact that we have people who are willing to like go the distance fighting for something like this, when there’s someone executive who may not care about time spent on page.

[00:28:08] Adam: And like, we sometimes get really mired down. And the details, I think there’s a lot of examples where people will say, if this data isn’t 100 percent perfect, I’m not going to use it. And that’s, I just, I wrote a whole series of blog posts about like, I called it hand grenades, like just, it’s got to be close enough, you know, you don’t want it, it doesn’t have to be perfect.

[00:28:28] Adam: And I think that we do sometimes overcomplicate. Things. And when I, the other example I gave in my presentation is when I worked at Salesforce, one of the kind of out of the box things that I tried was I asked each of my analysts to take a day, maybe once a month or every couple of weeks. this is before COVID, but I wanted them to work at home, which was really weird back then, because this was in the 2009, 2010 era and work from home for a day and turn off everything, turn off email.

[00:28:59] Adam: Turn off back then we didn’t have it. We had like basic instant messengers. And basically I said, your task is to use our website, salesforce. com. And I want you to find something that really bugs you or something that you think stinks. And then I want you to look at the data and see if the data supports that there is a problem there.

[00:29:19] Adam: And I want you to come up with a couple solutions. That we could do. And then I would say, here’s a template. It has to only be three slides. It’s gotta be, what was the problem? What is the data that suggests that there is a real problem? And what is your proposed solution? And I would then share this with my boss, the CMO.

[00:29:38] Adam: And so if I had a team of four or five people, I was getting basically one kind of idea a week. And then every month I would meet with my CMO and I would go through these ideas. And some of them he would say, Hey, I want to explore that further. And it was a really cool way to empower The analysts, and if we actually ended up following through and doing an analysis and making a change because of that, then that analyst was basically a thermostat.

[00:30:06] Adam: And I can’t explain to you how much job satisfaction you have when you are the one who found something, the company explores it. And then you could say that the company made a certain amount of money or save money. Because of that, like I had zero turnover on my team the entire time I was at salesforce because these people loved their job.

[00:30:27] Adam: They love being able to find that. And I think that set a tone throughout the organization that like, Hey, if you’re here, like you’re here to solve problems and you’re here to use data to change our website, not just to report on it. So I think that’s another kind of cool tactic that you can do. And sometimes you got to separate yourself from the noise.

[00:30:45] Adam: And just look at the website or look at the app and maybe even have friends and family look at it. Because sometimes we end up being too close to it. And I think too, oftentimes we let the data drive everything. I think sometimes you got to look at the actual experience and then use the data to validate if it’s a problem, not the other way around cause sometimes it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. 

[00:31:06] Bhav: Adam, do you think in, in both of the, in, in, you know, in the real life example you shared about the. Salesforce, sales team example and, and what you were just talking about. Do you think this speaks more about you as a leader than it does about the stakeholders?

[00:31:23] Bhav: Because it was you ultimately who was able to get that change driven, internally. and also on the flip side, maybe just a short full exercise is what do you think in an, in a, in a parallel universe, if the market, if the sales team hadn’t reached the same, roughly the same volume of sales with 30 percent and had lost, what do you think that would have done to The idea of analytics as a profit center.

[00:31:51] Adam: I actually don’t think it would have done anything. because I think you have to live by the data and die by the data. And I can tell you another crazy example to, to illustrate exactly your point. Because you’re totally right on that. Like there’s a chance that it would have been a bust. So Salesforce example, cause I loved all these Salesforce examples.

[00:32:10] Adam: we got a lot of feedback through qualitative data. That said, I hate you salesforce because if I want to view a demo of your product or I want to try out your product, I’ve got to fill out a form and people hate forms on B2B sites. So my theory was, why don’t we remove the forms? We’ll get more people viewing our demos, more people trying our product, and then eventually you’d expect that a bunch of them would buy it and so on.

[00:32:36] Adam: So I was kind of an early believer in product led growth, if you will. We were really nervous. Like, how do we do this? We were not going to just remove all of our forms. So I convinced my boss, who’s a great guy. He’s like, listen, I’m willing to try anything. We ended up taking a small group of people and cooking them and saying, you don’t see forms and we’re going to track you.

[00:32:59] Adam: And it was always going to be a little bit faulty because of people deleting cookies, but back in these days, people weren’t doing as much cookie deletion and it wasn’t that much blocking back in 2009. So we basically had a test group of people that we let see the demos and free trials, and then we tracked them.

[00:33:15] Adam: For like four or five months and when it wanted to see, do those people end up buying? And I was so excited that we got to do this because I was like, we might be able to like, have much more positive feedback and we’re going to grow our business and so on. It turned out I was wrong. It turned out that even though we did get better qualitative scores, we actually Lost business.

[00:33:37] Adam: And as much as people say they hate forms, if you do put a form in front of them and they talk to a salesperson, eventually, they are much more likely to buy the product than if you just let them kind of auto drive. Now, maybe that’s changed nowadays because that that was, you know, 10, 12 years ago. But back then, the data suggested it.

[00:33:54] Adam: That we should keep the forms and it broke my heart. Like I was really sad. And but you know what, if I would have said, Hey, I’m going to put my thumb on the scale and or do anything like then I mean, I can’t, I can’t do that. And so that didn’t hurt our team’s reputation. It was just an experiment that we tried.

[00:34:13] Adam: And our theory was wrong. And the cool part is we now know that if the new person who comes in the sales force, who thinks that they know everything and says, Hey, I’m new here. And I’m going to tell you, get rid of all the forms. You’re going to double your business. We can say, we did a test of that and it didn’t turn out to be the case.

[00:34:29] Adam: We’re welcome. We’re happy to do that test again, but I don’t think that that hurts the cost center versus profit center. I think it’s saying, listen, we’re We wanted to improve the bottom line. This was a tactic that we thought might help. It didn’t help. So we have to go back to the tactic that works.

[00:34:45] Dan: I am, I’ve got so many questions, but I’m very aware of time and I want to keep talking, but I also want to make sure that we get to a nice satisfactory ending point rather than cutting, cutting off midway through. So I’m, I’m going to do what I always do and promise that there’ll be a third time for you coming back on Adam, because there’s so much more to talk about, because I do want to bring up one, very interesting article from the You wrote on LinkedIn the other day, which was around the end of the gravy train of Google analytics.

[00:35:10] Dan: And, and obviously this is a tool that’s been near and dear to my heart. I’ve done a lot of work on this over the last couple of years. And I would like you just to give us in a nutshell, the summarized version of this for those that, I’ll link to it in the show notes for those and I implore you to go and read it properly, but, I resonated a lot with the messaging here.

[00:35:27] Dan: And I think it’s a really interesting perspective of maybe something that’s going to come up in the future. So give us the, the, the, the summary version, the, the, the Adam GPT version of that post. So then we can rip it apart. 

[00:35:40] Adam: Exactly. I expect nothing less. And I have to start off by saying again, I’m, I’m implicitly biased here because I do work for an analytics vendor that competes with Google Analytics, but I honestly believe in with any blog post I write, I always tell myself that I would write the same blog post whether I have this job or not.

[00:35:59] Adam: And my general thesis. is that for many years, a lot of organizations have relied on Google Analytics. I mean, it’s been 20 years and it’s an amazing tool. Google, you know, gives it away for free for many companies and so on. But given some of the new things that are happening, especially the lawsuits and the antitrust things that are going on both in Europe and now finally in America, there’s a real possibility that certain parts of Google are going to be split up.

[00:36:30] Adam: And obviously, it’s not a secret that the reason that Google Analytics is either free or even the enterprise version is highly subsidized is because Google has learned that, you know, they’re the largest ad network. And if you could see how your ads are doing, you’re going to probably spend more. And everyone, I think, in the industry understands.

[00:36:50] Adam: That Google Analytics is subsidized and probably wouldn’t be able to maintain itself if it were a standalone business. So if you were to take Google Analytics as a business unit and take all the engineers who work on it, all the servers that have to support it and put it in its own business, yes, there are some people who pay for it.

[00:37:11] Adam: But I don’t have inside information on this, but I just, my, my, my gut tells me that they would be at a loss in terms of maintaining all the servers, all the developers, all of this work. And I’m guessing the small amount they get from the enterprise that it would pale in comparison with how much it costs.

[00:37:29] Adam: And it’s a, it’s a loss for them in order to get more advertising business. So what I was supposing in this article is let’s imagine that Google Analytics had to be split out and it wasn’t allowed to be part of the advertising business. Now, there’s so many organizations that are relying on Google Analytics and a couple things would have to happen.

[00:37:50] Adam: Either Google would have to start charging for their product way more, you know, Adobe Analytics might cost a million dollars a year for the same thing that Google Analytics probably charges 150, 000, but Google’s probably losing money on that. So. That the enterprises would probably have to pay a lot more.

[00:38:09] Adam: I bet all of the free people who are getting it, they would be off the gravy train. They’d probably have to start paying for Google analytics. And now you have to ask yourself, how long would Google analytics survive as a standalone business? Would it make it? Or would it be a failed startup if it didn’t have all of the daddy money it gets from the ad business?

[00:38:31] Adam: And then if it does go out of business in that world, like now what happens, you know, all these people who’ve invested their whole career and a lot of their websites and apps on Google analytics, or would they be willing to pay? The amount of money that they’re paying for other analytics tools for Google analytics.

[00:38:49] Adam: And I think that, obviously I’m not going to be mean and talk about all the negative feedback on GA4, but I think a lot of people are frustrated with GA4, but they stay with GA4 because it’s free. Or subsidized the minute that that goes away and now you’re paying you’d have to pay the same amount I think there’d be a lot of companies out there who’d say well now i’m going to really look at all of the tools out There and what and would I stay with ga4 if it was the same price?

[00:39:17] Adam: As the other vendors, I have a feeling they wouldn’t and I have a feeling that they right now Google has always had an unfair advantage of being able to give away a product at such a cheaper price that that then built a whole community around it and that then once you build a community now everyone knows Google Analytics and then it’s this like network effect and it’s a flywheel where when people say digital analytics it’s almost synonymous with Google Analytics and so that was what I was having people think about and I was just saying.

[00:39:46] Adam: Hey, I’m not saying this is going to happen tomorrow. I’m not trying to freak people out, but I’m just saying like you, there’s a non zero probability that some organization could split up Google. And do you have a backup plan? Have you thought of a contingency plan for that? So that was mainly what I was saying.

[00:40:03] Dan: No, it’s, it’s great. And it’s, it’s, it’s worth considering. And I think it really forces this idea of a modular data stack as well. And saying that, you know, like, let’s not be vendor, let’s be vendor agnostic, tool agnostic. And if you were to have to swap Google analytics out, can you, should you, are you able to, how modularized is your ecosystem to be able to do that?

[00:40:22] Dan: One thing that I. I questioned in the thing and actually responded on LinkedIn as well. But, I was saying if there was a big Google divorce, where they split up all of these, products to essentially compete with each other to, to overturn the monopoly, I’ve always argued that Google analytics, especially Google analytics for onwards, is very much a Google ads product.

[00:40:43] Dan: Like it’s essentially the Google ads, CDP light aspect. And, and as, as any analyst will know, it’s a very difficult tool to analyze stuff in. It’s a very convenient tool for marketers to activate data through. and actually that’s where it’s kind of pushing the analysts into the Google clouds and BigQuery, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:41:02] Dan: We don’t want to go into that. but I’m wondering if, the premise of this is, what if it wouldn’t be able to stay with the advertising ecosystem? My argument is, well, I think Google ads would inherit the custody of Google analytics and, and it essentially becomes one product. Sweet tool, offering, and maybe, maybe even drops the analytics name and it just becomes Google ads data platform hub. I don’t know, something like that. 

[00:41:26] Adam: Yeah, I totally agree. And I think that’s where it probably should be. I do think though that the subtle change that that means is that today people will argue that Google analytics is yes, a way to understand how your ads are doing, but also people are using Google analytics as a traditional Digital analytics tool, which by definition is how do you make your website or your app better?

[00:41:50] Adam: And I think that with GA4, Google has taken a pretty, pretty hard turn towards ads. And like it used to be, you know, that you can make an argument that Google analytics was, you know, Hey, they competed with Adobe and amplitude and all these companies just to do digital analytics. But I think that they’ve accented a lot more on the audiences.

[00:42:09] Adam: and a lot more on the advertising side. So I think that would be the logical place for it. I just then question whether that would be enough of a tool for you to use if your goal was to improve digital products and experiences that you have agnostic of the advertising part. 

[00:42:25] Bhav: Can I play devil’s advocate on this? Because obviously, Adam, you do work for one of the major competitors, right? And if I was thinking about this, As a consumer of this is not as a consumer of, of analytic platforms, but as a, as a e commerce company or someone who has spend on something like, you know, Google PPC on Facebook marketplace, all these types of things, the idea that having to then pay for another platform is not in my best interest.

[00:42:57] Bhav: So I’m wondering like, For the record, I am not wedded to GA4. I think it’s, it’s, it’s an okay product, but sorry, Dan. is, are these like antitrust, you know, all of these, kind of like regulations that are coming in and monopoly and Google being a monopoly. Is this coming from the vendors who are.

[00:43:20] Bhav: Potentially losing business. And it’s in the interest of those vendors that Google gets split and GA4 becomes a standalone product. Or is it in the best interest of the customer? Because ultimately in this situation, there is, there’ll be winners and there’ll be losers. And one of the losers would be the customers who would now have to pay to just see the performance of their ads coupled with the rest of their website.

[00:43:50] Bhav: On another platform. So normally I agree with that on modularization. I do think it’s, I do think it’s a good, a good thing, but do you think that this is. something that would be in the best interest of people, the advertisers, the people who have to pay for the money for the advertising, just to then be able to analyze and understand how their campaigns are doing.

[00:44:11] Adam: Well, I’ll start off by saying the people in the antitrust case, both in the US and in Europe, have never heard of companies like ours. They don’t know anything about Adobe Analytics Amplitude. Like, that’s not what’s driving this. This would be a byproduct of, of regulation saying that Google is just too big and has certain monopolies.

[00:44:32] Adam: I think that what is involved in some of these suits is the idea that the advertiser is also providing, The data on how the advertising is doing. And that’s always been a little bit of a suspect, but that’s kind of like a Faustian bargain that a lot of people have made is like, Hey, the integration is so good between Google ads and Google analytics.

[00:44:51] Adam: Like I’m just going to trust them. And I’m not saying they’re doing anything nefarious, but I don’t think that this would cause hardship for other organizations. There’s people that have used non Google products for years, and it’s very easy to collect UTM codes and figure out how those UTMs are doing, but I’ll give you an example where monopoly is, is impacting consumers in general.

[00:45:15] Adam: So let’s just say if you use Google Analytics and you’re in, you’re in Google Analytics and you want to send an ad to anyone who looked at, a competitor’s website and looked at a pair of shoes and you offer a competing pair of shoes. Well, right now, your only answer to that is Google Analytics.

[00:45:36] Adam: Because, there is no way to track anonymous users really outside of people who have Gmail and Chrome. Like Google knows what everyone does on the internet. Most of the people. Now there’s new companies like the Trade Desk and others that are starting to kind of encroach in Google’s business. But for now, let’s just assume that if you want to do an anonymous ad retargeting, you pretty much have to use.

[00:46:01] Adam: Google Analytics because you can build an anonymous retargeting segment. Now, how do we do that with Adobe? How do we do that with amplitude? We can’t, because we don’t have this Google ID that is following people around. So I would make the argument that the Google ID and the Google ads business gives Google Analytics an unfair advantage over other analytics vendors, which is by definition, anti competitive.

[00:46:26] Adam: Now, Google could solve that by either being split out. Google Analytics, or Google could make available the Google ID to other analytics vendors. But of course, at that point, Google says we can’t do that because we’re big believers in privacy. It’s amazing how privacy is so important to Google when it comes to, you know, you know, having other vendors get some of their GCLID data and user ID data.

[00:46:50] Adam: So this is a topic we could talk about over drinks for hours. But I think that I think the most anti-competitive thing right now is that if, and I did a survey on LinkedIn that you could probably find where I basically said, if you wanted to leave Google Analytics, what would be the number one thing that would stop you from leaving Google Analytics?

[00:47:09] Adam: And I gave them a couple of choices and the number one answer was, you know, add integration and retargeting. And so I think that’s. been a problem for the industry. And even companies that leave Google Analytics and come to Amplitude will keep a version of Google Analytics around because just for that one use case.

[00:47:28] Adam: And I don’t think that’s good for the industry. I think that that thwarts competition. And I think that we would have much more, feature, You know, battles between different vendors, if more people, if not, you know, 80 percent of the world was all using one tool. And I don’t, I mean, that’s the general thesis of all monopolies, but to sum up, I do not think that the agencies know anything about Google analytics.

[00:47:50] Adam: I don’t think they’ve even mentioned it in their antitrust documents. It just happens to be a by product of the monopoly that Google has in advertising. 

[00:47:58] Bhav: So you’re saying that. for the record, I am definitely not pro Google or anything. I’m just, I like to play the devil’s advocate on this. And I just wanted to make sure, but it sounds like you’re saying that actually by making these user IDs available to other ad networks, like decoupling the product actually could potentially help drive down the prices of analytics platforms, because then everyone will have access to everything.

[00:48:20] Bhav: which would actually make alternatives to GA4 more accessible. 

[00:48:26] Adam: Absolutely. I mean, that’s what that’s when you break up a big company and you take away a monopoly, there’s always much more competition. And I think there’s a lot of companies that don’t even look at alternative analytics products because of the advertising use cases.

[00:48:40] Adam: And that means that there’s lots of companies that aren’t using non Google products and all of the ideas they have for new features, new functions all go towards Google. Now, in this case, Google. Isn’t listening so well, but, but anyway. 

[00:48:51] Dan: That’s a really interesting point. It will maybe even finally force Google to listen to their consumer base and actually develop a product we need rather than the one they want to make. anyway, I’ve got a couple of last questions. We’ve got a couple of minutes left. so I’m going to whiz through them. This is rapid fire. So answer them as quickly as you are able to. As of the time of recording, what does the term analytics mean today? 

[00:49:14] Adam: To me, analytics is. Improvement. How do you use data to improve something? Whether that’s a website, app, whatever your, whatever is digital that you’re tracking. 

[00:49:25] Dan: Awesome. And a second question. what tools, tech or skills does, an analytics professional need to have to be successful today? 

[00:49:32] Adam: I think communication and presentation skills are the most underrated in our industry. And it’s an area that everyone should focus on more. 

[00:49:42] Dan: Last question. And then you’re off hook unless Bhav does these classic thing of having a final one to throw into the mix, outside of work, outside the world of analytics, salesforce. com, Adobe and everything else. what do you like to do to wind down to escape from work?

[00:49:57] Adam: for me, two things, one, I have a fun little convertible car that I, a custom car that I had built that I like to go driving when the weather is nice and, just kind of keep the top down, listen to some nice music. And then second, I’m a travel person. I travel all around and I actually just bought a home in a second home in Europe. So I’m looking forward to spending more time in Europe. 

[00:50:20] Bhav: House party Adams, I think. Yeah. Yeah. That’s what I heard. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The next measure camp post drinks event, where it depends where in Europe it is. 

[00:50:27] Dan: I mean, to an American, a Europe is one place, but to us, it’s a pretty big place. 

[00:50:33] Adam: Come party in Amsterdam with me.

[00:50:35] Bhav: Oh, amazing. There we go. absolutely. I don’t have a, another follow up question to what Dan said. I, I do want it to aggressively agree with your point about analysts getting out there more. I kind of let that one ride over that point right over just because I wanted the conversation to continue, but I think it’s one of the most important things you could use that today.

[00:50:53] Bhav: Is that there is this concept of analytics not being well, integrated into the rest of the organization and it’s kind of like a cubicle digital virtual cubicle. so if you are listening and you don’t go out and speak to your stakeholders do, because that’s the only way you’re going to get some sales director or marketing director to stop.

[00:51:14] Bhav: You know, remove forms or, remove 30 percent of the, unnecessary calls that they’re making, whatever it might be. And I think it got worse. 

[00:51:23] Adam: I think it got worse during COVID. I think COVID was one of the worst things that happened to our industry because people got happy staying at home and you got to get out there, whether it’s virtually or in person. So, yeah, well, thank you guys so much. It’s always awesome talking to you. I’m happy to come back anytime. 

[00:51:38] Dan: That’s it for this week. Thank you for listening. We’ll be back soon with another episode of the measure pod. You can subscribe on whatever platform you’re listening to this on to make sure you never miss an episode.

[00:51:46] Dan: You can also leave us a review if you can on any of these platforms. We’re also over on YouTube. If you want to see our lovely faces and our lovely guest faces while we do this as well, make sure to subscribe to the measure lab channel to make sure you never miss an episode as they come out. If you’ll leave us a review, that’ll be hugely appreciated.

[00:52:02] Dan: You can do that on most of the podcast applications or there is a form in the show notes, you can leave feedback directly to me and love, thank you for listening and we’ll see you on the next one.

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