To win at digital measurement in 2015, you need more data capture tools than just your web analytics tool of record. In episode 3, the 3 musketeers of measurement try to outline what they feel the core tools are that any digital analyst should be familiar with and thinking about. What do you need to have? What should you want to have? What should you be careful about? Get ready to have the hype separated from the important, and done so efficiently it will make an hour feel like 43 minutes.
The following is a straight-up machine translation. It has not been human-reviewed or human-corrected. We apologize on behalf of the machines for any text that winds up being incorrect, nonsensical, or offensive. We have asked the machine to do better, but it simply responds with, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
[00:00:24] Hi everybody. Welcome to the digital analytics power hour. This is Episode Three.
[00:00:30] Tonight’s topic taming the analytics technology stack and the words of the Bard on my side. Let the world slip. We shall never be younger. Tonight I’m joined by my two other hosts Jim Kane double CEO of Rapkin and Babbitts systems out in Ottawa Ontario. Hi Jim.
[00:00:54] Hi Michael. And in the immortal words of Axl Rose all you need is just a little patience.
[00:00:59] There you go. And of course we’re also joined by a man who wears many hats of many colors. Tim Wilson partner at web analytics demystified. Hi Tim.
[00:01:10] Hey Michael. Hey Jim. You should get a quote too. Yeah I just called it a quote and I’m thinking if you wait all the girls rolling in I wouldn’t be surprised to fit in. He’s got a snack that is a Tim Wilson quote everyone. Dorothy Parker. I’m not taking credit for that Dorothy Armstrong. All right.
[00:01:29] So this is an episode committed to the premise of biting off more than you can chew is around the analytics technology stack. So so what do we mean by that and what are we going to discuss in today’s show. We’re going to dig into this concept of the must have tools. Nice to have tools. How do you make your list. How do you check it twice. How do you get tooled up for analytics greatness. So sit back relax enjoy the conversation. Certainly a lot cheaper than a Forrester report. Was like it was the same thing about Jim Kane. So let’s talk about the analytics technology stack beyond web analytics measurement tool. What else is on your must have list for digital analytics.
[00:02:20] Yeah so I’ll I’ll I’ll maybe start. It’s funny as we were sort of prepping for the show and I hearken back to when I get into web analytics the technologies stack was a logfile sniffer. There was absolutely nothing on the web page and it was not genesis. And as we started kind of rattling off what was in the. Innovative technology stack I was kind of like holy cow this thing really has got insanely complicated. So it’s like what’s in it. It does seem like it’s got to me what starts as the core is obviously when I’ve been Logic’s but I kind of think the second thing winds up being what you need for for media. And. Then I wouldn’t have said that probably three or four or five years ago I wasn’t working with as many sites that were spending big big bucks on media. But.
[00:03:18] You know just having those tags in place and then it quickly spirals from there to what you’re going to have media tags that need to be swapped in and out and you’re going to have web analytics and you’re going to want to customize some quickly getting to where you want to have tag management is as part of your technology stack.
[00:03:35] So I’d probably put those three is kind of the one step beyond the chorus of core web analytics. All right. So we’ve got a tag management system. I’m a fan of that. It’s obviously a digital analytics tool in media tags. What else is part of your must have list out there Jim.
[00:03:58] I mean for me and take management interesting and I’m I’m not going to be surprised if tag management dominates a lot of our conversation today. You know I spent most of 2013 watching tag management move from kind of cutting edge to where we are now which is kind of a standard must have an interesting thing to me for tag management is that it’s not it wasn’t designed to be a web analytics tool you know. But given the fact that web analytics tools are the hardest users are the hardest things to get into a DNS. I’m finding the tag management systems are being given to the analysts or the analytics partner record right in the I.T. department or the development organization. So we’re spending as much time at least right now with tag managers as we are with analytics tools for some of our clients. I think that’s really interesting how how many.
[00:04:52] I’m curious because on the one hand I feel like I’m saying time management time management time management I’ll be the first one to say that half of my clients that I work with regularly actually have management in place. I’ve got you know a couple who are in the process of migrating to it. But even I mean it’s kind of a vicious cycle. They desperately need a better way to manage their tags because they’ve got kind of a bloated process for managing their tags because they have a bloated process. They’re struggling to convert over to a team as.
[00:05:27] Well. I guess what I’ve observed is that like you mentioned earlier Tim you know when we started this thing we were all like OK let’s put let’s put a net tracker net Genesis or a web trends started analyzing log files and those kinds of things. And over the last 10 15 years we’ve seen the need for different marketing technologies and measurement technologies really you know just blow up right. There’s that there’s a slide out there somebody made this a classic slide that kind of shows like all of MarTech in one slide and it’s just this monstrosity of a slide right and all these huge categories a ton of.
[00:06:08] David hardtack to Martek. Who is that.
[00:06:11] Scott better. That’s who I was going to say. Got a break.
[00:06:16] But but you know what’s happened is that there has been an evolution of strategy for management of all of that as it’s grown and it’s because of the marketing organization drove the growth of the use of those technologies and the I.T. organization are frankly just got yanked along. So what happened was you basically had this explosion of technologies different vendors. Let’s get this on the website let’s get this on the Web site let’s get this media vendor let’s get this retargeting vendor. All these things need to go on the Web site tag management really rose in response to. Wait a second. We need some better methodology or system to manage what is an exploding toolset rate. Because if you think about like deploy technologies like the reason that we have goostrey today Ray has to tell all of us what’s going on on any individual website and it’s just sort of you load up a page and you just see her will get all the tools and technologies and vendors and pixels that are being deployed on this page. And you know 70 years ago it was like there’s two you know or three. And that’s it. You
[00:07:22] know the funny thing is that every single one of those technologies went to the the site the brand and said we’re a super awesome technology.
[00:07:35] All you have to deploy is a single line of atmosphere. The grand irony is when time management came out tank man and went around saying we will solve all your problems all you have to do is go live in South Korea.
[00:07:49] That’s right.
[00:07:50] Yeah that’s why we’ve inherited them but I’ve been solving business technology on the web for the last 10 years.
[00:07:59] The single line of Javascript but is it because I think time management and I don’t I don’t fully know the story so I may be talking completely out of my aspect. My sort of assumption was that that John Mannion when he was at strategem and evitable point when he was a search discovery were both guys who said this We need to for ourselves to do something that’s a little smarter. And I think that a lot of companies have actually effectively develop their own homegrown type management over the last five or 10 years. They had a good architecture department. It was just when agencies did it a couple of them said Yeah this is a problem everybody’s facing. And so we’re going to productize this.
[00:08:43] Yeah if you look if you look out there and you talk to I.T. organizations that have got good stability and been around a long time and dealt with a lot of these issues. What you’ll find out is that they have built systems to kind of manage all of these different tags by housing them and you know a killable file. Right. So if I need to I can knock out your marketing technology that’s messing with the function of the website. So like conceptually from a risk mitigation perspective good I.T. organizations are already solving this problem on a one off basis. The genesis of tag management at least in terms of leading Capet leading firms out there today. Like you mentioned like an seitan helium you know a lot of the genesis of that was in response to measurement capabilities taking a really long time to work through I.T. organizations and not getting a chance to actually get deployed. So if I have you know really great analytics implementation but for whatever reason it’s going to take six months for additional measurement piece to get put on the website at six months of lost value and to recapture that lost value. Tech managements are a really great solution. So like this is this is absolutely what the transition of Josh Manning from strategy to seitan was all about because he spent years and years working with large companies that strategist and facing that challenge again and again and again. And similarly you know Evan Lapointe was working on a similar problem. Right.
[00:10:20] I think we all agree that untag management tool is an absolute 2015 must have if you don’t have one then you need one.
[00:10:29] I think it’s you know to figure out where but I guess I don’t know. I mean it sort of depends if you have off everything else. If you’re if you’re able to get your Y.A. stuff pushed out if it’s not if it’s not a pain you’re feeling. I have such a resistance to ever adding new technology no matter what it is. I mean even if we didn’t have web analytics you’d think that would be a no brainer but I would start by figuring out are you actually going to use it. So there’s kind of the the purest because we haven’t even we haven’t talked about voice the customer testing networks that we were spending a decent amount of time deciding whether or not you actually need that web analytics tool on your site app that lets just apply the policy.
[00:11:18] If you listen folks if you’re not a web analytics tool today maybe in 2015 you should consider the digital analytics power our is not about alternating and direct current emphasis on analytics not power.
[00:11:36] So I have I have had a bunch of kind of year end conversations with some of our accounts and they’re asking what technology decisions should we be making next year. What are the core things that we should have in our measurement stack. And I think attack management is a requirement and it’s not because of faster page load times or you know it’s actually to divorce the I.T. department from the living process of an analytics deployment because the problem with analytics the point is that they need to be very agile. You know New Things happen all the time there’s new pages and pages the stuff. And when you wait for IP release cycles then the measurement group can’t do its job. So if I.T. doesn’t have to make changes because it happens in the TMF You have a much more agile measurement team.
[00:12:27] So we’re reclaiming something really important though is that you don’t actually take I.T. out of place yet when you have mass like you just you know a lot. You should never almost. And the reality is is an early marketing foray into India mass was sort of around this concept of like hey guys let’s shut the door. These I.T. idiots and really get some work done.
[00:12:56] Here’s here’s your panacea. Your one line of Javascript don’t work with them and that’s just it is so not true.
[00:13:03] And to their credit every vendor in this space has backed away from that concept right. No one’s trying to push that line anymore like. And that’s good because it’s it’s just not a reality. That being said there’s so much that can be done because one of the things that happens is marketing groups and I.T. groups tend to develop a certain kind of relationship in a lot of organizations.
[00:13:27] You gain a relationship based on hate and distrust.
[00:13:30] It’s all sort of a continuum. You know it’s like warm Fuzzy’s it’s all the way down to active sabotaging and hatred. Right.
[00:13:38] I’m not saying you cut it out of the equation entirely.
[00:13:41] I know. Right.
[00:13:44] What. Tag management has started to become for a lot of organizations is the platform for collaboration between those two organizations in a way that has a much more meaningful way than has been available historically. That’s really honestly the main value proposition for TMF today.
[00:14:03] And my point of view I think you just did a better job of saying what I was trying to say.
[00:14:08] That usually happens so I know right. You nailed it.
[00:14:12] But it is just a just a you know we haven’t even mentioned the having to web analytics platforms and your technologies that Google Analytics and whatever else you have which is another piece.
[00:14:25] But there’s this part of me that still still feels like you know you think that you have one piece of technology and you have that gives you X amount of data with a given breadth and depth and then you add another piece of technology and the hope is that that is giving you more data broader or deeper. And then if you add another stack of technology it’s giving you a broader deeper headed management. You know a lot of cases actually seems like it’s it’s not. I mean it’s enabling you more efficiently perhaps you know gather gather more of that. But I still feel like we’re we’re grappling with. When do you chase broader use of what you currently have with tag management may may enable you to. It absolutely does. So so but it still it winds up in a separate class and I’m not sure exactly what we call tag management but I don’t feel like we really nail that.
[00:15:27] So there’s there’s this dividing line. So on some levels organizations are struggling with just a competency around managing marketing and measurement technologies on their digital properties. Right. And a huge enterprise environment that’s a pretty big fulltime job for a group of people. Right. Just making sure the right stuff is in the right place at the right time. That’s just a big job in smaller and more nimble organizations. It’s one guy who manages it all and has no problem making updates today. Right.
[00:16:03] So you have this continuum of organizations so like you can go to that one guy and say to him Hey I need to make a change to the Web site and he can make it right then and there. That same day then you know that’s a great situation and maybe that’s not a great use case for the traditional sense of TMF. But what we’ve seen tech management systems do is they’re helping those kinds of organizations turn the corner towards more sophisticated usage. So transitioning from just using the measurement capability of a tool and starting to think about integrated capabilities of tools so bringing data together and using your tech management platform for that using your tag management platform to drive personalization using your tag management platform to drive sort of an integrated view of kind of customer touch points and those kinds of things. So. So that’s kind of if you look at kind of even the main vendors in the space there’s varying degrees there is that kind of drive as well. So there’s actually a value proposition no matter what kind of organization you are. And I would actually say the more nimble organizations are in a position to drive more incremental value out of a tier than a large enterprise because large enterprise is just doing something to solve a problem that will save them.
[00:17:22] It’ll be a cost savings as opposed to a value add whereas a more nimble organization is actually going to drive additional incremental value because they’re going to change certain things about how they’re interacting with customers based on data that they’re receiving potentially even in real time which will then allow for better transactional behaviors from customers that will give them higher value in those kinds of things.
[00:17:45] So to reiterate my point for five minutes ago we all agree that having a tag management system is a 2015 measurement stack requirement for technology.
[00:17:55] Other things are helpful in some cases for some kind of companies.
[00:17:59] I thought your point was that it removed entirely from the entirely Indian the equation for the work that I do it’s a huge piece but I would like to take that back and steal it Michael said because they felt better. Well so I actually let me throw one more.
[00:18:17] I haven’t actually seen it happen but I’ve talked to both clients and technology vendors about it. TMF should enable much much faster pirating are proof of concepts of kind of supplemental technologies if you if you’re saying I might want I want to try mapping or you know I really think this one form if I could just see mouse movements that would give me an enormous amount and I keep hearing the click tail would totally nail that right. If you could go in and say hey quick tail. I’m either going to use.
[00:18:52] I think they have a free trial or I’m going to talk to them because I’m an enterprise and say I want to just flip this on right.
[00:18:58] Rather couldn’t see through my TMF serpiente. I think that’s so that’s that’s kind of like a managing the growth of the technology stack of TMX. I mean I still feel like it’s so easy to get into into this world I’ve got I’ve got a client. And it’s more on the social side and I don’t know that we want to necessarily go to I mean social social analytics are done the metrics sessions just on the social technology stack.
[00:19:27] I mean John above it in my heart when my partners. It has two chapters on the technology because social.
[00:19:35] Because you’re not deploying it you’re basically configuring it and listening to it. And I really watch people in social just spin because they’re looking for they’re looking for the silver bullet.
[00:19:48] And maybe this does apply to sites as well or sites or apps but there are places in so why all of wasted effort that’s made on social instead of productive things.
[00:20:00] I’m not going to be a but there’s a ton of wasted effort on this listening tour didn’t didn’t give us magical insights. We’re going to switch to this other expensive listening tour and run that for six months and that doesn’t give us magical insights and it just kind of keeps keeps growing.
[00:20:17] In both cases it’s like are you really clear on what you’re trying to do and have you vetted that out to say if you had that information you know is that data even available by the physics of the universe. Can you capture you know the eye movements of somebody visiting your website. I would say mouse movements correlate to that. Yeah. Yep one OK say that you had that information. Who’s going to do with it.
[00:20:46] Well that’s that’s where you start seeing or not seeing kind of where we’ve gotten to in terms of value creation from some of these tools. Right. Because if I put a social listening tool on my side it’s going to capture or you know out there it’s on my site. Does it say. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:21:08] I don’t do as much social as Ido to know if if I start subscribing to a social listening tool you know there’s a lot of really cool things that those tools can do. And there’s been a ton of advancement even the last five years in terms of their capabilities. But I think in a certain sense we can agree that we’re still fairly early on in our understanding of how best to leverage social data to kind of impact or make strong recommendations to organizations as it pertains to their business as differentiated from sort of tactical stuff inside of social itself.
[00:21:44] It’s actually interesting because I would say with our sites and I even put apps on it there was kind of the maturity you know as is CSSA and flash and Ajax came along as the maturity of of Web site technology came in and the weather is always going to lag that stuff we like we always have but it’s gotten fairly mature for what sites do and the analytics platforms it was kind of a limited set of tools and those have kind of reached a level of maturity as well. By the time social comes along one it’s way messier. It’s constantly changing. You know Elmo could be the next big thing. Im pretty sure Elmo is not going to be the next big thing. So that is wildly less stable its not a stable progressing thing and yet theres a lot of money chasing the measurement of that which means it’s a lot of stuff that is completely you know wildly wildly half half baked which I think is probably a key thing about technology.
[00:22:52] There’s there’s money in analytics technology because it’s scalable thanks to thanks to the cloud.
[00:23:00] Thanks to advances in data storage the capture and storage. It’s yep yep. Come up with a sellable mousetrap and then it is relatively straightforward to scale it and there’s. There’s your margin. So you have a lot of vendors out there saying our technology is going to solve all of your problems. Every one of them and I think we touched on it like DMSO kind of had a little bit of a misstep because they did treat it as a panacea.
[00:23:32] And now we’re having to kind of walk that walk that back and to things that you’re missing when you when you’re talking about the marketplace right now and you’re not. And again it’s more of the market in general but you know that the kind of RSA San Francisco in specific but the tech bubble especially in soccer as a service especially in the Bay Area you don’t want to hone in on just the city you want to kind of spread out a little bit.
[00:23:58] Yeah I mean just those guys not Otto everyone Berala OK. No but just just that real startup community where people are trying to get a minimum viable product where they can raise funding and there’s all kinds of cutting edge things in digital that could be measured coupled with the fact that organizations like if you’ve been in business for 80 years social media like I have kids older than social media.
[00:24:22] You don’t I mean. So businesses can’t move at the speed of internet. And you see a lot of companies trying to sell technology solutions to people or kind of corporate culture problems. I actually almost jokingly asked if we could change the name of the session to hype lies and shady sales guys.
[00:24:41] The analytics technology is there.
[00:24:44] So I don’t think I’m missing that I completely this is my turn to say you’re stating that better than I think it’s completely organizational and cultural challenges or fear about something they don’t understand and the easiest thing on the easiest thing in the world is to is to buy a analogy it purports to solve a problem where you don’t understand the space or you know or somebody somebody three levels above you who really doesn’t understand the space. You know we got to be on myspace or we going to be on Second Life guys but you know we go on Facebook but we’re selling this. We got to be on Tinder. What’s your Tinder marketing strategy.
[00:25:28] Well I hear a Christian radio network like this can’t be good. Put all of our on air personalities on there.
[00:25:38] Yeah. So wait that was I agree. But I think that’s I mean I guess it’s what I as a consultant. A lot of times I’m saying Hold the phone. I know you got that cold call. You know your neighbor’s cousin is selling the latest gee whiz and it is gee whiz it is cool.
[00:25:59] You know. That’s the problem is that usually is cool it usually is they don’t have.
[00:26:04] Every year there is a new one. There are many new ones.
[00:26:07] But here’s a question that we can tackle because one of the things that technology has allowed us to start to do is gather all the data and then figure it out later or plan out and then pick and choose our data. Right. So like if we look at an. Event like implementation today it’s sort of like let’s plan out kind of what our measurement strategy is and then go capture those data points.
[00:26:34] Other tools and systems allow you to just say let’s just bring in every frickin thing that the visitor does and then we’ll use the power of the backend to use something meaningful afterwards.
[00:26:46] So let’s dig into that a little bit because I think that could be a hopeful point of view for us to hear that last part is such a hope and a prayer and drives me absolutely preserved.
[00:26:58] To me it is the it is it is the well intended laziness that says what just capture more because we can’t capture it like we’re fighting time better to just capture it as soon as possible start capturing as much as we can and then it is complete Nivat day that says hey and once we capture it all we’ll just be able to stitch together and do cool stuff with it on the back in. I have never never seen when I’ve worked with clients when I’ve been inside companies. I’ve never seen that actually happen.
[00:27:35] It just winds up with this shit storm a messy data in a big ass database that is. No one wants to touch it because it’s such a frickin mess.
[00:27:46] I know companies that are doing that. I don’t know a single company that’s generated wins or is doing that capture everything. Deal with questions later. Like it’s not it’s not a winner’s methodology it’s a I don’t know what to do. So maybe in six months we can find a data scientist because you know the sort of got up into the magic analyzed button and figure it out.
[00:28:13] That doesn’t mean I’m all for throwing a crap ton of metadata into a data layer so that I can then selectively with my DMSO. Now you know what I really know what I’m going to do with these three things so let me start throwing them into any of our.
[00:28:27] That’s fine.
[00:28:29] Well all that’s interesting and both of you came down pretty hard and not in favor of immense data capture and if you will I will let my position be known as well. I come pretty much aligned with you guys in that.
[00:28:46] Damn it I thought was a guy I know I was like fuck trying to find my bed ever where I just you guys but the reality is is like you know Wolak tea leaf is a technology that’s been around for a very long time.
[00:29:03] On the surface a really great technology has a ton of useful applications and yet almost every company I’ve ever interacted with who is leveraging that as a technology has usually ended up with a database full of stuff they have no idea what to do with no plan to do so.
[00:29:20] But I think I mean that like the tea leaf opinion lab integration and that for a while was it seemed like that was kind of their story.
[00:29:29] They had different clients that would say we’re going to take our voice of the customer when we start to pick up something somebody had a problem Wolf. Then fire up to leave and walk through and watch. Watch What They Do. I almost died today. I honestly had the thought. I wonder if tealeaves kind of actually sorta honed in and figured out where where their spot is and let’s I need to walk back something which is by mentioning Teeley specifically.
[00:30:00] Don’t mean to say that they’re a symptom of the problem. It’s more organizations aren’t grappling with what are we trying to accomplish by putting this tool in place ahead of actually buying that technology to fulfill that perceived need. Right. There’s not a prop. There’s nothing wrong with relief as a technology. I remain a fan right. It’s a very powerful capability. So if you know like hey you know what. Here’s the three things that we’re not getting from our current digital analytics tool and we’re pretty sure that tealeaves scratches those itches and as a result will give us information to accomplish this. This and this which will drive this kind of revenue for us. Then now you’ve got a really great case to go buy that tool and put it in.
[00:30:44] Well let me tell you that all the money tealeaves cost. Okay well let me let me let me let me pick next with the way that started is this is like.
[00:30:55] The challenge is you can’t frame the problem of this business data.
[00:30:59] We do not have in this other tool has it. I think that’s actually what happens a lot of people say it goes from this data we don’t have this technology will give us this data and if we have that in here’s here’s where the fatal flaw is if we had that data then we potentially could see.
[00:31:21] And then it’s some pretty wildly unrealistic scenario. And there is no recognition of the reality of of the people time and actual like real world scenarios that would have to happen in order to make that scenario come true. So
[00:31:40] we’re but I don’t want us to sit here and talk people out of putting in enterprise data warehousing solutions and those kinds of things or for TV.
[00:31:49] Let’s be clear. It what’s a quick beaten up until Hantili for that taken on IBM. You know that.
[00:31:56] Yeah I’m not hating on a PC. We we have customers who has to sleep and it’s pulled us out of the fire a few times in terms of a root cause or why something happened. I wouldn’t mind asking both of you guys a question. And like no justification for your answer just the answer I’m curious. So it was a sophisticated website like a lot of moving pieces a lot of traffic let’s say a relatively large marketing spend but they needed to spend as little money as possible on technology. Well what are the if budget is a factor. What are the things in 2015 you need to have on a relatively sophisticated digital property.
[00:32:36] Well here’s Gotham creation. So let’s start with our free tools out there right. So right out of the gate for free you can have Google Analytics up to a certain level of traffic right. There’s a ton of useful things you can do for analysis and things like that you know and depending on how much traffic you’re driving through that you don’t need to go any further. And so very quickly we enter this space of sort of driving sort of the cost benefit analysis of trying to take the tool further versus investing in a better set of tools. I’ll be honest I fall very squarely in the camp of Let’s get really smart people to push the tools out past where they’re supposed to go or where they traditionally go. And then once you’ve really really run the value out of those tools let’s get a better set of tools for those smart people because if they’ve proven themselves see that they’re going to do some nice stuff with some better tools you know what.
[00:33:35] Let me put on I’m kind of of the I’m also a big proponent of sort of piloting.
[00:33:40] So that’s where I Poyser the customer which I feel like if you’re a large site you really should have voice of the customer. Having said that I know large sites that have voice withstood the customer and don’t have people and processes to actually do anything with it. But I have done the you know what your long term solution is not Google consumer surveys for websites. But you know what for a couple of weeks to answer these two questions that you keep asking like why are people coming to my site. I’m a CTG site and they can’t start because they’re looking for coupons but we want to quantify how many that is. You can actually get a little buy in and say you know what. I’m just going to run this until I get I’ve got to realize it’s going to be. It’s going to be quick and figure out ways to kind of try before you fully fully commit because I feel like that it gets back to the challenge of the promise the potential of the technology is never realized with our about four times as much man hours on the implementation and ongoing use as you expected or the Avengers sold. So if you’ve budgeted none I mean I might have had a client who bought a testing platform with zero actual people were processed to back it up. And it’s been a little a little you know they kind of bought into the get the tool and then hey look you can just like run tests and things would get better. Well there’s actually a lot of things that have to happen.
[00:35:19] Buy the cheap version of the two and run those figures. Figure out what those first five tests are before you spend that nickel. Yeah.
[00:35:27] And in lies and shady sales guys in all got sold that tool we went through the process.
[00:35:36] When I worked at Land’s End and it went through the process of evaluating AB testing vendors and part of our process was evaluating how quickly can we repay the cost of this investment based on what the gains we expect to get from this tool in our capacity to run tests. And the reality was as we found out that in year one there was no way we could test fast enough to get back value given our organizational structure to be able to pay the cost of one of these tools and so we did as we built our own AB tested capability. Looking at the cooking time stamp and splitting down the middle and we AB tested that way for free for a year so that we could build up our capability for testing so that we could buy the tool.
[00:36:21] So like I think you could you could you could kind of you could do that you could do your piloting with the DNS right. Can you depending on your test say it’s going to take a little more I.T. involvement empathically the testing of long term solution but a pretty decent tech management system for free these days. Well lot better actually than actually use the time and for system to run an AB test. You’re not going to get all. There’s not a lot of value of having a pure play testing platform but if you know I’m convinced that if I could just run these three tests I would see that yes I could move out that I had the value you could easily used adobe DTM to run those tests.
[00:37:02] It may be a little trickier to do it through Google tag manager given they do and only asynchronous deployment of JavaScript but you’re absolutely right. So listen we have proven ourselves right. Once again we’re full of opinions. We’ve managed to graph the s word multiple times as something I think we’re passionate about but we’re also at a time.
[00:37:25] Tim and Jim wrap this up for us.
[00:37:30] I’ll throw in I’ll throw in my takeaway one also that we also talk about integration with your other existing systems you kind of touched on it with the mess helping with integration but I think that’s a whole other part of what are you doing with your e-mail your CRM your your data where marketing automation to me I think I have heard myself as we’ve been talking coming back to it and you said it really well be damn sure you are pushing your existing technology stack as hard as you possibly can it is wildly cheaper and often more beneficial to push your existing technology harder than to think that buying the next the next piece of technology that that’s going to solve your problems is going to make your life more complicated. It’s going to make the data more complicated and that doesn’t mean don’t do it. It just means make sure you are crystal clear on what you’re going to get out of it. You’re realistic about what you’re going to get out of that was going to take to implement it. Before you before you dive into it.
[00:38:35] So I guess my last two cents would be you know again I think 2015 we’re going to continue to be in a real seller’s market or technology solutions to measurement to digital. And if someone is selling you something that you don’t think you need hanging up the fall point said to me that I totally agree with them. And Michael mentioned earlier is that most companies that have a web analytics solution are using about 30 percent of what it’s capable of doing push it as hard as you can. I also think you should plan on pushing it through a tag management system. And I would love to have a future session with you guys on the actionable tools in the stack. Things like testing things like heat mapping experience things like voice of customer I would love to spend more time on that today.
[00:39:24] So memory is not serving you well but historically there’s been this sort of 10 90 rule. Digital Analytics where you spend 90 percent of your money on people 10 percent technology that represents.
[00:39:38] Well believe me I think that’s another Axl Rose quote.
[00:39:41] I’ve been hush hush. Definitely had to post in 2006. I mean I quote that post. Okay perfect.
[00:39:49] The point is I think we ended up in the same place. With this conversation and the other thing is as you know. Yeah push the tools. Spend spend the money on somebody is going to help you drive additional value of the tool you’ve got you know that may sound self-serving from three guys who are in businesses that work with companies to get more out of the tools they’ve got or put new tools in. But the reality is I think probably all three of us are in that position because that’s what we see work. And that’s where we find an opportunity to drive value for the clients and the people and the businesses that we work with. Great show today guys. If you’re listening to the show and you would want to interact please love to hear from you on our Facebook page or Twitter account.
[00:40:45] And we look forward to addressing tackling the tough issues today. Thanks for listening everybody. For Jim Kane Tim Wilson Michael humbling. We hope to see you next time.
[00:41:00] Thanks for listening. And don’t forget to join the conversation on Facebook or Twitter. We welcome your comments and questions Facebook dot com slash on our on Twitter.
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