#003: Taming the Digital Analytics Technology Stack

The following is a straight-up machine translation. It has not been human-reviewed or human-corrected. However, we did replace the original transcription, produced in 2017, with an updated one produced using OpenAI’s WhisperX in 2025, which, trust us, is much, much better than the original. Still, 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.”

00:00:24.93 [Announcer]: Welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. Three analytics pros and the occasional guest discussing digital analytics issues of the day. Find them on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash analytics hour. And now, the Digital Analytics Power Hour.

00:00:54.32 [Michael Helbling]: Hi everybody, welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. This is episode three. Tonight’s topic… teaming the analytics technology stack. In the words of the Bard, sit by my side and let the world slip. We shall never be younger. Tonight I’m joined by my two other hosts, Jim Cain, double CEO of Dapkin and Babbage Systems out in Ottawa, Ontario. Hi Jim.

00:00:59.26 [Jim Cain]: Hi Michael, and in the immortal words of Axl Rose, all you need is just a little patience.

00:01:11.04 [Michael Helbling]: There you go. And of course we’re also joined by A man who wears many hats of many colors, Tim Wilson, partner at WebAinLytics, Demystified. Hi, Tim.

00:01:13.70 [Tim Wilson]: Hey, Michael. Hey, Jim. You should get a quote, too.

00:01:14.96 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, you should get a quote.

00:01:22.25 [Tim Wilson]: You should get a quote, and I’m thinking, if you laid all the girls that you’ll end in, I wouldn’t be surprised. Does that fit in? Is that a stack?

00:01:24.70 [Michael Helbling]: That is a Tim Wilson quote, everyone.

00:01:28.72 [Tim Wilson]: Dorothy Parker. I’m not taking credit for that. Dorothy Parker. We are dark and strong.

00:02:06.16 [Michael Helbling]: All right. This is an episode committed to the premise of biting off more than you can chew. And that is around the analytics technology stack. 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, the nice to have tools, how do you make your list, how do you check it twice, how do you get up tooled up for analytics greatness. Sit back, relax, enjoy the conversation. It’s certainly a lot cheaper than a forester report.

00:02:09.24 [Tim Wilson]: I was thinking the same thing about Jim Cain.

00:02:20.87 [Michael Helbling]: All right. 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?

00:03:43.66 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, so I’ll maybe start. It’s funny, as we were sort of prepping for the show, and I harken back to when I got into web analytics. The technology stack was a log file sniffer. There was absolutely nothing on the web page, and it was net genesis. And as we started kind of rattling off what was in the analytics technology stack, I was kind of like, holy cow, this thing really has gotten 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 web analytics. But I kind of think the second thing winds up being what you need for media. And 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 bucks on media, but just having those tags in place, and then it quickly spirals from there to, well, if you’re gonna have media tags that need to be swapped in and out, and you’re gonna have web analytics that you’re gonna wanna customize some, then you’re quickly getting to where you wanna have tag management as part of your technology stack. So I’d probably put those Three is kind of the one step beyond the corest of core web analytics.

00:03:57.46 [Michael Helbling]: All right, so we’ve got a tag management system. I’m a fan of that. And obviously, a digital analytics tool and media tags. What else is part of your must-have list out there, Jim?

00:04:51.89 [Jim Cain]: I mean, for me, and tag management is interesting. And 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. And the 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 or the hardest things to get into a TMS, I’m finding the tag management systems are being given to the analysts or the analytics partner of record rather than the IT 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 very interesting.

00:05:27.87 [Tim Wilson]: How many? I’m curious because on the one hand, I feel like I’m saying tag management, tag management, tag management. I’ll be the first one to say that half of my clients that I work with regularly actually have tag management in place. you know, a couple who are in the process of migrating to it, but even, I mean, it’s kind of the vicious cycle of they desperately need a better way to manage their tags because they’ve got kind of a bloated process for managing their tags. And because they have that bloated process, they’re struggling to convert over to a TMS.

00:07:23.85 [Michael Helbling]: 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, okay, let’s put a, let’s put a net tracker or net genesis or web trends, start 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 Martek in one slide, and it’s just this monstrosity of a slide, right? And all these huge categories and tons of hundreds of hundreds. That’s Chief Martek. Chief Martek, who is that? Scott Brinkard. That’s who I was going to say. Scott Brinkard. But what’s happened is that there hasn’t been an evolution of strategy for management of all of that as it’s grown. And it’s because the marketing organization drove the growth of the use of those technologies. And the IT organization, 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 website. Let’s get this media vendor. Let’s get this retargeting vendor. all these things need to go on the website, tag management really arose in response to, wait a second, we need some better methodology or system to manage what is an exploding tool set, right? Because if you think about, like, deployed technologies and, like, the reason we have Ghost3 today, right, is 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 look at all the tools and technologies and vendors and pixels that are being deployed on this page and you know seven, eight, ten years ago it was like there’s two you know or three and that’s it.

00:07:46.14 [Tim Wilson]: The funny thing is that every single one of those technologies went to the site, the brand and said We’re a super awesome technology. All you have to deploy is a single line of JavaScript. And then the grand irony is when tag management came out, tag management went around saying, we will solve all your problems.

00:07:49.46 [Jim Cain]: All you have to do is deploy the JavaScript.

00:07:51.11 [Michael Helbling]: That’s right.

00:07:53.31 [Jim Cain]: That’s why we inherited it.

00:08:01.55 [Michael Helbling]: But I think you’ve been solving business technology on the web for the last 10 years with a single line of JavaScript.

00:08:43.82 [Tim Wilson]: But it’s interesting because I think tag management and I don’t, I don’t fully know the story. So I may be talking completely out of my ass, but my sort of assumption was that, that Josh Manion when he was a strategy and Evan will point when he was a search discovery or 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 developed their own homegrown tag management over the last five or ten years that 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.

00:10:19.71 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, if you look out there and you talk to IT 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 in a killable file. So if I need to, I can knock out your marketing technology that’s messing with the function of the website. So conceptually, from a risk mitigation perspective, good IT organizations are already solving this problem on a one-off basis. The genesis of tag management, at least in terms of leading firms out there today, Like you mentioned, like in Cyton and helium, a lot of the genesis of that was in response to measurement capabilities taking a really long time to work through IT organizations and not getting a chance to actually get deployed. So if I have a 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. That’s six months of lost value. And to recapture that lost value, tag management is a really great solution. So this is absolutely what the transition of, say, Josh Manion from Stratagent to Insighton was all about. Because they spent years and years working with large companies at Stratagent and facing that challenge again and again and again. And similarly, Evan LaPoint was working on a similar problem set, right?

00:10:26.59 [Jim Cain]: I think we can all agree that a tag management tool is an absolute 2015 must-have.

00:10:29.18 [Michael Helbling]: If you don’t have one, then you need one.

00:11:07.69 [Tim Wilson]: I think you need to figure out where. But I guess I don’t know. I mean, it sort of depends. If you rattle off everything else, if you’re able to get your Web Analytics stuff pushed out, if it’s not a pain in your feeling, I have such a resistance to ever adding new technology no matter what it is. I mean, even if you didn’t have web analytics, you’d think that would be a no brainer. But man, I would start by figuring out are you actually going to use it? So there’s kind of the purist. Because we haven’t even talked about voice of the customer testing. attribute management networks.

00:11:15.68 [Michael Helbling]: We’ve spent a pretty decent amount of time deciding whether or not you actually need a web analytics tool on your site.

00:11:19.81 [Jim Cain]: Let’s justify the podcast.

00:11:27.21 [Michael Helbling]: Listen folks, if you’re not using a web analytics tool today, Maybe in 2015, you should consider it.

00:11:36.36 [Tim Wilson]: The digital analytics power hour is not about alternating and direct current. The emphasis is on analytics, not power.

00:12:29.37 [Jim Cain]: So I’ve 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 IT department from the living process of an analytics deployment. Because the problem with analytics deployments is that they need to be very agile. You know, new things happen all the time. There’s new pages, new campaigns, new stuff. And when you wait for IT release cycles, then the measurement group can’t do its job. And so if IT doesn’t have to make changes because it happens in the TMS, you have a much more agile measurement team. So we’re saying it’s a requirement.

00:13:28.14 [Michael Helbling]: Something really important, though, is that you don’t actually take IT out of the equation when you deploy TMS. In all honesty, you should never, almost. And the reality is, is an early marketing foray in TMS was sort of around this concept of like, hey guys, let’s shut the door on these IT idiots and really get some work done. Here’s your panacea, you’re one line of JavaScript and you don’t have to work with them and that’s just… It is so not true and to their credit, every vendor in the space has backed away from that concept. No one’s trying to push that line anymore. 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 IT groups tend to develop a certain kind of relationship in a lot of organizations.

00:13:31.02 [Jim Cain]: Do you mean a relationship based on hate and distrust?

00:13:38.38 [Michael Helbling]: It’s all sort of a continuum. It’s like warm fuzzies all the way down to active sabotaging and hatred.

00:13:41.68 [Jim Cain]: I’m not saying you cut IT out of the equation entirely.

00:14:04.53 [Michael Helbling]: I know you’re not saying that. 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 in a much more meaningful way than has been available historically. That’s really honestly the main value proposition for TMS today in my point of view.

00:14:08.43 [Jim Cain]: I think you just did a better job of saying what I was trying to say.

00:14:10.01 [Michael Helbling]: That usually happens.

00:14:13.78 [Jim Cain]: I know, right?

00:15:27.63 [Tim Wilson]: You nailed it. We haven’t even mentioned having two web analytics platforms in your technology stack. Google Analytics and whatever else you have, which is another piece. But there’s this part of me that still feels like you think that you have one piece of technology and that gives you X amount of data with 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 broader or deeper. Tag management, in a lot of cases, actually seems like it’s It’s not. I mean, it’s enabling you to more efficiently, perhaps, gather more of that. But I still feel like we’re grappling with, when do you chase broader use of what you currently have, which tag management may enable you to do? It absolutely does. But it still, it winds up in this separate class. And I’m not sure exactly what to, we call it tag management, but I don’t feel like we really nail that.

00:17:45.61 [Michael Helbling]: So 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? In a huge enterprise environment, that’s a pretty big full-time job for a group of people, right? 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? So you have this continuum of organizations. And so like, if you can go to that one guy and say to him, hey, I need to make a change of the website and he can make it right then and there, that same day, then that’s a great situation and maybe that’s not a great use case for the traditional sense of TMS. But what we’ve seen tag management systems do is they’re helping those kinds of organizations turn the corner towards more sophisticated usage. transitioning from just using the measurement capability of a tool and starting to think about integrative capabilities of tools, so bringing data together and using your tag 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 all customer touch points and those kinds of things. So that’s kind of, if you look at kind of even the main vendors in the space, there’s two varying degrees, There’s 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 TMS than a large enterprise because a large enterprise is just doing something to solve a problem that will save them. 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.

00:17:59.83 [Jim Cain]: So to reiterate my point from five minutes ago, we all agree that having a tag management system is a 2015 measurement stack requirement for technology. Other things are helpful in some cases for some kinds of companies.

00:18:04.63 [Tim Wilson]: I thought your point was that it removed IT entirely from the equation.

00:18:14.11 [Jim Cain]: For the work that I do, it’s a huge piece, but I would like to take that back and steal what Michael said because it sells better.

00:18:58.75 [Tim Wilson]: Well, and so, you know, I’ll actually, let me throw one more. I haven’t actually seen it happen, but I’ve talked to both clients and technology vendors about it that TMS should enable much, much faster piloting or proof of concepts of supplemental technologies. If you’re saying, I might want to try heat mapping, 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. If you could go in and say, hey, click tail, I’m either going to use, 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.

00:19:02.87 [Michael Helbling]: Right, run a PFC through my TMS.

00:19:53.84 [Tim Wilson]: I think that’s kind of like a managing the growth of the technology stack of TMS. I mean, I still feel like it’s so easy to get into this world. I’ve got a client that, and it’s more on the social side, and I don’t know that we want to necessarily go to, I mean, social analytics, I’ve done E-metrics sessions just on the social technology stack. I mean, John Lovett, one of my partners, it has two chapters on the technology because social, 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 the silver bullet. And maybe this does apply to sites as well, or sites or abs. but they’re chasing silver.

00:20:00.81 [Jim Cain]: They’re like, they’re not going to buy all the wasted effort that’s made on social instead of productive things?

00:20:46.43 [Tim Wilson]: I’m not going to be the social basher. But there’s a ton of wasted effort on, hey, this listening tool didn’t give us magical insights. So we’re going to switch to this other expensive listening tool and run that for six months. And that doesn’t give us magical insights. And it just kind of keeps growing. 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? Like in just the physics of the universe, can you capture, you know, the eye movements of somebody visiting your website? And a quick tail would say mouse movements correlate to that. That’s step one. Say that you had that information, who’s going to do what with it?

00:21:42.97 [Michael Helbling]: That’s where you start seeing or not seeing where we’ve gotten to in terms of value creation from some of these tools. If I put a social listening tool on my site, it’s going to capture or out there, it’s not on my site. Yeah. I don’t do as much social as you do, too. If I start subscribing to a social listening tool, there’s a lot of really cool things that those tools can do, and there’s been a ton of advancement even in the last five years in terms of their capabilities, but I think in a certain sense we could 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.

00:23:35.77 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, it’s actually interesting because I would say with our sites, and I’ll even put apps on it, there was kind of the maturity, you know, as CSS and Flash and Ajax came along, is the maturity of of website technology came, and analytics is always going to lag that stuff, 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, LLO could be the next big thing. Actually, I’m pretty sure LO is not going to be the next big thing. So that is wildly less stable. It’s not a stable progressing thing. And yet, there’s a lot of money chasing the measurement of that, which means it’s a lot of stuff that is completely wildly, wildly half-baked, which I think is probably a key thing about technology. There’s money in analytics technology because it’s scalable thanks to the cloud, thanks to advances in data storage, capture in storage. It’s 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 and every one of them. And I think we touched on it like TMS kind of had a little bit of a misstep because they did treat it as a panacea and now we’re having to kind of walk that back.

00:23:53.32 [Jim Cain]: Tim, I think there’s two things that you’re missing when you’re talking about the marketplace right now. And again, it’s more the market in general, but You know, the kind of, I don’t want to say San Francisco in specific, but the tech bubble, especially in software as a service, especially in enterprise.

00:23:58.30 [Tim Wilson]: Just the bay area. You don’t want to hone in on just the city. You want to kind of spread out a little bit. Yeah.

00:24:44.49 [Jim Cain]: I mean, just those guys, not Ottawa, everyone but Ottawa. No, but 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, you know what 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 this session to Hype Lies and Shitty Sales Guys, the analytics technology staff.

00:25:25.32 [Tim Wilson]: 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, cultural challenges or fear about something they don’t understand. And the easiest thing in the world is to buy a technology to solve a problem where you don’t understand the space or You know, or somebody three levels above you who really doesn’t understand the space says, you know, we gotta be on MySpace, or we gotta be on Second Life. Or we gotta be on Snapchat. Yeah, we gotta be on Facebook, but we’re selling Snaps. We gotta be on Tinder.

00:25:27.62 [Michael Helbling]: What’s your Tinder marketing strategy?

00:26:04.51 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah. Wait, you’re a Christian radio network. This can’t be good. We’ll put all of our on-air personalities on there. Okay, so wait that was so I agree that I think that’s I mean I guess it’s 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 you know that’s the problem is that it usually is cool it usually is dating you don’t have

00:26:47.03 [Michael Helbling]: Every year there is a new one, there are many new ones, 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 you look at a web analytics 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. Other tools and systems allow you to just, hey, let’s just bring in every freaking thing the visitor does, and then we’ll use the power of the back end to use something meaningful afterwards.

00:27:46.59 [Tim Wilson]: So let’s dig into that a little bit, because I think that could be a helpful point of view for us to… That last part is such a hope and a prayer and drives me absolutely berserk. To me, it is the It is the well intended laziness that says, we’ll 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 naivete that says, hey, once we capture it all, we’ll just be able to stitch it together and do cool stuff with it on the back end. I have never, never seen when I’ve worked with clients, when I’ve been inside companies, I’ve never seen that actually happen. It just winds up with this shit storm of messy data in a big ass database that is no one wants to touch it because it’s such a fricking mess.

00:28:10.23 [Jim Cain]: 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. It’s not a winner’s methodology. I don’t know what to do. So maybe in six months, we can find a data scientist because there’s four of those guys.

00:28:28.86 [Tim Wilson]: I’ll punch the Magic Analyze button and figure it out. That doesn’t mean I’m not all for throwing a crap ton of metadata into a data layer so that I can then selectively with my TMS say, now you know what? I really know what I’m going to do with these three things. So let me start throwing them into an EVAR. That’s fine.

00:29:20.08 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. Well, no, that’s interesting. And both of you came down pretty hard and not in favor of immense data capture, if you will. I will let my position be known as well. I’ve come pretty much aligned with you guys in that. Damn it. I thought we were going to have a discussion. I know. I was trying to find a way to debate ever. Where can I disagree with you guys? But the reality is, is like, you know, well, tea leaf is a technology that’s been around for a very long time. 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 that I have no idea what to do with and no plan to do it.

00:29:54.83 [Tim Wilson]: So, but I think I mean, like the tea leaf opinion lab integration. And that for a while was, it seemed like that was kind of their story. They’d had different clients that would say, we take our voice to the customer, when we start to pick up something, somebody had a problem, we’ll then fire up tea leaf and walk through and watch what they do. Today, I honestly had the thought, I wonder if tea leaves kind of actually sort of honed in and figured out where where their spot is.

00:30:44.81 [Michael Helbling]: I need to walk back something, which is by mentioning tea leaves specifically, I 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. There’s nothing wrong with tea leaf as a technology. I remain a fan. 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 tea leaf scratches those itches. And as a result, we’ll 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.

00:30:50.95 [Jim Cain]: Well, let me think. You don’t have any money to leave costs.

00:31:41.06 [Tim Wilson]: OK. Let me pick next with the way that started is this is like the challenges. You can’t frame the problem of this. This is data we do not have in this other tool has it. Like I think that’s actually what happens a lot is that people say it goes from this is data we don’t have. This technology will give us this data, and if we have that, and here’s where the fatal flies, if we had that data, then we potentially could see, and then it’s some pretty wildly unrealistic scenario, and there is no recognition of the reality of the people, time, and actual, like, real-world scenarios that would have to happen in order to make that scenario come true.

00:31:55.98 [Michael Helbling]: 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. Let’s quit beating up on Teeli.

00:32:36.23 [Jim Cain]: We’re not picking on IBM. We have customers who use Tealip and it’s pulled us out of the fire a few times in terms of doing a root cause on why something happened. I wouldn’t mind asking both of you guys a question and no justification for your answer, just the answer, because I’m curious. So if there 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, what are the If budget is a factor, what are the things in 2015 you need to have on a relatively sophisticated digital property?

00:33:35.61 [Michael Helbling]: Well, here’s the thing. 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. 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 we’ve really, really rung the value out of those tools, let’s get a better set of tools for those smart people because if they’ve proven themselves through that, they’re going to do some nice stuff with some better tools. You know what I mean?

00:35:28.15 [Tim Wilson]: Let me put on, I’m kind of of the, I’m also a big proponent of sort of piloting. So that’s where like Voice of 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 of the Customer and don’t have people in 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 CPG site and they chance starts because of they’re looking for compounds, 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 500 responses. It’s going to be quick. And figure out ways to which 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 without about four times as much man hours on the implementation and ongoing use as you expected or the vendor sold. So if you budgeted none, I mean I might have had a client who bought a testing platform zero actual, like people are processed to back it up. And it’s been a little, a little, you know, but they kind of bought into the get the tool and then, hey, look, you can just like run tests and things will get better. Well, there’s actually a lot of things that have to happen by the cheap version of the tool and run those, figure out what those first five tests are before you spend a nickel. Yeah.

00:35:34.34 [Jim Cain]: I had lies and shitty sales guys and everybody got that tool, got sold that tool.

00:36:22.21 [Michael Helbling]: We went through the process when I worked at Land’s End and we 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 the value given our organizational structure to be able to pay the cost of one of these tools. And so what we did is we built our own AB testing capability. looking at the cookie timestamp and splitting down the middle. And we A-B 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.

00:36:30.98 [Tim Wilson]: Which I think you could do that. You could do your piloting with the TMS, right? Depending on your tests, they were just going to take a little more IT involvement.

00:36:39.33 [Michael Helbling]: Well, I mean, the nice thing about testing, not a long-term solution, but you get a pretty decent tag management system for free these days.

00:36:57.79 [Tim Wilson]: Well, no. But to actually then actually use the tag management system to run an A-B test, I mean, you’re not going to get all, there’s a lot of value of having a peer-played testing platform. But if you said, you know what, I’m convinced that if I could just run these three tests, I would see that I would prove out that I had the value.

00:37:30.78 [Michael Helbling]: You could easily use Adobe DTM to run those tests. It’d be a little trickier to do it through Google Tag Manager, given they do an only asynchronous deployment of JavaScript. You have slickers. All right, so listen, we have proven ourselves right once again. We’re full of opinions. We’ve managed to draft the S-word multiple times as something I think we’re passionate about, but we’re also out of time. Tim and Jim, wrap this up for us.

00:38:35.48 [Tim Wilson]: I’ll throw in my takeaway. In one I’ll say we also didn’t talk about integration with your other existing systems. You kind of touched on it with TMS helping with integration, but I think that’s a whole other part of what are you doing with your email, your CRM, your data warehouse, your 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 piece of technology, that that’s going to solve your problems. It 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 it, what it’s going to take to implement it before you dive into it.

00:39:24.89 [Jim Cain]: So I guess my last two cents would be, again, I think 2015 we’re going to continue to be in a real seller’s market for technology solutions to measurement to digital. And if someone is selling you something that you don’t think you need, hang up the phone. Points that Tim made that I totally agree with and Michael mentioned earlier is that most companies that have a web analytics solution are using about 30% 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 and experience, things like voice of customer. I would have loved to have spent some more time on that today.

00:39:37.25 [Michael Helbling]: So memory is not serving you well, but historically there’s been this sort of 1090 rule in digital analytics where you spend 90% of your money on people and 10% on technology.

00:39:46.78 [Tim Wilson]: I think that’s another Axl Rose quote. There’s Avanash definitely had the post in 2006. I mean, I quote that post.

00:39:47.92 [Michael Helbling]: OK, perfect.

00:39:49.36 [Tim Wilson]: There you go.

00:41:00.30 [Michael Helbling]: The point is, I think we ended up in the same place with this conversation. And the other thing is, push the tools. Spend the money on somebody that’s going to help you drive additional value through the tool you’ve got. 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 and we look forward to addressing Tackling the tough issues next time. Thanks for listening everybody for Jim Cain Tim Wilson. This is Michael Helblink and we hope to see you next time. Cheers

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