#006: What Is the Space for Tools that Aren't Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics

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[00:00:26] Hi there everybody. This is episode 6.

[00:00:29] Welcome to the digital analytics power hour. As always Michael hobbling the analytics practice leader at search discovery and I’m joined by my two other hosts Jim Kane CEO of napkins and Babbage systems. Tim Wilson a partner at web analytics demystified. But today we have a special treat. We have our first ever guest on The Digital Analytics power hour. And we decided to swing for the fences. Heaton Shaw is with us tonight. He’s the co-founder of two different digital analytics companies crazy egg and kiss metrics and he knows a little bit about the topic we’re going to discuss tonight. Heaton Hello and welcome.

[00:01:12] Thanks for having me. And I know is going to be the first guess I better make this good.

[00:01:16] Yeah you better you better be really good now. Well well OK. So guys let’s jump into tonight’s topic and it’s really about disruption in the digital analytics space right. Right now in digital analytics today there’s really two vendors who dominate the space. Google Analytics and Adobe analytics. And if you go and look at any Web site in the Fortune 1000 or the fortune I don’t know how far down they count. But lots of thousands. These are the tools you’re going to see out there predominantly. There’s a lot of other ones out there and if you look at the three of us on the show we typically deal with those two tools so that’s why we wanted you to come on the show tonight to really help us round out the conversation understand the place for these sort of other tool sets. How do they disrupt how do we do things with them how do we can be can people think of them as a replacement for these tools. Those are the kinds of things we’re going to get into. So let’s jump right into it guys of the major tools out there. How did the other tools stack up. Where

[00:02:20] did they fit into the space.

[00:02:22] So I feel like there’s actually sort of two classes there’s the classes the traditional web analytics tools that are trying to some pretty much all of them kind of broaden their footprint to be into the Dobi into the fall Marketing Cloud or into customer analytics or elsewhere.

[00:02:41] And then there’s the class of these other tools which Heaton’s definitely one of the things I was eager to get your thoughts on is like how do you even describe this metrics are you know crazy how do you frame that relative to these kind of core web analytics tools.

[00:02:59] Because I struggle to.

[00:03:01] Yeah. You literally could call many and most of us that are in that category. And there’s a lot of tools. I’m guessing there’s probably 100 at this point that are not adobe or google analytics. I mean just call us like ankle biters to all of those folks for the most part. And the reason is these both these companies have established themselves as dominant dominant being you know obviously ometer which I’ll still keep calling it but anyway Adobe web analytics I guess our digital marketing cloud or whatever the hell they’re calling it now you rename it every year.

[00:03:36] So that’s right. And you know they’re taking the sales strategy of trying to invent a new category every year or whatever.

[00:03:40] Who cares. I see that your accounts are there accounts that you’re hanging out.

[00:03:46] Good. So I’m super glad that you guys can keep up with it because I can’t even keep up with it. But I think they have dominated enterprise for such a long time. And what typically happens I just keep thinking about Innovator’s Dilemma Innovator’s Solution in those whole models of sort of disrupting industries as to what’s happening and probably going to keep happening. And so basically Adobe on the high end Google analytics on every website should have it and if they don’t I’m always wondering why because it’s free and it’s very comprehensive. But

[00:04:19] at the end of the day these are all both businesses. Product lines whatever you want to call it that were created many many many years ago. And so the way I would describe it is that there’s there’s basically a bunch of use cases that a lot of us that are smaller tools from a footprint standpoint are able to solve problems for customers maybe emerging needs. Sometimes it’s like for example in some companies are focused just on mobile. Other companies are focused just on e-commerce. Other come either focus just on let’s say dashboards right so everyone’s got their own perspective on how to disrupt and or solve a problem for customers. So the way I would I know you come to think of it as like their legacy companies. And then there’s disruptors and I think that’s a reasonable way to think about it in general. But the market is completely. There’s just new stuff coming up all the time and you use cases and new things that these companies can’t support very well I mean it took Google forever even though they have a whole mobile platform sitting there to understand how to do mobile as the case for analytics while many of us already figured that out years before they did. The problem is we don’t have distribution like they do that right. And in Adobe’s case it’s like there’s a whole support ecosystem around it where if you’re an enterprise company and you’re willing to spend 30 grand on a new change you know that you need to make just like one.

[00:05:41] Something that would take literally five minutes in our system that guess metrics or many other tools you can do that enterprises want that sort of handholding support and sort of process. And I think it’s just a matter of maybe another five or 10 more years of just chipping away at these large companies and also some of us really leveraging some of the shifts that are happening such as mobile and this is only if you look at it as analytics and you know I’m sure we’re going to get into a deeper conversation but that’s I guess how would think about it.

[00:06:08] I think the Clayton Christian The Innovators Dilemma is kind of a pretty fascinating way to look at it. We’re on a different trajectory to be talking about the space this way in five years. It is that’s what. Is that what’s happening that you’ve got 100 companies that are all trying to solve more focused problems in a more nimble and creative way.

[00:06:35] You know I mean you say Mixpanel and I think it’s events like defining everything they want to track.

[00:06:41] That’s my crude understanding of Mixpanel metrics. I sort of see is kind of heads since we’re going to start from scratch and make sure we’re thinking about looking into other data and web stuff so we’re not going to be I don’t know. SIMON I don’t know if that’s fair or not. I think of crazy or quick tail of it’s actually need to get heatmap since I’m looking at look at two way to pronounce it and it’s hey we’re going to take the opensource route. And those are all I don’t even know that they’re necessarily converging they’re saying we’re going to put on a different beachhead of what we’re going to do fantastically and then we’re going to kind of expand from there. I just to struggle wrap my head around look it’s happening there. I feel like Adobe. It’s simple.

[00:07:29] They’re just chasing each other on features and functionality and that’s about what they’re that’s about what they’re doing.

[00:07:36] So yeah I think the easiest way to look at it is you know Adobe and Google are probably not necessarily going anywhere but if you think about them as the big flat piece of Lego like a they should be platforms on which other things are built almost like an e-commerce platform. And then you’re in a situation where they do a lot of things well where they don’t do anything awesome and then you can start thinking about based on my business and my needs and what we’re good at how do we start getting best of breed applications and bringing it in. Like your integration into Google Analytics is really solid and it really seems to me that where you’re going with guest metrics is like that. You know Google does some things around engagement well but we do engagement great and we give you the ability to bring that in. Is that nuts or is that kind of in the ballpark. Yeah.

[00:08:28] It’s not nuts it’s a good point of view both your point of views are somewhat accurate. I think the space is still evolving but I’m not sure if I’d call it the analytic space that’s evolving. So let me throw a couple other viewpoints into it that are from I guess me. Me being somebody who keeps trying to create products in the space and always thinking about what’s the right product for the customer and starts with the product first. So that’s my sort of point of view. So I’ll try to break down some of these other ones in a second too. But like for me it’s like marketers are still the number one buyer of these things. There’s one caveat which is marketers don’t have that much power in mobile apps today because marketing is just kind of a shit show right now and tracking is all wacky. There’s some evolution that needs to happen there so right now from what we’ve noticed for mobile analytics most people are actually the people that are buying tend to be mostly engineers and product people especially in the markets we deal with which are everything but enterprise everything but by Fortune 1000.

[00:09:34] I always think of that as more of a function of the maturity of that particular platform or technology. Right. Everybody knows they need a mobile app lets get the mobile app out there guys but they haven’t actually figured out how that mobile app fits into the overall strategy of their business to say hey if I’m not getting these things or these measurements out of that mobile app I don’t understand how it’s helping or hurting me. You know the same thing was true 10 years go on a website where people were putting up websites and they heard somebody at a conference tell them they needed web analytics so they put web analytics on their site as well. But there was no rhyme or reason or sense for why that Web site was good for their business or bad for their business. And so many terrible looking websites.

[00:10:17] I think that would that would be reasonable. Would be a reasonable assumption if we were in the independent world like we were with the Web. But now we’re in a very highly dependent world where like if you have a mobile app it’s likely you have something on the web as well even if it’s just a Lannie page you get people to your mobile app and most people have a lot more than that. So I guess my viewpoint is just that it goes back to the customer and who are we selling to at least most of our products and we’re still selling to marketing marketing departments supporting marketing use cases and on mobile apps. Yeah you’re right. There’s still a lot of people fishing around trying to figure out what their strategy is and all that the folks that I deal with tend to already have mobile apps and kind of have a decent idea of what they want. A lot of the times they’re not even picking one of our tools and they’re building all this stuff in-house. And so the pattern that we saw many years ago with you know the reason even cost metrics exists is that Google Analytics and I’m sure these tools are not enough they were either not enough because somebody isn’t going to buy them because of their costs or the way that they approach analytics is not in sort of alignment with how the business thinks about it.

[00:11:23] If you’re if you’re largely sort of selling to marketers are you are you more often displacing existing technologies. Have they’re trying to do Google analytics on their mobile and they’re saying it’s not giving us what we need. Or is it more you’re getting in at the developer point where they’ve got to requirements say we’ve got to actually capture data on this thing and they’re actually sending out I guess what is kind of the entry point for you.

[00:11:50] And then who do you wind up competing with. To the extent that you’re comfortable I’m not asking you to necessarily name competitors or the.

[00:11:57] Yeah that’s why I’m always happy to name other companies in the space. So we actually don’t focus on mobile apps because marketers are buying mobile app analytics in the markets where and so they in the sort of everything below enterprise. So we tend to sell to web companies or people that want to attach web mobile and half line data together about actual customers. So you’re talking e-commerce company sassed companies and some Legion companies as well.

[00:12:24] And so you know our point of view has always been that people who are right now sort of innovators in their own businesses tend to not just want to see page views and event data they actually want to see that data tied to individual users of theirs. The reason is they can trust the data more. I mean just fundamentally you can trust the data if you can say okay I had 10 page views but three people did it and these are the three people and here’s everything about them that I know essentially that Kipps matrix knows because I tagged it and I sent it there. You can’t get a person to view in Google Analytics and I dare ask you guys how to do that in a day because I know it’s virtually impossible.

[00:13:03] By the way their data but that’s you’re saying. Like say say I’m a mid-market CRM SAS CRM play where I’ve got a highly transactional operational system where I’ve built a lot of custom functionality into it.

[00:13:18] You’re saying that’s the sort of thing that would be would be kind of a sweet spot when you’re saying you’re saying Sasser e-commerce you’re saying the actual is like a platform where they say we have functionality designed and we want to track that functionality and it’s not much we have a Web site that we’re using as a marketing platform that it’s not a fair description which is that let me try a different different approach.

[00:13:46] If you want to automate your data it has to be tied in key to something common across your multiple systems. Our belief has always been the common identifier is the actual person based on their email address. Right. And what we do is we basically if someone visited a site for the last six months anonymously and there’s a cookie and they’re in the same browser they didn’t clear the cookie of course and all that stuff and then they sign up today and give us the email we actually merged the data together which is some of the magic solution which we spent a lot of time working on. We believe it’s an advantage it’s been working out but the idea is that you don’t see that as two people in our system who see it as one person. Once that happens and all of a sudden this e-mail address your attribution to your channel data all that stuff is completely different and way more accurate and you can do that. And even going forward if I wanted to know my lifetime value is it more. It’s actually a lot more accurate when you can say what’s the lifetime value of an individual customer and then roll that up into what’s the lifetime value of a group of customers. So it’s more of it honestly it’s a data model. Fundamental difference between at least our solution and some of the other ones but also parts of the other ones for example Mixpanel you’re correct. It’s a real time event driven system.

[00:14:59] A majority of our customers buy it because of that functionality and they add it on people and they came out and said recently that only 20 percent of their customer base is using people and people is what the whole core of our toolkits metrics built. Because partly because of what Jim said like he was saying that these other tools might be more like Flash Lego baseplate than you can build on top of it. Well hulky built on top of it if a data model is flawed it will let you transfer the data back and forth between Google analytics or Omniture and other system great easily.

[00:15:33] It’s funny.

[00:15:34] It’s like years ago when I worked with Everclear now Oracle is so marketing automation that I can had the you know they said they had web analytics and they reported never matched with whatever they were run an urchin or Google were never objects to and I sort of had this minor Tiffany that web analytics is fundamentally a content centric platform right. The model sort of based on the page even if you’ve got a visitor ID and you’re tracking this other stuff web analytics looks at things Kemmis starting with the page and the marketing automation or at least Alec Lewis did that same thing where it would drop the cookie and say you’re anonymous until that point you’re not anonymous and then we’re going to assign all of that other stuff back to you.

[00:16:18] That was more to kind of pass that whole history into the CRM and pass into a nurturing program but it actually makes a lot of sense I said it was going to learn something on the night.

[00:16:30] Well and I think we’ve seen all the other tools move that direction too.

[00:16:34] Right. So there’s I mean you can’t be in this space for very long. I can be the space for quite a while without realizing that the person is the most important measurement. But most people can’t be in this space for very long before you realize that the visit or the session or visitor is sort of a bad proxy for understanding the value of what’s happening with their digital experience. So that sort of termites. So the but you know Google and Adobe and others are building those capabilities rates. There

[00:17:05] are services inside of a job today that you can jury rig. You could jury rig adobe or Google Analytics right now to get 80 you know way towards what. In

[00:17:17] 2008 we were jury rigging Adobe to do this. Now it’s part of Adobe.

[00:17:21] Well I think I think just not to suck up to our special guest. But the point that he made. Well

[00:17:28] you pride debate with with Ben Gage or somebody else whether or not they’re fundamentally architecting and I think it does sound like a it will be legitimate just from the outside assessment to try to give it your Tomich level of measurement from content and the the page driven call to a person is a pretty seismic shift that if you actually are built from that.

[00:17:54] And I don’t think I’m not saying one is better or right. I think there are going to be can be tradeoffs and absolutely Adobe. You know they are they are aggressively moving to try to get that universal person indicate tied across things. GA is still fundamentally hiding that.

[00:18:10] Right that is something that they have and are not exposing they’re working toward it too and I think you know where we can give props to Heaton is that you know he was doing this quite a while ago while the others are just getting caught up now.

[00:18:22] But the other point is that you can buy kiss metrics as a best of breed tool for what it’s great at and go from zero to hero and a couple of days of implementation work versus writing a check to Adobe pro services that don’t resell Adobe services and Michael does Bing.

[00:18:40] I don’t resell services. L.K. is zero anyways so if we think again they go back to the flappy Siliga thing. Right. And one of the places I love to use guest metrics by the way is for software as a service post log in.

[00:18:54] So I become a customer. I log in and I have the ability with Kest metrics at the email address level to not just look at lifetime value but lifetime feature use and feed that into product marketers and it’s a way to evolve the things you can do with digital measurement tools and inform and empower other stakeholders in the business.

[00:19:15] It’s one of these I like guest metrics for now. Could you do that with another tool. Eventually yes but could you create a cohesive we’ve got GA across the enterprise and we’re bringing Kest metrics to fulfill the specific need and bringing it all together. I think absolutely and Heatly question I’d have for you is are there other tools that you’re seeing coming into the market place that really fulfill a big boy tools do not do this well. If you’re an expert practitioner in this discipline you’d be nuts if he were using blank and.

[00:19:47] By the way that was just Jim talking because he realized that he is not running Kess metrics on the analysis engine client side port au. He’s running Google Analytics and gravity or whatever the hell that is. So he can if you want to go ahead and Jim interlinear. Then your CRM for a little follow up. I think there is there is an opportunity for his for his metrics implementation.

[00:20:08] He just is on record as saying that he’d like to buy that sun every podcast. Reclose Assael consider the prospect.

[00:20:17] Back to the doctor the question is whether that is a good question and I wanted to ask it too which is you know if you saw that then what are you thinking about now and what’s what’s happening out there that’s new and exciting.

[00:20:31] Yeah. All right. So we agree about the data model correct. Like there is a better data model forget like who’s doing it who’s not. There’s a better data model that can we agree on that because I think the foundation of the future actually is based on that.

[00:20:44] So I think we all agree that you need to be to really do digital marketing well you’ve got to have an understanding of the customer or the person who is the customer and what their behaviors are specifically. So yeah I think that’s probably fair.

[00:21:02] So a few things before I get into this because I am dying to talk about this but the person is the core object. The core thing that any business cares about. So all data should be tied to a person.

[00:21:15] That’s just a personal belief I have if at all possible whenever possible it should be merged around should be very accurate should be auditable. In fact they kiss metrics. We will not audit against another analytics tool we will audit all day long against CRM tools. We will audit all day long against anything you have in your database that’s tied to a user or your user table. And if we’re if it’s inaccurate if it’s bad we will help you fix it cause it’s our fault. But if you’re trying to benchmark US against Google analytics or something else we don’t care. Like that’s just not the way to think about it. So again it’s distressing point of like it is contact it is people that matter to you. And that’s been our take since 2009 when we are a year into the business we figured that out. But the kind of thing that I’m thinking and the thing and the thing that’s on my mind right now is I believe that in a few data points. Do you guys know Scott Brinker that was named chief Martek dot com.

[00:22:07] Describe describe his landscape for a presentation here.

[00:22:10] You know I put it in every deck of mine that’s talking to marketers because it’s just really important and really Kienzle the point I want to get at. So there’s like there was 900 tools for marketers last year. There’s about 1400 tools this year. So there’s a lot of tools out there and there’s a lot of supposedly innovation or whatever going on. But one of the most interesting things I’ve noticed about all these tools is that the statement I would make is analytics is now just a feature. If you look at the majority of these tools out there they all have some form of what we do what we would call analytics. They have tables with data and statistical significance and channels and conversions and all that kind of stuff going on and I can see you could take his landscape and be like okay that quadrant that quadrant that quadrant that quadrant.

[00:22:55] All the tools have it’s like analytics looking reporting interface so I think analytics long term just becomes a feature of something for everything else.

[00:23:06] And so I think those there are so many things called analytics and they suck so bad. I mean it goes back to my days with Everclear where it’s like hey we have a we have data we can chart that data because we get a little web kit or something and some sort of plug in. And now we can give you charts and graphs and time frames and then as an analyst I go in and say I can’t use any of this because I can’t actually look at the data in the way that I want to look at it. So I agree I think it’s being sold as analytics is just it’s just a feature and all of these tools they say oh we have analytics and they they said well the demo well and they say look we can slice it we can show you a map with stuff on it. And then as an analyst trying to dig in and say you know Dammann I need a time series breakdown of this and that and I need to customize my dimensions and metrics and I’m screwed. I agree they offer a feature they call analytics whether or not it’s actually analytics in a way that an analyst can meaningfully use and that I think that question a little bit.

[00:24:06] No argument here on that right but like an analyst again isn’t the core buyer right. Not every company has an analyst.

[00:24:12] No it’s not. It’s already velké average. The average analyst buying power is about like negative 20 whenever they want to hurt them in the total.

[00:24:20] If we think about this we think about this a lot. Like if I get a chance I’d love to demo our again I’m going to sell right now but because you brought it up but I’d love to demo our power report for you. It’s like a pivot table and interface and that’s crazy. What we discovered though is that a majority of our customers. They love the devil as well. You’re right. I mean it actually demos better than some of the other tools. You know they’re claiming it’s actually an analytics tool we ought to build that stuff but we hate selling it because it causes so much support for our you know 70 person company you know like his metrics on dealing with that. And you know Jim does like it or he doesn’t know how to help us sell it or get people to use it. I have no idea on that one. But like what I mean by analytics as a feature is like it yet on the enterprise and people are demoing analytics and sales force and all that and you run the issues you’re talking about but I just mean literally that you’re seeing data and charts and views in tools that are action oriented right. And and it’s like you know like my favorite tool right now that’s really close to the action. That’s not something I’ve built intercom. Are you guys familiar with intercom at all.

[00:25:28] Pretty sure you’re not talking about the button outside of my front door.

[00:25:33] No I’m not actually happy.

[00:25:37] It’s intercom that I know and their whole their message on the home page right now says an entirely new way to connect with your customers. And so if you log in to it they have literally your whole customer database sitting there and you can filter it. And to me that is starting to be like what we’re going to start seeing in the future. They also sent me this lovely e-mail every day about who signed up yesterday and how many of them signed up. And the fact that I can message when they even tell me who’s slipping away that I should be re reengaging with. So to me life is at the backbone of what a bill is a data warehouse to store your data. It is the ability to get that data fast and then be able to analyze it and then let you take action on it. So that’s kind of what I mean by analytics of the future.

[00:26:27] We’re going to see I think more analytics are what we used to call analytics in a lot of these tools but they’re not analytics tool they’re action tools.

[00:26:35] So I would probably agree in principle and disagree a little bit with sort of the idea that it’s a feature. What I think is is that you have all these action oriented tools and kind of if you look at sort of morphing technology in the Scott Brinker stuff is really a good way to think about it. But what I think is you still need to think comprehensively about data and data usage across the enterprise and has to have an owner and has to have a system of record so that you can actually use it for something meaningful in terms of actually doing analysis and making decisions. So I would say the all these tools and all these different action oriented platforms instead of having their own analytics really should focus on data transportation and portability. So then I can go and easily integrate them into wherever I’m using my system of record and then. So that’s kind of how I would probably. For me personally is probably how I would want to approach it.

[00:27:34] You have your analyst student like what I think is interesting and the URL is not read. You just play one on TV. But the point the thing that I think is really interesting about what he has said and I’ve never thought about it before is our last couple of discussions have always been about quality of data transparency of data accuracy of data being able to have an opinion in those kinds of things and heating up if I’m not totally wrong. Your point is those things are great but one of the ways to solve the problem of there aren’t enough analysts is to make the products smart enough to shorten the list of things that you should care about you know.

[00:28:07] So instead of having a total it’s you do your own discovery. Here’s five things you should give a shit about. Do those. Don’t take a chance. Jim I think what’s really interesting.

[00:28:18] I would say I would say that there are complex business problems that mostly right now enterprises and really high growth companies with lots of data have that analysts will always be required for. But there are a ton of problems today analysts are doing repeatedly that will not. They will not have to do in the future. So it’s not like a it’s not even a gripe against analysts it’s just like I would say 80 percent of your job. I don’t want you to do any more because you shouldn’t have to. You should be working on the 20 percent. You know that’s hard and you should probably learn data science if you don’t know it because that’s where your jobs go. In my opinion. Right. And so it’s like these two honestly intercom kiss metrics Mixpanel all these tools. We’re so far we’re still a dumb tool there. I think our tools maybe a little smarter than Adobe a little smarter than GA but we’re still all pretty dumb. And what you’re going to see is a next wave in my opinion would be all these tools get smarter they get closer to helping you take action if not doing it for you and then your job is mostly going to be as a marketer hopefully about obviously analyzing the harder problems in your business but also spending more time on the creative side of it and trying to figure out you know better ways to get clicks or better ways to make you know get people to do good things for themselves hopefully or not.

[00:29:34] It’s like success. Can we say that a hallmark of best of breed tool is the fact that rather than just data capture and data analysis it’s designed to create more actionable. Like it’s designed just to filter.

[00:29:51] Good lord. You should be selling for some large enterprise company along with the unicorns. There we go. What do we make it 30 minutes in before before I get home. I think it’s a valid point. Well but I guess I was I was actually I think I was coming I was going to ask this I was going to ask some more so if you look five years down the road and you’re your roadmap and a vision for PTIs metrics is it. Is it taking that core data model built around the user and making that so flipping fantastic and you’ve captured that much more and better data in more places. But there’s another tool and whether it’s Entercom or it’s pick you’re going to blank on every possible name. There’s somebody else saying hey that’s amazing data capture and has captured in model in a way that I can take it and hook it into all this other stuff and get us to the promise of big data. Or is your would you say five years ten years down the road you actually want to beat that. So we’ve got a better data model and therefore we’re going to be able to shorten that cycle and remove some of the analysts workload and drive to action faster.

[00:31:01] Or is that a totally false distinction and Bowsher question.

[00:31:06] I just go back to some examples so like when we started TKIs metrics one of the things that really helped to key in on this idea that it’s about the person is we studied the fastest growing companies that were not enterprise companies. I don’t think they grow fast but that’s a different story. Maybe Apple and Amazon whatever. But we study Facebook we studied these companies all the time. There weren’t as large as they are today. And what we realize is they don’t use Omniture and google analytics for the most important decisions they’re making. They’re using their own data warehouse and you know their own sort of data and we try to understand why and what we discovered is they want to tie the data to users to people. And I know I might be starting to sound like a broken record but like I’m getting to the point. And so in the same vein what I see today is there’s early indicators that are obvious today of a similar trend just kind of an expansion of that. So what I think about is not even like are you going to get better at it around that date on what we think we’re actually fantastic at it. And I think that we’re probably best in class but I’m completely biased there and we don’t need to go spend another five years working on that. I think that would be a mistake because it’s already not even good enough. That’s great and it’s accurate and auditable and all that just not enough people know about it you know. But what’s next is kind of I can pull up the article.

[00:32:24] But late last year Uber they put out a blog post and said right when you open the app they can predict. I think with 74 percent certainty or something like that I’m going to butcher how they set it. Where you get what your destination can be.

[00:32:36] What do you know what their what are they using for their day or is it a homegrown data collection. That’s what I mean if they think you’re there Facebook Amazon eBay. I mean we take our last episode we talked about big data and talked about how those were companies that have big data. I think you’re right they’re tying it to a huge like with libertinism.

[00:32:54] It’s all in-house and they said that they used a Basine model to do it 100 percent sure as all in-house. I’m sure they’re not using outsourced stuff outside of Amazon Redshift and things like that to do it and their data. I mean they have a whole blog post on it. Basically the statement they said is we found that 74 percent of the time our model could correctly predict the exact destination address. So to me where I have they have crazy egg on their site that great help they get. And so in my size my point of view is we’re starting to see that these companies are on the cutting edge that the fastest growing company they have a ton of data. This is the kind of stuff we’re doing.

[00:33:33] My goal would be to build product to support these use cases so that more companies can do this because the thesis I would have is more companies are going to have the amount of data that would enable that basically enable them to get value from analysis like this.

[00:33:48] I think the quote unquote enterprise world we know we call it personalization right. But it’s basically the pursuit of the same thing which is the ability to interact in a much more meaningful way in a personalized way with an individual customer at any given point of contact.

[00:34:03] This may be the Alabi bargain close to last call talking but it seems like there’s a little bit of a minor epiphany that this goes to kind of the shifting. It’s not the it’s not the Internet economy it’s the Gen X Gen Y is getting more comfortable with their personal data. They’re

[00:34:23] more comfortable being identified as individual people which means old school in and I’m thinking I’ve got I’ve got large CPG clients where they don’t get a ton of traffic and as people come in to look for coupons than good information. And there’s very little reason for them to come back or to be to have kind of a rich ongoing personal personalized experience. But you look at the new economy and it moves the new economy. You look at the Bubar. You look at Amazon you look at things where you’re saying I’m buying this kind of hybrid product and service. And I do need to be subscribed or I need to have this ongoing transactional relationship and that is kind of a fundamental shift from a Web site because I’m bouncing across devices and and because of that it sounds like some of the more during your research was some of the most explosive growth type companies have said the data is so important that we need to build our own solution and pay top dollar for these data scientists and really really invest in that. But the second wave is going to be that’s kind of the new norm that’s expected and there need to be more off the shelf tools that support that kind of mode of tracking and thinking and analysis.

[00:35:47] That’s crap. See I heard something similar Tim but would I actually I’m wondering if you know so you were saying that there are shifts happening. You talked about the best in breed companies and now I’m wondering if you could make a prediction in five years are a lot of companies not using a Google or an Omniture or one of those tools but they’re actually buying best of breed feature level best in class tools and then plugging them directly into the data mart. You know you said yourself earlier I could give a shit about Google or core metrics for data normalization. I want to look at the in-house data mart. So do you think people are going to like they’re not going to replace Omniture with TKIs metrics. They’re just going to get rid of Omniture and plug TKIs metrics directly into the corporate B system.

[00:36:33] Yeah. I know it’s definitely hard to predict the future. I think I just look for things that are obvious and things that are already happening.

[00:36:42] So Uber is not running on Omniture today. From what I can tell they’re using a lot of in-house stuff. The question is is the next Grubert gonna be using ometer or something else. What’s more likely it’s likely they’re going to be using something else if anything. And so yeah I think I think those companies are yet disrupted very fast. And part of the reason is like they I look I don’t know I have it like a little bit of a fetish for like origin stories and so I think the origin of our industry starts with logs right and logfile.

[00:37:12] And that’s where a lot of these companies started out grew up understood what they should be doing and built significant businesses. And in today’s world like there’s probably going to be a company that doesn’t exist today that’s likely to power the next Duber on doing this kind of stuff.

[00:37:27] And then you know that it’s just the way it works like even even our whole business is you know probably going to change as mobile evolves and as marketers get used to or learn you know as we figure out as marketers how to deal with mobile so I think I don’t know. I mean I just can’t see a future where like Google Analytics and Adobe Adobe love Alex Omniture or whatever are actually the primary tool that companies utilize and I think this whole idea best in breed. I mean if you think about it SAS is still pretty new. I think a lot of people don’t understand things that I’m going to say that are controversial but probably whatever is. People need to be able to sign up and try a tool like that’s really important and it’s going to going forward. Even more important. So if you can’t do that with your tool and you don’t build the right the proper user interface to let people do that at scale and easily then I think you’re dead you’re done. And like unless these companies start paying attention to some of those things reinvent themselves around that they will be gone. Like it’s just inevitable. But that’s just classic. It’s like where I started with this right it’s Innovator’s Dilemma dilemma super classic. It’s also like we’re probably in in some new category creation mode very soon as well. I really do feel like it’s just a feature it’s not it’s the I don’t believe people are going to be buying analytics in the long term.

[00:38:46] So to paraphrase Adobe analytics is the fax machine of measurement.

[00:38:52] Yeah basically people hear about me on that boat.

[00:38:56] That was Jim Kane of napkin system. Yes that’s right. Just to be clear we didn’t know everyone clear on that.

[00:39:04] All right well listen guys we are as always covered a lot of topics none of them given the justice they deserve. But I really like where this conversation went.

[00:39:16] And actually I feel like we went somewhere different than where we started to and I’m really glad we did because I think we exposed some really key things I want to go around and get everybody just to give a little recap of kind of what they thought was most interesting to them on what we’ve discussed today for we wrap up view and point to someone maybe Al because I think I think he his whole point on the underlying the core the core model being user centric versus I guess content centric that’s me putting words in his mouth but then the ability to have that kind of nimbleness sort of makes me in an I’m not just saying for KISS metrics I think we can hit on not that every everything is necessarily user centric versus content centric but that there’s space for tools that say the way people are using digital is shifting in what is going to make them what is going to make companies successful is shifting and evolving and there would be a very strong claim can be made that you need something that’s something that is nimble and inherently younger and started at a later point to kind of disrupt that to actually you know pull that off. I’m not I’m not prepared to say Adobe is going away and that they’re not going to make that pivot. They’ve got the amount of dollars behind it as those Google and you know there are going to be listening to this. It sounds like you know none of this is super secret it’s kind of philosophical differences trying to predict the future which we just said was was difficult.

[00:40:55] But I think it’s a good way to look at it that there are lots of ways to kind of tackle tackle what’s being captured and how it’s being crime.

[00:41:03] And when you’ve got like two behemoths that are largely candidate going at each other they’re going to kind of converge around one approach and there’s definitely room for other approaches.

[00:41:14] So I guess my couple of sense are that like I’m going to sit down in front of a white board to more after the session I had never really thought about building a measurement ecosystem where you have a set of best in class tools without a web analytics tool and what that looks like. I think it’s really neat and I get to wrap my head around it again. You know we said a couple times you can’t predict the future but the ability to take several tools that are great at something specific and bring them together directly at the B layer is really interesting. So I definitely you know I’m thinking about that one today. I think the second thing that I learned is that he agrees with me a lot more than Tim which I think is important.

[00:41:55] That goes for most of the population of the North American.

[00:42:03] And you know I think the last thing is that we never really talked about the practitioner level. And you know one of the things I’m always surprised about is given how many fantastic tools there are in measurement that more senior level practitioners either don’t have the chance or the opportunity or the budget or the inclination to really spend some time here. And you said it earlier a lot of tools like metrics you could try before you buy it. People don’t even have the bandwidth right. I would love that conversation about Idol practitioner. I have a specific need. How do I find a tool. What are the best practices for trying that tool. What are the recommendations to bring it into my ecosystem. I would love to have talk through that maybe we could do some other time.

[00:42:50] Also my lightning lightning round question for Heaton who actually are your end users and the analysts or the marketers or something else or is it all over the place online marketers 80 percent. So it’s marketers will be based on your target and they don’t even have analytics teams are there analytics teams they need to be self-service because you know teams aren’t top 10 percent have analytics teams.

[00:43:11] Okay. That’s awesome. That’s interesting. Them it was something else. We’re going have them back. OK. Tim Heaton was going to give his recap what you like jumped in. Never. I know. I just had to know.

[00:43:24] Apparently we have a lightning round now. I didn’t get the memo. Ah ha ha sakes.

[00:43:31] We think it was the first but really were the introduction of the lightning round. I’ll stop now.

[00:43:37] I guess it’s my turn.

[00:43:39] You know I it’s always nice hearing other people’s perspective that are very experienced with the industry from a different point of view than I am. I mean I’m always thinking about I look at a product and I don’t really care why it’s awesome I think much more about why it sucks just because I tend to build products and like building software and I think it’s something I just can’t get enough of and I keep building more new software.

[00:44:02] I think there’s a mental model that exists and people all of you even myself you know outside of building this product and these products is that there’s just the mental model and the mental model is from based on your experience and based on sort of the cohort you sort of you know and the tools you sort of used as you were sort of practicing your craft. And I think I learned a lot about that mental model like even the word content they used was enlightening to me because the words that you use are probably more accurate to how someone who uses Adobe and had a lot of experience with Google Analytics would use because I would say it’s page 3 but you’re right it is though the data models of those systems evolved into had a lot to do with content and everything was about content focused. I mean if you think about mobile that’s not going to work that’s probably why Google sucks at Mobile. To be honest on the mobile front I think everybody sucks and mobile analytics today and you can quote me on that. You can do whatever. I pretty much know what needs to be built in my head. I’m not going to talk about it like that. And we haven’t built it cosmetics either. And I think it just requires a different target customer and that’s the issue with mobile right now. For us at least when we we have a blog we get a lot of marketers because of our blog.

[00:45:20] We probably get more sign ups for trials than Omniture gets in a year would be my guess but like that’s just a whole different point anyway.

[00:45:29] Is there is there a page to sign up for a trial monitor.

[00:45:32] Yeah I did it while we were on the air here so from yesterday so from Twitter I know a couple seventy seven thousand dollars you guys are doing all my work for me.

[00:45:43] Chris we have to establish your base EPM OEM’s so I think I think it’s our request a demo and now they’re going to show me the benefits of Adobe marketing cloud.

[00:45:52] I just went to their site. So I think that’s what it is. But yeah anyway so I think the mental model people have is always enlightening for me.

[00:45:59] And it’s like it’s a lot different than what I think about every day. Even the fact that you guys really haven’t heard about Entercom or makes my day so super glad to introduce you to a new product that you probably should be thinking about and you think anyway. Yes that’s what I got.

[00:46:13] That’s great. I think for me this episode more than anything else has like confirmed and exposed this dichotomy that I’ve sort of started to see but haven’t been able to nail down between what I would say sort of you know and you kind of called the fast growth companies that you studied versus maybe traditional enterprise and how they use analytics certainly run into this multiple times but I really loved how that sort of crystallized tonight and that those companies that are growing like that they’re not using the traditional tools. They’re kind of approaching it a different way. And you definitely see that in the startup space like a lot of times you know a startup will have Google analytics or something on their site but it is not how they need to work to measure the business to be successful as a startup and to and to be and to go and do what they need to do. So anyway that was kind of my key takeaway. The other thing is is this concept of marketing cloud and how I think sort of we’re headed toward a convergence. The enterprise side is trying to take the old school digital analytics tools and build a Marketing Cloud to basically do what these points solutions have created over here on the side.

[00:47:25] And at some point we’ll kind of hit the middle somewhere and I think there’s a big interesting fight to be fought across many different layers of the industry around what’s the best or better way to do that whether it’s sort of like OK go pick the five best tools that do this and do that to be successful or go buy one vendor’s no big package of solutions and that’s the best way. So it’ll be interesting to see how that unfolds. Anyways that was my two takeaways. Well thanks everyone for listening. I think it’s been super amazing to have you as a guest on the show. Thank you so much for your time to do that. I think our listeners will get a ton of value out of this conversation in your perspective.

[00:48:07] I think there’s a lot that people can kind of take away from that. Obviously you know for the digital power hour we want to talk to you and hear your comments so please let us know on Facebook. Facebook dot com slash analytics ours and also go ahead. If you subscribe to this on iTunes you know feel free to rate the podcast and things like that again for Tim and Jim and thanks once again to Scharf for being our guest and will power our signing off.

[00:48:41] 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 and on Facebook now or I don’t 6:00 now on Twitter.

 

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