#014: Mobile Measurement with Lee Isensee

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.”

00:00:03.71 [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.

00:00:24.83 [Michael Helbling]: Hello and welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. This is Episode 40. This show, we’re excited to talk about something that’s finally arrived in a big way. You guessed it, mobile and mobile analytics. It’s 2015 and after many years, when it was the year of mobile, it finally is the year of mobile measurement. In this episode, we’re drawing a line between the big old computers on your desk and the teeny tiny computers that you’re carrying around with you right now. As always, I’m joined by my co-hosts, Jim Cain and Tim Wilson.

00:01:00.33 [Tim Wilson]: Hello, Michael, and hello, Quiet One in the greater north.

00:01:05.16 [Michael Helbling]: I say teeny tiny to you as well, sir. Good. A teeny tiny hello to you as well. Now, given that the three of us are not specifically focused in this area and have not as much experience with mobile as others, we went out and we sought out an expert. And so we’re also joined by our special guest, Lee Eisensee. Lee is the Director of Product Strategy at Search Discovery, and he also has spent many years focused on mobile previously with Localytics, IBM, and Unica. Welcome to the show, Lee.

00:01:38.19 [Lee Isensee]: Thank you for having me, guys. And I look forward to whichever mobile guest will be joining us today.

00:01:44.38 [Michael Helbling]: Great. Well, we could find a mobile expert. Now, Tim Wilson also wanted to make sure that I added that he was recently a guest on the Million Dollar Insights podcast. And so if you go back and listen to that show a few weeks ago, you’ll hear his dulcet tones swearing it up on that podcast. So check that one out.

00:02:06.47 [Tim Wilson]: I’m getting paid as much for that as I am for this one.

00:02:15.15 [Michael Helbling]: I am making $4 million on that one.

00:02:17.77 [Tim Wilson]: Yep, I’m going with the niche podcast circuit regardless of the title.

00:02:23.48 [Jim Cain]: It’s been awkward money in the podcast. Do you do a classic? You know what really blank Tim Wilson moment? You know, it really grinds my gears. You know, it really burns my bridges. You know, it really was one of those. Wow.

00:02:34.70 [Tim Wilson]: It’s like you’ve it’s like you’ve already listened to it. Yes. I don’t want to give it away. But you did swear and also call someone an ignorant slut, right?

00:02:42.38 [Michael Helbling]: Well, you’ll just have to listen. Okay, great. Well, let’s get back to the topic at hand. It’s a really exciting topic. And for me, and I want to get everybody’s opinion on this, but historically, let’s say over the past five years, certainly mobile has just taken a bigger and bigger focus for marketers, for digital in general, specifically around mobile applications and site experiences and things like that. It seemed like we went through a period where there wasn’t necessarily a high demand for strong measurement and analysis of mobile as much as being present in mobile was kind of the mandate of the day. But I feel like that pendulum is starting to, we’re starting to see a turning of that. Companies are more interested in finding value and driving analysis through mobile. What are you guys seeing as well?

00:03:34.77 [Tim Wilson]: I think from early on the question has been how many people are in mobile. Specifically mobile, the mobile site experience is a little tougher with mobile apps because if you don’t have an app then it’s really easy to measure how much activity that app has. i feel like it’s been a number of years since people have been saying we’ve got to get it mobile and at some point somebody says well we should look and see how many people are at least having our mobile site experience and i’ll say i’ve still got just today was looking at a client that has almost zero like less than two percent mobile traffic on their site it’s a total oddball type site that wouldn’t be normal, but I will say that that’s been like the bar is yes, we do mobile measurement. How much of our traffic is coming from mobile? And that’s about the extent of it.

00:04:19.92 [Jim Cain]: You know, I think that I’m really thinking about mobile in three ways. One of them is the MDOT or the responsive, but the tablet or a handset iteration of our web presence. And then I also think about it a little bit differently in terms of the app or kind of the, you know, like the native, we built something on purpose specifically for a phone or tablet experience. And then I’m starting to be more and more interested, and frankly I’m totally clueless about cool stuff you can only measure and experience as an analyst through a mobile experience, like kind of the hyper-local things that you can measure really only through someone interacting with a handset. So it’ll be interesting to kind of see where this goes today.

00:05:01.28 [Tim Wilson]: Now Lee, tell us how far off our perspective and framing of this whole discussion is.

00:05:06.28 [Lee Isensee]: Wow. I’m so fortunate to be on this podcast with all three of you amazing geniuses. I mean, Michael set this up pretty well, which is at first, many organizations just wanted to have a mobile presence, right? And I think, luckily, for the most part, that’s been dissolved down to, listen, my business is either going to need mobile or we just don’t know what we’re doing in mobile and we’re going to hold off until we can stabilize our business. But for the ones who’ve gone into mobile, they’ve stumbled through the first steps. You look at some of the research, maybe two and a half years ago, 65% of companies who had a mobile investment in analytics and marketing were using their web analytics solutions. I think it was even as high as 75% when you get to even larger organizations. So people were trying to figure out what was the best way to measure their mobile effort, but they didn’t have a great way to do anything with the data. And actually they didn’t even understand what mobile success was. And I think over the past couple of years, companies have evolved to the point where they understand a mobile isn’t about page views. It’s not about how many, you know, sessions, you know, what the session duration necessarily is. And we look into the specifics of analytics and we look at how mobile first companies are you know, monetizing their business, whether it’s through revenue, direct revenue or investment, it’s really about active users. So setting a new fundamental measurement for this channel was I think the first baby step that folks needed to get into before they figured out what to do with the data. So it was really like the pre crawl of evolution of the market.

00:06:50.95 [Tim Wilson]: Active users, is that app specific? I mean, if you’re talking about mobile site, are you still in the world of business pages and hopefully conversions or, you know, achieving whatever goals you set?

00:07:03.28 [Lee Isensee]: Yeah, so when we, you know, when you look at active users within kind of the viewport of a mobile device, whether it’s browser or application, If you separate this back to desktop web for a minute for people in web analytics, your typical web analytics session duration is 30 minutes of inactivity, your session stops and you start another one. In mobile, if you’re on a site, whether it’s MDOT or if you’re in an app for 30 minutes, Here, that’s a lifetime in the mobile world, right? The average life cycle for someone within a session is extremely short. It’s nowhere near 30 minutes. And unless it’s a highly addictive application, chances are they’re going to only check it once per day, maybe even less frequent if it’s a news or media application or website. So just the base metrics of what you consider an engaged user have changed dramatically. So going back to the point on users, when you look at vendors, they price their analytics and marketing products typically on active users less so than page views these days or server calls. If you look at the ability to uniquely identify users, especially on native or hybrid applications versus website M dot or traditional responsive, whatever it may be, the ability to identify an individual user is so much greater in a native app. that it actually gives you a very secure base model to engage or to understand how your business is doing rather than just how much content is being delivered. The easiest example that I like to use is if we were still using page views in the mobile world and you opened up, you know, the Facebook application on your phone, how many page views do you think you’d have scrolling down the front page? You’d have one. So in a typical mobile environment or even take away the concept of mobile and look at just from an app perspective, most app oriented digital solutions are less about the number of pages and they’re more about how much engagement at the event level is the person having and the fact that you’re able to identify an individual or more specifically a device in a much easier way on a native device, it’s It’s advantageous to go down that measure route rather than page views or something similar.

00:09:28.61 [Jim Cain]: Sorry, active user means number of users who have visited this site in the last X days?

00:09:34.62 [Lee Isensee]: I mean, to put it into native app terms, it’s within whatever the time frame is, the launch of an application. If you were to consider it like a website, it’s essentially how many times has the person had at least one view or an event within the relative time frame. Within the mobile industry, you typically see two key metrics of DA users or MA users, so monthly active users or daily active users. And that’s the summary of how many times has someone opened the application within whatever that timeframe is.

00:10:08.13 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, so there’s two trends that I see dovetailing nicely with mobile in terms of sort of traditional digital analytics. The first being sort of this concept of the user versus, say, the session, right, as a baseline for measurement or as a basis for measurement. And I think as companies and organizations get more comfortable thinking about measuring the web, like that transition to mobile will be smoother and much easier to understand. And the second is that event-based structure that you were talking about, Lee, I think maps well to kind of how the modern web is trending as well. because it’s not just the traversal of pages that helps us understand the value or the thing or the measurement of success for someone visiting a site. It’s the interactions and the events that are being measured in those intervening steps, but put a lot more emphasis on that versus say to your point of page view, which I think maps really well to the concepts that you’re talking about in mobile. So I think that’s two things that I saw as you were kind of giving that explanation that I think can give hope to the rest of us as we think about mobile in a in a deeper way is hey we can use some of these things to bridge that gap and really think about mobile in those terms.

00:11:27.12 [Tim Wilson]: Can we back up since so native app you built it it’s a native app hybrid app as I understand it as you’re basically building a web page but it’s kind of embedded in an app. So it’s got a little more portability. Is that right?

00:11:40.94 [Lee Isensee]: Yeah. Hybrid app is essentially a self-contained website that allows you to deliver those contents via an app store. So you can put it out to Google Play. You can put it out to iTunes. And a majority of the content or at least a reasonable amount of that content is built in JavaScript, HTML5, all that, and then has a native wrapper around it. And you see, Technology’s like phone gap is probably the most popular that defines hybrid.

00:12:11.19 [Tim Wilson]: But with the hybrid app, do you still get the access to the device ID? So from your user identification, does the hybrid app have that access?

00:12:20.70 [Lee Isensee]: Yeah, so because it’s native code, you still have access to the identifier for advertisers. So on iOS, you got rid of the old device UDID or UUID. and they Apple created this new IDFA app. Google has something similar on Android, but because it runs in native code locally, you still have access to that identifier that allows it to persist across app launches. So short of someone doing a whole bunch of hocus pocus on the device level and clearing that idea out, you know, it’s the same user. The other really cool thing about native is I’m actually hard pressed to open up my phone. and find any application that doesn’t have some level of authentication, whether it’s, you know, instantly authenticate with Google or, you know, authenticate with Facebook. If it’s a game, check out Game Center, right? So aside from just having the access to the ID, mobile has done a really good job of solving the problem that web has sucked at for so long, which is cross channel joining of data, having that common key. If I have an iPhone and an iPad, And I’m using both of them and I authenticate using my Google ID or my Facebook ID or Game Center. I now have a means to look at that user as an individual across those two devices, rather than knowing that kind of like the Chrome and Safari user browser, I can, I can join that back to one user secondarily to that device, even if they’re different on the iPad and the iPhone, which they would be, but I now have that one single view so I can deliver much more contextually valuable messaging to the user, whether it’s advertising or user experience.

00:14:03.83 [Tim Wilson]: You don’t get any sort of Apple ID, not the Apple ID itself, but there’s no inherent if I’ve got the same app and it’s iPad and I’m running on my iPhone. There’s no authentication. Is there any Apple linking that can happen or no?

00:14:20.53 [Lee Isensee]: So what you do, I mean, Let’s talk about nerding out for a minute, right? Let’s do it, man. Let’s break out some code. So, you know, if the person’s authenticated on iCloud and your application is using iCloud storage using core data, I’m able to store a small bit of data on the device that when the person opens it up on the other side and they’ve got iCloud and they open up that data on the other side, even if it’s just a hash, That one common key across the two is there thanks to iCloud storage, Google account storage. All the cool stuff because devices are inherently cloud-based. Even though we call them native applications, they’re always calling these external resources. Rather frequently, you have the ability to access this information that’s on your servers, and that’s a good environment to manage that key store exchange.

00:15:16.09 [Michael Helbling]: Let’s dig into sort of a selection of kind of the tools and what’s out in the marketplace today, because there’s kind of, to your earlier point, Lee, there’s sort of native apps and hybrid apps. And then at TwistRx, there’s sort of native tools and hybrid tools. the adobes and the Googles of the world to build SDKs around mobile. But there’s also purpose-built analytics vendors out there like Localytics, who you were with before, or other vendors. Let’s walk through that a little bit and get some perspectives on what’s good or bad about those.

00:15:47.90 [Lee Isensee]: Yeah, I mean, just at the surface level, I was putting together a presentation earlier, and I was just kind of doing the layout of the different competitors in the mobile market. And I got to the 20th vendor, and I’m like, OK, this slide’s getting a little sad at this point.

00:16:03.64 [Tim Wilson]: Just a mobile analytics vendors?

00:16:06.90 [Lee Isensee]: Moebile analytics and marketing.

00:16:09.39 [Tim Wilson]: OK. So outside of the Flurry localitics, the web analytics platforms, what’s a mobile marketing vendor?

00:16:16.45 [Lee Isensee]: So, you know, you start getting into companies like Haz Offers and Toons, which allow you to do advertising purchasing. There’s companies called like Kahuna, which are more on the marketing side of things. Push-oriented companies like Urban Airship, who’ve started to make a move into analytics. Smaller vendors like Swerve and IBM’s acquisition, Xtify, they’re probably a little bit bigger, but you get down to like Distomo, Crashlytics, right? Or Crashlytics. How often are apps crashing? Contagent, I mean, web trends isn’t even still in there. It’s still pretty busy.

00:16:51.41 [Tim Wilson]: Okay, that’s interesting. I mean, because it seems like I’m, it’s like a, do you go with your current or I feel like I know like two or three, but it sounds like, yeah, even Crashlytics, I’m assuming like you said, that’s, that’s a very niche, like, hey, you probably don’t know how often your app crashes, because when it crashes, you’re probably not collecting the data.

00:17:07.82 [Lee Isensee]: Yeah, I mean, Crashlytics was acquired by Twitter. They kind of got tied into that business, but still maintain their own thing. But they’re not the only company, right? There’s companies like Criticism that do exactly that. You know, you, you’re putting code out there on like a website, you put code out into the app store, people are running it in the wild. If 3% of your users experience a crash, chances are they’re going to go stream at you in the app store and ratings, and that could be the depth of an application. So if you had a way to collect not just how many times a crash happened, but what specifically happened, what’s the core dump, where does it relate to my application, having that in production, those tools, I mean, they’re lifesavers for some companies.

00:17:51.51 [Jim Cain]: Have you guys ever talked to anyone or done any measurement on an actual mobile game or like a monetized mobile experience? It’s really interesting stuff, right? It’s like you make all your money in two weeks after launch, right, Lee?

00:18:05.84 [Lee Isensee]: Something like that? I was just at App’s World, or I don’t know if it’s plural or not, but a World for Applications. They talked about that kind of quick adoption of applications and the hunt for whales, find that less than 1% of your users that are willing to cough up that $100 within the first week or two of getting the application because they have the, the personality that makes sure that they have to be ahead of everyone else. And once you build that application and you get them hooked into your brand, you assume the app’s just kind of going to die off and your job as app developers to get the next iteration of the app out and you’re using the same layout same concepts as much similarity between your platforms because the experience to the user is very much the same. So they’re familiar with how they could succeed, but they’re starting from scratch and you have the opportunity to go get a couple hundred dollars here and there or another 99 cents. And you see this with companies like Clash of Clans, right? Shortly after that came out, they put out a new game around essentially the same model except for Now, instead of being in the forest, you’re battling on boats. And they, for the most part, use the same exact application and they’re raking in the money again. There is a whole predictive science to when to release an application, what changes you need to make to it, who your target audience should be, what colors it should contain just around games. That market has a ridiculous amount of money invested in it. And a lot of times what I have found are companies go out and they build their own solution because they feel as though those calculations are proprietary and they couldn’t even get it from an off-the-shelf vendor. Zingo was kind of famous for that, right? They built their own analytics platform.

00:20:01.17 [Tim Wilson]: But it does seem like talking about web analytics and solely using the example of a pure play e-commerce site. That seems like a world that, well, I’m sure they have a lot of analysts who exist in them. They’re not a lot of analysts that I run into day-to-day. I mean, we’re a financial institution. We’re a CPG company. We’re a 25% of our business is e-commerce. Where does mobile fit? Not to shift gears too, too much, but kind of the more app from companies that aren’t expecting the app to be a revenue generator in and of itself is more supporting the overall customer relationship. You have thoughts on sort of how to approach that. That’s where it seems like some of that is It is the exact same questions you’d be asking about your website or any marketing activity is, why are we doing this? What is the value to the customer or the prospect that we can then hook into value for us? Is that a fundamentally different question when it comes to mobile?

00:21:05.51 [Lee Isensee]: Any digital investment, just like when social came around, companies are always somewhat weary of it, right? Should we have a Facebook presence? Should we have a Twitter presence? the cost to entry for mobile is admittedly higher than, you know, firing up a Facebook account. So there is some caution by companies entering the market. But funnily enough, I actually, I think it varies depending on the size of the organization on on their approach to mobile. So I was thinking about this the other day in engaging with prospects and clients and the like over the over the past couple of years, mobile, even to this day, you know, in an enterprise, for some reason always feels like it’s this little skunkworks project in the back corner of this, you know, massive Kagama or it, you know, office and it’s three dudes doing some awesome stuff, but they really can’t talk about it with other folks.

00:22:00.16 [Tim Wilson]: Isn’t that what e-commerce was?

00:22:02.31 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, that’s analytics and e-commerce, you know, 10 years ago. And I feel like we’re seeing similar things happen in the life cycle, right? Because that’s the exact same thing. And it’s sort of like mobile starting to get its chance to walk onto the main stage in a lot of enterprise. And those three guys who’ve sort of been basically holding down the mobile fort for these large companies with no attention and no investment are suddenly having a big light shown on them. And now people are starting to care. And I think to your earlier point, Tim, I think mobile applications are going to become much more transactional even than they are today for traditional orgs as opposed to mobile-first organizations because of the things like Apple Pay and the way that other kind of payment systems are getting promulgated via mobile. So I think it’s just going to continue that way. I am going to have to change my contact information for you.

00:23:15.19 [Lee Isensee]: You are no longer Michael monosyllabic helplink.

00:23:18.05 [Michael Helbling]: There you go.

00:23:20.76 [Tim Wilson]: But there’s a whole world of non-transactional from a non-financial, I mean, so there’s transactional from I’m a retailer, I can make a purchase of my site. And then there is, I guess, transactional from gaming and entertainment. The app is the business, the ads I can put in the app, or the revenue I can generate from selling the app, some hybrid of that. But there are all these other types of apps that are out there that aren’t what I would consider, in some ways, the low-hanging fruit. Not that you can’t optimize your e-commerce app, but I feel like a lot of people live in the world of, hey, we have an app and we need to measure it, and they’re not kind of that cut and dry.

00:24:01.64 [Lee Isensee]: The the value of an app, I think isn’t just necessarily having one out there because they’re putting half their out there because that’s the perception. I agree. You know, the more you drink, the more you’re making sense to him. It’s not the first time I’ve heard that the value of being able to to cross promote your brand, I think is is a massive value working, you know, with media and entertainment, and we could probably loop in financial services with this. But, you know, if if I’m a large television brand, And I have kind of disseminated my brand across all of the shows that the network offers. There’s not necessarily a reason for me to focus on just a branded network application. Maybe each television program itself can carry its own weight and allow me to promote like television shows. So if I’m a fan of X, Y, and Z show, and there’s an upsell opportunity or incremental advertising revenue for each of those shows that I can provide in mobile. That’s worth it alone to take the investment and kind of like games, duplicate the type of application, but just skin it or brand it specific to that program. So it is in many cases okay to wash out the brand a little bit if you’re able to target it audience in a much more specific way. And that’s where retention actually and going all the way back to kind of where we started, the ability to understand an individual user becomes so great, right? If I look at my total data, if I try to flatten my business into one application, and I do cohort analysis on that, we’re likely going to see kind of statistically looking at mobile applications, we’re going to see a drop off after about seven to 14 days. But if I can deliver an application that is super unique to my business or to a television show or whatever it may be, that cohort analysis can actually extend out over a month. And I can start seeing, okay, if I were to just look at that one application and target people who are on the cusp of dropping out and continue to engage them in either this brand or a like brand, that’s more incremental opportunity to advertise that user in whatever way advertising means to your business.

00:26:21.05 [Tim Wilson]: So does the analyst then have a challenge of whether or not that level of, and this I think is not different from web analysts sometimes, that if the owner of the mobile experience is kind of the We need to do this because it’s the year of mobile for the fifth consecutive year. Therefore, we must be in mobile, but it hasn’t taken that pause to say, okay, it’s not enough just to be in mobile for the sake of being mobile. We have to actually map out what our path to value is, and can the analysts play a role in helping with that? Or is that, am I just hitting the same challenge that analysts have always faced?

00:26:59.72 [Lee Isensee]: Is your question, do we analysts add any value?

00:27:03.67 [Tim Wilson]: Well, the analyst job is always easy if the owner of whatever the thing they’re being asked to measure and analyze has very clearly articulated goals and outcomes that they’re trying to achieve. I think that winds up not happening very often and mobile is kind of another wrinkle of it’s like a lot of social. We’re chasing the thing, we’re chasing the channel without stopping and thinking through, what are we really doing that’s going to contribute value or differentiate us from our competition in a way that is positive? If a marketer can articulate that, then the analyst’s job becomes much, much easier. If the marketer hasn’t or can’t articulate that, then does it become the role of the analyst to say, I’ve got to figure out what that path is, and therefore measure. And this is maybe me as the analyst, as the subversive marketer, of saying, it’s not being articulated. I’m going to define a measurement plan that has some basis in what value could be, and that’s what we’re going to measure to.

00:28:09.72 [Lee Isensee]: So just sorry to cut you off again, Michael, but I’m not looking at the roles of folks who typically are engaged in the mobile process. If you look at where the analyst plays in kind of that organizational structure, they’re typically coming down to like, these are the three questions I’m going to ask to add value to the organization to help justify this. And it’s, you know, hey, can I provide some insight on just the user behavior? I don’t care if it’s, you know, web, if it’s mobile, just tell me what actions people are taking because I need to hand that off to my product manager, my marketer or whatever the case may be. Do I still have the ability to segment? And mobile, that’s tough. Is it based upon the type of user? Is it an action that they’ve taken? Moest analysts are just looking for a way around mobile right now to take any data that they can get and segment it to help maybe find that unique group of people that they can start finding patterns on and tie to kind of that larger business goal. And then the last, which is looking at the patterns, are there people that we should be dropping? Remember, this is an application. It’s not a website. There are people who had to come find your brand and want to engage with it just to begin with. There had to be a vested interest, either that pitch to promote your application or something about your brand through word of mouth or app store search. They had to come find you. rather than kind of generically stumbling upon you like you would with the web. So is there an audience that we should actually stop promoting to and stop trying to attract by specific behaviors in the application? Now, as far as how they do that, it’s very much similar to what they were doing in web analytics, right? Funnel management, engagement analysis, LTV, all the normal stuff. It’s just What is the end result for the analyst and how they’re going to keep the user or ditch the user? It’s kind of like a sales funnel, right? The best salespeople don’t know how to just qualify a sale. They also know how to qualify out of a sale.

00:30:21.87 [Tim Wilson]: There you go. But you can, by the way, you can, you can buy downloads, can’t you? With media that’s, I mean, they still have to have, they still have to click through and download, but is that if you’re chasing downloads, do you, is that something the analyst needs to kind of say proceed with caution? Like you need to maybe get some critical mass depending on the nature of your app, but just buying through mobile advertising and enticing people to download your app, you know, proceed with caution.

00:30:49.14 [Lee Isensee]: There’s once again, there’s some crazy science and app purchases allowed folks to justify like, we’ll give the app away, we’ll try to get as many downloads and we’ll chip off of one out of every 10 users for that 99 cents. The freemium market is certainly healthy in the just splatter campaign of user adoption. It’s sad. That’s how you end up with people that have like 185 apps on their phone because they don’t delete them and Some marketer thinks that a download is worthwhile and just as valuable, if not more, than an active user.

00:31:24.55 [Michael Helbling]: But yeah, I ran out of gas. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a first. No. So we’re actually running short on time. So I want to start our wrapping up process. And it’s amazing because I think this has been a great discussion and we’ve covered some really interesting topics. But there’s even more out there like that cool new watch you see all the cool kids wearing and how that factors into this as well. So who wants to wrap up some takeaways as they say?

00:31:56.64 [Tim Wilson]: I will, without coherent thoughts in my mind, give it a shot for myself. I think there is a lot for analysts to learn. It sounds like what we’ve hit on is yes, some of the core fundamentals of analytics stay the same, but that goes beyond That’s not web analytics. That’s kind of any analytics. What are you trying to measure? What are you trying to do? Sounds like that really is having the hat of a marketer and trying to figure out where you fit in the process is the same. Don’t get wrapped up in counting things that are the wrong things to count on the flip side. And I think several times in this, I was asking for clarification of definitions and what does this mean and does this matter that mobile is there’s not a what’s the answer to measuring mobile that is almost as ridiculous as saying you know what what kpi should i have for a website without asking what is the what’s the site trying to do where’s the value at that that applies to mobile as well but because mobile does have these other kind of unique aspects we didn’t talk about sort of the you know, awareness, you know, local awareness, you know, proximity type stuff. But we did talk about, oh, you’ve got a better, a better hook than a easily deleteable cookie to work with from a, what a user is. So there’s, there are nuances in the world of mobile and nuances, actually the wrong word. There’s some kind of fundamentally different ways to sort of shift to thinking and So some things are the same and some other equally important things are very, very different. It’s kind of my takeaway.

00:33:45.66 [Michael Helbling]: What about you, Jim?

00:33:46.92 [Jim Cain]: The thing I really took away was that it’s the digital analytics power hour, not the web analytics power hour. And this kind of underlines that. I mean, mobile measurement, whether it’s m.dot or whether it’s an app, is really a subset of the overall digital plan. I think I would like to have covered a little bit more today on where device level or mobile and tablet level interaction with a brand sits in terms of kind of the engagement with the brand. You know, we’ve done some work before about, you know, you interact with the mobile in this spot, but then you interact with the website, then you interact with the store. You know, I mean, that’s kind of where we’re going, I think, is a discipline.

00:34:29.10 [Tim Wilson]: Episode 15, Omni Channel with Kevin Hillstrom.

00:34:32.90 [Jim Cain]: In this week’s episode of Jim gets cut off before he goes to get another beer. But you know, I really just think this is an interesting subset of Omni Channel. It would be interesting to have a chat where we start connecting all those dots. And I think my last thing is that there’s definitely some good cross pollination between best practices from group A to group B. I learned some cool stuff.

00:34:54.77 [Lee Isensee]: When you guys get that mobile expert on, it sounds like he or she’s going to be highly valuable.

00:34:59.23 [Tim Wilson]: This has been an awesome pre-session for when we get somebody who actually has a clue, and opinions. Can I take the ways for you, Lee?

00:35:08.17 [Lee Isensee]: Having been entrenched in mobile for such a long time, it’s interesting to hear from folks who they’re starting to get more than just their pinky toe into mobile, and they’re having to go through the same transition that clients are going through on changing their verbiage, changing the way that they go to the business and talk about, you know, this is the success of, you know, this aspect of our business and where they’re going to need money and actually the different types of people in an organization that they’ve even engaged with. An analyst and a marketer working side by side, whereas in the mobile world, it’s, you know, the analyst working with the product manager side and side. There’s a lot of cool things that are similar, but the differences I think are enough to warrant that niche market for both vendors and consultants.

00:36:08.66 [Tim Wilson]: Do product managers come in with misconceptions about analytics and what’s needed and what’s possible? Or do product managers come in with more focus and maybe relevance than marketers sometimes can, here’s where Tim inadvertently, this is marketers.

00:36:29.94 [Lee Isensee]: So this is me kicking myself in my teeth. Product managers are like, man, this is not going to be good. Product managers are like developers who are open to new ideas. Whereas analysts working with marketers, they’re helping them justify, you know, spend in budget in other areas. A good product management team, should want to hear about ways to improve their product and get the information straight from the user. And they don’t care if it’s good or bad, facts are facts. They’re typically detailed oriented type people. Whereas a marketer wants to know, we have this information, what should I do different? A product manager has the ability to make that change and ask feedback on this is what I did, what do people think?

00:37:17.11 [Michael Helbling]: And I think for me, as I think about this area of digital analytics, it’s in some ways reassuring. And in other ways, there’s a big hill to climb. And I think the reassuring aspects is that from a strategic perspective, mobile, like a website, is a system to optimize. And if you figure out the important things that matter for the success of that, application or that experience, you have the ability to get metrics in place that will allow you to do that. So I think that’s generally encouraging. And I think on the flip side of that is as companies get more focused on this, there’s certainly expanding demand for the knowledge and expertise in this field. And so as digital analysts, we have another amazing opportunity to expand into this space. And so that’s awesome. I don’t think digital analytics people have ever shrunk at learning a new challenge or task, so that’s good. Well, as you’ve listened to the show today, I am sure you’ve had ideas, thoughts, questions, and we would love to hear from you. Please send us a message on our Facebook page or on Twitter, or it’s great. We’re seeing more and more people come join us on the Measure Slack group.

00:38:37.69 [Tim Wilson]: Can I jump in on that? To get to it, because we have people ask us to add them. And actually, there are a couple of people on the podcast now who can do that. But there is a Google form that’s bit.ly slash add measure slack with the A, the M, and the S capitalized. So that is the way when Michael implores you to join the measure slack that you can go and fill in that form and you’ll get added.

00:39:01.27 [Michael Helbling]: So yeah, please do join the conversation. There’s so much more to discuss on this topic. And as always, we don’t. typically get to the end of a topic. So thank you for listening. It’s been great to have Lee Eisensee join us today. Thank you, Lee. And as always, for my fellow hosts, Jim Cain, Tim Wilson, this is Michael Helbling saying, see you later.

00:39:27.25 [Lee Isensee]: Au revoir.

00:39:29.12 [Announcer]: Thanks for listening and don’t forget to join the conversation on Facebook or Twitter. We welcome your comments and questions.

00:39:35.36 [Lee Isensee]: Facebook.com forward slash analytics hour or at analytics hour on Twitter.

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