#016: Digital Analytics Without a Clear Online Conversion

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.

00:00:25.01 [Michael Helbling]: Well, we’re welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. This is episode 16. We’ve got a very interesting topic to discuss for this show. Analytics in the absence of a clear online conversion. This is something that is tricky for any analyst. And so, to help me pull apart this thorny topic, I’ve brought along my two illustrious co-hosts. There’s Jim Cain, who is from Canada.

00:00:52.91 [Jim Cain]: My entry has gone from double CEO to just from Canada.

00:00:56.37 [Michael Helbling]: That’s right. I mix it up. I mix it up.

00:00:59.82 [Jim Cain]: I’m proud of you.

00:01:00.58 [Michael Helbling]: And then Canada is also a prestigious Jim Cain. And also Tim Wilson, who is not from Canada.

00:01:08.73 [Tim Wilson]: Good evening, Jim.

00:01:10.61 [Michael Helbling]: And I’m Michael Helblink. All right. Well, guys, I think all of us have run across this scenario before, which is we need to make measurement matter. for companies that don’t have any kind of online conversion. It’s not even lead generation. It’s like their website exists just because somebody decided that it was part of their corporate structure. And now we need to figure out how to do something cool with it. Let me throw it out there. What’s our first step? How do we really get analytics in there in a juicy way?

00:01:48.85 [Jim Cain]: So I’m glad that this was frankly one of the first 20 episodes. I’m surprised we didn’t touch on this topic in one of the first five episodes because if you look at the percentage of digital analysts out there, I would say 50%, 60%, 70% are people who are in large organizations where it’s real hard to pin down clearly what winning is. We talk a lot about goal definition and KPIs. and how hard it is to get senior stakeholders to buy into things. It’s way, way harder when you’re a government agency or a nonprofit that doesn’t have an online donation form or certain kinds of content sites. And there’s lots of analysts who struggle to show value because it’s hard to define winning. So I’m really looking forward to covering this one. We have a decent amount of experience. We’re relocated in Ottawa, lots of government analysts here. We’ve worked with a number of content sites, hopefully we’ve got some cool stuff to share, but I’m keen on this one. I’m hoping to learn some stuff tonight too.

00:02:53.44 [Tim Wilson]: I think I’ve been the analyst who’s frustrated watching vendor demos or at conferences that are speaking to, hey, here’s how you do this thing. And there’s just this presumption of an online conversion that is just critical to the company because it is an order or it is a lead. It’s something that’s very tangible and it’s rare to see vendors get up or often consultants get up and say, well, here’s how you do this when you’re in an environment where it’s not that easy to figure out what what success looks like for the site.

00:03:34.31 [Michael Helbling]: Well, great show. No. So we’re screwed. No. So I’ll jump in there and say the trick or the first, not the trick, the first thing to do is start to explore what you mean success for the organization first and foremost, right? at least that’s sort of been my approach, which is, you know, okay, well, let’s see. What would it mean for this organization to be successful, regardless of the web, right? So if I could figure that out, then I can start looking for how digital snaps into that picture and then guide measurement and metrics towards that. What’s your experience, Ben, guys?

00:04:21.31 [Tim Wilson]: Well, for me, I think one of the challenges or one of the dangers is going to what I can measure instead of trying to do that exercise so what you’re speaking to I absolutely by wholeheartedly endorse and a few years ago I got this there was a HBR article and it was something like measuring using non-financial measures to measure performance or something and it entered it talked about this concept of causal causal modeling and I googled and tried to find it and found kind of derivatives of it but it’s a concept of if you start with what is it that the organization is trying to do and you sort of start with the world that you’re living in you know I’ve got my site and my site can only do a finite number of things and I feel like those things are probably valuable Now how do I actually link them? What is the causal connection between what it is that I know I can do and I can measure on in my digital presence because this works for social media as well as the web. How can I link it? If I get more people to the site, I’m a non-profit, I’m trying to spread awareness about water quality in Africa. And part of what I need is for the public to be better informed and know what the issue is over there. You know, my website, is a resource for information. If I get more people to read it, then those will be people who will become more informed. If they’re more informed, then they will support policy initiatives that will support those efforts. And ultimately, I will help improve water quality in Africa. that was kind of a on the spot made up. I will sit and sketch out or put in a simple diagram and try to map those connections because you start to find when there are like seven jumps from what I can measure and what I can do to potential value, that kind of makes you scratch your head and say, wait a minute, is this really plausible? And then kind of validating that model along the way through third-party measurement. Hey, if I’m trying to grow awareness, I think that if I get more traffic or get more traffic to this area of the site, then that grows awareness. Well, now I can periodically do a study. and see if that’s actually been the case. But it fundamentally does go back to that what is the business trying to accomplish, what’s the outcome you’re trying to achieve, and if you haven’t stopped and thought through what is this digital presence doing, how does that relate to that, then you’re kind of doomed. You find yourself just counting traffic or counting registrations or counting something that may or may not actually be linkable to that business value.

00:07:22.66 [Jim Cain]: It’s like the Bob’s from Office Space. So what do you do exactly? And I’ve had that conversation like, and again, we have it with retailers a lot of the time, especially for secondary conversion points, but it can be a challenge with a non-transactional website to figure out what the point is, but there always is one. You know, for example, we did some work with a large Canadian government agency and they had several mandates. One of the things I like to do because it can be a very helpful kind of coaching tool is to look at the organization’s mission statement. Because one of the things that I find a lot is that the mission statement, because some of them are garbage, but a lot of mission statements are good and the organization put a shitload of time and effort and meetings and committees into clearly defining what they do. And you can take the verbs and the nouns out of someone’s mission statement and use that as the first pass towards goal definition. So, for example, with a number of government agencies, they have a two tiered goal of one of them is to be a resource for members of that organization, you know, people who work for that government department to find what they need. And then they also have a more primary goal. of being the single point of truth for the Canadian public for all the information about what that department does. When you pull all that stuff out of the mission statement, you can start to get into a place where you say, so if someone who lives in Canada who doesn’t work for the government completes an article on your website, is that winning? And you can start to get towards it. Something that used to be harder a couple of years ago, given kind of the black box that most web analytics tools were, again, even two years ago, the best you could do is a lot of inference at performance for the website. With web analytics tools now, and the way that you can both pull data out, but also push data in, you can start creating logical connections between what’s in the web analytics tool and data that lives somewhere else in the business.

00:09:25.62 [Tim Wilson]: So if you have… Are you talking aggregated data so that you’re kind of looking for correlations and patterns? Or are you saying the kind of user level… user level.

00:09:34.94 [Jim Cain]: So I’m talking CRM integration, you know, anything where you can have a post login experience and a CRM system, we know you’re cooking with gas, right?

00:09:43.73 [Tim Wilson]: I feel like the post login, hey, if your site just has a active post login experience, that’s like the number two on the list right behind the, well, after you convert to an order, because if you’re an intranet, if you’re a government agency, if you’re a financial institution, You know, if you’re anything that’s maybe got a customer service angle, if the purpose of your site is to serve a constituency, be they customers or citizens or something like that, I could see that happening. And then maybe that’s part of what we kind of rattled off. You’ve got government agencies. As you were talking, I was thinking, well, you’ve got intranets. That’s another one. There are companies that have a large enough intranet that they’ve got a web analyst for the intranet. And that poor, poor SAP saying, wow, we get one tenth of a developer a year to actually do anything on the site because, hey, we’re the intranet. But what’s success look like for an intranet? What’s the success look like for a nonprofit, which may have dual donor management, volunteer management, and actually supporting their mission. The content sites, you know, success for them tends to be impressions, which results in, if they want to sell media, which just results in just horrendous user experiences, I think. CPG, to me, that’s the one that I deal with probably the most of. And to Michael, you’re starting with, what’s the goal? The goal of the business is to sell shampoo. You know, okay, well, that’s great. Now I’m in a struggle with what I want to do on my site. And you fall into this, well, it’s CPG. So all you’re trying to do as a marketer is drive trial, which means you’re pumping out coupons and samples, which always feels like you’ve just kind of gone to that’s what we’ve always done, the purpose of our site, which isn’t really the purpose of our site. That’s the purpose of all our advertising spend is to drive people to somewhere where they can drive trial. Although insidiously I will watch that wind up getting to where we’re building our CRM so we just count the registration and we completely ignore the post-registration process of actually getting the coupon, printing the coupon, using the coupon. So we sort of forget that it’s supposed to be about trial and decided to gain about just getting somebody to fill out the registration. That is an analogous to the, I’m gonna do a great webinar and the webinar could be utter shit because all the people who are doing the webinar care about is whether you filled out the the Legion form to register for the webinar, and then you’ve given them 95% of the value that they wanted. So that was like, I think that just compressed like seven rants into one non-breatheable moment. Well done.

00:12:19.65 [Jim Cain]: Well played.

00:12:20.87 [Michael Helbling]: A lot of pork in that rant. Hold, before you go, there’s one thing I also want to throw out there, another flame-soaked gas can, if you will. No, wait, a Moelotov cocktail of insight. The other thing I have found and I wonder if you guys see this is that not only is there sort of a challenge with kind of applying a process for measurement as a couple to the business goals or whatever, but there’s also a fair amount of really not good thinking about website measurement. that you have to peel back first. So usually have like a, here’s our KPIs and they’re all like really not good. And you’ve got to like do a lot of work to get those off of there before you can really dig into what really is starting to matter.

00:13:12.50 [Jim Cain]: I don’t know.

00:13:12.80 [Michael Helbling]: Have you guys seen that too? Or am I just overly pessimistic?

00:13:17.35 [Jim Cain]: And there’s two reasons. The first one is that when you can’t directly tie a dollar value to something, its perceived value is much lower. So it’s hard to get a director of digital for a large property that doesn’t necessarily have a dollar value-driven conversion point. It tends to be treated like with some of the CPG stuff as kind of just something that exists for our brand. So it’s hard to get people to care at all about anything. The second thing, and so I’ve spoken to several large post-secondary education facilities in the US, and they are actually taking the web much, much more seriously. But if you look at a big college or university, they don’t have one primary goal. They actually have three of them. and they’re equally important and they’re completely different. So one of them is to be a knowledge base for existing students. Where’s the cafeteria? When’s my class? You know, I want to join the Glee Club or whatever Americans do for fun. The second one is for prospective students. So, you know, we need to be out there getting people to apply to this school. And that’s equally as important or maybe more important than being a resource. And the third one that I had never thought of until it was brought up several times is alumni donations. And generating money from alumni is extremely important to big American schools. and the website is one of the primary ways that they do that. So like three things that literally have nothing to do with each other.

00:14:47.48 [Tim Wilson]: They take all the students and all that. Where’s my class? Where’s the cafeteria? They direct them all to a room. This has been my experience. They direct them all. They all go to the same room that’s a phone bank where they then tell them to get whatever they want to the class, to the cafeteria, to whatever. They just need to call 27 alumni and ask them for money because I’m convinced with how often my phone rings. That must be what’s, it’s the entire student body mobilized to to take money from me. kind of a whole grantee area and you know what that is post login that is the people who are looking to to apply for grants are going to go and they’re going to log in and then they are in a in that portal and having a the grantee or potential grantee experience there’s a whole other section of the site that is saying well the output of that research we want to share that with the world and they basically wind up saying we’ve got a couple of different sites and you can kind of carve that off and say what are those different goals. I agree it already introduces a nuance of it’s not we’re trying to drive profit like that which is what retailers are in. Retailers may struggle with the omnichannel world but they want to have for-profit businesses are We want to make more money, by and large, so they can kind of have a single goal, whereas a lot of what we’re bringing up to government agencies, the universities, can kind of split into where they’ve got a couple of almost unrelated goals, different constituencies they’re serving.

00:16:31.21 [Jim Cain]: To take it further, I mean, and if a business ever ran this way, you know, to be a nightmare, but in a large university, every department tends to own their own website, or their own area of the website. So the alumni group has the alumni group, but the history team or the humanities department will own a subset of the website. They might even have their own, and they still call them this webmaster or webmistress. And they compete with all the other webmasters and mistresses for dev time and access to the CMS. So, you know, there’s more people working on that website than there might be for a large retailer. None of them are in lockstep. None of them have clearly defined goals. It makes it very hard to go in and even help create alignment on goals, let alone do analysis. So I guess now that I’m talking about it out loud, some organizations that don’t have clearly defined web goals may have similar problems internally, which makes it even harder to get going with data.

00:17:33.80 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, if you worked, if the university is a good example. I’ve got to know a couple of the web analysts that are here in Columbus affiliated with Ohio State and then have talked to them about some of those challenges or even specific subsets of Ohio State that you have different schools and they have historically operated as somewhat, I mean in a lot of ways they’ve got their own P&L basically. You know, they answer to the president, whatever the other sort of board of regents, or I don’t understand the corporate hierarchy of universities, but in a lot of ways, you know, it’s the dean and everything flows down. And so when you go to, and that maybe makes sense in a physical space, that you’ve got these different physical areas. So the school of architecture is somewhat self-contained. But when it comes to the digital world, it kind of needs to be a little bit more of an integrated experience. And I don’t know how often, though, those universities wind up saying, and now we have a web analyst who actually anybody is asking or expecting anything of, they just kind of live in a world of chaotic academia.

00:18:42.73 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, which is great, because that’s exactly what an analyst wants. You know, just sort of completely theoretical everything, right? No, I think you’re making a pretty good point. And what ways do you dig in to a situation like this? Are there any analysis methods that you promote or think are good for an analyst in this position? What kinds of analysis would you think would be good for them to do?

00:19:11.37 [Tim Wilson]: I think the number one thing an analyst can do is help figure out how massive the misalignment is between why people internally think that current people are coming to the site and the reality of why visitors are coming to the site now. CPG is a simple one. Why are people going to CPG sites that are looking for coupons? I’m pretty sure I have rattled that off on at least a couple of prior episodes, but it’s just a fact. For your run of the mill, selling cereal, selling shampoo, selling Kleenex, people are looking for coupons. Internally, often people think, oh, they’re coming to learn about our wonderful brand story because we ran this grand advertising campaign. And where they’re going on the site and where they’re coming from tend to be kind of weak proxies. A lot of times it’s you better throw a survey up and ask them the question, why are you coming? Why are you here? And just trying to get the conversation to you can’t just make people have a different intention when they arrive on the site. If the people who are coming are looking for X and you’re building a site to do Y, something has to give. That site, no amount of measurement is gonna make that site successful. There needs to be some clearly, and if it can be data articulated, you know, with facts of you have a gross misalignment about why you wish and hope people are coming to the site and what you wish they were trying to accomplish and what they’re coming when they arrive on the site, they’re trying to accomplish. And to me, that’s a struggle with that, a junior analyst that they can struggle to do that because that is kind of a strategy and a delicate, sensitive communication but trying to tease out. What is it you hope people are doing on the site? Now let’s talk about what they actually are and get that base level alignment going.

00:21:20.80 [Jim Cain]: I see a lot too that big Again, non-commerce organizations don’t tend to go too much farther past visits and visits by marketing campaign. Oh, time on site, man. They’re all about time on site. What was the time on site from email this week? How many more people showed up from our partners than did this time last year, but they don’t make it too far past? you know, a few interesting stats about our marketing campaigns. And one thing that I find tends to be a standard, at least as something that can be relatively easily instrumented, is content consumption. Because most large organizations that don’t have a shopping cart have some kind of information, and ideally information they refresh often, that is a big part of their mandate to get out into the world. If it’s a PDF download, it’s pretty straightforward to say, did someone download the PDF and which PDF was it? And if it’s an article, there’s a few tips and tricks for articles. If it’s a long scrolling article, you can build analytics eventing for the last scroll of the article. So you could say, how many people started and how many people finished? Is she any addition? But you could say, how many people made it to the end of the article? If it’s a multi-page article, you could say how many people navigated to the last page of the article. So you can actually go from kind of a basic engagement funnel. Someone came in from the email and then they went to this article. We can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that they finished it and they did that three times.

00:23:02.88 [Tim Wilson]: That’s a huge move forward. Now, do multi-page articles ever exist for any reason other than selling advertising and bumping up your impressions? That’s a semi-serious question, because I know drives me nuts.

00:23:17.08 [Michael Helbling]: Yes, Tim, of course. It enhances the usability of the article, maybe.

00:23:22.97 [Tim Wilson]: I mean, since it can be, it enhances the measurability, right? I mean, I die. It happens about once to twice a year that somebody comes up with a UX change that will improve the measurement, and I tend to I just die a little bit inside every time somebody says, let’s change this so we can measure it. I’m like, no, you got to take imperfect measurement any day. Do not negatively impact the customer experience. Yeah, don’t get in the way of the user.

00:23:56.80 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, absolutely not.

00:23:58.61 [Jim Cain]: If it’s good enough for Buzzfeed, it’s good enough for me. That’s what I say to the Canadian government.

00:24:04.22 [Tim Wilson]: I mean, I like that. So I do feel like I should throw in because it’s one of, I don’t quite get, I don’t quite, he calls it the spoon example. This is Adam Greco, so one of the analytics demystified senior partners. And he talks about the spoon and it’s a matrix reference. And I like the matrix, but I don’t quite get the Neo and the spoon. I need to go watch the scene again. But he says the question is, imagine a world like where our site doesn’t exist. we take our site off and you need to go in and now pitch why we’re creating a website. Why do we need a website? And I actually think that’s a very clear and simple way to frame it up. You can’t walk into if you’ve got 20,000 pages on your website and are getting a ton of traffic, you don’t wanna walk into the VP of marketing and say, hey, I have this thought experiment, why do we have a website? But as an analyst to actually sit back and think through really why, where are the vectors of value that we’re delivering that are contributing towards the overall, the business, the organization’s mission, the goals for the company, where does the site fit in that? Because it’s true that many sites got created because There wasn’t a site you had to buy a domain to protect your and then you better put something up there and it started out as brochure where and his evolved for 15 years and You’ve kind of lost some of that some of that clarity. And it’s, to me, it’s one of the fun things about being an analyst is getting to try to really ponder that and sort of question any sort of assumptions. Well, it’s all about having people stay on the site for a long time. Like really? Is that what it’s all about? Is vectors of value a Wilsonism? I don’t know where that came from. I think it’s just kind of my because that could be the title of our first book. It’s my affinity for alliteration. How’s that?

00:26:09.54 [Michael Helbling]: Vectors of value and digital data by Tim Wilson. So what about scoring models? So a lot of times in the absence of an online conversion, you’ll see organizations shift or want to look at some sort of scoring model. What’s your opinion on those or how would you apply those in this context?

00:26:30.51 [Jim Cain]: Can you elaborate a little bit more? I think I know what you mean, but I don’t want to go off on attention.

00:26:35.62 [Michael Helbling]: So some sort of model that scores digital behavior gives some kind of a point to this action or that action and adds it up and then gives weight to a visitor who has higher scores than that one based on whatever it is we’re trying to accomplish.

00:26:52.35 [Tim Wilson]: Both what percentage and what was the volume of visitors who exceeded score threshold X? Yeah, exactly. So like that was kind of, in a sense, kind of Jason Burby, when he was at Zazz, Zazz, I really should figure out how to pronounce that. Is it possible now? I think still doing it. Yeah, I know you’re talking about Zazz. Zazz, okay.

00:27:13.55 [Michael Helbling]: I go Zazz like a boss.

00:27:15.20 [Tim Wilson]: And maybe I’m miscritical. think he is the kind of coiner and champion of let’s assign every action a value and it’s more assigning a relative value action which I think was often assigned a dollar value but you’re assigning a dollar value in the absence of being able to quantify if that’s real and so you have to be really careful to tell people that no this isn’t real dollars this is kind of just a relative exercise I think that’s so pretty slow. But conceptually, I think going through what are all the things that we’re letting people do on our site and assigning a point system to have that exercise of, yeah, I’m going to assign points because I’m going to sit back and think about downloading a PDF means X, which is great. Completing a video means Y, which may be a great thing. I know they’ve consumed the whole video. just arriving on the site and bouncing you get no points right if you’re on one page maybe you get nothing and then with that you can start to to to both look at scores if you’re tying into a CRM you’re you’re scoring these people and figuring out who the most valuable people are and where they’re coming from and what they’re doing but then there’s also a way to look at your to start having a conversion what percentage of our visitors are exceeding scoring threshold X. And I can say I have tried that several times and it seems simple and obvious. I actually wrote a white paper years ago back when I was working with Eloqua a lot about two-dimensional lead scoring at a behavioral and profile and then talked about a third dimension. And it all seemed like really clear and getting companies to embrace it, it’s like a level of, it’s like one step too far for them for the light bulb to go on. But I fundamentally think that’s a great way to look at it because it forces some sort of introspection about what people, what you’re offering and trying to guide people to do on your site and how successful you are at getting them to do that.

00:29:24.32 [Jim Cain]: Eloqua, not at all bullshit. A white paper by Timothy Wilson.

00:29:30.96 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I don’t know where you’re, how you’re laying it so hard on that.

00:29:34.58 [Tim Wilson]: There’s a company from Toronto. Don’t you need to defend the Canadians? There’s ways to use that.

00:29:43.32 [Michael Helbling]: There’s ways to use products like that poorly, but I think there’s some real value in those too. I just, it’s weird now I have to defend marketing automation or something. Anyways.

00:29:55.18 [Jim Cain]: So the reason it, uh, It’s something that always drives me nuts is that organizations that have invested, I have yet to meet an organization that’s invested heavily in a Marketo or an Eloqua or a similar tool who is even remotely winning with it. It’s almost like heat mapping and user video capture tools. they are theoretically powerful. Or tag management or web analytics, let’s be honest. You know, I mean, we all know we don’t actually do anything. We agreed on that like 15 episodes ago. But you know, someone goes in, even if they use a consultant, they set up a lead scoring tool. And they decide that that is how the world is structured. And they almost never become a more effective, more efficient marketing organization. through anything those tools do. And that’s my issue with them. You know, can you win with Eloquor and Marketo? Probably. Have I seen anybody do it? Nope. Does it create a whole shit load of noise that I have to deal with when we work with them later? Every time. So I think that’s probably why I go…

00:31:04.80 [Tim Wilson]: A call for a future Digital Analytics Power Hour guest is to, I actually feel like there are B2B companies out there that are winning with it. And if there is somebody who actually listens to this podcast, so they’re in the analytics world and say, hell yeah, we actually are winning with a lead scoring, lead nurturing, marketing automation, that’s key to what we’re doing. Please contact us, because I think that would actually be a fantastic episode. the Jim Cane Dunk Tank episode. Yeah, because we need an episode where Jim gets beat up on. Yeah. We haven’t found any of those yet in the first 15.

00:31:42.80 [Michael Helbling]: The guy is bulletproof. What can we do?

00:31:46.91 [Jim Cain]: The Teflon Don of measurement. Keeps coming back. All right, so. I’d love to hear that story too. And seriously, if someone is hearing this and has a great example of one of those tools. And you can get through your PR department to allow you to come on and speak.

00:32:03.51 [Tim Wilson]: We’ve heard we’ve heard the feedback. It’d be great if you guys get practitioners. Yeah, it’d be great if practitioners were allowed to remove the muzzle and speak on a podcast.

00:32:12.52 [Michael Helbling]: Oh, snap. So now’s a good time for us to wrap up before we alienate anyone who’s not on the show. So guys, what are your takeaways from the conversation tonight?

00:32:25.27 [Jim Cain]: So again, this is the show I thought it was going to be at the beginning. I enjoyed talking non-commerce conversions. We all had some good examples. And again, I think the big things that I shared that I think are worth re-mentioning are that a mission statement is an interesting tool to use when trying to define goal conversion for a non-commerce business. I think content consumption and properly instrumenting successful content consumption is a very good way to show the effectiveness of a website that is a non-commerce or non-lead generation website. I think that if you’re an analyst in that kind of business, to a large extent you probably have your work cut out for you because before you can do anything cool with data, you have a lot of culture to change and you have a lot of people to align before you can get going.

00:33:19.82 [Tim Wilson]: So I’ll throw in two things. One, really just hit me with Jim’s last comment there. I was kind of thinking as analysts go in and are considering jobs, the organizations I’ve worked with that actually do have a truly noble mission. They’re not trying to push cheap plastic crap you know that nobody needs but everybody wants you know if you actually want to have a job where you can maintain your soul a lot of times that I think is going to work for companies that may have a lot of these sorts of struggles so I wonder about going into those in the interviewing in the job interview process and being a little bit of the What are your goals? What do you expect your website to do? I think is kind of an intriguing thought that, hey, if you’re going in, if you’re moving from retail to a government agency or moving from a B2B Legion site to a nonprofit, go in with your eyes wide open and recognize that, as Jim said, there’s probably a degree of cultural change in order to do analytics effectively. It’s kind of a little bit of an eye opener. The second thing for me is that I made sort of a preliminary little list before we jumped on here about There are a handful of different types of non-online conversion sites. And that list just got longer as we discussed this. So in a sense, I feel like we set up a false premise in that we said there are sites that have online conversions and then all sites that don’t have online conversions. And a little bit of an aha was there are fundamentally different types of sites that don’t have online conversions. And there may be very different ways to approach what you do with measurement. Michael, you got any thoughts?

00:35:06.38 [Michael Helbling]: Yes, I do. It is definitely challenging. I think there’s cultural aspects. And I think that was one thing as I was we were talking tonight and just the complexity of applying digital measurement to a success that may happen somewhere far, far away in the organization. Pretty challenging stuff, but definitely doable. Well, what a great show. Thanks again to Tim Wilson and Jim Cain, my co-hosts. We would love to hear from you. If you are listening to this show, check us out on Facebook or on Twitter or on the Measure Slack. And I’d love to talk to you about your experiences with this, especially open call for anyone who’s really knocking it out of the park with marketing automation tools in a non-legend or non-e-commerce environment. So you could be a guest on the show if you would like to step forward. We’d love to have you potentially. So reach out to us. And of course, keep on measuring. For Tim Wilson and Jim Cain, this is Michael Helbling. Peace out, cheers.

00:36:19.82 [Announcer]: Thanks for listening and don’t forget to join the conversation on Facebook or Twitter. We welcome your comments and questions. Facebook.com forward slash analytics hour or at analytics hour on Twitter.

00:36:41.67 [Michael Helbling]: Alright, we’ll just scrap that whole section.

00:36:45.10 [Michael Helbling]: Talking like Captain Kirk. John Lovett likes governance. Um, cut that part out.

00:36:54.71 [Michael Helbling]: How did this suddenly become about that when I was giving you guys props? Like, that’s the weird thing here, like… It was pretty dickish, actually.

00:37:01.62 [Jim Cain]: Yeah. I have to take that back.

00:37:05.06 [Michael Helbling]: It was Tim’s fault. Um, cut that part out. I agree with Tim.

00:37:10.59 [Jim Cain]: If you want to be on the show, you should… Or whatever it was he said earlier. And just man up.

00:37:17.96 [Tim Wilson]: This is not a topic that I have a whole lot of knowledge on.

00:37:22.77 [Michael Helbling]: Cut that part out.

00:37:24.85 [Michael Helbling]: How does it restart the whole fucking thing now?

00:37:28.32 [Tim Wilson]: Well, you probably need it too. So let’s give him your coverable.

00:37:34.06 [Michael Helbling]: Cut that part out. Just Jim came talking about taking his laptop into the shower. Cut that part out. Tim? No.

00:37:48.85 [Tim Wilson]: Jim? You’ve been waiting to do that.

00:37:52.80 [Michael Helbling]: Got a little analytics boner right there. Cut that part out. I’ll be editing later.

00:38:00.01 [Tim Wilson]: We’ll see if that stays on.

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