#026: The Power Hour Year in Review

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.”

00:00:03.69 [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.

00:00:25.81 [Michael Helbling]: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. This is episode 26. 26! 26. It’s a special show. It’s been one year, and we’ve had a lot of fun. Some of you are even still listening, and it’s all working out so well. You know, this show is a bit indulgent, so bear with us. It’s our year in review. And also, it’s the show where we reveal, drumroll please, our top show of the year. You can’t measure that. That’s right. As voted by our listeners, but not really voted just by how many downloaded, but not really. Of course, this show couldn’t happen without my two veteran, well, at least now veteran co-hosts. He’s the CEO of Babbage Systems in Napkyn. He’s in Ottawa, Canada. Jim Cain. Sorry I wasn’t listening. That’s what? And of course senior partner web analytics demystified hailing from Columbus, Ohio It’s Tim Wilson.

00:01:33.59 [Tim Wilson]: I’m not letting you actually finish the statement without me jumping in There you go.

00:01:38.19 [Michael Helbling]: And of course, I am Michael Helbling the analytics practice lead at search discovery Hailing from the beautiful state of Georgia Gentlemen welcome. It’s a pleasure. I can’t believe we’ve been at this for a year. What have we wrought?

00:01:55.96 [Tim Wilson]: I’ve had a fantastic time. I mean, we kicked around that we might talk about our KPIs, but I’ve found myself multiple times throughout the year saying I really enjoy every couple of weeks hopping on and chatting with you guys as well as chatting with various guests. I guess I feel like we’re a little bit of the imposters with the press pass who get to call up and ask people for interviews, but It’s been a hoot to hop on for, you know, get a good solid hour on a topic with some of the people that we’ve had. I mean, Jim sucks, but he doesn’t count as a guest. He’s technically a host.

00:02:35.21 [Jim Cain]: I’m like Kato Kailin. I was supposed to be a guest and then I just moved in and I’m here.

00:02:39.88 [Tim Wilson]: That’s in your face. Your facial hair. If Kato Kailin actually ever tried to grow a beard, I think he might have what you have going on.

00:02:47.83 [Jim Cain]: It’s a statement. It’s not a beard.

00:02:50.96 [Michael Helbling]: Hey, no shave November happened. And now you can do what you want with that. Yeah, it’s interesting. This whole thing kind of popped up because the three of us would hang out and talk and drink whenever we saw each other. And instead of doing what we thought was a really hard job of blogging our ideas, we decided to go down this podcast, A Road, which turns out to have been a really hard job.

00:03:21.72 [Tim Wilson]: given by the output on my on on the blog front of for me personally, that’s a good estimate.

00:03:27.96 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s probably worth talking about some of how the show got created, how we put it together and how we, you know, some of the some of the little nicky-nacky inner details, you know, I’m sure all the millennials listening will really appreciate that.

00:03:47.70 [Tim Wilson]: That will definitely kill our listenership. Various podcasts that I listened to wind up at some point sort of telling their origin story. You know, the fact is it was Jim and me having a argument via email or chat about dashboards and we decided that we could do that in an entertaining way and we should have a moderated tit for tat blog post thing, because we don’t, our definition of fun is clearly not in the mainstream. And we needed a moderator for it. And we said, Oh, Michael Helblings, like the second or third nicest guy in digital analytics behind John Lovett, Gary Angel, you know, who duke it out for first, first place in there.

00:04:33.44 [Michael Helbling]: Oh my gosh, be mentioned in the same breath as those two guys. It’s a dream come true.

00:04:39.66 [Tim Wilson]: And somehow, instead of a blog post thing, we said, why don’t we try a podcast and put Helbling as the wrangler of cats and see what happens? That’ll be easier and faster than blogging. And boy, were we wrong on that.

00:04:59.94 [Jim Cain]: See, I thought that we were planning on creating a mock blog war, where one of us would blog about something nonsensical and the other person would have an opposite, equally nonsensical position just so we could start shit talking each other and try to rile up Twitter.

00:05:13.83 [Tim Wilson]: There you go, giving away our 2016 plans. Exactly.

00:05:19.20 [Michael Helbling]: I still think that would be really funny. Controversy gets you an audience. That’s why Tim Wilson, I think you’re a jerk.

00:05:28.73 [Jim Cain]: I never loved you.

00:05:29.97 [Michael Helbling]: And all of your measurement and analytics ideas are the worst.

00:05:35.64 [Tim Wilson]: Well, but as we, I mean, as we got into it, we did settle on this lobby bar concept and the fact that that has stayed kind of core and true, we’re gonna have to get Jim Stern on at some point since I feel like he’s the one who touts the lobby bar as, you know, actively. And when we refer to E-metrics is where probably the lobby bar, we’ve all three been at the most often.

00:06:02.20 [Michael Helbling]: and hailing all the way from Santa Barbara California ladies and gentlemen.

00:06:07.74 [Jim Sterne]: It’s Jim Stern. Hey guys, thanks for letting me sit at your table here in the lobby bar. I think this is just a great metaphor for the relaxed, casual, but geeky conversation that happens at E-metrics. When all the other events were about the party and the rock and roll and going out and whooping it up, I was always more interested in the intellectual stimulation, the conversation. And then Renee and Oralee came along with chocolate and Tim came along with his special brand of humor and Mr. Kane with his sarcasm and Michael with his insights about Glenn Levitt. I made sure it became an institution and now you guys made it virtual. Nice job. And as is only proper, the next round’s on me.

00:06:59.86 [Michael Helbling]: Thank you, Jim. What a treat for our listeners. And back to our regularly scheduled show.

00:07:06.47 [Tim Wilson]: So what’s awesome is that we have the beauty of editing because, you know, that clip you just heard actually kind of was an idea that came up on the spur of the moment. Blissfully, Jim obliged us with a clip. But I do think something that I feel like sets us a little bit apart from Some other podcasts, not necessarily analytics podcasts, is the level of editing that we do, which we all feel like it’s because it makes us not look like bumbling jackasses by being able to cut stuff out. But we do edit this. I don’t know, should we do kind of a before and after? Like I’ve got a clip teed up that we can do of, this is what it sounded like when Tim Wilson cannot form a thought and everybody has to listen to his, the synapses firing in his brain. the before and then after Tim has labored over that for a while, what it sounds like after.

00:08:04.85 [Michael Helbling]: What it sounds like after? Well, we all have our own little verbal miscues. The ums and the uhs and the likes and the, the, the and stuff like that, which makes editing really exciting and fun. But it, you know, yeah, we do it because it makes it sound smarter. and hopefully then creates a better product for you, the listener.

00:08:33.32 [Tim Wilson]: Our agency and we’re going to get a developer who’s kind of interested and we’re going to have an analyst kind of dip their toe in. Have you seen, in my experience, that tends to be over underestimating the complexity and level of work to do testing. And that tends to, to not work, but you kind of were, we were talking about what causes testing programs, getting them off the ground to test or fail. And you were talking about the testing team versus the analytics team. So do you see that as kind of a, typically you have to say, look, this is a, a separate group that needs to be established.

00:09:16.19 [Kelly Wortham]: Yes. I mean, how many times do we see organizations?

00:09:23.18 [Tim Wilson]: So that was the before and here’s the after. Our creative team or our agency and we’re going to get a developer who’s kind of interested and we’re going to have an analyst kind of dip their toe in. So do you see that as kind of a, typically you have to say, look, this is a separate group that needs to be established.

00:09:45.81 [Kelly Wortham]: Yes. I mean, how many times do we see organizations?

00:09:52.80 [Michael Helbling]: What are we doing?

00:09:54.16 [Tim Wilson]: I don’t know. I mean, I think we have talked about in kind of the year in review. I feel like we’ve done a fantastic job of guests. The topics we’ve selected, I think we were all a little nervous of, would we be able to come up with, I mean, 26? Episode 26 topics. I feel like we’ve bandied some about. We’ve disagreed. I think all three of us have taken a strong stand that a particular topic is going to be terrible. And those, I think, are probably the three best shows we had, or the ones that one of the three of us said, that’s a terrible idea.

00:10:32.00 [Michael Helbling]: Well yeah I mean it is interesting and you know when you mentioned you know the guests we’ve been able to have on the show it certainly carried us through the year I mean starting with you know Heaton Shaw formerly of Kiss Metrics and what a great guy very generous at this time and then you know all the way through I mean we’ve had Couple people here, couple people there, kind of from all walks, and it’s been really nice. It’s been really nice to get people in like when we had Ben Gaines come in and talk about sports analytics. I think that was a lot of fun.

00:11:05.39 [Tim Wilson]: Oh, that one cracked me up because we… we thought it was going to be this total whimsical sports analytics and wound up like bridging back to parallels to digital analytics more than I think we expected, but probably not a real shock given how that is a passion. You know, those are dual passions of Ben’s. And I think all of us kind of have kind of interest there.

00:11:31.79 [Michael Helbling]: And then of course, who can forget the episode about R? That was one of those ones, Tim, where I don’t think all of us were convinced that was going to be a great show, but it turned out, I mean, Eric Goldsmith, who was our guest, did such a great job. And it turned out to be just a really outstanding episode. And so that was pretty great.

00:11:52.98 [Tim Wilson]: Well, I’d say there are ones where we’ve had only one of us has known the person. I mean, our last episode with Kelly Wortham from EY who I never met. I don’t think Jim had ever met. And I didn’t want that conversation to end. So there’s something about the format that is we somewhat quickly just slip right into the I’m in a lobby bar. I’ve had a couple of drinks and I’m going to tell you what I think. And that was probably the episode. If we had the technology to do it easily, I think I actually shut the hell off the most during that last episode.

00:12:28.21 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I know that wasn’t outstanding. What about you, Jim? Any notable memories?

00:12:34.62 [Jim Cain]: About the podcast specifically.

00:12:37.86 [Tim Wilson]: We’re not talking about the time.

00:12:39.24 [Jim Cain]: So there I was on a beach in Thailand. I don’t know. You guys have larger communities of peers, I think, closer to home. There’s web analytics. groups in Atlanta and in Columbus, you guys can join. This is kind of it for me, right? So when I sit in on one of the podcasts, I’m always in a position where I can actually hear peers talk through best practices. So I’m, you know, I’m enjoying listening as I am as much talking for these things. The ones that I like the most are probably selfishly the ones that I know the most about, you know, there have been a couple of surprises this year. I thought our was going to suck. than when we did on R. And I think that we got a really engaging guest. And it kind of meets my criteria for something I listen to that I’ll listen to again, because I went into the office the next day with two new ideas. So I think my favorite podcast of the year were ones where when we’re done recording, I was like, oh, shit, that’s really smart. I’m going to try that, or I’m going to do some more homework on that. And I would guess or I’d hope that the ones that people, like the listeners are listening to were ones where they don’t want to say, oh, shit, that’s a good idea. I’m going to write that down while I’m driving on my way to work in the most dangerous fashion possible. Yeah, right.

00:13:52.34 [Michael Helbling]: No, that’s great. And you’re right. It’s not every show was ones that we have complete agreement on beforehand, but somehow some way and probably on the strength of just the some of the amazing folks that we got to participate with us this year, giving us that to make the topic compelling.

00:14:11.74 [Tim Wilson]: Our intro says the occasional guest, and I think if we look back, well, we’ve got the records, but I think it’s been a while since we’ve had just the three of us.

00:14:21.58 [Michael Helbling]: I think the last episode where it was just the three of us was maybe episode 20, Candidate, Crital, Culture, and Creativity, a corporate conundrum.

00:14:30.28 [Tim Wilson]: Oh god, that episode sucked.

00:14:32.36 [Michael Helbling]: No, I don’t know. I don’t know that it was our best ever episode, but I think that was the last one was just on Trenew.

00:14:40.31 [Tim Wilson]: Is that because you have the Google Doc open?

00:14:42.69 [Michael Helbling]: No, it’s I’m looking at the listing on our site.

00:14:46.78 [Tim Wilson]: Oh, on our site.

00:14:48.01 [Michael Helbling]: And then remembering from memory whether or not there was a guest or not. I don’t think we had a guest for analytics advice for the recent grad. That was episode 18. If you’re a recent grad and you want to be a hope, never mind. We’re not going to put you on the show. Sorry. We’ve got standards.

00:15:07.72 [Tim Wilson]: I think that was one thing. Some of the feedback we’d gotten was, if you look at the people we’ve gotten, it does skew towards consultants. I mean, Eric Oldsmith is at TED. We had a little bit of David McBride’s at Intel. But we generally, I think, skewed a little more towards the consultants and agencies. And that’s just kind of the nature of who can kind of come on and talk the most freely about what their, you know, what their topic is. But that was kind of an interesting sort of find when we said, oh, we’ll get, we’ll get guests.

00:15:46.68 [Michael Helbling]: But this is the part of the show where we call out certain people who we want to come on and kind of shame them into coming on because I’m ready. Go for it.

00:15:55.03 [Tim Wilson]: You got some?

00:15:56.13 [Michael Helbling]: Absolutely.

00:15:58.62 [Tim Wilson]: I’ll list the shitty guests, and you’ll list who you are, Dylan Lewis. I’m still a little disappointed that we had Batayus Batag instead of Angela Merkel. But, you know, so it goes. She’s been a little busy. She’s got some refugees, too.

00:16:17.94 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, it’s a crisis happening. So let’s talk measurement because no podcast in analytics or digital analytics would be complete without at least some semblance or attempt at measurement. Tim. You put together a really great blog post at the beginning of the year. It may have been the last blog post you put together.

00:16:39.84 [Tim Wilson]: That’s fine.

00:16:43.19 [Michael Helbling]: Same with me. But yeah, you cobble together some key performance indicators, some low hanging fruit, if you will, some key KPIs.

00:16:54.73 [Jim Cain]: An APM machine.

00:16:56.22 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, that’s exactly. And so, you know, because as we started the year, we were trying to figure out, you know, well, how do we know if we’re, if we’re just a raging success? Because, you know, this may surprise a lot of our listeners, but we don’t actually get paid for doing this. At least not yet.

00:17:18.33 [Tim Wilson]: I’m not paying you. Stop that argument. I’m not sending you a check. God damn it.

00:17:22.36 [Michael Helbling]: All liquor you can drink.

00:17:25.57 [Tim Wilson]: Well, it sort of struck me. It didn’t strike me until, as we were preparing for this show, how rare it is that we are actually, as analysts, we actually are the key stakeholders. We are the business, the business users. I’ll take a little sense of pride that I ate my own dog food a little bit and said we will put a steak in the ground and we will define what success looks like and dealt with I think the challenges that we’re coaching marketers on all the time that there’s a crap ton of data but it’s wildly imperfect And we don’t have a target. We don’t have great benchmarks, and we need to put a stake in the ground anyway. And yeah, to be honest, I was writing a blog post and said, oh, shit, I need to put a few stakes in the ground. And I sent it out to you guys and said, yeah, so pre-read this post before it goes live. I kind of established some KPIs. And what do you think? and got a I believe to quote directly from slack yeah that is pretty legit measurement of a measurement podcast not too shabby which you know what if my marketing clients got that from their executives and they could They could look back a year later and said, this is the stake we put in the ground and you agreed to it. And now we can hold ourselves up against that because we published what we said we would do. So I feel like we did okay on that front.

00:19:08.72 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I agree. And to your point, being the, you know, being the business this time and setting our goals and setting targets is, it’s just a good, it’s good to sit on the other side a little bit and try to think of that.

00:19:24.57 [Tim Wilson]: Should we run through what they were, not necessarily in specifics and say, you know, hit or miss on what our, what our four KPIs are the ones that I threw out? Go for it. So we said not a great measure, just an output measure, but publishing a podcast every two weeks throughout 2015, assuming that this goes live on schedule, we will have nailed that one. And I think I even qualified that saying, That’s not a business outcome. There’s not revenue at the end of the day. But going into it, we had some assumptions about what it would take to do that. And our assumptions were dead ass wrong about the level of effort that would take. Yet we did it anyway. So I think we get a gold star on that one. We had garnering at least 300 downloads per episode, and elsewhere in the post, and we could talk about it here. Downloads is a shitty measure, but RSS is kind of a shitty medium, and that’s what podcasts run through. We totally hit that. We’re not going to maybe say specifics about what we get, but we crushed the 300 downloads per episode.

00:20:32.80 [Michael Helbling]: Jim Cain can either confirm nor deny that we have over two million downloads.

00:20:39.16 [Jim Cain]: I can’t. And that 1.999 million of them were from my mother.

00:20:44.51 [Tim Wilson]: And the internet was broken based on downloads of this, this podcast. We, so that was the Rosie. Then we get to, well, maybe we said an increasing trend in the number of downloads per episode. And I think it’s fair to say that we did not nail the solidly increasing trend. We’ve been probably a little closer to flat. It’s kind of noisy. It bounces around. But we’ve had discussions over the last couple of months that we haven’t really, we sort of hit our natural market, I think. and then have not done a fantastic job. Actually, if we look at other podcasts that have launched this year similarly in this space, the Present Volunt Beyond Measure podcast by Lea Pica, where there is aggressive promotion, and I think aggressive promotion is not something that any of the three of us do naturally.

00:21:37.45 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I think at the beginning of the year it was This was something of a lark for for me anyways, and so it wasn’t I wasn’t sure where it fit in right? So should I talk about it? I think Tim you did the best job of all of us of sort of being like yeah This is my podcast and you should listen to it and I was like alright Tim’s if Tim’s saying it I’ll say it too and so I started trying to be more

00:22:02.74 [Tim Wilson]: it wasn’t every every time i spoke this year although i think i also hedged it with enough of sufficient imposter syndrome that i i would assure people that if they were looking to if they’d only listen to cereal and thought this was going to be like cereal this was maybe not the their their best second podcast to go in so i i sort of hedged by saying this was should not be your gateway to podcast because i am such a huge fan of podcasts that’s becoming Lobby Bar topics for me is what podcast do you listen to? And I’ve got a whole system in Stitcher where I track things down and Tom Miller’s gotten me turned on to some some new ones from sitting in a Lobby Bar at Emetrics. But I think there was a level of us thinking, hey, if this takes off, it will spread organically. But I also think the nature of podcasts is that, you know, we’re not in a space big enough for it to hit critical mass and then explode. I think there’s some level of just letting people know what’s there and what the topics are. We record one Facebook post and one tweet for most podcasts.

00:23:15.61 [Michael Helbling]: We’ve even missed a few of those every two weeks. It is interesting. I think all of us have had this experience at some point this year where someone we know, or someone we barely know, or sometimes someone we don’t even know comes up and says, hey, I listened to your podcast. Well, you give me a job. That only happens to you. Well, because in every episode, well, you know, actually folks, well, I’ve got your attention. Searchdiscovery.com. Search discovery. So yeah, I mean, it’s such a great place to work. I’m loving every minute of it. Anyway, no, but people would say, hey, I’m listening to your podcast. And it’s, well, A, it’s sort of a humbling because like, oh, oops. That makes me want to work a little harder on this. And, you know, and then it feels good too. It’s exciting. And I’m excited that people find there’s something to listen to there. So, you know, that’s been a lot of fun. I think just being ourselves is kind of our secret recipe.

00:24:18.31 [Jim Cain]: Yeah, I’m, I’m surprised at the number of people that I’ve spoken to who aren’t analysts, but in digital that have listened to the show at least once. Like I was, uh, at shop.org a couple of months ago, and that’s a purely retail show. I mean, there’s a couple of analysts there, but it’s certainly not the point. And I had several people, I mean, some of them knew me already or I had worked with me. So they checked out the podcast, but several people as well that I was chatting with said, oh, you know, someone mentioned it or whatever. I was frankly surprised to see the reach that it has outside of that kind of core measurement community. Also, we’re definitely the hottest analytics blog in South Korea based on Facebook stats. We are absolutely killing it in South Korea.

00:25:01.94 [Michael Helbling]: Thank you, sir. Yes. I think that means hello in Korean.

00:25:10.09 [Tim Wilson]: Or you just killed our chances of being a hot podcast in South Korea by insulting all of their mothers.

00:25:17.84 [Michael Helbling]: I looked it up on YouTube before the show. Annyeonghaseyo.

00:25:24.86 [Tim Wilson]: So then our fourth KPI was to have a quality episode about podcasting by the end of 2015. So I think the jury’s still out on that one. Let us know what our Facebook page or on the Measure Slack or on iTunes is to whether or not this was of any interest whatsoever.

00:25:42.28 [Michael Helbling]: Well, and actually I’m glad you mentioned the Measure Slack because that has actually been a place where We’ve gotten great feedback from people, and actually some of our shows this year came from comments in Measure Slack. Specifically, I want to say the show about building an analytics team was something that, of course, I only know them as Spectaprod. Tim Munsell Tim Munsell thank you so much yeah we’ll edit out the part where I forgot his name oh the hell we will but no but on Slack you know that it turned out that was just a great way to do that and I remember we did a show and somebody it might have been Tom Miller was just like Michael you were completely wrong about this and I was like Oh, we got I’m going to fight you and then I was like, actually, he’s pretty right. And so that was good. It’s really great to be able to engage in conversation about that.

00:26:36.08 [Jim Cain]: And I’d like to measure what percentage of people who signed up for the measures lack came from the podcast because we pushed it pretty hard this year.

00:26:44.70 [Tim Wilson]: Well, I’d like to measure the revenue value of a tweet and that will be equally unlikely.

00:26:52.34 [Michael Helbling]: What is the value of each Facebook like? And actually, as we dug into our Facebook metrics, I noticed that some people unliked our page and I’m having a hard time not taking that personally.

00:27:07.87 [Tim Wilson]: because the fact is somehow they saw a rare post and and that was what triggered them to unlike the page so yeah i was like do these correlate with every other tuesday because you know it’s like damn that’s it i’m done the one post that facebook since we’re not paying for it is certainly not putting in their feed so how the hell is that happening

00:27:28.73 [Michael Helbling]: Actually the one you tried to boost has way more organic impressions than any other post we’ve done this year.

00:27:35.18 [Tim Wilson]: That was a comical. So we did find there’s a little side discoveries. There will be at some point a logo change because it turns out our Admittedly, I think we spent $5 because we spent $5 to get our Facebook logo and it is not compliant with Facebook’s promotional practices because it has too much text in it. So kind of using just like a lot of us have had websites or blogs where we can, you know, dick around with web analytics This seemed like an opportunity to say, hey, we’ll throw five bucks, 10 bucks, 20 bucks at, you know, promoting posts and see what happens. Because I don’t, while I am involved with social media analytics, I don’t personally have deep knowledge of Facebook’s ever changing way to screw brands and take their money. So I thought, hey, we could try it for this. And it turns out we can’t. Although it’s even funny on that front, the latest one that was getting decent organic reach in Facebook told me, told us as administrators, hey, you could boost this. And so I think I put $10 in to boost it. And it was like, Hey, as soon as this gets approved, we’ll boost it. And apparently they start boosting before and then it got rejected. So that was kind of funny. Cause I think I got paid charged like 47 cents of my $10 before it got rejected. So it was like boosted, but then it was a, it was a take back.

00:29:04.96 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. I think we got 17 or 19 paid impressions. and about 700 organic ones. So yeah, that’s interesting. Anyway, what else, Jim? What else is high level stuff? Yeah, anything.

00:29:23.17 [Tim Wilson]: What do you feel?

00:29:24.66 [Jim Cain]: What do I feel?

00:29:25.66 [Michael Helbling]: Everybody’s getting tired of Tim talking. No, not me. Not me.

00:29:30.66 [Tim Wilson]: Not me.

00:29:33.36 [Jim Cain]: I don’t know. I agree with the three of us riffing at each other a little bit more. It’s fun because, you know, I think, I don’t think we’re sensitive with our guests or anything. I think we’ve still been pretty raw and real with them, but you know, some of the more interesting tangents of the podcast have taken place when the three of us can kind of say whatever we want. It’s a little bit harder to do that with a guest, but with the caliber of guests we’ve had a few in particular, we’re just more than willing to kind of come on a ride with us. A few, I think I scared the crap out of them and we edited that out. That’s neither here nor there.

00:30:05.56 [Tim Wilson]: Jim, you’re definitely the source of the best outtakes by far.

00:30:10.95 [Jim Cain]: But the ones that didn’t even make the outtakes, like those are extra special. You still have the Internet of Things podcast.

00:30:18.62 [Tim Wilson]: You still think your singing was not in the outtakes.

00:30:23.29 [Jim Cain]: No, I listened. I nailed it. I hit that high note, man.

00:30:27.77 [Michael Helbling]: My kids are obsessed with that song now.

00:30:30.56 [Jim Cain]: Final countdown. Did you listen to Carrie after the podcast? Educational? Oh, come on. It’s a great song.

00:30:54.13 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah.

00:30:54.71 [Tim Wilson]: Well, final countdown is getting a resurgent with the ad. Well, because of the Geico. Geico, I was going to say, I didn’t know which.

00:31:00.68 [Michael Helbling]: Which we’re not sponsored by Geico. But, you know, hey, give us a call.

00:31:05.18 [Jim Cain]: They don’t have Geico in Canada. But one thing I wish that there had been more of, and I know it’s one of those things, everybody’s got biases and preferences and stuff. I wouldn’t have minded more sessions on tools. I know that sounds like the opposite of the kind of thing that I would normally say, but it’s an area of the

00:31:22.52 [Tim Wilson]: Specifically tools for extracting data from Google Analytics into BigQuery or into Microsoft Excel.

00:31:29.67 [Jim Cain]: Well, I’m glad you asked him.

00:31:32.47 [Michael Helbling]: Nice segue.

00:31:35.70 [Jim Cain]: The categories of tools that like I mentioned earlier that our conversation that that was awesome and it helped me understand that better. I’d love to talk more about. visualization tools. I kind of liked where the conversation was starting to go in the European conversation about like all these random web analytics tools I’ve never heard of that are big in Europe and stuff. I like the fact that the podcast tends to be best practice and kind of tool agnostic, but I think a lot of the practitioners out there are intermediate and going for power user. No point in throwing bias out there, but the dashboard cloud dashboarding tool of record that napkin uses i mean helbling told me about it at any metric show that’s a great commentary jim and i agree with you it’s uh…

00:32:19.18 [Tim Wilson]: I think it was funny, we had our first, actually I think it was the Heat, and I’ll say it, we had the Heat in episode, not knowing that he was kind of on his way out from Kiss Metrics, and there was one, and we actually, probably the only sort of troll-ish type behavior we’ve had, I can’t remember where it was, but somebody commented like, oh, they’re selling out, they’re just, people pitching their product, which in the discussion, it, That was one where I thought I walked away with a different perspective about digital analytics, kind of another lens with which to view it. I feel like I know I am a little paranoid or maybe overly sensitive to not wanting to turn into the podcast where you bring on a guest and you talk about their product. We’ve had people from, you know, absolutely from tool providers, generally not talking about their tools. You know, Ben Gaines, we joked about talking about, you know, when are we going to get a million E-Vars or whatever our joke was with Adobe. Yeah. And Christa Syton. Christa, we joked a little bit about, you know, what that was going to be. But I think from a tool’s area, and I think maybe that’s some of the challenge, you know, voice a customer. We haven’t really dug into that heat mapping. Haven’t really dug into that. I don’t know that getting a vendor on is the way to do that. The challenge is finding the people who can talk about the type of data in the landscape of tools that are out there, tag management. It’s another one.

00:33:59.31 [Jim Cain]: But, you know, when we had that conversation about testing the other week, we played in the places that we’re comfortable with that we talk about a lot, like people in process and hiring and skills and but I would have loved to have had her gone. Here’s five tools you’ve never heard of that let you test on the cheap or like, you know what I mean? Like there’s just, there’s so many things out there.

00:34:18.43 [Michael Helbling]: It was a good thing we’ve got another year of podcasting to do. Cause I think these are really good ideas. Somebody taking notes.

00:34:26.37 [Tim Wilson]: I’ll write them down as we’re editing.

00:34:29.40 [Michael Helbling]: Well, I mean, and that’s just it is, I think we, it always feels like when we get to the end of a podcast, We’ve just scratched the surface and we could just keep going or create a whole new topic around some of the things we’ve discussed. And that has been pretty consistent. And like all great podcasts, even this one must come to an end. But guys, let’s go around the horn and let’s look to the future. What’s a topic you hope that we cover in 2016?

00:35:02.04 [Jim Cain]: I want to talk to Kurt Cameron about the Rapture. I think he’s a man who knows things, and I want to know what those things are.

00:35:11.54 [Tim Wilson]: Always the Canadians with you.

00:35:13.94 [Michael Helbling]: Just because someone is a Hollywood actor doesn’t mean they’re smart about politics or religion or anything like that. Don’t fall into that trap, Jim.

00:35:25.50 [Jim Cain]: He should be a Canadian. Is he not a Canadian? Don’t you dare give us. I’m proving it right now. He’s born in Los Angeles.

00:35:32.67 [Tim Wilson]: No.

00:35:33.83 [Jim Cain]: Yeah, we got Bieber.

00:35:35.52 [Tim Wilson]: How did you know that off the top of your head?

00:35:37.94 [Jim Cain]: I just asked my friend Google on my computer.

00:35:39.96 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, no, he says Panorama City, Los Angeles, California. Yeah.

00:35:43.79 [Jim Cain]: Damn it. No, we got Bieber. You got your camera.

00:35:48.74 [Tim Wilson]: I would love to cover because I kind of know who I want to get on and I kind of know what he’s trying to do. I would love to do an episode on podcast measurement. I mean, we touched on what our KPIs were and we touched on the fact that it’s a shitty medium. But I think there are some very large organizations out there that are trying to figure that out. I would love to do an episode on that. Okay, Jim, your serious answer?

00:36:18.45 [Jim Cain]: My serious one is still Kirk Cameron. But if we can’t get him, I would actually really like, we’ve talked a lot this year about, in a way that was one of my surprises this year, like our in defense of the hippo, but like one of the classic things, you know, analyst conversations turned to, which is shitting on the senior stakeholders, we’re like vehemently the opposite of that without really planning it, which that was interesting. I would love next year to get a Fortune 1000 level CIO or CMO or even CTO, but one of those senior stakeholders who influences and owns measurement for a big company and just have them come on and say, here’s what measurement is to me. It’d be really interesting to see that other side of the coin.

00:36:57.96 [Tim Wilson]: That’s a good one. The CMO of nationwide insurance was kind of a keynote, kind of a conversational keynote at Accelerate in Columbus. And that was a very illuminating, just like when we walked through the CMO survey, getting the perspective of somewhat the top dog who we’re serving, not generally directly, but through the people who work for them. does seem like they tend to have a perspective that sometimes the people who work for them and sometimes the analysts don’t actually realize is their perspective.

00:37:37.04 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, somebody paying Tom Betts at the Financial Times telling me what I’m on. Oh, he would be a really good one, maybe for multiple things. Yeah, I think in 2016, I’d love to see us get back to topics we can disagree about more wholeheartedly. If you think back to someone of our earliest episodes around dashboard creation, not so much that we disagreed about what to do with them, but sort of some of the things, we definitely made each other think through some stuff and I really enjoyed that. So it’ll be fun to see if we can find a few topics like that where we all can sort of tear it up and, you know, call each other ignorant sluts.

00:38:22.00 [Tim Wilson]: There’s a Canadian reference right there.

00:38:24.05 [Michael Helbling]: There you go. Anyway, we’ll take that one. I think from this guy, it’s certainly been delightful to be on a podcast with you guys and our guests.

00:38:39.15 [Tim Wilson]: God bless everyone.

00:38:41.19 [Michael Helbling]: That’s right. It’s a time of year. It’s looking back and looking forward. It’s what I do. You know, I just, I couldn’t think of a better way to spend every other Tuesday. And some of the time in between. So, hey, if you are out there listening, oh wait, we forgot, our top show of the year. Drumroll please. This is actually based on a terrible metric, which is most total downloads.

00:39:21.16 [Tim Wilson]: So quick, just quick clarification. Very many who doesn’t understand that because I’ve had clients who can’t quite wrap their heads around it. Podcasts are based on RSS, no matter what you’re using. So that data is coming down and you have your app, be it Stitcher, be it iTunes, And if you have subscribed to something, it pulls it down. There is no way to know how many people listen much less or how far they listen. How far they listen. So it is a kind of like hits of old. It is a shitty, shitty, shitty metric. It is an indication. And when you look at why I’m blanking on what the tool was that would sort of try to derive. Like if you look at how many downloads you get on the day that you publish, there’s some indication that probably most of many of those are automated if it’s not kind of exploding. So you can say, oh, these are probably the people who have subscribed and their app has opened so that they can, can refresh.

00:40:21.40 [Michael Helbling]: So podcasts, of course, have to filter out those 206 partial success return codes.

00:40:28.19 [Tim Wilson]: absolutely so i i look at the fact that i in no way trying to pad our numbers you know just let me say itunes and which one’s top so it’s probably a reasonable proxy but blah blah after

00:40:46.90 [Michael Helbling]: after Tim’s super qualification. Yeah, the metrics are terrible. We work in what we’ve got. Episode 11. These are a few of our favorite insights. That was our top downloaded podcast of the year. Now, it is worth noting that downloads kind of happen over time. So some of the later ones in the year Obviously haven’t gotten a chance to catch up yet. So we may see a new challenger emerge from late in the year and there’s a couple of good contenders there.

00:41:18.58 [Tim Wilson]: Anyway, also our episode where we disappointed the most people because it was a hell of a subject line. But did we deliver? Yeah, hard to say.

00:41:28.52 [Michael Helbling]: Well, you know, maybe that’s where, you know, it is interesting because the show was trending up until then, and then, no.

00:41:38.81 [Jim Cain]: Maybe the takeaway is we just write more linkbait. Uh, exactly. Number six will shock you.

00:41:44.76 [Tim Wilson]: CMOs hate us. Ten reason this podcast is awesome. Number four, you’ll never believe.

00:41:51.55 [Michael Helbling]: If you have some awesome podcast titles, episode titles for us, we would love to hear them on our Facebook page or on the Measure Slack. We’ve now got our act together so much so that the Measure Slack form to get on there is actually pinned to our Facebook page. So all you have to do is go to facebook.com slash analytics hour. and you’ll be able to kill two birds with one stone, which is probably not okay in most jurisdictions. And obviously have a great new year for my co-hosts, Jim Cain and Tim Wilson. Keep on the strength.

00:42:33.40 [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.

00:42:47.68 [Michael Helbling]: All right, so now what we have to do is we need to get Jim to record like a little blurb and then plop it in there. Yes, he said, I’m gonna sound like a douche, and I was like, well, make sure we’re recording for that.

00:43:07.69 [Jim Cain]: Yeah, I was there for that.

00:43:09.09 [Michael Helbling]: No, you didn’t smile. You didn’t laugh. There was no facial recognition registered at all.

00:43:15.14 [Jim Cain]: I was drunk, and I don’t like football.

00:43:19.16 [Michael Helbling]: Well, you should. You owned the grudge as a demystifier.

00:43:23.23 [Tim Wilson]: No, no, no, no, no.

00:43:27.39 [Jim Cain]: Come on. I was drunk, and I don’t like football.

00:43:32.46 [Michael Helbling]: I came to your website and it’s shit!

00:43:36.39 [Jim Cain]: I was drunk and I don’t like football.

00:43:39.87 [Tim Wilson]: What are you sipping there out of your mug? I hope that’s something respectable.

00:43:43.84 [Michael Helbling]: Um, it is some nettle tea.

00:43:49.22 [Jim Cain]: I was drunk and I don’t like football. Rookie mistake, Tim. I was drunk and I don’t like football.

00:43:58.07 [Michael Helbling]: Nothing. Nothing from Jim. Just staring blankly.

00:44:02.18 [Jim Cain]: I was drunk and I don’t like football. Uh, state of… Atlanta?

00:44:08.85 [Michael Helbling]: Wait.

00:44:11.59 [Jim Cain]: The state of confusion.

00:44:13.67 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, the state of Atlanta. There you go. It’s a state of mind. George on my mind. You get it. Whatever. It’s a great place. Come visit me sometime. I’ll edit this for now.

00:44:26.09 [Jim Cain]: I was drunk and I don’t like football.

00:44:29.78 [Michael Helbling]: This was a shit show.

00:44:32.20 [Tim Wilson]: Rock, flag and podcast.

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