#032: Questions and Answers with Tom Miller

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.”

00:00:04.00 [Michael Helbling]: Tuesday. Tuesday. Tuesday. April 5th at the San Francisco Marion Marquis. The digital analytics power hour. Live! At E-Metrix San Francisco. There will be pontificators, arguing, probably drinking, and face painting for the kids. Then Jill Wilson will walk the tightrope over the pit of doom. Be there! April 5th at the San Francisco E-Metrix. And live on May 1st.

00:00:43.51 [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.

00:01:00.48 [Michael Helbling]: Hi everyone, welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. This is Episode 32. Why are we here? Where did we come from? Where are we going? Sometimes you just have questions. Well, this episode is not about those questions. Get ahold of yourself. It’s about analytics questions, specifically questions from the analytics community that we have not seen in advance. Who can adjudicate this SAT of digital analytics IQ? Well, that’s our guest, Tom Miller. He’s the analytics practice lead at digital surgeons. And he recently started his own podcast called Measure Directions. He’s been gathering questions from the community and this episode is putting us through the test. Obviously I’m joined by my two co-hosts, Tim Wilson,

00:02:01.10 [Tim Wilson]: That’s it. Just, just Tim Wilson. Sometimes I say it and sometimes I go.

00:02:05.45 [Michael Helbling]: Okay.

00:02:05.57 [Tim Wilson]: No, that’s good. I am, I am here. I am here and trying to find the mute button. So I’m not sniffling all over your intro.

00:02:11.86 [Michael Helbling]: And then Jim Cain, the CEO of napkin.

00:02:16.02 [Jim Cain]: Yeah. Give me the intro. That’s what time it is.

00:02:19.17 [Michael Helbling]: And I’m Michael Helbling. All right. Guys, this is exciting. Tom, welcome. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. We’re excited to have you on the show and excited to see what questions you’re bringing with you. We literally have not seen these in advance. And to be really honest, I think Tim is the most scared.

00:02:43.11 [Tom Miller]: Well, I’ve got a set of questions here that I think might put you guys on your heels a little bit. The idea of me coming on your show is to bring to you guys the format of the Measure Direction podcast, which is a podcast that myself and my co-host just started. And what we’re trying to do is do a question and answer audience-driven format for the digital analytics and digital marketing community You know, I started the podcast because I hate to blog. I think, you know, I’ve heard you guys separately say that you sort of started this podcast because you hate blogging. You want to be a resource for the community that you’re part of, that you care so much about. You know, I owe my entire career to the support of other people within the digital analytics community. And I wanted to discover a way to give back to it. And so that’s what I’m trying to do with the podcast. It’s audience driven question and answer. you know we pick a few questions each week we try to get into weeds with the questions and that’s it so taking that format to you guys and i’m ready to get started you guys ready to get started i just like the fact that this is the first time that i’m not the only one who’s totally unprepared they literally couldn’t prepare this time.

00:03:58.55 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, or flying blind. Yeah, I’m excited. Let’s get it going. All right, Tom Miller, the microphone is yours.

00:04:06.41 [Tom Miller]: Awesome. Well, part of the deal with the Measure of Direction podcast is if you submit a question and you want us to, we will give you a shout out. So I’m going to give a shout out right now to my friend, blogger, analytics, grandfather of analytics, as he calls himself, Kevin Hilstrom. Have you guys heard of Kevin Hilstrom?

00:04:27.48 [Tim Wilson]: Kevin Hilson has not responded to my email.

00:04:31.77 [Tom Miller]: Kevin Hilson has mined that data on Twitter. He’s got my favorite DeJoy Analytics blogs of all time. He’s got a podcast himself, which is always entertaining. And here’s his question.

00:04:46.35 [Tim Wilson]: Why do you guys keep emailing me trying to get me to come on your podcast? Is that his question?

00:04:52.41 [Tom Miller]: What can I do to make you stop emailing me? On a way he’s on your podcast too. So here we go. This is a little bit long, so bear with me or bear with him.

00:05:03.41 [Tim Wilson]: I would like it. We need an any five part tweet in proper Kevin Hill’s from fashion.

00:05:11.29 [Tom Miller]: All right, here we go. You’re presenting information to a team of executives. After presenting for about 15 minutes, your results are being aggressively challenged by the executive team. They are offering you a dizzying array of confusing comments. You cannot easily discern the core reason behind the comments. It might be that the executive team thinks your analysis is just plain wrong. It might be that the executive team is not capable of understanding the level of analytical genius you possess. It might be that the executive team is frightened by the course of action you are prescribing to them. It might be that the executive team are a group of disagreeable, insufferable business leaders. Describe what you would do in real time during your presentation to diagnose what is happening and then describe how you might modify your presentation style and or core message given your real time diagnosis of the situation.

00:06:06.77 [Jim Cain]: Sorry, just to be clear, Tom. You’re 15 minutes in and you’ve lost the room.

00:06:12.13 [Tom Miller]: That’s basically what you’re saying, right? Are you talking about me on this podcast right now? I don’t know. I feel pretty good about you.

00:06:18.80 [Jim Cain]: I think it was the question.

00:06:21.50 [Tom Miller]: Presenting your 15 minutes in 15 minutes in and you’ve got a cold room and they are executives.

00:06:27.27 [Jim Cain]: So this has happened to me before. And frankly, when you’ve lost the room and the room is senior executive, you’re not getting it back. because they probably talked about it before you came in. There’s probably a significant amount of perceived bias against the work and you can’t sell something no one wants to buy. So when that has happened to me in the past, I basically just put down the mouse. I state in my experience, it seems like I’m in a place where I’m not adding the right kind of value and figure out what it takes to earn the right to present analysis that will be listened to. Because it doesn’t mean anyone’s stupid and it doesn’t mean anyone’s wrong. Because when you’re dealing with a group of executives, you’re dealing with politics and bias and budgets and water coolers and things that you can’t control. So I just put a fork in it at that 15 minute mark and I say, I tried to do this to allow you to do that. And we’re not running in parallel. So where did it break so I can go back and try again? And normally those kinds of meetings are scheduled for 90 minutes. And at that 15 minute mark, I need to have about a 15 or 20 minute additional meeting. So I don’t go, we’re going to stay in here for the next remaining time. I go, for the next 15 to 20 minutes, you’re going to tell me why you stopped listening. I’m going to go back to the well. We’re going to come back again. You guys get a free hour in your day to play Racquetball or look at Bloomberg or whatever the hell it is you do. And we try and win again. Because if you don’t acknowledge that you’re not adding value and learn what you need to learn for the reset, you’re just going to spend five months of work for zero minutes of value, you know?

00:08:04.07 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, I thought I was I was thinking the same thing like the last thing to do is just to plow through like that that I’ve watched the No, no, no, let me just keep going through my slides and that’s it. That’s absolutely not it So my one add to that so I think the same thing standing up saying this isn’t working I’m not pointing fingers at anyone. I mean, well, yeah not getting defensive But acknowledging that this is there’s clearly a misalignment here and then that next 15 minutes the key is you’ve got to walk out knowing with what. Really understanding what your next steps are because in some cases you might not get another shot but if you are going to get another shot you. damn well better be crystal clear what it was that went awry and how to follow up. So I think that’s immediately going into the mode of I need to have an action item coming out of this and I need to make sure that my action item is the right one and that in this entire room that everyone is clear on what I’m going to do next and then apologize for the situation and let them get on with their day.

00:09:10.85 [Jim Cain]: Sorry, I’d follow up Tim’s follow up with a Double follow up follow up squared and that’s the other thing that you need to accomplish is to because you may have lost and you need to regain a phrase I use a lot which is trusted advisor. So if you walk out of that room and they go well nerd failed. I guess we have to have another meeting. Like you need to walk out of there with the people in the room acknowledging you didn’t kick it through the posts this time, but that person is an expert and they will come back properly next time or else you will lose the room and you probably won’t get back into it.

00:09:43.92 [Tom Miller]: To the trusted advisor idea, I think that if you’re walking into a room and you’re challenging someone’s position, then you’ve already failed. It’s like you’ve lost the meeting before you even begun it. And in order to be an effective communicator, especially to executives within a meeting, you need to pre-gain Meeting skills you know Kevin talks here about some meeting skills reading the room diagnosing what’s happening modifying your presentation you know that’s great you know those are good skills to have but. Pre-meeting skills are also important well you have a preview but that’s the key.

00:10:18.95 [Tim Wilson]: I was thinking like we’re not going to go into consultant mode and say you know how you solve that you hop in a time machine and go fix it because that’s definitely like don’t like don’t get to that spot in the first place like usually if you get to that spot.

00:10:30.23 [Michael Helbling]: I guess that’s right. Don’t go stealing my answer because that’s exactly what I was going to say because there’s two things that were happening before the meeting. that are going to hopefully save you from that situation. One is you’re going to walk through that analysis with other people on your team and they’re going to shoot at full of holes before you ever go in there so you can identify all the gaps and fix them. The second is, and depending on how important the recommendation is, you pre-align along every executive chain you can find to let everybody know what recommendations about to be made, and everyone’s feedback has already been incorporated, and you just blaze through it and get the decision made. The executive meeting is probably not the place to spring brand new ideas on executives.

00:11:17.70 [Tom Miller]: The phrase, don’t shoot the messenger, is a cliche, but the reason why it’s cliche is because messengers get shot all the time, right?

00:11:26.30 [Tim Wilson]: It’s easy to say, well, the easiest thing to do is not get in that situation by doing your upfront work.

00:11:31.83 [Michael Helbling]: First, so let’s say it happens. So then you just, you pause, you jail your inner Kevin Hillstrom, and then you look around and you’re like, okay, and then you probably do what Tim and Jim just said to do, which is like, okay, what should we be doing instead of this? Cause it’s obviously it’s not the right direction.

00:11:50.50 [Jim Cain]: The other point I’d add, by the way, and I have seen very good analysis turned to shit at speed by people that don’t know how to run a meeting. And I’m sure everyone listening today has been in two meetings today that were an epic waste of time. And an analyst needs to know how to run a meeting. And if you get in a room and the combined salary time for that room, it’s like a $6,500 hour for the business. And you don’t have an agenda. You don’t have structure. You don’t have pre-structured deliverables. You’re gonna piss them all off, they’re not gonna listen anyways. And that’s part of that trusted advisor thing, but learning to run a meeting is as important as learning PowerPoint as far as I’m concerned.

00:12:33.35 [Michael Helbling]: There you go.

00:12:34.91 [Tom Miller]: Awesome. All right, question two. Jim Stern, I think you guys might know him. Jim Stern of the Emetric Summit, author, agent provocateur. All right, nice guy. Yeah, at Jim Stern on Twitter, asks, What’s the most exciting over the horizon method or technology that you’re keeping an eye on? You can pass it if you want.

00:13:00.15 [Michael Helbling]: I think it’s a really great question.

00:13:03.01 [Tom Miller]: I do too.

00:13:04.60 [Jim Cain]: I think real doll analytics is really going to change the way people look at intimacy.

00:13:12.07 [Tim Wilson]: So I will sound a little bit like a suspected drum I’ll be beating throughout this year and it’s a little weird to refer to a technology that’s 20 plus years old as over the horizon but I think are or call it the broader genre and in time you can probably more eloquently state it. I think I was listening to an episode of the data stories podcast with Hadley Wickham and he was commenting on the like explosive growth of use of R and you know he’s saying there used to be this tiny little group of people and now it just seems like people all over the place are using it and looking around our industry I see a lot of people using it talking to actually Jim Stern when he was on and commenting about, it kind of got me thinking how something that might be mislabeled machine learning could actually be, you know, getting out of the web analytics interface, getting out of Excel, getting out of Tableau and saying, let’s put some math on this stuff and not rely on the web analytics tools to do much more than stitching together the sessions and collecting the data and using more powerful tools and kind of, so to me, I think that’s where I’m excited that we can start to say, oh, I found a bunch of correlations. And as an analyst, I looked at them and 80% of them didn’t surprise me or I couldn’t do anything with, but the other 20% sent me down a path of a meaningful, actionable analysis. So that’s, that’s to me. And I look around how much in the, the chatter in our industry, how many people are talking about it for an emerging technology are certainly is very old.

00:14:52.48 [Michael Helbling]: And that is great. It’s finally getting its due. I couldn’t agree more.

00:14:56.56 [Tim Wilson]: Over the horizon is the adoption within our industry.

00:14:58.71 [Michael Helbling]: It’s the adoption. So talking about new stuff, now, analysis workspace in Adobe Analytics has been out for about six, nine months or whatever. But it’s gotten is getting better. They’re updating it pretty regularly. And I think it’s becoming a more and more central way of using Adobe Analytics to do analysis. So I think that’s one for digital analytics people.

00:15:23.74 [Tim Wilson]: First time I’ve ever read business users like really getting in and digging in the data in Adobe is with the analysis workspace.

00:15:30.58 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, it’s pretty slick stuff. The other one that I’m pretty bullish on is Domo. I think there’s a real opportunity for that tool to become something very special. And it’s for a couple of reasons, one really dumb and one really solid. The dumb reason is, is because it’s a company run by Josh James and he just does a great job of getting people to buy his products. And so Domo’s gonna be everywhere and there’s gonna be a lot of companies who don’t know why they have it, but there’s hidden inside of Domo some amazing capabilities. that as companies learn to unlock them, they’re going to get a lot of value out of. So that’s what I’m excited about.

00:16:07.44 [Jim Cain]: So I’m not excited about any technology, really. And actually, to go back to Mr. Hellstrom’s question, I think there’s more than enough tech, and there has been for quite some time. And I think you’re going to start seeing an amalgamation of tech. So you’re going to start seeing analytics and content management tools start to merge together. You’re going to see BI tools and digital analytics tools start to merge together. The big thing for me is actually, again, per Mr. Hillstrom’s question, you’re going to start to see analytics be a first class item in the boardroom. So people are going to stop buying crap in the next 10 months and start having people at the CMO, CIO, CTO level say, this junk we bought over the last 10 years How do I win with it? And I actually think you’re going to see a slowdown on purchasing, at least on the shiny edge of what the technology space is doing, and more of an emphasis on tactical-practical. We’re certainly seeing it a lot in our practice. What about you, Mr. Miller?

00:17:07.11 [Tom Miller]: You know, where I see, I think the biggest thing that I think might surprise a lot of people is automated user segmentation based on supervised machine learning. I think that’s going to happen. I think that your discussion of R might facilitate some of that. I think there’s probably someone around the corner that’s going to pop up and say, you think you know how your audience is segmenting, how your audience is segmenting on, say, intent. Let’s dump your audience segments into a giant bucket, fire some supervised machine learning algorithms at it. It’s not really how it works, but you get the idea and come up with a predictive model for every user that visits your site, what audience segment they are to be in. Does that make sense?

00:17:57.01 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s we talk about segmentation, but it’s all the way when it’s driven 100% from our instincts and experience, which is good. I mean, like when you say supervised machine learning, you gotta give it some direction, but when you say, oh, I mean, you’re gonna look at what the tool gives me easily, new versus returning, what channel did they come from, a recency of visit. If you actually said, I can take a much broader set of collected data and see which of these kind of cluster and then have my defined outcomes and say which of these segments ultimately get to the same spot and have some similar characteristics. And then it takes a human being to say, and what can I do with that?

00:18:38.55 [Jim Cain]: How can I treat them differently?

00:18:45.22 [Tom Miller]: On the demo front, I think that there’s something there to use a cliche that’s going to crash a podcast, data democratization. I really do think that there’s something to that product that in a lot of ways that has not existed before can bring analytical functions to non-analytical jobs. And yeah, I agree. I mean, I agree with your assessment there. I think they will sell it and it will have an impact on the enterprise of the future.

00:19:16.44 [Tim Wilson]: I’ll just edit that out. Yeah, there you go.

00:19:23.47 [Jim Cain]: You should just beep out like a swear word data democratization. I think it brings.

00:19:32.06 [Tim Wilson]: I’m just, it’s expensive, I’m skeptical, I’m almost always strong.

00:19:40.65 [Michael Helbling]: I’ll get back, I’ll try to start winning you over Tim Wilson after I get through my current clients that are using it.

00:19:51.98 [Tim Wilson]: Wait, are you using it or have a license for it? Just wanted to clarify.

00:19:56.73 [Michael Helbling]: one follows the other.

00:19:58.50 [Jim Cain]: Do you want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge? Because I could sell you that.

00:20:02.72 [Michael Helbling]: Well, if you can explain how it helps me transport data in a meaningful way across the enterprise.

00:20:08.57 [Jim Cain]: Yeah, it seamlessly bridges the gap between stuff. Same as Domo.

00:20:12.60 [Michael Helbling]: Shall we move on? Let’s do the third question. We may only get to three questions tonight.

00:20:18.63 [Tom Miller]: And honestly, we only get to three. We have a backlog. Let’s just put it that way.

00:20:23.63 [Michael Helbling]: Let’s do it.

00:20:24.57 [Tom Miller]: All right. Well, this one is more of a question that you might hear on the Measure Direction podcast. But I think it’s a really good question, just because we will have some theoretical and some practical advice, hopefully. So this comes from Moee Kiss of Datalicious. at Moee M. Kiss on Twitter. Our international audience there from Sydney, Australia.

00:20:49.63 [Jim Cain]: Correct. Was that your Australian accent, Tim? That was terrible. That was old man on porch get off my lawn accent. You kids today.

00:20:59.94 [Tim Wilson]: I think my visa for my next trip there just got revoked and I haven’t even applied for it yet.

00:21:04.65 [Tom Miller]: Okay. So this is this question is, um, it’s a good one. I would love to hear an answer on best practice tips for attributing the effect of TV to online behavior. This has been asked in the measure channel, but a detailed response would be amazing.

00:21:21.03 [Michael Helbling]: Well, first you hire a social media company.

00:21:24.86 [Jim Cain]: Then make shit up, charge $100,000. No one will know any better.

00:21:28.98 [Michael Helbling]: All right, Tim, what’s the real answer?

00:21:35.50 [Jim Cain]: Go ahead. We’ve done something. With the available tools that most companies have, you can’t do it easily at a national level. What you can do is do it at the metro level. So what you do is you get a metro area that is similar to the metro area that you’re doing the TV and radio and print and stuff in. And then you pick certain things that those types of media will influence in terms of web traffic, specifically direct traffic and branded organic and paid. So you take those and then you can build a baseline on historically how much do we get. during this period in both of the metro areas that we’re comparing. And then what happened when the offline media was in play? Now you can use vanity URLs, but they’re bullshit, they never work. But you can use those to get kind of a little sample as well. But again, at the metro level, but it’s all inference, right? Like the thing I like about digital analytics is that if you plan properly, a one is a one is a one, and you can speak to it with a high level of accuracy. Um, when you start doing inference level measurement, like maybe kind of sort of the banner ads that we bought on the side of the highway, what do they call them? Billboards. I do too much digital. Out the home. Out the home. You know, those things probably led to people who most likely came to the website. I hate that kind of work. It doesn’t mean it’s necessarily wrong, but there’s, you know, it’s inference analytics. Was that helpful?

00:23:03.68 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, and I think that’s why everybody punts on this question is because there’s not a good formula for, oh yeah, here’s how you find out specifically. It kind of goes back to, okay, what data can I actually connect and what data can I actually get and then combine in a meaningful way.

00:23:23.05 [Jim Cain]: When it gets us in trouble, right? I mean, again, certain things are 100% accurate and certain things are educated guesses. And if you’re not an experienced web analyst, you don’t know the difference between those two things.

00:23:36.35 [Tim Wilson]: So the question was kind of what’s the impact of TV on digital, right? Just to be clear, because what is the absolute impact of TV?

00:23:43.99 [Tom Miller]: Now the question is, what’s the best practice for measurement of two digital?

00:23:49.00 [Tim Wilson]: Measuring TV to digital. So I’ll give a couple. This will be a little bit like the very first question that one, planning for the creative. I mean, the number of times that ads, and I worked in an agency that it was just, we could sit at the Super Bowl and just watch ads and see how often the TV creative had no thought of how can we extend the relationship using digital. So if your creative doesn’t have, so say vanity URL, that’s one thing, but if you go a little bit farther and say you want to have an integrated marketing campaign, when you have the, oh, and go onto our site to watch the end of this, or go onto our site to configure your own. So I think that’s like one level steps way back and says, If you want these to be related, you need to design them to be related, which means you probably need to have a digital experience that was still a tiny little minuscule fraction of an investment compared to what you spend on TV. But how are you paying off the commercial and giving people, like giving them a call to action that right now or at some point they’ll want to go to? Doesn’t work for all products. But if you do that, then you’re part way there, because you can say, hey, I’ve sent people to do this thing, and I may or may not know exactly when my ads are running. So that’s kind of one half of an answer. Another half, I was really intrigued by what this company called Clarivoy, a little startup, a little attribution management company here in Columbus. And going back a couple of years, what they were doing which was super intriguing to me was they were using Pwik, Pwik, Pwik, whatever, however you pronounce it, right? Open source, web analytics, where you have a lot more configurability. They could get down to the minute or down to the second web analytic granularity, and then they went and had partnerships with the data on the TV spots. And so then they would say, And this almost was more of kind of a TV optimization than necessarily a TV attribution. The more I kind of thought about it was they knew exactly what spots were running on what shows, on what channels, and where, and at what times. And they would then look at the lift in traffic to their site in very, very small, like within a minute or two of the ad running. And that didn’t necessarily say, here’s guaranteeing the value. But that would be even if an ad didn’t have a explicit call to action, you could say, gee, when this ad ran on the CW at 10 o’clock at night, we saw this kind of lift in traffic to our site. When it ran on ABC at this other time, we saw a much bigger lift. And what are we paying for those spots? So that, that was actually to me more of just a, you’re going to spend on TV. Why don’t you spend it in places it seems like it’s more likely to be hitting a market that wants to go find something out. Still didn’t get totally to the attribution. So I don’t think it’s impossible. I just think it takes a little, not a, hey, we ran this TV now, now go measure it. Kind of it’s, it takes a little more deliberate thought.

00:26:46.27 [Michael Helbling]: Right. And there’s also, there’s new stuff that’s coming. So there’s a recent merger between com score and rent track. which I think will turn into, I think, a really cool product offering. Although, tellingly, ComScore divested its digital analytics tool prior to that merger. So they got out of the actual website measurement space directly. I mean, there’s probably a ComScore pixel you can still put on your page, but they’re mostly doing panel measurement. Anyway, it’s an interesting space.

00:27:17.48 [Tim Wilson]: Well, TV is morphing into video too, right? That’s the others.

00:27:20.90 [Michael Helbling]: Well, yeah, video on demand and consumption via the internet is a huge deal.

00:27:26.37 [Tim Wilson]: And that’s actually increasing the need to be able to watch something because you can force pre-roll and you’ve got much better data. So I agree.

00:27:34.70 [Tom Miller]: Exactly. Way easier to track, right? Yep. Yeah, my comment to this question is, if you’ve got a lot of time on your hands and you know exactly what metros are showing what ad at what time, you could conceivably with all the big digital analytics tools programmatically look at, like Jim said, direct and branded search term lift for a brief amount of time post ad view. It would be an extraordinary amount of work to do that. I think the easiest option and one of the most obvious ones is voice of customer research. So, you know, using your voice of customer, leveraging your voice of customer system, however it’s configured to say, how did you come to the site? How did you, why did you come to the site? Did you come via TV, right? Asking that question explicitly. Have you seen our TV commercials even would be a good enough proxy? Now, to Jim’s point, it’s inferential, right? It’s not direct. You’re asking people a question, which is always fraught with peril, but it’s better than nothing.

00:28:40.32 [Tim Wilson]: Well, and I’ll say what’s kind of nice there is they’re already on your site. So if you’re doing ad recal, when you do, when they just do testing of creative and say, oh, our ad recall was amazing. It’s like, well, so what? You know, if I put a very memorable image whether or not it can associate it with the brand, whereas if you’re using Voice of Customer and if you get ad recall and they’re on your site, then that says, oh, the action happened and the ad recall is there. I can infer that there’s some sort of link there. Not just I made a memorable ad, but nobody remembers what brand it was for.

00:29:13.60 [Tom Miller]: Yeah, I mean, I guess the other point I would make is if you’re doing TV, you presumably have a pretty big budget and you probably also have a TV agency, a media agency doing the TV for you. And they’re going to be able to leverage those tools that Michael mentioned, or an addometry from Google, something like that. Again, it’s not going to be a perfect measure. But they’re going to want to use something like that to prove their own left, and frankly, prove their own worth.

00:29:42.06 [Michael Helbling]: And definitely make sure the data says what the executives you’re presenting to want it to say. Otherwise, you end up at question number one.

00:29:50.18 [Tim Wilson]: No, I’m just to choose your own adventure.

00:29:53.04 [Michael Helbling]: That’s right. All right. All right. Let’s, how about this? I got, I got one more. Let’s do one more, but let’s, let’s add a twist. We could only respond with one word.

00:30:06.26 [Tom Miller]: Okay.

00:30:06.64 [Michael Helbling]: So is that impossible?

00:30:10.63 [Jim Cain]: My word’s gonna be so gross. I’m just gonna be nectarine.

00:30:15.08 [Michael Helbling]: One sentence.

00:30:16.78 [Tom Miller]: Yeah, I got one for you actually. I got one for you that you guys can answer with one word and it’s great.

00:30:22.03 [Michael Helbling]: Okay, perfect. All right.

00:30:23.55 [Tom Miller]: Ready?

00:30:24.09 [Michael Helbling]: Do it.

00:30:24.87 [Tom Miller]: So this was submitted anonymously. Why is the conversation around digital analytics so centered around marketing activities? In truth, digital analytics is a discipline that encompasses IT, marketing, and other business disciplines. Is the challenge of siloing a self-inflicted wound?

00:30:44.78 [Michael Helbling]: And my one word response is money.

00:30:47.94 [Jim Cain]: Budget.

00:30:48.87 [Tim Wilson]: Inertia.

00:30:50.01 [Michael Helbling]: Do we get to elaborate a little bit?

00:30:53.49 [Jim Cain]: I don’t know.

00:30:54.23 [Michael Helbling]: I feel like we should now explain why we said those things. That’s a really good question, actually.

00:30:58.92 [Jim Cain]: No, it’s a really obvious question. Why is it that people are always concerned about where the money comes from and how money is made? Why can’t we worry about things that aren’t tied to money? Because money, there. That’s why.

00:31:11.81 [Tim Wilson]: I don’t know. See, I get annoyed anytime somebody says, and there’s a certain podcast that I really like, the podcast that always says, and this is how you advance your career. And to me, like, is that, yes, I personally want to make money, but I feel like When you’re just chasing budget, I don’t know. Maybe I’m still just Pollyanna that every manager is chasing, chasing, growing their budget. And we’re in a death spiral. We’ll never get out of it as opposed to people actually want the company to do well.

00:31:43.41 [Jim Cain]: If you’re not focused on what did we spend? What happened? How do we get more to spend less? There’s still a lot of runway with that type of question before we start talking about customer journey and IT empowerment. Don’t worry about where the money is, just try to get some of it.

00:32:01.52 [Tim Wilson]: dollar dollar bills y’all mo money mo problems well actually i will say if we go back when we talked to gary angel and he was making the point that the startups kind of the silicon valley high growth in a lot of cases seem to be a little more digitally transformed whereas the older companies maybe that’s really where my nurse is coming from that if you design from scratch knowing what how today is You may design an organization and communication great for today, but guaranteed that’s not gonna be the best thing for 20 years from now, but now you’ve built up all the structure and process and organizational hindrances, and it’s tough to get past that.

00:32:44.53 [Tom Miller]: So I’ll give you a troll. This one I love on so many different levels. Here we go. Why is it that every customer analytics job listing that involves the web or apps is seeking someone with a degree in computer science? Google Analytics isn’t hard.

00:33:03.04 [Michael Helbling]: That one was definitely advised. You know, that’s interesting. I don’t know that I think that’s a troll question. I think somebody, no, legit, somebody is like, you don’t need a computer science degree to do Google Analytics. But what they don’t know is you do need a computer science degree to do Google Tag Manager. So there you go.

00:33:27.75 [Jim Cain]: It’s certainly easy to start with a computer science degree. You know, because you’re using GA and something’s busted and then you need to do root cause because IT won’t give you the time of day.

00:33:38.53 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I would say probably somebody that straight up comps I. isn’t necessarily my first choice of who to go after. Art philosophy? Hmm. That’s interesting. Right. Yeah.

00:33:52.94 [Jim Cain]: I mean, someone wearing a wolf shirt covered in Cheeto dust is probably not going to be a world class analyst.

00:33:58.91 [Michael Helbling]: Oh, they’re going to run into that number one question more often. Are you a virgin? I think, I think Kevin Holstrom question. Oh, no.

00:34:07.94 [Tim Wilson]: I think some of it goes back to two questions ago, that it’s inertia of what is this? Oh, the web analyst is in our IT department, and they’re the ones who manage the tags, and the last person we had wasn’t very technical, so this time we need to get somebody with a computer science degree. I mean, I think job descriptions in general, I mean, it’s not just for digital analytics, every job description is too broad with too much of a search for a unicorn, and you want somebody who’s got SAS, or SPSS, and computer science, and a master’s in statistics, And, you know, experience with one or more web analytics platforms. So they’re kind of casting about and that’s it’s preferably all the analytics platforms. Yeah. So the fact is there, there are a lot of companies that are desperate to get somebody hired because they either had somebody who was fantastic, who moved on to greener pastures and that haven’t been able to find anybody to backfill that or they’ve got. ridiculous amount of work to be done and they can’t get anyone in. And I think it’s just kind of a spiraling cycle of we’ve got to get the perfect candidate because it’s taking us a year and a half to get somebody in the door who might fit.

00:35:19.02 [Tom Miller]: Yeah, I mean, that’s sort of where I see the weakness of that mindset is you’re taking a set of people that by their endorsement, by their degree, are in high demand and you’re further narrowing them to a very high demand position, right? And it shows a lack of, I mean, I guess it depends on the position, right? And it depends on the person, but you’re not casting a wide enough net. You know, you’re looking for, finding a good digital analyst is nearly impossible. And to limit the scope of your search to somebody with a computer science degree, I would say is almost in every case a mistake.

00:36:02.39 [Jim Cain]: Yeah, so that the real issue is that organizations don’t have the guts to realize. And again, I think we’re going to spend the whole year quoting Gary. I mean, he was like a gold mine of stolen one liners, but like the cross functional team internally. Every company has the ability to have a world-class web analytics practice right now with an executive sponsor, part of someone from IT, part of someone from marketing, part of someone from finance. And if they took the gap of the remaining qualifications and hired that, they’d kick the shit out of analytics for the rest of the year. But no one’s got the wherewithal to do that properly and on purpose. Well put.

00:36:42.11 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. Yeah, see, what I do is I don’t quote Gary. I just plagiarize him. Nice. Yeah, that’s good. Well, as you’ve been listening, maybe you’ve come up with some questions that were way better than the ones that Tom could get, although those were some pretty good questions. Frankly, a couple of them were hard for us to really get around on and we fouled off a couple of them. Thank you, Tom. That was amazing. I think everyone definitely go check out his new podcast, Measured Direction. It sounds like there’ll be some great conversations that he’s leading and guiding and getting questions from the audience, so it’ll be good to check out. Obviously, we would love to hear from you. on Facebook or Twitter, or on the Measure Slack, which is the place to be. And as you heard in the pre-roll, E-metric San Francisco, a live recording event of the Digital Analytics Power Hour. What will happen there? Who knows? But probably a great idea if you came and found out. So join us there. That’s in April. We’d love to see you. Love to meet you. All right, well, hey, it’s been great. Tom, thank you so much for A, coming up with this idea, doing all the work to get questions from the community. It’s been great having you just hang out with us on the show.

00:38:06.02 [Tom Miller]: Yeah, it’s been great. I mean, it’s been so much fun. And, you know, I really appreciate it. If anyone that is listening to this would like to submit a question to the Measure Direction podcast. The link is bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly.

00:38:22.65 [Michael Helbling]: That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s bit.ly. That’s

00:38:27.01 [Tom Miller]: Oh, you can find me on Twitter at TMLLR.

00:38:31.71 [Michael Helbling]: Great to have you. Thanks again to Tim and Jim for being good sports and putting up with this and having some fun today. I hope you enjoy it as well. We’d love to hear from you. And of course, for all my co-hosts, this is Michael Helbling signing off. Keep analyzing.

00:38:52.05 [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.

00:39:06.16 [Jim Cain]: Hi everyone, welcome to the Digital Analytics Powerout.

00:39:18.62 [Michael Helbling]: This is episode 32. Where are we going? That thing was audible. Whose thing was that? I thought that was so magical. It was like perfect for like that sort of transcendental meditation kind of like everybody focused on. Yo, yo. Oh, come on. Jim, you always stop, right? I didn’t need to, like, I didn’t know you were gonna throw it down hard. Yeah, I was just, you know, I was getting into the beat.

00:40:00.17 [Tim Wilson]: Y’all settle in there, Tom.

00:40:05.72 [Tom Miller]: I’m just trying to get comfortable.

00:40:08.90 [Jim Cain]: You know, I’m like 20 months away from technically being a millennial. It’s depressing. Then I’d be talking shit about myself a lot, which is just unacceptable.

00:40:19.96 [Tom Miller]: I love typing hard.

00:40:23.70 [Michael Helbling]: Type hard, type hard. Yeah, it’s hard.

00:40:27.31 [Tim Wilson]: Doing the sky thing is gonna hurt your audio the most, Mr. Helblink. You’re about to vomit the third place on the audio quality.

00:40:35.06 [Jim Cain]: Thank you, Countess. Now Tim will send you little snide one-liners for the next 18 months.

00:40:44.40 [Michael Helbling]: Skype knows that we are flirting with Zencaster.

00:40:52.98 [Jim Cain]: Did you just call a reskin to beta max player current tech?

00:40:59.29 [Tom Miller]: This is uh, Jim Cain trolling the uh, trolling the form. Who would win in a fight, the hosts of the Digital Analytics Power Hour, or Robocop? Well, let me answer this one. Robocop would obviously win. The question is, who would be Clarence Boddiker and who would be Dick Jones? And I’ve got an opinion on that. I think Jim is Clarence Boddiker. Michael is obviously Dick Jones.

00:41:24.14 [Michael Helbling]: I’m pretty sure we’d be joined by Ron Bergen and his news team after that fight. So I think it might be a draw. I make that joke around the office and everybody is just like, dude, shut up. I’ve never made a fart joke. That’s true. They’re usually open sexual. So if it’s a sexual fart joke,

00:41:53.36 [Jim Cain]: That’s the name of my next band. Hello San Francisco, we are a sexual fart joke.

00:42:01.49 [Michael Helbling]: From Ottawa, which is outstanding.

00:42:07.40 [Tom Miller]: If anyone’s listening to this. Sorry about that. Let’s cut that.

00:42:15.90 [Jim Cain]: He’s my pot dealer, but you know, he’s got a Primack.

00:42:22.17 [Tim Wilson]: Is Tim editing this? I’m here.

00:42:24.34 [Jim Cain]: Yes.

00:42:24.84 [Tim Wilson]: Oh, man.

00:42:26.22 [Michael Helbling]: It’s gonna be a train.

00:42:30.07 [Tim Wilson]: Rock flaggin’ hard questions.

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