#033: Winning with Analytics

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 [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.

00:00:26.16 [Michael Helbling]: Hi everyone, welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. This is Episode 33. You might wonder, why do we get these sweet gigs? Why do people listen to us on this podcast? Well, because we’re winners. That’s why when it’s time to do analytics, we do the real talk in the DJ Khaled sense, the cloth talk. Don’t know what this is. Be like us and DJ Khaled and come along for this episode.

00:00:55.36 [Tim Wilson]: Let me bring in my homies, Tim Wilson from Analytics Demystified, who has been frantically googling that entire intro to try to figure out what the hell we’re talking about.

00:01:06.04 [Michael Helbling]: And Jim Cain from Ottawa, the mean streets of Ottawa.

00:01:12.03 [Jim Cain]: I don’t want to go to the cold, hard streets of Ottawa, Canada.

00:01:18.65 [Tim Wilson]: All right, so we’ve got… They’re paved up there, so they’re actually really hard now. Well, no, the ground freezes. The ground freezes, yeah. We’re into March, but still frozen. It’s more permafrost.

00:01:28.96 [Michael Helbling]: We haven’t hit the two weeks of permafrost. Yeah, the frozen tundra. So yeah, this is an exciting show. We’re going to do a little something special where we’re throwing the show.

00:01:41.53 [Tim Wilson]: Don’t tell out the window. We’re telling them it’s going to be exciting. That’s right. Let’s raise that bar as high as we can. Never mind.

00:01:48.44 [Michael Helbling]: This show is probably going to be terrible. There you go. The deal Larry David SNL intro. So we’re going to throw out some approaches to analytics problems, and then we’re going to kind of talk about how we would approach it and what we would do in that situation. So we’re going to shoot out some scenarios. Jim Cain’s going to lead us off and we’re going to problem solve right here. All we do is win.

00:02:20.19 [Jim Cain]: All right, scenario number one. How did you win, Jim Cain? This is not a actual scenario that we’ve gone through at napkin, but it’s a fairly standard one.

00:02:31.88 [Jim Cain]: You know an agency that has gone through this scenario. I have no direct experience with this scenario.

00:02:36.11 [Jim Cain]: A train is leaving New Jersey going 45 miles per hour and in the opposite direction. All right, so you were brought cold into a conference call with a CMO and a CIO of a billion-dollar retailer. They proceed to tell you that they aren’t satisfied with their web performance data from their internal reporting and BI, which is what the senior leadership team had been using historically. They’re aware they have a web analytics tool, but they’ve never looked at it before. They ask what you could do to support them in the next 30 days to start a proper analytics practice.

00:03:08.96 [Tim Wilson]: Do they ask about a proper analytics practice or do they say, what can you do in the next 30 days to deliver insights? They need you to dive into the data and deliver some insights.

00:03:18.79 [Jim Cain]: Just a couple clarifying questions. Two years ago, no one would say analytics practice. And per our discussion for the predictions episode, we’re being asked that on purpose a lot now. Like not just give me some good.

00:03:35.68 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, because I popularized the term. This is the listenership of this podcast. Analytics Practice Lead. That’s me. You’re welcome.

00:03:46.62 [Tim Wilson]: Wow, our host tonight has brought a double dose of hubris to the table.

00:03:53.87 [Jim Cain]: Could you please help me with my business?

00:03:56.11 [Michael Helbling]: All right, so billion dollars, only a billion or a little more or a little less. They don’t really know their days. Well, I mean, because, you know, our client list kind of starts at $2 billion to, you know, I wouldn’t know some of the problems. No, I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding. We would gladly take a client making $500 million a year. All right. And then what do they sell or like pick a?

00:04:29.99 [Tim Wilson]: So beyond having a shopping cart, you want like a vertical?

00:04:33.00 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, that’d be great. Well, if they have a shopping cart, even that in of itself narrows it down to- It does.

00:04:38.71 [Michael Helbling]: But I mean, you know, we could be talking hammock or slammer, you know, $50,000 hot tub boats.

00:04:43.07 [Jim Cain]: Let’s just stay what they have a shopping cart, and if there’s a particular category that you want to use in your example, just give her.

00:04:49.70 [Michael Helbling]: Cool. Sounds great. All right, Tim, how would you solve this problem?

00:04:54.50 [Tim Wilson]: Well, this reminds me of maybe not billion dollar, maybe not retailer shopping cart. I tend to head into these things and feel like a lot of times the what is being requested is not really what’s needed. So maybe that is sounding big time like a consultant. But if you’re a retailer, typically your web analytics tool is not your system of record. So I would definitely want to probe a little bit and figure out why they’re not satisfied with their web performance data. I would want to know what, I don’t know, this to me feels almost like a strategy type engagement, which is something we do. Like how do we get on the path of selling our services. I don’t know. Where would you start? I’m going to punt because I can’t… These sorts of things come in and I probably half the time run for the hills because I have one or two conversations and I’m like, your expectations are not realistic and you are not receptive to any aspect of is your data clean? What are you expecting to get? What can you get in 30 days? What are you going to put behind it in the way of people? Do you have an in-house analyst who’s going to ramp up and learn this stuff? So I often run for the hills with these sorts of things because it smells a little funny to me. All right. So Tim Wilson would turn down the business. Uh, I was not going to start like you can’t say that Jim throws out a scenario and then just so I didn’t answer the question. I thought Jim would throw out the scenario and then give his, uh, oh, well, let’s let’s start with. Okay. So here’s a couple of thoughts.

00:06:42.88 [Michael Helbling]: One is in 30 days, there’s not a lot that you can accomplish to restore their faith in the data to be able to start making decisions with it. So really you’re looking for more quick hit sort of incremental achievements that can get them on a path. But the first thing you need to understand is sort of where are they at from a budget perspective? Because you could spend a lot of money in 30 days, or you could spend a little bit of money, but you got to understand sort of what you’re playing with, because that will dictate kind of what you try to do first, right? And then let’s say, for instance, they have a very small budget right now, but maybe a bigger budget in the future, next fiscal year, something like that. So no money now, but some money later. So then I would say, okay, well, let’s start small with something like an audit to figure out what data they’re collecting currently, where their gaps are, and then fix some of those things. Maybe layer in a little tag management system to make things more efficient.

00:07:47.44 [Tim Wilson]: Well, maybe the fundamental premise, and just because of recent goings on in the industry, like shy about the fact that, squeamish about the fact that the three of us are all kind of consultants analytics agencies and it’s you are brought into a conference call and there’s part of me feels like what if I’m internally what if I’m brought in because I’m an analyst internally and I’m doing this halftime and the CMO and CIO say hey we need to do more with web analytics Part of it does come down to the basic people process technology of even if you have a Web Analytics tool and you’re not aware that you have it and you’re not using it, chances are the data in it is limited and possibly really dirty. So you very likely could say in 30 days, all we’re going to do is figure out that the data in your web analytics tool is crappier than the data in your system of record that is crediting the site. There’s a people part that says, if you want to stand up a proper analytics practice and you’re a billion dollar retailer, You can’t do that with fully outsourced or with fractional internal headcount who were the people who were unsuccessful. It’s six other roles in the company. So they’ve been shoved into analytics and your process, if it’s we are expecting people to be able to log into the tool and just get insights, that’s going to fail too. So I’ll agree that in 30 days, about all you can do is assess. And I mean, those are the, and sometimes you throw governance in, although I think that’s kind of one step beyond the basics of do you have people and are they equipped? Do you have technology and is that in decent shape now in a snapshot and do you have any sort of process? And all you’re going to get after 30 days is a report card.

00:09:46.46 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, and I would say if you’re the analyst who already works there, your job is probably something along the lines of pumping out weekly reports that nobody looks at. And if you’re a really, really good analyst who works there, you’ve already quit and went somewhere else because no one’s paying any attention to you and you’re not having any traction.

00:10:03.95 [Tim Wilson]: Well, I’ll say if you’re an analyst, if you’re a really good analyst and you really like the company and you see the potential, you are hopefully automating the shit out of the stuff and you’re carving out time to find ways to deliver that incremental value. In which case, you’re turning around and asking that CMO and CIO, you’re saying, I need to get an hour with you and I need to find out what questions why you’re not satisfied with your white performance data from your internal reporting and BI. I want to know what you think is going on that doesn’t square with that data. I want to find out. So maybe that’s getting to the crux of the biscuit is you want to find out from the CMO and the CIO. Why? And I want to figure out not only what do you not trust? I don’t want to just give you more accurate data. I want to make sure I’m chasing down with very limited resources something that would lead to you making a change. You believe you’re throwing away money on affiliate or you believe that your checkout process is utter crap or something. That’s an easy one.

00:11:12.73 [Jim Cain]: These are the ones that I like. So I think that you guys touched on a couple of things that I would think immediately. And one of them is, and again, whether you’re coming in like cold to an organization you’d never met or whether you’re an internal analyst, the nature of that discussion means no one took you seriously until right now. So what’s your play, right? And I think going in and operating under the assumption that the entire measurement infrastructure is fucked up, You know, and we’ve even had a couple of conversations like this in the last year where they didn’t even have a tag manager yet, right? So they have a critically flawed measurement infrastructure for accuracy and coverage. They have, this is something that Gary touched on that I just, I’ve probably mentioned at every podcast since, but there’s a lack of alignment between silos or between departments to create that working group that lets you do measurement. Like who cares whether it’s BI or finance data or data mart or web analytics. They’re not doing it properly. And then the third thing is that they are probably not generating reports that people like and by reports I mean standardized performance reports. So what I would probably say is within 30 days. we will have an understanding of how bad your data capture infrastructure is. And on the other end of that, like on the direct opposite side and more of a pure business fashion, we will have approved wireframes for a dashboard that both the CMO and the CIO agree would give them proper visibility into performance. So you don’t like what you’ve got now. Don’t worry about the tools for a minute. Tell me what you want your daily report to look like. Do we need forecast? Do we need plan? Do we need ROAS? Do we need your favorite color? And then those two things will start to feed off each other, and then you can work your way towards the middle. But by day 30, a clear understanding of performance reporting and a clear understanding of the data capture infrastructure, you could hand that off and walk away. would be in a position where they could execute.

00:13:18.12 [Tim Wilson]: You were kind of alluding to it. Is there also a clear understanding of what the cross-functional alignment team looks like and who’s on that? Who is your champion? From IT, who is your champion from marketing? What is the cadence of them working together? Who’s the analyst? How’s that going to work? Or is that too?

00:13:41.74 [Jim Cain]: I don’t think it’s ambitious.

00:13:42.81 [Tim Wilson]: I think you just do it on the sneaky. Shoot for in that 30 days.

00:13:45.83 [Jim Cain]: So in order to do the technology audit, you’re going to be passed to the person in IT who owns the deployments, whether they take them seriously or not. You’re going to be passed to the people who own finance data of record, whether they care or not, right? So you’re going to have to talk to and the business will self-identify who all the stakeholders are through the departments that you need to bring together. You just don’t have to go out and say, tell me who you pick for these things. Because they kind of exist. They’re just not talking to each other or agreeing yet.

00:14:16.77 [Tim Wilson]: But there’s a little bit of a risk. I think, and this is one of those scenarios, that if you’re too sneaky, then what can happen is there’s not a recognition and awareness of how things should operate going forward. Like that is the downside of quick hits, which is not necessarily what you’re saying is quick hits. But to me, I’m increasingly finding, I want to have that conversation where it is, this is what needs to happen. If you’re serious about this, then we need to do X and Y. And if we try to kind of grill it, which I’ve been a big proponent of, no, you don’t need top-down support, you can kind of demonstrate and show and kind of incrementalize your way along with, you know, scrapping this stuff together. And I’ve been drifting over the last couple of years to, no, you need to have a come to Jesus meeting and say, you can’t be You can’t halfway do analytics. You need to have a full commitment. And maybe that’s what’s coming out at the end of 30 days is saying, you’re really short in these areas and you’re not going to get this daily or weekly dashboard. You’re not going to have the ability to do this sort of analysis unless you invest in this area and this area and this area. And if you don’t like it, then good luck, you know, knock yourself out. It’s not get one. That’s why I like doing the dashboard design at the wireframe level, right?

00:15:59.95 [Jim Cain]: Like don’t worry about your current infrastructure. Um, because when you have an approved executive wireframe and you have an understanding of all the gaps in these existing deployment, you’re also going to have a whole list of requirements from the executive team for data that doesn’t even exist in the deployment yet. So day 31, you can spin off a project plan to fix the infrastructure and evolve it to capture the data to power the dashboard for the CMO. And to pull that off, you’re going to have to have every stakeholder you met in that first 30 days be an active participant. So I’m not saying sneaky forever. I’m just saying you don’t need to make stakeholder identification and building an internal task force like the first thing you do because people hate that shit.

00:16:45.37 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah. Yeah. Great. I got you. Yeah, but you bring them in organically over the course.

00:16:50.16 [Jim Cain]: It’s finding out what people really want and where you really are. And then you’re in a position where people will come a lot more willingly, I think. Interesting.

00:17:02.09 [Tim Wilson]: So that’s the big strategy audit. Contact Tim at analyticsdemystified.com. He will put you in touch with John Lovett to conduct a strategy audit. Why are we doing this show? But the question of the show. The whole squeamish about this one.

00:17:20.32 [Michael Helbling]: It’s a concept, I guess. It feels weird. I don’t think so, because I really do think that.

00:17:25.81 [Jim Cain]: And this touches nicely on some of the stuff that Leah’s trying to support as well with her podcast. Analysts don’t get access a lot, and when they do, they tend to blow it. And so, you know, we have approaches from consulting land, but I think everything I said pertains 100% to an internal analyst. Right? The CMO does not give zero fox about what the tool of record is. And when we hear that people aren’t happy with BI or they aren’t happy with, you know, like we’re going to try this again with Adobe or Google Analytics, it’s because they hate their reporting. They don’t care. It’s a million monkeys and a million typewriters, right? But what they’re doing, the analyst is going, everybody else didn’t give me what I want. What’s your approach to give me what I want?

00:18:15.82 [Tim Wilson]: To me, it is a different environment when you are inside an organization and looking at it and saying, there is opportunity here. It generally hasn’t bubbled up to the CMO and CIO to say, hey, let’s call the web analytics team and ask them tell them that we’re dissatisfied with this other department, because that would be a little bit of a dysfunction to say, let’s call team X for marketing and piss all over team Y from the BI group and ask them what they can do for us. If they weren’t paying attention to the people before, why are they suddenly doing that now?

00:18:55.64 [Jim Cain]: The reason I made it a big enterprise is because big enterprises are more than willing at that senior level to throw whole departments under the bus when they’re not happy. It’s been 18 months. I’ve asked for X. I have not gotten X. Can someone else help me get the thing I want? Let’s give this department a try.

00:19:14.65 [Tim Wilson]: I guess I feel like I see a lot more of organizations saying, I suspect there is more value here. And I guess how can we get it? Not necessarily a, I don’t know. I get a lot of intros that are, the data is not good. When I go back to my client side days, it was much scrappier from the bottom up where we were trying to say there is value here, but it was completely run through what are our interactions with the business and let’s, every time we interact with the business, how are we finding what we can do with experts on our messy, clued together, fragmented data sources, How can we find a way to use that data to deliver value and kind of worked it from that angle and I left that organization eight years ago and they’re still on that journey and I think they’re getting there. I don’t know. I’m still, I’m struggling with the, maybe I just don’t have the same… Well, and to be honest, when I used to do stuff like that as an employee, I was an annoying employee.

00:20:31.32 [Jim Cain]: So maybe don’t take my advice. I don’t know. But I’m guessing that given the nature of my scenario, you guys have ones that are much more tactical.

00:20:40.63 [Michael Helbling]: Well, the only thing with change, Jim, is you’re just no longer an employee. You’re still a double CEO, but people have to take it. No, I mean, I think the scenario is potentially fine. It’s more just there’s so many things that could impact how you approach it. It’s just really hard to say, like, oh, well, here’s how you do it. And I guess I’m still at the point where, like you, it’s sort of like a lot of assessment and first steps. you can dig into maybe taking a step forward in a proactive direction. But there’s a lot of triage and limb chopping off you got to do before you can rescue the patient.

00:21:26.37 [Tim Wilson]: So maybe if we shift to a more tactical scenario, which is a little bit more at the one-on-one level of a marketer approaches me and says, you know, I own the site or I own this portion of the website and you have the keys to web analytics and I’ve logged into our tool and I’m not really sure where I’m supposed to be looking. Can you dig in and just find me some opportunities and gaps or can you find me some insights, things that tend to sort of make my skin crawl. That I feel like I run into regularly, day in and day out, kind of the one-on-one discussion, a sincere question of, I know the data’s there, I don’t know what it’s telling me, the analyst is the expert, dear analyst, can you tell me something that will help me drive my business? And since Jim got to throw his out and then not have to chime in for until I was done rambling on how I would address that, I’ll throw that to you guys as to how do you win with that one?

00:22:38.03 [Jim Cain]: That’s fine.

00:22:38.95 [Tim Wilson]: And do you need to know the specific vertical and daily, the conversion rate and sector and demographics of the, what department are they from? Well, they own, they’re the, they’re the business owner of the site or a portion of the site. I don’t know. They’re product management. They’re marketing. It doesn’t, they, they’re fucking. It matters a lot, Tim. Well, every organization is organized differently. I still don’t know the difference between BI, marketing analytics, and customer analytics and web analytics, so I can’t tell you what. Michael. If I could go straight, Louis CK, I would die a happy, happy, happy man. Now we’re talking about pop culture references that I can get behind. It’s just a matter of a certain number of drinks, Tim.

00:23:23.22 [Michael Helbling]: I think it’s all it would take.

00:23:24.18 [Jim Cain]: If you want to see us break the gin to Wilson-My mission is to see that number happen.

00:23:28.09 [Michael Helbling]: Visit us in San Francisco.

00:23:29.47 [Jim Cain]: Do you want me to take this one first, Michael, or do you want to go?

00:23:33.16 [Michael Helbling]: You go ahead. You’re a smart guy.

00:23:35.98 [Jim Cain]: The only one that’s more eye-rolling and finding something good is the why did sales go down? Like just those really broad, it could be any one of a billion things. I can’t believe you asked me, but it’s my job. So I’ll try questions and we get them all the time. The first thing that I would say is that something we’re trying to do a lot more in answering these questions, and it’s a little easier with Google than Adobe, but it’s something I stole from our vice president who’s an engineer, and it’s called paired programming. So we’ll actually, especially for certain kinds of asks, and this would be a good one, is share a screen or you know if you’re in the office sit down together at a screen and start to solve together because a big piece of dealing with these kinds of questions is kind of rapid iteration of hypotheses like, could it be this? Nah, hey, what about that? Let’s go a little deeper. Nah, let’s try something else. And so really being able to partner with the stakeholder and A, save a lot of time by trying to answer the question with them quickly and B, using it as an excuse for some kind of free training and development with that person is a really great way to get a quick win.

00:24:54.75 [Tim Wilson]: And I kind of think the, when I think of a quick answer, a quick thing to check, it may still take five or 10 minutes of poking and munging the data, but you’re actually saying you’d sit there, you will sit there with the stakeholder and say, let’s get to the point in the tool together where we have a solid hypothesis.

00:25:15.38 [Jim Cain]: And then I have to go do some heavy lifting. Let’s click on tabs and then when we get to a point where you go, oh, that’s interesting. I want you to pursue it. I’ll take off back to the Batcave and I’ll do the heavy lifting myself. But just getting people more comfortable with the end tool experience, I find this is super valuable.

00:25:32.75 [Michael Helbling]: I don’t disagree with the getting people familiar with the end tool experience, but I think for me that 30 minutes sometimes the tool is a distraction as opposed to an aid because especially if I’m writing our script while while they’re sitting looking at me.

00:25:47.45 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, I mean we’re talking 30 minutes.

00:25:50.42 [Michael Helbling]: That’s, I think that was the heavy lifting he was referencing. I can’t get it to a thing.

00:25:56.24 [Jim Cain]: Again, given the type of question, like if it was a really specific measurement question, I’ll just do it. But if it’s one of those big open generic asks.

00:26:04.67 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, yeah, like what can I do to, I know I’ve got some missing stuff like help me figure out some gaps or opportunities. But I think I would delve into a deeper understanding of what they were doing with their part of the business. in that 30 minutes that gave me a point of view to go in after analysis for them as opposed to spending the time in the tool. That’s just my preference. I think you could see it work either way. I just think the tool could slow you down in that conversation that could be used to kind of root out some useful information about what kinds of customers or segments to go after or types of details about what they do that may guide you in finding useful analysis. So I don’t disagree with the time spent. That’s why I was keen to do this. Suck it, Trebek. So you’re wrong. Totally 100% wrong. Do I get to be the John Roberts here and come down with help link on this one? No. But the thing is, I think there’s multiple ways to do that. And actually, I do know for a fact that going through the data, and I think Google Analytics, unless you have a really custom configured Adobe Analytics implementation, I think Google Analytics is very friendly to kind of walk through the way you’re suggesting, Jim.

00:27:27.92 [Tim Wilson]: You don’t think knowing you need to go to custom conversion?

00:27:30.65 [Michael Helbling]: 21 through 20 let me 29 in here and create a custom Metric and just the default navigation of oh, of course you need to go to a conversion 48 I said you if you if you do a really nice job customizing it which it needs to have that power or that Flexibility if it’s really well done then it makes it really easy to navigate, but I think

00:27:54.97 [Tim Wilson]: I think, but you surface how much they understand their own business, right? I’ve got a client who has a lot of e-commerce business and they have a very involved internal search because they have a ton of SKUs. So they have spent years kind of evolving how their internal search works. And the lady who runs internal search, she knows internal search inside and out and has been sort of tuning and tweaking it for years. And it turns out, yeah, go figure. She has really smart questions. And with her, the questions tend to come in very, very specific. And it is a case where I think last episode, we were talking about the analysis workspace in Adobe, you know, setting up something for her and saying, I’ve set up a project You can go and drag different things and explore this and then watching that enables her to dig in and then she finds something and she’ll say, hey, can you go look at that project as well? I want to make sure that what I’m seeing is what I think I’m seeing. That’s about the closest I’ve come to being in tool with somebody on the fly. I’m intrigued by that. It’s got to be the right receptive business user, I guess, who says, I’m interested in the tool, but I don’t really have the confidence to drive it. But if we drive it together for a while, like you said, Jim, you’re training them along the way. but you’re also kind of rapidly in broad cuts getting to, oh, it’s not that. It’s not where the traffic’s coming from. Nope. It’s not. It’s not capital traffic. Nope. It’s, you know, so you’re kind of rapidly go back to the original question.

00:29:38.44 [Jim Cain]: You were asked one of those big aspirational business user questions, right? Like give me something juicy. You know, give me an insight. Why did sales go down? Big, big question. And

00:29:51.68 [Michael Helbling]: So wait, you’re presupposing we just don’t say no and walk away.

00:29:55.04 [Tim Wilson]: I have pushed back and said, I, I’m going to have to need more information.

00:30:04.90 [Jim Cain]: And it’s not like anybody ever gets to ask a vague question, but you know, to me, acknowledging that it is too vague of a question requires the problem solved to include some training. And so if that person is involved in traffic marketing, We’re going to find some interesting shit in the channels or the campaign data, and we’re going to start there. If you’re in more of the insight marketing, we’re going to look immediately at landing pages and probably subset by device. If you’re in operations, we might look at page load times and 404 pages.

00:30:40.11 [Tim Wilson]: Bull rare. I like that. How much do you do you go in and you ask them to sort of guess what you think you’re going to see that, you know, when they say, when they’re kind of heading down a path of, Hey, we think we’re getting under credited with this media because We think the conversion is happening on the third visit and they’re higher in the funnel. And you say, well, how many, how often do you think that people who are converting have been to our site more than once and get them to guess? I mean, it’s kind of an interesting, with the right person, which it seems like it has to be a person you’ve got some trust built up with. ahead of time. And maybe internally, that’s easier. You’ve delivered reports that are useful. You’ve delivered analyses that are useful. They’re excited with what you’ve delivered. So they come to you and say, wow, every time we ask you a specific question, you come up with a little gem. So why don’t we just ask you the broad question, and we’ll get the hope fricking diamond. And you’ve got the credibility built up to say, you know what, let’s sit down for 30 minutes. and have that discussion and let’s have the laptop or have it fired up on a screen. I mean, I could see kind of a hybrid of what both of you guys have kind of articulated that I’ve got the tool at the ready. We’re having that discussion. I can say, you know what, I’m going to spend less than 60 seconds pulling up a broad swath at that. And I think that could Actually, I’m inclined to say that you’re probably going to pull up something they’re going to understand a lot faster in Google Analytics and pull up something in Adobe Analytics.

00:32:12.66 [Jim Cain]: I found that a lot of these stakeholders aren’t asking that kind of question to screw with you. It’s interesting. They just don’t know the difference between things that are easy and things that are hard for a web analyst. And we can do some things very, very quickly. No, I’m not trying to set anything up, Michael. There’s certain kinds of what a business user would think is really complicated analysis, like, I don’t know, breakdown mobile tablet desktop from New Jersey, from branded paid search in this landing. Like I could do it in like five seconds, right? But it sounds hard and then other types of analysis like find me some high level insights just just give me a direction to go in is really brutal and going through a few exercises with a stakeholder to help them formulate a better hypothesis. I mean it isn’t just kind of training and showing people stuff but it also helps clearly bound the role of how your analyst can be valuable to.

00:33:03.31 [Tim Wilson]: I often find myself having an immediate kind of visceral reaction of, I can’t believe you just fucking through that little Friday afternoon, can you, and it’s this ridiculous ask, and I have to kind of remind myself that yes, I can look at, I can get a question and know very, very quickly. That is quick and easy. Or, wow, that’s a mountain of work. And the fact is recognizing that the person who’s asking it, all they know is they’ve strung 20 words together. And they’re likelihood of knowing whether they’ve asked the most broad generalized unavailable offline sales conversion question, or whether they’ve asked device type.

00:33:46.13 [Jim Cain]: They don’t really see it in the way that a lot of times an analyst actually hears it because we know what data is rapidly available. Get me ROAS on programmatic display impressions. Good point. By EOD. That’s my most favorite acronym right now, Cringolino.

00:34:01.12 [Tim Wilson]: EOD. I do have to say every time I hear a little hanging fruit, I now have an involuntary, but usually a little involuntary.

00:34:10.56 [Jim Cain]: And several members of my staff who were signing emails with warm regards. So that particular, that podcast actually created a little bit of a degrassia action here at Napkyn. Yeah.

00:34:23.99 [Michael Helbling]: little bit of a backlash for you. All right, well, these are great. And you guys are great. Your answers are so smart. And I love them.

00:34:36.17 [Tim Wilson]: In the great words of Tom Miller, if anybody’s still listening to this episode.

00:34:41.60 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. No, I think there’s some really cool things that we came up with. We are running short on time, so we need to wrap up, although I have a scenario, but we’ll just have to wait. The world will never know. Now, let’s do a lightning scenario. Lightning scenario. Okay. VP of marketing walks over to your desk and he says, I need an insight that we can use to make money today.

00:35:04.98 [Tim Wilson]: To make money, can we save money? Drop your display spend. Yeah, drop, drop, drop the non-direct display spend. Non-direct response display spend. Lighting around, no need to play us.

00:35:16.29 [Jim Cain]: Everyone in the warehouse, there I fixed it. Boom. Extra revenue.

00:35:20.64 [Jim Cain]: I don’t even need a tool for that. Profitability.

00:35:29.07 [Michael Helbling]: Oh, man. All right, so yeah, lighting around worked great. Come on, what would your answer be to that one? You know, increased paid search spend?

00:35:40.57 [Tim Wilson]: Well, run it, right? You can check it, right? If you need something today, you should be able to check and say, chances are my highest converting, highest ROAS last click channel could have more money into that. Shift dollars out of the crappy one and into the other one. And it may only be short term, so it may come with caveats. It may not be. That’s assuming that you’re not running fully optimized right now.

00:36:05.24 [Michael Helbling]: I like that one. Or, you know, hey, with the new crazy great technologies, we can have a promotional banner on the home page for 20 minutes.

00:36:13.12 [Jim Cain]: What about turning off the coupon code box?

00:36:16.33 [Tim Wilson]: Well, that’s not going to make you necessarily more net money, but no.

00:36:19.97 [Jim Cain]: Yeah. Yeah.

00:36:22.55 [Michael Helbling]: I mean, if you can change your shopping cart at the same day, you probably don’t have the problem of needing more money today.

00:36:32.14 [Tim Wilson]: I like your, Michael, I like the, you know what, if you actually want to make money today, I bet you can shift spend between channels and you’re probably going to piss somebody off and make someone else happy, but you can quantify it and you can do it.

00:36:46.04 [Michael Helbling]: You know, if you know where demand is coming from, right, and across which channels, and you think you can eke more out by doing something unhealthy in this very moment,

00:36:56.57 [Tim Wilson]: Which could be dropping another email, actually. Yeah. Well, you can end up with an email today, but you may just be pushing an email you’ve already pushed. Yeah. This just did. I gotta go. I got some today wins to push to my clients now.

00:37:14.21 [Michael Helbling]: All right. So this has been great. Do you have questions? Have you faced these scenarios? We’d love to hear from you. As always, Jim and Tim, this has been a good conversation, a little fun, a little bit off-kilter. All we do is win, no matter what. You know, we’d love to hear from you. Thanks for listening.

00:37:34.12 [Announcer]: And for both of my co-hosts, keep on analyzing. Yeah, yeah. I’m wound up. Are we gonna start this thing?

00:38:05.38 [Jim Cain]: We can start this thing, but we do not know what the fuck we’re doing. We should probably discuss it. Okay guys, before we get started, web analytics is it easier or hard to discuss?

00:38:16.55 [Jim Cain]: What was that? One more time?

00:38:23.72 [Michael Helbling]: Self-righteous assholery?

00:38:25.78 [Jim Cain]: Yeah, the self-righteous assholery. Steal off my acronym, motherfucker. I will shiv you.

00:38:35.38 [Tim Wilson]: Okay, well now I gotta figure out who DJ Khaled is. I’ll be back in 45 minutes.

00:38:44.39 [Tim Wilson]: Sing!

00:38:49.32 [Jim Cain]: I’m laughing because Tim’s laughing. That was so amazing. And unable to be heard by anyone ever.

00:39:01.83 [Michael Helbling]: They own the database.

00:39:05.12 [Tim Wilson]: I was screwed.

00:39:07.56 [Michael Helbling]: You’re just fucking with our editing here, buddy. Sorry. Like in 20 years Tim will find this recording like stuck on a dropbox somewhere for a laugh and just throw it out on Twitter and we’ll all just die laughing because we’re already rich and what have you.

00:39:25.71 [Tim Wilson]: Rock flag and winning with Adalytics.

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