Funnel Reboot – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Since July 1st, 2023, the world of web analytics has undergone a seismic shift—and if you're still reeling from the transition to Google Analytics 4, you're not alone. In this episode, we unpack what many are calling the 'Armageddon' of digital measurement. You'll hear why GA4 isn’t just a new version of an old tool, but a completely different ecosystem

In human years, GA4 is still a toddler. But it is growing  rapidly and some are giving it a chance to mature. 

Many marketers took their licks in the forced transitioning to GA4 and there are still some raw emotions about how this tool was rolled out. But our guest says that even though change is hard, he guest believes GA4 is the change we didn't know we needed. 

Our guest grew up in the New York tri-state area, which gave him two passions. The first one is hockey and watching people grow up playing the game they love - he’s a lifelong Islanders fan. Working in Manhattan, he also worked a lot with numbers. Over time, he morphed from analyzing financial data to analyzing digital marketing, in tools like Google Analytics And  Adobe Analytics. He built this expertise at industries giants like American Express travel and entertainment’s NBC Universal. Wanting to use these skills without the constraints of being in a big corporation, he went independent and relocated to Las Vegas, where he now gives all kinds of companies insights into their analytics data. 

Let’s go talk to Neil Shapiro.

See Shownotes page for all people and products mentioned in the episode. 

Episode 209

When it comes to initiatives humans undertake, we only need to look at a few to see how they can fail spectacularly. One example: 

The iconic Sydney Opera House came from a competition won by a young Danish Architect. The board who’d commissioned him to build it was told it would be completed by 1963, but things were so chaotic and so behind schedule, he had to be fired. It is truly a marvel of design, but it’s a posterchild for poor projects because it didn’t open until 1973. 

Another example:

Out of a desire to research high-energy particles and potentially solve the fundamental  of physics, the US Government set out to build the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). A site in Texas was chosen, but after 6 years they had only tunneled a fraction of the 88 kilometres, when the project was cancelled at a cost of $2B.

A last example:

In 1998 NASA’s Mars Climate Observer travelled about 200M miles and was about to start researching the red planet. But the software setting its orbital altitude had been given imperial units instead of metric. This error in the code made it come in too steep, destroying the $328M probe. 

These failures are so huge, it’s bound to bring out our inner cynic. It’s natural to pose questions of those leading the projects, like: “what were they thinking?”  

I don’t scoff at the people who headed these projects, because I experienced something in my youth that showed me how humans sabotage missions.

When I was 15 I attended a camp that took us through exercises to cultivate teamwork. I thought I knew what teamwork was; I was not prepared for what awaited.

Two twenty-something Senior Counselors named Leo & Bob were in charge of it. We left the camp which was in rural New York State and drove in a van a few hours away. The van crossed into Pennsylvania, left the highway for a sideroad, then onto a dirt road and finally to a clearing somewhere in the backwoods. It was early afternoon by the time Leo dropped us off, leaving 4 of us and Bob to calmly walk for about 30 minutes, and we stopped to relax in a clearing in the forest.

At that point, Bob stood facing us and told us about this simple exercise we were about to do. He said, 'you are stranded in a forest a few miles from a stationary van which contains food and medical provisions. You have to locate the help, which will signal its location by a horn-blast every 15 minutes until sundown. You’ll succeed in your mission if you reach the van by then. He didn’t tell us what would happen if we didn’t.

All of this seemed doable, until Bob said one of your team is incapacitated due  an injury.' and then he closed his eyes, fell to the ground, and didn't say a word. I’s hard to be to say what the next couple of hours was like, as we tried to find the van,  carrying this 180lb man through the brush. Suddenly, it became important to recall the way we’d come, or how to lash branches together to form a stretcher, or whom among us should decide which way we should go. Each time we heard the horn, we felt a bit more exhausted and acted a bit more panicked, knowing that the horn-blasts would stop and we'd resort to screaming in the dark. The way we interacted with each other in every way, from rational to tense to hysterical. At several points in the day, I was convinced we'd never get to the van. But by some miracle we reached the van just before sunset.

Each of us had time during the trip back to reflect on how we worked as a team. I no longer wonder why people have difficulty collaborating on projects, especially as the stakes get higher. 

My guest also believes it’s our fault that projects fail as they do, and she’s got principles she teaches that make everyone clear on the task we’re all undertaking, significantly improving odds of success. 

She is founder and CEO of Spring2 Innovation, is an award-winning design thinking and innovation expert, as well as a TEDx and TEC/Vistage speaker. With over 25 years of experience, she has driven innovation in telecommunications, application development, program management, and IT, helping public and private organizations shape strategy, drive change, and launch new products and services. Let’s go now to speak with Nilufer Erdebil.

Chapter Timestamps

0:00:00 Intro

00:06:38 Welcome Nilufer

00:10:16 Poor design in showers and on projects

00:20:12 customers' unspoken needs

00:25:07 PSA

00:25:40 Devoting more of our time to communicating

00:28:49 Mistakes stemming from bad Workflows

00:37:39 Is our UX as disorienting to customers  as a foreign language?

00:43:12 AI's potential role

00:47:55 About Nilufer, book

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Episode 200

Podcasts are tiny time capsules, preserving moments of wisdom and insight. Every time I revisit past episodes, I am reminded of how insightful our guests have been. Certain themes consistently emerge, echoed by guests from the very beginning of the podcast to just yesterday. The cost of ignoring these insights is so high that they bear repeating.

Tune in to our latest episode where I share six aspects of marketing that I didn't know when I first started this podcast. Please listen in on these valuable pieces of wisdom.

Links to all episodes that featured the people mentioned are in the Show Notes.

Episode 199

Today’s topic is AI and ML, and though you may think this doesn’t concern marketing, we need to acknowledge how it’ll shift things.

Up to now, marketing was done on the premise that for a given audience shown a message, some  average percentage, would act on it. With AI, we’re now able to look at individual audience members and predict how each of them would act upon a message, and at the opportune moment we could have the message show up to each one of them. Goodbye analyzing what happened with crude audience averages, Hello to using detailed data to predict what’s likely to happen. 

With AI holding such promise, why don’t more companies hand things over to AI? I had thought it’s held up by a lack of technical people who know how to do this, but our guest says we’ve had enough technical expertise - He himself was previously one of those data people, and his expertise wasn’t enough to do the job.  He says AI initiatives are held back by those running business functions like marketing who haven’t made the business case and collaborated with the data people to implement this. 

My guest is a leading consultant and former Columbia University and UVA Darden professor. He is the founder of the long-running Machine Learning Week conference series, a frequent keynote speaker, and author of the bestselling Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die. In 2023 he authored “The AI playbook”

Let’s talk to Eric Siegel.

Timestamps/Chapters:

0:00:00       Intro
00:01:37    Welcome Eric Siegel
00:01:56    Barrier we face isn't technical know-how
00:06:05    Despite a strong start - AI's been slow to spread
00:11:17    Process a business needs to implement ML
00:27:41    building a custom algorithm
00:29:45    PSA
00:52:32    The human-side of the switchover
00:54:03    Contacting Eric

Links to all people and concepts mentioned are in the shownotes on the Funnel Reboot site.

Episode 198

A pretty widely held view in the world of B2B products is that sales has gotten harder, not easier. It’s not that buyers aren’t buying. By definition, buying is something they do. But in the example of software, some sales reps won’t even know they were being evaluated, let alone passed up for a rival’s product. Only the winning vendor knows that that account uses them for that specific function in their technology stack. All other companies are in the dark.  

But are they really? Another way to look at this is that every vendor has information that could be valuable to others. You can find many buyers stacks with products having some overlap but that largely complement each other. As proof, note that lots of these products even integrate with each other because of buyer demand. 

Should vendors consider collaborating with vendors they compete against? Aren’t we supposed to hate the competition?

We don’t have to. A famous example of that was Apple’s announcement in 1997 of the deal it struck with Microsoft. Steve Jobs defended the deal saying  “If we want to move forward…we have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.”

Zooming to today’s reality, It makes a lot of sense for vendors to collaborate as part of an Ecosystem. By pooling their data together with their indirect competitors, they can see internal buying patterns. Those vendors who hitch their data wagons together get around the ‘nobody talks to our sales rep’ problem, because one of their partners already has the info that rep needs. Using this intel helps them come first in the race for their product to be selected to go in the buyer’s stack. 

Our guest today got a Science & Engineering degree from Princeton University and after a stint in the investment world, he dove into co-founding startups. The first was business intelligence platform RJMetrics and the other was cloud data pipeline company Stitch, both of which he saw through to successful exits. 

His latest role is as Co-Founder of a platform that safely shares data among companies for this kind of partner-based selling.

Outside of work, He is a Trustee for one of America’s top centers of science education and development And an improv comedy performer, in a  team that has performed over 100 shows together.

This husband, father of two, is very proud to call Philadelphia home. Let's head there now to meet Bob Moore.

Timestamps / Chapters

0:00:00 Intro

00:03:46 Bob’s thesis on how sales is broken

00:11:21 Ecosystems are cause for hope

00:26:13 PSA

00:26:53 Revamping corporate partner practices

00:31:38 Pooling together data

00:55:06 Contacting Bob

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for Episode 198

Episode 197

Today, we are going to talk about how those of us who sell things find new buyers once we’ve exhausted our own audiences. We involve partners, and we can do this in a few ways. These partners may have high-traffic sites or be social media influencers. We are trying to use someone else's channel to reach their audience, hoping they will buy from us.

Alternatively, we might be the ones who are influential or have a large audience that brands want to reach, so they pay us to be their marketing channel. The name for teaming up like this is affiliate marketing.

Today’s guest came to affiliate marketing through dabbling in online gambling. He watched the incentives sites put out to attract players, and then in 2010, he created a website that reviewed gambling affiliate programs called Gaming Affiliates Guide. This site’s traffic led him to become, you guessed it, an affiliate. Over time, he managed several gambling affiliate sites.

As you progress in this field, you always hit a ceiling with this marketing channel. No matter whether you’re the one needing traffic and paying for it, or the one who has traffic and is turning it into money, everyone gets a headache tracking it. As our guest was deeply involved at this point, getting paid to manage affiliate sites, he saw numerous problems in this industry and saw a way to solve them.

There were already applications that reported affiliate activity, but he saw these technologies' shortcomings. With his engineering degree from the University of Toronto, which had taught him how to develop things, he joined up with partners to create a SaaS tool of their own: StatsDrone.

Having scratched an itch he experienced earlier in his career, he now heads a team whose tool addresses affiliate challenges.

Let’s go to Montreal and hear from John Wright.

Chapter Timestamps:

0:00:00 Intro

00:03:35 Welcome John Wright

00:06:57 Difficulty with Affiliate tracking

00:11:27 Postbacks and tracking methods

00:18:48 tracking dynamic variables

00:23:14 PSA

00:23:54 Tracking affiliate dollars

00:42:13 Contacting John

For complete links to the People, Products and Concepts mentioned in the show, go to the episode’s page on the Funnel Reboot site. 

Episode 196

There’s something we take for granted these days, something that wasn’t even possible a short while ago. Let’s go back to 2008, to the first iPhone, the 3G. What you could send & receive with one, if you could afford the data plan, was restricted to voice, text & small images. That’s because at the time, the cellular networks could transmit at around a third of a Megabyte per second, which went up to 2Mb/second when 3G was fully available. Then LTE/4G started becoming available in North America, reaching 97 percent by 2013. With those data speeds, you could watch brief standard definition videos, and social networks like Instagram & Snapchat began letting you record and send short clips. By the late twenty teens, advanced 4G infrastructure was fast enough, from 12 to 80 MPS, for people to watch 4K videos on their devices, bringing platforms like TikTok along with it. Now with 5G out, lag-free high-def video is available almost everywhere. And if you are a marketer trying to reach consumers, it means that  video must be part of the mix. 

There are still quirks to these platforms that we need to figure out. Some of their ad units include ecommerce options for selling products while the ad’s in front of them. More broad that this, it’s hard to know how these platforms will react to videos you post. They know so much about a user’s privacy, it’s raised issues of which country that data’s shared with. Clearly, this calls for an expert’s help.  

Our guest graduated from San Francisco State University and FIDM with a business degree and started working in-house at consumer eCommerce brands, running their digital marketing programs. After helping brands in every category from skincare & cosmetics to Books to jewelry, she built her own agency team to do this, Pennock, which is named after the rural Minnesota town where her family are from. 

Let’s go to  Northern California where she lives with her husband Tyler and three kids, to talk to Nikki Lindgren.

Chapter Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:03:12 - Welcome Nikki

00:09:05 - Video on platforms like TikTok

00:23:37 - PSA

00:24:26 - Reporting to stakeholders

00:29:59 - Ad campaign optimization

00:35:05 - Contacting Nikki

Links to all the people, products and concepts mentioned in show is available on the Funnel Reboot site’s show page.

Episode 195

We all want our organization’s decisions to be driven by the numbers. Who wouldn’t want to have at their fingertips analytics that accurately show which course of action will be best.  

But doing this takes analysts, and that doesn’t mean hiring them, it means managing them to function well. It means creating processes for them, Outfitting them with technology. Giving them budgets.It's hard pulling this off in a small or mid-sized organization, and even leaders of large organizations must exercise care when creating this. 

But there’s no set-in-stone law that says a data team must be in-house. Another model, managed services works well for IT and it can be used to give companies access to analysts so they can still be data-driven. 

We’re going to explore the outsourced analytics model with today’s guest. 

Throughout his career, he has worked at the intersection of data, business, and strategy consulting. He earned his Bachelor's Degree from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

Following graduation, he joined Cargill as a Data Engineer from June 2011 to November 2013. He went on to serve as the Analytics Lead at Slalom from December 2013 to February 2016, where he claims to have been Minneapolis' first Analytics Hire. 

In 2017, he co-founded DataDrive, a managed service provider specializing in analytics, alongside fellow data enthusiasts.

Let’s talk with Luke Komiskey.

Chapter Timestamps

00:00:00 - Intro

00:02:14 - Welcome Luke

00:17:38 - PSA

00:18:16 - Calculating value of having good data

00:49:29 - The MSP model

00:49:59 - Where to contact Luke

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Episode 194

There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Being honest, doing something differently is often neither better or worse, it’s just different.

- Playing Music with an acoustic vs electric guitar

- Writing with a pen on paper vs a computer. And continuing on that theme, it could be a Mac or a PC

- Programming can be done in various languages

- Films can be made with a variety of filming equipment, anything from an iPhone up to an IMAX ALEXA 65mm

This also applies to what we use as our analytics tool. And though Google Analytics gets a lot of attention, including in this podcast, to be fair, it is not the only game in town. The industry has a second tool,  Adobe Analytics and I wanted to talk with an expert, and to my mind, today’s guest is the person to talk to about it. 

She has 15+ years of experience helping enterprise organizations solve their analytics problems holistically, no matter where they are in their digital measurement evolution or what tool set they use. 

Few can go as deep on pixel implementation, tag management, and data layers as she. 

As a consultant at boutique agency 33 Sticks, she helps clients streamline the implementation process and get more value out of their tools, decreasing costs and headaches for developers, project managers, and analysts alike. On the side, she’s used her background as a developer to create free industry tools like the Adobe Analytics Beacon Parser and the mobile app PocketSDR. 

She loves helping and collaborating with others in the industry, and most days can be found in #measure slack or twitter doing just that.

Let’s go to the Atlanta-area to talk with Jenn Kunz 

Chapter Timestamps

00:00:00 - Intro

00:02:21 - Welcome Jenn

00:03:37 - How Adobe's used by larger orgs

00:20:55 - PSA

00:21:32 - Navigating the Interface

00:41:48 - How to contact Jenn

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Episode 193

Those of us in the digital economy think a lot about growing our business, but we don’t think as much about the tech that enables customers to interact with our business. When our sites don’t run smoothly or aren’t available, our customers suffer and it stops working as our sales and marketing engine. Terms for these episodes: the site crashed or it croaked, give us a perception that sites are either alive and well or completely dead, when its health really resembles our own human health. Meaning, a website can give off  warning signs that can be diagnosed and treated before anything really bad happens. It doesn’t take invasive tools to catch these; monitoring services that run without any special site access can detect issues.  These tools that take a site’s pulse are also good to gauge the site’s fitness - its ability to handle business growth. 

Our guest has always called Ottawa Canada his home. He has also always had an entrepreneurial spirit, supporting the local startup scene since the 2000s, which is where I first met him.

After earning his computer science degree, he began his career working at local web tech firms. A stint at a design agency stoked his enthusiasm for websites, and in 2010 he joined the parent company of Internet Service Provider and web host Rebel.com, and domain registrar Internic.ca.  

He took on the role of CEO for both companies, where he saw first-hand how the internet fueled communication and value-creation. In 2013 he took on additional responsibility as a Director of the not-for-profit Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), where for the last decade more or less he has staunchly pushed for the internet to be used as a force for good in Canada.

Workwise, after stepping away from Rebel and Internic, he returned to his technical and startup roots. Based on his observation that while websites were getting easier for non-experts to build, they could make mistakes hurting their user’s experience of their site with equal ease. That led him to launch ONIK, a product that monitors website fitness. 

Let’s go talk with Rob Villeneuve

Chapter Timestamps

00:00:00 - Intro

00:03:06 - Welcome Rob

00:09:19 - Monitoring site health

00:29:09 - PSA

00:29:59 - How much access is needed to monitor a site

00:41:01 - Holding different patrs of site to different standards

00:42:12 - How alerts help

00:45:21 - Knowing when enough is being measured

00:49:50 - How large sites do monitoring

00:53:09 - About ONIK.IO, how to contact Rob

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.