Technical Marketing Handbook

Latest Episodes:

TMH #13: Take Care Of Your Expertise with Simo Ahava Dec 14, 2021

It’s time for the last episode of 2021! I’m taking a little holiday break and will return in 2022 with new episodes.

(Remember that if you want to suggest a guest for me (please do!), you can send me an email with your suggestion: simo (at) teamsimmer.com. I’m looking for a (more) diverse cast of guests; people who can talk with absolute expertise and authority about some aspect of technical digital marketing.)

In this episode, we’re treading in self-help territory again. Building and maintaining expertise in any given field is hard until it isn’t. I share some of my strategies for how to keep that baseline and foundational level of expertise strong and healthy, as I firmly believe that’s the only way to branch out to more advanced topics in the long term.

The best strategy? Engage and help others, and make knowledge sharing a reflex. When you impart your knowledge on someone else, the net gains for you are resounding.

Thank you so much for your support. This podcast has been a wonderful journey, and I hope you’ve enjoyed listening as much as I’ve enjoyed hosting the episodes. Thank you to all my wonderful guests, too!

Listen to the episode using the player or find it in your favorite podcast service.

Topics

00:00:00 – Introduction.
00:03:52 – A flimsy analogy between house construction and learning new things.
00:06:35 – Tenets I live by when building and maintaining my expertise.
00:07:43 – Why engaging in discussions and communities is the best way to incubate a solid baseline of knowledge.
00:09:14 – Focusing on problem-solving and answering questions is a great way to structure your own learning, too.
00:10:38 – Make knowledge sharing a reflex.
00:15:08 – Parting words – Thank you for all your support in 2021!

Notes and references

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TMH #12: Missing Motivation with Simo Ahava Nov 30, 2021

It’s just Simo Ahava alone, again. But this time it’s somehow fitting, as the topic of this podcast is motivation.

Over the last four years or so, I’ve been really struggling with motivation, trying to stay excited about working in data and analytics.

I’ve been writing an analytics blog for eight years now, I’m still very active in a million different practitioner communities, and we founded Simmer with my wife so that we could scale up this type of work to an even larger community.

But it’s the actual work with data and analytics that’s got me in a slump.

In this podcast, I want to share four reasons that contribute to my motivation issues. I think they’re familiar to most who work in analytics.

I’ve also curated some ideas for overcoming these motivation slumps. I think they work because, well, I’m still here, right?

Please indulge me in this particularly personal and anecdotal episode. Thank you.

Listen to the episode using the player or find it in your favorite podcast service.

Topics

00:00:00 – Introduction.
00:04:24 – Data as a byproduct and a side effect.
00:09:11 – The drawbacks of introducing data and analytics work to the surrounding organization.
00:15:15 – Silos in the organization increase the disconnect between the ends of the data pipeline.
00:19:17 – The meta discussion and dichotomies within the digital marketing industry are exhausting to follow.
00:23:12 – Remember: Your work matters. You matter.

Notes and references

HiPPO: Highest Paid Person’s Opinion
TMH #10: Communication Struggles with Simo Ahava

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TMH #11: Product Analytics with Adam Greco Nov 16, 2021

We’re back with a special guest!

This time around, Adam Greco of Amplitude graces us as the star of this podcast episode.

Adam is one of the most industrious people in digital analytics. His work with Adobe Analytics (and its predecessor, Omniture) is globally recognized, and Adam’s been instrumental in popularizing the Adobe Analytics platform and making it one of the “big two” vendors in marketing analytics (in addition to Google).

Recently, Adam shifted gears and stepped into the world of product analytics. At first glance, it looks like just a change of a label – analytics is just analytics, right?

Well, not quite. Turns out that the focus is very different when comparing, for example, Amplitude (the company where Adam’s now the Product Evangelist) and Google Analytics.

Product analytics focuses on the product (duh). The uncertainty of the acquisition, on which marketing analytics is predicated, isn’t present in the product analytics context. When collecting data from the product itself, many of the problems that marketing analytics vendors are struggling with, such as how to stitch identity and how to collect cross-device data, are trivial to solve in the product context, where the users are logged in for most of the time.

But at the same time, marketing analytics tools are gravitating towards product analytics schemas (such as the event-based data model), and interestingly tools like Amplitude are taking steps to include acquisition data, too!

Adam joined me on this podcast to discuss all of the above and much more. It’s rare to get a chance to talk with someone who’s seen the emergence, the triumphs, and the declines of the entire, multi-gazillion dollar digital marketing industry.

Adam shared fascinating insights on where he thinks our industry is moving towards. You don’t want to miss this episode!

Listen to the episode using the player or find it in your favorite podcast service.

Topics

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:06:22 – Adam explains what product analytics is.
00:10:48 – Do product analytics vendors mainly compete against homegrown telemetry systems built directly into products?
00:13:39 – Why does it seem like the marketing analytics vendors are migrating to the event-based data model that tools like Amplitude have been running since day 1?
00:16:55 – What is the appropriate balance between having a system that tells the users how to read and interpret the data vs. giving users the tools to do the analysis however they like?
00:20:10 – What is the Apollo project (by Search Discovery), and how is it relevant to what Amplitude is doing?
00:23:13 – Is Amplitude trying to become a be-all end-all analytics suite, handling both acquisition and product analytics?
00:26:50 – Which is the easier approach: marketing analytics vendors becoming more product analytics -minded, or vice versa?
00:30:48 – How relevant is it to figure out the data collection part in these days? Data pipelines are becoming more complex and scalable – does it really matter what happens at collection time?
00:33:47 – Are analytics platforms like Amplitude trying to solve for CDP (customer data platform) use cases, too?
00:35:11 – What approaches are there to resolving and tracking users’ identities? How does amplitude solve this?
00:39:23 – Why has the marketing industry relied so much on third-party cookies?
00:40:48 – Many analytics tools use machine learning to fill in the gaps when data is not available. Is this relevant for product analytics vendors like Amplitude?
00:43:31 – If you could change anything about Amplitude Analytics at the snap of your fingers, what would you do?

Notes and references

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TMH #10: Communication Struggles with Simo Ahava Nov 01, 2021

No, no, look, you read the title wrong. It’s not communication struggles with Simo Ahava. Simo isn’t struggling with communication. He’s trying to discuss communication struggles. But, obviously, he’s struggling to communicate them.

If coming up with a (sloppy) podcast title is hard, then managing communication in an organization is doubly so! In this podcast episode, Simo does a solo run on how communication structures really make or break your organization’s capability to deliver.

Any (recurring) mistake that happens in the organization is typically a symptom of a communication breakdown somewhere upstream. These are often very tricky and time-consuming to locate, so it’s easier to just blame the tool or the individual that broke the thing for, well, breaking the thing.

But blaming (or fixing) the last point of contact is often counter-productive, as it doesn’t address the real cause of the issue. And the real cause, according to Simo, is in most cases a broken communication structure. That’s how Conway’s Law starts to manifest in organizations that are not equipped to deal with communication issues properly.

In this episode, Simo share’s with you his theories about these communication breakdowns as well as some ideas for how to start fixing them.

Listen to the episode using the player or find it in your favorite podcast service.

Topics

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:08:09 – Conway’s Law.
00:10:24 – Examples of bugs and incidents that manifest communication struggles.
00:14:17 – What can be done to fix communication structures in the organization?
00:15:32 – Introducing agile methodologies to the organization’s workflows.
00:16:55 – Daily standup meetings as the instant cure to the organization’s communication ailments.
00:18:37 – Demos to show what everyone has been working on.
00:19:32 – Retrospectives to analyze and inspect internal processes.
00:21:05 – Alternatives to agile methods.

Notes and references

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TMH #9: Experimentation with Matt Gershoff Oct 19, 2021

After the “drought” of the last three episodes, you can finally relax as it’s not just me doing a solo episode. And what an amazing guest I managed to persuade to join me!

Matt Gershoff of Conductrics is a good friend and an eloquent speaker. Above all, he’s so incredibly knowledgeable about experimentation and about statistical inference in general.

All the work we do with data is a subset of statistical inference. We collect data to draw conclusions, which we hope to extrapolate to the experiences and intuitions that we haven’t (yet) measured against. Often this is done through means of passive analysis, which is more related to the traditional “analytics” work done in organizations. Data is collected, and it is mined for insight and for feeding into new hypothesis generation.

The other approach is that of experimentation, where a business question is first formulated, then data is collected specifically for the needs of answering this question, and finally the results are analyzed on the basis of whether there’s (sufficient) evidence to suggest that an answer was found to the question or not.

Matt walks us through the ins and outs of techniques such as A/B testing, the frequentist and Bayesian approaches, and how it’s really up to organizations and the individuals within to make the right calls with how they approach data. No tool or service delivers automatic gratification.

Having said that, I would be remiss to not point out how amazing Conductrics is as an experimentation platform. It promotes transparency and open-source approaches over black boxes and magically produced results. It’s very developer-friendly, being designed and developed with powerful APIs in mind first and foremost, although it does provide a very intuitive user interface for running more traditional A/B test setups with.

We didn’t have enough time to discuss the Conductrics approach, which is why I’m comfortable in sharing this little unsolicited (and definitely not paid-for) shout out to what is my favorite experimentation platform out there!

Anyway, listen to the podcast to find out what trams in Helsinki have to do with understanding the p-value in the frequentist approach..

Listen to the episode using the player or find it in your favorite podcast service.

Topics

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:08:07 – Matt shares his thoughts on experimentation and the scientific method.
00:12:47 – What are A/B tests used for?
00:17:54 – How do you know what type of data to collect, and how much of it, for any given test?
00:23:21 – Should the analytics tools we use guide the users to drawing better and more statistically sound conclusions?
00:31:07 – The analyst should be aware of the circumstances in which the data was collected.
00:35:19 – How to deal with analysts or stakeholders who misinterpret or refuse to accept the results of a test?
00:41:44 – The problem with analyzing the data without having formulated the correct questions before data collection.
00:44:57 – By analyzing the results in different ways, could you change an inconclusive result to a conclusive one?
00:46:50 – Using experiment results for discovery and new hypothesis generation.
00:48:14 – What is the p-value?
00:54:04 – What is the Bayesian approach?
00:56:41 – How important is it to account for errors (e.g. false positives/negatives) in test design?
01:00:16 – If you could make everyone in digital organizations adopt a skill or know-how to help the organization be more sensitive to data and statistical inference, what would that skill be?
01:04:22 – How can people follow what Matt is writing about and sharing online?
01:05:23 – Outro

Notes and references

Conductrics
Neyman-Pearson lemma
T-test
Randomized Control Trial (RCT)
Frequentist and Bayesian methods
Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences 2021
Deborah Mayo: Statistical Inference As Severe Testing
HiPPO: Highest Paid Person’s Opinion
Benjamini-Hochberg Procedure
Prior probability in Bayesian statistical inference
Minimum detectable effect
Matt Gershoff (Twitter)
Conductrics Blog

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TMH #8: Server-side Tagging and the Vegas Rule with Simo Ahava Oct 05, 2021

In this episode, Simo Ahava revisits Server-side Tagging, a topic discussed with Adam Halbardier in episode 5 of this podcast.

This time, we take a look at some of the misconceptions around server-side tagging, especially when it comes to what users perceive to be its best qualities.

Simo tackles ad blocker and consent circumvention, the idea of getting data back, the lack of transparency to what happens in the server, and he also shares some ideas for how to solve some of these problems.

Server-side tagging is still quite new, especially in Google’s offering. Its reputation is extremely fragile, as the temptation to do malicious things with it is pretty potent.

It’s important to share education and to evangelize its redeeming qualities rather than focus on how to get more data at the expense of the user’s right to control their data use.

Listen to the episode using the player or find it in your favorite podcast service.

Topics

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:01:32 – Benefits of Server-side Tagging.
00:02:40 – Example of a problem that Server-side Tagging solves.
00:05:00 – How Server-side Tagging mitigates the issues with client-side tagging.
00:06:30 – The Vegas Rule of Server-side Tagging.
00:07:47 – The Vegas Rule explained.
00:08:43 – The lack of visibility to what happens in the server.
00:10:07 – Ad blocker circumvention.
00:12:55 – The technological difficulty of respecting ad blockers.
00:13:56 – The technological difficulty of respecting consent preferences.
00:16:18 – Solutions for overcoming the Vegas rule.
00:17:34 – The narrative of Server-side Tagging needs to change.
00:19:02 – Does Server-side Tagging solve for iOS / iPadOS releases?
00:20:15 – Just because you can do things in the server, doesn’t mean you should.

Notes and references

The post TMH #8: Server-side Tagging and the Vegas Rule with Simo Ahava appeared first on Simmer.

TMH #7: Browser Tracking Protections with Simo Ahava Sep 20, 2021

Once again flying solo, Simo Ahava discusses the phenomenon known as browser tracking protections in this short but topical episode.

Tracking protections are designed to prevent sites from tracking you – especially across the web but increasingly also while you are browsing the site itself.

The mechanisms deployed by browsers to tackle the problem of “tracking” (a loosely defined concept if there ever was one) are often quite brutish, resulting in web compatibility issues as well as limiting legitimate use cases for browser storage access.

Simo walks you through the difficult mess that tracking protections are, focusing mainly on Apple but devoting time to the other three browsers that also deploy tracking protection features. He also devotes some time to the one major browser that does not deploy any tracking protections at this time.

Listen to the episode using the player or find it in your favorite podcast service.

Topics

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:04:18 – Defining “browser tracking protections”.
00:07:39 – Apple/WebKit tracking protection mechanism (Intelligent Tracking Prevention, or ITP).
00:08:20 – What are cookies?
00:11:37 – Apple’s tracking protections cover more than just cookies.
00:12:05 – ITP reduces the capability of first-party storage too.
00:13:24 – CNAME / DNS cloaking mitigations in ITP.
00:14:12 – Tracking protections in Brave, Firefox, and Edge.
00:15:35 – Brave’s tracking protections in detail.
00:16:45 – Google Chrome’s lack of tracking protections.
00:17:37 – Privacy Sandbox in Google Chrome.
00:19:17 – What’s cooking in the near future?
00:20:53 – Could server-side be the answer?
00:21:31 – Three recommendations going forward.

Notes and references

The post TMH #7: Browser Tracking Protections with Simo Ahava appeared first on Simmer.

TMH #6: Web Browsers with Simo Ahava Sep 07, 2021

In this episode, the podcast host Simo Ahava delivers a solo episode.

Understanding how a web browser works is fundamental to all disciplines that are covered by the umbrella term of “technical marketing”.

Web browser is often the nexus of whatever mechanisms are required by things like analytics, advertising, and search engine optimization. It’s thus imperative to understand, at least on a broad level, the process of what happens when the browser fetches a resource from a web server.

There are so many moving parts to this, and it’s impossible to cover everything in this episode, but what you will receive is a broad overview of everything from the initial network request all the way to the browser signalling that the page render is complete.

We’ll return to many of the topics discussed here in future episodes. But for now, enjoy this overview.

Listen to the episode using the player or find it in your favorite podcast service.

Topics

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:05:08 – The network request and DNS resolution.
00:10:24 – TCP/IP handshake between the client and the server.
00:11:57 – Anatomy of the HTTP request.
00:14:26 – The purpose of a web server.
00:15:22 – More details about the HTTP request.
00:16:41 – What are browser cookies?
00:18:39 – How web servers produce the requested resource (e.g. dynamic templates, static files).
00:20:24 – The server returns the resource to the browser.
00:22:04 – The browser starts rendering the web content.
00:22:30 – The browser turns the elements, nodes, and tokens into the Document Object Model (DOM).
00:23:26 – Styles determine how things look like and how they are aligned; they are compiled into the Cascading Style Sheet Object Model (CSSOM).
00:24:49 – The position and alignment of elements is determined during the Reflow step. The actual rendering / painting of elements is done during the Paint step.
00:25:44 – Browsers use asynchronous operations to help with the limitations of running just a single execution thread.
00:26:54 – HTML files are more than just content. They contain a lot of metadata, too.
00:29:05 – Outro

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TMH #5: Tag Management with Adam Halbardier Aug 24, 2021

This is a special episode for all you Google Tag Manager geeks out there!

My interview guest this time around is Adam Halbardier of Google. Among many other roles, he leads the server-side tagging team for Google Tag Manager.

In this interview, we started casually with server-side tagging, a new-ish paradigm for Google Tag Manager, where the tagging logic is moved to the server rather than kept as a burden on the client.

This then spiralled, of course, to exploring the engineering decisions that come with such an incredibly popular service. We discussed the role of security, performance, and feature design.

GTM isn’t perfect, and Adam rightfully recognizes that. However, I’ve personally always considered GTM to be somewhat different than the other services and tools maintained by Google.

For one, it facilitates data collection rather than collect data in itself. This is all the more emphasized with server-side tagging, where the pitch is how it improves the governance and oversight opportunities for those data flows that would otherwise go from the browser directly to the vendor, unchecked.

Another aspect of GTM is how it’s always been a community product. I’m not saying the community built it, but that the community around GTM has been instrumental in making it a better service. The custom solutions, templates, and guides that are created and shared continue to improve the GTM experience for all users, not just those who pay the money for premium membership.

Listen to the episode using the player or find it in your favorite podcast service.

Topics

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:06:40 – Adam explains what server-side tagging is.
00:08:20 – How important was it to make Google Tag Manager’s server-side tagging 100% owned by the company running the site rather than turn it into a SaaS rented from Google?
00:09:37 – The default deployment runs on Google Cloud, and it downloads containers from Google servers. Is the server-side tagging setup REALLY owned by the customer and not by Google?
00:10:57 – Is server-side tagging a completely separate thing to client-side tagging? Is it complementary, or is it designed to replace web containers?
00:11:58 – What prompted Google to enter the server-side tagging space?
00:13:21 – Do you think server-side tagging is mainly about “getting data back” from browser tracking protections and ad blockers that infringe upon it?
00:14:45 – How do you decide whether to focus on generic APIs that could service all vendors and all endpoints vs. Google-specific APIs that are designed specifically for Google’s platforms (e.g. ads, analytics)?
00:18:08 – Are Custom Templates today the bridge between Google Tag Manager users and the engineers? Is there some other form of “community”, such as what existed back in the day with Google+?
00:20:23 – Do you think there’s an adoption problem with some of the security & trust measures that Google Tag Manager has released over the years?
00:22:14 – Governence is often perceived as a bottleneck to get things done – do you think an organization that is high-governance can’t really run GTM efficiently?
00:23:09 – How do you decide whether to build for beginners vs. for power users?
00:24:57 – Where do you think GTM sits best in today’s organizations? Is it still “just a marketer’s tool”?
00:26:46 – How considerate do you need to be about performance impact when designing features for GTM?
00:29:18 – How do you deal with the increased opaqueness of tracking that’s come with server-side tagging, now that much of the data flow is moved to the server?
00:31:42 – Are there features being designed that could increase transparency when using server-side tagging? Perhaps some type of response mechanism back to the browser that would detail what happened in the server?
00:33:53 – What are some of the big things in GTM’s roadmap for the near future?
00:36:05 – How do the consent settings in GTM relate to Google’s Consent Mode API?
00:36:54 – Will consent configurations be available in server-side containers too?
00:37:30 – If you could change any aspect of GTM at the snap of your fingers, what would you change and why?
00:39:33 – Outro

Notes and references

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TMH #4: Search Intelligence with Dawn Anderson Aug 08, 2021

I was fortunate enough to sit down (virtually) with Dawn Anderson of Bertey.

If you follow her on Twitter (you should!), you’ll know that she’s one of the most vocal and prolific voices around deciphering the operational logic of search engines and how that information should be applied to the industry of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

We discuss the world of ranking and querying algorithms, how SEO and search in general have evolved over the years, and we try to imagine what the perfect organization for delivering solid SEO results in 2021 looks like.

It’s difficult to discuss search engines without having a funny feeling in the stomach of search engineers laughing at us as we try to make sense of the obfuscated, super complicated machine they have built. But at the same time, there’s a lot of things we do know, in no small part thanks to people like Dawn who take the time to dig into the research and in that way try to reverse engineer the mechanisms of this machine.

I’m ever so grateful for this reminder that SEO is more than just about delivering links, or creating wonderful content, or figuring out the correct keywords. It’s an organization-wide paradigm which should be of interest to anyone in the organization, not just those whose job title has the “SEO” word in it.

Listen to the episode using the player or find it in your favorite podcast service.

Topics

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:06:53 – Dawn explains what BERT is.
00:09:20 – Would BERT and similar algorithmic features be something that SEOs should optimize for when doing their work?
00:11:24 – Should SEOs these days focus on academic research as well as the more traditional aspects of their discipline?
00:14:00 – Can you still (or have you ever been able to) progress in SEO by using just “tactics” rather than having a strategic, holisitic approach?
00:17:32 – Are people actually using search in a more conversational way as Google predicts (or hopes), or is search still very much keyword-driven?
00:22:05 – What is passage indexing?
00:23:20 – How English-dependent are these NLP-based search features? Do they work in a multi-lingual world?
00:28:32 – Are there any SEO tools to help make text more crawlable or queriable with regard to the algorithm changes in Google search?
00:32:44 – Is there anything in technical SEO that should be understood or taken into account with regard to BERT, for example?
00:35:35 – What should a modern digital organization look like when it comes to optimizing for search engines?
00:37:40 – Could SEO be the thing that brings unity and breaks the silos within modern digital organizations?
00:40:01 – There are many disciplines within SEO itself – can these work against each other?
00:43:40 – “Just create good content”; has this SEO cliche ever been true or is it today less true than it was before.
00:46:59 – Is there more to search than just content that is crawled and indexed from your site by the search engine?
00:51:52 – If you could change any aspect of search engines at the snap of your fingers, what would you do and why?
00:53:40 – Outro