There were a lot of books covered on the podcast in 2023 - 44% of this year’s shows were with book authors. Combined with previous years’ book episodes, we have reached the 60-book mark on this podcast - you can sift through them all on our site by clicking on the “books” category on the right-hand menu. 

But I’ve had the chance to read books outside of these, and found even more I’d like to feature. I’m not saying all all biz books that come out are good.  To be honest - a decent portion of them aren’t good at all. But since I set out once per year to make a special show, I felt it time to review some of the business books that shouldn’t slip by unnoticed. 

After you hear brief reviews of these 6 books, you’ll hopefully put one or two on your To-be-read pile. 

Shownotes with links to these books is available on the Funnel Reboot site's page for episode 175. 

There are websites and then there are websites.

Some give User Experience short shrift, slapping together generic templates that look pretty... generic. Others use experts to make interfaces that are optimized for mobile and PC environments, and anticipate what users want and present their content in engaging ways. 

Some with so little security, they’re susceptible to cyber threats. Others invest heavily in cybersecurity - protecting not only themselves, but visitors as well. 

Some sites have clung to technology that’s become atrophied and prone to crashing. Others are kept up to date, and are upgradable as the company’s needs change. Some have a backend that craters when traffic spikes,while others keep humming because of their scalable infrastructure.

Some expect visitors will come back on their own initiative, others use email smartly to coax visitors back.

Our guest is going to show us how to see the difference that well-developed websites can make. He knows how the value of our online presence can be unlocked to  produce experiences that lead to revenue.

Josh Garellek is co-founder & CEO of a full-service web development agency that's spread across North America.

He grew up and started his studies in Montreal, then went on to study at New York’s Yeshiva University.

He did stints in the food service industry and e-commerce before starting  a game development studio, until he and a business partner teamed up, switching it into a web dev company called Arctic Leaf. He’s gone beyond this and started other ventures too. The drive to do all this, he’ll tell you, is probably  rooted in ADHD, or being a natural entrepreneur, or his chutzpah; probably all of these. But after knowing him for over a decade, for questions about what to do with your website, he is THE person to listen to.

Links to all items mentioned can be found in the Episode 174 shownotes on the Funnel Reboot site. 

Today, we’re talking about the future of data with Google Analytics 4.  

It’s been about 6 months since we all had Universal Analytics. It’s good to talk to others who use GA4 to do their jobs, to compare notes. Although GA4 is here to stay, it still has gaps that need bridging. 

That’s why I spoke with Jason Hackenberry, Head of Partnerships from web development agency Arctic Leaf. Prior to Arctic Leaf, he held Digital Marketing and operations roles at Weatherby and Save Khaki United, along with roles in Merchandising. 

What you’ll hear is from a virtual event he and I did in December 2023, on topics including

• How Google is migrating users of its free version differently from its 360 version 

• How to capitalize on the information provided by GA4

• The data  you actually need vs. what you THINK you need

• Tips on finding insights, reporting, conversion tracking and data retention

• New GA4 features that can help your lead generation or e-commerce website.

GA4 is now our de facto analytics tool. Regardless of how familiar we were with the previous  tool, GA4 is here to stay so we may as well get good at using it. 

I’ve got just the person to make the transition relatively painless for us. 

Our guest’s love for analytics was a happy accident after she worked in a company where the sales director was making a move to take my budget and remove people from my department to fund new sales people. The work we were doing was having an impact, and she needed to prove it, show the evidence, and going into a board meeting with a warm fuzzy feeling in your tummy won’t cut it. You need to show our craft in all its creative beauty, but we also need to show the numbers to justify it and continue with our work.

As head consultant at The Colouring In Department, she has completed close to 230 audits now, and has trained thousands of people on GA. 

Joining from London England - here is Jill Quick

Links to all things mentioned in episode 172 can be found on its shownotes page at the Funnel Reboot site. 

AI won’t end up being one thing, it will be present in many little applications - hopefully that will help us in our marketing. But what kind of AIs do we want? Are we looking at the ingredients that go into them? 

Those are the kinds of questions innovations our guest considers as he makes AI models for healthcare and the retail marketing sectors.

Yash Gad is a data scientist, education advocate, and foodie. Founder and CEO of RingerSciences and Chief Data Scientist of Next Practices Group. He earned his PhD from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Computational Biology, Neuroscience &, Biophysics and received his undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins. He joins me from Austin TX. 

Links to all things mentioned can be found in Episode 171's shownotes page on the Funnel Reboot site.

Whenever your marketing is being assessed by an analyst, they will use one of two approaches. 

The first is called Multi-touch attribution, which takes a customer who’s made a purchase decision, then puts weights on the touchpoints they had on various channels (Google calls their model ‘Data-driven attribution”) on the way to that point, to say which touchpoints were most influential. 

The other approach they may use is Media Mix Modeling. From what previous podcast guest Kevin Hartman told me about MMM, it’s a ‘tremendous undertaking.’  It involves collecting and analyzing historical data in different geographies at different times of the year: sales figures, both legacy and digital marketing channels, and external factors like economic indicators and even weather. It has its own jargon: Incrementality, ratios, betas, impact on objectives. Then there’s the math. It uses regression methods, both linear and non-linear, Frequentist vs Bayesian statistics. 

I get so overwhelmed with these modeling solutions, it’s like the old Who’s On First skit. I needed someone who would sort this out for me. 

Our guest has been a consultant in the marketing and digital analytics space for 15 years. I'm currently focusing on helping clients quantify the impact of their marketing efforts using Marketing Mix Models, experimentation, and various attribution methodologies.

He is so passionate, he started a newsletter called MMM Hub

He graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a Masters degree in Information Technology, focused on Business Intelligence & Data Analytics.

Jim is great at showcasing other people in the analytics community -He truly believes that all of us are smarter than any one of us. He, along with Simon Poulton, co-host the MeasureUp podcast. 

He talked with me from his home in Pittsburgh. Let’s meet Jim Gianoglio.

Links to everything talked about in the show is found on the show's page at https://funnelreboot.com

You did everything just the way you were told. 

You took the tags the free tools gave you and installed them on your site, you configured platforms and poured over their reports, you connected the systems and even hired developers to hook everything up to a database. And yet, you have little value to show for all the work you’ve put into your company’s analytics 

You feel the analytics platforms are backing away from their responsibility to streamline all this. Instead, the answer from the largest of the bunch, Google, is they’ll hold onto your data if you use their newest tool, BigQuery, and pay them money to store your data …or is it their data… on it. 

The bad news is summed up in a 2023 book whose euphemistic name is “You’re data is flawed”- don’t want to get an explicit rating for using the actual name 

It was written by someone who empathizes with our situation and who lays out in the book the steps needed to generate positive financial returns for our analytics investment.    

Our guest Mark McKenzie started his career in London, but moved in 2014 to sunny New Zealand to work for a data-focused digital agency. That led to him founding and growing an analytics firm that served clients locally and in the UK, Australia, and the US. Following the sale of that firm in 2022, he moved with his family back to the not-so-sunny UK.  where he’s consulting with  on digital analytics

His focus on analytics can be seen through his volunteering at events such as ‘MeasureCamp’ and ‘Web Analytics Wednesdays.’ Let’s talk with Mark McKenzie.

Chapters & Timestamps:

2:26 Admitting our data is f_____ed

10:22 Prior to fixing data, must treat it as an asset

39:29 Fixing data we keep internally

54:47 The book and Mark's contact info

Links to all people and entities names are in show number 169's page on the Funnel Reboot site. 

Memes act as our collective memory’s transportation system. The instant they are seen or heard, our minds hop to whatever emotion the meme conveys. The use of this brain-hack is as scary as it is impressive.

Memes rarely come to us via broadcast media. Instead, they spread organically online. Most of the original uses for these have faded, while the internet has collectively assigned them new meanings. 

Our guest was so interested in memes that he came out with a book in 2023 called Marketing Memetics  to explain all that marketers must consider when using them. 

Mike Taylor shares content on wider marketing topics, such as AI & prompt engineering, which O'Reilly has commissioned him to write a book that’s due to come out in 2024. Experimentation is also a passion; he’s run over 8,000 CRO experiments, and he shares the insights he gets on his social channels, and  in courses he has on LinkedIn Learning and udemy. 

His love of learning & teaching can be traced back to his studies at Anglia Ruskin University and U of Nottingham, where he obtained his masters degree.

But in between his schooling and the present, he was working in the marketing trenches, at places like Candor, SumoMe, ShopStyle, Travelzoo and marketing agency Ladder.io, which has grown from its beginnings with Mike and his co-founders to a team of 50 people.

All people and entities mentioned are linked in the episode page on the Funnel Reboot site. 

A trend that’s currently having its day in the sun is Product-Led Growth. According to our guest, it’s a fine model, but our companies need growth that’s based on a more foundational element - advocating for Customer-Led Growth.

CLG begins with creating organization-wide understanding around what experience is most appropriate for the company's best customers. Value to customers is then delivered — whenever, wherever, and however they need it — throughout their relationship with the company. 

Our guest pioneered customer experience mapping while she was leading marketing for the Vancouver-based SaaS company Unbounce.

She has been a brand builder since 2000. In 2009, she embraced tech startups and SaaS, recognizing marketing's pivotal role in SaaS success. In 2023 she co-authored Forget the Funnel and with her co-founder Claire Suellentrop has a consultancy that goes by the same name. 

Let’s talk to Georgiana Laudi.

All persons and topics mentioned are linked in the show's notes page on FunnelReboot.com