Technical Marketing Handbook

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.

The post TMH #13: Take Care Of Your Expertise with Simo Ahava appeared first on Simmer.

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.

The post TMH #12: Missing Motivation with Simo Ahava appeared first on Simmer.

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.

The post TMH #11: Product Analytics with Adam Greco appeared first on Simmer.

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.

The post TMH #10: Communication Struggles with Simo Ahava appeared first on Simmer.

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.

The post TMH #9: Experimentation with Matt Gershoff appeared first on Simmer.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The post TMH #6: Web Browsers with Simo Ahava appeared first on Simmer.

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.

The post TMH #5: Tag Management with Adam Halbardier appeared first on Simmer.

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.

The post TMH #4: Search Intelligence with Dawn Anderson appeared first on Simmer.