Technical Marketing Handbook

Simo Ahava
  • 5.0 (7)
  • TECHNOLOGY
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Technical Marketing Handbook is a podcast series that seeks to explain technical topics that everyone working in digital (marketing/analytics/advertising) should know about. Guests are invited from a wide variety of technical disciplines, such as browser engineering, search engine design, tag management, online analytics, digital advertising, and anything else covered by the vague umbrella of “technical marketing”.

  1. 12/14/2021

    TMH #13: Take Care Of Your Expertise with Simo Ahava

    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 TMH #12: Missing Motivation with Simo Ahava TMH #10: Communication Struggles with Simo Ahava Measure Slack community Simo Ahava’s Twitter Simo Ahava’s Blog Simo Ahava’s YouTube channel The post TMH #13: Take Care Of Your Expertise with Simo Ahava appeared first on Simmer.

    17 min

  2. 11/30/2021

    TMH #12: Missing Motivation with Simo Ahava

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

    28 min

  3. 11/16/2021

    TMH #11: Product Analytics with Adam Greco

    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 Amplitude Firebase Google Analytics 4 Adobe Experience Platform Mixpanel Heap Snowplow Why I Joined Amplitude (Adam Greco) Apollo by Search Discovery Why Product And Marketing Need To Collaborate Introducing The Amplitude Google Tag Manager Template The post TMH #11: Product Analytics with Adam Greco appeared first on Simmer.

    48 min

  4. 11/01/2021

    TMH #10: Communication Struggles with Simo Ahava

    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 Conway’s Law SEO Horror Stories SAFe (Agile framework) Scrum (Agile framework) Kanban (Agile framework) Nexus (Agile framework) The post TMH #10: Communication Struggles with Simo Ahava appeared first on Simmer.

    26 min

  5. 10/19/2021

    TMH #9: Experimentation with Matt Gershoff

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

    1h 6m

  6. 10/05/2021

    TMH #8: Server-side Tagging and the Vegas Rule with Simo Ahava

    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 TMH #5: Tag Management with Adam Halbardier TMH #2: Ad Blockers with Pete Snyder EasyPrivacy list AppTrackingTransparency framework App Store privacy policy The post TMH #8: Server-side Tagging and the Vegas Rule with Simo Ahava appeared first on Simmer.

    22 min

  7. 09/20/2021

    TMH #7: Browser Tracking Protections with Simo Ahava

    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 WebKit blog: Intelligent Tracking Prevention WebKit blog: Full Third-Party Cookie Blocking and More Tracking Prevention In WebKit WebKit blog: Introducing Storage Access API WebKit blog: CNAME Cloaking and Bounce Tracking Defense WebKit blog: Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.1 TMH #2: Ad Blockers with Pete Snyder Improving Tracking Prevention In Microsoft Edge Privacy Sandbox CookieStatus.com Google’s Consent Mode The post TMH #7: Browser Tracking Protections with Simo Ahava appeared first on Simmer.

    24 min

  8. 09/07/2021

    Web Browsers with Simo Ahava

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

    35 min
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About

Technical Marketing Handbook is a podcast series that seeks to explain technical topics that everyone working in digital (marketing/analytics/advertising) should know about. Guests are invited from a wide variety of technical disciplines, such as browser engineering, search engine design, tag management, online analytics, digital advertising, and anything else covered by the vague umbrella of “technical marketing”.

Information

  • Creator
    Simo Ahava
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    13
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2021 Simo Ahava All Rights Reserved
  • Show Website
    Technical Marketing Handbook