Philippe Gamache 0:00 What's up guys, welcome to the humans of martec podcast. His name is John Taylor. My name is Phil ganache. Our mission is to future proof the humans behind the tech so you can have a successful and happy career in marketing Philippe Gamache 0:25 was up everyone today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Adam Greco field CTO and product evangelist at amplitude. Adam is one of the leading voices in digital analytics. He's managed marketing and customer success teams at enterprise companies and consulting firms has been Senior Director of Marketing and analytics at Salesforce. He spent nearly a decade as a senior partner at one of the best known analytics consultancies and analytics demystified where he's advised hundreds of organizations on analytics best practices. He's been a board of advisor at various well known startups, analytics associations, capital funds, as well as universities. He's also authored over 300 blogs and one book related to analytics. He's a frequent speaker at big name analytics conferences, and today he's field CTO at amplitude, where he focuses on providing content, education and strategic advice on how to build better analytics products. Adam, thank you so much for your time today really appreciate it. Adam Greco 1:19 Thanks so much for having me. Philippe Gamache 1:22 This episode is brought to you by our friends at knack. launching an email or landing page and your marketing automation platform shouldn't feel like assembling an airplane midflight with no instructions, but too often, that's exactly how it feels. NAC is like an instruction set for campaign creation for establishing brand guardrails and streamlining your approval process to knacks no code, drag and drop editor to help you build emails and landing pages. No more having to stop midway through your campaign to fix something simple. 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Honestly, Adam, I've struggled to explain event based analytics, like what the difference is between, you know what used to get in the old style of analytics, and what you get now feels better looks better the reporting seems to come together a little bit easier. But why is event based analytics preferred analytics setup? And what do you think marketers should be should know about this setup? Yeah, it Adam Greco 3:49 is a very confusing topic, especially for folks who've been in the digital analytics space or the marketing slash web analytics space for a long time. I think in order to really understand event Analytics, you need to go back in time. And think about the fact that in the early days of the Internet, most if not everything was happening on a website. And it was very rare that someone would come back to a website multiple times in order to accomplish a task, you might come back and buy something and then buy something again a month later. But most things were very session based in the web world. And so we grew up in a world where tracking pageviews and sessions was just the natural thing. You know, I drive I pay money to get someone to my website. I'm hoping that they buy something and if they don't buy that website, then it's almost like I failed. But as the world kind of evolved, and iPhone came out, Android came out. people's behavior started changing where they would float between websites and mobile apps. And as you know in a mo lap, your session could be three seconds, you know, you open up an app, you click, you tap on something, you got a phone call, you move on, it's just much more of a fluid experience. And so when mobile analytics came about, and that's where our company amplitude actually started, the idea of tracking sessions, which traditionally was measured as a 30 minute period of you basically have an activity until 30 minutes goes by, and you don't see any clicks anymore. didn't really make sense in a mobile world. So mobile apps decided we're not going to use sessions. That's like, that's like grandpa's, you know, old way of doing analytics. So we're gonna just track everything is events. Did they open the app? Well, that's an event, did they tap here? That's an event, did they do an order? That's an event? And it just seemed like time stamped events seem to make much more sense in that world? Well, now, you move to the day where people are using websites and mobile apps interchangeably. How do you deal with the fact that your web analytics vendor, which a lot of people were using either like a Google Analytics or an Adobe Analytics was using pageviews and sessions, but then you're using a mobile app analytics vendor like amplitude, and they're using events was something had to give, and the lowest common denominator happened to be the event based model. And what most in the industry decided is we're going to just treat pageviews as an event, and not just another event. And that's why you've seen Adobe, Google, the basically most of the players in the industry who said, We need to go down to the lowest common denominator, and just treat everything as events that have timestamps. And then the added benefit of that is that you can send in events that don't have anything to do with website and mobile apps like call center, or maybe someone is chatting with you on the website, and you want to track those as different event support tickets. So all of those can be digitized and turned into events. And then lastly, if you have a physical store, which I know seems like kind of crazy these days, but those events, when you go to a store, and you actually buy if you know who the person is, then you could send those in as events as well. And so that's why the industry has kind of moved there. And marketers just have to kind of think about the fact that a session is they used to think about it is really a timeframe in which a series of events take place. And most analytics vendors that you choose if you want to make that timeframe, you know, 30 minutes, an hour, five minutes, and most companies for mobile apps will say a session might be like two or three minutes, but for a website, it might be 30 minutes. Philippe Gamache 7:47 super interesting. Yeah, definitely find it. How like the with the advent of event analytics, there's also been a slew of tools that have been focusing on this idea of collecting those events and doing something with them. And I feel like data engineers have a good grasp on this maybe better than are definitely better than marketers. But as part of these, like decision buying committees for analytics tools, marketers are oftentimes part of that committee, definitely being part of the team that is using that data, or like building use cases around it. So I'd love your help in demystifying like some of the unpacking maybe some of the terminology around some of these tools. Last year, we did a deep dive on the CDP landscape and all the different players there and the composability space. So there's kind of three that I'd love your help to unpack there. So there's obviously product Analytics, which is where amplitude kind of started its grassroots in not only analyzes that data, and you can build funnels and reports, but it's collecting events, like you said, natively on your apps. We also have these CDI tools, customer data infrastructure tools like meta plain Retter, stack and jitsu. were collecting events natively from your apps, but they're throwing this in a data warehouse, they don't have the analytics component to it, or the Analysis Reporting angle. And we have these ETL or ELT tools like five Tran and air bite, who aren't collecting this natively. But they're collecting events from a bunch of different third party tools and throwing it into data in a data warehouse. So there's there's a ton of overlap in some of these tools. They're the part that sticks out to me is that amplitude does most of what an ETL and a CDI does. But they also let you build visualizations and funnels to understand this data. So Help Help help us unpack that a little bit for marketers that are just like, What do I need in my data stack right now to get the most of like analytics? Adam Greco 9:48 Yeah, and I'll try to be quick because this we could probably spend 30 minutes on this alone because there's a lot there. So I think, again, I'm a history buff. So if you go back in time As marketers, we're not traditionally the most technical people not trying to offend marketers, it just that that's, you know, nowadays, marketers are way more technical than when I first started the industry. And they would rely on a vendor, like a Google word, Adobe to basically say, put code on my website or an SDK on my app. And just get me the data that I need in order to make marketing decisions. And the vendor would have their own taxonomy, their own data model. And you are basically saying, I'm going to trade off the complexity, and just let them collect the data. And they're going to use their data model. I can't really change it that much. I can maybe tweak it around the edges, but it's kind of like their their constraints. Well, then as the world got more complex, you've got companies like rudder, Stagg, all of these came out and said, you know, what? Do you data is so important to your business nowadays, like, in many cases, the difference between you and your competitor is is what data you collect, and how much of an advantage you use by interpreting that data to make improvements to your website, and mobile app. So if data is so critical to you, do you want to trust that to a marketing analytics vendor? Well, a lot of companies said we want to kind of separate the data collection from the reporting. And that's where you've got like segment, runner, stat and particle, basically, these CB T, Liam DCTP vendors who said, we're going to collect the data, you could choose all the events and properties you want. And then we're going to send that to your warehouse. But we could also send it to your digital analytics vendor, like an Adobe Google amplitude. And that way you kind of own your data pipeline. And that was a huge shift. And that's kind of where you know, the world is going towards this more open composable bottle. And the most advanced companies are saying we like doing this on our own. But we don't have any reporting, like, you know, the benefit of going with an out of the box solution, like the Dhobi, Google or amplitude is just, you get these wonderful reports, because they know the data model, they have their own proprietary data warehouse and so on. So I think there's trade offs there. And it was funny at amplitude, we always kind of when I first joined, we kind of avoided saying that we were a CDP or a CDI, because we were a digital analytics or product analytics vendor. But then we saw all these other vendors out there, that were basically saying, Put JavaScript on your website, or an SDK in your ballclub. And we'll collect all the data for you, and then send it to send it to amplitude. And we're like, Well, we already have all that. So if they're claiming to be a CDI, then I guess we're a CDI. Like, why are we not taking credit for this. And the other thing that's interesting is if you use a CDI, oftentimes you are paying for every data point that you collect. And then if you then take that data, and you send it into an analytics product like ours, you know, we also charge how many events you you pass it. So in many respects, a lot of companies are paying more than one time for their data. And it's the same data. And so we had a number of customers at amplitude who said, we're using segment we're using a particle philia. We like those products. And Apple dude has always worked with them. And we love when people send us data for those products. But they said, you know, hey, the economy's a little tough right now, could we just collect the data right with you and not have to pay twice for it. And so we kind of got dragged into the Z CDI stays. And I'm not as familiar. You know, I don't work as much with the five trends and those but I kind of look at those as like Zapier on like an enterprise scale, where they're just saying, hey, well, you got data here, and you want to get data here, we're going to kind of send it back and forth. But I tend to focus much more on the companies that are doing the data collection, natively, and then sending that to analytics tools. And then there's a whole different topic we can get into later about the whole warehouse native, but that will say we'll save that for later. Yeah, and Philippe Gamache 14:09 I love love the breakdown there. So to kind of unpack that and give you an example for for folks listening. On my current startup, we use amplitude as kind of a CDI tool. So we have it hooked up natively on our mobile apps, and we're ingesting all of the events that people are doing in our product. We have it hooked up on our web flow pages also. So we're getting all of that data in amplitude, we can build funnels, and we're also pushing that data to our data warehouse on top of being able to like push that to our BI tool. So other teams in the company can do these full funnel analyses in the BI tool, we can build funnels directly in amplitude, and our product team uses it and we can answer questions like what parts of the funnel do we need to do conversion rate optimization on where we're using Everybody has the ETL tool to take data from amplitude that's collecting these events in the product. But also like our email events, data are what people coming in from direct mail. So we have like all these other third party apps that have events outside of our product that, you know, maybe there's a way to connect that to the amplitude to but yeah, that's, that's the marriage of how we've kind of set that up. And we've had discussions of like, do we need another CDI tool, and we're, we always just fall to this idea that like, amplitude is kind of our CDI tool, like we have what we need there. And on top of it, we have product analytics natively as part of that. So yeah, really appreciate the breakdown there. Yeah, Adam Greco 15:41 that's pretty common your scenario and, and, you know, there's definitely features that our product has that there's other products that go way deeper as CDIs. And you know, we just keep adding more and more each year, but, but since one of our core tenants is just being an open system, so we will never tell a customer, you can't use one of our competitors and send data into us. But we also are learning what our customers want. And you know, they can choose to do as much or as little with us as possible. And sometimes there's cost savings depending on on your situation. Jon Taylor 16:15 Sort of taking this a little bit of a different direction. But kind of still building on this concept as well. I recently reread a piece on the amplitude blog, where you talked about the convergence of digital analytics tools, I remember, you know, Phil speaking a little bit of his experience, I remember jury rigging a web analytics tool into a SaaS company that I worked for years ago, where we're like, Oh, finally, we can get product analytics out of out of the product team and send it into at the time Google Analytics. But you wrote this great piece in 2021, where you're talking about how like the convergence of digital marketing analytics, experience analytics, and product analytics, like having these as all separate entities doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. We've got motions like product lead, that are really starting to have this convergence moment of everybody can make use of this data, like a singular customer journey, as we were talking about with event based, it's coming from multiple, you know, offline and online sources. So I'm curious, like, if you were to update the article in 2021, maybe you have already in 2024? What would what would you say the future of digital analytics are? How are we on this path towards this convergence of tools? And what do you think the next steps are? Adam Greco 17:24 Yeah, it was interesting. When I wrote that article, I actually had a lot of pushback from people saying, you know, no, like, these are different disciplines. But I think now that we're in 2024, I feel pretty vindicated. Because I think a lot of the things that I laid out, have come to pass. And again, it goes back in time. And I think sometimes it just one of the benefits of being really old is that you've just seen a lot before. And since I've been in this industry, for so long, I've kind of seen the different cycles. But I think in the old days, there was just a huge line between marketing, and product. And designing. I saw this when I worked@salesforce.com. This is an example that I've given to the past is, I was on the marketing team. And I was in charge of basically getting more customers and getting more leads as a b2b SaaS company. And you know, we're a pretty big one. And I would do paid search, SEO, all those things and get people to the website, get them to fill out a form. And as soon as they filled out the form, like my job was over, I could go to the bar and have a drink. But then they wouldn't be in this like 30 day free trial, which was actually back in 2009 2010. When I was there, this is actually before product lead growth, we were actually doing product lead growth at Salesforce, the product team would use a different tool, I think at the time they use Splunk to figure out how are people engaging in the trial? And how do they make the trial better and get more people to convert. So my KPI was your return on ads. Their KPI was of all the people who start the trial how many become customers. And then we had a design group that was totally separate, to help us make the website better and get people to fill out the form a little better understand if we had too many fields and buttons. And then we also had a design group that worked with the product. But all three of those functions were different. And they were using different tools. The design team would do surveys, eventually they started playing around with like, more visual like session replay type stuff. And with the ironic part is that it was the same customer who was coming from the marketing effort, going to the form doing the free trial, and then deciding that they wanted to be a customer and we didn't really do a good job of connecting the dots. And I find that the larger the company, the more likely it is that the marketing group and the product group and the design experience group like they don't talk to each other. But then you've got digital natives who many people are wearing multiple hats. And they just kind of pioneered this, Hey, we one person and marketing and product and design, it's really those are all just one thing. And that's what I started seeing happening in the most cutting edge companies like Airbnb and DoorDash, and peloton. And I think that the fortune five and the old judicial legacy companies always are kind of like on a lag. And they end up adopting what kind of more digital natives do things. So when I predicted this convergence, I basically said, We're gonna move to a world where marketing, and product and design and experience are all targeted and incented, on the same Northstar metric or KPI. And they're going to want to see the entire customer journey. And you can't have a Frankenstein analytics stack where you're stitching together, you know, a different tool for marketing analytics, a different tool for product analytics, and a different tool for experience. And it just doesn't make sense. And so I predicted that this would just consolidate. Now, since then, I was able to convince amplitude of this. And you know, we had product analytics, I had them add marketing analytics, and then we just launched experience analytics with session replay a couple weeks ago. So we are kind of walking the walk. You also see that vendors like Adobe have said, Hey, we're marketing analytics. But we're not going to get into product Analytics, you just saw that an experienced analytics vendor content square just acquired a product analytics, better heat. So you're starting to see the beginnings of this. And I think that you'll continue to see 510 years from now that every digital analytics vendor is going to have to be able to do marketing analytics, experience analytics and product analytics if they want to survive. And that's why we've been pushing so hard to get all of these into one platform, just because we think that's just what customers want, not only financially, but just you get better results from your data. Jon Taylor 22:07 I love that answer. And like, the peer into the future is it feels like when I was reading that piece and rereading it, it felt very much in time with where we're at with like product, led motion, and, and so on. I remember with like, I got my start in marketing around 2010 2011, when, like, people were talking about growth, hacking, and all of this discipline. And it very much felt like as you were describing that going back to those days of kind of, I felt like a lot of growth hackers are on the outside looking in, like, how can I use all this data? And they were the people, as you were saying, who would be like cobbling this together? I do think that there's something around the trend of the individuals who can kind of see the full customer experience, what skill sets do you see, for folks who, you know, at this convergence point on marketing teams, like what should they be thinking about when they're looking at product analytics, and looking at the website of the analytics and, and joining these customer journeys? What do you think as the skills Yeah, the future for these folks? Adam Greco 23:04 Yeah, I mean, my advice to marketers is to understand that there are, even though it's the same data, there's different reasons why different groups of people are interested in the data, a digital marketer, or a gross barter, generally is looking at data to say, how effective are my campaigns at getting people to come to the website or app and do the maybe the first one or two things I want them to do, you know, if you think of the product lead growth loop, you know, you've got to kind of get the attention of people, then you've got to get them to try, then you've got to kind of, you know, get them hooked, and then you got to become part of their daily routine. And then you got to have them tell other people how awesome your product is. And then the loop kind of keeps going. And I think that marketers have to understand that product teams, yes, they kind of care, like, where are we getting customers from, but they care much more? How am I using data to figure out to make my product, whether that's a website or app super sticky, and super engaging, so that they want to keep coming back and they want to keep using it. And I think marketers sometimes have a hard time letting go. And with the concept of product lead growth, and say, you know, the product could actually be a very effective salesperson and marketer for your organization. And the example that I use a lot. My favorite personal example is Starbucks. Because if you think about it, if you're in the marketing department at Starbucks, like, I don't know what they actually do. I mean, most people know who Starbucks is. There's like Starbucks everywhere. And if you were the CEO of Starbucks, would you rather invest a million dollar? If you have a million dollars to spend, would you spend it in marketing? Or would you spend it in product? And what I have seen is that if you invest in product, in this case, like a really good Starbucks mobile app that has the features that know what Coffee, like, knows when you're near a store makes it a one click thing to order a coffee and have it waiting for you and walk up, pick up your coffee a very frictionless experience. I think most organizations are realizing that investing in that digital experience, which is really driven by the mobile app purchase driven by the product team is actually a better use of money than a marketing campaign at the Super Bowl to tell everyone about Starbucks. And so I think that's where marketers have to meet with product teams, and kind of understand what they're doing to make people sticky to embrace product lead growth. And the last thing I'll say on this is that if you do combine your market data and your product data, in your experience data, you could see how your marketing campaigns today are generating customers that are around a year from now. And that's what marketers really want. They want to drive long term customer value. And if you can put all that in the same system and marketing product work together. The product team can say listen, you know, Mister missus marketer, I love that you brought us a million new people to our product. But a lot of them are tourists. They came here, they did one thing, and we've never seen them again. We want to get them to create an account with us. And these are the marketing campaigns that we're seeing, they're actually getting us our ICP, you know, are the best users. And these are the campaigns that are not in the marketer should welcome that and say, Hey, any information you could give me of the downstream impact of my marketing, that's great. It's only what I would say is the kind of the bad marketers who are the ones who are just kind of paid to just drive traffic that they don't really care if that turns into business. Those are the people I think we're going to be in trouble Biden's convergence. Philippe Gamache 26:50 Yeah, I love the Starbucks example there. Adam was joking this morning with this morning to Starbucks. And I'm always shocked by the amount of people who don't use the digital app and are lined up in Starbucks for like 20 plus minutes to get their coffee. And I just like order online on my phone, I walk in, I pick it up, I say thank you. I leave and I'm in and out in like 20 seconds, literally. Yeah. And so when you were saying like, where would you invest that million dollars, like part of me was thinking, you know, it would make the in store experience better. But for these people digitally that are walking in like me for 20 seconds. Like, I don't even remember what the Starbucks looked like in the store. I was just in and out so quickly. But yeah, I feel like we could take this in a bunch of directions. This episode is brought to you by our friends at revenue hero. I can't think of anything worse than finding out a lead waited a week for a response from sales. That's why we recommend revenue hero, it's the easiest way to qualify leads based on Form Values or enrich data and route them to the right sales rep. Their product is packed with a bunch of behind the scenes superpowers that ensures qualified leads are assigned to the right reps following your custom round robin rules and sending key data back to your CRM. That means more qualified meetings for your reps. We all know they want more of those but more importantly, no more waiting time for your potential customers. 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Also, if you want your own face as a humans of martec style image, we're doing a fun monthly raffle with census for a personalized t shirt enter to win at get census.com/humans I want to go back to one of your previous points about like product design and marketing kind of all converging around this like full stack analytics idea. And for me when you were walking through that it sounded a lot like the potential of creating this like cross disciplinary growth team. And I'm curious how at amplitude what you can share about the internal setup and how you know from a product perspective you walked us through how you're combining product analytics design with like the the new session replay stuff that you're doing and Marketing Analytics already. But how are you like marrying these three teams internally from a process stamp point but also like a go to market perspective, curious what you can share there. Yeah, Adam Greco 30:04 there's certain limits of what I could share. But I could give you some high level we I used to when I was young, we said this expression of eating your own dog food, but at amplitude, they call it drinking your own champagne. And so what we do in amplitude is we were the first customer of session replay. And we will look at people who are using we know the people who are using our product, because they're logged in, we know which our top customers who pay us the most, and which are free customers, and we can look at each customer. And we've always done amazing reporting on, you know, which customers are engaged, which aren't engaged. And when we meet with our customers, every quarter, we're like, hey, you know, you're only using 20% of our product, you should be using these other features. And they're kind of like amazed, like, well, how in how do you know and they're like, we're like, Duh, like, this is what we do. But we actually are using session replay, to improve our product, and to look at how people are using it. And we have certain KPIs and Northstar metrics. One of ours that we use a lot is how often are people doing analysis and sharing it with colleagues because we think that that's a good leading indicator of getting value from our product. So we'll we will do is we're always doing a B experiments with our own product and feature flagging, but now we could use session replay and watch people using our product and say, why are they not getting from Step A to step B? And then we've learned an enormous amount by just watching our customers use our product that has really influenced design in our product and say, Okay, well, this is silly. Like, yeah, you know, we get it because we use this product every day. But we could understand that someone who's newer to the product would not understand you're supposed to click here. And we also are using, we use ABM marketing. So Account Based Marketing. So we know which companies are coming to our website, and looking at content. And then we're kind of tailoring our messaging on our website to them, and emailing them for the products that we think they might be interested in to try to get them into a free trial, because we actually find that the best customers are wanting to start using our product, because our product is our best salesperson. hard. The hardest part is just getting someone to try our product when they try it, they love it. And so we're trying to use all of these marketing, plus product, plus experience analytics all together ourselves. And there's reports that we run, and we can say, hey, here's a company who's not a customer of ours. But here's everything they've looked at on our website, they haven't started using our product yet. So let's reach out to them. And let's get them to understand how easy it is to try our product, start sending data in. Maybe if it's a big enough company, someone will reach out to them personally. If they do start a trial, we start scoring them to start understanding how are how engaged are they in the trial, we try to help them along with you know, someone reached out to them, and we have some automated stuff. And if we want if they're really important prospect, we can do session replay. And we literally have sometimes our first sales call with an enterprise customer, we walk in saying, hey, dirt, you tried using our product, you only did these three things, we'd love to share these other things you didn't do. And we noticed using our product that you struggled here. And so here's a little bit of training to make sure you get over the hump. And that makes a much better conversation. And the prospect is like, wow, like they really want my business. And they're listening to us. Now doing that at scale is really difficult. But I think that with AI, and newer advancements, I think we're going to be in a world where a lot of that could even just be automated. Imagine a world where AI is basically saying, hey, this prospect is using your product, but they're struggling here. We're going to automatically change the experience, make that a little easy for them and automatically figure out what are the documentation docs that we should send them at the right time to get them to go one step or One Step or in one step further. So that's what's most exciting in this area is just automating a lot of this data taking action on it. Philippe Gamache 34:12 Very cool. Yeah, there's there's lots of room for potential in the automation piece there. But I think even converging these three teams under one Northstar metric alone is something that like probably not a lot of companies are doing but you guys sound like you're doing really well. And isn't drinking your own champagne there. No. But like this idea of the Northstar metric being users who are building something and then sharing it with team members. I find that really interesting because John and I are like our first company we worked together at was a BI dashboard tool for startups and SMBs called Klipfolio. And that was also one of our key metrics, like how many people are building a dashboard and sharing it with the user like sharing is one of the key events we were looking at. And one thing that we uncovered and something that I currently do when I Use amplitude myself is that I don't use the product functionality to share a dashboard. There's, I don't use like the public Share link or like the link to the dashboard. A lot of the folks on my team aren't necessarily technical, I don't want them going into amplitude breaking that dashboard, or like adding another event and not knowing what event they're picking and using the right filter, to share a dashboard. Oftentimes, I'm just taking a screenshot of the graph, and I'm sharing it out. That's what I use in like my weekly reporting. When we do team meetings, when there's something that's looking really bad, like, I'll use a screenshot. So actually, we actually uncovered that too, is like, the biggest competitor to this, like sharing idea isn't like tooling or feature. It's actually the screenshot and like putting it in a presentation. I don't know, just off the cuff like product back there. I'm curious, your Adam Greco 35:51 thoughts? Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you, personally, that's not how we would recommend you do it. There are ways as you share dashboards that you can, you can lock them down so that people can just filter they can change they can add. And I think the benefit of sharing or the downside or screenshot is that you can't ask that second question, that third question. And we highly encourage our customers to go into a dashboard, open up the report that's on that dashboard, and drill into it. And we have threaded discussions, you we have notebooks where you can add a chart or a table and then annotate it, we believe that analytics should be a team sport. And I think that by screenshotting, you're kind of cutting off that channel of communication and deeper exploration. So that is something that I would highly recommend you think about. And if there is anything that you're sharing that you don't know how to do to lock it down, or there's something you think that we need to add, in order to lock it down further than you think we already lock it down, then I would definitely let us know. Because we just think that the company, we see that the companies that get the most value are ones that are really deeper and deeper and deeper. And that's one of the things that separates really good analytics products from other analytics products is how deep people can go, even if they're novice users, and they're not being the tool every day. So that would be one minor advice I'd give us maybe change that process and try it out maybe on something that you're not too worried about and see if you get better results doing it my way. Ya Philippe Gamache 37:25 know, appreciate that. I'll take that advice. But maybe I also ended up giving you some some new blog posts advice there like the Yep, the upsides of sharing dynamic dashboards and allowing filtering. And here's how you can lock it down versus doing screenshots. Because yeah, I'm sure I'm not the only one. So quick to do just quick screenshots. But yeah, yeah, I'll take that advice. I'll give it a shot. Jon Taylor 37:46 Um, you know, one of the things in 2023 that I think happened for a lot of folks, you know, the, the the end of Universal Analytics, and then the migration to Google Analytics for, for a lot of the folks that I work with, and in my consulting business, and so on Google Analytics for is a great advertisement for alternative web analytics solutions and digital analytics solutions. As we were talking earlier, like the event based model is now the default model for folks in GA for honestly, like, I haven't used amplitude, yet, it's on my list to experiment with. But just looking for a customer who wants to deploy it, I just want you to take the stage and kind of pitch amplitude as a GA for alternative, mostly for myself, but also for our listeners. Adam Greco 38:30 Yeah, and I don't like to be a salesperson. So I'm not gonna push too hard. And I also don't want to have an army of GA people come at me, but I think I think most people, even people who are very big advocates of Google Analytics, in the past, will admit that GA for you know, leaves a lot to be desired. I think going back again, I'm gonna keep doing this, like history. I think Google originally got into the analytics phase, because they wanted to be able to show marketers the impact of Google ads. And if you see how well your Google ads are doing, then you're gonna probably keep buying Google ads. So why not show them how great it is. And I think that there's a couple factors that have led Google to GA for obviously, we talked about the event based model, having, you know, customers use GA, for web and mobile app, they tried a couple different iterations. They basically said, we need to kind of go to the event based model, because that's where the industry is going. But I think the g8 for the Google has kind of almost like, unmasked themselves and said, we don't really want to be in the digital analytics business. We really just want to help you to see how your ads are doing. And I kind of joke that I think GA four is really a front end for Google ads like they should call it Google ads for Instead of Google Analytics for, and I think there's always going to be a place for g4, because the integration with Google's ad org is amazing. And Google's ad network, you know, has a monopoly. So you can't really get away from it. So, but we have seen hundreds of companies that have said, you know, what, I want to do product analytics, marketing, analytics and experience analytics. And GA is not a product analytics tool, no one would really say it is, I mean, it's an event based tool. But there's a big difference between event based tool and being a product analytics tool. And I wrote a blog post on that. It's really a marketing analytics tool. It doesn't do sec, anything around experience analytics. And so I think that a lot of people were confused, do they use Firebase for the mobile app, and then GA for for the web, and so on. But I think that also Google has issues with HIPAA compliance for healthcare companies. And we could talk for an hour about some of the concerns that I have around Google's privacy. So I think GDPR, Cookie deletion, all these things are starting to hurt kind of the marketing analytics world. And that's why I think a lot of people are moving more towards our spaces, product analytics. And a lot of Google customers just tried G four, and they just didn't like it. There's a lot of reporting interfaces. Sometimes the data in Explorer doesn't match what you have in BigQuery. And really, if you're using GA for you now are basically using BigQuery, for all advanced questions. And the reason why a lot of people come over to amplitude is we have an interface that makes sense to both marketers and product teams, you don't have to know SQL, the data is always the same no matter where you look at it very easy to get data in and out, we have a Google Tag Manager template. So on the website, if you want to get data and you can leverage the data layer you have and just use Google Tag Manager just rerouted to amplitude instead of Google. And we actually have a lot of customers that use Google Analytics and amplitude. There's some marketers who are just never gonna let go with Google Analytics for SEO stuff and some other campaigns. But if you really want to go in more advanced, there's just a ton of things that g4 Can't do that amplitude can do. And I have a whole webinar that your users can Google where I did like a 45 minute webinar that goes feature by feature and talks about the differences. But yeah, again, it's been great for us. And honestly, I think Google just doesn't want to be in that business. I think they want to have a product that their big advertisers use. But I don't know that they wake up every day wanting to be in the product analytics business. Jon Taylor 42:36 Just as a quick follow up, I do a lot of implementation around Google Tag Manager and GA for and like, I have some skill sets and more on the development side with JavaScript and stuff like that. Maybe you could just like how transferable the skills that I have for setting up like custom events on Google Analytics for towards amplitude, like, is this just going to be kind of like a breeze walk in the park? Like, what would listeners want to know before they get started? Adam Greco 42:58 Yeah, I mean, it's really, really similar. If your listeners have ever worked with SEMO ahava, or read any of his stuff, you know, he literally built our Google Tag Manager templates, and it basically is just a front end to our, you know, to our tags, so that you could just send the data to amplitude. And, again, if you have a well thought out data layer on the website, then you should be tracking when events are happening, you should be defining those events with properties. And that's going to be the same in Google and amplitude. And so I would just tell your listeners that basically, Google just took amplitude and copied it and made it in GA for. So whatever you've done to move to GA for it takes we've had companies that take literally hours to just switch it over and send it over to amplitude. And I would highly recommend you do both same time. Because that way you have GA for as a backup. And then eventually if you if you do everything you need to in amplitude, then you can decide to turn off GA four. But if you have a free version, why do it, it's really where we talk to companies where they start getting to the limits of GA four, and then they have to pay for GA four. And then they're starting to realize like, hey, this product is not that great. Why am I paying for it's fine if it's free. And then once they start having to pay for it, they realize that our product is the same price and way better. Why not go with someone who actually cares about digital analytics. And the last thing I'll say is, and maybe your listeners know, if you've ever wanted to add a feature request to Google Analytics, like good luck, you don't get to talk to Google. Or if you have a bug, you just have to go to forums and hope that you can, someone knows a workaround. You can't actually talk to Google unless you're like a huge, huge paying customer. But you know, with a company like amplitude where 700 employees like you can talk to us we actually have people who want to talk to you product teams and you know, you've a relationship and a contract with the direct vendor, not with an agency who then has to then go and lobby on your behalf with Google and I think people are just a little tight figured it out today pay a lot of money. Philippe Gamache 45:02 Awesome, awesome answer, Adam. Yeah, I think you explained that really well, I find it kind of funny. Like looking at all the posts like couple months ago of all the folks like going through these like painful migrations and myself being a privileged amplitude, customer and user, like, I was just not involved in any of those headaches. Like I don't remember the last time I use Google Analytics at my startup, like, all the landing page views, the session stuff, the UTM codes, like, I get all I need from from amplitudes. On top of this, like big shift to UA to GA for others, there's another shift. That's been a hot topic for us on the show. And we teased it out a little bit earlier in our interview. And that's this shift to the Data Warehouse native architecture, would love to like pick your brain on this a little bit and ask you like, how do you think this shift? from an architectural standpoint, effects the skill set that's required for marketing ops, or just marketing professionals? Like I, I live in this world where like, I think we still need translators, whether you call them like martech product managers, or technical marketers, like folks that are able to bridge that gap and explain the marketing use cases, to data teams and analytics teams. What's your advice to marketers to upskill in this area, and be better versed to talk to it and data teams? Adam Greco 46:26 Yeah, so I'll Kendall was in two parks, you know, really quickly, when we talked about warehouse needed just to make sure everyone understands the concept. For many years, analytics, vendors would collect data, send it up to a SaaS cloud. And then, you know, an analytics vendor would have their own proprietary database that was optimized for running queries really quickly. And then there's reports that sit on top of that, that's the way amplitude does its way Adobe does what Google does. But many companies have decided we want to collect all that data in our digital analytics vendor, but then also have a backup of it in our warehouse. That could be redshift could be data, bricks could be snowflake. And the warehouse native trend has said, Well, what if we could just run the same reports that people love in Adobe Google amplitude and run it right on the warehouse? And what if we don't send it up to a SAS vendor? Is that possible. And that's been kind of this new composable trend. And it's happened in with email with message gears, EPO testing, and analytics is just kind of the next iteration of this. And the idea is, if you don't send it up to the cloud, well, that's one less place, you have to worry about GDPR. And privacy, it's one less place that could get hacked. Unfortunately, you know, in many cases, sometimes the speed is the trade off there. Because, you know, you might not have as optimized of a database that, you know, the vendor has created in order to get reports to run really quickly. But I think that there's also this trend where people who are really good with data collection, we talked about this earlier, like render stack, we've said, Well, what if I just send my data right to the warehouse, and let's just use, you know, Tableau, Looker, let's just use BI tools on top of that. And I'll tell you a couple of reasons why, as you were saying, that doesn't work for marketers. First of all, if you just use BI tools, there's a limit of what BI tools can do. They can't do conversion bottles, they can't do path flows very well, they don't, they can't hold properties constant, like there's some really big things that they miss, they're usually just good at kind of high level reporting. And marketers and product teams need to go way deeper into exploration of the data. And there's just things that BI tools can do. So I think there's always going to be a place for the I'll call the behavioral analytics mindset, which is traditionally called Digital Analytics. But also the UI is really important. And I'm sure there's really technical people who on the data team will say, well, I'll just use SQL, and I'll just query whatever I want right off the warehouse. But most marketers are not there. And it's really hard to get data self service, when you have to force people to be experts on Python R SQL, and you're gonna get really low adoption, you're gonna end up forcing your company to have a couple people that are going to do all the analysis on behalf of everyone else at the company. And that's fine when you a small startup with two or three people. But if you're Atlassian HL, you're a huge company, that's probably not going to work. And so I think marketers have to stand firm and say, Listen, you can't expect everyone in the company to make decisions, you know, making decisions that have to no SQL and have to be data, hardcore data scientists now, maybe 1020 years from now, maybe that'll be the case. I mean, I have kids in college and they're learning Python, they're learning SQL, so maybe they'll be comfortable with that. But I think for the foreseeable future, there's going to be dumb people like me and others who just need to have reports that they can go in and learn how to go into a UI and build cohorts. users send those core to users to email tools or campaign tools. And I don't think that's going to go away anytime soon. And so I think that's why even those vendors that are getting into the warehouse namespace and and I include amplitude in that are realizing that you still need to have reports, dashboards, all of these things that sit on top of the data. And I think warehouse need them is just changing whether that data is stored in a proprietary database owned by the vendor, or is it own is it stored in your warehouse, and that's going to kind of oscillate over time, depending on if you need the data, right away, privacy implications, and so on. And so, like, at amplitude, we're kind of thinking of it as a hybrid solution. But there's some data points that you might want to have just in the warehouse. Maybe for privacy reasons, there's some that you need to have really quickly, and we use our own proprietary recording system for that. So it's an emerging field. But again, it just, it's pretty new. It's pretty exciting. And that's what I love about this industry, because it's always changing. But I think marketers are going to just have to make sure that there's always an interface they can use to get the data that they need. Jon Taylor 51:03 You know, just building off of that I was listening to you on another podcast, and you're talking about the fate of warehouse native technology, really, depending on the team's agreeing on how to use this technology and to deploy this technology. Like, you know, a lot of people think that this is the future of technology, but actually getting everybody internally to agree on the approach to this. I think as some of our listeners certainly would be thinking like, this is a little bit over my head like this is new technology, somewhat technical. I'll just let my data team handle it. What do you think the marketers who are navigating this new technology should be thinking about in those conversations with the data teams? And how can we all hug it out and make make this awesome technology? Yeah, a real reality for us. Adam Greco 51:44 I think if I were to advise marketers, I would say, there is a set of use cases that I have a set of data I need and reports that I need. And I need to be able to take groups of users that do X, and I need to communicate with them somehow, or I need to retarget to them. And I would say these are the things I need. And if you can give this to me in I don't really care how you give this to me. But it has to be accurate, it has to be performant. And if you have a better way to do this, that is either more cost effective, or better security, better privacy, those are the things I need, and I'm not gonna let go of those things. So until you prove to me that this new system that you're gonna do, can get me these things. I think the technology shouldn't matter. I mean, again, these technologies are all tools that help people to accomplish tasks or in the product rule did love to say jobs to be done. So you just have to be firm on what are the jobs that need to be able to do? I will say that a lot of data teams that I interact with do not understand that nuance that marketers need. And I'm going through this, when I've worked with amplitude to add marketing capabilities to our product. You know, it was it was not super easy, because I was there like, oh, a marketer needs to be able to do this, oh, here. Now they can do that. I'm like, well, but they also need to be able to break it down by this, and then do this. And they're like, Oh, I didn't know about that. Then they added that. And then I'm like, Yeah, but they also need to build a take a quarter of these users, and then really quickly send that off to this other system. Oh, okay. And like, there's a lot of things that data teams don't do that marketers do. And if you take a step back as a marketer, and write down on a sheet of paper, all of the things that you do and all the data you need to do it, it's actually quite a lot. And that's why there's been, you know, Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics for 20 years doing this. It's not like, they just you know, that this grew over time. And so, yes, I think you just got to stand firm on what you need. But I think that if you can interchange technologies, then that's great. And I'm all for innovation. Now, whether warehouse needed will be the next big thing. It could be. It may not be you don't know, I mean, time will tell. I mean, as more companies adopt it, and push it to its limits, it could either succeed or fail. So it's gonna be really exciting. And I think that's the best part, this industry. For those who don't know, this industry started when one person decided that they could attach data to an invisible one by one pixel image. And Dan would started sending data that created the web analytics industry. So if this entire industry that's billions of dollars every year could be started by someone figuring out how to put data on an invisible one by one pixel on a page. Why can the industry not shift five years from now to a whole different paradigm where you're reporting right on a warehouse, and you don't have to have different data in your digital analytics platform that you do your warehouse? So your BI team and marketing team are all using the same data? I don't think that's out of the question. Just Moore's law will kick in eventually. And he asked I will see. Philippe Gamache 54:53 Love the historical context to all of your answers there. John is probably thinking back to This massive blog post, he just wrote about the history of email. And maybe there's a history of digital analytics that we can carve out at. But I'll just quickly like, we want to ask you one last questions. But like, I love what you said about data teams don't understand the nuance of what marketers need. And frankly, I don't think that's their job, like they have enough shit to worry about and understand that I think that's the martech person's job or like the the marketing technologists role to be able to unpack what I need, and also understand the roadmap of like, what am I going to need in five years from now, because the capabilities that I need today might be very different than what it needed five years from now. And that's crucial information for the data stack and the architecture, because servicing the marketing team for capabilities today might be very different than real time needs in like 510 years from now. So yeah, great advice. The last thing Adam Greco 55:57 I'll say, before we hit the last question is, I can't tell you how many companies in my last 2030 years have tried to go do their own analytics, where they say we're going to collect the data, we're going to do our own thing. And I'd say 95% of them always come back to a vendor. Yeah. Because they realize this is a lot harder than they thought. And they don't want to be in their primary business, and also be a digital analytics vendor at the same time. And I just always recommend like, don't go down this road, because it there's a reason why vendors focus on specific things. You can't be in that many business, obviously, like, Amazon is an example of someone who, you know, does it on their own, but like they're, you know, billions and billions. So they've got the resources. Very few companies can do that. Yeah. Awesome. Philippe Gamache 56:46 Adam, you're an author, a keynote speaker, Father, as well, as a world traveler in your vintage 1962 Corvette. One question we ask all of our guests is, how do you remain happy and successful in your career? How do you find that balance between all the things you're working on while staying happy? Adam Greco 57:02 Yeah, well, it's, you know, I find that a career is something that's really about how much impact do you make in other people's lives. And I think at the end of the day, everyone, you know, wants to have, you know, have something that they're remembered for. And so the way I kind of have approached my career, is I want to educate people, I want to mentor people, I want to push the industry in forward in different ways, even if that kind of pisses people off at at certain times. But I want to be able to say, Hey, listen, I had an impact on a particular industry. But at the same time, you know, we're all doing this, so that we can live our lives, enjoy, spend time with friends, family. And so I think, I always try to find that balance between having kind of a really impactful professional life, but also, you know, being there for friends family. And that's why I spend so much time traveling, trying to meet new people. In my job, I get to travel a lot. So I have kind of different groups of friends in different cities. And so it's just kind of fun to go down that that path. I'll say that, you know, being a parent, has many parallels of also working, I find myself kind of mentoring my kids and helping them kind of figure out what they want to do. And seeing their strengths and weaknesses and pushing them in different directions the same way that I do that for people who I mentor in the industry. So yeah, it's just always a balance. And it's hard. Sometimes we get really caught up in our work. And we forget that the reason we're doing this work is so that we can, you know, have enough money to live our lives, enjoy, do things and you know, at some point leads a stamp both personally and professionally on the world. Philippe Gamache 58:47 Awesome. Such a great answer. Adam, really appreciate your time. Today is a really fun conversation. Nice little break from marketing operations topics. So yeah, thank you so much, Adam. This is awesome. Now, thanks Adam Greco 58:59 so much for having me. 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