Interview with Maksym Gapchuk, an expert in end-to-end analytics

Hello!

I’m Serhii Soloviov, CEO of Solve Marketing.

Today I’m going to talk to Maxim Gapchuk, an expert in end-to-end analytics and founder of the #PROANALYTICS platform.

In this interview, you will learn about:

— how to find an analyst for a project and what to look for;
— whether all businesses need end-to-end analytics and when to think about it;
— what myths about analytics are bad for business.

It’s going to be interesting, so read to the end!

Буде цікаво, тож читайте до кінця!

— Hi, Maxim! Tell us about yourself. What do you do and how can you be useful?

— I always start my story with the fact that I have been working as a digital marketer for 2.5 years: I launched newsletters, organized webinars, set up targeted advertising, attracted visitors to offline events, and performed other tasks. So I understand how marketing works very well.

I am currently engaged in analytics. How did I come to this? It all started with my introduction to end-to-end analytics. I set it up on a project where I worked as a marketer and realized that:

«Marketing without analytics is money down the drain».

To simplify the numbers a bit, my story is as follows:

I had 100 leads, from which we received about 20 sales. We get 60 of these leads from advertising, and another 40 from other traffic sources. It seemed good, and we were measuring something. But when I set up end-to-end analytics, I realized how little we were seeing: out of 60 leads from contextual advertising, we were getting only one sale at best. Instead, out of 40 leads that came from other sources, we received 20 sales. As a result, we almost totally abandoned direct advertising on Google Ads and completely changed the logic of the company’s marketing in general.

It was then that I realized that end-to-end analytics is a must-have for business. So now I help marketers, in particular, to track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns in terms of revenue and profit they generate.

We also created a separate #PROANALYTICS platform, where four courses are currently available. The very first one, PRO GTM (a course on working with Google Tag Manager), appeared back in 2019, and the 12th stream was recently released.

Then there were two courses on web analytics: one PRO-level for specialists and a simpler one for marketers.

At the beginning of December, a new course on working with Server-Side GTM was launched. So if anyone wants to upgrade their skills, they are welcome. I think we will post a discount code for your readers at the end of the article (laughs).

In general, in my courses, I teach students to think first and foremost. Because analytics is not just technical knowledge. Much depends on a deep understanding of the business. To do this, in particular, you need to find out from the client what factors affect a particular indicator.

— Will your platform allow employers to submit a request to find specialists for their teams or contractors?

— Of course, we have such an idea, but not for this year. Because now the No. 1 task is to train these specialists and only then offer them to employers.

At the moment, I already have 200 students who completed the course before the platform appeared, and about 200 more people who have already been trained on #PROANALYTICS. This is not enough to realize this idea right now. But I have already hired more than a dozen graduates.

— Please tell us what projects you are working on now.

— Currently, I am working with such projects as Portmone, Foxtrot, Brabrabra, the network of travel agencies “Let’s go with us,” etc.

— Who do you consider an ideal client?

— Most of my clients (laughs).

In my opinion, an ideal client is someone who loves numbers and relies on them when making business decisions. Usually, they are interested in what exactly is hidden behind these indicators.

There are clients who only ask for a dashboard with certain data. When they are faced with the fact that we first need to determine how we will calculate these indicators, they simply refuse, not wanting to understand it. As a result, the business loses the opportunity to work more efficiently. And I consider this a bad example of cooperation.

I have a case where we spent three months agreeing with the management team on how to calculate MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue), the monthly income generated by the company’s customers. The difficulty was that at that time we were using more than four systems that calculated this indicator in different ways. I don’t consider this experience to be a bad one, because now the client finally sees not only the final data, but also understands what influenced it.

— What qualities do you think an entrepreneur should look for when hiring an analyst?

— Almost a year ago, I would have paid attention to whether an analyst could work with Google Analytics 4. Now, it’s better to ask if they know how to work with raw data in BigQuery, because GA4, in my opinion, should be known by now. But that’s if we are talking about the technical set of knowledge. I would recommend evaluating a web analyst not only by this criterion.

First of all, it is important to pay attention to how much a person is ready to dive into your business. The specialist must understand where and how this project makes money, and be able to analyze the user’s path from visiting the site to paying for the product/service.

For some reason, many experts believe that web analytics is only about what happens to a visitor on a website. But those who know how business works understand that this path can be more complicated.

For example, a user can see an ad on the Internet, go through it to a website, get acquainted with the products, and… visit an offline store to make a purchase. And this path and the work with it is also part of web analytics: otherwise, how else would a business know that it was online advertising that brought this user to an offline store?

— Do you think all projects need end-to-end analytics?

— I believe that all businesses need end-to-end analytics, but only when the budget allows it.

A long time ago, I was thinking: when is it profitable for a business to start working with web analytics and how much money should be invested in it? I think everyone understands that investing two or three thousand dollars in web analytics with an advertising budget of $100,000 and with an advertising budget of $1,000 is not the same thing. I would recommend investing no more than 30% of your marketing budget per month in analytics. Ideally, about 15-20%.

Why is this so? Imagine that you spend $10,000 on advertising. As a result, you get $50,000 in profit. If you do everything right and spend 8,000 on advertising and 2,000 on analytics, you will most likely achieve the same result in terms of revenue. And over time, investing in analytics will also increase your profits.

But if your advertising budget is $3,000 in total and you allocate $2,000 for analytics setup, your investment is unlikely to pay off quickly.

— What is the fundamental difference between setting up an analytics service for a startup and an established business that already has 10,000 monthly visitors?

— For me, the main difference is not in the number of clients, but in the budget. As I said, the budget for analytics setup should be up to 30% of the marketing budget.

If we talk about the minimum functionality that I advise everyone to implement, it is the Google Analytics 4 settings:

install the basic code on the site;
set up recording of the main conversions (registration, purchase, form submission, calls);
connect GA4 and BigQuery.

The latter is not very common at the moment, but its advantages open up more opportunities for entrepreneurs. The BigQuery service allows you to store data for the entire period, while the GA4 interface allows you to build advanced reports based on data for the last 14 months only. Therefore, having access to data from previous years, you can better predict current plans.

It’s also important to set up the recording of traffic sources in the CRM system, which will allow you to understand where the client came from and how far they have traveled.

— What problems or situations do businesses most often contact you about?

— Mostly, I receive requests for setting up an end-to-end analytics system. Someone compared data from Google Analytics and CRM and noticed that some of the leads were disappearing for some reason. And some spent 5 hours every week on manual reports. Yes, at first glance, these problems are different, but they have the same solution.

— Do you have any universal template solutions that allow you to quickly set up end-to-end analytics for business?

— There are many services that provide template solutions, but my main target audience is clients who come to me for customized end-to-end analytics. Usually, they have already used similar services but were not satisfied because they had other needs. That’s why I think it’s easier to create your own system than to try to adapt to an existing one.

Let me explain using a more familiar example with plugins for CMS systems that are used to customize e-commerce in GA4. If you do not make changes to the standard CMS, these plugins will work perfectly. But in any case, you will have to make certain changes to the site: implement new features, change the structure of pages, etc. Such customization changes the site, and the plugin does not work correctly and usually does not pass even a superficial analyst audit.

— How do you start implementing end-to-end analytics in your company?

— The team’s work generally consists of three stages.

Google Analytics 4. We check whether GA 4 is set up correctly. If it is, we conduct an audit and provide advice on how to improve the system. If there were no preliminary settings, we do it ourselves.

Why Google Analytics 4? Most businesses that operate on the Internet run Google Ads anyway, so they use GA. It’s a great system for working with website data. We use GA4 mainly to collect raw data to further work with it in Google BigQuery.

Collecting raw data in Google BigQuery. We collect this data from various systems, for example:

Google Analytics;
Google Ads;
other advertising systems (Meta Ads, Bing);
email newsletter services;
CRM system or website admin panel where customer requests are stored;
if necessary, we add information from call tracking, provided that the client has it connected.

We choose this service because it is the only one among competitors (from Google, Amazon, Microsoft):

is hosted in the cloud (therefore, no separate system administrator is required);
free tariff limits are acceptable for small and medium-sized businesses and allow them to save money;
has the ability to quickly set up data collection from all Google tools (YouTube, Play Market, Google Ads, Search Console, Merchant Center).

Building final reports in Power BI. In general, you can visualize data in other tools, such as Looker Studio or Tableau. The reason why we work with Power BI is simple:

Looker Studio is just a data visualizer, and although it’s often considered a replacement for Power BI in the online marketing community, it’s actually quite limited in functionality and frankly falls short of the business intelligence tool that is Power BI.
Tableau is a cool tool and a direct competitor to Power BI. We don’t use it only because Power BI is cheaper to use for small and medium-sized businesses. And Ukrainians don’t like to overpay))

Of course, there are other ways to build end-to-end analytics, such as using the Measurement Protocol to transfer data to Google Analytics. But given the way Measurement Protocol works now and the limitations it has, we don’t recommend this method to our clients.

— Tell us the top 3 most common myths about analytics.

— The first myth is that analytics is not important. In fact, everyone needs it, because without it, you won’t see the problems that cause you to lose money.

The second misconception is that analytics is expensive. On the contrary, it is its absence that leads to wasted money because you are not aware of the existing business problems that cause it.

The third myth is that Google Analytics 4 is very complicated. In fact, the Google team has greatly simplified most of the functionality of Universal Analytics. And this impression is due to the fact that GA4 has added many new options, which, unfortunately, still work with certain bugs.

— What has changed in analytics since February 24?

— Approximately 80% of the projects I work with are from Ukraine, so I noticed how the outbreak of a full-scale war affected Ukrainian business. I have clients who continue to work. There were also those who temporarily suspended their operations, but later resumed their activities. Just a few weeks ago, a client came back to me with whom we had temporarily suspended cooperation because of the start of the full-scale invasion. By the way, it was the last one — now the entire collection is assembled))

As for the changes in my niche, I have seen that entrepreneurs are paying more attention to analytics and have reconsidered their expenses.

— What trends do you see in analytics customization?

— Here I can highlight several trends that continue to gain momentum. By the way, I have recently made a presentation on a similar topic at a conference, and if you are interested, you can watch the presentation.

Analytics tends to systematize and collect as much data as possible in one system. Events from apps and websites, social networks and call tracking, email marketing systems — everything is collected in one space.
The second trend I see is the tendency to work with raw data. Going beyond the already provided interface and learning SQL (a programming language) allows you to get data that is not limited by template interfaces and customize it depending on your needs.
Restrictions and how to deal with them. Here I am talking about legal restrictions, personal data protection, etc. Nowadays, there are also restrictions on the part of browsers, for example, Safari allows you to identify a user for 7 days. If a person visits a website more than a week later, it will be a new user for analytics systems. Google is also moving in this direction and plans to actively tighten restrictions on working with third-party cookies in 2024.
In the process of combating restrictions, Google Tag Manager Server-Side is increasingly used. Soon, I think everyone will want to set it up. For now, it’s like setting up GA4 in 2022. There are businesses that are already benefiting from this, but most have not even thought about it yet.
And the latest trend is artificial intelligence. Everything is heading towards the point where a neural network will be able to analyze data. Currently, for example, ChatGPT already shows the ability to analyze large amounts of information. But it still needs a human to provide information for analysis 🙂 That’s why tech-savvy specialists who can customize data collection and provide clear instructions to AI are becoming more valuable.

These are the trends. I think that all of this will be actively developing over the next year.

— What three tips would you like to give to an entrepreneur?

— The first tip is to use analytics.

The second is that you are the person who should be more familiar with numbers than other employees. Yes, delegating responsibilities is normal. Especially if your business is firmly on its feet. But who, if not you, will determine the KPIs that will guide your business to achieve its goals.

The third tip is that marketing is one of the main components of your business. It is impossible to build a successful company without it. Of course, this is the part of the work that should be delegated to professionals. But a business owner should generally understand the basic processes of digital marketing. For example, to understand why funds are spent not only on performance but also on brand maintenance, what are the nuances of multi-channel sequences, etc.

— Thank you very much for this conversation, it is super full of interesting information.

Have you read to the end and haven’t forgotten about the promised promo code for training at #PROANALYTIC? Use SOLVEMARKETING2023 to get a 20% discount.

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