A big focus for us this year has been growing our team. We have even bigger plans for 2023 but this is a reflection blog, so I won’t say too much about future plans. We’re finishing the year as a team of 25 (including a few trusted contractors). This is up from 18 last year. A few people decided their time had come to move on in 2022, but we’ve also welcomed some bright new faces to the full-time Measurelab crew: Scott - who I mentioned in last year’s review in advance of him joining in January, Rajeev, Liam, Tim, Cal, Nasima, James and Gary.
One of the names in that list, Cal Ellis, joined us as our own Talent Lead in August so we now have someone fully dedicated to and focussed on growing our team further.
Northern Takeover
Six of these new faces are based in the North of England, joining the 3 people we already had in the greater Manchester area and Nick, who was an honorary Southerner, moved back up to York to join the Northern takeover. To cater for this growing crew north of the wall, we moved to a new private workspace in one of the amazing Colony Cowork offices in Manchester.
Fun fun fun!
Our First Thursday Club monthly socials roar on. In fact, we’ve just recently had our Christmas edition, on ice!
Going back to the start of the year, we sadly had to cancel our January social due to a high number of cases of a certain virus that I shall not dare to name. But they were back with a bang from February when we had some VR fun @ Otherworld, followed by Pizza Pilgrims.
We hit a games room in March, bent the laws of physics with ping pong in April, couldn’t hear each other in a very noisy cocktail bar in May, had a good knees up with the Old Time Sailors at the Brighton Fringe in June, Plonked some crazy golf and ate lots of tasty vegan food at Mallow in July, immersed ourselves in a gamebox in August AND had our Summer BBQ/Picnic Thingy in Richmond. Then it was a board game café in September and Escape Rooms plus Oktoberfest in Brighton in October. Then it was our annual offsite in November followed shortly by our Christmas social mentioned above to wrap the year in a big red bow like a gift from Santa.
Measureversaries and role changes
We’ve naturally had a few more Measureversaries (I can’t believe this name has stuck) and also a few role changes at the top - something I also talked about last year.
Dan and Magda both hit the 6 year mark with us. Steve, our new MD, reached 4 years. Victor and Dave both reached 3, George hit 2, Nick, Natalia, Katie, Matthew and Elisa all hit their magic first. And of course Measurelab celebrated its 9th birthday. 🥳
This year also saw some other changes, with myself moving to the CEO role, and Mark COO. As mentioned above, Steve has been a Measurelabber for 4 years now, and is now our MD - steering the ship of Measurelab into 2023 and beyond!
Marketing
Not to toot our own horn, but we are proud of the work we do here at Measurelab, and we love sharing it too. No strings attached. This year saw 33 new blogs at the time of writing (including this one). A personal favourite of mine has to be the one from Victor on using GTM to add Doom to a site and visualisingthe GA4 BigQuery export schema from Scott!
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And now for a personal favourite of mine, The Measure Pod podcast. I know I'm biassed being a co-host, but 2022 saw our first full year and in that, there have been >7,200 listens at the time of writing! We released 45 full episodes (and one bonus), with a 50/50 split between having a guest or just myself and Dan nattering away.
Offsite and awards
A highlight of the year for me is the annual offsite, or now called our "Kick-off", the time we all get together IRL to look ahead to the next year. This year was in Reading, with a few nights staying in a fancy hotel. Including a cinema that we absolutely did take over and watch Back to the Future in!
We also ran our 2nd annual Company Values Awards. Before the event, we asked everyone to anonymously nominate one person for each award, with one award for each of our four company values. Our very deserving winners can be seen looking understandably proud below:
Left to right: Katie (Compassion), George (Tenacity), Daniel (Integrity), and Matthew (Curiosity).
Training
It's been a while since I ran our analytics training at Measurelab (anyone remember UA?!), but this year has gone from strength to strength. In 2022 we ran 35 training courses, teaching GA4, Looker Studio and Tag Manager to 422 people!
We have also started running GA4 training for brightonSEO, which always brings an amazing group of analytics-curious people together in-person a few times a year.
Predictions for 2023
I feel like a broken record, but we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the dedication of our team and the loyalty and trust of our clients.
I’m more than excited to see what 2023 holds for us, and it will be interesting to see what changes 12 months from now in the industry with things like UA being sunset and the focus on privacy and compliance not slowing down any time soon. We’re seeing GA4 get closer and closer to being the source of truth, and of course, working with BigQuery is ever growing in importance. So, I foresee further growth in demand for legal and ethical data collection methods and the inevitable full transition to GA4 in the year ahead.
In the meantime, to everyone reading this, have a safe and Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year – from me personally and on behalf of the whole team here at Measurelab.
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