#64 The Measure Pod 2022 in review

This week Dan and Dara take a look back across The Measure Pod in 2022 and share some numbers and statistics of how it’s been going. They also each share their top 5 episodes of the year, and compare notes. Happy holidays, christmas, new year and the rest – here’s to 2023!

Here is Dan and Dara’s top 5 episodes of The Measure Pod from 2022:

#Dan’s top 5Dara’s top 5
5#42 Consent Mode and behavioral modelling in GA4#61 WTF Google?! GA4’s Data API quotas are breaking things!
4#62 Debunking common cookie consent, GDPR and ePrivacy myths (with Rowenna Fielding @ Miss IG Geek)#62 Debunking common cookie consent, GDPR and ePrivacy myths (with Rowenna Fielding @ Miss IG Geek)
3#46 Google Analytics for apps (i.e. Firebase) vs. websites#56 Why GA4 means you need to get on board with BigQuery – MeasureFest (with Katie Kaczmarek @ Measurelab)
2#52 Talking privacy, GDPR and GA4 (with Rick Dronkers @ Data to Value)#59 Digital accessibility in social media and analytics (with Ellen Cole @ Little Seed Group)
1#50 Who wants to be an analyticsionaire!#50 Who wants to be an analyticsionaire!

And here’s some stats about the podcast from 2022:

  • ~6,500 total listens
  • 44 total episodes (43 main, 1 bonus)
  • 47.5% with a guest (24% female)
  • We’ve never missed a Friday morning release (UK time)

In other news, happy christmas and new year!

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Intro music composed by Confidential – check out their lo-fi beats on Spotify.

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Let us know what you think and fill out the Feedback Form, or email podcast@measurelab.co.uk to drop Dan and Dara a message directly.

Quote of the episode from Dan: “when I’m talking to app devs and app analysts, it’s always about Firebase this-and-that, and then I go over to the web side, it’s Google Analytics. But actually we’re talking about the same stuff, it’s just translation layers…”

Quote of the episode from Dara: “…the top one podcast for 28 fans. So that can’t just be my mum and your mum, Dan. There’s got to be other people out there who do genuinely like listening to us too”


Transcript

Intro

[00:00:15] Dara: On today’s episode, we look back at the year, we share some stats about how The Measure Pod has done in 2022, and Dan and I compare our top five favourite episodes.

[00:00:28] Daniel: And we’d love to hear from all of you what your favourite episode was, whether you’ve got any suggestions of what we could do better, what things you like, what things you don’t like, any people you think that we should speak to coming up next year as well. You can do that, there’s a form in the show notes, a Google Form or there’s the email address at podcast@measurelab.co.uk. If you just drop that in an email, that gets straight through to me and Dara, and again we’d love to hear guests, ideas, thoughts, your top episodes, anything you can share with us that would be great. Happy holidays.

[00:00:56] Dara: Enjoy the episode.

[00:00:58] Dara: Ho ho ho, welcome back to The Measure Pod, a podcast for analytics and Christmas enthusiasts to talk about all things analytics related. I’m Dara, I’m CEO at Measurelab.

[00:01:09] Daniel: And I’m Dan, I’m an analytics trainer and consultant at Measurelab.

[00:01:14] Dara: Before you start to worry, this is not going to be all about Christmas, but it is coming out on Christmas Eve so we figured it would be a good chance for us to reflect on the year and share a few stats, and also talk about some of our favourite episodes that we’ve enjoyed throughout the year. It’s probably worth a little reminder to our listeners who do tune in each week, but also maybe to anyone who’s listening for the first time. Dan and I set up this podcast during lockdown to replace what we used to do in real life when we used to sit and maybe have a beer and talk about analytics.

[00:01:48] Dara: So the original inspiration for The Measure Pod was us trying to replicate that when we were in lockdown, and we really enjoyed it. So we see absolutely no reason why we would stop. It’s not meant to be super serious; it’s not meant to be going into huge amounts of technical detail. It’s meant to be a chat between usually Dan and I, but sometimes we’ll bring a guest on as well to talk about a topic of their choice. Hope you’ve been enjoying The Measure Pod, we’ve certainly been enjoying making it and a big thank you from Dan and I to everyone who has listened and supported us in the roughly year and a half that we’ve been doing this so far.

[00:02:25] Daniel: Yeah so we have our first year in the bank. Really exciting actually to have a look back across the whole of 2022. I mean, we’ve still got a little bit of 2022, just a bit behind the scenes magic here, it’s not quite the end of the year just yet when we are recording this. But rather than put an episode out on Christmas Eve with some deep and heavy analytics chat, we thought we’d have a quick look at our favourite episodes, our favourite conversations from the last 12 months, talk about them, discuss them, and figure out where we’re going to go next year.

[00:02:50] Dara: Okay, so before we get to our favourite episodes of the year, why don’t you give us just a little summary of some of the stats. We said it wouldn’t be data heavy this one, but I think it’s worth sharing a few numbers around the actual podcast itself and how we’ve done over the year.

[00:03:04] Daniel: Yeah, for sure. I’ve got a lot of data and a lot of analytics coming out the back of this podcast, which is really, really fascinating and I’ve got two flavours of that and I thought I’d just do some quick pivot tables, quick stats to share. First of all, with just the total number of episodes, we set this out to be a weekly show, so we released this on Fridays. Have yet to miss a Friday release date, which is pretty cool, pretty impressive actually considering it’s not a fully automated process. But we’ve had 44 episodes in total this year. 43 of those were kind of main episodes, and we had that one bonus show that sprung up when Google dropped the bombshell on us around deprecating Universal Analytics.

[00:03:37] Daniel: That was a midweek episode, but the rest of them have been weekly episodes, Friday morning release times from a UK perspective at least. And we’ve had the occasional break, you know, every 10 episodes we decide to have a little break. So that’s how we got to 40, 43 kind of core episodes this year. It’s almost 50/50 in terms of nattering amongst ourselves and having guests on Dara. We’ve got 23 without a guest, 21 with a guest, so that’s about 47.5% with guests. And one thing, just looking at the cold hard stats in the light of day is that actually around 24% of our guests were female, and that’s something I want to look at addressing going into next year, just having a bit more balance in the conversation, making sure we’re not always one-sided. So that’s something that’s come out of the wash with this, I suppose.

[00:04:14] Daniel: So that’s in terms of the number of episodes and what we’ve done. And obviously the key stat with podcasts is the number of listens, the number of downloads, or the number of I suppose, people consuming it per episode. And overall, we’ve got about 6,500 listens this year, so that’s pretty cool. It’s a big number, at least it feels big, we’ve got nothing to compare it against, so maybe there’s an argument there, but it does feel like we’ve done something that other people are enjoying, so I feel that’s a worthy number.

[00:04:37] Dara: Six and a half thousand is brilliant, and we had our Spotify, what do they call it? They don’t call it a year in review, they call it like the year wrapped or something like that.

[00:04:45] Daniel: The wrapped.

[00:04:46] Dara: Yeah, it’s always nice to see that as well. And obviously Spotify is only one of the platforms that we’re being listened to on. On Spotify it was in the top 15% most shared globally podcast, which I just thought was brilliant, another really, really good stat. And one of the other kind of group of stats that I liked from that was we’re in the top 10 podcast for 112 fans. Top five podcast for 76 fans and the top one podcast for 28 fans. So that can’t just be my mum and your mum, Dan. There’s got to be other people out there who do genuinely like listening to us too. So it’s nice validation, we enjoy making this and we’d probably do it anyway but it’s always really good to know that it is actually being enjoyed and it’s useful. So it means we’re feeling enthusiastic and motivated to carry on next year, and who knows what our topics, our range of topics are going to be, and who knows what curveballs Google are going to hit us with. But if you are a fan and you have something to talk about, why not come on the podcast next year and have a chat with Dan and I about whatever it is that you, whether it’s an opinion or a topic or, you know, an area of expertise that you want to come on and have a chat with us about.

[00:05:53] Daniel: Yeah we’ve got the Google Form as always in the show notes. So, even if it’s not yourself and you want to put someone else forward or just give us a name that we can approach happy to do that too. We’re thinking at the moment around 2023, what those big themes are and who those people we should be talking to. I’m keen to get a couple of people back, I think every guest we’ve had on, we’ve promised a continuation and a part two, so I think maybe it’s time to start making some of that happen. And again, some fresh voices in as well will be ideal.

Topic

[00:06:14] Daniel: But anyway, Dara, should we get to the main event, top five time. We’ve both had to think about what our favourite episodes were of The Measure Pod of the last 12 months. We don’t know which each others are, we haven’t talked to each other before about this. This is going completely off script, not that we have a script anyway. So Dara, start us off, what have you got at number five?

[00:06:33] Dara: So at number five, I have episode 61, which was, WTF Google GA4s Data API Quotas. Actually, I didn’t write down the full title, but it’s the one we did quite recently about GA4s data API quotas being enforced and causing havoc with Looker Studio dashboards.

[00:06:55] Daniel: I’m going to play dumb, but why was that your favourite or your number five on your list Dara?

[00:07:00] Dara: Well, no, let’s see if you can guess why it was my number five.

[00:07:03] Daniel: Is it because I was a bit angry and I didn’t hide it very well?

[00:07:06] Dara: You got it in one, it was genuinely surprising to me to hear you so unhappy, so dissatisfied with your beloved GA4. So it’s terrible. I guess it’s, maybe it’s a little bit of a sign of me having a bit of a cruel sense of humour, but I did quite enjoy it because it was such a contrast. But what I didn’t enjoy is the subject that we were talking about, because obviously it has caused a lot of frustration. I also like the breaking news one we did, the bonus episode back in, I think it was March, when Google announced that they were going to sunset Universal, and there’s something about that kind of like, you know, quickly gathering around an issue and getting something out there, talking about it, having an initial opinion, and then also then looking back further down the line.

[00:07:48] Dara: I know we said at the end of that episode, we looked forward to, and hopefully this will happen, a future episode where we get to say, oh that’s all been sorted out now, Google have backtracked and everything’s fine, and everything’s back to normal. So I always like the episodes where we’re kind of quickly responding to something that’s happened, whether it’s something good or something bad. But yeah, I did also enjoy listening to you getting a little, a little bit unhappy with GA4.

[00:08:11] Daniel: In hindsight, I can look back and smile about it. Like you were, I know it’s an audio medium, but you had a bit of a smile on your face the whole way through. Again, not because of the subject matter, just I think because I was getting, you know, clenched fist angry, where I was just like I got so frustrated, maybe that didn’t completely come out in the edit. But yeah I get you, I get you.

[00:08:27] Dara: So how about you? What was your number five?

[00:08:29] Daniel: So my number five was episode number 42, Consent Mode and Behavioural Modelling in GA4. And the reason this made my top five, because it is just another sort of odd GA (Google Analytics) subject that we talked about, I suppose I could have picked any of them, but it’s ones that were, it’s so kind of odd and complicated and new, but also I had to do a bit of research into it beforehand and pull some stats out. So, I kind of came in armed and I’m not normally one that comes in armed to the teeth with stats and numbers and stuff come into an episode of this. So I really quite enjoyed the subject matter, talking about the pros and the cons of it and some of the nuance around it, but also some of the really interesting stuff coming in and almost doing a show and tell more than anything.

[00:09:07] Dara: I don’t know if this is meant to be part of the format, but I’m going to say it anyway. It was in my shortlist, it didn’t actually make it, maybe this is a spoiler but didn’t make it into my top five. Partly because, and I think I’d maybe, I can’t resist adding a disclaimer into mine. I did try and think about what you might pick, at least for some of them, and I thought I would try and go a little bit differently to avoid that. I mean, it wouldn’t be awkward, but if it was like, oh, that was my number five too. Oh, that was my number four too, oh that was my number three too. I’ve kind of tried to think a little differently if possible, but we’ll see, maybe I’m wrong about that. But that was definitely on my short list as well, I thought it was a really good episode because it actually, similar to what you said, I had to go and kind of really prep for that one because I didn’t really know much about how it worked.

[00:09:48] Daniel: Well look, if I give you my number four, I’ll call it out now just because I have a feeling it’s going to be in your list somewhere. My number four is actually a recent one, and this is episode number 62. This is the cookie consent for GDPR, ePrivacy, and the like with Rowenna Fielding.

[00:10:02] Dara: Guess what?

[00:10:03] Daniel: Where is it? Is it number one?

[00:10:04] Dara: Number four.

[00:10:05] Daniel: No, it’s number four. Maybe you like double bluffed yourself and you kind of come back with me.

[00:10:11] Dara: That was probably on my only criteria for the one around consent mode and behavioural modelling. It’s a little embarrassing to say, you know this, but I’m making a confession here. I wasn’t nearly as clued up as I should have been and obviously, you know, still probably not because there’s so much to know about it and obviously gets into kind of both legal and technical detail, but I found it really eye opening. And you know, not just the episode with Rowenna, but actually looking at her to her slides from when she presented at brightonSEO, which is where you saw her and then asked her to come on the show. But I thought it was really kind of educational for me because I had admittedly kind of just shied away a little bit and thought, oh well, you know, I’m not a lawyer I’ll just have my kind of couple of sound bites that I use and that’s it, and that’s a little bit lazy really.

[00:10:53] Dara: So, she forced me to kind of think a little bit more and kind of look into it a little bit more and understand and become aware as well that I had probably fallen into some of the myths that she busted on the show. I had probably been, you know, guilty of believing some of those myths in the past. So yeah, very educational episode. Sorry, I kind of hijacked, that was your number four and I kind of took over.

[00:11:14] Daniel: Well, I’ve got very little to add. I mean, that’s exactly why it’s my number four too. I think we are both thinking very similarly about that in terms of making us aware of something that we are aware that we should be more aware of but not, something that is very important. Just going back onto the episode itself, I think the thing that stuck with me, and the thing that I’ve used actually a number of times since especially when doing training and talking to clients about this kind of stuff, is that those three camps that you can be in, as you mentioned, there’s three, there’s the risk factor of like, I’m going to live dangerously, you know, or at least I’m aware of the risk and I’m happy to take it, let’s go down this path. There’s the legal compliance route, which is doing the minimum they can to get away with, I suppose, become legally compliant.

[00:11:49] Daniel: And then there’s the ethical approach. So there’s like a, can we get away with it? Are we allowed to do it and should we really be doing it camp. And I really, really like that kind of three camp visualisation to help kind of frame where people are, where people are thinking and you know, that’s nothing to be said about the live demo as well that she run through our website and did a little cookie crawl and had look all that stuff, which was you know, obvious in hindsight, but at the time there was, I swear there was some good reasoning behind some of those decisions. So yeah, it’s definitely become I think one of the most actionable ones for us in terms of actual changes on our website that we are undergoing at the moment, or at least at the time of recording, but also personally as well in terms of the way we approach stuff and think about stuff. We’ve set the bar already high, haven’t we? For the top three, haven’t we?

[00:12:30] Dara: Yeah we have, I think you went first there, so shall I say my number three? So my number three was, ah, I’m going to do another quick disclaimer as well, I’m terrible for this. All of mine are very recent and that’s not, I don’t think it’s because I just have a really bad memory, that might be a factor. I think maybe it’s a coincidence, let’s just call it a coincidence, but yeah, all of mine are fairly recent ones. So my number three is episode 56, which is why GA4 means you need to get on board with BigQuery. And this was an enjoyable episode for at least two reasons, I’ll probably end up saying more than two.

[00:13:03] Dara: Firstly, I got a chance to do The Measure Pod without you, Dan, and that might sound like a weird thing to say. I don’t mean that in a bad way it was just, it was a different experience and I think you’ve enjoyed it when you’ve done it without me, because it’s just a different, you know, it’s a different kind of experience and it’s a slightly different dynamic. So I was joined by Katie Kaczmarek on that episode, and this was not long after she spoke at MeasureFest. So it was talking about her talk and that was what I liked about it, so she talked about the content of the talk, but then also talked about her experience. It was her first time speaking at a conference and even though she did brilliantly well, like really, really well, she didn’t really enjoy the experience, but she, you know, she put a lot of work into it and it really paid off.

[00:13:43] Dara: She gave some good tips at the end for anybody who’s considering speaking at a conference, but hasn’t before. So it’s kind of a nice mix of like her actually talking about the content but also talking about the experience of speaking at MeasureFest. And it was really nice for me because I had seen her speak, so to then have her on The Measure Pod and talk to her about it was just a really enjoyable experience for me.

[00:14:05] Daniel: And I would say it’s an enjoyable one for myself as well because I think this is the first real time I’ve ever been able to be a, you know, be a listener, to be on the other side of it and to actually go in not knowing what was going to happen and what was going to be talked about, and just enjoy the conversation. It just feels like there’s like this black mark against my name now, I’ve got this one episode I’ve not been on it almost feels like for no real kind of important reason, but it felt like a streak that I’ve broken, you know, like Duolingo or some other kind of random game you got on your phone where I’ve broken a streak. But I did really enjoy it, I enjoyed the fact that it’s a reminder that it doesn’t need me, it doesn’t need either one of us. And it’s just a thing that can, can happen without us right? Very humbling.

[00:14:38] Dara: Maybe you were trying to make me feel better because I had already broken my streak a long time before that. So what was your, what was your number three? I take it from, you didn’t react, so I’m assuming you have a different number three.

[00:14:49] Daniel: I do have a different number three, yeah. So my number three is episode number 46 and that is GA for apps, i.e. Firebase vs. websites. It’s a bit of a long one, but a deliberately convoluted title because I think one of my favourite discussions on this was talking about a blog that we read which was a guy diving into the differences with names and the complexity with naming conventions between Google Analytics, GA4, App+Web, Firebase Analytics, GA for Firebase (GAFF). And just those two worlds of app and web analytics colliding with Google Analytics 4 has kind of created this plethora of confusion, which is almost comical when you break it down. And so I really enjoyed us talking about that frustration, that annoyance. And it’s still something that comes up in like day-to-day when I talk to people around app and web kind of implementations where you almost have to have like two camps to live in. It’s like when I’m talking to app devs and app analysts, it’s always about Firebase and this and that and then I go over to the web side, it’s you know, it’s Google Analytics, but actually we’re talking about the same stuff, it’s just translation layers in between.

[00:15:49] Dara: Yeah, I’m still confused with all of that naming. I think at the time when we finished the episode, I thought yeah okay, kind of unravelled some of that. But that’s a classic Google thing, isn’t it, like the naming. They seem to have come up with some very convoluted names, and then they rename things and then they’ll buy a product and then they’ll rename that. And so yeah, that was a good kind of episode in terms of like unpicking something and trying to add a bit of clarity to something that is definitely not clear.

[00:16:14] Daniel: For sure, and I think that’s why I like the episode so much is just this kind of, this whirlwind of confusion and just going and laughing about it pretty much. Not laughing at people, but just laughing at the situation Google’s created and just trying to unpick it a little bit. But yeah, I was more reacting to a blog that we wrote really.

[00:16:28] Daniel: Nevertheless, number two Dara, number two on my list. Number two is episode 52, so this is the one we did not too long ago with Rick Dronkers. So this is the one that’s called Talking Privacy, GDPR and GA4 with Rick Dronkers. And this for me, it was very high on the list because I had such a blast talking to Rick. I don’t know how long we actually recorded for, and I can’t remember how long the episode cut down to, but it was on the long side. I think it was 40, 45 minutes in the final cut, but we recorded for well over an hour, and we could have kept going. It was just because of, you know, time commitments elsewhere that we had to stop. Definitely someone to get back on for another episode to continue talking, but I had such a blast just going into every nook and cranny around this wild subject of privacy.

[00:17:08] Dara: Yeah and I’m going to sound like I’m trying to make up for not putting him on my list now, but I also in prep for that one had listened to his podcast, which admittedly I hadn’t before. I know you had, but I listened to his own podcast and really enjoyed it. So I kind of almost felt like I’d almost been on a podcast with him before he joined us because I had been listening to kind of a few of his back catalogue, I’d listened to like three of them or something before we did it. But yes, again, I’m being quite, you know, there’s only five places on this list so sadly on mine, Rick didn’t make it with us through no fault of his, and I did really enjoy that episode. But this is the problem, isn’t it, when you have to come up with a top five, you can’t put everyone on there, but I would say this, wouldn’t I? But I have enjoyed all of them.

[00:17:49] Daniel: Oh, of course. Oh, I like all my kids equally come on, that’s not true. I mean, we’re not calling out a bottom five here, we’re just saying our top five. Let’s hope Rick’s not listening and not taking it too personally.

[00:18:02] Dara: So my number two was episode number 59, which was with Ellen Cole from Little Seed Group. There’s variety in the episodes, but what I was going to say was there’s a bit of a theme in that I’ve gone for ones in some cases where it’s not an area I know very much about. I think when we have a discussion, for example, the two of us about something GA related, it’s very natural and we just talk about it and we talk about our experience and, you know, we talk about like how things used to work and then how whatever the change is. So like with the GA4 API one for example, we kind of talked about the impact that would have and the problems it would cause, but I always like doing the episodes where it takes me outside of an area that I know about and makes me kind of think and opens my eyes a little bit.

[00:18:43] Dara: So Ellen’s episode, if I’m not wrong, you had seen her speak at brightonSEO also. She talked about accessibility in digital marketing and social media and analytics, which maybe we kind of shoehorned in a little bit. But we did get her experience of using GA which she said is not particularly accessible, friendly. But this was all about kind of people using screen readers and there was just some kind of even really simple things that I just hadn’t ever considered. Like with hashtags, if you’re overusing hashtags in a LinkedIn post and if you don’t use camelCase, tell me if I’ve said the wrong one there Dan, but I think it’s Camel Case. If you don’t use Camel Case, then the screen reader’s just going to read it out as one big long string and that can be confusing for the user.

[00:19:28] Dara: So it was little tips like that. And again, it was something that made us kind of look at our own website and our own content and try and make sure that we’re not excluding anybody in the way that we’re promoting ourselves. And save the best bit for last, she also rescues hedgehogs, and I was enjoying the episode before she mentioned that and then that was just the cherry on top really. I’m also a fan of rescuing animals as I think our listeners know, because I’ve talked about my rescues before, but when Ellen said that and showed us some pictures of some of the hedgehogs that she’s rescued and rehabilitated, that really melted my heart. So there was no way she wasn’t going to make it on, so her and the hedgehogs so it was a group effort, but they managed to get onto the number two spot on my list.

[00:20:13] Daniel: I’m glad we managed to work out the real reason she’s up there and that’s the hedgehog. Definitely the email that she sent not long after we recorded with all the pictures, was amazing, and obviously we put that on the website. So if you click any of these links that goes through to the episodes, you’ll see all those lovely hedgehogs right at the top of the page. But yeah, very, very cute. So, imaginary drum roll please, what is your number one, Dara?

[00:20:37] Dara: So, my number one is episode number 50, who wants to be an analyticsionaire.

[00:20:44] Daniel: And it’s the same for me as well. I love that one.

[00:20:48] Dara: I thought it might be.

[00:20:49] Daniel: I was trying to hold out longer, but no it’s exactly the same. I absolutely adored that episode and sorry I won’t interrupt you carry on.

[00:20:55] Dara: Yeah, so I mean for me, I said it on the episode and I’ve said it to you several times since. I was really, genuinely nervous and like, more so than I’ve been about anything in probably a very long time. It really felt like I was in the hot seat, and I was squirming. At the time, I felt pressure and I have to again, thank my audience they got me out of a few sticky situations. So I did have some help, but I was genuinely nervous. I thought, what if I go on and I get the first question wrong? So I was squirming. But that’s good, it’s good to squirm, it’s good to be put on the spot, and it’s good to be challenged and pushed outside your comfort zone. But it was just brilliant, it was so much fun and then once I kind of was able to take a breath after I was finished, I was able to kind of think about it and really appreciate the work that went into it. Because all I did, as stressful as it was, all I had to do was show up and answer a few questions, but, you know, all of the work, preparing and writing the questions was all down to you. So it was really nice to kind of appreciate that once I was out of the hot seat and was able to kind of think clearly again.

[00:21:55] Dara: It’s a bit like a pleasure pain thing. I think I enjoyed the stress of it and I’m probably kind of looking forward to the next challenge that you put me through, which is probably going to be even harder because you’re probably going to think I got a bit of an easy ride maybe, and you’re going to try and ramp it up and make me squirm even more next time. It was really good fun and it was great getting some of our fellow Measurelab crew involved as well. So it was really great having people there watching me try and muddle my way through the questions.

[00:22:23] Daniel: Yeah, all of that plus I really enjoyed it. I think the, it was for me, from my perspective, putting together that whole thing, all the questions and to the listeners. Obviously you didn’t see this, but I put together like who wants to be a millionaire themed slides with all the questions and coming up. But I loved seeing it pay off and we did not, I suppose, fiddle the books. We didn’t do anything like that, you genuinely won the metaphorical million pounds. We donated that a thousand pounds to charity, the animal rescue charity, which was fantastic. Because obviously we wanted that to happen, but we didn’t want to fake it either so it was like a perfect, happy coincidence more than anything, and considering the last question was a complete guess, like how the hell did you get that?

[00:22:57] Daniel: I tell you what my favourite thing about the episode was, was the fact that I don’t know if it’s obvious or not, but for, from us, the sound effects and the drama that’s created with the atmosphere, with the music, it’s not there when we record it. So in a sense, we were acting out the game show while recording it and then our wonderful editors put in all of the music and the sound effects after the fact. And listening to it, it was a whole new experience listening to it with the sound effects than it was even recording it or remembering recording it. So I think for me it was the production value, it was the kind of the prep and the effort that went in to kind of set up that, you know, from our perspective at least the kind of most productionised thing we’ve ever done.

[00:23:35] Daniel: But yeah, I just thought it was a blast, and like you said, having our colleagues on there as well, having an audience basically was really cool. All of that plus probably way more than I can’t remember right now, I just found it fascinating. And also I think it just really embodies kind of what we’re trying to do here and why we started doing this. We’re not here to break news in the industry and to have heavy, you know, not just having heavy, powerful news and guests and all that stuff. We’re here to have a bit of fun with it and just to enjoy the time we’re spending chatting around this stuff and you know, kind of scratching that itch. I’ve said a couple of times actually on the podcast over the year, over the 18 months now is that with this kind of industry and this kind of job, you very rarely get to talk to other people about it because most people have no clue what you do for a living, especially your family and friends and loved ones. So getting a chance to talk about this stuff with other people is just, it is something we don’t often get to do and especially working remotely now. So, yeah, I felt like that embodied a lot of the kind of energy, the fun, the interesting, the nerdiness that we’re trying to embody with this podcast and hopefully that came across.

[00:24:29] Dara: Yeah I mean what was not to like about it?

[00:24:31] Daniel: Let us know in the form.

[00:24:33] Dara: Yeah, yeah. But you got to see me squirm, as you said, it was all the Kind of extra production with the sound effects and everything else and we raised some money for a good charity. So yeah, all in all, it was a really good, fun episode. And I’m not surprised that it ended up top on, on both our lists. I thought it would make it onto yours as well, I wasn’t sure if it would be number one or not, but yeah, I think we equally enjoyed it, so it’s probably deserving number one.

[00:24:55] Daniel: So if you have a suggestion by the way of what we can do for the hundredth episode, do another special, fun, maybe quiz based thing, then let us know. We’d love to get all of your feedback, any suggestions, any ideas. Even the terrible stuff, we’re open to it and we’re still trying to think at the moment, well I’m trying to think about what to put Dara on the spot for the hundred episode mark.

[00:25:13] Dara: Why does it have to be me in the hot seat? When did I sign up for that?

[00:25:17] Daniel: Alright, let’s do a little poll then with our audience. And see who wants to put who in the hot seat. Let’s get a format, first of all, and then we can figure out who gets to go in the hot seat.

[00:25:24] Dara: Who should do it, yeah, yeah.

[00:25:26] Daniel: Or maybe we get third party, maybe we’re both in the hot seat.

[00:25:28] Dara: Ah, maybe. Yeah it could be a competition.

[00:25:32] Daniel: Ooh, bring it on.

Wind down

[00:25:34] Dara: Me versus you, maybe not on GA4. We’ll have to find some safer, safer brand yeah. We’d love to hear what your favourite episodes of the year were, to see if they’re similar to ours or very different. We’re off to eat mince pies and drink mulled wine, hopefully you’re going to do something similar. So from Dan and I, we would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

Outro

Dara: That’s it for this week, to hear more from me and Dan on GA4 and other analytics related topics, all our previous episodes are available in our archive at measurelab.co.uk/podcast. Or you can simply use whatever app you’re using right now to listen to this, to go back and listen to previous episode.

Daniel: And if you want to suggest a topic for something me and Dara should be talking about, or if you want to suggest a guest who we should be talking to, there’s a Google Form in the show notes that you can fill out and leave us a note. Or alternatively, you can just email us at podcast@measurelab.co.uk to get in touch with us both directly.

Dara: Our theme is from Confidential, you can find a link to their music in the show notes. So on behalf of Dan and I, thanks for listening. See you next time.

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Daniel is the innovation and training lead at Measurelab - he is an analytics trainer, co-host of The Measure Pod analytics podcast, and overall fanatic. He loves getting stuck into all things GA4, and most recently with exploring app analytics via Firebase by building his own Android apps.

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