#49 Will you still need GA360 in a GA4 world?
This week Dan and Dara chat about assessing the need for Google Analytics 360 in a GA4 world. Do you need 360? Should you still continue with 360 if you already have it for UA? Will you need to go to 360 with GA4? These are the questions that they assess and chat though, and more!
The Measure Pod episode #6 (or just look in your podcast player that you’re in now)
The Google page detailing the limit differences with GA4 and GA4-360 – https://bit.ly/3p9s7Po.
The Google page detailing the 1 million events per day limit for the BigQuery export – https://bit.ly/3Ag7tDu.
Dan’s posts on GA4 and GTM in Unity for app development – https://bit.ly/3QlcIY3.
In other news, Dan is teaching skating and dara is back to Netflix!
Follow Measurelab on LinkedIn for all the latest podcast episodes, analytics resources and industry news at https://bit.ly/3Ka513y.
Intro music composed by the amazing Confidential (Spotify https://spoti.fi/3JnEdg6).
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Dara: Hello and welcome back to The Measure Pod, a podcast for people in the analytics world to talk about all things analytics. I’m Dara, I’m MD at Measurelab.
[00:00:23] Daniel: And I’m Dan, I’m an analytics consultant and trainer at Measurelab.
[00:00:26] Dara: Okay so we are going to do a bit of a, bit of a revisit, a refresh on a previous topic that we discussed all the way back in episode number six, which at the time was talking about whether you need GA360 (Google Analytics 360) or not and Dan feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here, but this would’ve been well before the news of Universal Analytics being sunsetted. So at the time we were talking about Universal Analytics users who were on 360 (Google Analytics 360) or considering going to 360 wasn’t necessary and is it always necessary? We’re going to do a bit of a review of that today, and we’re going to talk about, is it going to still be necessary in a post UA (Universal Analytics) world?
[00:01:04] Daniel: Oh, very clickbaity. Post-UA (Universal Analytics) world, but it’ll come around quick right? That’s July next year for the majority of us. And obviously there’s a slight extension for 360 (Google Analytics 360) contracts, but that’s maybe a really good jumping off point. Maybe just talking around, what do we mean by a new GA360 (Google Analytics 360) contract? Because much like when we talked about Firebase, Google Analytics and all that stuff. There’s a weird approach Google’s taken to the naming conventions, all this stuff, which just causes confusion and we’re not experts in terms of the terminology and the reasons why they’ve decided to call things what they’ve called things. But the long short of it is that there is no GA4 360 (Google Analytics 360). It’s just called GA360 (Google Analytics 360), but “new”.
[00:01:41] Daniel: I think I made the analogy last time for all of our gamers, that’s not you Dara. When Nintendo brought out the New 3DS it was a brand new console, completely different to the previous 3DS but they just called it the New 3DS and I think this is a very similar thing that Google’s done. They’ve got GA360 (Google Analytics 360) and they’ve got the new GA360 (Google Analytics 360) contracts “for GA4 properties”. Like there’s lots of subtext behind what they’re doing, but I suppose it’s only for a year until everyone’s on the new contract and then it would just be GA360 (Google Analytics 360), right?
[00:02:08] Dara: As confusing as it is a bit like when we did talk about, you know, the horribly confusing naming changes between Firebase and Google Analytics for app. I can’t even remember what it was called now, app plus web, and all of those changes that I want to just forget about. Similar this time around and you’re right they’re probably thinking, well, if we call it something slightly confusing for now while GA4 is a buzz term. When GA4 just becomes GA (Google Analytics), then it can just return to being GA360 (Google Analytics 360) again, rather than what would arguably make it more confusing if they called it GA4 360 which might just confuse people even more. But yes, we’re talking about Google Analytics 360 for GA4 properties.
[00:02:46] Daniel: And actually the reality is that anyone that’s currently on a GA360 (Google Analytics 360) contract, the next time your contract is up for renewal, the likelihood is that unless you’ve got a really, really good reason or an edge case, you’ll be signing this new contract. And the key difference is that this is not a Universal Analytics focused contract. So what this new contract does, it gives you access to your GA4 properties becoming 360ified. But the difference is that it does not account for Universal Analytics in any way. Let’s say I’m on a current GA360 (Google Analytics 360) contract and as of right now today, or whatever day this is you’re listening to this. Right now, you sign your new contract, which overwrites and replaces your previous one. You then are given 90 days or three months. So it depends who you ask or what you read, but you’re then given three months before your Universal Analytics property is downgraded to the free tier.
[00:03:35] Daniel: So they’re not going to get rid of Universal Analytics, but you’re going to lose the 360 (Google Analytics 360) privileges of Universal Analytics within three months. And this is a really interesting point because it’s very confusing when we talk about the deprecation or the sunsetting or the sunset of Universal Analytics next year, because we all know that the 1st of July is when it gets switched off, or at least the new hits are stopped being processed. But we are also told you get a three month extension until the 1st of October for 360 (Google Analytics 360) accounts. The issue is, if your contract is up for renewal right now, and you sign the new contract, you technically only have 90 days left of 360 (Google Analytics 360). So in a sense, a lot of 360 (Google Analytics 360) customers might be off of Universal Analytics a long time before the free users because there’s no way you’ll ever get to the 1st of October, 2023 if your contract is up for renewal now, you’ve got a three month ticking clock to get away from Universal Analytics. So it’s very confusing, there’s probably going to be nuance. There’s probably going to be a conversation to be had with your reseller around what’s the deal here, can we keep it till the 1st of October or not? The terms and conditions are very clear, you get 90 days to get away from it really.
[00:04:38] Dara: And in terms of people who are in a GA360 (Google Analytics 360) contract for Universal Analytics at the moment, they get to use GA4, they get to upgrade GA4 properties to 360 (Google Analytics 360) but within beta only. So they don’t get the SLA that you would get if you were in a GA4 360 (Google Analytics 360) contract.
[00:04:55] Daniel: Yeah, exactly. So the only difference you get all of the access to all of the improvements and the changes within the GA4 360 contract or properties, but yeah, you don’t get the SLAs. So you only get the SLAs once you sign the new contract, and that is obviously going to be a key part of the migration is getting guarantees in a place for our data uptime and also the SLA’s now covered the BigQuery exports too, which is the first time this has also been a thing. But this is actually an interesting point because I think going back to the whole point of this, do you still need 360 (Google Analytics 360) once Universal Analytics is gone, because the products are so different and we’ve talked a lot about Universal Analytics versus GA4 and lots of different contexts.
[00:05:32] Daniel: One of the key differences is that when you have to start paying for it, it’s completely different. So in the Universal Analytics world, like for example, if you wanted the BigQuery export enabled, you had to go past the paywall, you had to go to 360 (Google Analytics 360). Whereas of course now you don’t, that’s part of the free version and there’s lots of things like that now where you might have had to pay to get what you needed is now just part of the free licence. So in a sense, it’s not even obvious that you will go onto a new contract at your point of renewal, you might actually be able to save a huge chunk of cash and not take the new contract and just let your contract lapse because the free version of GA4 actually does enough for what you need it to do. So it’s a really important point, is not just to assume you’re going to go onto the new contract, to make an assessment and say, well, actually, can we get away with the free version? Is it ticking all of our boxes? And can I save that cash for an extra hire or two or something else entirely, you know, or just save the bottom line.
[00:06:26] Dara: On the previous episode, we talked about how often we would speak to people who were thinking about moving to 360 (Google Analytics 360). And obviously there’s a lot of cases where people absolutely do need to, and there’s a really crystal clear business case. But in other cases, we spoke to people who just felt that was the logical move because they were big, big site, big traffic. So they just felt they should move to 360 to have an enterprise-level solution. But in many cases, people weren’t actually using the free version to its kind of potential or they weren’t pushing it to its absolute kind of breaking point before they moved to 360 (Google Analytics 360). That’s maybe even more the case now where some of the key reasons why people did end up moving to 360 (Google Analytics 360), they’re not so relevant now because they’re features that are included automatically. Like you mentioned that you know, the BigQuery export, so you get that as standard now with all GA4 properties. Previously, the only way to easily get that data into BigQuery, to get your GA (Google Analytics) data into BigQuery was to go 360 (Google Analytics 360), now you don’t have to do that.
[00:07:24] Dara: The other kind of big reasons were sampling. So the amount of times people would quite rightly, us included, gripe, complain, moan about sampling in the interface. And even though there is still sampling in the explore workspaces in the reporting workspace, if I’m using the right terminology, there’s no sampling in GA4. So it’s another aspect that would’ve previously pushed people towards 360 (Google Analytics 360) that is less of an issue now. So there is still higher limits where there are still higher limits in GA4 360 for the explorations in terms of sampling and you also get the option to download unsampled data, or it’s unsampled up to something like 50 billion hits, I think hit 50 billion events or something big. Whereas in Universal Analytics, it was much more of a need if you had a big volume site to move to 360 (Google Analytics 360), because sampling was such a big issue, it would basically grind the reports to a complete standstill, and you would have very low sample rates, which would give you kinda questions over the data. It’s not so much of an issue now, I guess, or it’s less of a concern than it was with Universal Analytics. Is that fair to say?
[00:08:30] Daniel: Yeah, completely fair. I think sampling and access to raw data is the two biggest drivers, or at least in my experience of people moving to GA360 (Google Analytics 360), some of the other ones that, you know, there’s some honourable mentions as well, like some of the other ones are things like the connectors to the Google Marketing Platform products like DV360, Campaign Manager 360, basically all the old DoubleClick stuff, even Google Ad Manager as well. So a lot of the publisher side of things. If you were earning revenue through sort of publishing ads on your site, that was a 360 (Google Analytics 360) connector as well. That’s gone and the, well, at least the paywall has gone for those and you can be running your campaign manager account, connect that to GA4 using the free version of GA4, exporting the raw data to BigQuery again, or part of that free licence.
[00:09:09] Daniel: A couple of other things as well on top of the GMP (Google Marketing Platform) connectors, you’ve got data-driven attribution is just part of and improved upon, but part of Google Analytics 4 now with the free version. That’s not, again, dated behind the 360 (Google Analytics 360) licence and even just the whole concept of having that expirations workspace Dara that you mentioned. That was beta tested in GA360 (Google Analytics 360) before, so now everyone has access to that, again slightly more improved. I think that all of these things are slightly better than the Universal Analytics counterpart, and you now get them all for free. So all of this stuff is something that, you know, if you went to a GA360 (Google Analytics 360) licence purely for one of those reasons, it’s now a really good opportunity to say, do I even need to pay for this thing again? When actually I’m only going to be sort of playing within the free licence tier. So that’s one thing, but it’ll be probably bad of us to not talk about some of the stuff that it does actually affect.
[00:09:55] Daniel: So there’s now different reasons why you would go to 360 (Google Analytics 360) in a GA4 world. So it’s not the same reasons. So you might find that you’re either on the side of the fence where, oh, I’ve got 360 (Google Analytics 360) now and I can bin it off for GA4, or you might think well actually I never paid for GA (Google Analytics) and now I have to pay for GA4’s version of 360 (Google Analytics 360). So it is going to be interesting to see how many companies make the transition one way or the other. Because the biggest feature that probably everyone that’s even looked into GA4 will probably be aware of and that’s the fact that there are no views in GA4. And so they do, I suppose, in a roundabout way exist, they’re called sub-properties and roll-up properties and that is gated behind the 360 (Google Analytics 360) licence. So in a sense, just having the concept of a view is now paywalled. So if you had a very complicated setup or if you had multiple different domains and websites, you threw them all into one property and created views to pick apart, you know, the EU countries, individual countries, different micro sites, including a roll-up, that is something that’s going to be really difficult to do without paying for 360 (Google Analytics 360) and getting access to sub and roll-up properties.
[00:10:57] Dara: I’m going to come up with one of my random kind of statements here, but if you had more skills than you had money, you probably could replicate that within BigQuery, if you knew what you were doing. So if you ended up reporting on that data outside of the interface then, I also should clarify as well like you just did a minute ago. We’re not trying to say don’t go to 360 (Google Analytics 360), we’re just kind of saying, make sure you know why it is that you’re doing it. And if you were 360 (Google Analytics 360) before, don’t just assume you will need to be 360 (Google Analytics 360) again, but you could in theory, replicate some of what the sub properties or roll of properties do if you have the skills in house and if you’re actually working more with the data in BigQuery and then visualising that in Data Studio or whatever.
[00:11:36] Daniel: But yeah, it’s also probably worth it as well that we’re not resellers either. We are not pushing for 360 (Google Analytics 360), or not pushing for not 360 (Google Analytics 360) either. We are just trying to make sense of like, well, what’s the value to the business? Is it something you need to pay for? Because it’s not cheap, right? You know, we’re talking tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds per year for some of these technology licences. That obviously depends on how much you go for how much you use it, there’s all sorts of different caveats to that number there. And I think if you were to inquire to a reseller that they can give you a proper quote, same thing for the new version as well. There’s a different pricing model and it actually scales with the volume of data now, which is really nice compared to the previous one, which was a kind of like a licence tier you just got access to. So they’ve changed the billing approach, you might even find that you end up paying substantially less than you were before, even with the 360 (Google Analytics 360) contract, you might find it’s the same or even more, depends on lots of different factors.
[00:12:24] Daniel: All that side, like you said, it’s all about being smart with it, rather than just assuming. Don’t assume that you will be able to get away with a free version if you have been to date? Because there might be a case, again, the amount of companies I’ve worked with that had very complex view structures, and then the accounts that they link those to the Google Ads accounts, they link those two and the conversion exports they were doing, there is no solution for that right now in GA4, they have to use sub properties or roll-up properties. So we’re kind of a bit of a bypass with those guys because we are having a conversation that they need to approach a licence fee, which they’ve never paid before. It’s just, don’t assume nothing’s going to change, and it’s just about reevaluating as if you would any new piece of technology, because this is so different. It may as well be not called Google Analytics, right?
[00:13:08] Dara: Yeah and actually you hit on something in there too. So we mentioned earlier that the linking to some of the GMP platforms is free with GA4 standard. But that’s a potentially big issue with the fact that you can only get the sub properties and roll up properties with the 360 (Google Analytics 360) version. Because if you have a complicated setup where you’ve got different ads or SA360 accounts or whatever for different subdomains or different markets, whatever, then to be able to migrate that linking you almost certainly will need the 360 (Google Analytics 360) version of GA4 to be able to match what you were doing before. In those examples you mentioned where you’ve got a fairly complicated or had a fairly complicated Universal Analytics setup in terms of properties and views.
[00:13:48] Daniel: Let’s assume you are on 360 (Google Analytics 360) now, where do we start to think about if we need to keep paying for this licence? Let’s say our contract is up for renewal in three months time. So we’ve got plenty of time to figure it out. Where do we sort of start with all of this?
[00:14:00] Dara: I don’t know if this would be where you’d start or not. But one thing I wanted to add as well, when I half jokingly said a few minutes ago. Oh, well, you could just rebuild all of that kind of reporting structure within BigQuery. One thing I should probably add on to that is you do only get up to, I say only, but you only get up to a million events per day in the BigQuery export. So actually if you are a big volume site and you are tracking a lot of events and you are trying to export a lot of data into BigQuery, then there is a chance you are going to come up against that 1 million event limit, daily limit. In which case that would be a very strong argument to go with the 360 (Google Analytics 360) version of GA4.
[00:14:38] Daniel: But, there’s always a but. There are ways around that as well. So again, it depends how much skills versus money you have, I think I like the way you phrased that earlier Dara. There’s two exports you can set up from GA4, you’ve got the streaming export, that’s the almost real time data export into a sort of temporary data set that kind of only exists for today. And then you’ve also got your daily exports. The daily exports are the kind of standard business as usual tables that a lot of people use. Whereas actually there’s no limit to the streaming export. So there’s real time data, there is no limit to that export. So you could, in a sense, create some kind of function to kind of pull that data from the temporary intraday table. And you can go store that in another table over there. So you can work around that via different methods or what you could do is just filter out the events, there’s a little feature within the BigQuery export connector in GA4, where you can actually just filter out certain events. So if you’ve got, for example, scroll on every page and you never use it, just remove it from the export and it might get you under the threshold. So there are ways around it and I think, again, it just depends on is there more than a million events per day or is there likely to be in which case start thinking about it, but it’s still never a given there’s always a but what about what if we did it this way to most of these, which again, a lot of people might be quite content doing again, not to pay for it.
[00:15:50] Daniel: It is kind of a all or nothing with the 360 (Google Analytics 360) licence in terms of cost and there’s no like sliding scale starting from very cheap to very expensive. It kind of jumps into the kind of middle of the swimming pool and then swims out to the deep end.
[00:16:03] Dara: Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just pay per feature ‘PPF’, because you’re paying for BigQuery storage and querying costs, which, you know, could be tiny or could be a lot depending on who you are. So if you could just bolt on components, 360 (Google Analytics 360) components and pay for them, wouldn’t that be nice?
[00:16:19] Daniel: That would be nice. So some of the things we haven’t really mentioned on this episode, but like when you get the new GA360 (Google Analytics 360) contractor it comes with Tag Manager 360 and Google Optimize 360 and it comes with SLAs. You get limits increased, so the number of audiences and event parameters you can store, custom dimensions, all of those kind of classic things go up. So if you didn’t need those and you just needed the SLA, could I just buy an SLA from Google. Let’s say that’s, you know, a grand a month. I just want the SLA, I just need you to guarantee the data, or maybe I’ve got more than a million events per day, but I don’t need anything else. And so I can just turn on that feature, again however it would work. It could be like an interface thing and each feature could have its own sort of pricing model, but that would be amazing.
[00:16:57] Daniel: It also makes it completely self-service because one of the things, and I know I said this already, but we are not resellers of GA360 (Google Analytics 360) and that’s because we’re not a marketing agency right, We’re an analytics consultancy. We only do analytics, and so we are not able to be a reseller because it’s for marketing agencies to sell on top of their other services. And so that’s something that we’ll never be part of and actually that’s great because we don’t want to do that kind of stuff. But if it becomes self-service, it takes it out the control of your marketing agency and it just means that you are not going to have a marketing agency controlling your data licence, which detaching those two things is really important because what if you wanted to move agency or what if you just wanted the licence and you didn’t want someone to keep trying to upsell you some SEO work or some PPC work? It’s not the case in all places, I’m being very broad and generalising, but from my experience, having that detachment is something that has been asked for quite often and it just means that you are free to switch agencies maybe that slight bit easier than you would if you were tied into a sort of annual Google contract via them.
[00:17:56] Dara: Well that’s our wishlist, or maybe our crystal-balling, but just pulling it back to the question you asked me about where would you start if you were going to assess what’s needed and it is something we say quite a lot on The Measure Pod, where this is kind of presenting an opportunity to review what you’ve got. So we talked about this when we talked about migrating to GA4. So because of the fact that it’s a totally different data model, it’s making people kind of review what they were tracking before and seeing what’s fit for purpose still and what optimisations they can make and whether they’re actually collecting the right data and using it in the right way. This is no different, really, so it’s another chance to kind of look at the data you’re collecting, how it’s being used, who’s using it. You know we’ve mentioned, and I guess we’ll link off to these support documents in the show notes, but if you really need the higher limits for, let’s say you really need a higher sampling threshold in the explorations, then that’s a tick in the box for the business case, we’re going 360 (Google Analytics 360). If you really need more than a million events, exported daily into BigQuery then that’s another tick in the box. But, you know, it’s for every kind of business to assess where they are on that, you know, looking at that comparison between GA4 standard and GA4 360 (Google Analytics 360) and seeing which of these extras do we actually need?
[00:19:07] Dara: And if you need them, but you only need one or two, are there workarounds that are more practical? It might be that there aren’t, going back to what we said earlier you know, you could work around some of these, some of these differences, but you might not have the skill set in house, or you might not have that resource available. So you might prefer to pay for that feature, even if you’re paying for 360 (Google Analytics 360), just for one or two features that you need out of the full list. And that’s going to be on a case by case basis isn’t it? Do I actually need the additional functionality? Do I need the higher limits that are offered on the 360 version? In some cases it’ll be a very clear yes or no. And in other cases it might be a slightly grey area where you think, well, you know, this might be a pain, but we could probably live with it versus no, we definitely on balance need the extras that are offered with the 360 licence.
[00:19:52] Daniel: And think about how much of a hero you can be if you end up saving the quite substantial licence fee every year, or if it goes down onto the new contracts, for example, to a certain amount, it’s all about having the business case for it right? So you’re not kind of going in blinded, assuming, because you are locking in for 12 months with these contracts. And if you find out on month two that you didn’t need it to begin with, that’s a bitter pill to swallow.
[00:20:11] Dara: Of course what we don’t know and this isn’t based on anything we do know, this is just another bit of a crystal ball, gaze into the crystal ball. But when the original GA360 (Google Analytics 360), when it came out, the additional features were added over time that were 360 only. The same might happen with GA4, so what’s on offer now with the 360 version isn’t necessarily the end of the journey. You know, it could be that they could create more distance between GA4 standard and GA4 360 (Google Analytics 360) as time goes on, as they continue to evolve GA4 and roll out new features in the future.
[00:20:43] Daniel: That’s a really interesting point, yeah. I haven’t really thought about that in much detail, but you’re quite right. If you just think about some of the missing features from GA4, that Universal Analytics does have, whether it’s free or paid, you think, well, for example, they made views or the evolution of views paid. They don’t have things like store visits data yet, they don’t have the Salesforce connectors that the existing Universal Analytics properties do. They don’t have custom attribution model facilities or custom channel groupings or anything like that. There is genuinely some way they could end up putting those behind the paywall as well and making it more necessary to go 360 (Google Analytics 360) potentially. We’re not saying they are or not, we’re not privy to that information. The idea is that, you know, there’s lots of features they have yet to roll out, you’re quite right they could put those behind 360 (Google Analytics 360) and make the difference between the two products more severe, I suppose. They’ve already got different ways of managing user access and different sort of like control you can have over your users.
[00:21:30] Daniel: Something that’s just come out recently, I didn’t talk about it at the top of the episode in the news. I didn’t really fancy mentioning it, but it’s relevant now, is the fact that they’ve just rolled out a new API for 360 (Google Analytics 360) properties to be able to see the last login time for each person that has access. But not only that you can see what report was viewed, how many times they viewed it, their email address even of what you’ve logged in. So in terms of the governance and the kind of like management across access, across potentially hundreds of people and agencies, that might be a reason you need to go 360 (Google Analytics 360). Because you know, you might end up granting access to an agency that don’t need it anymore and you’re a massive company and they could leak information, it could be a real important part for that. But there’s lots of reasons where they could take this that’s interesting, shall we say. But for now, take it at face value. We know what we’ve got in there and ultimately it’s just about assessing whether or not it’s worth dropping that much cash on something that turns out you might not need to. You’re going to find out very, very quickly if you do need it or not, and it’s just how quickly can the business kind of spin up some budget for it.
[00:22:27] Dara: And so much of this is still to come out in the wash because even though certainly the majority of businesses we’re speaking to, they have actually implemented GA4, but they haven’t necessarily migrated fully to using GA4. So there’s probably a lot of businesses who won’t yet know how well they can cope with GA4 standards. So regardless of whether they’re on 360 (Google Analytics 360) currently or not, there’s going to be a big question for everybody to answer once they actually make that full switch from Universal Analytics to GA4, rather than just thinking of GA4 as something that you’re kind of testing in the background, or in parallel. Once GA4 is the analytics in place that’s being used by everyone in the business that’s probably when a lot of these conversations are going to happen within businesses where they’re thinking actually, we thought we could make do without views, but we can’t. Or we thought we could make do with a million events exported to BigQuery a day, but we can’t.
[00:23:20] Daniel: If you are on 360 (Google Analytics 360), take stock of what you’re using within that 360 licence and see if it’s available for free. If you’re not on 360 (Google Analytics 360), look at GA4 and if you’re struggling to understand how you’re going to map over your Universal Analytics property without some of these features, then start thinking about this now and start engaging or speaking to someone about potentially getting a quote for it as well, just to see what the kind of prices are. Even if it’s something you might not actually need it’s worth knowing as early as possible. In terms of actually migrating to GA4, again I think most people nowadays have the parallel setup. So if you do already have a setup, and you’re not really focusing on it too much. Maybe take a day, take a couple of hours here and there to kind of read up about it. What we’ll do is we’ll post a bunch of links into the show notes of this that gives you the changes in limitations or the limits that are increased in the 360 (Google Analytics 360) version of GA4, a couple of other links there around the 1 million daily events, I’ll try and pull out a resource to kind of work around that. But again, all of this stuff is still pretty new so there’s new stuff popping up all the time.
[00:24:14] Daniel: So if you do find this useful all of you listeners out there, then, you know, that’s our intent with this. Again, we’ve got no skin in the game with it all, it’s just about making sure we’re not throwing money away unnecessarily, or putting yourself on the spot and then having to force the decision very quickly with an agency you might not actually want to work with. We’re just trying to help avoid those awkward conversations.
[00:24:31] Dara: Yeah, or end up lacking features or limits that you do actually need. Okay, I think we’ve done it justice, this is the second time we’ve had a go at the question of, do you need 360 (Google Analytics 360) or not? Next time might be when GA5 comes around and we tackle it again. Okay, changing tack completely Dan, what have you been doing since the last episode to wind down?
[00:24:51] Daniel: I’ll tell you what I’ve done recently that’s been a real good escapism thing for me, from the world of analytics at least. So probably if you’ve listened this far on the episode, you’re probably aware that I skateboard and it’s been part of my life for well, almost 20 years, and I love doing it, but I also love teaching and obviously that’s why I’m a trainer of analytics, you know, at Measurelab as well. And for the first time, probably in any kind of serious level, I was teaching some guys how to do certain tricks in the skatepark for the last couple of days. And I’ve got a real big sense of pride and satisfaction out of teaching someone something that makes them feel good about skateboarding. So just through kind of working with them for a couple of hours, the excitement that they got from it was just so infectious. And just seeing that kind of joy of like learning something and doing something for the first time was amazing. So I think I’m a bit addicted and I might pursue it a bit more, maybe do some skateboarding lessons or something for some kids that want to get involved or maybe don’t feel confident right now. But yeah it’s something different completely from my day to day, but combining something that I already do, which is training and something that I love, which is skateboarding. And I think if there’s something there for me to pursue extracurricular. I thoroughly enjoyed doing that.
[00:25:53] Dara: That’s brilliant, and so rewarding. I’m really impressed hearing that, I think it’s such a good thing to be able to give back with something you are so passionate about.
[00:26:00] Daniel: Thank you. Anyway, what have you been up to Dara, what have you been doing to escape?
[00:26:04] Dara: Mine’s going to sound terrible now, but I do feel justified in having another Netflix, another Netflix related wind down. Been away on holiday previously and talked about that and that was nice and active and cultural and all the rest of it. But since getting back, it’s been watching Stranger Things on Netflix. That’s been probably the main thing we’ve been doing to chill out in the evening. We’re a bit late, a bit behind, but we’ve just finished season four, which I think, I don’t even know when it finished, earlier this year?
[00:26:29] Daniel: Yeah, dropped on the 1st of July I think, the second part. It was the first of the month, I can’t remember what month it was, you’re not too far behind.
[00:26:35] Dara: No, we’re not actually, I felt like I was further behind, but obviously not. I don’t know if this is a spoiler or not, but I had somehow convinced myself that this was the end of it forever.
[00:26:45] Daniel: Oh, you didn’t know there was a series five coming alone?
[00:26:47] Dara: I didn’t know there was a season five, so I was pleasantly surprised when I thought, oh, hang on there must be more to come.
[00:26:53] Daniel: Yeah well that series five is going to be the last one. So we know that it’s going to end after series five or at least they said, but the idea is that it’s becoming like a Harry Potter or Marvel universe where they’re going to spit off lots of different things from I hear, so who knows, who knows what will happen, but this current show will end next season. But I thought it was amazing, again, no spoilers for people that haven’t seen it, but I highly recommend it. It’s not something that I ever felt the need to kind of re-watch, I watched it all through once, but then series four completely blew it out of the water really. It was just such a fantastic TV show, that series four was absolutely phenomenal.
[00:27:25] Dara: I agree, yeah, absolutely loved it. Really looking forward to season five, especially now that I know there is one, which I wasn’t expecting when I was watching season four. Okay, aside from in skateparks, where can people find you Dan if they want to reach out to you or find out a bit more about you?
[00:27:40] Daniel: You can contact me on LinkedIn and Twitter, all the links to these things are in the show notes. Also my website danalytics.co.uk, I intermittently post stuff on there which pings over an email if you sign up. Most recently I’ve done a couple of posts on Unity app development, I built a little Android app to test out some Firebase stuff. This sparks off some of the conversations we’ve had recently, I’ve written up some of the bits in there if you are keen to dig into that.
[00:28:03] Dara: Nice for me, it’s just Linkedin. It’s the easiest way to find me connect with me if you want to do so. That’s it from us for this week, to hear more from me and Dan on all things GA4 and analytics related, you can check out our previous episodes on our archive at measurelab.co.uk/podcast, or you can just use whatever app you’re using to listen to this to go back and listen to previous episodes.
[00:28:26] Daniel: And if there’s someone you think we should be speaking to, or if that is yourself, or a topic that you’d like to hear us dig into, even if we’re very underprepared for, just pop a email over to us at podcast@measurelab.co.uk, or there’s a Google Form in these show notes.
[00:28:39] Dara: Our theme music is from Confidential, you can find a link to their music also in our show notes. I’ve been Dara, joined as always by Dan. So on behalf of both of us, thanks for listening and see you next time.
Daniel Perry-Reed
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Further reading
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)
Grand Designs: “The Warehouse to CDP conversion”
