Daniel Waisberg who is an Analytics Advocate at Google.
Douglas Goldstein, financial planner & investment advisor, interviewed Waisberg on Arutz Sheva
Radio.
Douglas Goldstein: What is an analytics advocate at Google?
Daniel Waisberg: Basically, one of the big issues with analytics is that the technology
is really good but what is missing right now is a real understanding of what we can do
with the technology.
The advocate is a person that should be out there in the world and helping people to understand
and both educating and inspiring professionals to that driven decision making.
Douglas Goldstein: What is that driven decision making?
Daniel Waisberg: We want people to use analytics not on just deciding random decisions, but
knowing that one thing will be better than the other.
For example, one of the things that we like people to use is A/B testing which is one
of the analytics features which helps people to decide which design is better because helping
to decide if something is more or less beautiful than the other.
The answer is just show them to your customers and whichever they like is most beautiful.
Douglas Goldstein: This is a service that you're providing to companies who have a web
presence so that they can sell better to their clients?
Daniel Waisberg: Yes, anyone using Google Analytics for online marketing, I will be
there and will be talking to people.
I'm going conferences and writing articles and publications.
Douglas Goldstein: What's the real benefit to Google if people do this?
Daniel Waisberg: Google analytics is a free product right now.
There is also a premium version but the free product is the most common and what we saw
is that people that use analytics are savvy on the web, they end up moving their budgets
to online advertising so that's obviously good to Google.
We provide this tool for free and we help people use it because we understand that people
will be driving their business to the web more than offline.
Douglas Goldstein: I deal mostly with people who live in Israel who keep their assets in
a US brokerage firm and we try to access that market and we hired a web specialist to help
us.
I find the whole thing to be so big because it's really endless what you can do.
How do you help people to deal with that problem, sort of the infinite nature of the web so
that they can really reach the right target audience?
Daniel Waisberg: I think what's really important is to start small.
Understand for example who is your customer and I'm sure that you know who your customers
are so we know more or less what kind of people they are.
For example a web presence, you would have a website and use it for example to push content
so that your customers, they would be able to read more content and then once you start
building content and building a web presence, you will understand more and more your customers
and what they need, what they want and what they don't want so you'll be able also to
find your own offerings to them, they know what they like and what they don't like.
Douglas Goldstein: There are so many platforms out there like Twitter, Facebook, Google+,
Pinterest and it goes on and on and it's impossible for a small to medium-sized company to really
dominate in any one area without having a full time team.
How do they deal with it?
Daniel Waisberg: In terms of social, I think that the most important thing in social is
to focus on one.
Mostly when you go to websites, you see for example that people have Google+, Twitter,
Facebook and Pinterest and you go to those accounts and they're just empty and it's really
bad for your reputation, for the client it's really bad because they see something empty.
What I like to see is for example, you can do a small research on the web, for example
in Pinterest, there are much higher percentage of women and people there are more interested
in design and things so probably for financial product, it wouldn't be the right decision.
Facebook is for more for family oriented activities and Twitter will be more relevant, I think,
because it's more business or LinkedIn.
So I think starting with one of them and seeing what works, which kind content and which kind
of direction would be the best alternative.
Douglas Goldstein: One of the things that I like to believe about the internet is that
there's so much information out there but the people can always turn to Google to find
the most relevant information and the quality content is the target of all the searches.
Is that really true?
How does Google do that to make the experience good for all of the end users?
Daniel Waisberg: Content is certainly the most relevant.
We would have a really [inaudible 0:06:44] which is content marketing so people are always
trying to push content on their customers to bring them to their websites and engage
users.
One of the things I think is Google Search is trying to organize that and bring people
to the right place.
I think Google Analytics helps you as a publisher.
If you have website and then you publish things about your products and content that will
help your customers, what Google Analytics can help is by telling you which kind of content
people are enjoying and which kind of content is not being read.
For example, if you have an article that is trendy and it's appearing on search and it's
appearing on social media channels, you'll be able to understand what kind of content
you could use in the future and I think one of the big features of Google Analytics is
helping you understanding what people like in terms of content on a website.
Douglas Goldstein: There are people who maybe are not writing such great content but somehow
they just know how to get high in the rankings and at the end of the day, it's not necessarily
what the end users are looking for.
How can you improve that?
Daniel Waisberg: The Google Search team is trying very hard to understand which website
should rank and which content is the best content to show to a specific user and I think
we, as content publishers, should be thinking, not only I've always thought that we shouldn't
be thinking in terms of what search engine you like, we should always think what users
will like.
I trust the Google Search team that they will understand that and lead people to that content
instead to less qualified content.
Douglas Goldstein: You've written a number of articles and books and you have a website
out there which is called Online Behavior.
Could you just tell us what you have discovered about human nature that you teach people in
your writing?
Daniel Waisberg: The books are more hands on so they are more about how to use Google
Analytics in the most optimized way so you can integrate all Google tools and build a
suite of products.
You can integrate SEO and PPC and your YouTube [inaudible 0:09:44] into Google Analytics
so that's more a hands on approach on Google Analytics.
In the past, I've done masters in Tel Aviv University and one of the things that I researched
is Markov Chains.
One of my conclusions from my research and I still believe that it's true is that on
the web, one of the really important things when you're analyzing your websites is to
look at specific page, not the whole website.
For example if you sell something on the website, you shouldn't look just for sales as an objective
so you should look for example each page.
Are you managing to persuade people to go the next step so if you sell for example books
on your website, you would like people to land on the homepage and then you should persuade
them to go to a category for example novels and then from the novel, they should go to
a book page because it's really important to look at
consumer behavior, not as something that we could put into a bucket and everyone behaves
more or less the same.
It's really looking into each individual piece on your website and seeing if it's working
for you or not working for you and that's how
I think Google Analytics can help.
Douglas Goldstein: How can they follow you and your work?
Daniel Waisberg: I'm the founder of Online-Behavior.com which is a content website.
I published articles for people to read about how to learn Google Analytics and other analytics
related subject.
If you look for me on Amazon, you'll see my books and that's about it.