Google Analytics 4 for E-Commerce: Fred Pike’s Expert Tips to Get Tracking Right

[00:00:00] Amanda Webb: Welcome to the show, Fred Pike.

Fred Pike: Thank you, Amanda. Delighted to be here. Very excited, in fact.

Amanda Webb: Me too. And as I was telling you, I’ve been binging a lot of your content recently, and I just find it very entertaining, which I think is important when we’re talking about analytics. So let’s hope everyone else is entertained by what we’re going to talk about today.

Fred Pike: Amanda, thanks. And the only people I know who binge my content are insomniacs, and boy does it help them. So I hope it helped you too.

Amanda Webb: Don’t be silly. Don’t be silly. Wouldn’t put me to sleep. I tell you, I could be watching that stuff all day long. Tell me about Fred Pike. Tell me, where did this journey into marketing, into analytics, where did it start?

Fred Pike: That’s a, that’s an excellent question. So I kind of went into it, certainly not by plan. At one point I was kind of interested in CRO and, CXL at that

[00:01:00] Fred Pike: point was just beginning to offer some courses and, and, Peep Laja there. Said, you know, join my cohort and you’ll figure out how to do, how to do CRO. So I didn’t join the first one, but I thought, damn, I wish I, I wish I had. So I joined the second one and it was a, it was an excellent course. But what I really learned coming out of that is that I thought I knew Google analytics. And I clearly didn’t know it at all. I could barely scratch the surface. So I thought, okay, I really have to, this is an area that interests me. I really have to dive into that. And right about that time, Jeff Sauer was coming out with his first Google Analytics course, and I signed up for that. And, and literally he would like record a lesson one day and I would take it the next day. So I was kind of like his, his guinea pig to run through it. And then, and that was a great course. I’ve been friends with Jeff ever since. And then right after that, it’s like, okay, if I, if I know Google analytics, the way to implement it is through Google tag

[00:02:00] Fred Pike: manager. So I took Measure Schools, with, with Julian Juenemannd. And that was a fabulous course to, and then I’ve just taken courses, learned a lot on my own, developed a lot of, through client work, just really, you know, dove into this area and learned it from, from experience. And so right now I’m a, I’m a managing director at Northwoods. We’re a 45 person digital marketing agency in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, close to Chicago. I lead up the, Google analytics and Google tag manager practice. So that’s, that’s. That’s my claim to fame, I guess.

Amanda Webb: And I love the way when I’m watching your stuff that you go and you kind of like stalk other, other Google Analytics accounts to see what they’re doing or tag manager accounts more. That’s been really helpful to me, at least. So I’d highly recommend people check out your stuff if they can find you online anywhere. I always find that stuff fascinating.

Fred Pike: Oh, thanks, Amanda. Yeah. And I think that’s a really

[00:03:00] Fred Pike: cool part about being in an agency is that you see so many different Approaches and implementations and everything. And that’s, that’s what I, that’s part of what I really love being here.

Amanda Webb: And I know I saw Julian reference you in a talk that he gave about leaving notes on your, I’m getting a bit technical for people now, but you can leave notes on the tags that you, you write, you wouldn’t notice it was there. You just click something and it appears. So you may have learned from Julian, but. Julian’s also learning from you. And that’s what I love about the analytics community. We all learn from each other when we find new things.

Fred Pike: Yeah, I agree. And I mean, it’s a, it’s a small community. And so we, we do learn so much from each other and that, that idea of putting notes in. to remind you six months from now, why did I do this? Oh, it’s because of this blog post or whatever. So I love that.

Amanda Webb: Yeah. But okay, so let’s stop talking about our community. And let’s start talking about there’s a couple of things we want to talk

[00:04:00] Amanda Webb: about. And before the show, we were talking about this just briefly, which is the state of measuring e-commerce, which is a headwreck for me, I don’t do many e-commerce sites, I have to say at the moment, I’d love to do a few more. But whenever I do, it’s never simple to connect up. analytics to e-commerce. So tell me about some of the bad things that you’re seeing.

Fred Pike: Well, almost, I mean, any e-commerce implementation you look at, there are bad things involved in it. I even really well done, professional ones always have at least one nuance that’s kind of missing or whatever, but they, they get the gist right. But, What blows me away about the e-commerce side is that the model itself, the GA4 e-commerce model is so simple to understand. You look at it, it has an items array, which is just a list of all the things that you’re going to buy or put in your cart or

[00:05:00] Fred Pike: whatever. And then it has a bunch of events around that, add to cart, remove from cart, begin checkout, et cetera. So the model is so simple, but in terms of implementing it, Oh my God. Like you, you have Shopify, for example, that doesn’t implement all the events and in their standard implementation. So it doesn’t have removed from cart. For example, do you care? Maybe not. I mean, that’s kind of a nice event to know. It doesn’t have add shipping info. Do you care? Yeah. If that’s where your funnel is breaking, you do care. So, and that’s just in the native, in the native, Shopify implementation. The, the WooCommerce one and WordPress using the GTM4WP plugin. I think that, in general is a, is usually a clean implementation. So I really like that plugin. I love the support that I can’t remember his name Tobias, or I should know his name, but I don’t, but he is, he’s active in the community. He’s always

[00:06:00] Fred Pike: giving support. And so that, that works pretty well, but, but where I spend a lot of my time with e-commerce sites is in internally developed e-commerce platforms for, for large and generally large companies. So they’re not running Shopify. They’re not running Woo commerce. They’ve built their own system. And that is. That is so hard for them to understand and implement properly the model instead of, I mean, there’s so many things they do wrong. So instead of add to cart, they might say add to shopping basket. Well, that’s great, but Google Analytics doesn’t understand add to shopping basket. It’s looking for add to cart. If you give it anything else, It’ll say, ah, I’ll, I’ll take that in, but I have no idea what to do with it. It’s not going to go in the monetization reports. It’s not going to go in the e-commerce section. A developer may say, well, I want to call it, instead of quantity, I want to call it QTY, which is

[00:07:00] Fred Pike: a common, you know, abbreviation. Google won’t know what to do with that. That’s not the, the name that it’s looking for. And so there, there’s so many. Like I said, it’s really simple, but you have to follow what Google tells you in the documentation. You have to follow it exactly. Otherwise, it’s, it’s not going to work. Google will accept that information, but it’s not going to put it in the right place. So that, that’s where I spend much of my time, working with, with clients. And I call myself an e-commerce whisperer because they come in and say, I, we don’t know why this funnel is broken or why our transactions aren’t going through or whatever. And so I kind of figure out, ah, okay, here’s, here’s where it’s broken. Here’s where it’s not corresponding to the model. Here’s where it’s implemented. Incorrectly and then try to fix that and get it working. And, it’s

[00:08:00] Fred Pike: a nonstop. It’s a nonstop battle. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s, it again, as I said at the beginning, it blows my mind how simple the model is and how hard it is to implement it. So I guess it’s good that it’s hard to implement because that keeps me busy a lot.

Amanda Webb: So to avoid that happening, I’m kind of going if you’re working in an agency, you at least have the technical team there that can help you implement. What might be wrong, which for me would be nice. I’m always working with a variety of all lovely web developers, but a whole different group of people with different skills. And I guess that must be nice. But as you, if you’re saying that, that means these sites aren’t being built by your agency. They’re being built by someone else. What can we do? So firstly, I do have a lot of, web developers who would be listening to this show. So what can they do? Number one, what’s the first thing they can do to stop that being such a pain?

Fred Pike: So the first thing is

[00:09:00] Fred Pike: there’s two resources, part of the developers. google. com that are really good for one is for what the model is. So this is what the items array looked like. This is how you have to tell me information. Tell me Google information about the items. And these are the events around it. And then, what’s interesting with that documentation, as good as it is, it doesn’t tell you what any of those things are, like item name or item ID. We, you know, we can kind of figure that out. But location ID, for example, is one parameter that people are often confused about. And it doesn’t say any place in that documentation where it is. So there’s a second list of recommended events. Is, is what that is. Also part of the developer. google. com. And that’s where all the parameters get described. So location ID is blah, blah, blah. So those are the two things you can’t leave it at that you have to tell us what location ID is now. Location ID is, is a specific,

[00:10:00] Fred Pike: actually I’ll have to look it up. , so I’m looking for Google recommended events, location ID. The physical location associated with the item, e. g. the physical store location, it’s recommended to use a Google Place ID that corresponds to the associated item. A custom location ID can also be used, and the Google Place ID, that’s a thing that’s, that’s tricky, It’s, place IDs uniquely identify a place in the Google Places database and on Google Maps. So it’s essentially the geographic location of it. But you wouldn’t know that otherwise.

Amanda Webb: No. I should remember that. But you know, the Google place id Yeah. That doesn’t come trippingly off my tongue. . Yeah. Yeah. And that, now that sounds even more complicated. I wish I hadn’t asked . I know.

Fred Pike: See, that’ll teach you.

Amanda Webb: So with all this, we were talking about what developers can do. So they should look at these notes and if they

[00:11:00] Amanda Webb: bring together those two documents, they should be able to see what each thing actually means and how they should assign it.

Fred Pike: Yeah. And they have to follow that. Exactly. Well, however it lays it out. And, and, and that’s, that really seems to be hard for developers. Like I’m working with one right now and she kept wanting to put the view item. event at a different place in the, in the, in the process. And it’s, you know, there’s a specific way that you look at this stuff. You, you view the items on the list. So view item list, you select an item. So select item you’re viewing the item. So, I mean, it’s, it’s really a, Google is defining a process by which a user is going through an e-commerce website. And you have to think in their mindset and follow their instructions and do that. And then it’s going to work in analytics just fine.

Amanda Webb: And I guess, so this isn’t a rule that can be bent. Basically, you have to follow this or it won’t

[00:12:00] Amanda Webb: work. And this is just for custom implementation. So it wouldn’t necessarily, I have come across WooCommerce integrations that even using that plugin, they’re just not, it’s just not sending. Some of that data to the data layer at particular points, which can be quite frustrating.

Fred Pike: Yeah, and that’s a great point because GTM4WP, that plugin doesn’t guarantee success. But it, it takes you a long way there and what you can do if you understand the model and you understand what the items array looks like and when, when those events should take place, the view item, the add to cart, et cetera, then you can look in the data layer and see, okay, is it showing up here where I expect? Is it, does it have the information I want? Why is it not working here? And so sometimes that’s in the WordPress store itself. So at least you get a clue. It, the, the plugin doesn’t guarantee success. But if your website is set up properly, it’s, it’s most likely going to work.

Amanda Webb: Yeah, that’s in most

[00:13:00] Amanda Webb: cases. Fingers crossed. I’m always with that. And I suppose we’ve gone into a terminology that might be confusing to people, which is data layer, which obviously it’s one of those things that we look at every day. So we don’t realize that it’s complicated thing. Tell us what a data layer is just for those listening that don’t know.

Fred Pike: Absolutely. So, so a data layer is, I think of it as a temporary storage place where any, any, anybody, anybody, any, program that’s interacting with your website can put information there. And it’s just going to store it there, and then any other program can take that information out, of, of it, and then do something with it. So, for example, that GTM4WP plugin, it’s going to put into the data layer, Hey, this person did an add to cart, and here’s the item that that person chose. So that’s how in the data layer, anybody can grab it. In our case, Google Tag Manager is going to grab that and say, Oh, that’s an add to cart event. I’m going to create a

[00:14:00] Fred Pike: Google Analytics event around that. And that’s going to say it’s add to cart. And this is the item that got added. And then I’m going to send that Over to Google Analytics, and if it’s formatted properly, GA will say, oh, here comes a, an e-commerce hit, an ad to cart, I’m going to put it in, ultimately, in my monetization report.

Amanda Webb: Perfect, great description. I’m not sure if that clears things up, but Well, it is, it’s that connector, basically, between what’s going on on your website and what’s appearing in your GA4 reports. So that’s for the web developer. Because I’m sure your regular business owner doesn’t want to be getting into data layers.

Fred Pike: Oh no, my God, no.

Amanda Webb: Yeah. But if you are, if you’re just running your small business or you’re the only marketer in your organization, which we come across a lot and you’re looking at GA4, how would you, what would they be the signals that it was implemented correctly or it wasn’t?

Fred Pike: Well, so a couple things is, you know, Google Analytics, is not the source of truth that it, what you’re, what you’re

[00:15:00] Fred Pike: seeing in Google Analytics is trends and patterns. That’s what you’re looking for. And it’s not the source of truth because people may not accept cookies or the JavaScript on the website on their browser is broken or whatever. So the source of truth is going to be is going to be WooCommerce, let’s say, or Shopify or whatever. So you’re going to look in shop in, let’s just choose WooCommerce. And it said you had, You know, 10 transactions on this one day and you had 7, 000 pounds or whatever of revenue. Now you look in GA4 and it says, Oh, you had zero transactions or you had 30 transactions and you’ve got 50, 000 pounds of revenue. You know that something is wrong. So you have to look at the source of truth, the e-commerce platform, and then look at the analytics and see Hopefully they’re within 90%. I mean, that’s, that’s, if they’re within 90%, that’s, that’s good because you’re never going to get And you shouldn’t try to get a hundred percent in analytics. Again, that’s a trends tool. It’s not a

[00:16:00] Fred Pike: source of truth. So that’s one way I look at. Another, another thing that’s really obvious, in, in the e-commerce report, in the monetization report and Google analytics, one of the things, it really has a funnel. So it starts with session, start the first, the person hit your website. Then they viewed an item, they add it to cart. They be, they, and then they begin. Check out and they purchase. Okay, so there there’s your funnel. If if you’re not showing anything in the view item Area, then it’s broken. You know that something is wrong there Particularly if things got added to the cart, but there’s nothing in the view item It’s like, well, how do they add it to the card if they didn’t view it? I mean, there might be a way they do that, but that’s, that’s atypical. So you really look at what the data looks like. You compare the data and analytics to the source of truth. And you look at what the funnels look like. And if they’re making sense for,

[00:17:00] Fred Pike: for your website. And, and I, like, if you look at the, I think the Google merchandise shop, At least in some time ranges, they have like 10 times the add, the number of add to carts to the view items. So you know something is broken. It’s not tracking the view items correctly.

Amanda Webb: You know, I love looking at that site. So just for anyone that doesn’t know, this is a demo account that anyone can have access to. You can’t mess with it, but it’s there. And I love looking at it because, yeah. Obviously they’re testing stuff on it. It’s like very often. My own analytics are broken for exactly the same reason, right? I’m testing stuff on it. But yeah I love looking at that because it just makes you see what can go horribly wrong If you’re not if you’re not looking at stuff properly, so yeah that makes sense So If there is no view item, but you’re getting lots of add carts, that’s, that’s obviously something that’s broken within your implementation. So you might talk to your web developer about it, or even just for yourself to know that there’s an

[00:18:00] Amanda Webb: issue there, I think is sometimes important. Which, and yeah, go on.

Fred Pike: I mean, even with the view item is top of mind right now, because I’m working with a client, large, internally developed system, and they never implemented view item. So that funnel. Initially was broken in Google analytics. Now it’s an open funnel, so it’s not totally broken, but I’m working with them right now to create the view item event, so that’ll start populating and in, analytics.

Amanda Webb: Yeah. And I was going to mention that, that you could technically go into explore if you want to get. Like and have some fun. I always call it fun and create your own fun.

Fred Pike: It is fun

Amanda Webb: Yeah, and create your own funnel if there are bits missing or broken, you know And it can be based doesn’t even have to be based on the standard events You can you can create it from paid views or whatever as a sticky plaster I’m gonna say that isn’t the solution, but it will do until you get it fixed. So that’s something you can definitely do

[00:19:00] Amanda Webb: I’m glad you say it’s fun because I always cringe when I say it’s fun because everyone it’s like Yeah. What does she mean? That’s like saying accounting is fun.

Fred Pike: Oh man, I don’t know about accounting, but explorations is definitely fun. And, and I, like you, I’m sure I spend 70 percent of my time in explorations building, you know, a custom one off or whatever custom one off report rather than doing the standard UI reports.

Amanda Webb: Absolutely. I’ve been like, what, what happens if I do this? Let’s find out.

Fred Pike: Yeah, great. And it’s, it’s kind of. It’s, it’s a poor person’s approach to Looker Studio. You know, it’s nowhere near as powerful as Looker Studio, but it’s within analytics. And it, it’s. It’s a great tool. I mean, if you haven’t, if you’re working in analytics and you haven’t worked with the explorations, that is a fun area to dive into. And I agree. It’s fun.

Amanda Webb: That’s good. I’m glad I’m not alone. I’m glad I’m not alone. So we’ve been talking about, and this kind of brings us into the second topic that I,

[00:20:00] Amanda Webb: we wanted to talk about, we talked about e-commerce and where it can break, but in general, you mentioned like, where’s the source of truth? What’s the source of truth? Google analytics isn’t the source of truth, which is constantly surprising to people. I’m sure it’s like, it can only show you so much, maybe less. So since we’ve got consent mode, people are more aware that we’re not tracking everything. So what, what sort of, what sort of measurement plans or measurement strategies should we put into be putting together?

Fred Pike: Oh, that, that is a, that is a great question. And the, you know, the, the backing up just a bit, the issue you said is that people don’t realize that analytics is. a trend tool. It’s not, it’s not truth. And that, as you said, that is a shock for a lot of people. And you can’t make it truth. It’s a, it’s a fool’s errand to, you know, try to collect 100 percent of all your transactions on an e-commerce site, for example. But what, what analytics is great for

[00:21:00] Fred Pike: again, is the trends and patterns. And I think, I think the beauty of analytics, the power of analytics is. When you, when you customize your own website. To be reflected in the analytics and and the purpose of your website is to engage with people and if they were Physically walking into your store, you know, you might go over and talk to them You might find out what they’re looking for You might find out what’s important to them in the shoes that they’re looking for or whatever you can’t do that on a website at obviously, but what you can do is is try to listen to what they’re doing and Make sure that you’re giving them the information that they’re looking for and sometimes it’s as simple as okay a form submission I mean, that’s that’s a very common action on a lead gen site, right? And we do a lot of work. We do some work with e-commerce. Most of our clients are really lead gen sites, or, or manufacturers. So, so that whole

[00:22:00] Fred Pike: thing of, filling out the form is important, but it’s, it’s not just a form. And, and I had mentioned, Amanda, that I just went through this intense, 13 week Measurement Marketing framework course through measurementmarketing.io, which was really, really good. And so, I mean, it, it, it opened my eyes to some ways of, of measurement that I hadn’t developed as fully before. But one of the things that I love in there is that it, they have something called ACT Ask, consider and Transact. And it’s, it’s creating a, a mini funnel out of one conversion event that you’re looking for. Let’s go with the form submission. So you may you may ask them at some point. Like It’s a kind of you’re you’re asking them to sign up for something. You’re going to ship them. Let’s say, Or even sign up for the email. So there’s a there’s a button With which I have to click

[00:23:00] Fred Pike: on that’s the ask they you have asked them to do something They’re clicking on that that’s beginning of the process now It takes them to a form and that might be a one line form that might be a 30 line form With lots of updates and stuff. So now they’re considering Do I actually want to do this? Am I am I going to fill this out and you want to measure that because Like one client i’m working on right now it literally is one button to, to start the form and 30 lines after that. Plus you have to upload four images. And it’s like, Oh my God. So how do you know what they’re doing there? And the way we set it up there in that consider mode is okay. They’re going to have spent at least 30 seconds on this page. They’re And they’re going to have at least started filling out one of the fields. That’s going to tell us that, all right, they’re at least considering my offer. You know, they, they, they went with the ask. They clicked on that original button. They’re considering because they’re spending time on this form, and

[00:24:00] Fred Pike: they’re starting to fill out information in at least one of the fields. Then I, then I, that’s not really part of ACT, I also track errors. So they try to submit, but they didn’t enter their phone number or, you know, whatever required fields. So I tracked that. And then finally, there is the T, the Transact. So they click on the submit form, passes all the security, it’s a successful form submission. And now, In the past, we would just track the form submission. Oh, we had, you know, 14 form submissions last week or whatever. But now we see we had 180 people click on the, on the ask button, and we had 170 people click on the, or go through the consider phase, but only 14 people transacted. What, what the heck happened? We know where that’s broken now. It’s in the consider phase. There’s something in there that is providing too much friction because people get there, they’re

[00:25:00] Fred Pike: spending the 30 seconds in this example. But they’re not filling out the form. They’re not finishing the process. So where is it broken? And that’s, that’s one of the things that I love about, about the ACT is that you’re really creating these mini funnels out of the, the important conversions or key events that you’re trying to track on the website. So that’s one of the, that’s one of the things that I really like about the approach.

Amanda Webb: That’s, yeah, really excited me as you were talking because I’m obviously clicking the people, getting the people who click the button. And I’m obviously getting the people that fill in the form, but I hadn’t thought of tracking. People that stayed on the site long enough to fill in the form and started the form fill. I’ve just gone, either they filled it or they haven’t. So now, and also I do track the error messages, at least. So that now I’m really excited. I want to go back to all my clients and do that for them because that just makes so much sense. And that will give you kind of your conversion rates at each, each stage as

[00:26:00] Amanda Webb: well. So, yeah, and I’m sure there’s a reason they’ve got 30 lines of text and uploading four images. It’s sometimes it’s better to ask for all that information so you get rid of the people that aren’t really interested, but I’m a bit scared. I would be a bit scared of that.

Fred Pike: So, so actually, so let, let’s follow that down just a little bit more. Let me expand on this a tiny bit more. So one of the things that, that, Mercer, the guy at, at measurement marketing, part of his, his approach is all right, you’re going to have ACT, but, but you need more than that. In fact, you need to be able to forecast. What do you expect to happen? So people see that button, you know, the ask portion, what percentage of people do you expect to hit? Of all the people who come to that page, what percentage should hit, should click on that? And you might say something like, you’re going to give it a range, 20 to 30%, let’s say. Okay, so I’m not expecting 100 percent of the people to click on that, but 20 to 30%. That’s my gut feeling. Okay. So the next thing he says is,

[00:27:00] Fred Pike: okay, if it’s higher than that, if it’s 100%, what are you going to do? If it’s right at that level, 20 to 30%, what are you going to do? And if it’s 3%, or if it’s below where you expect that range, what are you going to do? So you think of, of this, Before you even start getting data, you’re going to think about if it’s 100%. Oh, you know, I may not be discriminating enough in the traffic I’m sending to this page, because the chances of, you know, that form being interesting enough to 100 percent of your visitors, there’s probably something wrong there. So you think about the ramifications at each step, of what happens if it’s below, above, or at the range that you’re expecting. And I just went through this with a client, and they said, Oh my God, I love this. You’re gamifying, you’re making a gamification out of the tracking of this form. And, and we went through We did the the range 20 to 30

[00:28:00] Fred Pike: percent on the three portions of the ACT, we defined what we were going to do based on whether it’s high, low, or at that range for each of those forecasts. So we had a, we had a grid of nine actions that we were going to take. And then we looked at the data, and then we could highlight, Oh, look at the problem is here. We decided we were going to do this if that was a problem. And we did it. And it’s like, Oh, my God, that is so freaking cool.

Amanda Webb: Yeah, I’m excited about it too now. It’s like, I said, I have to go and try this on my own site, I guess, before I go mess with my client sites. But yeah, so that initial number, how am I setting that if I’ve got nothing, no benchmark to start with? What would you recommend?

Fred Pike: Amanda, that is the key question, which is absolutely fabulous. You go with a gut feel at that point. You’re the one who’s closest to the website. You have a sense for the people that are for the traffic that’s coming to the website. So you just have to go with your gut. And then after you, you start getting some real

[00:29:00] Fred Pike: data, the next time you go around and, and create those, those forecasts at range, you might say, okay, last year when we ran this campaign, 20 to 30 percent of the people clicked on it. So let’s, let’s use that as our expectations. And then let’s build around that. But if you don’t have the data, you go with your gut, what you think is going to happen. And, and it’s, you’re not, You’re not striving for accuracy, you’re striving for what you think is going to happen and what you’re going to do in the three areas around that.

Amanda Webb: That is an amazing tip. I’m so doing that for everyone now, and I’m sure lots of other people, the people who already know a little bit about analytics. That’s not difficult to implement, really, if you’re using Tag Manager. If you don’t, of course, you can talk to me or you can talk to Fred. That’s we’ll help you.

Fred Pike: Yeah, it’s all good. It’s all good I wish we could talk about and you would be a tag manager for this. I’m, sorry, go ahead. Amanda

Amanda Webb: No, no. Yeah, you definitely need tag manager for this So if you’re one of the people that’s allergic to tag manager Just get it on your

[00:30:00] Amanda Webb: site That’s what I would say Make sure it’s on your site because then you can always get someone else to do the work for you. It’s just It’s, it’s a good tool, but yeah, definitely. I think I need to do a whole episode on why you need a tag manager, but maybe that’s for the next series. Yeah. I was going to cut us off because we’ve been going for a little bit longer than we should have been. And I feel like we could now I’m really excited and I want to probe more and I’m going, no, we can’t go into an hour’s worth of a show. So I am going to move on to, and maybe we’ll get you back for series two to talk about something else.

Fred Pike: Absolutely. I’d be, I’d be delighted to come back.

Amanda Webb: So quick fire questions, data, data, or data.

Fred Pike: I always say data.

Amanda Webb: Do you? So why?

Fred Pike: Now, as an American, that’s really, yeah. Data, like Star Trek, right?

Amanda Webb: You’ve surprised me there and you’ve surprised me because the Irish person I’ve asked has said something that’s surprising also. Okay. This is a weird

[00:31:00] Amanda Webb: question for marketers. The next one. When you see a cookie banner, do you dunk it or delete it?

Fred Pike: You know, I am the 0. 05 percent that goes in and says yes to analytics and no to marketing.

Amanda Webb: Wow. Okay. So you go to that granular. I’m way too lazy.

Fred Pike: I mean, every now and then I just say no, but almost always I will allow the analytics and I actually go into customize. It’s a pain in the butt, but allow analytics. And I don’t want the remarketing stuff. So I say no to the marketing, but, I, I will say yes to analytics. I mean, it’s like, I’m going to do, this is my livelihood. So I’m going to do you the favor of giving you my analytics.

Amanda Webb: You know what, it’s really weird. I was thinking about this because I almost always click yes. Sometimes the cookie banners are so stylish that you don’t notice them. And I’ll be a few pages in before I’ll notice and then I’ll click. Yes But when the

[00:32:00] Amanda Webb: Facebook thing came up and said can I track you and I was doing Facebook ads when that but came out I wouldn’t let it and i’m kind of like i’m wondering I was always like doesn’t everyone click yes on those banners and I found out obviously that they don’t Yeah, so either I was a bad marketer when it came to Facebook ads. I’m a good marketer when it comes to websites So there you go. All right Yeah And finally AI yay or nay

Fred Pike: I mean, in my case, it’s definitely a yay. I, I use I use chat GPT all the time, primarily in, programming related things. So SQL queries, JavaScript, things like that. It, huge grain of salt that you need when you’re working with it. I mean, I started my career as a developer. I’m not a SQL expert or a JavaScript expert or anything, but I understand the developer mindset. I understand how to, how code works. So a lot of times I have

[00:33:00] Fred Pike: to remind, chat GPT that, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re working within a custom HTML block and H in GTM, for example. So remember, which version of JavaScript we can use. And, and so I’d say a yay, but, but anybody who thinks that they can just go to chat GPT and have it do, give it the right answer for any coding specific thing, that’s not going to happen. I also use it, and, and this is actually very useful. I use it to come up with, titles for different presentations or, segmenting them. I just did, I just did a blog post on, on the GA4 e-commerce model. Gee, how about that? And I ran it and I ran it through it and said, so this is what I’m trying to do. This is who I’m aiming at. What do you think of this? And it came up with a couple of good recommendations and some better subtitles for some of the subheadings. So yeah, I mean, is it going to take over the world and kill us all?

[00:34:00] Fred Pike: Probably. I hope not. Knock on wood, . But yeah, I, I could not imagine doing my work without, without it.

Amanda Webb: It’s mad how quickly that’s happened, hasn’t it? Because I, yes, I have chatGPT and Gemini open pretty much all the time. Which is, you’ve kind of answered. The final question was if you were yay to ai, are you chat GPT, Claude or Gemini? You’re current. You’re chat GPT clearly.

Fred Pike: I am chat GPT and I just I just got a subscription or bought a typing mind and from there you can go to Claude Gemini whatever perplexity. And so I’m going to start playing with that because I want to get different answers, not on the coding stuff, but certainly on, blog posts and titles, like it would have run, would have been nice to run the GA4 e-commerce blog through Claude, for example, and just see what, what it thought of it.

Amanda Webb: Yeah, it is. Cause I use Gemini, I pay for chat GPT, but I use Gemini

[00:35:00] Amanda Webb: for free and they do come up with different, it’s almost like just. Different personalities. It’s really strange. I can see how this is going to take over our lives eventually. Yeah. Yeah Great. Okay. So Fred, where can people connect with you and find out more about you? What’s the best place for that?

Fred Pike: So, I’m, I’m more active now on LinkedIn than I am any place else. I think I will put that in the show notes. I’m sure, also nwsdigital. com is Northwoods is the Northwood site. So you can follow me there. We do webinars and, you know, we, we have a blog and stuff like that. So feel free to follow me there, but, I used to be super active on Twitter. I, I cannot believe how what used to be such a great platform is now such a morass. Well, I won’t even go into it, but that, that my heart bleeds over the loss of that community. I loved Twitter. I just loved Twitter and LinkedIn is becoming pretty good. And I’m, I’m on threads a tiny bit,

[00:36:00] Fred Pike: but LinkedIn is the place to follow me.

Amanda Webb: Yeah, I’d share your mourning of Twitter. It was my favorite place too. So, but you know, LinkedIn, as you say, it’s kind of pretty good these days as well. So yeah, exactly. Yeah. Great. Thanks so much for being on the show and I would love to get you back and chat to you again.

Fred Pike: All right, Amanda. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed this.