20 books in 2022 and hundreds of articles (via Pocket)! With me setting a goal last year of >15, I did pretty well. Especially in the first six months of the year, I had a good pace and averaged 2.5 books a month. In the second half, I slowed down and read some larger ones.
Why am I writing this blog post? For the last seven years, I wrote blog posts (2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 & 2016) listing the books I read in the past year and want to read during that year. Commit to reading and sharing publicly to get more book recommendations.
My favorite books of 2022
Zero to IPO: The book follows a similar format to the High Growth Handbook from Elad Gil that I read a couple of years ago, which is still one of my most recommended books. Zero to IPO focuses a bit more on the title: growing to an IPO. While Okta, to me, isn’t the most exciting business in the world. It adds a lot of value in terms of understanding the different facets of a product, business, and industry to make it successful.
The Founders: If you’re working in tech/startups and haven’t heard of the PayPal mafia, you’ve likely lived under a rock for the past decade. The Founders goes in-depth about the different people (Musk, Sacks, Thiel, Levchin) involved in the creation and success of PayPal. It is very detailed, sometimes a little much for my liking as it didn’t add that much extra for me, but an amazing read as it’s one of the biggest successes.
Angel: 2022 was the first year for me to start angel investing. While learning the ins and outs, I picked up this book by Jason Calacanis to understand his mindset and process for finding the right opportunities. Together with a bunch of other resources, it gave me enough confidence to get going and hopefully pick some (future) winners.
What books I’m planning to read in 2023
The Signal and the Noise: We were gifted this book in 2022, and while it’s already a classic, knowing it was published a decade ago, I can’t wait to get into this Nate Silver book as it put him (and his work) on the map. A lot of my interest well over a decade ago in marketing, analytics & data came from the predictions and data being used in the Obama ‘08 election and inspired me to go that route.
The Customer Base Audit: Most tech companies have their eyes early on set on the acquisition of users over retention, which makes total sense. However, that also means that in a later stage, the need for CRM, retention, and genuinely understanding the customer increases if they get there. Having read a few Wharton-powered books before that added value, I’m hopeful this one will also.
Pragmatic Capitalism: While writing this, I’m reading the Intelligent Investor. This book was a recommendation from @RickDronkers after talking about it as a good counter to the more oldskool approach in Benjamin Graham’s book.
What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence: Over the last years, through executive coaching, I’ve learned about myself that I value mastery of skills very highly (sometimes too much). Reading more about how to get better at certain skills and the lessons learned is a good back. It won’t likely be mindblowing, but throughout the year, I always like to mix in a couple of personal development books.
Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail: Ray Dalio’s book Principles was a long but good read. Understanding how he thinks about decision-making and setting a guiding framework for himself and Bridgewater. His work in this book has been mentioned many times, so picking it up to read seems like a good idea.
Good Is The New Cool: The Principles Of Purpose: Purpose remains a hot topic in building businesses/marketing. Over the years, I have read many articles on this topic and listened to just as many podcasts. Picking up a book this year about it feels like a good way to keep up the knowledge.
Since I started to present at board meetings a few years ago, it’s been interesting to understand how board members/investors think about a business/industry. As Marketing, you’re just a tiny piece of the whole puzzle (which was my first humble learning). It is even more important to use your time with them wisely.
As marketers (and SEOs specifically), we talk a lot about the measurement of success and the way we report to our manager > manager > CEO > board. After seeing Aleyda Solis present this deck at Friends of Search and participating in the SEO MBA, I digested a lot more information about optimizing reporting up the chain. But… what we forget to talk about is the level above your bosses, bosses boss: the board & investors.
Regular Reporting Frameworks
Domain Authority, External Links, Referring Domains, # of Optimized Pages – All standard metrics for the average SEO, I bet. I’ve also reported on many of those types of metrics. They’re good metrics, but do they create a comprehensive reporting framework that can be used to strategize your SEO? I wouldn’t say so. In my blog post about Input Metrics for SEO, I wrote about some metrics mentioned previously that can add value but on the other side of the spectrum. To influence the output.
What to improve? Business-Focused Metrics!
The metrics that you report on need to be focused on the business or industry. What does that mean? They need to have an angle that can support understanding the context of the business/industry and the trajectory it’s going at.
Examples of SEO Metrics for Boards & Investors
Let’s look at a few examples of metrics that might make sense to show to a board or investors. Remember, a lot of what they care about is understanding your category and its opportunity for growth (of your business) there.
Search Volume: Some of these metrics could, for example, be very simple. Certain keywords and your average position could sometimes be enough. If you’re in the red shoe space. Just overall search volume for that keyword might be enough to give you an insight into how the industry is performing. Because investors often want to know if a certain category is growing, and the top volume keyword (short head) is often enough to give a proper indication of industry size (close to it being TAM, which we’ll address right now).
Keyword Categorization: Extend this initial one and try to take all keywords in a category. If you’re a shoe e-commerce shop, just gather all your Search Console data with the word shoe. This will likely show the volume on a monthly basis and see what the direction is. Combine this SEO data with your PPC data from Google or Microsoft, and you likely get an even more accurate insight into how search impressions are trending.
CTR Position Analysis: You can be gaining tons of impressions, but with additional search features (local pack, more ads, featured snippets), you’ll, over time, lose click-through rate. With the pandemic, we also saw a shift in more people going back to desktop usage, impacting overall CTR trends a bit. The analysis of CTR & by position is something you can do yourself, powered by Google Search Console data. Showing this insight will help indicate where growth is coming from. Did CTRs increase per position, or did you actively improve positions.
Keyword Gap Analysis: In the past, I have already blogged about how to approach this. You can find it here. Keyword Gap analysis can tell you if competitor X that you’re competing against in niche Y is delivering many more clicks & impressions on keywords that you’re not ranking for yet: opportunity. Knowing what this opportunity is and being able to go after it is in my opinion, just as important as already ranking well for stuff.
Competitive Metrics: A no-brainer, but how are you stacking up against your competition. Sometimes this means that metrics like Domain Authority could be useful or knowing the number of referring domains, but don’t mistake them for leading metrics. They’re not. In itself, they’re useful for benchmarking at best.
Brand Traffic %: It does need to be clear how much you’ve invested in brand-related efforts during this time period! If you don’t, it skews the view, and people want to know what has moved the needle as it creates a playbook that can determine where to invest more.
What are your thoughts on this topic? How would you extend reporting to make it relevant for the board and investors? Feel free to ping me @MartijnSch
Sessions, transactions, and revenue are not metrics that an SEO shift overnight. It’s a matter of often waiting for Google. They’re considered output metrics, the work that you’ve put in results in those.
I just put down the book: Working Backwards by Bill Carr and Colin Bryar. It’s about their many learnings working for years at Amazon. It documents the process and policies that were put in place to make it the true giant it is today (including the theory behind pizza teams, the bar-raising process, etc.). One of the chapters talks about the concept of Input Metrics. Something that we often forget about in the context of SEO (or driving traffic via other channels).
Input metrics are considered metrics that can help define progress towards an output metric.
How many products do you have (today versus a week/month ago)? Metric: # of SKUs.
How many pages do have a custom/unique title or META description? Metric: # of optimized pages.
Analysis Decision Tree
They can be influenced by the work that you do on a daily basis. Let’s say that your (output metric) revenue is down. You would likely follow a decision tree like this:
Did the number of transactions decrease or did the average order value decrease last week?
If transactions decreased, did our conversation rate change?
If the conversion rate didn’t change, did sessions change?
If sessions were down, what channels caused this? Let’s say for a minute that all channels were flat except for Social Media.
If Social Media was down on the metric of sessions. What caused it?
A very simple explanation often follows: We just posted less on social media channels on Tuesday because of X. Aka, you defined the input metric that is in your hands to change: the # number of posts. My take often is that any metric that you report on should be able to either trigger an action, report an outcome, or show industry-level trends/benchmarking. Knowing certain metrics is useless without context via either benchmarking or historical data.
Example: # of Posts > More Social Posts > More Traffic > Larger Community
While I led Marketing at The Next Web, we looked at our variability in traffic to figure out how to grow our audience more sustainably over time (instead of relying on content going viral). Besides the apparent focus on SEO, we realized that the # of published posts was obviously a big input. It was not too surprising in itself, but it was an input metric that could significantly impact sessions. For example, it led to us republishing or reposting old content more on Social Media and having more writer support on weekends to create a steady stream of content. Without knowing what impacts traffic on a channel, you’ll have difficulty figuring out how to change your approach.
Reporting Input Metrics versus Output Metrics
What metrics should you be reporting on to your boss or upper-level? The ones that show the impact, which is most often output metrics in my opinion. You want to show business results as that shows your contribution to the bottom line of the business (at the end of the day we’re all getting paid based on that).
However, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have reporting for input metrics. If you know the % of pages that aren’t indexed, you have an input metric that needs to change to grow the output metric: sessions over time. If you run an e-commerce store, the number of products has an impact on their availability. In RVshare’s case, we can have thousands of RVs, but if they’re not available at the highest peak of the year, it’s still not going to help us (or the owner) grow.
Example Input Metrics for SEO
Input to Output can often be visualized as a funnel, as in SEO there are many steps that eventually lead to an outcome:
Crawl to Indexation: Each combination of steps will provide you with a way to input the next outcome. Increasing the number of pages should increase how many are crawled.
Number of pages (input)
Number of pages that are crawled
Number of pages that are submitted (via XML sitemaps)
Number of pages that are indexed
Number of pages receiving traffic
Number of pages driving revenue (output)
What do I need to get started?
Getting this insight goes back to having access to the right data. Most of what I just talked about is available through free tools: Google Search Console and Google Analytics is your best friend. The next best source is your internal data or CMS, which can provide insights into the quality of content/products/etc.
Sometimes, you want to assign specific user interactions to a different user.
There are many cases where you want to send an event for user X while user Y performs the action. But it’s important that you can save this information to the right user.
In our case, we ran into the use case where an RV owner needs to accept a booking. Only after the approval takes place do we consider this an actual purchase (transaction in GA). According to regular logic, the RV owner would get the purchase attributed to its session in Google Analytics. In the end, that user goes through the steps in the interface and confirms the transaction.
Marketing <> Google Analytics Logic
This doesn’t work for Marketing, though. We did our best to acquire the renter, and they’re the ones purchasing. According to Google Analytics, we’d fire an e-commerce purchase on behalf of the owner. What this messes up is channel attribution & performance measurement of our campaigns. In this case, the owner’s path is likely not touching any paid or true marketing channels but either direct or email.
In summary, the wrong user would get credit for the conversion, which could cause issues with our ROAS measurement of marketing channels.
Switching Client IDs & Leveraging User IDs
When Google Analytics is loaded, it will set the client ID value in the _ga cookies in your browser. This value (the client id) will be used to tie events → pageviews → sessions together and be seen as one user (in combination with the userId value, obviously).
So what we’re doing is pretty simple to change this behavior:
Whenever a user goes through the checkout funnel and creates a user account, we save their Google Analytics Client IDs (for GA4 and UA) to their profile.
When user X confirms the purchase, we’re sending an event to Tag Manager with the purchase context, including the impacted data from user Y.
Instead of directly firing the hit to Google Analytics, we swap out the client ID and userID from user X to user Y so that the actual purchase will get attributed to that hit. You need to mimic a session ID.
Google Analytics will now stitch this purchase to user Y instead of user X. You can choose for yourself what you want to fire for user Y.
Where possible, make sure that you’re already sending a userID to Google Analytics to ensure that the interactions can be truly tied back to the same user.
In my 1st job in Marketing, I ‘managed’ a marketing budget of less than €5.000 a month (mainly paid acquisition spend), eventually growing it to about €20.000 a month. A few jobs later, my budget responsibility has grown significantly, while now responsible for a yearly eight-digit figure ($)💸. This creates a need for more accuracy, accountability, and diligence into what you’re spending resources on and the return on investments.
Operating Expenses versus Compensation versus Other
Often you’ll roll into a role or organization that already has a set strategy and aligned budget plan. The same applied to my role at RVshare, which I joined almost four years ago. It’s rarely the case that you get to build a budget out from $0/scratch. Instead, I joined on a budget plan that already had some essential buckets (that we remain to invest in). This often also predetermines the organization’s path and how a budget will be divided in the short term.
Operating Expenses/OpEx: All expenses tied to regular marketing activities, campaigns, and the operations of the business. I can’t describe it better than Investopedia does here.
Capital Expenses/CapEx: For most businesses or functions, there is a more strong capital element for investments that they’re making. As we’re a very asset-light business, we don’t own any inventory and don’t have any actual physical marketing assets (at least not to make a dent in a budget plan). This is not a thing for us. And probably with us many other marketing organizations.
Compensation: Salary, Bonuses, etc. Basically what you get paid every two weeks.
Direct Return versus Non-Direct versus Supporting
There is no one right way to set up a budget plan, as it can be divided in many ways. Our Marketing one contains three big buckets:
Direct Return: Channels that directly can drive a return on investment and can be measured on this basis. Examples of that are Paid Acquisition, SEO, and Marketing Partnerships. It doesn’t have to be a scientific method, but you can predict your spend > revenue pretty well often.
Non-Direct Return: Other channels, for example, more focused on driving awareness or reach like PR, Social Media (Organic) and Brand Marketing.
Supporting: Marketing Analytics, Technology, Education, Consultants, etc.
Categories like travel, meals/entertainment, and education are not directly coming out of our marketing budget. But it is realistically also a tiny allocation of a total multi-million dollar budget (considering we have a relatively small team, we do invest in them, don’t worry). Which doesn’t mean that it’s low in itself as you always want to make business travel possible, as well as training & education.
Internal versus External
On ‘who’ do you spend your resources, and how is the decision made. In most cases, this is not a finance/budget-driven decision, in my opinion. As it’s mainly tied to what functional/strategic expertise you need to make an impact in a specific area. Before a year’s start (financial years exist for a reason), we plan out our expected spend on internal versus external resources. At that point, we often already have an idea of what we’d like to add headcount for and what might be better to hire external support for.
The narrative around this is often that you always need to scale. It applies to most startups, and overall I’m a fan of it. But it’s not realistic later on. A business with 90% of its marketing expenses is not healthy at scale. Scaling an unlimited budget might work well for you, but at some point, Finance will start knocking on your door as you’re ruining their cash flow positions.
Unplanned Costs
“A good leader can plan for any type of cost well ahead” – Nobody said ever. New ideas and costs always come up; I’m a firm believer in making sure that you keep a flexible mind and can adjust plans. For example, when we hit the pandemic in 2020, all our (preplanned budget) plans were useless as it would have ruined RVshare if we had continued on that spending level. Two months later, it turned out that we needed to spend way more aggressively than we ever expected and we ended up ‘overspending’ according to budget plans by many millions.
Brand versus Performance
“You should always invest in the long-term by building a brand” versus “Performance Marketing is key, Advertising can’t be measured”. If you’ve heard both, welcome to the club! If you lean one way, you might be able to learn a bit more about the other side. It’s a misconception that you can’t measure a brand. The comparison that I keep bringing up to people is the one of Booking.com versus Airbnb, one very well known for its performance marketing and the other one for its amazing brand building. However, that doesn’t mean that Airbnb spends over $400+ million on efforts that I would mainly categorize as performance marketing. Initiatives don’t always belong in a bucket, although I just described as they do. Both sides are just as important and not your budget but your overall marketing strategy should guide you on what to spend money on. Ours has guided us in multiple ways but we’ll remain to invest heavily in both buckets, in the future.
Working with Finance
Understanding Finance & Their Concerns
As part of the misconceptions, I touched on unlimited resources, and money isn’t unlimited for a company. If you’d spent all of your marketing budgets in the first month of the year, you likely would go bankrupt because your Finance team wasn’t aware of you doing this and ran out of cash flow. They also have a lot of their worries around financing and accounting, which makes it so that you need to be aware of what they care about and help.
Actually Understanding Finance & Accounting
Pick up a couple of books that can give you a high level of what finance and accounting terms mean so that you know how to speak the language of your finance team/CFO.
→ The HBR Guide to Finance Basics for Managers is a good start. After that, you’ll easily figure out what other books you might find interesting and how deep you’d like to go into the topic.
Being able to prove ROAS accurately
Invest in (marketing) analytics so that you can more accurately predict the return on your investments. We have spent the past two years getting good at this to ensure that we can ensure that our investments are returning value for the business. This is not just important for budgeting, but also a direct way to give Marketing a seat at the table as we can provide good answers to questions about how much money every additional 1M of (direct) marketing spend could be.
A data warehouse (& data lake) stores and structures data (through data pipelines) and then makes it possible to visualize it. That means it can also be used to help create and power your SEO reporting infrastructure, especially when you’re dealing with lots of different data sources that you’re looking to combine. Or, if you have just a ton of data, you’re likely looking to implement a (quick) solution like this as it can power way more than your actual laptop can handle.
Some quick arguments for having a warehouse:
You need to combine multiple data sources with lots of data.
You want to enable the rest of the organization to access the same data.
You want to provide a deeper analysis into the inner workings of a vendor or search engine.
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Setting up a warehouse can be quick and easy, but maintaining is where the real work comes in. Especially when dealing with data formats and sources that change over time, it can create overhead. Be aware of that.
What can I do with a warehouse?
Imagine you’re a marketing team with a strong performance-marketing setup, you advertise in Google Ads and meanwhile in SEO try to compete for the same keywords to achieve great click share. It would be even more useful if your reporting could show an insight into the total number of clicks in search (not either paid or organic). By joining two datasets at scale you would be able to achieve this and meanwhile visualize progress. Excel/Google Sheets will give you the ability to do this (or repeat the process if you’re a true spreadsheet junkie) but not to have daily dashboards and share it with your colleagues easily. With a warehouse, you’d be able to store data from both ends (Google Ads and Google Search Console), mingle the data, and visualize it later on.
Are you a small team, solo SEO, or work on a small site? Make this a hobby project in your time off. You likely, at your scale, don’t need this warehouse and can accomplish most things by connecting some of your data sources in a product like Google DataStudio. Smaller teams often have less (enterprise, duh!) SEO tools in their chest, so there is less data overall. A warehouse can easily be avoided at a smaller scale and be replaced by Google Sheets/Excel or a good visualization tool.
Why Google BigQuery?
Google BigQuery is RVshare’s choice for our marketing warehouse. Alternatives to Google BigQuery are Snowflake, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon’s Redshift. As we had a huge need for Google Ads data and it provided a full export into BigQuery for free, it was a no-brainer for us to start there and leverage their platform. If you don’t have that need, you can replicate most of this with the other services out there. For the sake of this article, as I have experience dealing with BQ, we’ll use that.
What are the costs?
It depends, but let me give you an insight into the actual costs of the warehouse for us. Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are free. Botify, Nozzle (SaaS pricing here), and Similar.ai are paid products, and you’ll require a contract agreement with them.
Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools: Free.
Nozzle, Similar.ai, Botify: Requires contract agreements, reach out to me for some insight if you’re truly curious and seriously considering purchasing them.
StitchData: Starting at $1000/yearly, depending on volume. Although you’re likely fine with the minimum plan for just 1 data source.
SuperMetrics: $2280/yearly, this is for their Google BigQuery license that helps export Google Search Console. There are cheaper alternatives, but based on legacy it’s not worth for us to switch providers.
Google Cloud Platform – Google BigQuery: Storage in BigQuery is affordable, especially if you’re just importing a handful data sources. It gets expensive with larger data sets. So having the data itself is cheap. If you’re optimizing the way you process and visualize the data afterwards you can also save a lot of costs. Average costs for querying/analysis are $5 per TB to do that, and especially on small date ranges and selecting a few columns it’s hard to reach that quickly.
Loading Vendors into Google BigQuery
A few years ago, you needed to develop your data pipelines to stream data into Google BigQuery (BQ) and maintain the pipeline from the vendor to BQ yourself. This was causing a lot of overhead and required the need for having your own (data) engineers. Those days are clearly over as plenty of SaaS vendors provide the ability to facilitate this process for you for reasonable prices, as we just learned.
Bing Webmaster Tools & Google Search Console
Search Analytics reports from both Google and Bing are extremely useful as they provide an insight into volume, clicks, and CTR %. This helps you directly optimize your site for the right keywords. Both platforms have their own APIs that enable you to pull search analytics data from them. While Google’s is widely used available through most data connectors the Bing Webmaster Tools API is a different story. Find the resource link below to get more context on how to load this data into your warehouse as more steps are involved (and still nobody knows what type of data that API actually returns).
Nozzle is our solution at the moment for rank tracking, at a relatively small scale. We chose them a few months ago, after having our data primarily in SEMrush, as they had the ability to make all our SERP data available to us via their BigQuery integration.
Technical SEO: Botify
Both at Postmates and RVshare I brought Botify in as it’s a great (enterprise) platform that combines log files, their crawl data, and visitor data with an insight into your technical performance.
Lesser known is Similar.ai, which provides keyword data and entity extraction. Useful when you’re dealing with a massive scale of keywords of which you want to understand the different categories. Especially when they’re to create topical clusters it’s coming in very useful. With their Google Cloud Storage > Google BigQuery import we’re able to also show this next to our keyword data (from Google Search Console).
Bonus: Google Ads
If you’re advertising in paid search with Google Ads it can be useful to combine organic keyword data with paid data. It’s the reason why I like quickly setting up the Data Transfer Service with Google Ads so all reports are automatically synced. This is a free service between Google Ads and Google BigQuery. More information can be found here.
How to get started?
Figure out what tools that you currently use provide a way to export their data?
Create a new project in Google Cloud Platform (or use an existing one) and save your project ID.
Create a new account for StitchData and where needed create an account (paid) for Supermetrics.
Connect the right data sources to Google BigQuery or your preferred warehouse solution.
Good luck with the setup and let me know if I can help in any way. I’m curious how you’re getting value from your SEO warehouse or what use cases you’d like to solve with it. Leave a comment or find me on Twitter: @MartijnSch
Over the last few years, I’ve written several times about Google Tag Manager, especially when I was at The Next Web as we had an extensive integration. Something we ran into over time was the lack of being able to send events that needed validation or were triggered from the front-end. At the time, I asked the Product team of GTM what their thoughts were about sending server-side events. It wasn’t a primary use case for a publisher, but for many others, it is. For example, you often want to validate data or check if an interaction has happened/passed a milestone (like verifying payment) before you can accept a purchase. In the web version (front-end) of Google Tag Manager, you either had to fire an event by hitting the purchase button or wait until the thank-you page was loaded. But sometimes, that doesn’t guarantee it, and the final confirmation takes place behind the scenes. This is where Google Tag Manager for the server-side will come in.
An intro to Server Side Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager server-side was released originally in beta in 2020, and since the early days, we’ve been in their program with RVshare. Server-Side (SS) leverages Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to host a GTM container for you that you then point via your DNS records to it. By doing this, you’re able to assure that any ad/privacy blockers are not blocking the default Google scripts hosted on google.com. But mainly, it will provide you with the ability to receive back-end requests. In our case, this means that we have more flexibility to validate purchases or user signups before we fire a successful event to SS GTM.
Learnings
New roads can be bumpy as you’re still trying to learn what should work and what new beta features might still not be ready for production. That’s why we gathered some learnings on our integrations that I wanted to share.
Server-Side Validation
Although we’ll likely all have to move to a world in which we run server-side containers there are still plenty of reasons why smaller sites don’t have to migrate yet and can avoid the overhead. But if you’re dealing with use cases that require validation, I would urge you to take a look.
Examples are:
You want to verify someone’s identification before registering a signup.
You want to verify payment information or inventory status before registering a purchase.
Those examples will require validation but will likely already send the user to a thank-you page without knowing if this is actually all approved or not. As a lot of this depends on business logic you want to ensure that your marketing or product analytics tracking in Google Analytics 4 supports this as in my opinion as you want to align your reporting with the business metrics that the rest of the organization cares about.
How to think about this for your setup? What are some of the examples or business rules that are in place for your organization that your current analytics integration might not line up with perfectly? Chances are that you find an opportunity to improve this by using server-side validation and only sending events once it successfully passes.
Managing Server Capacity
GCP and SS GTM on setup will create 3 (small) servers via Kubernetes by default. When you start receiving many events and send them in parallel to many different clients, you’ll start to notice the load on your servers increase. We didn’t realize that autoscale only goes up to 6? by default. Since then, we improved this, but it caused us to lack partial data for a few days after a significant release. So check how many servers your servers can auto-scale to avoid any issues. Realistically, you can quickly push that number up to 20+ without incurring any additional costs as they’re only used with a high CPU event, and they’re automatically being downsized after traffic slows down.
Monitoring Request & Server Errors: Slack & Email Alerts
Look at the trend line in the report. Notice the cliff? You never had to deal with this issue previously, as Google managed GTM web containers. But with SS GTM, things can go wrong, quickly and you’ll need alerting to tell you about it. In this case, an error came up on the side of Google Analytics with ec.js, which wouldn’t load for enhanced commerce, causing 5XX errors on the managed servers. That eventually led to conversions not being recorded, as that’s a mission-critical piece of our infrastructure. You can guess the implications.
How to do this yourself?
Go to your Google Cloud Platform project that is associated with your GTM account, your project ID will look something like: ‘gtm-xxx’.
Use the search bar at the top to find the ‘Logging’ product, you can also go there via App Engine which powers the servers for this.
You can find all the requests that are being sent to this server and debug what could be going on.
Saving request & error logs in Google Cloud Storage
Server-side events can come in all shapes and sizes, POST/GET requests, and can contain many things that you care about. In our case, we sent a server-side event on purchase with a full POST body with data. But… this body isn’t shown directly in the logging feature that we just talked about, that we just discovered as only the request URI is shown: GET /request-path. When you’re sending an event to: /request-path?event_name=foo-bar with a body, this quickly can cause issues as you don’t have a place to debug the body. We opted for sending this full request as a JSON file to Google Cloud Storage so that we can evaluate the full request. As this technology is still in development I can’t share much more about it this time.
Special thanks to the team of Marketlytics and Data to Value (Rick Dronkers/Peter Šutarik), as they’re our marketing analytics partners at RVshare.
2021 was a failure… but I was right. Early 2021 I already predicted that I wouldn’t read as much, which indeed proved to be true. My newborn daughter (hi 👶🏻!) caused a good amount of sleep deprivation in the earliest months of the year. Only in the Summer period I slowly got back into reading but meanwhile also spent most of December catching up on my Pocket (app) reading list that had gotten out of hand. But 2022 could be more bright. I think I could end up at > 15 books again this year with some luck.
Why am I writing this blog post? For the last six years, I wrote blog posts (2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 & 2016) listing the books that I read in the past year and wanted to read during that year. Mainly to commit myself to read as much as possible.
What books I didn’t get to in 2021 and have re-added to the list for 2022:
Amazon Unbound: It was a great look behind the scenes of one of the biggest companies in the world. Getting a better insight into their other business units, process, and organizational structure over the years was an interesting read.
Quantum Marketing: Although I’m afraid I disagree with the term ‘quantum marketing’, I think the book touches on a few good things and shows how important it is to stay ahead of the curve on trends.
Think Again: The concept of being able to ‘rethink’ is so important, but so many people struggle with it. From Adam Grant, who is great regardless, this book gave plenty of great examples to show how important rethinking your opinions is.
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need: After watching the documentary: Bill’s Brain on Netflix a while back, I’m very interested in getting a better sense of how Bil Gates is thinking about the climate. It’s a bit out of the scope of books I usually read, but worth spending some more time in this area.
This blog post was written in partnership with Ian Hoyt, who’s RVshare’s Marketing Project Manager.
While you pass through the growth stages of departments, things start breaking. Teams become less efficient. There is more work and often less accountability. In a small startup, everyone shares the responsibility because there is no one else to blame or lead initiatives. While you grow to a marketing team of 5+, it becomes clear that there are owners for channels (social, SEO, creative, email, to name a few). At 10+, you’ll undoubtedly have the first manager, and you can see how things evolve from there (multiple managers, managers managing team leaders).
At RVshare, I hired a Marketing Project Manager to help manage scale. We had too many ongoing initiatives and team members late last year. Unfortunately, it became too much for one person to manage (welcome to me partially failing as a leader). In many startups/scale-ups, I’ve noticed similar roles, and people show up to help manage the growth and support leaders (often in the form of a Chief of Staff, which we’ll talk about later).
What this role is (for us).
There are plenty of different titles and nuances to the role of a Marketing Project Manager in a marketing operations structure. And it comes down to the lifecycle of your company. The role can wear many different hats, and often, they do. At RVshare, we had a choice to make when we hired for this role. We could either hire a project manager FOR marketing (think SCRUM master, JIRA wizard) or a well-rounded marketer who knows how to manage projects. We chose the latter.
The difference is subtle, but context is key.
As a department going through a growth phase, it isn’t always the prettiest, most neatly tied bow of an existence. You try your best to stay organized, but there is no perfect “hey, we have a campaign idea,” let’s set all the requirements and execute the project at perfect timing (or hand it off to an agency), always. Instead, growth can be messy because better (or bigger) opportunities come up, priorities shift, and then you’re left with a team that needs someone to help fill those gaps and navigate the tides of the unknowns in the project all at the same time.
Kind of like someone sitting in the haul of a sinking boat with a rag and some wax ready to fill punctured holes as they traverse rough waters, all while screaming up to the captain what the heck their plan is. Except, our marketing project manager has never been in a haul of a boat, and no marketing campaign is ever that life or death.
What this role is not.
It’s not an executive assistant (EA), period. This person shouldn’t manage the team’s calendar, transport, or travel expenses. You can manage these activities way more efficiently by hiring an EA or putting enough processes/tools in place to manage them.
You’re lazy. You should have just {fill in the blanks}…
Hired more interns or more Virtual Assistants
Build more technology to avoid overhead
Created less bureaucracy and processes, to begin with
Hire more agencies or contractors
Your thought process is likely correct, and there is a place and time to think about all these areas, especially before starting the hiring process and figuring out how to avoid needing more headcount. But a VA or intern isn’t usually the right pick to lead strategic initiatives as they lack experience and seniority in an organization. Technology supports initiatives but doesn’t lead them.
They have things in common. They’ll often lead strategic initiatives and have the autonomy to operate parallel with the rest of an organization. But this role is usually the right hand of a C-level executive and more often than not focused on cross-organizational initiatives. The role that we’re talking about is more supportive of a team, and its primary goal is to keep the team operating as best as possible.
The role of (Business) Operations in the High Growth Handbook
If you want to read more about the role of business operations, I recommend reading the specific chapters on that in the High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil. It gave me the first glance a few years ago into what a team like that can do and how they can support the overall organization by being a ‘gap-filler’. To a large extent, the role of Marketing Operations fits into that as well.
The background of Operational roles in for example Design & Business
Design: In bigger design teams (>15 people), you’ll often find people focused on design ops. They’re helping the overall team design more and be better at their job by creating tools, workflows, and processes that eventually will help the team create more output.
Business: Filling gaps, exploring projects, and chasing ideas that could help make an impact on a company. Meanwhile, helping out to operate the business better by leading the way on cross-functional projects. That’s often what the role of business operations is all about.
Working through inefficiencies & why you need this role
As described earlier, nothing is perfect, and things will be inefficient. In a growth marketing organization, you’ll miss certain skill sets once you go through certain levels. With a marketing team of 5 people, you will not have channel specialists or functional leaders for everything. At 20 marketers, you might need more bandwidth temporarily somewhere based on seasonality. With this role, we’re providing a way to work through those inefficiencies, and it’s a reason this role could be helpful.
A couple of months ago, I was one of the participants in the SEO MBA program by Tom Critchlow. It was a 5-week long workshop series going through all kinds of subjects that matter in dealing with the executive level regarding SEO. We touched briefly on the subject of TAM (Total Addressable Market) along the way ts) as well.
In itself, I’d say this is a topic that isn’t often talked about in the context of SEO, so through this blog post, I want to spend more time talking about it as through years of working in/with startups, it keeps coming back. An often discussed question in board rooms around company potential remains; “What do you think the TAM is for this market, and how does that influence the potential long-term valuation?”
Why is knowing your Total Addressable Market useful:
Find out the maximum reach for the product/service that you’re developing?
What is the maximum market share for you to gain in this TAM?
Provides you an insight into the size and adjacent industries that are relevant for you.
How to leverage TAM for SEO & PPC
In the context of industries and segments, TAM is a powerful tool for SEO & PPC because it will help prioritization for content creation. Companies with many smaller segments and an average SEO team will have to prioritize what they can work on as they often don’t have the resources to go broader. Knowing what a search-focused TAM looks like can help you identify what to focus on first.
Note: This is not the only exercise they should be doing to prioritize, as the competitive nature of the industry should also play a role in this.
Identifying segments
Most categories within your business can be easily defined. For example, RVshare is, guess what: RV rentals. Which wasn’t hard to figure out, and you can likely do this for your business as well. But where Total Addressable Markets come in is expanding this. Let’s use an example:
RV Rental > Camping > Outdoor > Vacation > Travel
See what just happened there. Within seconds we went from a subset of a subset to the major category of Travel. It’s a high-level example, but it also applies in a more granular way:
Red BMW X5 for Sale > BMW X5 for Sale > BMW for Sale > Car Sales > Vehicle Sales
On this one, the last piece is a stretch, if you’re a car sales company, it’s often unlikely that you sell tons of different vehicles as well, but if you’re specifically looking for a red X5, you’re likely in one of the upper segments as well.
Calculating Click Share & Share of Voice
In the context of PPC, most folks will be familiar with the click share for ad groups or campaigns as it’s the percentage of clicks you’re receiving as part of a keyword subset. It’s beneficial in the context of TAM and search channels as it could indicate what the maximum click share (read; market share) could be for clicks. Because the chances are high that you’re not able to capture 100% of clicks on your properties (even if you claim all other positions in the SERP).
Want to know more about this? I’ve previously blogged about:
All Keywords within your segment * Search Volume = Total Search Volume / TAM
Makes sense? Calculating this metric in itself is not that hard, as it’s just a quick math equation. However, getting the data for a full segment or industry is much more complicated, so how do you get this data. But there are many ways to do this yourself simply. Only if you’re in an industry with tens of thousands to millions of keyword combinations (home sales, travel, etc.), you likely need more resourcing to support this.
Export all your keyword data from Google Search Console or Google Ads/Microsoft Advertising.
Calculate the yearly total search volume for those keywords.
Find any other related keywords in your industry:
Leverage related keyword tools.
SEMrush, Ahrefs can provide you with tons of keyword insights for your competitors.
Gather all this data back together and calculate the total market size & your share (your clicks).
At scale, for bigger industries, the process is a bit more complex as you have to digest more data to get to an accurate answer to your sizing problem. In addition, you’ll run into more data or keywords that might look relevant but aren’t, which you’d have to shift through. So, what’s the size of your Total Addressable Market (TAM)?
