Honest Ecommerce

Bonus Episode: The Real Reason Why Analytics Feels Inaccurate with Brad Redding

Episode Summary

On this bonus episode of Honest Ecommerce, we talked with Brad Redding from Elevar about brands that excel in Google Analytics, why brands perceive analytics as inaccurate, expert tips about UA and GA4, and so much more!

Episode Notes

Brad has specialized in eCommerce and analytics since 2008 when he launched his first SaaS company that was a marketplace matching shoppers and independent local retailers through dynamic personalization. 

He’s helped build analytics and tracking foundations for brands like Rothys, Rebecca Minkoff, and Autodesk. 

In 2017, Brad founded Elevar which automates data collection and server-side conversion tracking for thousands of Shopify brands. 

You can find Brad sharing his knowledge on Youtube, the Elevar blog, and his Conversion Tracking Playbook podcast. 

In This Conversation We Discuss: 

Resources:

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Episode Transcription

Chase Clymer  

Before we get started, if you're enjoying this content, you can do us a favor by subscribing to our YouTube channel and ringing the bell.

That will let the algorithm know that you like this content and it will help us produce more.

Brad Redding  

Start with what questions or assumptions or hypotheses [you're] trying to prove true or false. Make sure you're tracking for that and [answering] those questions. And don't get distracted by everything else you could be doing in GA.

Chase Clymer  

Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game. 

On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.

I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.

Let's get on with the show.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, we're welcoming to the show, the founder and CEO of Elevar

They power server-side conversion tracking for direct-to-consumer brands on Shopify and Shopify Plus that need accurate data to make strategic decisions. 

Brad, welcome to the show.

Brad Redding 

Awesome. Thanks for having me, Chase.

Chase Clymer  

I'm excited to get into it. And I'm excited that it's now working. We had some technical difficulties but we persevered and here we are.

Brad Redding  

Yeah. Awesome. 100% my fault. Thunderstorm just came through here. So it's probably throwing  some Wi-Fi out of whack but we're on so we're good.

Chase Clymer  

We're good. Alright, so quickly, can you talk about Elevar? What's the product? What's the problem solving... I shared a little bit there but... 

Brad Redding  

Yeah.

Chase Clymer  

...give me the layman's terms of what you guys are doing.

Brad Redding  

Yep. Two main things, two main goals: Number one, we ensure that every marketing channel, i.e. Facebook Pixel, or Google Analytics/GA4, TikTok, etc. 

But every marketing destination or analytics tool that you connect to Elevar receives 100% of conversions. And we do that through the server-side tracking connection with Shopify. 

Number two, is that every conversion that we send to those platforms contains the maximum amount of attribution data associated with that. 

So the platform can then do its matching back to a customer matching clicks to conversions, etc. So by attribution data, that could be cookie values, like the FBC/FBP cookie for Facebook, or UTM parameters, or click IDs for affiliates, etc. 

Those are the two main things that we focus on and obsess over. And obviously a lot of nuance, but that's the layman's example of what we do.

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. So take me back in time. I'm assuming conversion tracking and data sharing wasn't what you woke up and wanted to do one day? How did you end up here?

Brad Redding 

Yeah, so Elevar started. So pre-Elevar... This is my second SaaS startup in the world of Ecom and analytics. but Elevar started solving a problem in between where, in my previous career and agency we were designed... 

We designed to develop and optimize sites for mid-to-large retailers, primarily back then was Magento Enterprise and or Demandware, and then Salesforce but kept running into the same problem of "Okay, we're trying to pull all this data from Google Analytics and analyze it and slice and dice it to provide insights and strategic reports for our customers to help them build a roadmap on what to execute on." That's going to drive the most value. And that reporting... 

And I'm sure you have a ton of experience with this as well as pulling out the same data from analytics, it's literally the same report. You're looking for the same nuggets, you're looking at the same landing page, by device, etc, etc. So Elevar was... 

Immediate thought was we should be able to automate this because by the time a person pulls that data out, does the analysis, puts it into a deck, presents it to the customer or brand, the brand reviews that with their team, they make decisions on "Yes, let's move forward.", it's 30 days later.

So you're essentially making decisions based on data that's really old and stale. So Elevar sought out for our beta product, we just ingested all of your Google Analytics data, we had a bunch of algorithms where we slice and dice just looking for essentially pass-fail. 

And we'd say, "Hey, these 20 things are wrong with GA. Here's your high exit pages with very low page value that have a high number of sessions." So trying to just help that analysis part where we ended up hitting some friction was... 

While the concept was great, more than 50% of our customers were just like, "Well, this is great, but I don't trust my data. I know my data is inaccurate..." And I don't know if this is an explicit podcast or not, but...

Chase Clymer  

Go for it. 

Brad Redding 

Anyway, so yeah, "I don't trust my data. So I don't really trust the insights that you're providing me because it's based on inaccurate data." Then we said, "Alright, well, we got to solve this problem."  

But then it was a little bit of a mix ]between] Magento and Shopify. So then we said, "Alright, let's create a Google Tag Manager app that we know can just automate everything that we need in terms of a data foundation for GA. And that'll help solve the problem of getting that accurate data." 

And that just kept leading to more and more "Well GA is not accurate. Facebook's not accurate, Google ads, conversions aren't accurate, etc." 

And honestly, just working closely with our customers listening to them and hearing cool, it's like, "I will literally pay you $500 every month for the rest of my life if my Google Ads conversion tracking never breaks again, because it just broke and it cost me $30,000. And that can't happen again." 

So we just kept going deeper and deeper and deeper and solving this problem which kept uncovering more problems. And with the world of privacy changes and browser changes, which is making tracking more and more difficult and complex. It's just... 

It's like the never ending road. And that onion that just keeps having more and more layers. So we actually sunset the original and data analysis part of our product this year. 

So we no longer do that analysis inside our app and just focus on tracking.

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. So going back to the beginning you were essentially automating reporting at the end of the day. It was a very simple way to... 

And that's how it started and then you guys just kept iterating and pivoting...

Brad Redding  

Yeah. 

Chase Clymer  

...based upon the feedback you're getting from your customers. 

Brad Redding 

Yeah, exactly. 

Chase Clymer  

That's wild. And I think that every time Google Analytics comes up when I'm talking with customers or prospects, leads, etc. on the agency side of things, it's just... They immediately like, "yeah, it's probably not right." And... 

Brad Redding 

Yeah.

Chase Clymer  

It's like, "Okay, well, that's a good place to start. Let's get this in better shape. And then... 

Brad Redding  

Yeah.

Chase Clymer  

...once you get that data in better shape, I think, one of the other biggest pain points for people that own Ecommerce businesses that are out there is they don't know what to do with the data. No one's actually looking at the data. 

Nobody's getting insights from the data.

Brad Redding  

Yeah. And that, honestly, if I were to pull all of our customers, I don't think the vast majority of any site out there is going to say, "Yes, my Google Analytics is one on 100% accurate." And that's just the reality that we're... 

Especially going forward with privacy restrictions. that's just... That's our reality. Historically, and that's going to be the reality going forward. 

Where we've seen, brands really excel with GA or agencies that are doing the analysis on behalf of brands is don't just open up Google Analytics every day, just try to pick a path to go down and you just go in deeper, because you're gonna end up in a black... 

It's like a black hole where you just keep going deeper and deeper. Then an hour later, "I don't even know what I was looking for. I don't really have any insight to share." 

So it's more of taking the, "Okay, what's the foundational data that we need to have in place?" Whether it's transactions or enhanced e commerce reports, if you rely on the product performance reports in GA or landing pages by campaign, etc. 

But then it's the "What questions do I need GA to answer for us today, this week, this quarter, this year, potentially?" And make sure your tracking is set up to answer those questions.

So that's going to vary by role, especially once you get into an organization where you have product owners for email and retention, product owners for Facebook, product owners for Google ads and affiliates. 

They will all have different use cases for what they need to get out of GA and many times they conflict. 

And that that actually is part of the reason why I say if I were to pull all of our customers, the vast majority probably would not say it's accurate because you're going to have the product owner who owns SEO or organic traffic is going to think that paid search is cannibalizing organic and vice versa. 

So just those 2 alone, they're going to be competing on "Well, I think attribution should be more heavily weighted towards organic because of these reasons that they see." 

But anyway, so going back to the questions, it's "Okay, I need to know whether our product fit videos are working, because we want to invest a significant amount of dollars and resources into producing fit videos and more professional videos outside of just UGC." 

Well make sure you have tracking to understand. Are the current fit videos? Are they working? Are they helping increase conversions? Are they decreasing conversions? 

Or thinking about UGC or you want to really push UGC out there and start pulling in customer content and customer videos and images that can do through your posts etc? Is that helping or hurting conversions? 

If it's hurting then you want to know that so you know not to promote that feature or you're likely impacting your bottom line without really knowing it. So that's the... 

I guess starting with "what" questions or assumptions or hypotheses are you trying to prove true or false? 

And make sure that you have tracking for that and answer those questions. And don't get too distracted by everything else that you could be doing in GA.

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. That was one of the number one pieces of advice from... We had a CRO coach not too long ago, and it was like, "You never open GA just to bounce around." It's like "You go in there with a mission." 

Brad Redding  

Yeah. 

Chase Clymer 

"You have questions that you want to solve or questions you want to try to solve with the data." 

Brad Redding  

Yeah. 

Chase Clymer  

And it comes back from just always building hypotheses based upon user behavior. And now this is getting super into the CRO weeds on this, which I know you have a bunch of experience at the old agency with this stuff.

But yeah, once you get Google set up, don't just go bouncing around, because you're just gonna waste time. Make sure that you have a mission. 

And we can maybe have another episode all about like, what are those missions that people should be having when they get into Google Analytics? You alluded to this about Google Analytics being interesting in... 

The way I want to take this is like, what's coming up now as GA4? 

Brad Redding  

Yeah.

Chase Clymer  

Everybody currently is on Universal Analytics. What's your thoughts, opinions, or hesitations about Google trying to move everybody to GA4 basically within the year?

Brad Redding  

That's a loaded question. I could take the next 40 minutes on that one. I have my suspicions of why this is it was such a drastic... For Google, that's a pretty drastic change of... This is happening... 

Basically you got 14 months to make that cutover. They've been in the middle of a lot of controversy in Europe with their data processing agreements and how data is flowing over the pond, so to speak, and they've been in lawsuits, and they've been deemed illegal in certain countries. 

And that has a trickle down effects, not necessarily just for Google Analytics as a whole but everything else within the world of Google, whether it's within Google ads, whether it's YouTube, whether it's their Display Network, AdSense, etc. So one of mine... 

I think, if I look at what Google ended up rolling out with Google Tag Manager, where --I think it was August 2020-- they released their server side container type, where you could essentially spin up a Google Cloud Platform and host your own GTM server-side container is... 

That's one thing I've thought about GA4 just if we say Google Analytics is potentially starting to look at how they can enable users in countries that have to follow very strict regulations. How can they self-host that? That's pure conjecture. I literally have... 

I don't have insider information but it's more... I'm thinking... The reason why I came to that one hypothesis is that just so much scrutiny is happening with privacy is making analytics more of a DIY, "You own it, it's not going to live in our servers where you don't know where everything's going. And it could be your own servers, it could be ours, etc." 

So that's a little bit about why I think it's happening. It's just a privacy shift. And we're starting to see this with Shopify's new... 

Some of their new privacy changes and enforcement's that they're having. But in terms of how it's going to impact tracking for all of us, not even just Ecommerce brands, is number one, the UI right now 99.9% of users, they just find the UI unusable. And that could be... 

To me, it's not necessarily... It's not a knock on GA4 it's just time is our number one resource all of us. We have a very finite amount of time. 

And we don't have the time to spend 10x additional time that we've allocated for GA just to understand how to use GA4 because it doesn't look like UA which is what we've all used for 10 to 15 years. 

So it's "Do I want to take 10 hours off? I was planning on doing these other high level initiatives for my business to just learn and maybe figure out GA4?" So I think that's the friction. That's going to be the friction over the next year. But there are a lot of good things with GA4: Their Funnel Builder, their Path Explorer... 

Just the way that you can send data makes it a lot more flexible to... Again, if you know how to use it to extract insights... 

So it's going to be a steep learning curve for next year. And then there's going to be other resources like prebuilt Data Studio reports that basically translates GA4 data into the old UA data so people can self-orient as they transition away from UA. 

But again, like I said, I could go on for 40 minutes straight but those are my initial thoughts on GA for

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely, I guess I'll ask your opinion as a data expert. On our side, we've implemented GA4 a few times now for clients and their immediate response is, "This data doesn't match." 

Brad Redding  

Yeah.

Chase Clymer  

And my response is "Okay, there's nothing we can do about it. It's set up the right way. But Google... The way that GA works is so different from Universal Analytics, it isn't going to match for a while." 

Brad Redding  

Yeah. Yeah, it's that is the number one question that we've been getting for years on it, even when we've been setting it up since it was called App + Web. But if you just take revenue... 

Revenue and Universal Analytics is literally your net revenue. So you think about product line and revenue plus shipping, plus taxes, minus discounts, that's your revenue metric in universal. And GA4 when you go into the... 

I think it's the Performance tab or Reports and Performance, the revenue you see as a line item revenue. So you are seeing revenue for your line items. So just those 2 alone, they literally... They're not supposed to match. They're different metrics. 

Conversion Rate, probably as of this recording, there isn't actually a conversion rate metric in GA4. You have to create a calculated metric for that. Yes, most people don't... 

You don't know that because you are blinded when you get into GA4 or just like "Holy shit. Where am I? Everything's new." And yeah, you just don't even realize the obvious like, "How can I look at my source medium report and see conversion rate by source medium?" You can. So there are so many nuances. 

Bounce rate. So, bounce rate and engagement rate or the engagement session or engaged session. You can control how that's calculated in GA4. So you can say, "Well, I want an engaged session to be anyone who is on…” 

“Even if they visit one page, but if they've been on the page for more than 30 seconds, I want to view that as an engaged session." 

So that way, you can split people that are less than 30 seconds, greater than 30 seconds, even if they had just viewed one page. And that... 

You might ask, "Well, why would I do that?" Think about your video sales letter landing pages or ClickFunnels landing pages or Truvani, the Food Babe, they've... In my opinions had always had one of the best experiences where [there are] very, very long pages, product pages, [that] were telling a story, the problem, etc. And those... You might... 

If someone's on that page for 2 minutes, but they exit that would be a bounce in Universal Analytics. But in GA4 that would be an engaged session. 

So that to me is it could be a very useful session to analyze, understand what we're doing, sync into the Google ads or whatever else you might want to do. Anyway, there's a lot of examples like that, that they, just like you said, they're not meant to match to UA.

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. And it's also... It isn't a final product yet. And they're going to be just adding feature after feature month after month, to get it to such a better place before the... 

Brad Redding 

Yeah. 

Chase Clymer  

…the date that they say isn't going to move again. So we'll see about that. But... 

Brad Redding  

Yeah. 

Chase Clymer  

...everyone's moving towards it. Everyone's gonna be learning about at the same time. And hopefully, I can get some smart guests back on here to keep talking about it, we can all learn together about it. 

Brad Redding 

Yeah. 

Chase Clymer  

Another big change that's happened... Now this isn't in the future. This is in the past, just how iOS 14 which basically started this whole privacy thing and brought attribution to the forefront of every Ecommerce owner's mind. How did that really change the game? 

Brad Redding  

Well, iOS was... If you actually have to go back to WebKit and the ITP... 

There's so many acronyms. It's an acronym soup. I can't get them all straight. 

But the internet tracking prevention protocols. Something like that. But it's actually this push for browsers, so just think Safari, to say "Hey for anyone running WebKit..." which is essentially your software within a browser. 

But "Hey, we are going to start limiting the tracking that known trackers like Facebook can do." 

So an easy example, "We're going to start automatically expiring their cookies after 7 days. Facebook's cookie used to automatically expire after 90 days which it does in Chrome today. 

And then that just started to snowball where it's like "Okay, we can no longer load a script from Everflow Affiliate script and then have that script pass data to Snapchat and others."

[They] were essentially cross site scripting. So that's really when we started to see these impact actual tracking whether it's analytics, Facebook, etc. And then with iOS, when it came down to device, that was like the "Holy cow this is real now." Because you can't actually mean... 

The device is basically [the] user. We all have these right next to us. So that's the... 

That was the "Alright there tripling down on data protection/data privacy and we've seen the impact of that." So we'll continue to see that as we go forward with GDPR, CCPA... 

There's another version of CCPA that's rolling out for California and I think 5 more states. And that's, that is going to be the, "Okay. We dealt with iOS. We figured out a way to either use an attribution tool or mix our Facebook and Google analytics reporting and just get a sense of where we are." 

But now, we're seeing the likely impact of all these different tracking preventions. "Well, now GA only has 60% of my conversions." or "Google ads is missing 30% of my conversions. What do I do with that?" And that's going to be a whole different... 

It's gonna be significantly more complex to solve that. And, again, there are some changes coming with Shopify and the way they're allowing checkout tracking with their new pixel API.

But that's going to be probably just as painful. I'll use the word painful from iOS. Likely just as painful as what we were seeing with post-iOS changes with Facebook.

Chase Clymer  

Now, does a solution such as server-side tracking help to mitigate some of that data loss?

Brad Redding  

It can, but you have to be... You still have to be compliant. So the way... Right now we have integrations with onetrust and Cookiebot, Shopify's native privacy widget, and basically what these tools are doing... 

So if you just think "How do people implement their cookie compliance with GDPR compliance?" I signed up for onetrust. 

onetrust says, "Hey, dropped the script on your site. It's going to prompt for people to opt in or opt out to the 4 different main categories." Once people do that, then onetrust will essentially output data in the network console saying "Add storage for these categories = true. For the marketing categories = false", etc. 

And that is essentially where all of your trackers are supposed to read that and say, "Hey, I'm going to... I'm Google ads. I'm triggering my script. And I see that the ad storage for marketing is not allowed." So it's up to... 

Google ads then at that point, they won't collect any cookie information. Or you can do the alternative, what we see a lot is if those are false... 

So if people opt out of tracking, then they block those scripts from being triggered. And this is where it gets really complicated and nuanced. But so where server side tracking can help... 

It's not going to be like a silver bullet by any means. But where the server side tracking, what you'll end up doing is… 

So basically what we do is we will read that output from onetrust, add that to the order or the Shopify session, and then you pass that with the integration to which is just think Google Analytics or something like Google Properties. You can still send data to those properties but they are your... 

As long as you're sending the add storage rules, then it's up to them to basically handle and ignore any of that additional data that they're not supposed to receive. There's a lot of nuances in there. I don't know how deep you want to get into that.

But the shorter answer is server-side tracking can help in that scenario, where by default, if your onetrust is blocking all scripts, unless someone says "Allow All", servers eye tracking can still help pick up your orders and activities, and then pass along that same opt out that onetrust has, then you pass that in with your tracker, and then the tracker knows to ignore, etc. That's going to vary. 

It's gonna differ for every brand depending on how tight they want to be with compliance, legality, they're gonna have different ways to go about that. But that's in general. 

Chase Clymer  

Yeah, and it's definitely such a wild west right now. Attribution, data, all this stuff, it's been a while. 

[It's been] around  forever, but it is now getting more to the forefront of a more general internet user learning about these things where it used to just be like a technical marketer knew about it. 

Brad Redding  

Yeah.

Chase Clymer  

And I think that there's going to be... Definitely, things are going to be happening from a legal perspective nationally, down to state level, and then also internationally. 

You've already seen, Europe is at the forefront of this stuff, too. So it's gonna be interesting to watch. And as you alluded to, there isn't a right answer yet. 

Brad Redding  

No. 

Chase Clymer  

And it's [probably going] to be a while till we get there.

Brad Redding  

If you just look at how marketing platforms name their pixels... So you have the Facebook Pixel, the Google Ads tag, the TikTok... Again, they all have different names, which if they name everything differently, you can just imagine their implementations being different as well. 

So Google Ads rolled out their consent mode, which is a setting that you can pass in their tag, which again, allows you to send transaction data so you can still get some attribution. But they essentially... 

Those users are excluded from being in the remarketing pool.

Chase Clymer 

Well, let's shift gears here. Let's talk about things that we can do. And one of them being...

Brad Redding  

Everyone from that last segment when we get into the weeds on GDPR and privacy, everyone's like, "Alright, I'm out of here this stuff is boring."

Chase Clymer  

Well, no, no, no. You're very insightful. And that's what I'm gonna talk about here. You also have a podcast. Let's pitch that real quick. 

Where do people go to learn more about this conversion tracking stuff and  what's going on? 

Brad Redding  

Yeah, just that's easy. The name is called the Conversion Tracking Playbook Podcast. And literally, all I'm doing is we're talking about this stuff as new things come up every week. So we're usually sharing, talking about new things, new problems. 

And we generally take topics, problems that our customers are facing, share the solutions or or how we're navigating those solutions on the podcast. So it's fairly technical. 

We do sprinkle in some CRO insights, like how to use GA4 "Here's a couple examples of some funnels we've created that you might be able to leverage." But yeah, that's the Conversion Tracking Playbook Podcast. 

So if you're into it, you'd enjoy it. 

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. We'll make sure to link to that in the show notes. Is there anything that I didn't ask you about today that you think would resonate with our audience?

Brad Redding  

I would say, the one thing that I would just share is something that we see with everything that's going on privacy, attribution, etc, that we are seeing a heightened focus on CRO. 

So it's if we all know what's going on with just rising costs across the board. So what is something that we can have more control over? And it's the user experience. 

It's "How can I better convert and/or increase average order value for my existing traffic on site?" 

So that is where we see just a bigger focus on "Okay, we're gonna let Facebook do its thing. We're gonna focus on CRO, user experience, testing, iterating, and making sure that we are maximizing the value out of our existing traffic." 

I don't know if you want to double tap on that but...

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. The number one way to increase your return on ad spend is to make your website experience better. 

Brad Redding  

Yeah. Yeah. 

Chase Clymer  

And I promise me and Brad didn't talk beforehand about this but that's what we do at the agency. So if you're interested in that stuff, please reach out. 

There's an ad that will come up in 30 seconds after we're done with this thing if you want to kind of talk to Electric Eye about that kind of stuff. 

Brad, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Where do people go to check out the product?

Brad Redding  

Just getelevar.com. G-E-T-E-L-EV as in Victor-A-R.com. 

Chase Clymer 

Awesome.

Brad Redding  

Or on the App Store. Shopify App Store.

Chase Clymer  

Thanks so much for coming on the show today.

Brad Redding  

Alright. Thanks, Chase.

Chase Clymer  

Alright. I can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. 

We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes. 

Make sure you head over to honestecommerce.co to check out all the other amazing content that we have. Make sure you subscribe, leave a review. 

And obviously if you're thinking about growing your business, check out our agency at electriceye.io. Until next time.