Episodes

It’s time for the last episode of 2021! I’m taking a little holiday break and will return in 2022 with new episodes. (Remember that if you want to suggest a guest for me (please do!), you can send me an email with your suggestion: simo (at) teamsimmer.com. I’m looking for a (more) diverse cast of guests; people who can talk with absolute expertise and authority about some aspect of technical digital marketing.) In this episode, we’re treading in self-help territory again. Building and maintain...

It’s just Simo Ahava alone, again. But this time it’s somehow fitting, as the topic of this podcast is motivation. Over the last four years or so, I’ve been really struggling with motivation, trying to stay excited about working in data and analytics. I’ve been writing an analytics blog for eight years now, I’m still very active in a million different practitioner communities, and we founded Simmer with my wife so that we could scale up this type of work to an even larger community. But it’s ...

We’re back with a special guest! This time around, Adam Greco of Amplitude graces us as the star of this podcast episode. Adam is one of the most industrious people in digital analytics. His work with Adobe Analytics (and its predecessor, Omniture) is globally recognized, and Adam’s been instrumental in popularizing the Adobe Analytics platform and making it one of the “big two” vendors in marketing analytics (in addition to Google). Recently, Adam shifted gears and stepped into the world of ...

No, no, look, you read the title wrong. It’s not communication struggles with Simo Ahava. Simo isn’t struggling with communication. He’s trying to discuss communication struggles. But, obviously, he’s struggling to communicate them. If coming up with a (sloppy) podcast title is hard, then managing communication in an organization is doubly so! In this podcast episode, Simo does a solo run on how communication structures really make or break your organization’s capability to deliver. Any (recur...

After the “drought” of the last three episodes, you can finally relax as it’s not just me doing a solo episode. And what an amazing guest I managed to persuade to join me! Matt Gershoff of Conductrics is a good friend and an eloquent speaker. Above all, he’s so incredibly knowledgeable about experimentation and about statistical inference in general. All the work we do with data is a subset of statistical inference. We collect data to draw conclusions, which we hope to extrapolate to the exper...

In this episode, Simo Ahava revisits Server-side Tagging, a topic discussed with Adam Halbardier in episode 5 of this podcast. This time, we take a look at some of the misconceptions around server-side tagging, especially when it comes to what users perceive to be its best qualities. Simo tackles ad blocker and consent circumvention, the idea of getting data back, the lack of transparency to what happens in the server, and he also shares some ideas for how to solve some of these problems. Ser...

Once again flying solo, Simo Ahava discusses the phenomenon known as browser tracking protections in this short but topical episode. Tracking protections are designed to prevent sites from tracking you – especially across the web but increasingly also while you are browsing the site itself. The mechanisms deployed by browsers to tackle the problem of “tracking” (a loosely defined concept if there ever was one) are often quite brutish, resulting in web compatibility issues as well as limiting l...

In this episode, the podcast host Simo Ahava delivers a solo episode. Understanding how a web browser works is fundamental to all disciplines that are covered by the umbrella term of “technical marketing”. Web browser is often the nexus of whatever mechanisms are required by things like analytics, advertising, and search engine optimization. It’s thus imperative to understand, at least on a broad level, the process of what happens when the browser fetches a resource from a web server. There a...

This is a special episode for all you Google Tag Manager geeks out there! My interview guest this time around is Adam Halbardier of Google. Among many other roles, he leads the server-side tagging team for Google Tag Manager. In this interview, we started casually with server-side tagging, a new-ish paradigm for Google Tag Manager, where the tagging logic is moved to the server rather than kept as a burden on the client. This then spiralled, of course, to exploring the engineering decisions t...

I was fortunate enough to sit down (virtually) with Dawn Anderson of Bertey. If you follow her on Twitter (you should!), you’ll know that she’s one of the most vocal and prolific voices around deciphering the operational logic of search engines and how that information should be applied to the industry of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). We discuss the world of ranking and querying algorithms, how SEO and search in general have evolved over the years, and we try to imagine what the perfect or...

Paul Boocock of Snowplow Analytics joins me for this episode. Paul is a brilliant engineer, helping build Snowplow into the analytics pipeline powerhouse that it is. For the uninitiated, Snowplow is a modular, open-sourced, end-to-end analytics pipeline that anyone (with the skills and resources) can setup to run their own analytics collection, processing, and reporting system. This episode isn’t (just) about Snowplow, however. Instead, we discuss the world of online analytics with Paul. As s...

In this episode, I got to chat with Pete Snyder (Brave) about ad and content blockers, and their impact not just on user experience on the web but also the engineering decisions a privacy researcher working on a web browser might have to make daily. Ad blockers are used to prevent the web browser from communicating with domains and URLs that have been flagged as harmful or malicious in various filter lists. This blocking makes the web browsing experience faster, more private, and more secure. ...

We are joined by Philip Walton (Google) to discuss the Web Vitals initiative. Web Vitals is a set of measurement guidelines for creating and optimizing for a great user experience on the web. Core Web Vitals is a subset of these, focusing (as of the time of recording this episode) on the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Philip is one of the main contributors to the web-vitals JavaScript library as well as the author of the web.dev docu...