Krista Seiden’s Google Analytics Viz Tips & Unusual Presentation Prep

Hey guys. Lea Pica here. Today's guest is the face of Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager today and she's a shooting star on the analytics speaking circuit. Stay tuned to find out who's making a cameo on the Present Beyond Measure Show, Episode 009.

<announcer> Welcome to the Present Beyond Measure Show, where you’ll learn the best tips, tools and techniques for creating and delivering data visualizations and presentations that inspire data driven decisions, change hearts and enlighten minds. If you’re ready to get your insights noticed, remembered and acted upon, you’re in the right place. Now your host, Lea Pica!

Lea: Hey guys! Welcome to the ninth episode of Present Beyond Measure where analytics, data visualization and presentation get together for a little par-tay!

Sorry. I just had Swedish House Mafia blaring in my car and I'm a little over jazzed at the moment, so pardon me. Before we jump in, I'd like to take a moment to read another lovely review for the show. Today's review comes from Staxmaster – cool name – and they say, “Clarity. Clarity. Clarity. Let's be real in this review. Marketing is nebulous and difficult to measure and focuses on feelings instead of results. A Senior VP told me this once so it must be true. Present Beyond Measure dives into the tools, applications and wisdom to destroy Mr. Senior VP's argument. Building a case through data and clearly presenting those results has changed marketing for the better. This podcast and the host brings so much clarity to all aspects of marketing. It's a must have for any practitioner.”

Thank you so much. That was such a lovely review. So thanks to Staxmaster and as a show of thanks I'm going to be reading all my favorite reviews to show my appreciation, so if you’d like to leave a review and get a shout out on the show, please visit me in iTunes at leapica.com/PBMiTunes and click ratings and reviews. I really appreciate it.

So, I am really excited about today's episode because it was my first in-person on-location interview in…drumroll…Australia! Sorry for my horrible pronunciation. I had the privilege of presenting with Jim Sterne, Tim Wilson, Simo Ahava and so many other amazing analytics thought leaders at the Loves Data Analytics Conference in September. It was such an incredible experience and if you want to check out the video recap of the event, just go to leapica.com/LovesData, It was so awesome, and I got to interview one of the very esteemed speakers in person, so without further ado, let's do it. <music>

Lea: Hey guys. I’m recording straight from Melbourne Australia at the Loves Data Analytics Conference. I’m so excited to bring you today's guest who's my fellow speaker and possibly one of the most well-known rising stars in the measure community today. She is the analytics advocate for Google where she's responsible for educating and advocating for digital analytics and optimization best practices, as well is running the GA premium training program. She also co-chairs the San Francisco chapter of the Digital Analytics Association and mentors for the Analysis Exchange. You may know her as the face and voice of the insanely popular Google Analytics Academy Course on Google Tag Manager which I just took, and she travels all over the world speaking to analysts who want to make the most out of Google analytics. Please help me welcome my great friend Krista Seiden.

Krista: Hi, and thank you for that really nice intro!

Lea: I try. I try…so we are recording right outside the Loves Data Analytics Conference right now so incase you hear any ambient noise, please excuse us, we are doing the best we can. So Krista and I met at the Analytics Demystified Accelerate Conference a few years ago but we were electronically introduced by Eric Feinberg from ForeSee who was my guest on episode 007, and you know Eric told me that you are rising star in this industry with lots of new presenting duties so I was very interested to make your acquaintance, but I love to hear a good origin story, so tell us a little bit about how you fell into this whole analytics thing.

Krista: Yeah so, you know it was kind of by accident, which you hear a lot in this industry. There’s a lot of people who start out doing something completely different and find their way into analytics and I am one of the stories. So I actually graduated college and went straight into finance, which turned out to be terrible for me. I was working on a trading desk at HSBC, but in San Francisco, and so that meant that I was at my desk at 5:30 in the morning, every morning, working New York hours. It was rough. And then in 2008 I actually got laid off with the economy and the downfall, and it was a blessing in disguise. It was really rough three months when I was applying to every job known to man but eventually I got hired on at Adobe and that's where I started to do business analysis, business intelligence and then eventually moved into a marketing analytics once they acquired Armiger. So it was an amazing opportunity while I was there to learn the tools sets, learn the industry, had great mentors in the organization, started following people on twitter and blogs outside of the organization.

I did that for two years in an effort to use internally at Adobe a lot of really great resources on hand there to learn from. Then I went from there to the Apollo group which is the parent company of the University of Phoenix and I ran product analytics for their mobile app in for an internal social network and that was a really cool experience because especially with mobile, I was able to sit in on a lot of UX studies at a UX lab in Phoenix and actually watch students use new versions of our mobile app and see how they qualitatively were interacting with the app and with the data and then pair that with the quantitative data I was seeing at Google analytics and really give me a better understanding for how the user experience went and how I can use data to inform that factor of project managers. Really cool experience.

I then went from there to Google. So my first two years at Google I ran an analytics optimization program internally through the Google for work group, built up an Analytics practice and optimization practice. It was a lot of fun and then that kind of landed me in my next role, my current role, as the analytics advocate for the Google analytics team.

Lea: That's an amazing story. The idea that a company was dumb enough to let someone like you go is fascinating to me, but I too can totally relate about the accidentally falling into that and I think a lot of people do and what I think is so interesting about this field is how left brain and right brain it is, and you get these really well-rounded people with all these different skill sets, but you still need a lot of help making the most of that all that. So, did you have to present a lot as an analyst in your early career? Like different findings and things like that?

Krista: I did, actually even early on at Adobe in my very first role as a marketing analyst I reported directly to a director who happened to be really oversubscribed in everything that he was doing, which worked out great for me because he ended up sending me to pretty much all of his meetings as the representative for the second-largest business unit at Adobe at the time. And I was in meetings with directors and senior directors and VP's presenting on behalf of my business unit, so I had to very quickly learn to have a voice in a meeting. That really, really helped me develop some of those early skills.

And then as I moved more into other roles and into more product analytics, I developed a skill around telling a story with what was going on. So I told you about the user experience testing with the mobile app and I really think that was a good grounding in kind of the entire user and customer experience, and the need to pull that together into a story that delivered back to your stakeholders to show them why it's so important that you do one thing with an app, or you change one page on your website, or CTA, or whatever it is that you're trying to tell them about. That story in connection to the user's experience is really, really important.

Lea: Yeah, I totally agree. One thing I'm curious about is presenting isn’t always something that comes naturally to people that fall into this industry. Was that something that came naturally to you, or was it more of an evolution and what was challenging about that?

Krista: So, it was definitely an evolution. I remember many of those early meetings when I had to speak to senior stakeholders and run meetings. My voice would quiver, especially depending who was in the room. The more senior the audience I was talking to, the more nervous I would get. But over time that kind of diminished when it was the smaller group settings. Talking to large audiences is tough, and it's definitely a skill set that you build up over time, and become much more comfortable with large audiences over time. And to this day I have to thank our mutual friend, Jim Sterne, for giving me my very first speaking opportunity in the analytics industry at a conference at eMetrics, and you can ask most of our mutual friends who were in the room at the time, it didn't necessarily go so well.

Lea: <laughing> No… come on…

Krista: I mean the content was alright. The delivery needed a little more polishing. I think it was a 45 minute session and I might've let everybody out about 20 minutes early because I talked so fast. That was the biggest take-away from that one for me was that I needed to slow down and just realize my own pace and that the audience actually receives things much better than you realize when you talk slow. So for me, I always felt like when I was talking slow I was talking down to an audience but that's actually not how it comes across. That’s totally in your own head. So it's really just about building that skill set and becoming comfortable with standing in front of a large audience.

Lea: I couldn't agree more. The first public speaking class I had was in high school and the very first thing we had to do was get up and speak and every single comment/feedback for every person was “slow down.“

Krista: It’s so important.

Lea: Especially if you’re from Jersey. It’s like part of our accent to speak three times as fast. So do you still get nervous, even small or large, and if you do, how do you build your confidence before going in?

Krista: So I don't get too nervous anymore, but that has a lot to do with the fact that I speak only on a few topics generally. These are topics that I know very well and I’m very passionate about. I speak a lot about Google Analytics and digital analytics and the industry. I speak a lot about testing and optimization, and Google Tag Manager, and those three areas are very much in my wheelhouse, and I think that anybody who is doing a lot of public presenting, when you're doing it, if you don't know your content well, and you’re not passionate about it, you're not going to come off as authentic or as genuine as you really could or should. So that’s really been what’s helped me get over the hurdles of being nervous is really knowing my content very, very well and not just knowing it well, but also going in with my own war stories. A lot of what I speak on comes from my own experience as a practitioner, running programs with analytics and optimization, and the ups and downs that I had over time and the lessons that I’ve learned from those experiences, so I think that really helps too.

Lea: I think that's great. The best way to get an audience to relate is show them that you've been through all of the same ringers. You’ve made all of the same mistakes, and I think that's what makes you so accessible despite having such an illustrious background.

Now, I myself went through the Google Analytics Academy training which is awesome, and recently I heard your AMA call with Jim Sterne and I fell out of my chair when I heard how many people have signed up with that, so can you share what that number is?

Krista: Yeah, amazingly we had 102,000 people register and take the course.

Lea: That’s crazy! How do you feel having that much exposure to this audience?

Krista: It's incredible. Google Tag Manager is definitely not a mainstream analytics product. It’s kind of on the super-techy-nerdy end of what we do, and to know that I was able to be part of bringing education to Google Tag Manager at scale is, I mean it’s incredibly fulfilling, and I feel honored to have had that opportunity to teach that course.

Lea: It was great and I highly recommend it and I'll definitely put this on the show notes for this episode which is going to be leapica.com/009.

Now as analytics advocate for the most widespread analytics platform in the world, you have a position that's sort of like a CIA correspondent. You must get just lobbed with questions that you can't answer, so what are some of those common questions and how do you navigate around answering them in a way that serves your audience but obviously doesn't get you killed?

Krista: Totally. A few questions that come to mind that I really can't answer or that we don't want to spend a lot of time or energy focusing on, you know, happen to be things like, “What's on your product grid map? Tell us about what’s coming next?” And as much as I want to tell everybody what’s coming next, you have to be fairly political about that and say things like, “Oh you know, we’ve got some really exciting things on the horizon. Definitely pay attention. We’re looking to solve pinpoints in these types of areas. So stay tuned.” Which you know, sometimes people are a little bummed about that answer but that’s as much as I really can tell at that time.

Other things, I don’t know if you remember the whole referral spam thing that was going around in the recent past…

Lea: It’s still going I think…

Krista: Still going a bit yeah…I think people have started to find their own solutions for it, but I’m constantly being asked about what it is, why we’re not doing more about it, how we’re solving it… It's a lot of pressure on a business when this isn’t a problem that we have ourselves created, but we are trying to work in the best interests of our users and are definitely looking to help out here. But until we have the solution, it's not something that we can stand up and really talk about. It's those kinds of questions that are tough but you have to be political in your answers.

Lea: I think it’s hard because when you think of a company like Google with all of the resources and manpower you think that there's probably just 10 people dedicated to just that one problem and releasing things, improvements, and it’s just not the case.

Krista: Yeah. Those 10 people also have day jobs. <laughing>. They’re working on that at night, in the wee hours of morning, trying to solve that new issue that’s popped up.

Lea: Right, right. You delivered an amazing talk at the Loves Data Conference today which is a big area of growth for me which is testing, and I love how you’re making testing seem approachable and how to make it approachable for your team, so do you have any advice for presenting test results that you get, if they're good, and the bad and the ugly?

Krista: Yeah, definitely. So I think that presentation starts with really being transparent about what you're doing so before I even going to into a presentation, I make sure that everybody in the organization already has access to the test plan and knows what it was that we tested and how we went about it, and what was on the road map, and how it got prioritized, so that when I go into these meetings it’s not a surprise that we’ve gotten tested what we tested, and it's really just reviewing the results and sometimes those results are fantastic and people get really excited, and sometimes they're not as stellar, but you can still find words of wisdom from these test results. For instance, if you ran a CTA test and you didn't find a winner that was better than what you had, maybe the take away is “Hey, the CTA that you have right now is probably pretty good for the audience that's coming to your website at this time. And oh, we also learned that XYZ occurred or people who were interested in this CTA may have also been interested in these products,” So there’s always new insights that you can glean from test results. It’s just a matter of digging in the data to find more.

I actually though am a big advocate of what I like to call a failure report. I very much like to just as much as I like to broadcast how well a test has done, when it had a few failures, if you would call them that in a row, which I wouldn’t necessarily, I like to wrap those up in a report as well, and show our organizations what it is that we learned from those, because you can learn something from every test.

Lea: Yeah, there's one my favorite entrepreneur instagram quotes that I’ve seen flying around is “What do you call a failed entrepreneur? Experienced,” and I would say that's the same exact thing here is you can’t possibly learn and grow unless you make mistakes here and there.

Krista: Totally.

Lea: That's great. So talking about growing as a presenter, you know, what would you say is the area you're working on the most right now for yourself?

Krista: So there’s a couple areas that I'm working on. One is making my content more relatable and I think early on, even that very first presentation when I spoke twice as fast as I should have, one of the other points of feedback that I got was that I just didn’t have a lot of personal stories or connections to what I was talking about. And over time, I added more and more personal stories to the point now where pretty much every point that I make is wrapped up in a personal story. I think that that not only makes it more relatable for people but I think it also makes it more tangible and more memorable when they can relate a point to a story and actually Jim Sterne was talking about that earlier today, is that when you have a story that people can latch onto that meaning, you've also mentioned this in your slides as well, adding a picture onto a point to similarly adding a story onto a point, really helps drive it home. So that's one thing that I'm constantly working on as I come up with new content, new presentations, is how I tie that to my own experiences.

The other thing I’m working on is just really being comfortable on stage, on camera, so before we recorded the GTM course, I actually started to use some improv classes.

Lea: Nice…

Krista: Yeah, it was it was definitely stepping out of my comfort zone. I kid you not, the first improv lesson that I took, the two instructors had me crying – over the word cucumber. It was this exercise where they had a random word generated. It happened to be cucumber, and I had to talk about it in a positive way, and in a negative way, and it kept going on and on until I literally broke down crying out of frustration and embarrassment and I couldn’t go on. They have this whole thing recorded on film so I get to go back and watch it whenever I like.

Lea: And you’re going to send me that afterwards and I’m going to maybe tweet it…thank you.

Krista: Hmmm, maybe.

Lea: And you know that's interesting because that’s sort of the opposite of what you talked about, about living in your content and knowing what's coming. But at the last eMetrics San Francisco I duked it out with Jim Sterne and Tim Wilson and Jim Cain in PowerPoint Karaoke we'd heard about this happening on the West Coast and it was absolutely terrifying. I had no idea what was coming, but at the same time Jim Sterne came up afterwards and said that was one of the most personable exchanges that we had because feedback I've gotten is sometimes it's a little too TED-like and mechanical and not so approachable.

Krista: Exactly. That I think is probably the biggest take away that I’ve had from the improv training that I’ve done is that it just really helps me to be on my toes and react as soon as something new comes up. You miss an important bullet point you meant to cover, <laughing> for all of our love of bullet points, and don't let that fluster you. Move on. Come up with something else on the spot and just be in the moment.

Lea: Now during the conference I happened to overhear, because I was eavesdropping on your interview, you are studying a special technique for prepping for public speaking. Would you please share what that is?

Krista: Yeah, so it actually comes out of this improv training as well, and that is that I am an aspiring beatboxer. So turns out that beatboxing is actually a really great way to warm up your register when you are going on to speak. So if you want, I can give you a short example.

Lea: Oh, you will be giving us a demo. Yes.

Krista: So basically you have to practice two words and that’s “Boots” and “Cuts” – like I’m going to cut you.

Lea: Oh! <laughing>

Krista: I’m not actually going to cut you.

So let me break it down into the various sounds. So ‘boots’ is kinda that lower register but it also has that ‘ts’ at the end, so you got “Boo-ts, Boo-ts, Boo-ts.” And then cuts is Cu-ts. It gets the back of the throat opened up. So it’s “Cu-ts, Cu-ts,” and then you pull it all together and it’s “Boo-ts ‘n Cu-ts ‘n Boo-ts ‘n Cu’ts ‘n Boo-ts ‘n Cu-ts ‘n Boo-ts ‘n Cu-ts…”

Lea: What. Yeah….a little Jersey Shore coming out.

Krista: So you can start to make up your own tunes there. I'm still working on the whole like getting my beat down, but it is a really good way to warm-up and it’s fun and it makes me smile and I think that's probably even more of a takeaway is that it puts me in a good mood when I go onstage.

Lea: Relaxation. Whatever you need to do. And Krista will be making her new demo CD available.

Krista: The EP’s coming out next November.

Lea: We’ll come up with a witty name for it later. So you've seen a lot of presentations I'm sure having been to so many conferences. What are some of your biggest pet peeves about the presentations you see?

Krista: Um, you know, like you and like many of our colleagues in the industry, really busy slides are always overwhelming and make me lose the story right away. Pie charts. We share a fond love for hating them.

Lea: No love and hate. It’s just hate.

Krista: But I actually think the number one thing that has bothered me in presentations is kind of what I've been working on so much is really that personal touch. When somebody gets up and it just sounds very, very dry and like they have memorized a speech, I personally struggle to pay attention, to listen to it and internalize their message. I think that's a good take away from that for me is that I just really need to continue to work on that even more.

Lea: I totally agree. One of the first blog posts I wrote was about five ways to lose your audience really fast and it was based on a presentation I had seen at a conference where I have never seen someone so disconnected from the audience and forgetting “Why am I actually doing this?” I like to think we’re creating experiences for people. That's why they're paying the money to be there, and unfortunately I overheard someone describe it as the worst presentation they’d ever seen and I would agree. The one thing, if you can do one thing, it's to be personal and relate to your audience like that.

So, you know you are also a huge inspiration for women in this industry, and you know you recently wrote a wonderful blog post that I loved about an interesting question you received during a speaking panel. So can you just briefly share that story?

Krista: Sure. So that was an interesting experience. I was in Amsterdam speaking at a user conference there and they asked us to do a 45, I was keynoting, and it was a 45 minute keynote followed by 15 minutes of Q&A. And they had an app for Q&A where people could submit their questions then upvote and downvote them and then those that are most upvoted were asked by the moderator. I gave the presentation. It went really well. The first couple questions that came in were right on topic asking for the clarifications about what I talked about, or product questions. Everything that was in my wheelhouse. And then this one question kept getting upvoted and upvoted and unfortunately it was, “Are you married?”

Lea: Ooh…

Krista: Yeah… and the moderator asked it. It really threw me off and I got kinda flustered. I was like, “OK, let’s move on,” and after the moderator and a few people in the audience attributed it to bad Dutch humor.

But you know I just feel like that was a really unfortunate question in the situation. And the blogpost that I wrote was really about how I'm a woman in tech and I'm proud of that. It’s definitely benefited me to be a woman in the industry that is fairly male-dominated because it does help you stand out, but I don't want to be known as a strong woman in my field. I want to be known as a strong speaker, or somebody who is very skilled in what I do, not because I’m a woman and I do that. And I’ve actually gotten invited to speak at conferences before with literally in the email it’s saying, “Hey, we need a strong female speaker.”

Lea: Hmm. Interesting.

Krista: Yeah, so I think my key takeaways from that are that I just hope the industry can evolve past that to a point where gender isn't really part of the consideration. It’s who is the leading expert on data visualization these days? And of course, that’s Lea Pica.

Lea: Oh goodness!

Krista: And who is the godfather of analytics? Well, that’s Jim Sterne. You’re known for your accomplishments and not for your gender.

Lea: So would you have any advice for fellow women practitioners for standing out in this industry that's not about being a woman and standing out?

Krista: You know, I think it's just really focus on being excellent at what you're doing and don't be afraid to stand up and to stand out in the industry. Go to conferences. Try to speak. Get in on the speaking circuit or in with the fun crowd of analytics professionals, or you know any tech profession or any profession. Just don't be afraid to go into those situations because you might be outnumbered gender wise. That's the biggest thing that holds us back today and that we need as women to get over it. We need to not be afraid to walk into the room and stand up and be skilled in what we do just because of our gender.

Lea: I couldn't agree more as a fellow presenting woman. So well thank you for sharing that very personal story I really appreciate that.

Krista: Of course.

<Music>

Lea: So I call the next segment “The Upgrade” and it's a power tip usually for presentation tools or Excel, but you have a particular tool that you know somewhat well that I think people would love to know what your big power tip would be for communicating data.

Krista: Oh so, you want me to tell people about how I really know telegram messenger really well?

Lea: Uh yeah…<laughing>

Krista: So, I think you're probably talking about Google analytics.

Lea: Oh right, yes. That would be it.

Krista: Actually one of my favorite reports in Google analytics, there’s actually two of them now, because there's the premium specific one, but the standard version is funnel visualizations and in the premium version it’s custom funnels. But I think that funnel visualizations and visualizing your data in a funnel is one of the most effective ways to communicate to your senior stakeholders. It's something that's very easy for people to understand. It’s visual. You can see how many people enter the top stage of your funnel. It’s wide and maybe that's a marketing campaign sending people to your website, or people going into the first step of the checkout flow, and then you can see each step along the way how many people are dropping off, and if there's a big drop off that’s cause for concern. It’s an alarm and that's something that all the way up the chain to senior stakeholders they’re going to be able to comprehend and understand and internalize and so for those reasons, I think that funnel visualizations are probably my favorite report and useful visualizations within Google analytics.

Lea: Nice. OK. Awesome. Well, this is my last question and I want you to think very hard here. Imagine this scenario. You’re scuba diving off the coast of Borneo when suddenly a current pulls you through a rip in time and you’re brought back to the precise moment you're about to give your first presentation.

Krista: <laughing> It could happen.

Lea: What would today you say to then you?

Krista: To a lot of the points that I made earlier I would probably first and foremost tell myself to slow down. They're going to understand what I say even if I talk slowly. They’ll probably understand it better and to just try to make it personal. Those are the two biggest takeaways that I’ve had from that very first presentation that I still carry with me today and so if future me can tell past me that that's definitely something I would like to hear.

Lea: Well, that’s awesome, and unfortunately we've run out of time but Krista, I've had so much fun with you today and I think everyone listening is loving getting to know you a little bit better. So why don’t you tell them where they can keep up with you and anything new or exciting they can look out for?

Krista: Yeah, definitely. So I’m on Twitter at @KristaSeiden and I also have a blog it's bloggerchica.com. Soon I’m going to redirect that from KristaSeiden.com which I also own, but today it is still bloggerchica.com and I’m also on Google+ if you are there at +kristaseiden.

Lea: OK and all of Krista's details are going to be on the show notes page again that's leapica.com/009. Thank you again so much. I loved spending the whole week with you and let's do this again maybe something a little less exotic or closer to home.

Krista: <laughing>Thanks for having me it’s definitely been fun hanging out in Australia.

<music>

Lea: What a fun way to see a different side of someone so well respected in the field. I think Krista had so many valuable things to say and is such a source of inspiration for me, and so many others, and hopefully the ambient noise and interruptions weren't too bad. So, thanks for sticking it out and thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Present Beyond Measure Show.

If you like what you’ve heard hop on over to iTunes to subscribe and please leave a rating and review, if you like it. Ratings and reviews are so appreciated because they boost the rankings of the show, and again, I'll be reading out my favorite ones on future episodes.

To catch all the resources we mention on this episode visit leapica.com/009. To review the show notes, download a copy, view the transcript, all other sorts of fun things, and I would love if you could leave me a comment or suggestions because I want to hear about the challenges you face when you're presenting your data and anything you'd like me to talk about here. Or you can tweet me a question for the show by including my twitter handle which is @leapica and including the #PBM as in Present Beyond Measure. And if you're located in New York, Seattle, or Atlanta, you can catch me at my next data visualization with Excel and PowerPoint workshop with the Digital Analytics Association. 

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And today's presentation inspiration is from Carl W. Buehner, but I think this quote is really fitting for this episode, and that is “They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” Find the common ground between you and your audience. Create your relatable story and you’ll turn them into raving fans. Namaste.