The tenth edition of the MeasureCamp Prague 2024 conference definitely did not disappoint us. Archetix went too, but this time as partners! It is great that we can support such a wonderful event, which has such a big impact not only on the web and data analytics community.
MeasureCamp Prague 2024 was once again held at a very prestigious venue – the ČSOB headquarters. And since this conference is a great experience for us, we decided, as every year, to give you a short summary of what the event was about.
In the following paragraphs we present how the individual members of our Archetix team experienced the event. So let’s get started!
Marek Čech
The tenth edition of Measurecamp Prague 2024 was very special for us, mainly because we became MeasureCamp partners. The event took place at a great venue, to which you had to undergo a morning workout just to get there.
Big thanks go to all the speakers who proposed a session. I would like to highlight a few of them who caught my attention with their topics and gave me further inspiration.
Trends in Mobile App Analytics
The first was Michal Nováček, who works on mobile app analytics. In his talk on how to measure webviews in mobile apps he summed up his overall experience with this phenomenon. He showed how to measure apps that are not so-called native (they are not developed directly for the given device but load a web page in the same way as in a browser). This is currently quite a popular trend in how apps or parts of them are developed. From a measurement point of view, however, it is rather problematic, because mobile and web data get mixed. Michal showed how to avoid this with the help of developers, in 3 ways:
- Information about the user is passed from the mobile app to the web interface, where it is then measured.
- Information about the user is passed from the web interface to the mobile app, which then measures it.
- Part of the information about the web page (e.g. the page name) is passed to the app.
So it depends on the situation which way will suit best.
For us at Archetix, mobile apps and their measurement are a very interesting and sought-after topic. We have already tried it in practice and in the past we measured and set up several of them.
Jan Hornych reminisced about the evolution of web analytics. He showed on examples how they process data in real time for their clients, that is, in specific databases intended for so-called Stream Analytics. These are special in that they do not store the data but actually discard it after a few hours. A great discussion broke out about why not do this on ordinary BigQuery. We came to the conclusion that the costs would be a hundred times higher.
Inspiration for Development
I would like to highlight Marcus Stade, who showed in a few simple lines of code how to automatically check the data layer in Google Cloud using the headless browser (library) Puppeteer. It was very nice inspiration, which Pavel (Pavel Košan) and I immediately took on as a task. We want to create a prototype that we could start using. The idea is that Puppeteer comes to a website, performs some interaction, looks into the data layer and saves it to Google Cloud, and another function then checks the data layer.
Marcus often shows such examples in the Analytics Pioneers community, which holds similar workshops, and I am going to take a look at those as well.
Martin Štacko
I was interested in the talk by Dominik Jirotka from igloonet s.r.o. on the topic of data visualisation minimalism (you can read Dominik’s article on this topic here, in Czech). We discussed when visualisations are too complex and, conversely, when they are too simple (minimalist). Of course neither extreme is desirable, and since we want to provide our clients with quality visualisation services, this topic is much discussed among us.
We therefore need to improve in how we give the client a simple, easy-to-read report from which they can immediately read everything they need. It is necessary to think about how not to overload their cognitive thinking and how to make the information they need easy to reach.
For me, as a team lead, the talk by Tomáš Janák on the topic of prioritising work was interesting. It is a topic I deal with every day at work, and it was great to hear how it is handled in a different, much larger organisation. Tomáš came up with a proposal for how to evaluate the priority of work according to several metrics. As is usual at MeasureCamp, a big discussion developed around this topic, with the whole community joining in.
Veronika Vacková
MeasureCamp Prague 2024 was a very interesting experience for me. It was my first time at this conference, and it was great to see so many experts from different fields in one place. A surprise for me was also the fact that the talks were not announced in advance but were created on the spot. For a very organised person like me this was a bit of torture, but overall the concept is very remarkable.
It was clearly visible that all the speakers know what they are talking about from practice and work with it every day. I really like that anyone could come to the talks, because they were adapted for a less experienced audience too. But I believe that more senior listeners also took away a lot of inspiration and new tips for their professional lives.
Interesting Talks
From start to finish the conference was packed with interesting information. What interested me most was the talk by Anička Horáková and Vašek Jelen on using the Google Ads export to Google BigQuery. The point of the talk was connecting Google Ads directly as a connector to BigQuery, where the raw data lands. The talk presented in more detail how to effectively connect the data from Google Ads with data from Google Analytics 4 and how to work with it afterwards. The speaker also pointed out current problems in Google Ads. One of them is, for example, that visits to the website from campaigns are attributed to organic, whereas they should correctly be attributed to CPC. That can then break your whole dashboard and noticeably skew your perception of the results.
Along with presenting these problems, the speakers also proposed an effective solution, namely connecting Google Ads via GCLID. This tool gives every customer in Google Ads a unique ID, which is then carried over into GA4 too. It is a very interesting approach, because we process Google Ads data through Keboola. I will definitely reach for this solution in cases when for some reason I cannot use Keboola.
I definitely recommend this event, especially to people who are starting out in their profession and want to learn practical tricks and procedures. It was also great that most of the talks were in English, so the conference is suitable for people from abroad as well.
Conclusion
We are glad that we can be part of MeasureCamp as their partners too, and we are happy to support these great events. We are looking forward to the next conferences, including those that will not be in the Czech Republic.
On behalf of Archetix, Marek gave a talk on Server logs in Google Cloud. He showed how queries work, how to create metrics and above all alerts. We are glad that there was great interest in the talk, and if you would like to get more information about it, do not hesitate to write to us! We will gladly prepare an article or run a webinar for you.
Among the last talks was the classic Analytics therapy by Lukáš Čech, where everyone has room to complain a little and share what is troubling them. From our point of view it was nice to hear that we are dealing with the same problems as everyone else, and so that we are not alone in it.