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Episode 14: Optimizing User Experiences Through Comprehensive Web Governance

Hosted by Aaron Burnett with Special Guest Cameron Cowan

Cameron Cowan, Senior Director of Product Strategy at ObservePoint, joins Digital Clinic this week to discuss the intricacies of web governance and digital marketing. In this insightful episode, Cameron shares the history and evolution of ObservePoint, from its roots in Omniture to becoming a leader in web analytics. He highlights the importance of continuous monitoring, measuring, and improving web implementations to ensure clean, consistent data, emphasizing the challenges introduced by the shift to server-side tagging and the need for both client-side and server-side data layers.

The conversation also explores the impact of privacy regulations on digital marketing, particularly in healthcare. Cameron discusses maintaining compliance with evolving laws while ensuring optimal site performance. He likens web hygiene to maintaining a “honey-do list” for websites, prioritizing and addressing critical issues promptly. Throughout the episode, Cameron provides insights into the future of digital marketing and how organizations can enhance web experiences to drive better user engagement and business outcomes.

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The Founding and Evolution of ObservePoint 

Aaron: Welcome to the Digital Clinic, the podcast that goes deep on critical digital marketing trends, strategies, and tactics for the healthcare and medical device industries. Each episode brings you expert guests sharing the knowledge, insights, and advice that healthcare marketers need to be successful in this complex and rapidly evolving digital landscape. I’m Aaron Burnett, CEO of Wheelhouse Digital Marketing Group, and with me today is Cameron Cowan, who is Senior Director of Product Strategy for ObservePoint. Cameron, thanks very much for talking with me. I am really looking forward to the conversation. 

Aaron: Can you tell me a bit about ObservePoint, and tell me about the history of ObservePoint, which is fascinating to me? I met one of your co-founders years and years ago with a prior company, and it’s really impressive that he’s gone on to found yet another very significant company in this space. 

Cameron: Yeah, in a lot of ways, the history of ObservePoint is the history of my career, because all of this started with Omniture. If you’re familiar with the Omniture brand, Josh James and John Pestana started it as, really, the original SaaS-based web analytics platform on the market. I got connected with them-they were local here in Utah-right out of university. I got a job not knowing anything about technology or digital marketing. I was a business finance major, just to put a little bit of perspective on it, but I had a couple of friends say, “Hey, we’re going to go to this new startup. You’ve probably never heard of them, but go work there for nine months to a year, get a little bit of experience, and then go back and get your MBA and go work for Lehman Brothers, or become an investment banker in Hong Kong, or whatever it is you want to do.” Here I am, almost two decades later, still in the same place. 

The evolution of Omniture was with Josh and John creating this fantastic web analytics platform that eventually, as you know, sold to Adobe and became what is now Adobe Analytics. But there was always this understanding that when you implemented Omniture, it was always very bespoke. It took weeks, if not months, to get up and running. There were every customization you could think of, and I don’t think any two implementations I ever saw were exactly the same. On day one, it worked great, and on day 30 and day 90, it met all your business needs. Then over time, entropy happens. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is spot on in the case of digital marketing and measurement. You look at it two or three or four years later, and the website had changed, and the implementation had kind of lost its luster and was missing things, and business requirements had changed. The people that originally implemented it had come and gone. 

One of the things that John Pestana saw was it wasn’t just about getting that technology up and running. It was making sure that the data stayed clean, consistent, and useful over many, many years to help a business grow. And that’s really what led to the founding of ObservePoint. When John left Omniture after it sold off to Adobe, he still wanted to help that ecosystem. So ObservePoint’s entire focus then was helping Adobe Analytics implementations consistently be monitored, measured, and improved, so that people didn’t just get fed up and rip it out and replace it after a couple of years, but they would consistently get more out of that investment. From there, it’s just a matter of saying, you know what? If this works for Adobe Analytics, it really should work for Google Analytics as well, which it does, and it really should work for any other technology that’s on the website, which helped the evolution of what we’ve become now, 15 plus years later. 

How ObservePoint Monitors and Improves Web Analytics 

Aaron: So when you say monitored, measured, and improved, can you describe that a little bit more? You’re not really talking about the data side so much as the technology side of things, what has changed in terms of what’s present, what’s absent, what continues to fire, what doesn’t fire, that sort of thing? 

Cameron: Yeah, it’s a great call. Really, the underlying technology that ObservePoint is built on is a web scanner. We’re going to web pages and creating synthetic traffic to replicate any type of user experience you could think of. If I want to go to your website right now as though I am a fully opted-in consent visitor from the state of California, I can do that. If I want to make it look like I’m coming from London or Tokyo or Sydney, I can do that. If I want to turn the global privacy control, the GPC signal on or off, all of these manipulations are simply saying, “If I were a user going to that website in this way, what happens?” 

From the earliest days it was- we’ll load that Omniture, that Adobe Analytics code, as the page loads, and telling me what’s in the payload. Tell me every single variable, all the events and eVars and props if you know that space, making sure the right data is going to the right place in the right way, and making sure there’s no gaps in that. And once again, if that’s true for an analytics installation, that’s only one of often 30, 40, 50 different tags and technologies that are on a website. Let’s start monitoring those as well to make sure they’re everywhere they should be as those pages load, and that you don’t have any data going to the wrong places. I mean, it’s one thing to say is the tag there. It’s another thing to say, “Well, what cookies is that tag or technology setting? What data is being collected in those cookies and as part of that implementation, and where is that data going? What vendors, what geographies?” And does all of that fit the consent level, from a privacy perspective, that the user, when they go to that page from that location, has established with you and your brand. 

Aaron: That’s a great overview. When was the company founded? 

Cameron: I actually give a couple of different answers to this. I think formally, 2007 is when there’s like founding documents and incorporation started. We opened for business in the platform in 2008, and then I think we relaunched a couple of years after that. Depending on who you ask, I usually use the 2007 date. 

Shifting to Server-Side and the Increased Complexity 

Aaron: With the company founded in 2007, that was a time when tags were client-side and scanning was relatively easy. It was still a significant technical feat, but relatively easy. As we’ve shifted server-side, I would assume the sophistication, the complexity, but also the value prop for ObservePoint has increased tremendously. 

Cameron: Yeah, I think you’re right. The complexity is one layer to it. When ObservePoint started scanning web pages in 2007-2008, it was a matter of there being only four or five pixels on that page, and we just want to grab one of them and see what the payload is. As the internet grew up and as things got more complex on every website, as you know, the tag management space really started to come onto the scene in 2011-ish. Adobe purchasing Satellite that became Adobe Launch, Google Tag Manager, and others really helped manage all of this complexity. I find it interesting when I hear people say “going server-side,” like, what does that actually mean? There are a lot of tags and technologies on your website that have no way of going server-side; they only run based on the client. If you need to adapt and personalize a user experience, if you’ve got pop-ups that happen based on site intercept for voice of customer, that happens on the client. So even the companies that I hear say, “We’ve gone server-side,” that usually means they’ve moved a handful of measurement technologies to a server-side approach. 

Even then, the thing that we find, and we’re really encouraged by, is our customers are using both client-side and server-side, because there’s always a data layer. All this data needs to map at a proper level. I have good, clean, consistent data across an ever more complex technology stack. Also, there’s coverage, like, is this server-side call that’s going to leave my website and go somewhere? Is that on every page it should be and implemented in the right way? So that still needs to be verified from a browser, and then even when that data leaves to go to a server, it’s interesting that whether I have a call going straight to, for example, Adobe Analytics, or straight to a server that is then eventually going to get to Adobe Analytics, really, in the outbound payload, you should still have all the same information pieced together. The difference is, where am I doing that transformation, the enrichment, all the different rules that change or alter the data that’s leaving the website? And whether that happens on a server or it happens through VISTA rules and processing rules and classification rules in Adobe Analytics itself, nothing you see in a payload leaving a website is actually going to show up exactly that same way in the reports within the technology that it’s going to. So it’s just a matter of where is that being changed and translated. 

But back to the original question, the complexity is there. It’s going to keep changing. There are going to be people that are going to be doing things in new and unique ways, and we’re trying to make sure that no matter where they’re at, we’re still the authority on what is happening on your website right now and what data is leaving it, no matter where it’s eventually going. 

Monitoring Data on Both Sides: Client and Server 

Aaron: Do you have the ability with ObservePoint, then, to both monitor what is firing and being collected on a website, and also that server-to-server communication as well? Can you see the data payload that’s leaving on the other side, or are you really focused on what’s being gathered from the website? 

Cameron: Yeah, I’d say from a data perspective, we’re focused on what is happening on the website and what’s the payload leaving. Once it’s gone, we’ve never reached into Adobe or Google and said, “How are you changing this data once you receive it?” And so that’s never really been part of our focus. We’re more focused on what is on the website, what’s leaving the website, and where is it going. Once it’s left, that’s kind of beyond the realm of what we’re looking at. I’d say where we’re starting to expand a lot more is in the way we look at what is on the website. It used to be really just analytics, and to be more focused, it used to be Adobe Analytics. Then it included all tags and technologies, and then it included all cookies, and then it included all network requests and payloads. Eventually, we said, “Well, we’re still throwing away a lot of data. So what about what’s happening on the front end, not just what’s happening behind the scenes? Are we looking at page load times? Are we looking at the rendering of videos and images and forms and text and all the content that users see and experience?” So just recently, we started focusing more on both the front end and the back end, not just that more narrow look of tags and technologies. 

Importance of Site Performance and User Experience 

Aaron: I’m curious about new features and functionality related to site performance, which is critical for user experience and customer journeys and also critical for performance in search. One of the interesting things that was confirmed in the recent data leak focused on Google’s ranking signals is the extent to which site performance does have a profound impact on where you’re going to appear, where you’ll remain in search. I’m curious to what extent is that data being used and actioned by clients? 

Cameron: Yeah, and you’re actually talking a language that I love, because when we talk about search specifically, I spent 10 of my 13 years at Adobe all in the advertising and digital marketing side of things. When we think about the signals from paid and organic search and how people should be validating those things, I think that was almost an afterthought for ObservePoint for a number of years. As we started getting into it, it was a matter of what pages you are actually scanning. A lot of people take a very simple approach. They say, “I’m just going to start at a homepage, and I’m going to use you literally as a crawler. I don’t go to any other page. I just know I want to go scan 10,000 pages, start at this one place and go wherever you go,” very similar to Google’s own bot. And we’ve done that successfully. 

But really, my goal as a product manager over here is to understand what are the most important pages? What are the things you should be scanning the most often? Whether that’s going into an analytics platform and saying, “Here are the top 1000 pages over the last seven days, these are the most trafficked experiences on my web properties. I need to know that all these things are working and working correctly.” Just as importantly, and especially with my background in digital advertising, is where am I spending the most money? When I think about paid search, social, display, every single click leads to a user experience, and so I want to make sure I’m prioritizing based on where I’m spending the most money. And you’d be amazed at how much waste there is. Well, maybe you wouldn’t be, but there is a ton of waste in that digital ecosystem. We find consistently between 5 and 10% of all URLs on not only search but all digital advertising go to a 404 or otherwise broken page. 

So being able to suss out those problems, and that’s just the first step, it didn’t load. Therefore, I’m not only delivering a bad user experience, I’m paying Google or Facebook for the opportunity to disappoint my customers. And that’s where we even look at, does it load quickly? Are the right tags on the right pages? Does everything render? All those other signals that we know Google and others use for ranking, that’s all part of that experience as well. Just because it didn’t 404, doesn’t mean it wasn’t a bad experience. What we’re trying to do is, yes, still represent everything that’s happening on the back end, all the tags, technologies, cookies, everything we’ve talked about up till this point, but also we want to understand what is that user experience, especially in those most critical first experiences that people have with our brand. Because we know that if they click through and it’s a bad experience, whether that’s a page not found, or just a super slow loading site, or content that doesn’t render in the right way, 50% of the time, they leave and they never come back. So how do we capture that audience and find those problems long before they ever go live? And if they do go live, find them immediately. 

Aaron: How are you gleaning the data that gives you the critical pages from a digital advertising perspective? 

Cameron: In a lot of cases, it’s super simple. It’s as easy as opening up a tab that’s got your Google Ads account, downloading all of those ads, and looking at the URLs they point to. Now, most big enterprises are talking tens, if not hundreds of thousands of ads with millions of dollars of ad spend. But if you boil it down, you de-duplicate that, usually it’s only a few hundred very specific landing pages. So take those few hundred pages and run them through a web scanner like ObservePoint. Do that every morning, because anytime any one of those links goes down, once again, you’re paying Google for the opportunity to deliver a bad experience. But I think even beyond paid search and social and some of the digital advertising, you’ve still got email, which is a top two to three channel for every single brand we work with. So how do we monitor those email links before they ever get pushed live to the consumer? How do we consistently look at our social media and all the great links and information we’re sending out there? It’s really about understanding and mapping that entire ecosystem so you can see all the different ways in which people are coming into your website and making sure, once again, those very first experiences are great ones that they’re happy with, and they come back again and again. 

The Rise of Privacy Regulations and Compliance 

Aaron: When we were chatting last week, of course, we were talking a lot about the rise of privacy regulations and how critical it is, not just from the perspective of performance and data integrity, but also from the perspective of compliance to know what is and isn’t firing, what’s being gathered, what’s not being gathered. How does ObservePoint help in that context? 

Cameron: The first step for anyone is simply knowing what is happening on your website. Remove all judgment from it, just be an observer and say, “Tell me what, what are all the tags? What is the inventory of every single technology on my website right now, and what are all of the cookies or other trackers that are being set by those technologies right now?” And then, hopefully even down to the payload of what is all the data that’s being collected as part of that ecosystem, and where is that being sent? Just getting that view, I’ve been surprised over the last several years at how few people can tell me every single technology that’s on their website. And then from there, it’s a matter of saying, “Okay, now that I know what is happening, I get to decide what ought to be happening.” 

For a lot of people, this comes down to categorization. I know the vast majority of our customers are using a consent management platform, somebody like OneTrust or TrustArc, and they’ve categorized down to the individual cookie level. “Okay, well, this is strictly necessary, and it needs to be there for my site to function. And here are some other things that aren’t strictly necessary, but they help the functionality or the personalization of that experience, or the measurement and the analytics that’s happening on that experience, or the retargeting and messaging and the advertising that’s happened.” And so those are the big buckets people are using. 

What I’ve now been shocked at is not so much the adoption of privacy and consent controls, but how few websites are actually respecting the consent they say they’re respecting. I can go to just about any website that has a CMP, pull in that categorization and say, “This is what is happening. Here is every single cookie that’s on that website. Here’s what you say should be happening.” And almost invariably, there’s going to be a gap. You’ve got 20, 30, 40 cookies that aren’t categorized anywhere, that the user is not consenting to, and yet you’re dropping them in that experience. And whether I’ve said explicitly opt into everything or explicitly opt out of everything except for strictly necessary, it’s looking at the delta between what is and what ought to be. And unfortunately, from a privacy and consent perspective, very, very few people, including the privacy folks themselves, are doing this at 100%. 

Aaron: We find the same thing. In fact, we just a couple of weeks ago ran an audit. We looked at all of the sites that had medical or healthcare schema on them, and then ran an audit of the tags that were present on those sites. More than 90% would still be considered out of compliance from a HIPAA perspective, and 6% still were running the Meta Pixel. 

Cameron: Jeez, yeah, and that’s been a big discussion lately. Even if it’s on one single page, you’re liable for what data that tag or pixel collects. 

Navigating Healthcare and Pharma Compliance 

Aaron: What is your unique value proposition from a healthcare perspective, or for healthcare clients? 

Cameron: In general, I don’t think too much about verticalization because really, every website works differently. It’s the beauty of the internet and how we deploy, and even from one healthcare or pharma company to another, you see a lot of variance. I think from a high level, especially in regulated industries, you need to be even more buttoned up than the other guys. Whereas some people may be auditing their website every couple of weeks or once a month, I think what we see is our healthcare and our pharma customers, they’re doing it at a higher frequency. They’re checking things, if not daily, at least weekly, and especially from a data privacy perspective, that cadence needs to be at a higher level. You need to make sure you’re buttoned up because, yeah, if somebody drops a cookie in a blog post on a media site from 2017, that’s unfortunate. It probably should be cleaned up, but it’s a lot different than if you’re doing it with somebody’s personal health information on the screen at the same time. 

So I’d say, more than anything, the cadence and the volume. The other complexity that I see, and maybe this is a little bit more pharma-related than it is maybe from a healthcare provider perspective, is the complexity. By law, these businesses have to have an individual domain for every single offering. Even in healthcare, you see that as well. You have different domains that are supporting different business units, different types of consumers, and so you need to be able to think at a massive scale and complexity, as opposed to a website that has a single domain and a single website that’s got a few thousand pages. Being able to do that with all of those complexities. I think the other kind of vector that I think about is, what are you trying to replicate? What are all the user states that you need to be able to understand? It’s easy to say, “Yes, I need to understand opted-in versus opted-out.” Great, from a privacy and consent perspective, that makes sense. But how many different geographies do you need to do that for? How are you respecting a GPC signal for California and Colorado consumers versus just a default state with no consent for the rest of the United States, or the variance that you’re seeing in the UK or in Germany, the EU, versus what you see in Tokyo and Australia? So understanding, especially if you’re a geographically diverse and global business, you need to be able to also replicate a lot of different permutations, and that’s before we ever start talking about the real nitty-gritty of, “Well, what happens if I use OneTrust to go in and opt into functional and performance cookies, but not advertising and targeting cookies?” And all of a sudden, now what used to be just an on-off switch is eight or nine or ten different permutations of all the different consent states you can get to a user. I think from that perspective, is that healthcare-specific? Probably not. But I know the healthcare customers that we work with are much more concerned. So once again, they’re running it at a much higher frequency and getting much more into those details because they know they have to be buttoned up more than anyone else. 

Future of Privacy Regulations 

Aaron: Yeah, well, so this is maybe a good transition. You’re sort of speaking to and alluding to the increasingly Byzantine nature of privacy regulations in the US and around the world. Last week was an interesting week for privacy regulations, as there was a ruling out of district court in Texas, which was the American Hospital Association versus effectively HHS, challenging the new guidance from the OCR that was first issued in November of 2022 and then confirmed in March of 2023. In effect, in brief, that ruling kind of gutted the OCR guidance. They said, “Look, this notion of a prescribed combination, which is the combination of an identifier, IP address, and then the pages or the URLs that a visitor would visit, you can’t preclude that from tracking. It was naive to assert that people in healthcare, that organizations in healthcare should do. It did not acknowledge how the digital ecosystem works, and by the way, it’s a really long shot from collecting that information to identifying a person.” It was an interesting and kind of powerfully worded ruling. I suspect that the inclination of lots of healthcare organizations is going to be to heave a sigh of relief. And maybe some of them think now we have to do anything, we can go back to the good old days. But your last response, I think, is quite telling, in that things are already so complex. There’s already so much that you have to account for and so many ways that you have to be compliant, that I’m not sure that ruling matters that much ultimately. 

Cameron: Well, I think there’s a couple of things here. One, the AHA, the American Hospital Association, they didn’t pull any punches in the way they responded to this. They said the OCR bulletin is “unlawful, harmful, and counterproductive. It is a massive overreach by the federal bureaucracy. The HHS ruling exceeds the government statutory and constitutional authority, fails to satisfy the requirements for agency rulemaking, and harms the very people it purports to protect.” I love that, because when I first started the same thing, I’m like, “I understand their intention. It’s a good intention. Also, this sounds like a bunch of people that don’t understand technology, trying to legislate technology to be able to say, ‘Well, you have to do it in this certain way, and if you’re not, you’re completely non-compliant.'” Most of us that understand how the internet works and how web technology works, we’re thinking, “Yeah, if you really wanted to torture yourself into looking at every possible IP address and then mapping that back with fingerprinting based on other signals from a browser and a browser version and a time of day and the geography, maybe you could get something possibly minorly interesting for some very small portion of your audience.” But from the fact that my browser and an anonymous cookie went to a page that was looking up the newest Ozempic drug, that really doesn’t give you much to work off of. 

Now, to your point, does this ruling really matter? I think just the fact that we’re bringing it up, and once again, we’re just talking about the US here. There are other laws and legislations for Canada, for across the EU, and other legislations that are saying, “No, we still care about these things, and personal health information is a very sensitive part of what’s happening online, so we want to be overly cautious.” And if that means we throw out a little bit of the baby with the bathwater—I don’t know if you can do that just a little bit—but if you want to do that, we’re happy to do that, to err on the side of being very protective of people’s health data. I think in general, the way I look at it is, it goes back to those first principles. First and foremost, do you know every technology that’s running on your web properties? Whether it belongs there or not, that’s the next question, what ought to be, but do you know what is? Where is the Meta Pixel? Do you know all the parts of your website, both public website, as well as behind authentication walls? I think that’s something that came up. Was it the Costco ruling from last year, where their pharmacy had certain stuff behind authentication walls, as people were logged into their own accounts. But because Meta Pixel was there, there were questions about, what else are they connecting that to? I think that understanding of the landscape, mapping out everything that you have, creating inventories, and not just of the pixels or the tags, but also of all the cookies and all the data that’s being passed. Also, I think one of the vectors people forget about is, where is that going? Not just who’s the vendor, but where are they sending that data? You can actually see in a network request, for example, is it going to Ireland or Germany or Cuba? And the answer to that question may change the way you implement stuff on your website and what tags and technologies you do and don’t allow. 

Aaron: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely true. As you said, we’re sort of talking about the US here, but the ruling only applies at a federal level. There are still 12 or 13 states that have their own state-specific regulations, and there are more that are in process. From a regulatory perspective, we are going to continue to only see more complexity. What also is true is that we’re still facing the deprecation of third-party cookies, so you can’t relax and say, “Oh, we can go back to the good old days and rely on third-party cookies and third-party data and platforms, and everything will be great.” I think if you continue in a conservative fashion, and you focus on first-party data strategy, and you focus on, as you said, knowing what is there and what ought to be there, and become much more effective at understanding your targeting based on your data, your performance based on your data. At worst, you come out the other side of this with the option to use third-party data if you wanted to, but not the need to use third-party data. You won’t be reliant on another platform provider for all of your marketing fidelity and understanding, which is where most organizations are today. 

Cameron: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. If you use the United States as a microcosm, for the rest of the world. You’ve got these 50 different jurisdictions, 51 if you count DC, and they’ve all got their own perspective, and some have actually already voted privacy laws and turned them down, said, “We’re not interested in that right now.” The IAPP publishes a map every month or so, and I think the last one I saw had 17 different states that have passed and signed laws. You’ve got another 14 that are in committee and under discussion, you’ve got this constant hum about a federal level law, and I just don’t see that happening because you’ve got people that are super strict, like for example, California and Colorado, that says that unless it’s at least as strict as our laws, we’re not getting on board. But all those others that said, “Well, actually, we voted on this and turned it down. There’s no way you’re going to turn us into California.” You’ve got people from both ends of the spectrum pulling apart. I just don’t see a federal level law coming about. 

Now extrapolate that out to the rest of the world. How do we think about US consumer privacy versus EU consumer privacy, or new laws that are coming up in China or Japan or Australia? You’re never going to have a constant and consistent measure. Then the question becomes, well, so what do we do? Do we just go by the highest common denominator? This is the strictest law, therefore we’re going to apply that to everyone. Or do you get a little more nuance? The marketers are saying, “Don’t do that because then we lose all of our data.” You nuance because, yes, maybe I have to go at a default level. I have to be able to be explicitly opted out unless I choose to opt in in Europe. Fine, but if you left the United States, I’d lose another, what, 20, 30, 40% of my data and the people that are opting in. It really comes down to a matter of, are you willing to put in the extra effort to get incremental benefit, knowing that’s going to cause more complexity for your legal team and reviewing how you’re being compliant, for your marketing team on how they’re implementing all of these things, and then it becomes just a business decision. Is it worth putting that extra effort in? Are you getting economic value off the back of it? 

Aaron: Well, to get some sense of the velocity of new privacy regulations, you mentioned the IAPP and the map that they publish. I think the last time I looked at that map was probably about six weeks ago when I had the count of 12 or 13 states. You said 17 is where it’s at now? 

Cameron: I’ll check it right now, but yeah, that’s where it was last time I checked. And you’re right. It’s changing every single week. 

Aaron: Yeah, so only going to become more complex. This is fantastic. Is there anything else that we should talk about? 

The Ultimate Goal: Improving Web Experiences 

Cameron: I mean, I think there’s a lot else we could talk about. I think in general terms, I want to improve web experiences as a consumer. I’ve had so many bad ones over the course of my life of websites not respecting my consent. I’ve never opened up a JavaScript or web console and said, “Tell me all the cookies that are being set on this website right now,” but I know it’s happening. So I want to be able to, as these privacy considerations continue to evolve, I want people’s consent to be respected. They deserve that as consumers of a business. I also just want to improve the usability of the internet. If that’s too broad of an aspiration, I want to get rid of every 404 page in the world that’s linking from somewhere else and leading to a bad experience. I want to speed up as much of a web experience as possible, so when I’m browsing gap.com, the homepage on mobile devices is just as good as if I had it here on a wired-in connection on a laptop. I want to be able to find and replace every video and image and form that doesn’t work because I have felt that frustration as a consumer. I’m just fortunate enough to work for a company that can go to the biggest brands in the world and say, “Hey, we have this for you. As long as you use it, as long as you monitor what’s happening on your website, you can find those things and fix them and make the internet a better place for everyone that’s working with your web properties.” The concept of people as they have their own needs online. We could be talking about people with disabilities that need accessibility. We could be talking about people that are in lower connectivity parts of the world that don’t have the fastest internet connection. There’s a lot of different variants as far as how we experience the online world. The more we can bring everybody up to the same standard, the more I think that we’re providing a phenomenal experience that will only help these brands grow year over year. It’s not because of some sort of artificial pay-for-play scheme, it’s because they provided a good experience. At the end of the day, I think most consumers are willing to share their private personal information. They’re willing to consent to be tracked, to even have retargeting and advertising, as long as there’s a value exchange there. They want to know that they’re getting something in return. Maybe that’s just the idealist in me, but I think that most people don’t have this massive concern about their privacy from an IP address or what web browser they’re using, or what connection they’re on, as long as they know they’re getting a great experience and it’s personalized and tailored to what they need as they interact with your web experiences. 

Aaron: I agree. They understand the exchange, they understand the value that’s being provided, the utility in the relationship. I completely agree, and I wholeheartedly agree with the aspiration. I think it’s very clear through what you described that ObservePoint does an excellent job of telling people what is and giving them the ability to then decide on and discern what should be. I’m curious, you provide clearly a rich trove of information as frequently as people want it and consume it. How often is that data actioned? 

Cameron: It’s something I think about every day in my role over product strategy is, yeah, we can give you a firehose of information, but unless you do something with it to improve those web experiences, all you’re just paying for is volume and noise. I think there’s a couple of things. One, we are seeing incredible adoption in the privacy space, and I think that’s because there’s a stick involved. If your web analytics, your TMS breaks, well, what’s the ROI of fixing that? That’s a little hard for some people to nail down. For some, they’ve got it really dialed in, but others, it’s like, well that’s less than ideal, but I should fix that at some point. Maybe when privacy goes awry, it’s, oh, I’ve seen the fines. We’re talking about, billions and billions of euros that have been assessed just in the last several years under the under the umbrella of GDPR, okay, there’s a stick there. I think in the United States, we’re still a little bit waiting for that stick to fall. We can point to one or two examples, but we’re not talking about 10s or hundreds of millions of dollars of fines yet. I think that’s coming. I think the when you start getting closer to ROI, when you start looking at advertising channels. So you mentioned search earlier, tons of money being spent there, display advertising, social media, email marketing, making sure those experiences are buttoned up. Now, you’re not just talking about, well, what if my data is bad, or what if somebody finds out I’m not fully buttoned up from privacy perspective, but I actually could point and say, okay, these 45 ads that are all leading to a 404 page. You’ve wasted $18,000 in the last week alone because you’re sending traffic to a bad experience. And guess what? Half of those people that hit those pages never come back. That’s true Roi. That’s really where the kind of the money is front and center. And I think most people are just trying to figure out, how do I focus on the ROI of the technology stack I’m employing. 

The Honey-Do List Approach to Web Hygiene and Governance 

Aaron: It seems like the value proposition is so clear, and the proof on the other side, the ROI on the other side, is so explicit that it must be kind of fun to talk with prospective clients. 

Cameron: It absolutely is. And I’ll I’ll leave you with another example that I’ve started using. Just in the last week or two. Are you married? 

Aaron: I am, 31 years. 

Cameron: How many? 

Aaron: 31 

Cameron: Oh, congratulations. That’s fantastic. So in those 31 years, have you had a honeydew list? Is that something that’s on your radar? 

Aaron: Sure. 

Cameron: Have you ever completed your honeydew list? 

Aaron: Yes, but it’s a little bit of a different situation in that a lot of it, it’s sort of co-created. A lot of it, I generate, and we also, although we have input with one another, we tend to skate our lanes pretty well. We have learned over time. Okay, this is your area of expertise, and this is my area of expertise, and we’re going to understand one another’s needs and expectations, and we’ll work to that. Otherwise, we won’t spend a lot of time going deep into one another’s specific ways of doing it. 

Cameron: Sounds like you figured out a few things in 31 years of marriage. That’s great. Most of it, most of the married gentlemen that I know that have that type of relationship, there’s a constant adding. There’s always things around the house, in your relationship, in your family, that need to be addressed. And most of the people I know never finish it. There’s always things that are continually popping up and being added to. I think a website, web properties are just the same way. There’s always going to be something wrong with every website. You let me scan enough pages, I’m going to find a problem on every single website in the world. But just because I’ve got 30 things on my honey do list that I’m not going to get to this weekend either. Doesn’t mean that if the basement starts flooding, I don’t need to be paying attention to that right now and fixing that right now. And I think that’s the way I think about web hygiene, web governance, it’s that you want to be consistently, continuously monitoring, not because you don’t already have enough to do, but because the prioritization of what really is important, about what’s impacting your users’ experience, about what’s hitting your bottom line. It’s a big difference. As I mentioned earlier, having a blog post from 2017 that’s got a tag or a pixel that shouldn’t be there, yeah, that’s one thing, a 404 page that’s linked to from something that’s 18 clicks down into a help doc. Yeah, that’s probably shouldn’t be there, but it’s not the big deal. But if I’ve got a problem in my booking or checkout funnel, if I’ve got something that is stopping people from making purchases and generating revenue with my business, yeah, that’s the flooding basement. That’s something I need to know about as soon as it happens, and I may be able to prioritize and fix it right away. That’s when we think about web governance, web hygiene. That’s the way I feel about it. It’s the honey do list. Constantly monitor, but know when the most important things pop up. 

Aaron: And I think, in all candor, I have to clarify that when I say I do finish the list, the period of time during which it’s complete and empty is pretty short. Certainly measured in hours, sometimes in minutes. 

Cameron: There’s always new stuff coming up. 

Aaron: I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you. 

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