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Transcript

Greg Marshall  0:00  All right. Well, I think we were talking a little bit about server side. Google Tag Manager tag. Yeah. All right. So because I don't know much about this, and you're more on the technical side, we're gonna run this more like an interview style. All right, let's do and, and I'm gonna ask questions that I think clients would actually asked. Yeah. And then you can respond to that, they at least have a deep understanding of what we're doing. So number one, what is

Blake Beus  0:25  let's talk about what Google Tag Manager is a lot. I mean, many, many, many of you out there are already maybe know what this is. But the problem that was built to solve was essentially, a lot of marketers and advertisers needed the ability to control a little bit of the marketing code on the website, without having to necessarily involve developers. So traditionally, you had to like copy and paste that code, to put it on the website. And if you're a larger organization, you needed to get a developer involves to make sure the code was was loading correctly on the page and everything like that. But that slowed down your ability to launch campaigns into trying to try to set up new funnels and things. So Google came out with this thing called Google Tag Manager, which allowed the developers to put the code on, put some code on the page at once in a little code container. And then marketers had a nice little interface that they could log into. And they could drop. Not even really code. I mean, you could put code, but you could drop data pieces that would fire marketing tags, or event tags and things. So you could control that as a marketer, and make adjustments as you needed it without having to wait for a developer team with all of their different responsibilities and everything. Yep. So you could you could put that so that's what was there for. Got it. So So now there is now we have a server side version of that, and what is server side me. So server side essentially means basically, where where the code is run, and where your where, where the ownership of the data kind of comes from. So traditionally, the the Google Tag Manager server was Google's server. And it was owned by Google. And it was on a google.com domain, it was like Google Tag, manager.com domain. And all of the data that Tag Manager collected, went to Google Tag Manager first, and then was forwarded on to whatever marketing tools you were using, whether it's your email marketing platform, or whatever. With server side, a company now has the ability to create their own server, they could still host it with Google, but it would be a server on your own domain name, okay. So it could be like Tag Manager, dot Blake beus.com, or like Tag Manager dot, Greg marshall.co, or whatever, yep. And then the Tag Manager, server software runs there. And then when you put the code container on your own website, it's not a Google Tag, manager.com. Domain Name, it's your domain name. And the data flows from there to a server that you own, and then out to your marketing platform. And

Greg Marshall  3:13  as far as like, why, why is that? I mean, I think I know the answer. But I think most clients would have this question. Why is that important?

Blake Beus  3:23  So it all has to do with first party and third party data. Right? So there's all these things in America, it's starting to impact us more in the in Europe, it's even bigger with their GDPR. They have different privacy rules and everything surrounding first party and third party data. So first party data is essentially you're interacting with my website, you know, you're interacting with my website. And I'm collecting data as the owner of that website and everything. So there's it's a lot clearer who owns that data, and just your click and browsing data. And and it's very clear to the user that, oh, Blake, or you know, Blake's business is probably collecting some data, third party data is much less transparent, and that I could have all these tracking codes on my website and everything. And someone could come to my website. And then who knows, I could have a data broker that selling their data off to a credit company or something like that, and they would have no idea that that was happening. So that's third party data, and we're getting more and more and more laws put in place, and tech restrictions put in place to prevent third party data from happening because there's these privacy concerns. So that was one of the big reasons. stated reasons with iOS 14 and iOS 14.5 of making the changes they had because they're like, We want to make sure that people are understanding and it's clear who's who's Only what they're doing what they're

Greg Marshall  5:00  using, why they're using it, right. Got it, right. So that's why this is important. Now from a business aspect, this is actually super beneficial, because this can help you improve your understanding of return on investment.

Blake Beus  5:16  Yeah, it helps, it helps in several ways. First, it improves your data collection process, right? So I don't know exactly how a lot of this is going to shake out. But as of right now, it's quite likely that if you set up Google Tag Manager server side under your own domain name, iOS 14, will likely not black block a lot of that stuff, which they currently are. And the reason is, is it's a technical reason, one of the ways iOS 14 blocks tracking data, is they block it based on domain name. So anything Google tag manager.com, just don't let that traffic go through. Well, if it's a workaround, if it's Greg Marshall, you know, if it's tracking, Greg marshall.co, Apple doesn't have a block list for Greg Marshall, they probably don't even I mean, they they take your money, but yeah, the Apple execs don't know. Right? They don't. And, and it may NFU,

Greg Marshall  6:15  and it would be harder for them to do this. Because you'd have to do this individually per domain, which would make this harder to block.

Blake Beus  6:24  Absolutely. And it it may you mean, you said it's like a workaround? And in effect it is. But it really has to do with who's owning the data and the transparency of of how that data is being used?

Greg Marshall  6:41  Do you think it's more some of my thoughts about the data and where it's going, do you think it has a lot to do more with we may get, like we you almost may get access to the data used to have as long as it's first party. And the reason why they're doing that is because they want to just make sure they can hold organizations or people accountable for specific actions.

Blake Beus  7:06  Yeah, I think so I think there's a lot of accountability there. There's a lot of of ownership there. I mean, back in the back in the day, 10 years ago, you know, eight to 10 years ago, throw whatever on there. And that data was just getting any elected all over the place. It's still getting collected a lot today. I mean, I don't know if if you watch John Oliver at all, every now and again, I'll pick some up because you know who he is. He's a he runs a comedy show. But it's all political based. And he's a little bit left leaning. But he he does tackle some interesting topics. And one of them he tackled was called data brokers. It's something we haven't even talked about a whole lot on here. But there's this whole other layer behind the scenes of these huge companies that all they do through through these ad networks. And I'm not talking Google ads, or Facebook ads, I'm talking the ad networks, on all the sites that you're not familiar with. Those are ads. They collect a ton of data about people and then they just sell sell it, sell it to everybody. And it's deonna D. It's anonymized. Okay, right. They have a word for it or whatever. But the thing is, it's anonymized data, but it's this person was at this place, and he stays the night there every night of the week. But we don't know who that person is. Yeah, it's very easy to D anonymize that for someone that and that's an issue that a lot of companies are trying to solve, and some of these laws are trying to solve. So if I own the data, Blake Beus owns that data, I have zero desire to sell that data off to a Data Broker, I have no, it's not something I do or whatever. But if I put if I had a blog or something, and I was trying to expand my ad networks, and I was using some, some ad network to drop some marketing code on there, and I have no control over what types of data they're collecting. But if now with Google Tag Manager being server side owned, I own all of that data that sits there in my own database, even though Google is providing the software, and then I get to choose who I'm sending that to. And it's, it's a lot less wild, wild west. Got

Greg Marshall  9:17  it. So, you know, what it sounds like his data is merging, or just, there's an evolution of cleaning it up. Making sure that it's taken care of. Yeah, just because maybe the the value wasn't seen years ago. Yeah. In the past, like, they say data is the most valuable thing. Right, right. And so because of that, you almost have to make sure there are some kind of regulations and things to keep things in order. Yeah, just because you don't want you know, wanting to go crazy as yours, how it can be used, and people just not knowing but I just think overall, organizing is probably the better way to do it. And Initially, I think there's maybe some pushback with, especially marketers, because you use us in the early stages, I think long term, it's probably going to actually make things better. I think so because then so who knows what you can do with your own data as far as what that value actually is? Because like, in the past, it was just customer list, right? And people who've purchased from me, and that's kind of your, your asset. But now, if you have first party, that could also be sold off probably, if your company was bought, right?

Blake Beus  10:33  Yeah. Like if you if you have an exit plan, and you want to, you know, you, you, you sell your company or whatever, that's a business asset that you spent a lot of money and time and time growing. And as someone who maybe has an expectation, the exit plan, or whatever, you could, you could probably write into the contract, here's what you are allowed to do with this data. And here's what you're not allowed to do with this data if we agree to these terms. And, again, for me, I have zero desire for any of the data that I collect on my website is sold to a Data Broker, it doesn't, it's not a thing that benefits me at all

Greg Marshall  11:08  right. And so I think, too, with first party data, it's a great way to package the value. I think this could be just an absolute, I could be completely wrong. But my guess would be in the future that could increase the value of a company is not only your customer list, but what is your your data? What are the all the data you have? Because if you can hand that off to someone that is buying your company? Yeah, that's, to me, that's one of the most valuable things is what are all these datasets that you have that we could use to keep growing the business? Yeah. And give us a head start?

Blake Beus  11:44  Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I feel like and I know, I've said this before, in the future, my prediction, and I'm confident I'm 100%, right on this is that businesses are going to have to own their platform, meaning they're going to have to have ownership over the servers that their website runs on, they're going to have to have ownership over their marketing tools, they're going to have to have ownership over their how they're gathering visitor data. And that means there's going to be a higher technical barrier to getting to that, because now you have to know how servers work and at some of these things, and, but what that means is, because of that ownership, you're gonna get cleaner data, yeah, you're gonna get access to data that in maybe a year from now, you can ask a question. Hey, what about? Remember that one campaign that we ran? Or, hey, is there anything similar between the people that follow this step into into this purchase funnel? You can go back and answer those questions. Whereas right now, that's really hard to do. Yep. So owning that entire stack is going to be more and more and more important. And I think the negatives is you're going to start having places where they handle a lot of that stuff for you. It's going to be harder and harder and harder for them to scale. And I'm thinking of places like click funnels, right, yes, funnel builders or, or Kajabi that builds funnels, or, or Squarespace or maybe even Wix, or whatever. Shopify maybe kind of fits into that category. But Shopify does some unique stuff. And I feel like they stay on top of things pretty fast. And I'm, I would be pretty confident that they would basically make it easy for you to spin up your own server that you have ownership over, but then you your Shopify fee is basically a maintenance, right, but but it would be kind of like your own ownership or something like that. I feel like they would have a way to do that. But these other like click funnels, I don't know full up people know this, but their privacy agreement, they share data all over the place. They share it all over the place. And I'm gonna guess most of those, any of those funnel builders, builders probably do the same thing. Yep. And I think that's going to be a hinderance in the future more than it is going to be a benefit. So what I think those sites will turn into would be something like, Okay, I have a business idea. I've got this, this plan, and I need something quick and dirty to get started. But then once you hit a certain level, you'll you'll need to move off to a platform that you all

Greg Marshall  14:29  well, I think there's gonna probably all that really means is, you know, businesses a constant pivot, right. And what that means is there's going to be more offerings, new services provided of people, you know, helping you build this out. Yeah. And giving it to you. So I think, to me, it looks bright as far as what what's going to happen because if you think about it, you don't first party data you always want because you don't want to put your hands at the ear your business in the hands of someone House because you can't control that. Right? So the first party stuff I think is going to totally be beneficial. I think he's going to be a big asset to everyone who starts to build it. If you build early, you'll probably have an advantage just like anything. Yep. And I think it's really important to also understand like, at the moment, if someone wants to execute this, and they know nothing about code or whatever, should they just go to Upwork? Or what do they do to set this up? Or is this or this, Google has something already set up? Where a person maybe that similar to like myself, that knows some, but not all? Yeah. Are there instructions to follow? Or is it just hired out, like, just find someone just say, hey, just build this,

Blake Beus  15:49  both. First, I always think it's worthwhile to have an understanding, even if you're not a technical server administrator, or DevOps kind of person, to have a good understanding about just the project and how it works in general, maybe you're not the one writing the code or whatever. So that's the first thing, Google has some documentation on it. And it's, it's literally like two pages of documentation, I think you could read it in a few minutes. Second, you can definitely look at hiring it out to someone on Upwork. It's a relatively new thing.

Greg Marshall  16:23  I was just gonna ask you, how do you know if someone actually knows how to do? Well, you

Blake Beus  16:27  got to you got to interview them and ask them. And I mean, look, I've been doing this kind of stuff for a long time. But I haven't actually ever set up a server side. But I read through all of their instructions. And I understand every bit of the process. And I've done the exact same process just with something else, right. So I'm 100% confident that I could launch this, get it set up and everything, I've done all of the puzzle pieces, I just haven't done it with this software package. So that's one way to do it. The third thing is, is a lot of people don't know this. But companies like Google and Amazon, they have an entirely different side of their business. Okay. So with Amazon, it's called Amazon Web Services. Yes. And what it is, is it's for hosts, it's for hosting servers, web servers, databases, all of these things. And they own the physical infrastructure. But you own the server, which is basically a think of it like a virtual machines server running on their hardware, but it's your, you have to maintain it and everything. Google has the exact same thing. And it's called GCP, Google Cloud Platform. And it's for web servers, right, and you can, you can set up web servers, starting, I even have a free tier, okay, so as long as you don't hit a certain like traffic threshold or bandwidth threshold, you don't have to pay anything for your first server. And I think you can only use one of one of those at a time or whatever. So reading through the documentation on Google Cloud Platform, they said that 99.9% of use cases, the free tier for server side, Google Tag Manager is fine, it's fine. So you don't even have like an extra cost associated with this. Now, Google Cloud Platform, they may even have like a one click Provisioning Service as part of it for Google Tag Manager, what that means is you basically hop in there and say, Okay, I want a server on your free tier, I want a virtual server. And I want you to install all the software, I need to run Google Tag Manager server side, go. And then it has a bunch of scripts behind the scenes that and I'm gonna get nerdy here, behind the scenes, that's going to install Ubuntu, probably 2022 Server Edition, it's going to put the web server software on there, which is probably a software called nginx, they're going to they're going to put your file management software on there. And then they're going to put, you know, open open up the firewall port so that you have the secure traffic that can come into that. And then they will after all of that provisioning is done. They will then install the Google Tag Manager software and they'll say you're done. What domain Do you want this to point to? And then you pointed to that domain, and then they'll give you a login. Got it. But that is your server, even though it's on their whatever on their physical hardware cloud, that is your server to own and maintain. And that's your database of data. And that's your domain name, and that's yours

Greg Marshall  19:30  data. And how do you so you've used a word that I think is important to what type of maintenance does it require from a technical side? Do you need to be doing something to make sure that it's up today? That's working the way it's supposed? Yeah.

Blake Beus  19:48  So So typically, when you own your own server in a virtualized environment like this, you are responsible for server updates and a server operating system, and then code updates and things things a lot Along those lines, I went, whenever I spin up a server like this, I usually use a service called Digital Ocean. They're one of my favorites, that they they host the server and I can spin up a server as needed. But then I also use an external service that I pay 15 bucks a month for, that will install security updates, it will notify me of things going on behind the scenes or whatever. And that's for a specific, that's for a specific kind of technology stack, that service wouldn't work necessarily for Google Cloud Platform. That being said, Google Cloud Platform does have some services that can help auto install updates and things along those lines. And you

Greg Marshall  20:37  would pay for that you would say like to like, add, like, I want this or that? Or maybe it kind

Blake Beus  20:43  of depends, I wouldn't be surprised if for their free tier for this service for this offering. If Google has some sort of a way to just say, Yes, I want you to do automatic server updates, and not charge you for it. Because, frankly, it's in their best interest to do so like, they want people to continue to use Google Tag Manager, they want people to continue to use their platform and their service and everything. And so they're incentivized to make it as easy as possible for for that to happen. But it's definitely going to be more technical than just using the regular Google tablets people are used to Yeah, so but I think it's approachable. For anybody that has the ability to learn new things and learn a new skill, I think it's probably going to be quite approachable for someone like

Greg Marshall  21:28  them. Well, it sounds like to the next wave, you know, how social media marketing was a big wave early on. And, you know, really picked up. I think the next wave is going to be this the actual technical side of implementing, because of all these changes. Yeah. And I think there's some big opportunities for you know, for guys like you that already have corporate experience and, and entrepreneurial experience with how to code all this and how to make it safe. Yeah, and not break. Right. And all that I think, I think there's going to be a big shift in needing that, right? Because it sounds like most of the platforms are in fact, before we started recording that I asked you a question about like, Well, how do you even figure out like, Tik Tok their retargeting was asking for, and I can't remember something about like an advertiser ID. Yeah, suddenly advertiser ID and I said, Well, how does someone even figure that out? Yeah, you don't? I mean, and so I think that those are the types of questions that are gonna happen. And you're gonna start seeing maybe a higher. In fact, you're working with a couple of companies that hired you for these types of things, right, that they're actually hiring outside consultants, to make sure that they can come in and do a lot of does it stuff because they don't know. Yeah,

Blake Beus  22:52  well, exactly. I think if you're even a small, you know, media buyer agency or something like that, it'd be worth trying to build a relationship with someone that's more technical, because the these two sides of things, the technical side of things, the DevOps, the software engineering side, are and the the the marketing the media buying side, those two things are going to become more and more more intertwined, as we go down the road. And so having either a working relationship with someone who's doing that as Freelancer consulting, or bringing someone that's good in house to help with that is going to be very important.

Greg Marshall  23:31  You know, it's funny, you'll probably remember this. So remember, there was like a, I don't know, maybe a two year stint where growth hacking was like a, like a term that was being thrown around everywhere. And I remember there was an integration of where, like the Ubers, and Airbnb, they were pairing up with software engineers and marketers to like, make the ultimate Yeah, marketing machines, right. And then for some reason, it felt like that went away. And I'm not 100% Sure, maybe, you know, but it just felt like you should have stopped hearing about like growth hacking just kind of went away. But it sounds like it's gonna move back to that. But on a more, I guess, long term basis, meaning growth hacking is probably not sustainable. As far as like, there's no real hacks that you can do for the long term. No. But utilize it. But the philosophy I think, is a good one, which is pair up marketing and salespeople with, you know, engineers. Yeah. And then have the engineers how does that like, say, we need this and the engineer knows how to actually build it correctly? Yeah. I think that's gonna be a big one, two punch. Oh, and a lot of companies move forward.

Blake Beus  24:50  Absolutely. Absolutely. And, I mean, as far as growth hacking going away, a lot of the things they were doing back then was were very short sighted. I mean, you had Uber or Airbnb. rallies, they really just wanted to get their business to a point where they could either exit or go public. And they did that. And now they've got to sit down for the long haul. And they've both struggled in big ways in that, because they did a bunch of shortcuts to get to that exit. But I mean, back on topic, it is going to be a big one two punch to pair that together. And it's not a new strategy. I mean, I can't remember where I first heard this, but the intersection of, of, you know, creativity, and logic, logic and technical capabilities is where a lot of magic really happens. And if we, if we look in completely different industries, what was Pixar was one of the first where they had the story writers and the artboard creators in they forced them to be in the same room as the 3d modelers and the technical people. And that's why they kept creating just this insane stuff, because the intersection of a lot of those ideas was where the innovation actually started happening. Yep. And it's, it's going to be the same with, you know, media buying, marketing and everything. And this, and frankly, this is one of the reasons we kind of started this podcast was for this exact same thing. Because this is where a lot of the magic happens. I as a software guy, I mean, I've done my fair share of marketing, but as a software engineering guy and DevOps guy, there's a lot of times I don't think about certain aspects. And then you will say, hey, Blake, have you ever thought about this, and it gets me thinking about how I could get results or better results from a technical standpoint. But I would never have thought of that, had you not pointed it out, and then the same back via yours, right? When I start talking about technical things, you start thinking about, well, wait a minute, if we need to do this, and this, maybe if I structure my campaigns like this, we will then give the machine learning AI and the correct triggers it needs to do whatever it is, and then you go test it and confirm or disprove that. Right?

Greg Marshall  27:07  Here's something this is this is something that I think yours and I situation, I think is unique, where we automatically kind of, I think respect each other's opinion on our kind of expertise. But I says with giant butt because I think these two roles, probably industry wide, but heads up in a way right similar to like how I know like in a traditional like salespeople, and operators, or salespeople and accountants and stuff like that, they have two different views of the other profession. And normally, it's not a positive one, right? It's like, well, these salespeople, they're a bunch of idiots. They say anything just to get the sale and and operations as to clean it up. Yeah. And then vice versa, the operations they don't know how to sell. Right? And so what are some ways that before I even go into that, would you agree? Oh, lately, yeah, it's probably like technical and sales and vice versa. There's,

Blake Beus  28:08  there's always head butting between, like, all lump all it together. And then like creatives, marketing, or whatever. I've seen that I've experienced that when I've been working in corporate. Luckily, I've worked at a lot of places where there was very quickly built some mutual respect there. And I think that there needs to be some understanding, you're both experts in your own area. And instead of saying, that's a dumb idea why why would changing the button color? Why should I spend 20 minutes hopping in there changing the button color, putting a commit in there, and then pushing that out to the website? That's not gonna make any difference? But you're over here? Well, I want to measure if that makes a difference. Yeah.

Greg Marshall  28:49  You know, and kind of the funny thing is, because because I know just how I come a lot from the sales sides. I know how salespeople who do not understand technical, how almost ignorant, we can sound when you say, Hey, can't you just do this? Like, I should just take five minutes? Yeah, can you just code this really fascinate me the next Facebook and then we can test it? If it don't work? Just make Instagram next, right? It's like, there's a huge ask for things that you don't understand. Right? Yep. And you assume like, oh, they just don't want to do or vice versa? Well, why can't you give me a more structured idea of what I've made this mistake so many times on in front of not providing enough detail to even allow an engineer and engineer minded individual, the tools necessary to build something, right, because they can't just, they're not just gonna build it. They don't know what the idea is. Right? You know what I mean? Like, you can't just say, hey, build me something that gets me more sales. That could be who knows what? And the engineer themselves, I believe understands. That's gonna take a lot of time. Yeah. And so they want to lie. I for sure know what the plan is because they know it's going to take time to build it. Is that correct?

Blake Beus  30:06  Yeah, absolutely. And, and part of the reason is, is because when you're in the middle of engineering something, there's a bunch of tiny little, and no one talks about this. So I'm actually kind of glad we're talking about yeah, there's a bunch of tiny little micro decisions you have to make about how you structure something, because that's going to have long term impacts in six months, or whatever. And so not having enough context means, okay, I can build something that looks like that. But then in six months, I didn't quite fully understand what the larger vision was. So I made a couple of micro decisions early on, that now are making it way harder to do XY and Z. That was part of the plan all the time. Yep. And, and so now we've, we've, we've come at an impasse, and it's become hard to maintain and blah, blah, blah, but it does, it does exist the other way as well, because a lot of engineers will say, you'll, you can say something like, alright, we need a signup form. All right, I'll make a signup form. And it's ugly and hard to use. And the labels are off to the side instead of overtop, so on mobile, it doesn't quite look right. But they're like, but it works. Yeah. And, and that's where engineers need to say, but hold on, we're creating this to help like the customer, the visitor, whatever, which ultimately helps both of us. And so we need to lean on some expertise out there, to make sure that what's being built is not only just functional, yep. But it's it's easy to use, intuitive for the customer, and all of those things. And so that's where the mutual respect needs to come together.

Greg Marshall  31:42  Well, and it's funny, I've worked with many, you know, many people in the kind of the engineering, more development type, individual that builds the stuff that actually works. And the, what I've learned is you have to be I've learned to become more, what is the empathetic or what not to what I'm saying? And how is being interpreted? Right, right. Because one thing I know, there's, whenever you're a professional in your field, I think there's a level of kind of, what's the word like Terrot, territorialism, like, Hey, listen, you know, like this, this is my space here. You don't I mean, like, I know what I'm doing, right? Because you do. Yeah. And see, there's a level so sometimes when there are suggestions being made, it could feel like it's an attack you Oh, yeah. Right. But but it's actually not. And so, one thing I try to stay very conscious of is when I'm speaking to engineer, people, engineer minded, and I'm just kind of buckling everyone in their technical space in that, but to make sure that I'm communicating in no way, am I criticizing what you're doing? I'm just speaking out loud. So you have enough information, right, to digest it and build it. And I'm thinking if there's an individual out there right now, or our first conversation was very rough. And it's because I didn't think thoroughly enough, because I assumed I assumed he knew what I meant by what I was saying. Like he knew like, my intent was not that I didn't actually voice that first. And this is a brand new relationship. Yeah. So I made the critical mistake of assuming I have credibility automatically with someone who has no idea who I am,

Blake Beus  33:36  right? Well, and let's. And let's be clear on both sides of this fence here. There are jerks, they're idiots, right, like, and there are people that give both sides a bad name. And so that does happen. But I think as long as both sides are willing to even just spend 30 minutes reading up on what goes into media buying and what goes into attribution as an engineer, will put you in such a better place and for media buyers, or whatever, spending 30 minutes about what an engineer has to do to to whatever can can help and

Greg Marshall  34:19  a day in the life of you know what they say when they say walk in someone else's shoes? Oh, yeah, very easy to tell people what to do when you don't have to do it or have never experienced that. Yeah. But in every profession and role there are pressures. And there's different types of pressures and demands. Yeah, that come from these roles. And if you give your if you allow yourself to work in these roles in a day or two, you may only last a few hours. Because you'll learn really quickly. Oh, this is not as easy as it as this person is making it look yeah, because they're a professional that space.

Blake Beus  34:57  A long time. I mean, I've I've been doing time Next, the tech side of things for 20 years now,

Greg Marshall  35:02  so long, it's not gonna look like someone will watch you do something and go, Oh, that's got to be in five minutes. But taking 20 years and making five minutes,

Blake Beus  35:12  and you've been you've been doing sales and marketing for probably about the same amount of time, right, like a long time, a very long time. And, and so, yeah, it's worth sharing that mutual respect. But yeah, I mean, we're, we're a little bit long on this. So why don't why don't we wrap it up?

Greg Marshall  35:32  Respect your engineer? Yeah.

Blake Beus  35:35  Media Buyers there. But I would say just to wrap circle back to the initial conversation, where we're talking about server side, Google Tag Manager, yep, I'm confident we're going to see more and more and more of this stuff, where your your platform is going to need, you're going to need to have some ownership over that server. So that's first party data, I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing this with analytics. In fact, we already are seeing this with analytics, there's some projects out there where, where you have to maintain your own server, but you get a lot better tracking, because you own it, it's first party data, we're going to start seeing, we might start seeing this with email marketing, that will be a really interesting one for me. So I'm going to be keeping my eye on that. But I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing it with that. We might might start seeing it with with all sorts of sorts of other things website hosting. And I mean, we already see that website hosting, we'll see more and more and more of it. So yeah,

Greg Marshall  36:38  well, I think you know, this this episode, we've kind of covered the importance of new technology, and essentially what to do and who to look for when you need these because it's important there, this is only going to get more and more critical for businesses, as the years go on, not less. Yep, absolutely. And so it's, it's, it'd be a good idea now to start thinking about what's your technology plan, moving forward with all of this data, because you just want to be prepared, you don't want to be the business that is not thinking about this, and your competitors are, and then they, you know, speed right past you, because you didn't take the time to learn how the markets actually move. Yeah,

Blake Beus  37:23  I think there's no harm in just setting up one of these servers yourself and going through their process. Because you can because they're a virtual server, you can create it, you can destroy it, you can create it again, you can destroy it again. It's, it's not like they're there. They're basically kind of disposable. So there's no harm in going to Google's documentation page and just saying, Alright, let's just go through these steps, we'll we'll sign up, we'll sign in, and then I'll install it on a website and see if we get data if it doesn't troubleshoot, or try to figure it out. Again, there's no harm in that there's only good that can come out of going through that process, even if you're not a super technical person. Because number one, you'll you'll have a good understanding about what the process takes number two, you'll you'll have a good understanding when you're interviewing someone to help you with that maybe at work or something, you'll you'll be able to know if they're full of shit,

Greg Marshall  38:13  or you don't want to get taken.

Blake Beus  38:17  And number three, you might realize, oh, this is something I can handle myself. And now it's a new service I can offer for my clients. And because it worked well for me, I can spin it up in 2030 minutes, but it's a huge value offer for my clients, even though I'm just maybe maybe a media buyer and I'm not a tech person. So

Greg Marshall  38:33  well I think if you need help with this, where do we go?

Blake Beus  38:38  Or you can just use go to Blake beus.com You can you can reach out to me on there and yeah, that'd be a good way they can reach out to you as

Greg Marshall  38:48  well. Yeah, you can go to a Greg Marshall Dotco you can book a strategy session call but when it comes to the technical side, I'm going to do it for you.

Blake Beus  38:58  And you can you can join SM three which is a group on social media marketing. Yeah, where we cover topics for from beginners to experts. Yep. And everything in between. So

Greg Marshall  39:13  well. I hope you guys enjoyed this. This episode. Make sure to subscribe to our channel anywhere you see it. Yeah. All right.

Blake Beus  39:20  We'll catch you guys later. Bye.