Top Takeaways from Validate 2019

Insights from ObservePoint’s 2019 Validate
TOP TAKEAWAYS FROM
2019

The data and analytics world is complex, competitive and complicated by definition.
Analysts have to be prepared to constantly upgrade their tools, implementations
and understanding in order to gain any type of competitive advantage for their
companies.
So how do you increase your understanding and know what tools to choose and
what routes to take?
Our opinion? Learn from industry experts and discuss strategies with other analysts
to gain new ideas and insights.
Validate is a conference that offers just that. And to help you get started, here are
the key takeaways and insights from the industry experts and analysts who spoke
at Validate 2019.

Table of Contents
Rob Seolas, Co-Founder, CEO of ObservePoint
Creating A Better Digital World
Kevin Jorgeson, Co-Founder, CEO Session Climbing
What Are You Capable Of?
Adam Greco, Senior Partner at Analytics Demystified
Getting Executive Buy-in For Data Quality
Colleen Berube, Chief Information Officer at Zendesk
From UX to User Loyalty: Using Data to Develop Relationships
Matt Crupe, Senior Technical Consultant at Adobe
Leveraging ObservePoint During Your Adobe DTM to Launch
Migration
James McCormick, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research
Thrive In The Age of The Customer With Data And Insights
Michele Kiss, Senior Partner at Analytics Demystified
Digital Analytics Hacks for the Masses
Paul Murphy, Technical Alliance Manager, Strategic
Partnerships at Adobe
Expert Panel
Krista Seiden, Vice President, Product Marketing & Growth
at Quantcast
Expert Panel
Christi Thompson, Manager, Web Content and Analytics
Tagging at Southwest Airlines
Jordan Avalos, Senior Analyst Analytic Technologies at
Southwest Airlines
Pixel Perfect Implementation
Seth Poplaski, Analytics Architect at Texas Instruments
Integrating ObservePoint into Your Development Process
Ryan Storment, Web Developer for REI
Nolan Cross, Program Manager, Digital Analytics and
Optimization Platform for REI
Quality Assurance: What Software Testing Can Teach Us
About Data Integrity
Peter Symuleski, Head of Business Intelligence and
Data Engineering
Jeremy Fletcher, Principal Software Engineer,
Business Intelligence at NBCUniversal
NBC News Digital’s Transformation from an Analytics
Team to a Technology Organization
Cindi Vickery, eCommerce Manager/QA Lead at Marriott
Meenu Jakkula, Digital QA Automation Manager at
Marriott
Setting Up for Success with ObservePoint

Table of Contents
Chris Mavromatis, Senior Systems Analyst at
Mastercard
Analyzing Approaches to Remediating Unapproved Tags
Found on Your Sites
Julie Park, Privacy Manager at The Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints
Jordan Hammond, Associate Consultant at
ObservePoint
Beef Up Your Security: Privacy and Security Regulation
Compliance
David Gatdula, Adobe Analytics Business Consultant at
Adobe
Data Governance & Maturity
Tim Munsell, Digital Analytics and Strategy Consultant
at Bancroft Digital
Lianne MacLean, Senior Consultant, Business
Analytics at Bancroft Digital
Dot McCleskey, Project Portfolio Manager at
Bancroft Digital
Ani Lopez, Advisor, Data Architecture at Bancroft
Digital
“Several Archetypes Walk into a Bar…”
Jennifer Yacenda, Senior Director, Strategic
Consulting, North America at Digital IQ
Justifying the Investment in Analytics
Aimee Bos, Director Analytics Strategy at Blast Analytics &
Marketing
You have a CDP. Now What? Essential Use Cases for Success
Matt Parisi, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Tealium
How Customer Data Maturity Powers the Modern Enterprise
Andrew Geddes, Consulting Team Lead at ObservePoint
Stockton Knotts, Data Governance Consultant at
ObservePoint
Centralizing and Standardizing Data Quality — An
Organizational Endeavor
Lacee Jones, Data Governance Consultant at ObservePoint
Chris O’Neill, Solutions Engineer
Perfecting Release Validation: Catch Errors Before They Destroy
Your Data
Mike Maziarz, Consultant and Product Manager at
ObservePoint
Kyle Homolik, Associate Consultant at ObservePoint
Governing Your Analytics and Marketing Tags at Scale
Jarrod Wilbur, Data Governance Consultant and Script
Services Lead at ObservePoint
Yes, You Can Audit That: Using the ObservePoint Custom Tag

ROB SEOLAS
Co-Founder & CEO
ObservePoint
Creating A Better Digital World
“There are two kinds of companies, the ones who have data
collection issues and the ones who know they have data
collections issues.
The countless marketing technologies at our disposal have
brought endless opportunity to analysts to revolutionize
digital experiences creating a new internet. You as the
analyst have that power. The power to change, create,
and improve the internet in an informed way. You create
better, more personal experiences in a safer environment
for users, and that is compelling. The purpose of this
conference, and of ObservePoint in general, is to further
this mission, helping you create a better digital world.”

KEVIN JORGESON
Co-Founder, CEO
Session Climbing
What Are You Capable Of?
“While everyone asks me ‘what’s next,’ I encourage
you to consider a more productive question: What
am I capable of?
As we all strive to answer this question, two
facts are clear. First: hardship and challenge are
inevitable. Second: how we respond is a choice.”

ADAM GRECO
Senior Partner
Analytics Demystified
Getting Executive Buy-in For Data Quality
“If your digital analytics data isn’t accurate, running reports and
conducting analysis is done in vain. But often times, it is difficult for an
organization to prioritize data quality over other ‘sexier’ initiatives.
Many organizations have a hard time convincing executives that data
governance is important. The trick is to get executives to see the
connection between business objectives and data governance.
[For example], have a list of business requirements that drive your
analytics implementation and map each business requirement to the
data points in your analytics implementation.”

COLLEEN BERUBE
Chief Information Officer
Zendesk
From UX to User Loyalty: Using Data
to Develop Relationships
“There is a lot of buzz in the industry about creating these
amazing experiences, but that doesn’t always quite close the
gap. Brands have to connect—to create next-level experiences
and develop a two-directional relationship with their audience in
order to gain their loyalty, learn how to continue to serve their
needs, and develop an ongoing relationship with them.”
Berube introduced four ways to create these relationships:
1. Leveraging modern flexible architecture
2. Being a change leader for customer centricity
3. Combining data to deliver value
4. Embracing AI/ML

MATT CRUPE
Senior Technical Consultant
Adobe
Leveraging ObservePoint During Your
Adobe DTM to Launch Migration
Mike talked about a four-phased process to executing the transition:
- Phase 1: Catalog
- Phase 2: Strategize
- Phase 3: Migrate
- Phase 4: Test
Does the thought of auditing your tag management system make you
cringe? Why not automate it? Migrating your Adobe DTM implementation
to the new Adobe Experience Platform Launch doesn’t haven’t to be a
daunting task. Adobe and ObservePoint work together to get you through
the transition smoothly.”
“At the beginning of 2021, Adobe will officially sunset DTM in favor of
their new tag management system, Launch by Adobe. As a result, all
current DTM users will have to migrate to the new solution.
For more information read the white paper here.

JAMES MCCORMICK
Principal Analyst
Forrester Research
“Truly insights-driven businesses have now emerged. They leverage data and
analytics technologies at scale to deliver sustained market differentiation.
Today they represent a growing proportion of enterprises whose numbers and
influence on the market are accelerating. It is time to learn from them to start
your journey towards becoming an insights-driven organization.”
He gave four suggestions on how to become a more insights-driven organization:
1. No vendor can do it all. You have to have a best of breed approach and be
good at managing the data flow between different technologies.
2. There is no time to waste. Earlier adopters are gaining significant advantage.
3. Accelerate adoption with a services partner.
4. Start small and iterate. Iterate as you grow your program. There is no
template for success; every firm is different.
Thrive In The Age of The Customer With Data And Insights

MICHELE KISS
Senior Partner
Analytics Demystified
“There are never enough hours in an analyst’s day! Start learning hacks and
time-saving techniques to help you maximize your day. These can be anything
that makes an analyst’s life easier, whether it’s a clever use of your analytics
tool, spreadsheets, a data viz solution, automation, SQL, or even email,
calendar or task management.”
Michele shared some of her favorite hacks including:
- Using Google Sheets formulas to manipulate data (such as for detecting a
language in page names and translating them into your own language)
- Using spreadsheets to build repetitive SQL and avoid syntax errors
- Using Adobe Analytics Calculated Metrics to fix bad data
- Using Data Studio for Google Analytics Alerts
- Using Data Studio to recreate Channel definitions
- Using Sparklines for quick visuals
Digital Analytics Hacks for the Masses
Click here to see her presentation.

Expert Panel
Paul’s comments on data privacy concerns in the wake
of GDPR and CCPA:
“We have to be evangelists and say, ‘Is what we
are doing ethical, is it right, is it even good for our
business to gather these points of data?’”
PAUL MURPHY
Technical Alliance Manager,
Strategic Partnerships
Adobe

Krista offered comments on the effects of GDPR and other privacy regulations:
“The businesses that are going to win in the next several years are the ones
that are really paying attention to privacy and the customer first. When you
layer on the other privacy impacts such as ITP and ETP from Mozilla and all the
other things that come about, I think we are only in the beginning of what this
is going to look like.
The internet and how we use it is really changing, and we as analysts have to
adapt and help our businesses really understand what that means. And it does
mean that we are going to be more limited, and it does mean that we are going
to have to get more creative and it does mean we are going to have to put our
customers first, and understand what that really means in terms of that value
exchange.”
KRISTA SEIDEN
Vice President,
Product Marketing & Growth
Quantcast
Expert Panel

CHRISTI THOMPSON
Manager, Web Content
& Analytics Tagging
JORDAN AVALOS
Senior Analyst
Analytic Technologies
Southwest Airlines
Pixel Perfect Implementation
“Pixels are small things that can have a huge impact on privacy and
data governance. To protect against unauthorized data collection,
Southwest Airlines is utilizing ObservePoint Labs to create a whitelist of
approved pixels and 3rd party code snippets for Southwest.com, along
with the creation of scheduled audits and alerts to ensure on-going
compliance and protect our customers’ data.”
Thompson and Avalos introduced a process to ensuring compliance:
Step 1: Visit ObservePoint Labs
Step 2: Run an initial audit
Step 3: Define Whitelist
Step 4: Upload Whitelist
Step 5: Schedule Audit and Alerts

SETH POPLASKI
Analytics Architect
Texas Instruments
Integrating ObservePoint into
your Development Process
Poplaski offered several tips in his session for integrating automated analytics
testing into your development process. Poplaski suggested how to organize your
development process along three different dimensions: Technology, People and
Process.
- Technology, which refers to your continuous integration platform (e.g.
Jenkins) and your testing platform (ObservePoint). Make sure everyone is on
the same page with these tools.
- People. Assign different tests or types of tests to specific members of
your team. Utilize others outside your team as well, like your ObservePoint
consultant and the DevOps engineer in charge of the deployment process.
- Processes. Figure out who is in charge of each role in the process and
what their responsibilities are. Ask questions like “Who is going to make the
API calls? Which team is going to validate the audit and make sure it’s clean?”
Make sure to incorporate approval and reviewing processes.

RYAN STORMENT
Web Developer
“In 2019, a mature software lifecycle depends on ensuring that applications
continually meet business requirements. You need to ask yourself questions like:
- Does the application provide the right user experience?
- Is the content up to date and accurate?
- Can it handle errors and unusual circumstances gracefully?
This level of quality assurance is accomplished by automatically testing every
application change before allowing it to launch in production.
- In the world of data analytics, there is a similar set of business requirements:
- Does this data tell me what I think it’s telling me?
- Is it up to date and accurate?
- Does it help me discover problems and measure unusual patterns?
So how is data governance like software development? Automated QA creates fast
feedback loops that catch failures before production!”
NOLAN CROSS
Project Manager, Digital
Analytics & Opt. Platform
REI
What Software Testing Can Teach
Us About Data Integrity

NBC News Digital
PETER SYMULESKI
Head of Bus. Intelligence
& Data Engineering
JEREMY FLETCHER
Principal Software Engineer,
Business Intelligence
NBC News Digital’s Transformation from an
Analytics Team to a Technology Organization
“Organizational change is difficult. The growing consensus is that to make those
changes a reality, you need buy-in from leadership. Accurate data is important, but
sometimes that isn’t enough.”
Symuleski and Fletcher gave several suggestions for accomplishing organizational
change, including the following:
- Take control of your data by centralizing ownership.
- Reduce complexity and create parity within your analytics tools to generate
trust in your data.
- Build once and reuse. Extend this mentality across analytics and development
teams to create operational efficiency.
- Promote an open environment for your team, but give them guardrails to
maintain organization.
- Use your successes instead of your failures to make improvements in your
organization. When things are going right ask, “How can we make it more right?”

Marriott International
CINDI VICKERY
eCommerce Manager/
QA Lead
MEENU JAKKULA
Digital QA
Automation Manager
“If you set up your [ObservePoint] platform in a user-friendly
manner, you will get much more out of the experience.”
Vickery and Jakkula shared several tips for setting up your
ObservePoint platform for success including:
- Establishing a standard naming convention for the titles of
your audits and journeys, including information like path taken,
language, starting page, etc.
- Establishing a standard naming convention for rules,
including information like severity, page, type of information
being tested, etc.
- Organizing your folders by environment, type of journey/
audit, or what you are testing for.
Setting Up for Success with ObservePoint

CHRIS MAVROMATIS
Senior Systems Analyst
Mastercard
Analyzing Approaches to Remediating
Unapproved Tags Found on Your Sites
“Learning how unapproved tags resolve on your digital properties can create
tremendous insight into the inner workings of your digital ecosystem and help
you discover tools you didn’t know were affecting your site.”
Mavromatis suggested four steps to begin remediating unapproved tags:
- Start with an ObservePoint audit to know if you have unapproved tags on your site.
- Go through the tagging rules in your tag manager
- Utilize tag specific extensions such as ObservePoint’s TagDebugger to search
through the code that renders on the site.
- Contact the development team of the site and task them to do a search through
the code to determine if specific tags are being hard coded to resolve on the site.
Hard coded tags may not show up in the reporting tools previously described.

Beef Up Your Security: Privacy and
Security Regulation Compliance
JULIE PARK
Privacy Manager
Julie presented several strategies for ensuring your company is compliant
with new security regulations. Some of the strategies she shared are to:
- Keep a record of all personal data collected, used, stored, and shared.
Have an actionable plan to remove customer data held by your organization
or shared with others.
- Manage consent when using cookies that collect, use, store, or share
information about a person.
- Audit your websites and have a clear understanding what data is collected
and shared. Eliminate the tags and cookies with “data leeches” (Julie’s term
for piggybacking)
Julie also talked about how RIVN, a company focused on compliance with
GDPR and CCPA, can help with responding to requests for access and erasure
about any data collected, used, stored, and/or shared about a person.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints & ObservePoint
JORDAN HAMMOND
Association Consultant

DAVID GATDULA
Adobe Analytics
Business Consultant
Adobe
“Data governance and maturity is a foundational
element in an organization’s short and long-term
success.
“Unfortunately, [data governance] may only be
addressed when pain points rise to the surface or
when teams become aware of gaps in organizational
processes or assets. As the incredible amounts
of data being captured remains persistent and
ever-growing, so too are the needs to address the
stewardship, strategy for accountability, and clarity
surrounding it.”
Data Governance & Maturity

TIME MUNSELL
Digital Analytics &
Strategy Consultant
Bancroft Digital
LIANNE MACLEAN
Senior Consultant,
Business Analytics
DOT MCCLESKEY
Project Portfolio
Manager
“So many conversations around governance are dominated by the
difficulty of the politics and the horror stories of governance gone
wrong. There aren’t enough examples of governance going right,
growing in influence, and providing value. And it can really be a story
of success for you, if you can pull together as a team. Success in data
governance is a cross-discipline story, with different people in different
roles stepping up to take ownership over their piece.”
“Several Archetypes Walk into a Bar...”
ANI LOPEZ
Advisor,
Data Architecture

Justifying the Investment in Analytics
“With alignment between the analytics implementation and
our customer journey, we can enable real-time monitoring
for our customers across our digital experience and during
the moments that matter.”
Some of the techniques Yacenda shared to justify the
investment in analytics include:
- Identifying power users within your organization to
advocate for analytics
- Establishing benchmarks to minimize impact of bad data
- Moving analytics organization across maturity curve
JENNIFER YACENDA
Senior Director, Strategic
Consulting, North America
Digital IQ

AIMEE BOS
Director Analytics Solutions
Blast Analytics & Marketing
You Have a CDP. Now What?
Essential Use Cases for Success
“73% of people point to customer experience as an important factor in their
purchasing decisions, just behind price and product quality. Yet only 49% of
U.S. consumers say companies provide a good customer experience today.
CDPs are key to bridging this gap, but the strategy and planning behind
onboarding CDPs is lacking across organizations both large and small. A
CDP’s ability to stitch customers across devices increases the likelihood that
you’ll deliver a compelling message, providing an optimal user experience
that your customers expect.”
Some of the use cases for a CDP that Bos shared include:
- Unifying customer data
- Matching customers across multiple devices
- Understanding the customer journey
- Complying with privacy and ethics

MATT PARISI
Senior Product
Marketing Manager
Tealium
How Customer Data Maturity Powers
the Modern Enterprise
“Top performing companies are using customer data insights from
across the organization to power better customer experiences—
from awareness to renewals. For many companies, however, much
of the necessary data remains locked away in departmental and
technological silos.
Tealium recently commissioned the Forrester research report,
‘Customer Data Maturity Powers the Modern Enterprise’ to evaluate
this challenge. The report found that even though almost 90% of
organizations have some level of customer data strategy in place,
many struggle to impact key business outcomes effectively.”
Click here to learn more about the report.

Centralizing and Standardizing Data
Quality — An Organizational Endeavor
“Centralizing and enforcing data governance makes it possible for
all departments to utilize these essential analytical tools, while still
maintaining a baseline for accurate comparison. Additionally, the better
you govern your data, the more accurate that data is, which means
your data-driven decisions will be more effective in helping to achieve
your business objectives.
One of the best ways to jumpstart governance is by creating a data
governance council. The objective of a data governance council is to:
- Review quality assurance of marketing technology implementations
- Address any outstanding actions or concerns with an
implementation
- Apply the business requirements to projects and discuss potential
additions
- Ensure the data is being sufficiently governed and producing
accurate, secure, and actionable data for the organization”
ANDREW GEDDES
Data Governance
Consultant
STOCKTON KNOTTS
Data Governance
Consultant
ObservePoint

“Taking a proactive approach to governing your analytics
and marketing tags can provide huge benefits for the
accuracy of your implementation, which ultimately boosts
your credibility.
Ideally you want to catch analytics errors before they
happen. Some ways you can do that are by:
- Addressing data quality issues before they reach a
production environment with Release Validation through
ObservePoint.
- Focusing on implementing tag governance in early
development environments, such as staging, dev, and
QA.
- Instilling a culture of proactive tag governance.”
LACEE JONES
Data Governance
Consultant
Perfecting Release Validation: Catch
Errors Before They Destroy Your Data
ObservePoint
CHRIS O’NEILL
Solutions Engineer

MIKE MAZIARZ
Data Governance
Consultant
KYLE HOMOLIK
Association Consultant
“With the right solutions and processes in place, governing your tags
at scale is possible. As you do so, you’ll be able to trust your data,
realize ROI on technology spend, and do it all more efficiently than
ever before.”
In order to govern tags effectively, Maziarz and Homolik suggested that
teams use ObservePoint to:
- Create a tagging plan and align implementation with the tagging
plan through user-defined rules. Then, create audits that regularly
test against the plan.
- Deploy and QA through remote file-mapping, audit and journey
schedules, notifications, and integrations (webhooks).
- Validate and monitor through recurring audits and journeys,
alerts, query builder exports, custom reports, comparisons, and tag
governance councils.
Governing Your Analytics and
Marketing Tags at Scale
ObservePoint

“The primary use case of ObservePoint—what ObservePoint was built to
do—is to scan your website to verify that your analytics and marketing tags
are firing as you expect them to.
But on top of that, the ObservePoint Custom Tag allows you to take
advantage of ObservePoint’s auditing capability to execute JavaScript on
any page of your site, interact with the DOM, and then push that data into
ObservePoint. You can use the custom tag to do things like:
- Verify basic SEO configurations
- Compare data in your DOM to your data layer
- Generate a video or PDF inventory
- Verify your privacy policy is always present
- Gather external links
The limits to what you can audit run as far as your ability to write JavaScript
to run in the console.”
Yes, You Can Audit That: Using the
ObservePoint Custom Tag
JARROD WILBUR
Data Governance Consultant
& Script Services Lead
ObservePoint

These are only a few of the many insights shared at Validate
2019 by these incredible speakers. Those that attended gained
valuable action items to apply to their businesses, and we hope
that all of you will be able to attend next year at Validate 2020!
Discover how ObservePoint can help provide valuable insights
into your data. Click here to schedule a free website audit.

Top Takeaways from Validate 2019

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